Once Were Radicals

by Irfan Yusuf

  So when I first visited the lush grounds of St Ignatius, I was impressed by the immaculate green grounds and the flat turf cricket pitches. I imagined launching an international cricket career as Australia’s first (somewhat overweight) Indo-Pakistani Dennis Lillee, running in to bowl a few bouncers and knocking the space helmet off some poor frightened Tony Greig, sentencing him to a lifetime of exile from the cricket ground apart from the odd pitch report.

  My dad had other concerns. He told Mum he felt the school was a little too austere for his liking. So he decided to try another school. This one was in the city and was run by the Anglican Church. I didn’t mind Anglicans as my favourite scripture teacher at my state school was Anglican.

  Dad picked me up from school early one day. We parked the car at Chatswood then caught a train to Town Hall. I imagined this would certainly be a more exciting way to get to school each day than walking among bullies or being dropped off at St Ignatius. It took us around thirty minutes along the North Shore line, crossing the Harbour Bridge and enjoying a gorgeous front-seat view of the harbour and the city skyscrapers. This was going to school in style.

  We arrived at reception and went up the lift to the eighth floor of a building located just behind the Town Hall. The location of the building was exciting enough. When we exited the lift, it was as if we’d entered the twenty-first century. Of course, sitting in the twenty-first century now doesn’t seem like a big deal. But for a ten-year-old in 1979, it was huge.

  I started attending St Andrews Cathedral School at the beginning of Grade 5. Our school uniform was much more formal, consisting of a light-grey safari suit and a straw boater. Mum thought the safari suit would be good training for my future life as a ‘daaktar’—all my doctor uncles wore safari suits. I felt like a broadway actor wearing the boater on my head.

  The trip to school now took at least ninety minutes. I had to catch a bus to a nearby railway station and then catch a crowded train to Town Hall station. Often the trains were so crowded that I’d have to wait until a number of trains had come and gone and a less crowded train was available.

  It was on one such train that I recognised a boy in my class. His name was Donald, and he would catch the train most mornings and afternoons. The only time he would miss out was when he would be on choir duty. St Andrews has a world-famous choir, and choristers were expected to attend early morning practice and stay after school from time to time for what they called ‘evensong’. They would dress up in special robes and gowns and sing at our weekly chapel services.

  My parents insisted that I attend chapel services because they felt it was important for me to learn about the dominant faith and religious culture of Australia. They also insisted I attend Divinity classes which were held once a week.

  Mum and Dad didn’t want me to feel left out because of their ancestral faith. In fact, they felt that attending church services and Divinity classes would make me a better Muslim. As far as they were concerned, Christianity and Islam were similar enough that my intense exposure to Christianity would be good for me. Mum even encouraged me to establish friendships with boys at the school.

  Mum impressed upon me that Christians were good people just like us. In many respects they were better people, which was why God gave their countries so much wealth. I guess Mum hadn’t heard of Latin America or Eastern Europe at that stage.

  What my parents liked the most about my new school was that St Andrews had a zero-tolerance policy on bullying. A number of kids in my class had mild intellectual disabilities, but anyone who poked fun at them was punished severely. My parents could see that I was much less fearful of going to school and much more relaxed after coming home. In fact, on the first day I was interviewed to go to the school, the deputy principal told me that I should approach him each and every time someone made even a slightly disparaging remark about the colour of my skin or my ethnicity. It impressed in my mind the idea that real Christians could never be racist.

  In the first month or so at St Andrews, I was approached by the school captain. His name was Jackson and his parents were Pakistani. He sought me out and welcomed me to the school. I duly greeted him with the traditional ‘assalamu alaykum’. Because he was Pakistani, I immediately assumed he must be one of my mob (Pakistani = South Asian = Muslim = cricket fanatic). Jackson fulfilled all of these criteria except the third.

  I felt proud to be at a school where the school captain was one of my mob. ‘Jacko’ (as he was known) was popular among both teachers and students. He was a brilliant cricketer and frequently scored centuries when representing the school. What particularly impressed me was that he felt no embarrassment about being from Pakistan.

