Once Were Radicals

by Irfan Yusuf

  With seven people living in the house using the toilet and washing their backsides, you can imagine the toilet area remained quite smelly and wet. Slipping on the wet floor with rubber thongs was, in my case, more than just a distinct possibility. Another difficulty arose because I only had two hands, both of which were needed to perform the washing and none of which were available to hold the string. My only option was to call out to make sure no one was sitting in the lounge room or to hold the dirty string (which had no doubt been touched by hands previously used to wash backsides) between my teeth.

  Pakistan seemed to have mosques on every street corner and in every neighbourhood. The mosques would be packed with men on Fridays, which was the first day of the Pakistani weekend and regarded as a holy day. The mosques typically had at least one tall tower-like minaret along with a large dome on the roof, and they often had onion-shaped domes similar to those of Sikh temples. The arrival of the five daily prayer times was greeted with chanting of the azaan or call to prayer in Arabic. Within a few days, I had managed to memorise the azaan just by listening to these chants.

  During our time in Karachi, we stayed at the home of my aunt on al-Falah Road (literally ‘the Street of Success’), across the road from a large mosque. The mosque wasn’t named after a saint or religious figure but rather after the street where it was located. Or maybe the street was named after the mosque. Who knows?

  Mum wasted no time in enrolling me in the religious school attached to the mosque. The school was called Madrassat al-Falah (which I guess would roughly translate as ‘the College of Success’), attached to the Masjid al-Falah (‘the Mosque of Success’ or perhaps ‘the Mosque on al-Falah Road’ … whatever). I attended madrassa for four to five hours each day, learning the ‘Arabi’ alphabet and how to join the letters to make the sounds of the Koran.

  The mosque was quite a large and exotic-looking building with walls painted a combination of light green and white. Green and white are apparently the colours of Islam, and they were also the favourite colours of the Prophet Muhammad. They also happened to be the colours of the Pakistani flag. Was this just a case of Pakistani nationalism co-opting religion for patriotic purposes? How would I know? I was only six at the time!

  The mosque was open before sunrise (in preparation for the morning prayer) until late into the night. The mosque was spotlessly clean and smelt of sandlewood and jasmine. It had three front doors, all of which were arch-shaped, and two tall minaret towers.

  Each time we entered the mosque, we were expected to take off our shoes and place them in a plastic bag. Installed by the mosque’s left side-wall were small taps, near which were seats (they were actually concrete blocks) where worshippers would wash before prayer. The mosque’s main open space (its prayer hall) had no chairs and had a tiled floor which was quite cool to sit on. Near the entrance of the mosque was a basket full of cheap skullcaps woven out of strips of straw, but Mum warned me against wearing these as they were lice infested.

  My teacher (I was supposed to address him as Molvi Sahib, in recognition of his status as a molvi or religious leader) was a rather stern fellow with a long beard and large frame (he’s now deceased. The way he used to hit his students, I really do hope God has mercy on his soul). He also led prayer services at the mosque. The molvi had a very simple teaching philosophy: the best way to teach kids how to make the proper sounds of the Koran was to bash the shit out of them using either a very hard cooking utensil or a stick of some sort.

  I wasn’t exempt from the process. Molvi Sahib had three sticks. One was short and hard, designed to cause pain. The second was long and malleable to cause a stinging sensation. The third was both long and hard and designed to provide us with the necessary incentive to memorise the Koranic sounds faster.

  At madrassa, our uniform consisted of a white-coloured shalwar kameez with a prayer skullcap (called a topi) often embroidered with different designs and small chips of mirrored glass. It is an act of religious devotion for men to cover their heads when reading the Koran or another religious text. Many of the older boys were growing smallish beards. I assumed they must have been trainee molvis, preparing their faces as part of some hairy apprenticeship. Perhaps when their beards grew long enough, they could start their own madrassa where they could bash the Koran into (and the crap out of) their own students. In such an environment of spiritual sadism, it was little wonder I began to associate Islamic learning with big boofy-bearded blokes brandishing sticks and passing on the Divine Word of the All-Merciful and Almighty with some almighty whacks. Whether we understood what we were reciting and memorising didn’t seem to matter. Then again, if we could have understood it, we’d have made sure our molvi threw away his stick.

