Once Were Radicals

by Irfan Yusuf

  Mum had no idea I was toying with these notions. She was too busy convincing herself that my being Dux of Year 10 meant I would end up with enough marks in Year 12 to satisfy her (as opposed to my) aspirations. That, of course, meant studying medicine. She kept horrifying me with motherly (and in my mind, overly surgical) terms of endearment such as kaleje ka tukra (piece of her heart), and made sure every Indian and Pakistani (by now I knew the difference) aunty in Sydney knew the difference.

  Mum’s ultimate gift to me was that she sent me to my first Muslim youth camp. Dad was appalled with her decision, as she didn’t allow my sisters to go despite the fact that their best friend Lubna used to go. However, Mum dug in her heels and paid the camp attendance fee herself.

  This camp would be the beginning of my discovery of the Muslim ummah, a word I learned at that camp but whose meaning I’ve found hard to explain ever since. In my mind, the ummah represented the religious glue that sort-of kind-of binds Muslims across ethnic, racial, linguistic and other boundaries. Or at least it’s supposed to.

  My Uncle Asif worked at the offices of the Australian Federation of Islamic Councils, who organised the camp. He picked me up and we arrived at the AFIC headquarters around an hour late. I was scared we might miss the bus, but he assured me everything would be okay and that Muslims were never on time.

  Three hours after we arrived at the AFIC headquarters, he was proved correct. There were people of various ages there, including my Uncle QAA and Dr Wang. What struck me was the enormous variety of ethnicities represented there, groups that I never imagined would learn and worship together. I met Muslims from Sri Lanka, South Africa, Albania, Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan and even New Zealand. There were also the usual suspects—Pakistanis, Indians, Lebanese, Egyptians, Turks, Indonesians and Yugoslavs. It was a veritable United Nations.

  When we finally boarded the bus four hours after schedule, Uncle QAA asked me how many surahs of the Koran I had memorised. I had never heard this word surah as a way of dividing the Koran, and assumed he must have been talking about a thirtieth part of the Koran which we called sipara. When I was attending madrassa in Pakistan in 1976, I had memorised two entire siparas, but I had since forgotten them. I felt very guilty about this as Mum had warned me that forgetting bits of the Koran would earn me plenty of negative spiritual currency and may land me in hell for a while.

  Dr QAA told me that the camp participants would be divided into two sections—beginners and advanced. This division would be based on a test which had an oral component (reciting twenty surahs from memory) and a written component testing our knowledge of Islam. He said that I should be able to pass the written component, but that I had to memorise at least twenty surahs. He explained that a surah was different to a sipara. Whilst all siparas were of the same length, a surah could be as short as three verses or even longer than a sipara. Every surah of the Koran (except one) began with the same sentence which in Arabic sounded like bismillah hir-rahman ir-rahim and which meant words to the effect of ‘in the name of God who is most gracious and most merciful’. Mum had taught me to say this formula (we called it the Bismillah) before doing anything, whether it be eating or drinking. I only knew of it as a special spiritual formula to bless what we did.

  I spent the entire bus ride memorising surahs (roughly translated as chapters) of the Koran. When we arrived at the camp, we all sat for the test. The questions were really basic, and I finished them in no time. I was sure I’d be in the advanced group, and was shocked when told that I would be in the beginners class. I asked for my marked exam, and saw that the person marking the exam had made several mistakes. I took my exam paper to Uncle QAA who immediately diagnosed the problem.

  ‘Irfan, you are using Urdu words instead of the Arabic originals. You described the five daily prayers as nemaaz when the proper word is salaat. You described fasting as roza when the proper word is sawm.’

  ‘But Uncle, these are the words Mum taught me. Was Mum wrong?’

  ‘No, she was not. It’s just that her words aren’t used in the Koran.’

  Uncle QAA then issued the following ruling to camp administrators: ‘Put this mummy’s boy in the advanced class.’

  After arriving at the campsite, located in a gorgeous little Victorian town called Harrietville, I continued learning more new Arabic words. Not all of these words were fit to form part of the Koran. I became friends with a group of young Arab boys—Abdullah, Kamal, Faris and Bilal. Faris was Egyptian and the other three were Lebanese. Faris kept calling us bayekh, which isn’t a nice way of describing someone. Soon enough, this word became Faris’s nickname.

