Once Were Radicals

by Irfan Yusuf

  Mum told us that some of her older brothers were also involved in these practices, though they were affected to a greater extent. They followed an allegedly holy man known as a pir who claimed a special proximity to God and who added many unnecessary and extreme forms of worship to the religion.

  I grew to associate the pir with the spiritual charlatan, one who took advantage of emotionally unstable or vulnerable people. My uncles had apparently paid their entire incomes to their pir at a time when their father had just passed away and the family desperately needed money. My mother said she and her sisters suffered a lot because of her brothers’ fake pir, who lived in a place called Ajmer in North Western India where a famous Arab saint known as Moinuddin Chishti is buried.

  The pirs were the figureheads of Indian Sufism. Mum instilled in all of us a healthy scepticism of all forms of Sufism. Her prejudice towards Sufism was understandable, and was nurtured by her Jamaat-i-Islami aunt who had adopted the anti-Sufi sect of Wahhabism that was the state religion of Saudi Arabia, whose government donated funds and moral support to the Jamaat.

  During the final month of my stay in Karachi, Mum decided it was best if she taught me from religious books, including some her aunt had provided. By this time my Urdu was quite good, and I could converse with her with relative fluency. Mum felt my listening to her read religious books would improve my Urdu. Many of the books she read were written by one Syed Abul Ala Maududi, the founder of the Jamaat and a former journalist. Even Maududi’s staunchest critics amongst the orthodox religious scholars acknowledged that he was one of the greatest (then) living writers in the Urdu language, a man who had developed his own school of Urdu literature.

  Mum would read from the simpler books Maududi wrote. Among these was a set of sermons he delivered in Punjab in 1941, before the Partition of India. These were delivered to a group of largely illiterate villagers, and they concerned basic aspects of belief and religious life. The language Maududi used was simple yet forceful and effective. Even when translated into English, the sermons leave a deep effect on readers (at least they did on me, and continue to do so). In Urdu, their force is magnified many times.

  Mum also would read excerpts from Maududi’s commentary of the Koran which was entitled Tafhim al-Qur’an (literally ‘Toward Understanding the Koran’). Parts of this commentary were written when Maududi was imprisoned at various times.

  Apart from books by Maududi, Mum would read a book of stories of various incidents from the lives of the Prophet Muhammad’s family members and friends. This book was called Hikayaat-i-Sahaba (literally ‘Stories of the Sahaba’ where the term sahaba referred collectively to the Prophet Muhammad’s companions), and was intended to be a story book mothers would read to their children at night. It was written by a twentieth-century Sufi and expert in the sciences of hadith from India named Muhammad Zakariyya Kandhalwi. Sometimes Mum would be reduced to tears reading these stories. These were the first times I saw her show visible signs of profound religious experience.

  Later in life, I was to learn more about these scholars and writers, and where they stood in the modern Islamic theological scheme of things. However, at this stage, I just knew them as authors of books that my mother would read to us when she wanted us to learn about our religion.

  Mum was always very careful about what she would read to us. She skipped whole paragraphs if not whole pages of books. At the time, she told me it was because the material there was beyond our understanding. Later, when I read these books for myself, I realised she had skipped the contents she felt would be unhelpful for us living in Australia. Some of Maududi’s ideas about non-Muslims and rejecting Western culture may have been okay for Pakistani consumption. But we had to spend our lives living in Australia. She didn’t want us to think Islam meant being hostile to Western people.

  Mum avoided reading the political content of Maududi’s books. Like many devout South Asian Muslims, she was discerning about what she took from his writings. Although Mum respected her aunt, she didn’t share her aunt’s views on political matters.

  Mum didn’t like the way Jamaat people stuck to themselves like some exclusive club. For instance, she didn’t like how Jamaat men would only marry Jamaat women. Mum also felt like she wasn’t always welcome by Jamaat women because she refused to wear the niqab (a type of face veil but covering slightly less than the burqa).