  I went home after meeting Jacko and told Mum and Dad about him. My parents knew Jacko’s father, an Anglican priest who had passed away some years before. Jacko’s dad was a highly respected man among Pakistanis and had helped many (mostly Muslim) migrants settle into their new country.

  One thing I never quite understood was why Jacko didn’t return my greeting. For as long as I could remember, I was expected to greet all my South Asian uncles and aunts with the same greeting of assalamu alaykum. At the time, I didn’t realise this was an Arabic greeting literally meaning ‘peace be with you’ and generally used by Muslims (both Arab and non-Arab). I even addressed my Hindu, Sikh and other South Asian uncles with this greeting, and they would respond with walaykum salam (meaning ‘and peace also upon you’).

  But each time I said assalamu alaykum to Jacko, he would give me a slightly puzzled look, smile and then just say, ‘Hi Irfan.’ However, Jacko could recognise the greeting I gave him when we would finish our conversation. It was the same departure greeting I’d give my Sikh uncle who lived down the road and the Jewish lady who ran the Indian spice shop in Bondi—khudahafiz.

  It turns out that the departure greeting of khudahafiz was a traditional Persian greeting used by just about everyone—Muslims, Jews, Sikhs, Hindus, Parsees, Jains and Christians from South Asia. It merely meant ‘may God be your protector’. In fact, the first time I learned what the greeting meant was when I was watching the Dave Allen show with my dad. Allen ended his show with ‘Goodbye and may your God go with you’. Dad looked at me and said: ‘See, he is saying khudahafiz. That is what khudahafiz means.’

  The only problem I had with my parents exposing me to people of all faiths was that I couldn’t imagine my very Indian Islam as something I could take with me to school, to show to my friends and to feel part of the mainstream. I could be Muslim at home, with uncles and aunties and occasionally at the mosque but never anywhere else.

  Furthermore, Islam was taught to me by stern men sporting big beards and wielding big sticks. My experience at the madrassa in Karachi was that the Koran wasn’t taught. Instead, it was bashed into you. At my state primary school, we did have kids receiving ‘the cane’, but this was administered only for the most serious offences such as getting caught stealing. I never received the cane at Ryde East, and only occasionally at St Andrews. It seemed to me that Christianity was more a religion of love than of the stick.

  Attending chapel services once a week at the Cathedral was almost a surreal experience. We would line up outside the Cathedral and walk into an old building that smelt of sandalwood, our shoes gently stepping on floor tiles so old that I sometimes wondered whether they had been laid by Captain Arthur Phillip. The stained glass showed images of a white bearded Christ preaching while other white men and women listened intently. Christ was white, and so was his mother—no wonder they were played only by white children in the school passion plays.

  Church music proved mesmerising for me, even if I couldn’t understand half of what the choir was singing. The procession of the choir into the Cathedral wearing their white and purple robes, with the organ playing some majestic tune, was a profoundly moving experience. At first it felt a little scary, like sitting in a haunted house, but as I got to know the hymns and their tunes, the music grew on me.

  Mum had often t
aught me that listening to music was a sin, but she was a voracious consumer of classical Indian lyrical songs and songs from Bollywood films. We couldn’t drive anywhere without her putting on a cassette of Indian songs and asking me to explain the meanings. Sometimes these Indian songs contained references to serving and drinking wine and becoming intoxicated. This was strange as my parents were strict teetotallers and impressed upon us that we should never touch alcohol. We also tended not to mix with people who openly drank alcohol. I couldn’t imagine South Asian people drinking, let alone singing about the joys of drinking.

  Although South Asians had a strong religious culture and openly wore their religious symbols, they also enjoyed joking about religious prohibitions and were quite irreverent about men of religion such as gurus and molvis.

  On one occasion I missed chapel as I wasn’t sure if I was committing a sin by attending church. I was also worried by the attraction I was feeling to this new kind of worship. But my parents weren’t at all worried. They believed the Christian faith was so similar to ours that it was natural for me to feel attracted to it. Christians believed in God just as we did, and they worshipped God just as we did.

