Once Were Radicals

by Irfan Yusuf

  ‘Mr Yusuf, you can ask me a hundred questions to which I may not have all the answers right now. In fact, I may not be able to find answers to some of your questions ever. But good Christians, and no doubt good Muslims, believe that the real goal in life isn’t to know all the answers but rather to know the Person who knows all the answers. And can you tell me who that Person is?’

  I whispered ‘God’ rather sheepishly.

  ‘Excellent. Now why don’t you and your friends run along and have some lunch or go watch a movie or something.’

  So much for converting the Dean of Sydney! Kamal, Abdullah and I quietly slipped away. Kamal was clearly embarrassed, and suggested I had shown disrespect to the ‘Christian sheikh’ and should apologise to him at the next Friday forum. I followed his advice and I was at the Town Hall square again. This time I had no questions to ask. I just wanted to listen and then find an appropriate moment to apologise. But there was no podium and no microphone. The Dean had taken ill and wasn’t holding his scheduled Friday session.

  My hero Deedat wasn’t always generous even to his Muslim brothers. I used to regularly receive mail from both the South African and British branches of Deedat’s Islamic Propagation Centre International. At one stage, he seemed to be grooming a young South African barrister named Yusuf Bacchus, and videos of Bacchus’s debates with missionaries were being advertised and promoted. Within a year, a newsletter arrived from Durban. The back page showed portraits of both Bacchus and Deedat. The black and white photo of Bacchus’s face was serious, and he had a cross (as in ‘X’) struck through his face. Deedat’s colour photo showed a face radiating a smile and had no cross. Below their faces was an announcement to the effect that Yusuf Bacchus should no longer be regarded as having any affiliation with Deedat or the Islamic Propagation Centre International.

  Eventually I got over the aggressive missionary work of Deedat. When his repetitious arguments began to bore his audience, Deedat turned to Middle Eastern politics and the Israel/Palestine dispute. I watched a video of a symposium he’d organised with a former US Congressman named Paul Findley. Deedat was clearly out of his depth, his arguments sounding so simplistic compared to the relative nuance of Findley, who limited his discussion to American foreign policy.

  What really made me wonder about Deedat’s approach was when he visited Australia during a lecture tour. Flanked by local bodyguards, Deedat delivered a lecture to a packed Sydney Town Hall. I wasn’t at the lecture though I did watch the official video recording afterwards. What particularly disappointed me was the timing of his talk. The lecture was based on his book Crucifixion or Cruci-Fiction? and was held on the evening of Good Friday. I thought this was unnecessarily inflammatory.

  Soon after leaving Australia, Deedat suffered a stroke, and after a long period in a coma, he passed away. Notwithstanding his often provocative remarks about other faiths, Deedat played a major role in shaping my religious identity. His combats were always about doctrine (in the case of Christians) or Middle Eastern politics (in the case of Jews). He did, however, acknowledge that Christians, Jews and Muslims shared the same moral and ethical values and worshipped the same God.

  While the political Islam of books by Maududi and others of similar ilk made lots of sense, events overseas always proved a source of doubt and even disillusionment. I always had the impression that Iranian political Islam was much friendlier to conventional Western thinking than the Jamaat stuff I’d read coming out of Pakistan. It was weird how books by Jamaatis (as we referred to JI members) like Maryam Jameelah were openly being distributed in Australia without anyone inside or outside Muslim circles caring.

  I still have a two-volume set of commentaries by Jameelah titled Western Civilisation Condemns Itself. Her critiques of Western philosophy and the writings of other Pakistani Jamaati ideologues left me with the impression that the values of Islam and my own Australian values would clash more often than not. This wasn’t the case with Iran’s Shariati. I’d often wonder whether the marching Iranian hordes screaming ‘Death to America’ had even bothered to read Shariati.

  Indeed, the closest I felt Shariati came to showing hostility to Western values was in a selection of translated lectures entitled Marxism and Other Western Fallacies. I haven’t read the book for years, but I recall being left with the impression that while Shariati mildly criticised most Western philosophers, he largely left them intact. But in the case of Marxism, the demolition job was quite direct and brutal. It was as if the only real fallacy Shariati identified was Marxism, and in the Cold War era of the time this was regarded as a good thing.

