Once Were Radicals

by Irfan Yusuf

  The above paragraph is precisely the sort of tangential paragraph Damien would write and deliver in a lecture. He would often bore the living daylights out of people, always putting on an earnest face whilst doing so. Thankfully, he later printed out a copy of his full speech. It had some very interesting information and was extremely well researched and referenced. He could have written the same thing using half the pages.

  The grand finale of speeches were what I was waiting for. I would get to hear imams of both Sunni and Shia sects standing together on the same podium for the same cause. Instead, I got to hear two boring and loud monologues delivered by two imams who had so much respect for their largely non-Arabic-speaking audience that they delivered each word in Arabic.

  Sheikh Hilaly started. There was a simultaneous translation posted on an overhead projector, according to which the sheikh spoke about the importance of Shia–Sunni unity before digressing onto a discussion about the significance of Jerusalem and the history of the Crusades. It was interesting stuff, but I wasn’t quite sure how it related to our twentieth-century topic.

  Then Sheikh Sayyid Hashim Nasrullah, imam of al-Zahra Mosque, delivered his speech. He spent much of his time talking about the meaning of the Palestinian cause to Muslims everywhere and how the Islamic government in Iran had made the liberation of Palestine a top priority.

  During the question-and-answer session, I was bored out of my brain as all questions and answers were in Arabic. Finally Zia got to ask Sheikh Hilaly a question in English about how he believed Muslim youth in Australia could best assist their brothers and sisters in Palestine. Through an interpreter (yes, finally one showed up!), Sheikh Hilaly clearly misunderstood the question, and said something to the effect that Muslim youth should learn their religion and practise it. Sheikh Hilaly’s luck with interpreters hasn’t improved since then.

  All in all, the seminar was a complete WOFTAM (waste of fucking time and money). However, what made it worth all the WOFTAM was that I did feel quite rebellious hanging around with the Senior Usrah Group mob. All this controversial talk of intifada and Iran and Islamic movements sounded dangerous and funky, even if it almost sent me to sleep. Thankfully no one brought a video recorder.

  Three months later, I was sitting at home watching the news on Channel 9. The first news item was politicians getting angry about Sheikh Hilaly. I assumed it was just another instance of anti-Muslim bias until I saw the report. There, in full view, was Sheikh Hilaly on the screen talking at a seminar months back at Sydney University. The backs of the heads of various members of the audience could also be seen. Luckily my head wasn’t there. But with politicians and Jewish community leaders getting angry and calling for an investigation, I suddenly became nervous.

  Sheikh Hilaly’s speech allegedly had some rather nasty stuff. He had allegedly claimed that Jews tried to control the world using sex and money and power and even pornography. I read the subtitled translation on the news and refused to believe what I saw. I was there. I was at the seminar. I read the overhead translation. Sheikh Hilaly said nothing of the sort.

  As pressure began to mount, I made some telephone calls. Soon, a meeting was convened at Uncle QAA’s house. A committee was set up to prepare a document which would be distributed to State and Federal MPs across Australia. All the different Islamic bodies would be lobbied to support the sheikh.

  Apparently AFIC were hesitant to support Hilaly. A number of key imams, including Dad’s friend Imam Chami, were calling for Hilaly to be deported. Rumours were flying around left, right and centre, and it was a disturbing and depressing discovery to find out just how divided and impotent our so-called Muslim leaders were. These people who addressed each other as ‘brother’, who managed our mosques and employed our imams and who were seen by governments as representing Muslims and whose organisations carried such bombastic titles as ‘federation’ and ‘council’, turned out to be unable to even write and sign a letter of support for Sheikh Hilaly.

  What upset me even more was that it seemed like leaders of another religious congregation were dictating to Muslims who they could and couldn’t appoint as their religious leaders. Muslims didn’t tell Jews who should be appointed as rabbis in synagogues. Why should we receive orders from them about who we can have preaching in our mosques?

