by Irfan Yusuf
‘Yusuf, turn to the last chapter of the Gospel of Mark and read the final six verses.’
I started reading them out loud. Rev Alex looked at me curiously. ‘Yusuf, I told you to read the last six verses. What you’ve read isn’t from the last six verses.’
‘Sir, these are the last six verses.’
‘No they aren’t. The second last verse should read: “So then the Lord Jesus, after He had spoken to them, was taken up into Heaven and He sat down at the right hand of God”.’
‘Sir, I can’t see it.’
Then Rev Alex said the words I had dreaded. ‘Show me your Bible, Yusuf.’
I passed over my Bible to him. The other kids could see it didn’t have the right coloured cover and was without a school crest. So could Rev Alex, who looked at the page where the last few verses were and then addressed me in a rather stern and foreboding manner.
‘Yusuf, you heard what the headmaster said at assembly the other day. You know what the school rule is on Bibles. You’ve had days to buy the right Bible. Why have you brought this Bible?’
For some reason, I felt less fear and more defiance. I could see a chink in Rev Alex’s theological armour, and I knew he couldn’t cane me for exercising some religious freedom.
‘But sir, this is still a Bible. It is still the word of God, isn’t it?’
‘That’s not the point. The headmaster gave orders.’
‘Sir, are you telling me that the Bible I have is wrong? Why isn’t it the word of God?’
‘Yusuf, see me after class.’
It is difficult to describe how elated I felt. It was a huge ego boost to feel like I had a reverend, who must have spent years studying the Bible and Christian doctrine, on the back foot about these important issues. After class, Rev Alex took me into his office and showed me a New Testament he had in the original Greek. He showed me that the verses missing from the main text of my Bible were in fact in the original Greek main text, but the main text took up one-third of the page, with the remaining two-thirds being alternative readings.
During this time, my father started spending extended periods doing teaching and consulting work overseas. In his absence, Mum started focusing more on our religious education. This wasn’t at the expense of our Indian culture—we still had a rule that we were only allowed to speak Urdu at home, and we regularly went to the Footbridge Theatre at Sydney University to watch Indian movies on Sunday evenings. We also mixed with our usual Indian friends of all faiths.
At the same time, we started attending religious sessions with members of the Indian and Pakistani Muslim communities. Most of them lived in Sydney’s northern suburbs, and their very middle-class Islam focused on outward ceremonial matters. They were also a very competitive mob, forever boasting to each other about their children’s achievements in academia and sport. Religion (or at least kids reaching ceremonial religious milestones) was just another thing to boast about.
I was competing with another young Indian boy (with whom I shared my first name) to see who would be the first to complete reading the entire Koran in Arabic. Parents of a child who completed reading the Koran would then organise a party (known as a khatm-i-Qur’an) where the child would receive plenty of presents. After that, we only had to read the Koran at gatherings to commemorate someone’s death.
I firmly believed that finishing the Koran meant not only reading but also memorising the text in Arabic. My mother insisted that I memorise each sipara (an Urdu word referring to a thirtieth part of the Koran) before moving onto the next sipara. As it turned out, Irfan the younger completed his reading some eighteen months before me. His party was a lavish affair, and I was jealous—not just at the presents he received but also at his boasting of having a better memory than me.
I later found out from his mother that Irfan Jnr had only read the text once from start to finish, not memorised it! I confronted Mum about this, and she admitted there was some element of misunderstanding (if not downright deception) involved. She promised I could have a khatmi-Qur’an after I’d read the text once from start to finish and gained a basic degree of fluency in reading. Within six months, I managed to finish the entire text and had my party.
The fierce competitiveness among these North Shore Muslims was even reflected at the party. Irfan Jnr turned up and boasted at how he’d beaten me by almost a year. I boasted that I’d be getting better presents than he. Sadly I was wrong.