  Kamal and I were of the same age, and enjoyed talking theology, whilst the rest of them just listened and occasionally spoke about their favourite musicians—Prince, Freddy Mercury and (in Bilal’s case) Elvis Presley. Kamal wanted to be an engineer. He asked me what I wanted to be.

  ‘Mum wants me to be a doctor.’

  ‘But what do you want to be?’

  ‘Um, I’m not sure. A doctor, I guess.’

  Kamal couldn’t believe how much Mum had control over me, and began teasing me by referring to me as a ‘mummy’s boy’.

  Hardly anyone at the camp had difficulty pronouncing my name. Just about every Turk or Yugoslav (or ‘Yugo’ for short) or South African had a cousin or uncle named Irfan. However, the Arabs did have trouble. Apparently my name sounded like an insulting description. There was another Pakistani boy named Arfeen who had the same problem. The first syllable of our names sounded like bi’arrif, an Arabic word meaning ‘he disgusts’, and the Arabs kept getting Arfeen and I confused. Finally, one kid named Mamoun started referring to us as Bi’arrif-1 and Bi’arrif-2.

  It was at this camp that I met someone whose ability to provide calm and rational explanations to even the most controversial religious issues reminded me of Yusuf Islam. Imam Fehmi was an interesting man. For a start, he had very fair skin and looked like an Anglo-Australian. He spoke fluent English with an ever so slight Lebanese accent. And he was somehow lucky enough to have the word imam as his surname. However, it sounded strange calling him Imam el-Imam. Instead, we just called him Sheikh Fehmi.

  My new friend Kamal was like Sheikh Fehmi’s understudy. Kamal would deliver the azaan (or call to prayer) over the microphone, and Sheikh Fehmi would lead us in salaat. By now I was getting used to calling this form of worship salaat (instead of nemaaz). We would perform salaat in congregation in straight lines facing Mecca, boys’ lines at the front of the hall and girls’ lines at the back. Then after we had completed the congregational salaat in a seated position, Sheikh Fehmi would turn around facing our lines and nod to Kamal, who would lead us in a special form of worship called zikr that involved the repetition of certain religious phrases, including possibly the most well-known Muslim prayer: Allahu akbar (meaning ‘God is always greater than all else’).

  Sheikh Fehmi taught us that normally we would perform the salaat five times a day. However, as we were travelling, God gave us concessions. This included joining the two prayers of the afternoon and evening respectively, meaning we would perform three prayers in total instead of five. After each salaat, Sheikh Fehmi would deliver a talk about some topic and would invite us to ask questions.

  The camp was divided into organisers, supervisors and participants. Each day we would sit through a lecture given usually by one of the organisers. Each organiser was a member of the AFIC executive committee who was always a middle-aged man. There were no female organisers. Mostly, their lectures were pre-prepared and involved reading long and rather esoteric passages from the kinds of books Mum kept in her library. The organisers’ lectures sometimes went on for hours, and many participants (and at times, even supervisors) could be seen nodding off.

  The supervisors were both male and female and were usually more experienced and knowledgeable people who were either studying at university or in the workforce. Many supervisors were either children of or related to the organisers.

  At c
amp, there was the advanced and the beginners group, and we also had cabin groups. Each cabin had seven or eight kids, each with its own supervisor. My cabin supervisor was a Turkish guy named Refat who was extremely physically fit and quite strict with us. However, after a few days, he calmed down and even laughed when we poked fun at his name which some of us recited as ‘re-fart’. Later, Refat read to us from a small booklet he had which explained various textures, smells and even colours of flatulence one could make, even illustrating these using his own abilities.

  One chap in my cabin was a Pakistani kid I occasionally saw at family gatherings. Waseem had curly hair with glasses, and reminded me of the musical satirist Wierd Al Yankovic. Then there was my other Pakistani buddy Arfeen as well as a half-Pakistani and half-Yugoslav kid we called Mukhi. It turned out that Mukhi was related to the Yugoslavs I had met some years back at the house of Lubna, my virtually adopted sister.

