Once Were Radicals

by Irfan Yusuf

  This extreme pressure was made even worse by the fact that my next eldest sister had managed to reach one of the highest HSC scores of any Indo-Pakistani family in Sydney. She genuinely wanted to study medicine. I, on the other hand, wasn’t sure what I wanted to study or what kind of career I wanted.

  There was another student who had just started at St Andrews and who was also being pressured to study. Brian was from Sydney’s eastern suburbs and was one of our school’s few Jewish students. Brian and I immediately clicked, and joining us was an atheist of Catholic background named Tim.

  Brian, Tim and I used to enjoy manufacturing disorder in Divinity classes, firing questions at Rev Alex, Mr Martin and other Divinity teachers. I had by this time memorised just about every polemical booklet of that aggressive South African Muslim missionary Ahmed Deedat, and was able to fire questions and biblical verses (usually quoted out of context but still sounding impressive) almost at will. Brian also borrowed my books and managed to memorise Deedat’s arguments in less than a week. Tim didn’t bother memorising anything. He just enjoyed the spectacle of religions at war over the nature of a God whose very existence he denied.

  On one occasion, we noticed another new bloke in our class named Jesse was receiving a hard time. Jesse was a Mormon, and was being harassed by the guys from the Christian Fellowship, most of whom, ironically, were good friends of mine from our debating team. There were now many sides to our Year 11 mass debate over religion.

  One afternoon after school, the Christian Fellowship organised a movie session where lots of soft drink and cake would be served and we would watch a video. Jesse had been tipped off that the movie being screened was an anti-Mormon documentary, and asked Brian and I (a Muslim and a Jew!) to turn up to defend the Mormon faith. I had to admit to Jesse that I didn’t know much, but I’d try my best.

  We watched the film, called The God-makers, which alleged that Mormons believed that human beings would be transformed into gods after death. After the film, Fellowship leader and fellow debater Julian stood up and confidently threw this question in the general direction of Jesse the Mormon and his Muslim and Jewish supporting think tank.

  ‘After watching this movie, I’m sure you’ll all agree with me on the answer to this question—could there possibly be a more silly belief than the suggestion that man can become God?’

  Brian whispered something in my ear which made me almost die laughing. He wanted me to provide the answer, but I was already in stitches. Brian then responded loudly: ‘The only belief more stupid than man becoming God is to believe God would become a man!’

  Jesse and I lost it completely. We were rolling around on the floor in extreme pain, trying to stop our sides from splitting. The Christian kids weren’t impressed, one of them calling out from the other side of the room to Brian, ‘What would you know, you bloody Jew!’

  I then quickly regained composure and delivered this reminder to the accidental anti-Semite. ‘Hey, you guys keep claiming you worship the same God as Jews. I guess you weren’t being completely honest.’

  Brian, Tim and myself used to go each Friday and visit a different house of worship. On the first Friday we went to the Great Synagogue. I was amazed by how similar to both a mosque and a church this building was. The Synagogue also had a museum, which carried a five-dollar entry fee. Tim and I jokingly remarked to the attendant that Brian was paying as he was the wealthiest. ‘Hey, don’t expect us to pay. You’re the wealthy eastern suburbs Young Liberal!’

  The following week we went to the mosque for Friday prayers. Brian was genuinely scared at the prospect of being in a packed mosque. He’d been a voracious consumer of international, especially Middle Eastern, news and had heard about Iranian and Lebanese terrorists kidnapping and killing Jews. I reassured Brian: ‘Mate, don’t worry about it. Just wear my prayer cap. If someone greets you in Arabic, just respond as I do. You’ll be fine.’

  I lent Brian my prayer cap, which he quickly wore and held my arm as we walked into the King Faisal Mosque in Commonwealth Street, Surry Hills. Tim stayed outside, even more scared of being noticed (he was well over six feet tall) and in case someone asked him if he believed in God. Not even seeing Brian and I walk upstairs without any hassles could convince him.

  The prayer service took a little longer than we expected, and the three of us were late to our next class. Our mathematics teacher, whom we had nicknamed ‘Barnyard’, wasn’t impressed.

