Once Were Radicals

by Irfan Yusuf

  The naqeeb on this occasion was Zia. He started by going around the room and seeing who had memorised and could recite a set of verses of the Koran assigned at the previous meeting. None of the more politically minded people (such as the Canberra student, Imran, and myself) were interested in this kind of devotional stuff. It shouldn’t come as a revelation to readers that here we were, a bunch of young activists, discussing the establishment of an international Koranic social order without being bothered to memorise, recite and understand around ten or so verses of the Koran. It wasn’t the first time ideology would get in the way of logic.

  After this, Zia then passed the microphone to the Afghan jihad rep Mahmud Saikal, who delivered the latest instalment of analysis on prominent figures from the Islamic movement. Saikal chose a passage from Maududi’s book, Four Basic Terms of the Koran. He then opened the floor for discussion. Each person would give one or two insights that they gained from the reading.

  After this, the microphone was handed to Jamal, who would talk about preparations for the next event. The Senior Usrah Group organised quarterly events called ‘Islamic Unity Seminars’. They chose a particular cause and invited speakers (including imams) to speak on the topic and its relevance to the worldwide Islamic movement and to Muslims in Australia. Jamal spoke about preparations for the next seminar which would explore the Intifada or Palestinian uprising in the West Bank and Gaza.

  So why was the Senior Usrah so controversial, both in the Muslim community and in the broader community? Was it because we were reading the works of political Islamists? Was it because we included a known representative of an overseas jihad?

  The main reason was because we were talking about Islamic unity. We were talking about Sunni and Shia Muslims working together. And powerful forces in the government, media and certain embassies of certain Muslim countries made it their business to spread hysteria about any form of Shia Islam, especially political Shia Islam with even the vaguest connection to the Iranian revolution. If that meant perpetual Muslim disunity, so be it.

  Iran was regarded by Western nations as a radical and dangerous enemy hell-bent on exporting their revolution to Muslim communities across the world. Shia Muslim communities in particular were seen as prone to Iranian influence. For centuries Iran had been a heartland of Shia Muslim religious scholarship, with Shia imams from across the world going to the traditional Iranian Islamic seminaries at Qom (where even Ayatollah Khomeini taught) to study.

  The West was paranoid about Iranian Islam. Many Arab governments were also paranoid about Iranian influence. Saudi Arabia had a large Shia Muslim community in its eastern provinces, and a number of Gulf states had majority Shia populations. Iraq was fighting a war against Iran, and Saddam Hussein was at the time regarded as a friend of the West. No one in those days seemed to care that Saddam had invaded Iran and was using chemical weapons against the Iranians. Indeed, we all thought that it was the Iranians who had invaded the Iraqis.

  Saudi Arabia and other Arab states presented the war between Iran and Iraq as a continuation of an ancient struggle between Sunni and Shia Islam. What they didn’t tell us (and what was rarely told by mainstream media) was that Iraq was itself majority Shia, and that Saddam had mercilessly suppressed the Shia majority community.

  The official sect of Saudi Arabia is known as the Wahhabi sect. It was founded by an eighteenth-century scholar named Muhammad bin Abdul Wahhab, whose followers regarded Shia Muslims as unbelievers and infidels. This old theological rift proved convenient for the Saudi government and could be used to great effect to encourage Sunnis to oppose any incursion of Iranian revolutionary ideas.

  It just so happened that some Indo-Pakistani Sunni groups also were anti-Shia. Among the most prominent was a school of thought founded in the late nineteenth century in a place called Deoband. The Deobandi sect was competing for Sunni supremacy in the Indian subcontinent with another sect known as the Barelwi sect. The two sects had much in common. In fact, it was hard even for many Indians to tell the two apart. However, more militant members of the Barelwi sect often labelled Deobandis as Wahhabi, despite the fact that there was often little basis in theology for this claim.

  Of course, I knew none of this intricate sectarian stuff. Further, like many Indians, my parents had many Shia Muslim friends. On the whole, members of the Yusuf clan regarded themselves as Sunni Muslims, even if my siblings had little knowledge or concern about what made them Sunni. However, we cared little for sectarianism. We continued to mix with our Shia Muslim friends, many of whom had little interest in Iranian or any other Islamic politics.