  One evening, Sheikh Fehmi gave us a talk about the situation in Afghanistan. He told us about what the Afghans were suffering at the hands of the evil communists. Someone asked Sheikh Fehmi what happened to the Afghan Muslims killed. Sheikh Fehmi explained that they were martyrs who would enter paradise without reckoning.

  That night, I joined with my Arab friends Kamal, Abdullah, Belal and Faris. We spoke about the situation in Afghanistan. Kamal seemed to know a lot of what was happening there, and he also knew people who had gone from Australia to fight in the jihad. He expressed a wish to go and fight. Having read Maududi’s work on jihad, I also felt some zeal to go and at least see what was happening on the battlefield.

  The next day, we approached Sheikh Fehmi to see if he could help us. Sheikh Fehmi deterred us from taking up the Afghan jihad by giving us the explanation contained in the Prologue of this book.

  But Kamal was sceptical of Sheikh Fehmi’s explanations. Kamal followed the Muslim group referred to earlier called Wahhabi who were aligned to Saudi Arabia, a close ally of the United States. He saw the jihad in the same way many American (and indeed Australian) Cold War warriors saw it—as a fight against the evil, godless communist empire. Kamal even told us stories of boys he knew of our age or a little older who had made it to Afghanistan or worked as volunteers in the Peshawar office of a charity that helped organise foreign fighters.

  Sheikh Fehmi had an enormous amount of knowledge, as did his understudy Kamal. However, Kamal didn’t process his knowledge with as much wisdom as Sheikh Fehmi. For Kamal, religion was all black and white. Rules were rules and had to be obeyed. Kamal would read the Koran and books of hadith and come up with his own views. At times, he even tried disputing what Sheikh Fehmi said. But the sheikh was much more patient and much more nuanced in his approach to religion. He would often caution Kamal not to be so harsh to others and not to be so sure of his own opinions.

  One rule I found strange was that the girls at the camp all had to wear a hijab which covered their hair in full. Even Sheikh Fehmi was strict on hijab, insisting that Islam teaches women to cover everything except their face and hands when going out or being in the presence of men to whom they aren’t related.

  One person who was also very influential at the camps was a Turkish man from Melbourne named Mahmud. He had a beautiful recitation voice, and his Koran recitations would often bring Sheikh Fehmi and the organisers to tears. I had seen very nice recitations on Ahmed Deedat videos at home, but to see a master recite so perfectly and melodically in person for the first time was an extraordinary experience.

  Mahmud was also a kind of religious celebrity. He had come first or second in an international recitation competition in Saudi Arabia and had been awarded the honour of entering inside the cubic structure called the Kaaba in Mecca. This was an honour that few Muslims would ever experience. Mahmud was in charge of teaching people the Koran. He was the most senior supervisor and was held in awe by the others.

  One aspect of the camp I was most uncomfortable with and which I found most un-Islamic was that boys and girls would mix freely. In Indo-Pakistani culture, this was regarded as almost sinful. I rarely if ever spoke to Indo-Pakistani girls unless they were friends of my sisters. At the camp Muslim boys and girls were joking and laughing despite the fact that they ate separately to us boys and slept in separate cabins on opposite corners of the campsite.

  I was extremely shy when it came to talking to girls. However, some of the older girls liked my taste in music and thought I asked interesting questions which sometimes tripped up the uncles giving the lectures. Some of the girls were friends of my sisters’ friend Lubna. Among them were female supervisors including a Yugoslav ‘sister’ (we always referred to each other as ‘brother’ and ‘sister’) Sylvana, her younger sister Ajsa (pronounced Aisha) and their Tasmanian friend Enisa.

  One of my least favourite (and most memorable) moments at the camp was when we had a visitor. I had heard that the AFIC people would always bow before leaders of Muslim countries, hoping a few currency crumbs would be thrown their way. But I never expected AFIC officials to involve us in such sycophantic nonsense. One day after the pre-dawn prayers, one of the organisers stood up and made an announcement.

  ‘Brothers and sisters in Islam. This afternoon at lunch time, we will have a very special guest joining us. His name is Tunku Abdur Rahman and he was the first prime minister of Malaysia. I know you will all be very excited by his visit. I will provide you all with instructions on how we will greet him later on.’