The party started with me dressing up in fancy Indian clothes, including those embroidered slippers with the curly toes. I felt like the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan (the one who built the Taj Mahal) in one of those old Bollywood movies. Unfortunately the shoes were too small for me and their shape caused the leather to dig sharply into my feet. Wearing such painful shoes all the time might explain why Shah Jahan spent much of his time high as a kite on opium.
A Pakistani uncle named Sultan then sat me down in front of everyone and asked me to recite some Koran. I came to a verse which could have been recited in at least two ways. I recited it one way and the uncle started correcting an already correct recitation. A few of the Pakistani aunties started sniggering and whispering about how my mother didn’t teach me properly.
The result of all this was a rather un-Islamic display of gossip and counter-gossip, with women taking sides between Mum and her detractors. My poor Uncle Sultan later telephoned and spoke to me. It was the first time an uncle had seen me as important enough to talk to at some length on the phone. Uncle Sultan was a true gentleman. He had not done anything wrong at all. He explained that he was just showing me an alternative way of reciting the same verse. It all sounded perfectly plausible and sensible, but his explanation didn’t stop all the chatter.
Once I had completed my reading and gained some fluency in the Arabic text of the Koran, I discovered we had an English translation at home. It was a very old edition, and had lost most of its cover. The paper was brownish in colour and many pages were ripped. It was published in Pakistan in the 1940s, and the translation was by one Molvi Muhammad Ali. Each page had two columns—one with the Arabic text and the other Molvi Ali’s translation.
For me, this was a godsend. Finally I could understand the meaning of the Arabic text of a book I’d suffered so much pain and so much boredom to learn. Then one day some North Shore uncles told me that this translation was wrong and that Molvi Muhammad Ali wasn’t a true molvi but rather belonged to a heretical sect. They showed me proof—that the publishers were from a group called the ‘Ahmadiyyah’. Their explanations all sounded like double Dutch to me. Ahmad was a common name in Indian circles. Mum told me to ignore these uncles and to study the English translation so that I could actually understand what the book was saying. She also promised to get Naani Amma in Pakistan to send more translations.
The Koran revealed some familiar personalities. I knew of these from the scripture classes I attended at school. The Koran made reference to people from the Bible—Moses, Jacob, Noah, Mary and Jesus. It even contained the entire life story of Joseph and his ultimate triumph over his brothers.
The story of Joseph was one of my favourites in scripture. The Koranic version of the story referred to him as ‘Yusuf’. I was always embarrassed by my surname which few teachers or classmates could pronounce properly. Having a strange name made me feel more isolated and alienated, and it was good to be able to use the ‘it’s just another way of saying Joseph’ comeback line.
I was pleased that the Koran referred to such well-known biblical figures. It gave me a sense of belonging, of knowing that my ancestral religious heritage wasn’t so alien after all.
Mum had read me excerpts from the Urdu translation of the Koran during the last year or so when I was completing my Arabic reading. This gave me a glimpse of the power of the words. Mum also showed me how many words in the Arabic text were also used in Urdu and had virtually the same meaning. I always looked out for these words in the Arabic text, and this made me feel like I could understand at least some of what God
was telling me in the book.
One day Naani Amma sent a huge parcel from Pakistan. Included were a bunch of Islamic books in both Urdu and English. There were books about Islamic history, sayings of the Prophet Muhammad and other more advanced topics like ‘law’ and ‘ethics’ and the ‘Islamic State’. Mum told me not to bother reading such books and to focus on the translations of the Koran.
Thankfully, Naani Amma had sent not just one translation but a large number of translations as well as commentaries. These included a rather Shakespearian ‘King James’ translation by an English Muslim named Muhammad Marmaduke Pickthall.
An English Muslim? How could that be? I read the introduction and discovered that Pickthall had changed his religion. He was brought up a Christian but then went through a process of ‘conversion’. I knew it was possible to convert to Christianity. In fact, I was still contemplating such a conversion myself. Reading about Muhammad Pickthall was the first time I learned that it was possible to convert to Islam. Up until then, I thought Islam was something some of us were born with and forced to carry around with us like a squashed fruit hiding in the bottom of your school bag.
