Once Were Radicals

by Irfan Yusuf

  Mr Scott impressed upon us the importance of reading a quality newspaper every morning. For him, that meant reading the Sydney Morning Herald. He particularly encouraged us to appreciate the dry humour of one David Dale, who wrote for the back page of the main section, called ‘Stay in Touch’. Often he would go through ‘Stay in Touch’ with us, bringing to life even the silliest cartoons of a chap who signed his name as ‘Reg’. A fair few of these cartoons were related to penises.

  Mr Scott was also a huge fan of a late-night news reader named Clive Robertson, who read the news in a rather entertainingly cranky manner. Mr Scott encouraged us to stay up late (often until after midnight) to watch Robertson’s unique cynicism and spontaneous witticisms. He would test us the next day on some witty remark ‘Robbo’ had made the previous night.

  Spontaneity was a quality Mr Scott also appreciated in his students’ writing. He hated clichés, and once was scathing of a poem I had written that mentioned ‘the milk of human kindness’. It was a poem I wrote as part of a poetry test, and to ram home his point about spontaneity Mr Scott awarded the top mark to a chap named Hobbs, a grumpy self-declared socialist whose four-line poem went like this:

  Me hand is shakin’

  ’Cause me arm is shakin’

  And me arm is shakin’

  ’Cause the earth is shakin’

  A few months later, Hobbs added this profound ending to his poem.

  So why don’t you just fuck off!

  To our surprise and appreciation, Mr Scott thought it was quite an appropriate final verse.

  One week, Mr Scott asked us to write down what we wanted to study should we reach university. We were to write down our answer on a piece of paper. I wasn’t sure what to put down, and so kept the page blank. After the following English class, Mr Scott asked me to stay behind after class.

  ‘I notice you didn’t say what you wanted to study at university.’

  ‘Well, Mum and Dad want me to study medicine.’

  ‘That might be the case, but what do you want to do?’

  ‘I’m not sure.’

  ‘Well, what do you enjoy doing right now? That could give us some clues.’

  I thought for a while. Cricket was fun, but it was hardly a career choice unless I was extremely lucky. I was a good swing bowler, but I was no Dennis Lillee or Michael Holding. I was very good at debating, and our Year 10 team was unbeaten in the Independent Schools Debating Association competition, even triumphing over those pompous wankers from Sydney Grammar School. I seemed to write okay, always coming first or second in the top class in all exams. I enjoyed watching the news and reading not just the Herald but also the three-in-one weekly paper that arrived from England.

  ‘Well, sir, I enjoy debating and reading the newspaper. I also think I’m okay at writing …’

  ‘When you write spontaneously and remove clichés, you’re a very good writer. Have you thought of becoming a journalist? The University of Technology has a really good course on mass communications.’

  Being a journalist sounded fun. I could see myself going to far away places and reporting what I saw. I also thought I might be able to throw light on stories that were rarely told by the mainstream media, stories like the plight of the Palestinians in refugee camps. I could also help alleviate the bias against Muslims that I began to notice in the mainstream press. I might even grow a moustache and sideburns as impressive as George Negus’s.

  My parents weren’t too keen on Mr Scott’s suggestion. As far as they were concerned, medicine (or some course that would get me into medicine) was the only option.

  One day in a Year 11 English class, Mr Scott told us that he would be leaving the school. We thought he might have landed a job at a better school such as Sydney Glamour (an implicitly homophobic nickname we gave to Sydney Grammar to denote its proximity to Oxford Street, Sydney’s gay heartland). In fact Mr Scott told us that he had accepted a job writing speeches for a Liberal Party politician. We were sad to see Mr Scott go. He proved to be a very popular teacher, someone who treated us like grown men and enabled us all to learn and appreciate all kinds of written word. Under Mr Scott’s leadership, our English class resembled a Dead Poets’ Society minus the fatalities.