  What was clear was that Iranian Islam was regarded as dangerous. And there was one Sydney imam who had made a name for himself thanks to his precarious comments.

  When I was in high school, Dad was having one of his late-night card games with Uncle QAA and Uncle Aussie (‘the Oz’). The new imam in Lakemba, Sheikh Hilaly, had made the headlines with his fiery sermons about how non-Muslim Australian women dressed like sex workers and how Jews were all rather unfriendly. Although Dad had no involvement in the Islamic industry, he occasionally took an interest in religious affairs. Dad used somewhat undiplomatic language when responding to reports of Hilaly’s statements. Uncle Aussie was even less diplomatic, but we always expected this from the Oz, who was forever blasting religious people. The Oz was known to be a rather irreverent fellow with more interest in economics than religion. That made perfect sense, given he was a high school economics teacher.

  On the other hand, Uncle QAA praised Hilaly for bringing Sunni and Shia Muslims closer together, especially within the Arabic-speaking community. Hilaly was also a very eloquent speaker. Unlike the imam he replaced, Hilaly welcomed people of all nationalities to the Imam Ali ben Abi Taleb Mosque, the main mosque in Lakemba. Even more revolutionary was that Hilaly encouraged women to become active and even set up a women’s group called al-Mu’minah (meaning ‘believing woman’).

  Mum and my sisters had started attending al-Mu’minah meetings which were held on Sunday mornings at Lakemba. They never spoke about Sheikh Hilaly. Perhaps he never attended the meetings. However, Mum stopped attending after she got into an argument with a Lebanese woman over whether hijab was compulsory.

  After my first camp, I invited my friends Abdullah and Kamal over to my house for a swim. At the end, Dad and I dropped Abdullah at the train station. On the way, Abdullah told us he was going to a protest rally in the city. The congregation of the Imam Ali ben Abi Taleb Mosque was protesting against a government proposal to revoke Sheikh Hilaly’s visa and deport him. Abdullah invited me to come along as well, but Dad took it upon himself to refuse the invitation on my behalf. After we dropped off Abdullah, Dad asked Kamal what he thought of Sheikh Hilaly. Kamal said his brothers had told him Sheikh Hilaly was an evil man who was too close to Iran and wanted to make peace with the Shia. For Kamal, Shia and Iranian were interchangeable.

  Dad warned me to be careful and not get involved in the political feuds of various Lebanese factions. He also warned me to keep away from Iranian revolutionary ideas but at the same time not to become anti-Shia. He then told me the names of many uncles and aunties who, it turned out, were actually Shia. I never realised just how many Shia family friends we had. No matter how hard I tried, it was difficult to maintain sectarian neutrality in an environment of anti-Iranian and anti-Shia hysteria in the popular media and from many Sunni imams.

  Mum always insisted that differences between Sunni and Shia Muslims were very minor and nowhere near as great as differences between Catholics and Protestants. The differences were about politics and community leadership. Shia Muslims believed that the cousin and son-in-law of the Prophet Muhammad, named Ali, should have been the first leader due to his blood relation. Sunni Muslims believed leadership should be decided by the community democratically and could be anyone. But our core beliefs and practices were the same.

  The anti-Iranian propaganda machine was very powerful. Saudi religious foundations flooded
Muslim communities with anti-Shia literature, and also funded Deobandi Sunni imams in India and Pakistan to print anti-Shia books. Deobandi Sunnis had always been anti-Shia, or at least were more hostile than Barelwi Sunnis.

  And so I was bombarded with anti-Shia and anti-Iranian material from all sides. The news played regular stories about Iranian-backed groups in Lebanon who kidnapped Westerners, executing some and releasing others. The Iranian government was accused of having ties with Yasser Arafat’s PLO, which in those days was generally associated with plane hijackings and killing Jews in Israel.

  The Saudis weren’t just the good guys for supporting Iraq against Iran and for leading the fight against the spread of Iran’s Shia revolution. The Saudis were good because they helped finance the fight against the communists in Afghanistan. (So did the Iranians, but we were never told that!)

  And to further reinforce their clout, Saudi religious authorities claimed legitimacy as custodians of the land where Mecca and Medina were located, where the Prophet Muhammad lived and died and towards which Muslims around the world (including Shia Muslims) face when they perform their prayers.