The translation of the Koran that I found easiest to read, and which became my favourite, was that of former English civil servant Abdullah Yusuf Ali. This was first published in Lahore during the 1930s by Sheikh Muhammad Ashraf. This name became more familiar to me as quite a few books we used to get from Pakistan were published by him.
Mum was a rapacious consumer of TV news. She used to make us sit through one hour of what was then known as Eyewitness News on Channel 10. I’d have to put up with watching a fairly sanitised reporting of local and world events.
Certain conflicts figured prominently on the news and these affected my earliest impressions of various parts of the world. I knew that there were Muslims outside of South Asia, but I had little idea of a broader Muslim world, and no sense of affinity with Muslims from the Middle East, Africa or South East Asia.
Mostly, Arab Muslims were seen as a source of embarrassment, as people who had lost their culture and wore Western-style clothes whilst flirting with Soviet-style politics. In terms of losing their culture, Turks were a complete write-off.
The net effect of the incident with Mum and the Turkish woman at her work was that we regarded Arabs and Turks as sinful uncultured drunkards who wanted to drown all Muslims in a sea of beer and communism. The fact that our ancestors had Turkish blood didn’t seem to alter our perspective. I didn’t see such judgments as inherently racist in the way I do now.
The other problem with Arabs was that they were rather violent. I fully swallowed the popular propaganda of the ‘Arab terrorist’. Palestinians were particularly nasty because they used to hijack planes and kidnap people. For some reason, they also tried to harm the poor Jewish people who had suffered so much for two thousand years and had finally managed to carve out a country in the middle of the desert. I never learned about Palestinian refugees or of the illegal Israeli occupation of Palestinian land. All I knew was that the PLO (the Palestine Liberation Organisation) were nasty terrorists who were shaming us all.
Lebanon was also a basket case, with Muslims of various denominations fighting each other and fighting Christians. It wasn’t clear exactly who was at fault or who started the fighting. However, all the Lebanese people we had ever met in Sydney were uneducated, arrogant and racist towards us because we didn’t recite the Koran in their accent. The only nice Lebanese people we knew were all Christians. One woman often told us about her parents who had been shot dead in their bed in Lebanon by Muslim militiamen who had stormed into their house. This Christian woman loved hearing me recite the Koran and would explain its meaning to me in her broken and heavily accented English.
The impressions I gained watching the TV and meeting Muslims who weren’t from South Asia reinforced in my mind the view that non-Indian Muslims belonged more in the ‘them’ than ‘us’ category.
Pakistan, on the other hand, was with the good guys. It was an ally of the United States and was a thriving democracy, even if I regarded it as a rather dirty, unhygienic place where people didn’t use toilet seats and where you had the Koran bashed into you by imams.
Mum and Dad were far more interested in Indian or Pakistani news. They were both extremely disturbed by the arrest and hanging of the prime minister of Pakistan, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, in 1977. Mum was never a huge fan of Bhutto (who was the Pakistani prime minister during the period we lived there), because of the stories about him sending out goons to kidnap young women and having his way with them. As far as my parents were concerned, Bhutto was the democratically elected leader. General Zia-ul-Haq’s military coup was a huge embarrassment for Pakistanis everywhere. Dad and a Pakistani uncle used rather colourful language in Urdu when General Zia appeared on the TV news promising elections within ninety days. The uncle noticed I was listening, and advised me not to repeat his words in respectable company. From memory, his words were:
‘Yeh haramzada maadat choth kiya election karwa-e-gah. Thum deklena, yeh kutha badmaash tho kursi ko apnahi bana-e-ga! Khuda ko bhi mushkil hoyegi is kamineh ko hataane meh.’
(‘As if this bastard mother-fucker will organise an election. You watch, this dog-like pimp will make the [Presidential] chair his own. Even God will have trouble removing this low-caste fellow.’)