  Iranian political Islam seemed more pro-Western. It didn’t require me to turn my back on conventional thinking in an intellectual manner. On the other hand, the Saudi- and American-backed political Islams of the Sunni world—groups like the Jamaat-i-Islami and Muslim Brotherhood, which were actively backing the Afghan jihad against the Soviets and whose books were being distributed and bought and sold openly—were far more hostile to the West than anything the Iranians had to offer.

  That all changed when the name of an Indian Muslim writer I idolised suddenly hit the front page of the newspapers.

  I was shocked by the attitude of English Muslims shown on TV protesting against Salman Rushdie. I’d have expected them to be as proud as I was when I saw Rushdie’s name in the newspaper. Rushdie was the man who introduced me to the injustices suffered by the Palestinians in a touching review he wrote of Professor Edward Said’s autobiography. Yet now this leading British Muslim (albeit a rather unobservant and secular one) was under armed guard, his books and effigies burned by fellow English Muslims. Surely having someone with a name as strange as their names being printed in the newspaper and writing novels should have been a source of pride.

  What made the reactions of Muslims even sillier was that many had not even read his book. It seemed rather stupid to me that anyone could condemn a novel for being blasphemous. How could a work of fiction become blasphemy? It wasn’t meant to be taken as real. That’s why it’s called a novel.

  At the time I wondered if Shariati would have behaved in this manner towards Rushdie if he were still alive. Would a writer who embraced anti-colonial non-Muslim European writers like Franz Fanon and Jean-Paul Sartre have attacked a British Muslim novelist? It seemed unlikely.

  Then something really shocking happened. The Iranian government of Ayatollah Khomeini decided to issue a religious ruling that Rushdie must be put to death. One Iranian religious foundation even announced a cash prize for someone who could successfully enforce the ruling and kill Rushdie.

  Almost overnight, there were people openly boasting they would kill Rushdie. On one episode of Geoffrey Robertson’s Hypothetical program, former Guardian journalist and UK Muslim Parliament founder Dr Kaleem Siddiqui even flirted with the idea of shooting Rushdie if he saw him in a restaurant in London.

  What shocked me most was learning that my childhood hero, Yusuf Islam, was reportedly supporting Khomeini’s fatwa. Once again, I could feel the kind of disillusionment that led me to consider being baptised in high school. Muslim religious and political leaders across the world were again behaving like lunatics. This idea of killing writers reminded me of the people of Salem I had read about in high school English classes when we studied Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. It was maximum hysteria with minimum thought.

  I somehow managed to get on the mailing list of a newspaper called the Hong Kong Muslim Herald (HKMH). This was a pro-Iranian newspaper which seemed to have less input from Chinese Muslims and more from Iranian and Pakistani Shia Muslims. Much of the material was taken from other magazines of the Sunni Islamic movement, including a Canadian magazine called Impact International. The HKMH began running excerpts from Rushdie’s novel with a view to ‘exposing’ his blasphemy. I read these excerpts and noted Rushdie had offended the religious sentiments of Jews and Christians as well. However, I didn’t see any Jews and Christians engaged in violent street marches and burning effigies. No W
estern leader or Israeli politician called for Rushdie’s assassination.

  I wondered whether the HKMH’s quotes were out of context. And what impact did all these riots have on Islam’s image, if not Muslims’ reality? Could millions of illiterate Muslims be fired up by a novel they were in no position to read?

  Some of my Indo-Pakistani uncles seemed to have lost their sense of perspective over Rushdie’s alleged blasphemy. I remember going to one uncle’s house with my parents. A few of the uncles got all hot under the collar when Rushdie’s name was mentioned. One was so angry that he spent hours trying to convince the others that the Iranian fatwa was correct. Meanwhile, the time for the early afternoon prayer had passed and the late afternoon prayer was about to end without this impassioned uncle leaving his chair to perform his pre-prayer ablutions.