  Yet I couldn’t see any similarity between the two faiths. I had learned to read the Koran but never understood its meaning. Our prayer involved physical postures and exercises and reciting prayers that seemed strange to me. I used to cringe when we would go on picnics with South Asian uncles and aunts and some of the men spread out mats to perform nemaaz on the grass. It looked like such an embarrassing spectacle seeing these men wearing tight pants prostrate and pointing their bums in the air whilst having a (presumably snotty) handkerchief wrapped around their head like an undersized bandana.

  Sometimes we would go to the mosque and take our shoes off to pray, only to find our shoes had been removed and placed in another spot or even just taken. My family were life members of the Islamic Society of NSW (the organisation that managed the Surry Hills mosque) but there was a change in the committee and all life memberships were cancelled. On one occasion, Mum went to the mosque for an annual general meeting and an election of the mosque committee which descended into a match of shouting and throwing chairs. The police had to be called to keep apart members of competing factions.

  It all seemed so barbaric when compared to the grace and gentleness of Christianity at St Andrews. Muslims just seemed foreign, uncivilised, violent, embarrassing, poor, dirty and dishonest. Dad often spoke disparagingly of people who were part of what he called the ‘Islamic industry’, people who had spent years drinking and gambling then suddenly were growing beards and lecturing people on why they should only eat halal meat just because they had secured a job at a religious body that made money from halal certification.

  Islam was also extremely disorganised. We didn’t have a central Cathedral with offices and a hierarchy. We didn’t have our own archbishop. We just had people with thick accents (that’s if they could speak English) fighting over executive positions and halal meat income. And the few mosques I saw were often dirty and grotty and poorly maintained.

  By the end of Year 6, I was beginning to have serious doubts about whether I wanted to be a South Asian Urdu-speaking Muslim when I grew up. I wondered why I had gone through so much suffering at madrassa and so much teasing at school just to be a passenger in what looked like a ship of absolute fools.

  One thing I liked about the Christian religion was that it was all in English. I already knew from my previous school that Jesus and Mary were white, but I wasn’t sure what language they spoke. But at St Andrews, I learned that the Gospels were written in Greek. I assumed that meant Jesus spoke Greek and felt terribly guilty about referring to my old Greek friends sometimes as ‘wogs’.

  The New Testament may have been in Greek, but we always read the Bible in English and our church services were always in English. Even the choir sang hymns in English, though it often sounded more like Latin.

  Christianity was also a religion for the downtrodden. The word ‘Christian’ was first used as a label to insult Jesus’s disciples who apparently used to get bullied a fair bit after he ascended to heaven. It felt good to be hanging around with people whose religious heritage was basically about bullied people wearing their wounds with pride.

  What impressed me most was that you could learn the Bible without getting bashed by some overweight bearded dude with a stick. This seemed most enlightened when compared with the molvi who taught me the Koran in Karachi. We learned Bible stories and basic Christian theology without being scarred in the process.

  In Year 6 we spent a number of afternoons watching an animated video of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, a popular children’s novel by C.S. Lewis. It was an extraordinary story of this lion sacrificing all for his people and then being killed in the process. He then somehow comes back to life and re-establishes his kingdom. This lion was an awesome figure, and the kids around me cheered and clapped when the lion returned to life. After the final instalment, our school chaplain (and Divinity teacher) Rev Alex told us that the story was about Jesus. The lion represented Jesus who died on the cross for our sins and then miraculously rose from the dead. Jesus now sat by the right hand of God and was the son of God. Jesus was also God, his divinity proven by the act of rising from the dead.

  The idea that the son of God was also God was confusing. But I was so impressed by the awesome sacrifice that any niggling doubts about the logic of that two-thousand-year-old situation were filed at the back of my mind for future consideration.

  Jesus seemed like a far more impressive God than Allah. Although I always understood God and Allah to be the same person, I associated Allah with getting beaten up for mispronouncing words I never understood from His book. Allah also expected me to stop work or pray at five set times a day, engage in ceremonial wash and then perform prayers that involved a fair bit of effort and physical exertion.