  We? Excited by the first prime minister of Malaysia? By some dude with a name that sounded like Tonka Toy? Heck, if Bob Hawke or Paul Keating were coming over, I’d have been impressed. But me, excited about this Tonka guy?

  Just before lunch, one Uncle Kazim stood us all in two long straight lines, boys on one side and girls on the other. The distance between our lines had to be wide enough for a car to be driven in between—Uncle Kazim even tested this by driving his car in between. Once he was satisfied by the width of our lines, the supervisors distributed some rice and flower petals to us. By now I wasn’t sure what was going on, and sought advice from my friend Shaf who was a rather irreverent Fiji-Indian bloke.

  ‘Hey Shaf. What the bloody halal’s happening here?’

  ‘Mate, I dunno. Some arse-kissing of an overseas leader again.’

  ‘Does this happen often at camps?’

  ‘Irfan, this is nothing. You should see what they do when the Saudi ambassador rocks up!’

  Uncle Kazim then instructed us that when Tunku’s limousine arrived, we should shower it with rice and petals and call out ‘Welcome to Tunku’.

  An hour after these instructions were relayed to us, the limousine still hadn’t arrived. In the absence of mobile phones, we had no way of finding out which part of Victoria Tunku’s driver had taken him to. Then finally, after an almost two-hour wait, a black Mercedes Benz entered the driveway with an old man seated in the back seat. I was standing at the far end of the line. Shaf stood next to me. He expressed some disapproval of the welcoming process.

  ‘Buggered if I’m gonna welcome this old fart like royalty. He can take some of my rice and shove it where the sun don’t shine.’

  One of the other cabin supervisors overheard Shaf and told him to quieten down. Then at the other end of the line, the absurd spectacle began as we were led in throwing rice and petals and calling out repeatedly the chant of ‘WELCOME TO TUNKU!’.

  Tunku’s windows were still up, and it was unlikely he could hear anything we were saying. With that in mind, many of us chose to be somewhat less compliant. Indeed, the welcoming message became gradually more and more disrespectful. By about a third of the way down the line, it sounded like someone had said: ‘G’DAY, TONKA TOY’. One of the Lebbo (i.e. short for Lebanese) girls then screamed out: ‘HOWYA GOIN’, TANKO WANKO?’

  Things then got really out of hand when some of the Yugo guys didn’t want to be part of it. One Yugo kid screamed out this welcoming message: ‘FUCK YOU, TONKA-MAN!’ He was soon led away from the line. Shaf and I followed him
without much prompting. I later asked Shaf what message he would have called out. ‘I would’ve told the dog to drive his shitty little Tonka Mercedes to the nearest airport and catch the next Tonka plane back to fucking Malaysia.’ Shaf always had a way with words.

  At the conclusion of the camp, we were awarded various prizes for sporting and religious competitions. I managed to pick up a prize for the camp essay competition, and was given a certificate and a copy of a rather boring book which seemed to have nothing at all to do with Islam. The book was called The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, and was published by a group called IIFSO (which stands for the International Islamic Federation of Students’ Organisations) and printed in Kuwait. I could tell the book had something to do with Jews, but I wondered what relevance it had to Islam?

  I was still confused when packing the book and certificate in my bag along with a camp booklet which we had all received and which had the names and contact details of all the participants and supervisors. Sheikh Fehmi encouraged us to keep in touch. I certainly wanted to, and looked forward to attending next year’s camp. Sadly, that wasn’t to be. When I got home and started spending hours on the phone chatting to camp friends, sometimes even talking to the same person twice a day, my parents thought enough was enough.

  More important to them was the prospect that I was now in the two most important years of my schooling (and quite possibly my entire) life. I was entering Year 11, and I was to focus on entering a medical faculty. I was to put my religious books away, end my near-obsession with camp friends and focus on my studies. The only extra curricular activities I was permitted were school debating and listening to rock music.

  8

  The three non-Anglican musketeers

  It’s impossible to exaggerate just how important their children’s academic achievement was to my Indo-Pakistani parents and their friends. The pressure became particularly acute when we reached Years 11 and 12. In my home state of New South Wales, a child’s worth was measured by the mark he or she received in the Higher School Certificate.