  Jamaat people insisted that a woman must wear a niqab when she leaves her home. Their view was largely based on a book written by Syed Maududi entitled Purdah, in which Maududi sets out how gender relations are to be conducted according to his interpretation of Islamic texts.

  Among South Asian Muslims, the word ‘purdah’ is used to describe strict segregation between men and women in conservative and traditional Muslim communities. As mentioned earlier, ‘purdah’ literally means curtain, and in practice was a kind of social snobbery. Its religious justification was found in the practice of restricting the Prophet’s wives to speaking from behind a curtain.

  Purdah isn’t as absolute a form of segregation as the harem scenes in Hollywood movies make out. Muslim jurists agree Muslim women needn’t worry about absolute segregation or covering their hair in the presence of their fathers, husbands, brothers and certain other male relatives. Most observant Australian Muslims don’t practise purdah, preferring the views of religious authorities who interpret the Koran and other sources to read that women leaving their homes need not cover their face and hands.

  Jamaat women emulated the Prophet’s wives by wearing a face veil when going outside their homes. Others would stay at home altogether and would not appear before men other than certain male relatives. This explained why Mum’s Jamaati aunt would only speak to my dad from behind a screen, and would not enter a room when he was around. My dad found this behaviour somewhat extreme and even offensive, especially when later she was quite happy to appear in front of me when I was in my twenties.

  Mum’s aunt wasn’t always with the Jamaat. Her late husband was a successful businessman, and while he was alive, they lived for many years in the United Kingdom. Hence, Mum’s first cousins all spoke fluent English. Mum also showed me pictures of her aunt as a young, beautiful and fashionably dressed woman who, like many middle-and upper-class Pakistani women, would walk around in public unveiled.

  In fact, it was only after her husband passed away that Mum’s aunt felt drawn to religion. Like many conservative upper-class people, she was attracted to the ideas of Maududi.

  We always understood our stay in Pakistan to be temporary. We knew that eventually we would be moving on and returning to Australia. But for the next year or so, ours was to be a nomadic existence. That overseas trip left lasting impressions on all of us.

  3

  Jewish brothers and Bollywood love

  After spending almost a year in Pakistan (it was actually only six months, but it felt like a year!), we spent a week in London and Paris before arriving in Princeton, New Jersey, where Dad was spending his sabbatical.

  Because my parents strictly enforced the rule that we were not allowed to speak English in their presence, I became so saturated with Urdu that I had to re-learn how to read and speak English.

  I was enrolled in a local school and another culture shock was in store for me. For starters, there was no uniform. Imagine the reaction I received when I turned up on the first day at school wearing a Pakistani school uniform and an embroidered skullcap. I soon realised this wasn’t exactly the College of Success, so the next day, I wore ordinary Western clothes.

  In the playground, I noticed other kids wearing embroidered skullcaps. Feeling a sense of affinity with them, I struck up a conversation with a rather large lad whose nickname was ‘King Kong’.

  ‘So, are you learning to read the Koran?’

  ‘Yes, I have a man with a big beard come over every afternoon to teach me the Torah.’

  ‘Korah? It’s called the Koran. Do you read it from right to left?’

  ‘Yeah, of cou
rse!’

  ‘Do you have a big party when you’ve finished reading it?’

  ‘Yeah, we get lots of presents too.’

  ‘We don’t get presents in Pakistan. We get money instead.’

  King Kong and his friends wouldn’t eat food from the canteen. Once I went with King Kong and his mum (or rather, his ‘mom’) shopping. Kong’s mom wore a small headscarf, and she made a point of showing me which aisles to point out to my mum. When I did this, Mum told me that the food sold in these aisles had no pork in it. As such we Muslims and Jews could eat from there, even if there was pork everywhere else in the supermarket.

  I could understand about Muslims eating from there. But who were these people called Jews? I assumed King Kong and his friends were Muslims, just like me. They all wore embroidered caps and had men with big beards teach them to read a book from right to left. Mum had to give me another lesson on religious differences. She reminded me of the family that ran what was then Sydney’s only Indian spice shop on Bondi beach.