  One Friday during the school holidays, I went to the King Faisal Mosque for prayers. I noticed a book and a magazine almost ripped in two sitting in the bin. The book was an exposé of corruption in the halal meat certification industry in Australia. It included an interview with Sheikh Tajeddine Hilaly, the new imam of the Imam Ali ben Abi Taleb Mosque in Lakemba. Many Pakistani uncles used to say nasty things about this new imam, complaining that he couldn’t speak English and that he had extreme views.

  The magazine was called Afkar Inquiry and looked like an Islamic version of Time magazine. It was printed on the same kind of glossy paper. I carefully used sticky tape to put the pages back together. I then devoured all its articles, reading many of them two or three times.

  This magazine was professionally written. It opened my eyes to a new perspective on world events. One of the authors whose name appeared repeatedly was a man called Ziauddin Sardar. Of particular interest to me were the book reviews. One of the books mentioned was by an Iranian named Dr Ali Shariati and was called On the Sociology of Islam.

  I kept going to the university with Dad, taking my textbooks with me so that he’d think I was studying. My interest this time was not just in the politics of Israel/Palestine. I had always assumed that the revolution in Iran was something evil. But the religion section of the library carried a book by Ayatollah Khomeini. The book was a guide to worship for followers of the Shia sect. Many things in the book, such as how to perform pre-salaat/nemaaz ablution, were already familiar to me.

  I then found On the Sociology of Islam, the book by Ali Shariati reviewed by Ziauddin Sardar in the Afkar Inquiry magazine. I spent the rest of the afternoon trying to understand what this book was about. I always imagined that an ideologue of the Iranian revolution would use the same kind of organised and structured writing method as Maududi or Qutb. Yet Shariati had a very fresh and spontaneous style of writing, as if he was having an informal conversation with people.

  In fact, most of Shariati’s books were just transcripts of tape recordings of his speeches. I noted that Shariati rarely if ever attacked Western culture. He was sent by his father, a traditionally trained Shia scholar, to complete a PhD in France. Shariati spoke about such writers as Jean-Paul Sartre, Louis Massignon and Bertrand Russell. I expected an Iranian revolutionary writer to declare death to all Western writers, but he seemed to praise many of them and applied some of their ideas to Iran’s contemporary situation.

  I was particularly impressed with a set of lectures Shariati gave and which had been gathered in a book entitled Marxism and Other Western Fallacies. Shariati used quite sophisticated arguments to criticise the work of Marx. The year 1986 was still in the era of the Cold War, and so anyone who hated Marxism and communism was to be regarded as good.

  I remember we once went to a function at Uncle QAA’s house. Uncle QAA took time out to talk to me about what Islamic books I was reading. He was most impressed when I told him I was reading Ali Shariati. However, he did sound a warning: ‘You should be careful with Shariati’s work. He writes for the Iranian situation, and we face different challenges here in Australia. We don’t want to have an Islamic revolution here. Australia is already more Islamic than most Muslim countries.’

  Because Iran was so maligned in the popular press, I felt excitement in dabbling with the dangerous ideas of its ideologues. In a copy of a glossy magazine published in England titled Imam, a chapter was included from Muhammad Qutb’s book Islam: The Misunderstood Religion about the need to implement Islam in its entirety, and how the Islamic economic and political systems were better than anything either the Communist East or the Liberal Capitalist West had to offer. Qutb’s agenda didn’t sound like he was suggesting a complete reinvention of the wheel. He said that the Islamic politica
l system should be based on shura (consultation), and I got the impression that he broadly supported the idea of democratic elections.

  Imam also had excerpts from the speeches and writings of other writers whose names I noted. One famous name was Murtaza Mutaherri, who I found out was close to Khomeini and was murdered just prior to the revolution. It seemed that the Shah of Iran, who had been opposed by Mutaherri, had in fact been an evil dictator. The Shah’s legacy of torture chambers and piles of skulls was now being published in overseas newspapers (such as Le Monde and the Guardian) but hadn’t quite filtered into Australia.