  The Senior Usrah Group’s writing committee set to work, preparing a document defending Hilaly and claiming his speech had been deliberately mistranslated and distorted. I was part of the committee but I asked for my name not to be mentioned in case my parents found out. Apparently one translation used by a media outlet referred to the Koran as the ‘Qumran’, something that led us to have a good chuckle. It confirmed in our minds that the sheikh’s opponents didn’t know the first thing about Islam. Making the sheikh’s case stronger, different translations were of different lengths, and there seemed to be no consensus from his detractors on exactly what Hilaly had said.

  Yet still politicians and Jewish leaders called for Hilaly to be deported. The saga dragged on for months and even years. I wasn’t sure whether this was because of the power of an alleged Jewish lobby or the impotence of Muslims themselves. There were recriminations and arguments and fights between different Muslim factions. Most of the Indo-Pakistanis supported calls for Hilaly’s deportation. They said he was an embarrassment and had unnecessarily upset Jews. Lebanese were divided. Some Muslims spoke of a powerful Jewish lobby which had used its money to buy off politicians and others spoke of a Jewish conspiracy. It all began to sound surreal.

  Many years later, after Hilaly was given the position of mufti and after I’d finished my university studies, I asked someone who was at the Hilaly lecture at Sydney Uni. I wanted to know the real answer to a question I’d asked him many years ago.

  ‘Bro, I know I asked you this before. But now I want you to be completely honest with me. Remember all that kerfuffle over Hilaly and the translation of his speech?’

  ‘Yes, I remember. Who could forget?’

  ‘Did Hilaly really say those things about Jews controlling the world with sex and stuff?’

  ‘Well, Irfan, I’m no Arabic speaker. But my in-laws are. And some of them were there on that day.’

  ‘Did you ask them what they heard him say?’

  ‘Yeah, they said he said those things. He didn’t stick to his speech and started getting excited.’

  ‘So why didn’t anyone speak out? Why didn’t anyone tell us? More importantly, why didn’t anyone tell me? Why the fuck did I get dragged into writing some futile defence of some fucking indefensible racist remarks when I could have been finishing my law essay and getting an “A” instead of a “B”?’

  ‘Your guess is as good as mine.’

  No doubt if my parents are reading this book, they will be shocked to learn just how deeply involved I was in all this stuff at a time when I should have been studying. I was too busy being sucked into an ideological quicksand, trying to understand how we could transplant an allegedly Islamic political agenda from places like Pakistan and Egypt to Australia. I say allegedly for reasons I’ll explain at the end of this book.

  And what must really scare them is that even after many years, I didn’t have any regrets over my involvement in this process. I did have some regrets about failing certain accounting courses. Why I did that economics degree, I have no idea. Only in my final year would I realise that I could have combined law with mass communications!

  I do have some regrets about the impact on my studies. But I have no regrets about making the journey. It is a journey many kids of my generation had to make. Sadly, a tiny minority ended up going completely off the rails, an even tinier number going overseas to fight and die in conflicts in places such as Chechnya and Kashmir. Some even brought all this conflict back home, as illustrated by the boys responsible for the 2005 London bombings. Still, in their cases it wasn’t just religion or an extremely politicised version of it. There must have been other and more complex reasons, many of which we won’t know as t
he boys won’t be back to tell us why they murdered over fifty people, amongst them an English girl whose surname was Islam.

  My continued search for the true Islam during my university years involved continuing the navigation into and through various forms of political or collective Islam. It involved reading books and pamphlets and speeches. It also involved listening to and even delivering a few speeches and sermons of my own, as well as having articles published in various Muslim community newspapers. My parents were at times concerned that I was falling into fanaticism and that I was being manipulated by persons who belonged to the Islamic industry. They never imagined my comtemplating figting jihad in Afghanistan.

  Yet for me, this wasn’t just a search for a true understanding of the faith. It was also part of a search for belonging that is common to virtually all children of migrants. Some kids experiment with music or art. Others do it with drugs. I did it with religion.