  On the way home, I asked Mum how seemingly religious uncles could miss their compulsory prayers to defend Islam’s honour against Rushdie’s attacks. Mum’s bilingual answer summed up my own thoughts.

  ‘Unfortunately some Muslims seem to be more interested in defending God than worshipping God, as if God cannot defend Himself without their input. Dhey miss nemaaz? Is terribul! What kind of ignorant person would miss his prayers? Dheez peepul jaahil fanatic!’

  I decided to find out for myself what all the fuss was about. I went to my local library and borrowed The Satanic Verses. I took it home and started reading. After ten pages, I was so bored that I put it down near the TV in our lounge room. That night, some Indo-Pakistani uncles and aunts came over for dinner. One uncle (I’ll call him Uncle K) saw the book sitting around with a bookmark in it. He immediately went on a rant about how awful and blasphemous this book was, and that no decent Muslim home could have such a book anywhere except the garbage bin. I picked up the book and took it to my room. I then returned to the lounge room and sat down. Uncle K then proceeded to chide me.

  ‘Irfan, I can’t believe that a good Muslim like you who goes to youth camps and tells my children to go to your Islamic Youth activities would read such filth!’

  Dad couldn’t help himself. ‘So, K sahib, how do you know this book contains filth? Have you read it?’

  ‘Yusuf sahib, I don’t need to read it to know it is evil.’

  Dad was always a cool customer, and was never abusive to guests. This occasion was no exception. ‘Then I hope you don’t mind my seeking your views on my PhD thesis. Does it contain evil also? You haven’t read it after all.’

  ‘Yusuf sahib, you are no Salman Rushdie!’

  Dad then gave up and switched the topic from religion to the next usual topics of Indo-Pakistani dinners—politics and cricket. After all the guests left, Mum suggested I return the book to the library. I was a little confused. Did she object to my reading the book?

  ‘Yoo hav exam neks veek. By all means borrow and read it after the exams are over.’

  Yep, everything revolved around study!

  It was initially in Year 11 through exposure to Schaeffer and Maududi that I felt convinced God had to control more than just what was happening inside the church or mosque. God was our creator. God knew more about us than we knew about ourselves. With our limited knowledge and foresight, how could we possibly manage our own affairs? For me, the mission of a Muslim was to spread this kind of cryptic and simplistic theocratic nonsense across the Islamic world, beginning with young Muslims in my backyard.

  While Muslim youth groups focused on socialising at picnics and barbecues, in my mind there were bigger issues at stake. This wasn’t about just my own identity or the identities of other kids. This was about saving the world from the evils of what Dr Schaeffer called ‘secular humanism’ and what Maududi and others described as jaahiliyah.

  Mum often used the Urdu word jaahil to describe uneducated and uncouth people. For ideologues from Islamic movements like Maududi’s Jamaat-i-Islami and Muhammad Qutb’s al-Ikhwan al-Muslimeen (Muslim Brotherhood), jaahil was an Arabic adjective describing the state of the Arabs before the arrival of the Prophet Muhammad. The Arabic noun was jaahiliyah, and referred to a state of collective existence or civilisation that wasn’t based on Islamic principles. Modern secular humanism was a kind of neo-jaahiliyah or new ignorance.

  My assumed role was to help transplant the struggles and implement the agenda of overseas Islamic movements in Australia. I was to be Australia’s own Maududi, implementing his program in the Islamic Youth Association of NSW by first making it more independent of the cultural corruption of the elders.

  Of course, I had other less altruistic reasons for being involved in the IYA. Some of those Palestinian, Yugoslav and Turkish chicks (or rather, sisters) were really good-looking, with or without hijab. We used to go on fun picnics where we’d eat Turkish pide. We’d also have cultural nights where groups would put on satirical plays poking fun at elders and singing crazy songs (‘Born in the USA’ would become ‘Bored in the IYA’). This was a social circle where I didn’t have to answer silly questions about whether Dad had four wives, where people had no issue with my otherwise unpronounceable name.

  AFIC gave us an office downstairs from their offices in Zetland (it used to be their storeroom). It was our own space, but was too small for all of us. Often we’d end up at the movies or having a barbecue down at Carrs Park in southern Sydney.