  One day, I took my copy of Imam to school. I’d mentioned it to our debating master (who was also my English teacher for a short time), an Englishman named Mr Cox. I felt quite proud of the fact that my English teacher was a real Englishman! Mr Cox used to enjoy having political discussions with me, and he’d often talk to me about this strange thing called ‘Christian socialism’. He imagined that the Iranian revolutionary experiment was a kind of Islamic socialism.

  Mr Cox asked if he could borrow the magazine, and promised to return it the next day. Unfortunately he lost the magazine, which upset me a great deal as it was the only one I had. For some reason, I suspected some intrigue on Mr Cox’s part, and imagined he must have handed my copy to some James Bond-type spy character who would come in the middle of the night and interrogate me. I never quite trusted Mr Cox after that. It was a hysterical way of thinking, but we were living in times of hysteria and paranoia about a secret ‘them’ who ‘we’ assumed were out to destroy ‘us’. Not much has changed.

  While Mr Cox was a huge fan of Christian socialism, the Divinity teacher Rev Alex’s politics seemed to be in the opposite direction. He was a huge fan of a group called the Festival of Light, which taught that God’s law should play a role in politics and government.

  During one class, Rev Alex explained to us Jesus’s saying about rendering to Caesar what is owed to Caesar and to God what is owed to God. The impression I got from Rev Alex’s explanation was that we shouldn’t take this idea all the way. He often said that God had to play a role in social and political spheres.

  In Year 11, Rev Alex and Mr Martin arranged for us to view a series of videos featuring an eccentric-looking philosopher named Dr Francis Schaeffer. The series was called How Should We Then Live? and our entire year would watch this in the school amphitheatre. Mr Martin would provide an introduction to each episode and explain to us the various stages of ancient, medieval and modern history and culture that were being discussed.

  Rev Alex later told us that Dr Schaeffer’s ideas were being implemented in groups like the Festival of Light in the United Kingdom and Australia, and the Moral Majority in the United States. One thing I remember Schaeffer discussing in the series was this contemporary diseased thinking called ‘secular humanism’ which grew out of that period of European history called the Enlightenment. Schaeffer left me with an extremely negative view of the French Revolution, which he said was characterised less by liberty and more by the liberal use of guillotines.

  Dr Schaeffer seemed totally disillusioned with contemporary Western thought and philosophy. He wasn’t just concerned with the Bible and theology (though he did often quote from the Bible) but also with history, art, science, education and a range of other subjects. His basic claim was that, by removing God and biblical ethics and values from the social and political equation, Western civilisation was facing an abyss as it nears the end of the twentieth century. Secularism and humanism combined may have produced material wealth, but it had also given us a general sense of meaninglessness, not to mention two world wars and numerous acts of genocide.

  This was a compelling message which matched many of the ideas of Maududi that I had studied at home. However, there were some differences. Schaeffer only discussed European history, and mentioned little or nothing about the Middle East or Asia. I was reading various books sent by Naani Amma that mentioned the great strides Muslims had made in science, art and philosophy at a time when Europeans were still in the Dark Ages. At school, we had only touched briefly on this in Year 8 history when we studied the impact of the Crusades on Europe.

  The biggest problem I saw with Schaeffer’s approach was that it could only be implemented in a very general way. Each time Rev Alex would talk about how our laws and politics had to reflect biblical values, I would ask him how this should specifically be done. What sort of legal and economic and other systems should we have in place?

  Maududi and Muhammad Qutb spoke about Islamic law, Islamic economics and the Islamic political system. Qutb’s work contained specifics on how Islamic teachings could directly influence economics and even literature and film. It seemed to me then that the basic problem Schaeffer’s vision had was that he didn’t have enough to work with—as in, Christianity simply didn’t have a legal and political tradition to refer to. And what little tradition it had in the Old Testament had been deemed unnecessary thanks to Christ’s death and resurrection. Christians might end up having heaven in heaven, but their individual and social lives would be a kind of blind hell where they would try to find their way from avoiding one fire to finding and avoiding the next.