After Dad provided me with a full translation (Mum wasn’t around to stop him), I told the uncle how impressed I was with his extensive vocabulary even if I felt it was blasphemous. I soon heard similar language used even by the most religious Pakistanis to describe political leaders, especially military dictators. Poor God used to get dragged into all kinds of political discussions. Within months, General Zia’s anti-democratic antics and love for power became a source of numerous blasphemous jokes, many of which were told at religious gatherings by very devout uncles sporting impressive beards.
I remember standing outside the front gate of the Surry Hills mosque with Dad after Eid prayers. Eid was one of those occasions when that 90 per cent of Muslim people who never otherwise set foot in the mosque turned up. As soon as the prayers were over, people would walk out and completely ignore the sermon. On this occasion, an uncle on the mosque committee came to mingle with Dad as we waited for Mum to emerge from the crowded women’s section. The uncle shared a General Zia joke with my dad that went something like this.
On the Day of Judgment, God decided to organise a special cocktail party for world leaders to be held just before He set up His mizaan (the scales used to judge people’s actions during their lifetime). Each world leader was expected to greet God upon entering His Divine Court before mingling with the other guests. Margaret Thatcher (the first British female prime minister) walked up to God, who stood up from his throne and shook Mrs Thatcher’s hand. Next was Ronald Reagan, and God again stood up and shook his hand. Finally, General Zia arrived, late as usual (heck, he was running on South Asian time!). God called Zia closer and shook his hand. Zia was a little perturbed by this inconsistent treatment, but assumed only the best from God.
‘Allah, you called me close to you before shaking my hand. I guess you must have been happy with my Islamisation policies.’
‘No, General Zia. It’s just that after seeing what you did to Bhutto, I was too scared to get out of my chair!’
That joke was told and re-told at religious gatherings all over Sydney, with even Urdu-speaking imams having a good chuckle. Sometimes religion and politics do mix well.
6
The Islamic industry and the Holy Trinity
Dad was always very private about his religious faith. He regarded religion as a personal matter, and was so averse to preaching that he never even insisted on my performing daily nemaaz or other rituals. He also didn’t like praying in public unless there was no choice such as when we were at the mosque.
Dad also never led any nemaaz service at home. Hence, in our house, we all performed our nemaaz separately. It wasn’t until later in l
ife that I learned of the importance of performing nemaaz in jemaat (congregation).
Even if only two men were present, one of them is meant to lead the nemaaz service and the other follow. The leader is known as the imam and is usually the oldest or most knowledgeable person in the group. This nemaaz done in jemaat is considered more Islamic and therefore deserving of greater reward from God for all involved. People praying in congregation therefore become a truly Islamic jemaat (or, shall we say, a true jemaah islamiyah? It’s okay, keep that national security hotline magnet on the fridge).
Sometimes when we were invited to lunch or dinner by more openly devout friends, the menfolk would gather at prayer time and perform the nemaaz in jemaat. Someone (often a young child) would call out the azaan (call to prayer) that I used to hear radiating from numerous minarets in Pakistan. Sometimes even I’d be roped in to perform this task. A heap of bedsheets would be rolled out, and an uncle (usually the one with the longest beard and the most expensive Mercedes Benz) would act as imam.
These uncles would follow up nemaaz with religious talk about why we should be particular about nemaaz or why we should spend more time reading the Koran. They would read out of a book in Urdu. Other children my age, most of whom couldn’t understand much Urdu, would be forced to listen to these talks. They would look on in confusion whilst I nodded in sequence with other uncles when the imam-uncle made some substantial point.
Some of these uncles had only recently become religious. Dad was particularly sceptical about their calls to religiosity. He recalled a time back in the early 1970s when he served one year on the executive of one of Sydney’s earliest mosques. He once went on a fundraising drive around Sydney seeking funds for the mosque. Many of these uncles were too busy wining and dining to join him or even to contribute. It was Dad’s first and last involvement in what he cynically described as the Islamic industry.