  ‘Dhey J’wish peepul, just like yor firrend King Kong.’

  ‘No they aren’t. They’re Muslim. They wear a topi just like we do. And King Kong has a molvi come to his house to read the Koran.’

  ‘Hee not lurn Kooraan. He lurn Thauraat. It diffurunt book.’

  All these years, I presumed that kind old lady who gave me free ice creams at the Bondi spice shop belonged to the same religion as me. I assumed that anyone who spoke and looked and ate like us were us. Even after Mum explained that the ‘J’wish’ were different, I still thought of them as virtually the same. Mum never tried to dispel that thinking.

  Growing up in Sydney and Princeton surrounded by people who wore skullcaps (especially on ceremonial occasions) led me to regard Jews as brothers-in-faith. It was only years later, when I attended my first Muslim youth camp, that I was first exposed to anti-Semitism.

  Our family returned to Australia in 1977. I went back to my old Ryde East Public School where once again, I felt like an outsider. There were no madrassa kids and no friendly Jewish kids. I couldn’t just go to a school friend’s house and assume his mom … woops, sorry … mum wouldn’t serve me a ham sandwich.

  But worst of all, I now had extra reasons to feel like an outsider. It wasn’t just a case of having brown skin, chubby appearance and a mum who wore clothes that made hippy-chicks jealous. I now also had to contend with taunts about my thick New Jersey accent and a strong aversion to school uniforms. The kids would laugh at my multi-coloured clothes and my mispronunciation of words like ‘girrl’ and ‘worrld’. I had to re-learn the Australian accent, not to mention the rules of cricket and rugby league.

  My parents’ social circle was reduced because many of our old South Asian family friends had moved interstate or overseas. In fact, we had more friends from Pakistan, and most of them were distinctly Muslim (those months in Pakistan made me more capable of figuring out the difference between Muslim and non-Muslim South Asians). A simple reason for this was that there were more South Asians living in Sydney, and so people now mixed more with their own kind. But the definition of ‘own kind’ among South Asians was no longer as universal as it once was. We did still spend time with some of our regular South Asian Hindu, Sikh and Catholic friends, but the change was marked.

  My parents resumed their fascistic language regime which involved us not being allowed to speak English at home. This time, the regime was extended to my not being allowed to speak English to my parents at all. It was as if speaking to them in any language other than Urdu was an insult.

  My linguistic education included a regular regime of Bollywood movies. Almost every Sunday, Mum would load me and my two siblings in the car and drive us to the Footbridge Theatre at Sydney University. There, we would join other South Asians for some overly spicy vegetarian samosa and a three- to four-hour musical that generally had the same plot as the one we saw last Sunday. More intriguingly, the different actresses all had the same singing voice. And when the men fought, their blows never seemed to connect despite making some rather dramatic tishun-type sounds.

  Mum had a cassette player installed in her car. She used this device to torture her children by forcing them to listen to Hindi film songs and more exotic (and indeed repetitive) Urdu ghazal (classical poetic songs). Mum would then test us on what message the singers were telling us through their highly nasalised voices.

  With Indian film songs, it was fairly easy. When they weren’t singing ‘la la la la laaah’ and ‘hm hm hm hm hmmmm’, the singers were lecturing us on how they had either completely lost the plot in love or completely lost it from losing love. The ghazal were a different kettle of fish altogether. In these classical songs, the singer would often spend a few minutes just clearing his or her throat by melodiously singing ‘aaaaaaah’ to the sound of a harmonium and possibly even gentle tabla (the Indian equivalent of bongo drums). Once the singer’s throat reached the requisite level of clarity, he or she would tell us how much they had completely lost the plot in love or losing love.

  It seemed that Indians were fixated with romance and love. Yet all these songs and movies were about how destructive love was. The films showed couples not being allowed to marry each other notwithstanding their extreme love. Instead, they had to marry someone their parents approved of, even if it drove them crazy enough to sing God-awful songs.