  Rufus (Refat) and his wife were active. There was a young Indian lawyer who shared his first name (shall we call it his Muslim name?) with Sheikh Fehmi el-Imam from our AFIC camps. Then there was an assortment of ‘Lebbo’ guys and gals. Many of the youth were studying or working. Intermarriage was happening—Pakistani programmer marries South African student, Indian doctor marries Lebanese law student, Lebanese social worker marries Turkish teacher, Indonesian anthropologist marries Lebanese counsellor. And an Indo-Pakistani law student dreaming of perhaps marrying some good-looking ‘Yugo’ or ‘Gyppo’ or Turk or … well, anyone but Mum’s choice of Urdu-speaking ‘respectable’ non-gori lady!

  Of course, all this made Mum absolutely paranoid. She had dreams that her son would marry a good Urdu-speaking larki (girl). Mum might have believed anyone from any country could be Muslim, but only an Urdu-speaking girl was fit to be her daughter-in-law.

  Dad was fairly ambivalent about who I married, where she came from or what language she spoke at home. What concerned him more was that his son was too busy getting involved in Islamic youth activities instead of studying and going out with friends (male and female) like normal undergraduates. He almost pushed me to go and find a girlfriend and at times even wondered about my sexuality.

  Yet my near fixation with saving the world (and to a lesser extent, my extreme shyness) stopped me from pursuing the IYA sisters. Indeed, the IYA itself was becoming more politicised as factions began to emerge. These all came to a head following what would be the last national Muslim youth camp to be organised by the Australian Federation of Islamic Councils.

  Hazelbrook is a small town around 100 kilometres west of Sydney in the Blue Mountains. In January 1989, a large group of Muslin youth and young adults took the train to the mountains and walked a distance of around 300 metres to a scout camp. After two camps, some four years of on-and-off involvement in the IYA and having been recently elected president of my small campus Muslim Students’ Association (MSA), I felt I’d earned the right to be selected as a group supervisor.

  But I had to become accustomed to the fact that the Islamic industry wasn’t a place of meritocracy. I was pissed off but not surprised when I was passed over in favour of people who had never been to a camp and had no history of involvement in any Muslim religious body. I had to settle for a deputy supervisor’s spot.

  My friend Shaf, who was also active in the IYA and served on the executive of his campus MSA, was also overlooked as a group supervisor. Being both of Indian heritage, we decided to engage in some Gandhi-style nonviolent resistance (not that either of us had violence in mind), and to boycott the camp competitions. We didn’t boycott the camp entirely. The organisers
asked me to give a lecture about family relations, including relations between husband and wife, an issue on which I was hardly an expert.

  For a start I wasn’t married. I also didn’t show too much sensitivity to those who were. My fixation with lecturing women on hijab became so acute that I even made a snide remark about a senior Muslim religious leader whose wife chose not to wear it. I asked how someone could possibly represent Muslims when his own wife didn’t embody Islam by covering her hair. She was deeply upset by my comment, as were numerous IYA sisters, including those most strict on hijab. It’s so easy to pass judgment on others.

  Years later Mum started covering her hair more often when going out. During the first US war on Iraq in 1990, Mum was driving to her local shops when a prejudiced driver almost ran her car off the road. She only narrowly missed hitting a tree, and was extremely shaken. After that incident Mum stopped wearing anything on her head or her shalwar kameez suits. Instead, she started wearing slacks and a Western-style top. Her experience and understandable fears made me realise just how hard it is for Muslim women.

  ‘God will forgive me for this,’ she said. ‘I’d rather go bare-headed than make someone feel so angry that they do something they’d later regret.’

  It was easy for someone like me to lecture women on how they should dress. I’m not the one who so openly embodies a religion I love but which others love to hate. The Koran mentions the abuse which Mary, the mother of Christ, copped from her neighbours and from the congregation of her father (a rabbi and a prophet) for obeying God in miraculously conceiving and giving birth to God’s Messiah. Not all women have as much strength as Mary did. Observant Muslim men should appreciate that we are living in an age when merely looking and dressing like Mary is not easy.