  Of course, being in Allah’s crowd had its fringe benefits. Mum was part of Allah’s crowd, and she always boasted of having her prayers answered. Plus, instead of having one Christmas, we’d get two celebrations (Eid). Being part of Club Allah meant you could pick your own Eid presents because everyone gave money not gifts. Allah’s mob ate less bland food, and we were generally much smarter as we spoke more than one language.

  But Allah didn’t guarantee you paradise like Jesus did. To gain Allah’s reward and pleasure, you had to work hard. You had to pray and fast and give charity and even be prepared to spend thousands of dollars flying to Mecca and withstand fifty-degree heat. The price of getting into heaven was a lifelong effort.

  You also had to make sure that your good deeds outweighed your bad ones. Each night before going to sleep, I would calculate in my head the number of good and bad things I did. If my bad deeds were more, I would recite special prayer formulas by which Allah rubbed out the effect of the bad deeds.

  Allah had a really efficient method of keeping track of our deeds. Apart from being able to see and hear everything, Allah placed angels on the shoulders of all human beings. The angel on our left shoulder recorded our bad deeds, while the angel on our right shoulder recorded the good stuff. In my case, Mum often said the left angel might run out of ink unless I behaved.

  Jesus, on the other hand, wasn’t such a stickler for records. All Jesus wanted from us was faith. We just had to believe Jesus was God and had died for our sins, and we’d get an automatic ticket to heaven. It was that simple.

  5

  Faiths, doubts and politics

  My religious upbringing was being affected not just by my personal experiences at home and school. Events many thousands of miles from the safety of Sydney suburbia also began to impact on how I viewed myself and my ancestral religion. The drums of overseas conflict were beginning to play loudly.

  It all started in 1979, the year before I started at St Andrews. Something really terrible had happened that involved Muslims and was being blamed on Islam. It was all over the TV news (that I rarely pai
d much attention to but was forced to sit through during dinner) or on the AM program on ABC radio that Dad listened to in the car.

  This terrible thing—labelled a ‘revolution’—was happening next door to Pakistan in Iran, a country whose name I always remembered because it sounded so much like my own. My Anglo-Aussie teachers often accidentally called me ‘Iran’ when I introduced myself and then when I subsequently (and inevitably) had to spell it out for them.

  The news reported Iran had been a very good place. People there liked America a lot. Mum, however, said that Iranians were in many ways just as bad and un-Islamic as Turks. They had lost their culture, they drank alcohol and went to nightclubs and their women all wore short skirts. Mum’s phrase for Muslims suffering from this kind of corruption and decadence was they were ‘too modern’.

  Iranians went from being too modern to a pack of screaming galahs marching through the streets. They had overthrown their nice handsome king and allowed a man with big nasty beady eyes to take over their country. He and his colleagues were strange people with big beards who wore long black coats and an austere black cloth tied around their heads, much unlike the colourful cloth my Sikh uncles would wear. Also unlike my Sikh uncles, these people rarely if ever smiled. They certainly never laughed or told jokes about Sikhs (again, most unlike my Sikh uncles).

  The bearded men reminded me of my Molvi Sahib at madrassa in Pakistan. Except these men had titles like Mullah and Ayatollah. The angry ayatollahs were less like molvis and more like magicians, waving magical spells on Iranians and making them shout nasty slogans in the streets calling for entire countries to be killed. I’d see these frenzied crowds scream things like ‘Death to America’ on my TV screen. It didn’t sound like ‘Death to America’, but that was what the English subtitles said.

  This sort of thing disturbed me greatly because I had relatives and friends living in the United States, and I didn’t want them to die. Added to this was their violent, loud and nasty revolution was described as ‘Islamic’. Mostly I’d become accustomed to associating ‘Islamic’ to describe something good, because it was done in accordance with Islam. Yet now I saw crazed people beating their chests shouting death to entire countries and even holding frightened American hostages and threatening their lives being described by news readers as Islamic. Was there something about Islam Mum and Dad were hiding from me?