  ‘Well good afternoon, gentlemen. It’s good to see you decided to join us. And where, may I ask, were you delayed?’

  Tim answered Barnyard’s query. ‘Well, sir, we were having an interesting cultural experience. We all went to the mosque.’

  Barnyard raised his eyebrows and addressed me and then Brian. ‘Yusuf, I can understand you going to the mosque. But why take these chaps? And as for you, Brian, aren’t you Jewish?’

  Some of the more rebellious guys began heckling in unison: ‘Jew! Jew!’ Brian was used to this by now, and responded to Barnyard: ‘Yes, sir, I was a little scared at first. But thankfully this mosque was in Sydney and not Beirut.’

  We sat down and Barnyard resumed the class. At the end, as we were walking out, Tim turned to Barnyard and said: ‘Sir, I promise you I’m never going to the mosque again, not even if it means missing your Maths class!’

  The following week, Brian and I went to visit St Marys Cathedral to show our respect for Tim’s ancestral faith. It was an unusual visit in that Tim had no clue what all the different statues and other cathedral features meant. Finally, in exasperation at our questions, Tim provided us with a comprehensive answer. ‘Listen guys, stop asking me questions. Just know that it’s all bullshit.’

  Brian couldn’t help himself. ‘Yeah, Irfan and I already knew that.’

  ‘Shut up, you stingy Jew,’ Tim remarked.

  We were good friends, and used to poke fun at each other using popular but unfortunate stereotypes. Tim and I would talk about Brian being rich and stingy. Brian and Tim would talk about my being ‘explosive’ and ‘angry’ and prone to violence and terrorism. I’d jokingly threaten them with being kidnapped by my Iranian friends and taken to Beirut. Brian would threaten me with trouble by using his allegedly extensive Jewish business and political contacts and have me expelled from Australia back to Beirut.

  Tim invented an even more novel phraseology to describe my religious background. ‘I killed one of your type in the shower yesterday. I slapped him dead just as he was about to bite me and suck my blood.’

  I was confused. Tim clarified with a question. ‘Aren’t you a Mozzie?’

  Brian made sure word of Tim’s new terminology spread across the entire year. Soon blokes would find a mosquito buzzing around, point to it and ask my permission. ‘Irfan, do you mind if I flatten one of your cousins?’ Another would join in. ‘Irfan, how come you never seem to have mosquito bites? Oh, yeah. I forgot. They never attack their own!’

  It was all good-natured banter. Gradually the phraseology evolved (or rather, mutated) into greater levels of absurdity. What started as ‘Mozzie’ eventually became ‘Moozie’ and then ‘Moozite’ until consensus was eventually reached on ‘Moozard’. My chorister mate Don even told the rest of the choirboys, and before long primary school kids would recognise me and call out after our weekly chapel services: ‘Hey look, there’s Don’s Moozard mate.’

  The nickname stuck so effectively that at a recent reunion of our school year (held rather un-Islamically at a Sydney pub), I couldn’t help but chuckle when ‘Moozard’ again made an appearance. One old school foe standing near the bar even remarked: ‘Hey Moozard, you want a beer? Woops, sorry. I forgot. Moozards don’t drink.’

  Brian once came over to our house and boasted to my dad of how he and I could easily handle the arguments of even the most fervent born-again Christian. To my surprise, far from being proud of this, Dad was extremely angry.

  ‘You boys shouldn’t insult people’s faith. Religion is a private thing, and you should leav
e it that way and focus on your studies.’

  I hesitatingly objected, and said to Dad that our debates were usually good-natured. Dad didn’t care.

  ‘People may not tell you that they are offended. But believe me, they are offended. In this country, you don’t ask people about their religion openly. It is considered very rude. Can you even begin to imagine how rude it is when you openly challenge someone to justify their religious beliefs?’

  Brian and I made a secret pact that one day, after we’d finished school and university and had our careers and families taken care of, we’d write a book together talking about our adventures with our respective faiths and how we withstood the collective challenges posed by all the Divinity teachers and Christian Fellowship leaders of Sydney’s only Anglican cathedral school. We’d then debate each other on Middle Eastern political issues and reach some compromise which would hopefully lead to peace between Israelis and Palestinians.