  Sheikh Hilaly didn’t think Sunni and Shia Muslims should fight. He’d lived many years in Lebanon, where Sunni and Shia communities had separate religious institutions and political parties. During the Lebanese civil war, they also had separate militias. Hilaly didn’t want to see the same divisions in his new home.

  Hilaly’s predecessor, the late Khaled Zeidan, was an Arab nationalist with very anti-Shia views and was close to the Iraqi government. So close that when he was kicked out of his position as Lakemba imam, he set up a separate mosque which he called Markaz Saddam Hussein Islami (literally ‘the Islamic Centre of Saddam Hussein’!). I’d known Pakistanis to hold strong political views, but I was yet to visit a mosque there which was named after a Pakistani prime minister or general. This sounded more ridiculously sycophantic than the episode with Tunku Abdur Rahman at my first camp. Then again, other Sunni mosques were named after past or present Saudi kings. Our local Surry Hills mosque was named the King Faisal Mosque.

  Hilaly was against the influence of any overseas government in the religious affairs of Australian Muslims. It’s true that when he first arrived, he was associated with the Libyan Islamic Call Society.

  However, now Hilaly had no ties with Gaddafi-duck (the nickname we gave to Libyan leader Colonel Muammar Gaddafi) or King Fahad (the ‘King Fart’ as we sometimes called him) of Saudi Arabia or any other Middle Eastern or Asian Muslim despot.

  Hilaly took independence even further. He was critical of both superpowers. He hated the Soviets for their war in Afghanistan and for spreading socialism in the Arab world, and he hated the United States for its blind and unconditional support of Israel.

  Thanks to Dad’s subscription to the three-in-one overseas newspaper digest (Guardian, Washington Post and Le Monde), I was beginning to learn more about Palestine. When I was in Year 11, the Palestinians started a spontaneous uprising known as the Intifada (literally a ‘shaking off’, but commonly understood as ‘uprising’ or ‘rebellion’). This demonstration pitted young Palestinians with slingshots against well-armed Israeli soldiers and tanks. The uprising was so huge that it wasn’t just reported in the three-in-one papers but also in the Sydney Morning Herald and even on the ABC and SBS television news. It took over a year before Channel 10 or other commercial news programs gave it coverage.

  We rarely heard about Palestine or Israel at home or from Indo-Pakistani uncles. The Muslim uncles were always too busy arguing about some silly religious issue (usually relating to whether meat from Woolworths or McDonalds was halal or whether we determine religious months by sighting the new moon with our naked eye or using a calendar based on astronomical calculations). Cricket was also a favourite topic for discussion, with uncles pontificating on whether Richie Benaud was biased against Indian and Pakistani cricketers. Politics discussions were based around the subject of whether Pakistan should have been created or whether the Muslims should have all supported a unified India. Occasionally someone would mention Kashmir, a topic with which I had some familiarity. During my visits to Pakistan, I would watch the PTV news and would be almost constantly bombarded with stories about Indian soldiers attacking and looting and raping innocent Kashmiri Muslims.

  In Karachi, I’d regularly travel by public bus with my cousins who would point out stickers printed by the student wing of the Jamaat-i-Islami. These were stuck to the interior roof with slogans like ‘Crush India’ and ‘Crush “israel”’. I could understand the ‘Crush India’ stuff (even if I found it quite offensive). But what possible problem did the Jamaat students have with Israel? And why did they spell it with a small ‘i’ and place its name between inverted commas? In his Tafhim commentary, Maududi often remarked on archaeological evidence supporting certain historical claims in the Koran, much of which could be found in what he described as ‘the modern state of Israel’. No small ‘i’ and no inverted commas.

  It seemed many Arab Muslims in particular had a problem with Israel. Yet on the TV, Iranian crowds were seen screaming ‘Death to Israel’. Sometimes the literature I read used very crude words to describe not just Israelis but Jews in general. Even Koranic verses were marshalled as evidence that Jews were always opposed to Muslims, despite the fact that the books I read by Qaradawi and Maududi always emphasised that these Koranic verses were talking about a small number of Jews who joined the Prophet’s sworn enemies and tried to destroy the Prophet’s city of Medina. The verses were never intended for general application.