  The first time I went to madrassa, I was wearing jeans. The molvi was most upset and delivered the appropriate beating. It was the first and last time I was beaten in an Islamic school for dress-code violations. Future beatings for dress violations weren’t administered until years later when I attended St Andrews in Sydney, though these were of a more Christian variety.

  At madrassa we would sit in long rows with some students more advanced than others. I was amongst the juniors and was still learning the Arabic alphabet using the qaida.

  Surrounded by all these skullcap-wearing bearded men and boys, I imagined heaven to be filled with bearded men (and perhaps even bearded women!) all rocking away backwards and forwards reciting their qaida. Yep, paradise and qaida (though without the seventy-two virgins) went hand-in-hand even at that early age! No doubt some readers will now find the name of my teaching aid to be sure proof that Pakistani madrassas are little more than terrorist training facilities, but my qaida was just a book.

  Other more advanced boys would read straight from the Koran without the aid of a qaida. Molvi Sahib would insist that we all recite loudly so that he could follow us. He would pace up and down our line, waving his arms in the air. Anyone not reading loudly enough would get a nice whack on the back with one of his sticks. I’m not sure exactly how Molvi Sahib could have understood each individual with us all reciting loudly and simultaneously. Sometimes when he wasn’t within striking distance, I would stop reciting and look up. We were a choir that looked and sounded like it was chanting to the instructions of a tone-deaf conductor having an epileptic fit.

  Once Mum came to the mosque early to pick me up for an appointment. She saw the molvi in full flight hitting boys with his stick and was rather shocked. She pleaded with him in chaste Urdu, begging for mercy on my behalf.

  ‘Please don’t hit my son. He is new to Pakistan and he isn’t used to it.’

  ‘Listen, madam. I don’t give special status to anyone. If Prime Minister Bhutto brings his son to me to learn the Koran, I’ll have great pleasure in administering a good beating to him also! And maybe even his dad!’

  (As far as I am aware, Bhutto’s son never did learn Koran at the College of Success. Then again, given the imam’s conservative politics, he certainly would have done the same to a PM committed to such evil innovations as ‘Islamic socialism’.)

  Mum’s entreaties fell on deaf ears. He continued belting me with his stick. Mum eventually removed me from that madrassa. There was no other mosque and madrassa in the area for me to attend so Mum supplemented Koran lessons with her own private tuition. Thankfully, her stick only consisted of a small wooden spoon which broke easily.

  After all this pain and suffering, you can imagine my shock when a decade later, native Arabic speakers at the first Australian Muslim youth camp I attended told me that the sounds I was taught to make at my Pakistani madrassa were actually wrong! So much for the College of Success.

  My mother was the first person to teach me the ceremonial prayer (we called this nemaaz but it’s known in Arabic as salaat) which consists of a range of physical postures combined with special prayers and recitation of verses from the Koran. Mum taught me that Muslims are meant to perform the nemaaz at certain fixed times, five times a day facing the holy city of Mec
ca, where the Prophet Muhammad was born. If they miss a nemaaz for some reason, they can always make up for it afterwards. However, deliberately missing a nemaaz time was a major sin.

  For as long as I can remember, Mum has always performed her nemaaz at the right time. I only recall one or two occasions when she actually missed nemaaz, and this was always because of some extenuating circumstance.

  The postures were slightly different for men and women. By copying Mum, I inadvertently started using the female postures, and I often wondered why people at the mosque would snigger at me while I was performing the nemaaz.

  Mum taught me the various rules for performing the nemaaz and for special prayers to recite after nemaaz. I later discovered that many of these rules were heavily influenced by South Asian cultural understandings of religion. There is a large element of religious practice which Muslims of all backgrounds follow. For instance, all Muslims face in the direction of Mecca when they perform the nemaaz and the combination of physical postures is fairly universal. But Muslims from different regions of the world often preface or conclude their nemaaz with prayers and worship formulae peculiar to their region.