  What confused me even more was that all my Aussie friends told me how their parents fell in love and then married. Australia was such a rich country full of married couples still madly in love. Meanwhile, India and Pakistan were full of poor people and religious teachers wielding big sticks. But where was the love? No wonder they’re so poor.

  To make matters worse, Mum taught me that there was this thing called adultery. She said it was a terrible sin, one of those sins given the label of haraam and which God rarely forgave. I wasn’t sure exactly what adultery was. It reminded me of a trip we took to Las Vegas when we were overseas. We were stopped at a red light, and I looked out the window to the neon sign of a cinema. The sign read ‘Adult movies’. I was confused and sought the advice of my elders.

  ‘Dad, what are these adult movies?’

  ‘Son, you shouldn’t worry about them right now. Wait until you are a little older,’ Dad replied.

  ‘Okay, Dad. So what you’re saying is that I can come back to watch adult movies when I’m an adult.’

  For some reason Dad laughed while Mum was most upset. Now, many months after this incident, she was warning me of something that sounded similar.

  ‘Adulturry vairry bad gunna [sin]. It haraam!’

  ‘Mum, what is adultery? Is it something like adult movies?’

  ‘Adulturry iz lowe before marrij.’

  Love before marriage? Now I was totally confused. Indian movies were full of stories about love before marriage. But I couldn’t watch American movies showing the same thing until I became an adult. And even more confusing was that I wasn’t allowed to love someone before marrying them. This proved particularly troubling when I fell in love for the first time in my teens.

  Part of our struggle in returning to Australia involved Mum having to find work. Despite holding a Masters degree and many years’ experience in office management, Mum was satisfied with a job as a process worker.

  Mum was embarrassed to socialise with Anglo-Australians, whom she would refer to as gori (white woman). At the time, I thought it was because Mum saw them as culturally impure in some way. In fact, it was because Mum was embarrassed about speaking English with a thick Indian accent.

  Mum knew that the only way she could get a job was to go to the local office of the Commonwealth Employment Service (CES). She was afraid to go there, but on her second visit she met this gori with long hair tied in a pigtail and wearing a sari.

  Maureen was a follower of the Brahma Kumari sect. She was married to a Malaysian Chinese man who was also a devotee. Maureen was trying to learn Hindi, and Mum offered to teach her. In return, Maureen set Mum up in
a job at a local pharmaceutical factory. Mum was so stoked about getting the job that she declared Maureen her sister. So from then on, we had a gori aunty named Maureen.

  Aunty Maureen became my first real gori Muslim aunty. Again, my simplistic understanding led me to think that women who wore saris were Muslim. Yet Maureen was a strange Muslim. She never ate any meat, while all our other South Asian friends (including those who were Hindu) did. Also, she was married to a man from a strange place called Malaysia. I’d never heard of this country. What made me even more confused was that her husband was Chinese. Didn’t Chinese come from China?

  We used to visit Maureen quite regularly, and would participate in some of the social activities of the Brahma Kumaris. Mum taught Maureen Hindi the way she taught us—by forcing all of us to sit and watch wretched Indian and Pakistani movies. Mum also taught Maureen some special vegetarian recipes and how to sew Indian clothes.

  Around this time, I suffered a dislocated shoulder bone in the playground. I was tackled by a few small boys and pushed onto a concreted footpath. My shoulder caused me enormous pain. One day, we were visiting Maureen and I complained about the pain I was in. Maureen had a friend over, an Iranian ex-Muslim lady who suggested I could overcome my pain by a special prayer called transcendental meditation (TM) which involved removing all thoughts from your mind and silently letting your mind wander. I wasn’t quite sure what she meant by this. I thought it might involve worshipping things or even some kind of strange magic, and expressed my reservations in these terms. ‘Don’t be is-stoopid,’ Mum reassured me. So I was taken by this Iranian lady into a separate room and taught TM. This was my first major experience of a religion I recognised as being different to mine. It almost felt like I was testing a different God to see if he could do things Allah couldn’t.