  Ignorant and prejudiced pundits claim that religion (or rather, what they see as the wrong religion) is dangerous for young people to experiment with. Really? More dangerous than drugs? What is the difference between someone who preaches a potentially dangerous ideology and someone who flirts and encourages others to flirt with a definitely deadly and illegal substance? Do the conservative pundits think we are stupid enough to believe that a young Muslim reading Maududi or Shariati or either or both Qutbs is as risky as a young person (Muslim or otherwise) injecting the first dose of heroin into their veins? Reading the works of mainstream political Islamic movements might make you a little warped to begin with. But then, so does reading Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto. Or reading Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom. Or trying to read Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged without falling asleep.

  Later in life, after leaving university and joining the Young Liberals, I met people who went on to become involved in all kinds of illegal activities which they deemed consistent with their understanding of conservatism or liberalism. The first domino in their political activism may have been reading a speech by Sir Robert Menzies or a book by Karl Popper. Other dominos fell in quick succession, and they eventually ended up with criminal records. These boys may not have supported suicide bombings but they did revel in the carpet-bombing of innocent civilians in Iraq. They may not have become Islamo-fascists because they were too busy being the genuine article. They may not have believed in anti-Jewish conspiracy theories but they certainly subscribed to the equivalent anti-Muslim ones. Should we blame the first domino for all the subsequent ones that fell? Should we declare that reading the works of conservative political philosophers can lead one to criminal activity? Or support for wars of genocide and ethnic cleansing?

  10

  Fatwas and fanatical uncles

  There were times when I’d become sick of reading about the dynamics of the political failure of twentieth-century Islamic movements. All these stories about Muslim countries rejecting (or being forced to reject) their own religious and political heritage was enough to make even the most casual fan of political Islam depressed.

  It was at such times that I’d be hungry for some kind of Islamic success. I’d then enjoy the relative ease of immersing myself in my old and familiar high school doctrinal debates. Arguing about which dogma took you to paradise was so much easier than finding solutions to save the world. I’d then revisit the work of that rather undiplomatic South African Muslim missionary Ahmed Deedat, watching videos of his one-sided and almost choreographed debates with various missionaries and re-reading Deedat’s booklets, many of which had highly provocative (and, dare I say, grossly offensive) titles like Crucifixion or Cruci-fiction? and The God Who Never Was.

  It didn’t take me long to realise that Deedat was just repeating the same arguments without solving real-life problems. His polemics were like a shot of adrenaline that fired Muslims up and make them feel more confident about their faith. But they really didn’t achieve much in the long term. Worse still, his cold, sharp logic could just as easily be applied against any religion, including our own. What’s to stop people quoting verses of the Koran and various ahadith and scholarly commentaries out of context and reaching offensive conclusions about Islam and Muslim traditions? These days, each time someone emails me complaining about the latest junk they’ve read on some evangelical anti-Muslim website or blog, I remind them of what offensive arguments Deedat used to get away with before the days of internet and email.

  On one occasion, Dad’s work in London coincided with one of Deedat’s UK tours. On Deedat’s itinerary was a debate in the Royal Albert Hall with a Palestinian Christian missionary named Dr Shorosh. Dad attended the debate and was impressed by Deedat’s knowledge of the Bible, though he was most unimpressed with Deedat’s rudeness and lack of respect for other people’s religions.

  Dad brought home a recording of the debate made by Deedat’s hosts. I watched the debate numerous times and had almost memorised it. It’s been at least fifteen years since I last saw the tape. However, I do remember some details. The debate was chaired by an English Muslim lawyer named Ahmed Thomson. In those days it was a shot in my faith’s arm just to see an English person adopt my religion. Ahmed Thomson asked the audience to stand up for the recitation of both the Lord’s Prayer and the first chapter of the Koran (containing seven short verses and called Surah al-Fatiha or ‘the opening chapter’). The al-Fatiha was recited first in Arabic with an English translation. Dr Shorosh then recited the Lord’s Prayer in Arabic first and then in English. I remember the audience as a whole remaining standing for both prayers, except for one notable exception. Yusuf Islam was seated when the Lord’s Prayer was recited.