  Sadly Brian is no longer with us. I guess I’ll just have to write the book without him.

  I had brought home both the certificate and book I’d been awarded for coming first in the essay competition at my first Muslim youth camp. I showed the essay to Mum and Dad, and they were most pleased. They were also pleased by the certificate, but immediately snatched the book from me. Dad looked at the cover and then opened the inside cover. I distinctly remember the book had a stamp that had the seal of the Australian Federation of Islamic Councils, as well as a stamp that said: ‘Gift from the Embassy of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’ on the inside cover.

  Dad handed the book to Mum and warned me not to tell any of my friends about this book. I was later told by Mum that Dad told her to throw the book out with the rubbish. However, I was curious about this dispute over Palestine between Jews and Muslims.

  I spoke to Uncle QAA about it, and he told me the names of some authors whose books I could read. He said that I might find these books in a university library. One of the names he mentioned was a professor named Edward Said. I was puzzled by the name—how could a Palestinian Muslim have a name like Edward? ‘Because, Irfan, Professor Said is not a Muslim. There are many Palestinian Christians. There are also many Jews writing fair things about Palestine. Don’t think Palestine and Israel is about Jews against Muslims.’

  Dad used to subscribe to a special weekly newspaper that provided excerpts from the Guardian, Washington Post and Le Monde, all printed on thin rice-paper. I would also read this newspaper, and I especially enjoyed reading coverage of the difficulties the Soviet Union was facing in fighting against the Afghan mujahideen. The Guardian also provided extensive and quite critical coverage of the Middle East, especially the disputes between Israel and the Palestinians. Certain names kept popping up—Yasser Arafat, Shimon Peres, Hosni Mubarak, Yitzhak Shamir and Yitzhak Rabin. But there were other names as well—Daoud Kuttab, George Habash and Hanan Ashrawi. Many of these people were of Palestinian Christian background, though some had adopted Marxism or some other form of socialism.

  It all seemed rather confused and confusing. There were all these different factions, and each side was just as much at war with itself as it was with its ‘terrorist’ or ‘colonialist’ enemy. I wasn’t sure what the difference was between Jews and Zionists, between Arabs and Palestinians, between terrorists and freedom fighters.

  Then one issue of this weekly newspaper ran an article by a man with an Indian-sounding name. Normally such names were part of the story, usually the names of terrorists or kidnappers. I felt proud to see a name as hard to pronounce as mine, a name like Salman Rushdie, appearing as the author and not just the villain of the story.

  Salman Rushdie was writing about a book that had just been published, an autobiography of American-Palestinian professor Edward Said. I recognised this as the professor Uncle QAA had spoken about. Said’s book was called After the Last Sky, and told the story of his exile from Palestine, that took him on a journey from Jerusalem to New York.

  Rushdie also mentioned Said’s other books, including one whose title was a word vaguely familiar to me. Some of the books Naani Amma had sent from Karachi also mentioned this thing called ‘Orientalism’. One book, entitled Philosophy of Islamic Law and the Orientalists (in fact the first book I read about Islamic law), spoke about how Orientalists were involved in a project to stop Muslims from implementing their own religious laws. In his introduction, the author, Dr Muhammad Muslehuddin, writes:

  Orientalists … stand for a thorough-going change in Islamic law and their works serve only to add fuel to the fire of militancy against [Islamic] Orthodoxy … Orientalists have launched a campaign to subvert Islam by their unfair criticism of Islamic law.

  So the real militants and extremists were the Orientalists. They had no respect for Muslims and their legal traditions. They didn’t want Muslim countries to rule their own affairs in accordance with the wishes of Muslim citizens.

  … Orientalists are trying not only to turn Islamic society into that of the West but also to deprive divine law of its controlling capacity …

  Orientalists have to set their own house in order. Their society is corrupt and their laws are bad as is evident from their positive law which is divorced from justice and separated from ethics.