  Before performing the nemaaz, I would perform a special ablution called wazzu using as little water as possible. I would wash my hands and arms up to my elbow. I’d also wash my face, and wipe my hair lightly with water. The most important (and for a chubby kid like me, the hardest) part of the ritual was to wash my feet up to my ankles. It was something I would take shortcuts with, but somehow Mum knew about my shortcuts and would regularly check to make sure my feet were still dripping.

  After being thoroughly abluted, I’d stand on the prayer mat with my hands by my side. I’d then lift both hands approximately to the level of my ears in a manner whereby I looked like I was pushing all my worldly troubles over and behind my shoulders. I would then remain standing with my hands clasped over my belly and recite certain verses from the Koran.

  I would then move into bowing position with my hands on my knees. We called this posture ruku. I was taught to go down in ruku as far as I could whilst keeping both my arms and knees straight. The imam at the College of Success would hit those boys who did not bow down sufficiently or who had bent knees or arms during ruku. It wasn’t easy to do, especially for a chubby kid who could barely touch his toes!

  After ruku, I would stand up briefly before going into prostrations, called sijda. When I first learned to perform nemaaz, my sijda would often end with me banging the top of my head on the ground. This didn’t cause much problem on carpet, but it did cause plenty of discomfort if I slipped and hit my head on a hard surface. Now I know that I only need to lightly keep my forehead and nose on the ground, it’s a lot less of a headache.

  After doing sijda twice, I’d completed one rakaat (or cycle) of the nemaaz. Each nemaaz was to be performed at a different set time, and each set time involved a different number of cycles. It wasn’t hard to keep up with the correct times in Pakistan. This was because the mosque kindly provided us with a rather long and loud alarm signal from its loudspeaker. This alarm consisted of a man called the muezzin, either live or via a tape recording, calling the azaan.

  It is a truly majestic sound of Arabic phrases praising God. When done properly, it can send shivers down your spine. When done clumsily in a Pakistani accent, it would make you want to tell the muezzin to go find another job. In our neighbourhood, the latter usually applied. And if that wasn’t enough, virtually every street corner had a mosque with a loudspeaker. Each azaan would start a few moments apart. By the time they were reciting together over third-world quality sound systems, it sounded as if a huge herd of confused cows were flying through the air from one minaret to another.

  I couldn’t help wondering: surely God didn’t intend the call to prayer to sound like this. Why did each mosque have to perform the azaan? Why couldn’t they come together and assign the task to one particular mosque? Or why couldn’t they share the responsibility? By competing with each other, they just made the beautiful azaan sound like Bob Dylan being played backwards.

  Eventually, I learned the proper postures for men from the son of Molvi Sahib across the road, whom I had befriended when I was a madrassa student. I also learned how to read the Koran, the nemaaz and other special prayers for different occasions. Islam seemed to have a special prayer for every daily activity, from getting up in the morning to finishing a meal to even going to the toilet. The problem was that all these different prayer formulae were in Arabic. Mum would try and identify some words which had managed to find their way into Urdu, but by and large, I hardly understood anything I was reading or reciting.

  During our days in Karachi, Mum and I would visit relatives who lived in a nearby suburb. I loved these visits for two reasons. All the uncles and aunts spoke fluent English so I could let my cultural and linguistic guard down. The second reason was life-saving: they had a proper Western-style toilet seat into which I could let down some other stuff as soon as I arrived!

  The house was actually the same house where my mother lived when she first moved to Pakistan. It belonged to her maternal uncle, who had passed away by the time we were in Pakistan. The head of the household was my mum’s aunt, a regal and extremely fair-skinned woman of impeccable good looks and North Indian refinement. Just like my maternal grandmother, we used to call Mum’s aunt Naani Amma even though our real grandmother was still alive. Now, in her older years, Naani Amma had become a prominent figure in the women’s wing of the Jamaat-i-Islami (JI).