  In contrast to Schaeffer, Qutb, Maududi and other theorists and practitioners of what became known as the ‘Islamic movement’ did have these traditions to refer to. Christ’s example only lasted thirty-three years, of which we had very little in the New Testament compared with the numerous detailed biographies of the Prophet Muhammad available. These biographies outlined his social, political and economic policies in establishing the world’s first Islamic state in Medina in the seventh century.

  I was convinced by Schaeffer’s logic and by his rejection of secular humanism. I was too young to understand how inherently silly it was to reject an entire legal and political tradition before even bothering to study it in any systemic fashion. If anyone was influential in leading me down the path of theocratic and political Islam, it was an eccentric twentieth-century American Christian theologian! Of course, none of this thinking took into account the masses of juristic, philosophical and political work undertaken within the Eastern Orthodox and pre-Reformation Catholic tradition, nor does it take into account the work of modern ‘liberation theology’. But then our Divinity teachers weren’t in the business of promoting non-Protestant Christianity any more than many Sunni imams in those days were in the business of exposing me to Shia theology, law and politics. Just as many Sunni imams would curse Ayatollah Khomeini from the pulpit, it wasn’t unknown for certain Divinity teachers to suggest that the beast ‘666’ in the Book of Revelation (i.e. the Antichrist) was none other than the Pope himself!

  No doubt many of you will be reading this and imagining that my thought processes were extremely simplistic. Some Christian readers might argue that I had misunderstood Schaeffer, and some Muslim readers will say that I misconstrued Maududi. Both judgments are quite probably correct. In writing this book, I have deliberately chosen not to re-read Maududi or watch or read Schaeffer’s How Should We Then Live?, and have instead focused on what I recall of the impact of both men’s work on my own thinking back in Senior High School in 1986 and 1987.

  I thought long and hard about these issues, and discussed them with some of my more religious uncles. Uncle Asif had himself started reading Qutb’s book and felt quite empowered by it. Uncle QAA had studied Maududi’s work extensively in its original language—Urdu—and recommended I speak with my mum about it. I did. Mum’s response?

  ‘Irfan, I honestly believe you should cease wasting your time thinking about such esoteric matters. If anything, focus on your prayers. I am disturbed that you sleep through your morning prayer. Yoo must do fajr nemaaz and dhen is-studee Maath or Phizeek.’

  9

  Becoming and unbecoming a hijab messenger

  The Australian Federation of Islamic Councils (AFIC) was a body dominated by middle-aged men who had poor English-language skills and had little understanding of how young
Australian-born and bred Muslims thought. AFIC spokesmen would pay lip-service to the idea that youth were the future, yet the reality of AFIC’s operations showed that the future never arrived because AFIC operatives were too lost in the past.

  AFIC was an umbrella representative body of State and Territory Islamic Councils which themselves were umbrella bodies of various mosque societies. In the main cities where most Muslims lived—Sydney and Melbourne—mosques were divided along ethnic and linguistic lines. Imams were employed to deliver sermons and talks in the language spoken by first-generation migrant members of the society which owned and managed the mosque.

  At the same time, AFIC did hold national Muslim camps for young people from across the country. However, it seemed to me that most of those who attended were the kids, nephews and nieces of various officials of the Islamic industry. Still, Dad himself had once been part of that industry—he served as first secretary of the Islamic Society of NSW, the body which built and now manages the King Faisal Mosque in Surry Hills. Dad only stayed for twelve months and then resigned. The only time of year he ever went to that mosque was for the Eid al-Fitr prayers to commemorate the end of Ramadan, the closest thing we had to Christmas.

  My approach to senior organisations like AFIC, our NSW Islamic Council and mosque societies was influenced by a mixture of the idealism of more ‘Islamic’ uncles and the cynicism of Dad and others towards the Islamic industry. Uncle QAA and his colleagues insisted that the only way to solve the problems and clean out the rot in the Islamic establishment was for young blood to step forward. Dad and his colleagues insisted that these bodies were beyond help, and that our involvement in them would lead to our own disillusionment after having wasted precious years doing the dirty work of others when we should be studying hard, getting good grades and working on our careers.