  Having read Anne Frank’s diary and having had such positive childhood experiences with Jews, I found it hard to fathom why Muslims would want to fight a nation with whom we had so much in common and that had suffered so much. My first real exposure to less crude and more sophisticated (and in my mind, more convincing) anti-Jewish venom was Maryam Jameelah’s book Islam and Ahl-i-Kitab: Past & Present. What made Maryam Jameelah’s venom towards Jews so convincing was that she herself was once a Jew who grew up in a Jewish family, studied Jewish religion and theology at school and university and attended a Zionist youth group. She was an ‘insider’, a ‘native informant’. When she wrote that the God of the Old Testament was little more than a real estate agent for the Jewish people, her words carried the same authority that the words of ex-Muslim Ayaan Hirsi Ali are given when she makes equally outrageous and prejudicial remarks about Islam and Muslims.

  Returning to the Senior Usrah meeting mentioned above, our discussion turned to a seminar proposal suggested by Sheikh Hilaly. He wanted to have a seminar on the subject of ‘Jihad-Intifada: The Palestinian Uprising’. I always understood jihad to be a religious war, while the Palestinians were fighting over land. How could this be a jihad?

  The Anglo-Aussie convert Damien said that he had done some research in the Sydney University library on the subject. It appeared that the old leadership of Yasser Arafat and the PLO in Tunisia had nothing to do with this particular uprising. Rather, it was being directed by an indigenous Islamic movement led by a blind and crippled sheikh named Ahmed Yassin who headed the Palestinian wing of the Muslim Brotherhood. Damien gave me a sneak preview of his paper. It turned out that Sheikh Yassin’s followers had built an entire infrastructure of schools, clinics, hospitals, orphanages etc in the West Bank and Gaza in direct competition with the PLO-run institutions. The Israelis themselves allowed this infrastructure to develop and flourish. The paper cited both PLO and Israeli sources to show that Israel was for many years sponsoring and supporting Yassin in the hope of driving a wedge between Arafat’s leadership and Palestinians on the ground.

  The Canberra student Imran, who was Damien’s flatmate, suggested Damien do a presentation. Zia knew some people at Sydney University and offered to arrange the booking of the large Stephen Roberts lecture theatre and invite Sheikh Hilaly to deliver a speech. The Iraqi Shia Dr T suggested that for the sake of unity, the Imam of the al-Zahra Mosque in Arncliffe (a Shia mos
que) should also be invited. There was talk of whether or not an invitation be sent to the PLO representative in Canberra, but there was consensus that he would only come if he supported the idea that the intifada was a jihad and not just a nationalist struggle. Finally, Jamal would deliver a report on the grassroots situation in his hometown of Gaza.

  What surprised and impressed me the most was that Zia insisted an invitation also be sent to the NSW Jewish Board of Deputies. A decision on that was deferred to the next meeting. I later heard that an invitation was sent.

  And so on one fateful Sunday in 1988, I headed out to the Stephen Roberts theatre at Sydney University. It was the mid-semester break, and I’d promised Mum that I was going to uni to study. I wasn’t telling her the whole truth, but then I wasn’t lying either. I may not have been doing my first year ‘History and Philosophy of Law’ essay (which was already a week late) or my major accounting assignment, but I was studying something at a university.

  I arrived at the seminar and was greeted by Zia and Damien. I sat down in the almost-full theatre. As usual, things weren’t running on time. Jamal was running late. Jamal’s involvement in the seminar was very controversial as he was vehemently anti-Shia. However, he was the only pro-Islamic Palestinian the Senior Usrah Group knew, and hence they really had no choice but to involve him. The Iraqi Shia Dr T kept his cool, though I could tell he wasn’t terribly impressed.

  After Jamal spoke, Damien stood up and delivered a long and rambling lecture that almost sent us all to sleep. Damien had this habit of centralising the trivial and trivialising the central. Yes, I am also very impressed with that turn of phrase. It’s something I read in a translation of a Maududi book prepared by a UK outfit calling itself The Islamic Foundation. The original translation of the book printed in Lahore was called Evidence for the Truth. The UK edition had a long-winded title about the ‘Dynamics of Power’ and ‘Change’ in ‘the Islamic Movement’. The introduction by the translator was actually longer than the text itself! Yes, men in the Islamic movement love to prattle on. The most useful thing I learned from the introduction was this turn of phrase ‘centralising the trivial and trivialising the central’.