  The name of JI simply meant ‘Islamic group’ or ‘Islamic organisation’. It was a generic term adopted by numerous Muslim organisations and parties of various stripes across the world. It isn’t to be confused with Jemaah Islamiyah of Indonesia, al-Gamaah al-Islami of Egypt or Jamiat-i-Islami of Afghanistan.

  At age six, I could hardly be expected to understand or be interested in the politics of JI. I knew that they published books in English, and Mum stocked up on each and every religious book in English she could find in Naani Amma’s private library. I tried reading some of these books but found them terribly boring. However, I did become familiar with some of the authors’ names: Syed Abul Ala Maududi, Khurshid Ahmad, Khurram Murad, Syed Qutb, Maryam Jameelah and Hasan al-Banna.

  Naani Amma used to talk to my father from behind a screen. She never appeared in his presence, even though he was married to her niece and even if my mum and a roomful of others were present. I found this quite extraordinary, and at first thought they must have had a long-standing argument. Naani Amma would also cover herself with a long cloak and a veil over her face when she left the house. I had seen women wearing this kind of clothing in the bazaars, and asked my mother why they would wear it.

  ‘It part our reelijun,’ she said.

  ‘So why don’t you wear it, Mum? I’ve never seen you or our aunts wear it in Australia. You don’t even wear it here.’

  ‘Becuz it not cumpulsury. I cover my hair ven somebody read Kooraan loud and ven I teaching yoo Kooraan or at reelijun gadhuring. But other time it look silly vering in Sydney. Thing diffurunt in Pakistan. Vee in Muslim country.’

  I wasn’t quite convinced. It seemed strange that Mum, the most religiously observant person I knew, could be outclassed in the religion stakes by someone else.

  When it came to religious ceremonies, Mum had impeccable and incomparable credentials. In Sydney, she played the role of religious teacher among the Pakistani Muslim aunts in her group of friends. She even encouraged her Hindu, Sikh and Catholic friends to observe their own religious practices. Mum regarded all religions as forces of good. She brought us up to believe that the best people were the most religious ones.

  However, I was beginning to learn a different kind of Islamic religiosity in Pakistan. I was hearing that people of other religions were probably going to hell. And certain religious ceremonies I was familiar with were now missing. No one celebrated Hindu festivals like Diwali in Pakistan, and we didn’t distribute sweets or burn incen
se when people died. Innocent religious adjectives like ‘Hindu’ and ‘Sikh’ were now spoken of in a derogatory manner.

  Mum and Dad were attuned to these changes, and would try to inoculate us from this novel and divisive way of religious thinking. Mum would try to explain to me why the Jamaatis did everything so differently and so strictly. In her most strident Hindlish, she would declare: ‘Eerfaan, dhay have dhayr own society. Dhay only mix eech udhar. Jamaati only marry Jamaati. Dhay good peepul but sumtiem dhay too extreme.’

  ‘So why do you stay with them?’ I’d ask.

  ‘Beecuz Naani Amma my relative. She like my mudhar.’

  Mum’s biological mum (whom we also called our Asli Naani Amma where asli meant ‘real’ or ‘literal’) was alive and we visited her often.

  Although I was very attached to Mum’s mum, I could never quite understand her. She was always talking, babbling away, whether we spoke with her or not. Mum said that she had an illness of the mind that had afflicted her ever since my grandfather died.

  Despite her illness, my grandmother was fastidious in her performance of the five daily nemaaz. She made sure we also performed the nemaaz, and kept reminding Mum of the importance of remembering God. My grandmother always kept a large set of rosary beads with her (known in Urdu as tazbih) and would recite the ninety-nine names of God frequently. She told us that we could feel God close to us by repeatedly reciting these names.

  Mum didn’t approve of some of Granny’s religious practices. She said Granny used to frequent the graves of saints and ask for favours and intercession. This was regarded as an act of shirk (associating partners with the Divine or treating a non-Divine being as capable of granting things only the Divine being—as in God—could grant).