  I found Yusuf Islam’s response so uncharacteristic of him. Though I’d met Yusuf only once before in my early teens, I thought of him as a gentle and tolerant man who had years before treated my relatively juvenile questions with respect. Yet now he could not bring himself to show the same respect to a prayer which quite possibly may have been uttered by God’s Messiah. Surely there was nothing in the Lord’s Prayer that would offend anyone, let alone a Muslim. Then again, for all I know, he may not have stood up for the Koranic prayer either. Muslims aren’t expected to stand up when the Koran is being recited.

  Apart from this, I enjoyed the debate. Deedat was still using and repeating many of the same phrases, arguments, anecdotes and even biblical verses (some of which he had memorised in their original Hebrew or Greek) to great effect. He even used Shorosh’s own books against him. Shorosh was clearly no match.

  One Friday, I went to the Jummah (congregational) prayers at the King Faisal Mosque. There I met up with my two friends Kamal and Abdullah, and we set off to the city. On Fridays, the Anglican Dean of Sydney would set up a podium and microphone in the middle of the square between St Andrews Cathedral and Sydney Town Hall. He invited questions from members of the public on any subject related to Christianity. I wanted to show off my debating skills to my two buddies.

  On our way, we bumped into one of my Indian uncles who helped organise at our youth camp. Uncle Kazim asked us where we were off to. He must have sensed we were up to no good. I did the talking.

  ‘Uncle, the Angelican Dean of Sydney is having a public question-and-answer session in the square. We would like to question him and challenge him to accept Islam.’

  Uncle Kazim identified my delusions of polemical grandeur instantly.

  ‘Irfan, don’t you think that might be a silly idea? The Dean is a learned man with a doctorate in religion. You are in law school. Why should he convert after hearing a few questions from you? Maybe you and your friends should go back to the mosque and read some Koran.’

  Despite Uncle Kazim’s best efforts to delay our journey, we managed to catch the last ten minutes of the Dean’s session. When it was my turn, I asked a question which I had used in Divinity classes frequently and which I thought was very clever.

  ‘Yes, Dr Shilton, I have a question. We know that Adam committed a sin in the garden by eating the forbidden fruit. We also
know that Adam asked God for forgiveness. My question is this—was Adam forgiven?’

  Kamal looked at me, confused. He whispered in my ear. ‘Bro, that’s a pretty simple question. I thought you were going to debate him.’

  ‘Just wait and watch, Kamal.’

  I looked at the Dean and could almost read his thinking process. On the one hand, if he said ‘yes’ then it meant that we’d inherit both Adam’s sin and forgiveness, making the doctrine of original sin redundant and rendering the whole salvation formula via the death and resurrection of Christ unnecessary. On the other hand, if he said ‘no’ then it meant that Adam wasn’t forgiven despite asking God for forgiveness. It meant God was punishing someone who turned to Him in repentance. It reflected badly on the Christian concept of God.

  Of course, looking back, it’s likely the Dean was really thinking something else. Instead of answering our question, he asked me to speak to him about the issue afterwards, at which time he provided me with an appropriate answer.

  ‘You must be that Yusuf chap, the St Andrews old boy who used to make all that trouble in Divinity classes. I’ve heard you’ve asked Rev Alex this question. My answer is the same as his. We inherit Adam’s sinful nature, not his sin. It doesn’t matter whether God forgave Adam or not.’

  I then tried to corner Dr Shilton with other questions about the authenticity of the Gospels, about the processes used at the Council of Nicaea in 325AD etc etc. Dr Shilton was a kind and patient man and taught me a lesson that has stayed with me even at times when I have wanted to walk away from religion altogether.