  Maryam Jameelah also wrote about Orientalism. Jameelah was a Muslim convert of American Jewish heritage who moved to Pakistan after exchanging letters with Maududi, the Pakistani journalist who taught himself Islamic religious sciences and who founded the Jamaat-i-Islami. Jameelah was far more open in her hostility to Orientalism, describing it as a conspiracy by Western non-Muslim university professors and missionaries to subvert not just Islamic law but also to misrepresent Muslim cultures, history and politics.

  Jameelah wrote a book entitled Islam and Orientalism which she dedicated to:

  all Muslim college and university students in Pakistan and abroad so that they may gain a full appreciation of the conspiracy working for their ruin and what can be done to frustrate its malicious activities before it is too late.

  I wasn’t yet at university, and we didn’t have ‘college’ in Australia. However, I was now in the Australian equivalent, senior high school, and took Jameelah’s dedication to heart.

  Rushdie’s article in the Guardian also struck a chord with me, and I looked out for both his name and that of Edward Said. I developed a strong interest in reading about politics. Sometimes I would go with Dad to the university on weekends. He would stay in his office and work, while I would spend time in the library. I took my textbooks with me, and Dad assumed I was studying. However, I was spending much of my time exploring the religion and politics sections of the library.

  I managed to find a book by Said which spoke briefly about Palestine but dealt mainly with media attempts at covering islam (as in give Islam and Muslims media coverage whilst in the process cover up its reality and make it look ugly)—also called Covering Islam. There was an entire section devoted to the movie Death of a Princess which I had seen on TV many years before. Said was scathing of the Saudi government’s attempts to censor the film as well as its extreme punishments. At the same time, Said criticised the contents of the film and questioned whether the filmmaker was really wishing to increase understanding of Muslim societies. This kind of fair-mindedness and nuance was something many of my Indo-Pakistani uncles lacked.

  I gradually became used to reading university-level books about religion and politics. I’d spend hours devouring books, reading hundreds of pages in a single sitting. I would often keep a place mark in a book so that I could return to it the following day or the next weekend to continue reading.

  By now, I had some idea of the history of the Palestinian struggle. I was able to meet my friend Brian’s claims with hard facts. And what I knew was that the Palestinian struggle, which continues today, was not just about Palestinians and Israelis fighting over land, it was about Palestinians fighting for their survival as a people. You see, in 1948, just like India and Pakistan were divided, the British divi
ded up Palestine, and gave half to Jews who had escaped the European Holocaust. This ‘half’ was renamed Israel. But, as we’ve seen since 1948 through several wars, the Israelis have taken over the majority of the land, even though there are more than 4 million Palestinians still living in the West Bank and Gaza (not counting the millions who live as refugees all over the world). The result is that Palestinians don’t have their own country, don’t have their own government (even though there is one, it isn’t allowed to function like a normal government), they have no economy to speak of and so most people live in poverty, and they are living under Israeli military occupation. The most recent example of what the military occupation means for Palestinians can be seen in what happened in the invasion and destruction of Gaza in January 2009.

  One question that is often asked is: Why do even non-Palestinian Muslims support Palestinians so strongly? There’s no one answer to this, but the reasons listed above are a good start.

  Brian had a real brain for politics. He told me he had joined the Young Liberals at age sixteen, a fact which the other boys (and even our largely pro-Labor teachers) mocked but which I secretly admired.

  Perhaps the only subject in which I had some natural talent was English. It made me quite pleased and proud to learn that someone like me, someone of Indian ancestry, could be better at the English language than the possible descendants of India’s English colonial masters.

  Having had the same jovial English teacher for the first four years of high school, I was faced with the prospect of a new teacher. Mr Scott had dark-brown curlyish hair and glasses, and frequently wore eccentric ties with polka dot designs. Mr Scott taught us to appreciate the humour and cynicism of T.S. Eliot. He also taught us Shakespeare, and even tipped us off about Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s illicit drug use. Contrary to objections from many parents and the school chaplain, Mr Scott taught us a play called Equus, by Peter Shaffer, which was the story of a boy who allegedly enjoyed fantacising about having sexual intercourse with horses. He believed in treating us like mature men, not immature, smutty kids. Though I’m not sure to this day what is so manly or mature about studying a drama concerning sex with horses.