Once Were Radicals
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Putting political Islam into practice … well, sort of
The next three years of my life were devoted to putting into practice what I had learned from the various books I’d read about political Islam. I never imagined this journey involved making any changes to mainstream Australia. In that sense, I only really sought to impose my religious values by fighting gay rights in the conservative wing of the Young Liberals. That was another time (and hopefully for another book!).
For me, it was about making existing Muslim religious bodies more ‘Islamic’ by bringing them closer to the ideals of various political (so-called) Islamic movements. Of course, I hadn’t at that stage seen or experienced Islamic movements in real life operating on their home turf in Pakistan or the Arab world. My knowledge of these movements was based on what I had read. And most of what I read wasn’t terribly specific, analytical or helpful.
In first-year university, I was elected president of the Muslim Students’ Association (MSA). This wasn’t exactly a huge political coup. The few members the MSA had were mostly overseas students from Indonesia or Malaysia. The vast majority of local students of nominally Muslim background or origin were not members of the MSA. I found it hard to convince even students from Indo-Pakistani families I had grown up with to join the MSA. This was the case even with kids whose parents were members of the Islamic industry.
The only regular MSA activity was Friday congregational prayer held in a classroom in the Education Faculty. Each Friday the men would gather and quickly rearrange the furniture to allow prayer mats to be laid out. Hardly ten to fifteen people would attend during semester time and even less during holiday time. The only woman I saw turning up ended up leaving before the show even started. I guess she wasn’t happy performing the physical postures of the salaat surrounded with furniture and facing bums of various nationalities.
The Friday congregational worship service consisted of one person calling the azaan (call to salaat), followed by the imam (the person presiding over the service) delivering a khutbah (sermon) and then leading our congregation in two short cycles of salaat (prayer). Each student took it in turns to play the role of imam and deliver the khutbah. Apart from the minimum mandatory Koranic verses and prayers recited in Arabic, most sermons were delivered in Bahasa Indonesia. Occasionally the Indonesians would attempt to deliver the khutbah in what was often broken English. Unlike the stereotypical firebrand preachers we see on our TV screens all too often, the Indonesians delivered their sermons very quietly.
The Indonesian students were very polite and gentle people who ensured the service was carried out with minimum noise and fuss. The azaan was only loud enough for people in the classroom to hear. When a class was using the room after us, the Indonesians always ensured the service was finished with enough time for furniture to be returned to its original condition.
Rarely did Indonesians bring politics into the equation. It seemed to me they weren’t terribly interested in the goals of Islamic movements. They were too busy focusing on ceremonial aspects of faith or completing their (mainly postgraduate) studies. I never had much idea what the subject of these Indonesian sermons were all about, and rarely if ever asked.
When it was my turn to give sermons, I’d try to shake them out of what I saw as their cultural and ceremonial stupor. Indonesia’s official civic ideology is called pancasila (literally ‘five principles’). Though one of these principles was belief in God, the ideology was designed to be inclusive and not offensive to minority faiths. But for a firebrand follower of the Islamic movement, this ideology was deeply troubling. Indonesia was the largest Muslim-majority state on earth, and these students would return to the country and hold positions of influence. I needed to train them so that they would feel a zeal to make their country more ‘Islamic’ and to start movements where they didn’t exist.
Of course, it was extreme hubris on my part to think I could further Islamise the world’s largest Muslim-majority state from a university classroom in Sydney. On one occasion, I delivered a khutbah which openly attacked pancasila and virtually suggested that then President Suharto was a kaafir (unbeliever or apostate) for not making any effort to implement Islamic systems in full. My Indonesian listeners were extremely polite, though one later approached me and requested that it might be better for the Friday sermon to be free of political discussions.
It never occurred to me that trying to bring about any fundamental changes in Indonesian (or indeed any) Muslim society required me to take into consideration the existing cultural, social, linguistic and political realities in Indonesia. I’d never been to Indonesia, and didn’t know the first thing about how Indonesians understood Islam and what role it played in their public life. I didn’t care either.
I despised the idea that people’s religions were influenced by their culture. I resented Mum’s cultural Islam that made her pressure me into only marrying someone who spoke Urdu. I imagined pure Islam should be a culture-free (or at least a culture-neutral) zone. We didn’t need culture because our culture was the sunna, the example of the Prophet. I thought it was simply a case of implementing Islam in all aspects of life, and assumed all Muslims (except my culturally rich but religiously poor middle-class Indo-Pakistani elders) shared my zeal. For me, Islam was like a software program, with Muslims the hardware that needed the software to function and process. All we needed to do was to cleanse the hardware of alien cultural and ideological viruses, and then the entire system would function perfectly.
I tried getting local students more involved, but few appeared interested. My Indo-Pakistani friends preferred getting involved in the Indian club, while Lebanese students were more interested in the Lebanese society. It seemed few shared my serious and politically charged disposition.
There were a small group who did. The problem was that they weren’t at my university. To be part of this nascent Islamic movement, I had to skip classes and spend much time on other campuses. My grades naturally suffered, and any hope of a transfer to a ‘better’ course was soon beyond reach.
A group of students from the University of Sydney organised a seminar entitled ‘Zionism, the Other Face of Nazism’. It was a provocative title and, looking back, not a terribly smart one. The promotional material for the seminar showed images of little Davids with slingshots and stones facing large Goliaths wearing WWII German helmets, each helmet engraved with the Star of David. Within a few hours, they’d managed to get the Jewish students, Jewish academics, Muslim academics and the university student union completely off-side. But the organisers insisted the seminar wasn’t about Judaism, and that our criticism wasn’t directed at people who just happened to be Jewish. After all, they’d distinguished between Judaism and Zionism. They seemed blind to the fact that the Star of David was also a religious symbol, and that associating it with Nazi helmets would cause huge offence to students, many of whom had relatives and ancestors who had been victims of the Holocaust.
I couldn’t understand this either. My old Jewish buddies from the Princeton school never spoke about it. Even Brian at St Andrews didn’t mention the Holocaust when attacking Palestinian terrorism. But with the rush of adrenaline and with university officials all the way up the chain as far as the Vice Chancellor wanting to stop the event, this was one bandwagon I was happy to hop onto. In the middle of this fray, we felt like we were taking on a superpower.
I was MC at the seminar. The speaker was a young Shia Muslim of Lebanese background who was studying law. A large number of Jewish students stood outside distributing leaflets praising Israel for being a democracy where everyone lived in perfect peace and tranquillity. Their material also described us as anti-Semites for associating the Star of David with the symbols of Hitler’s death machine. Their material painted Palestinian youths facing heavily armed troops and tanks as terrorists, not victims. These were the days before Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin shook hands on the White House lawn. Neither side was in the mood to understand the other.
I later asked the chap with the camera whether we could watch his recordings. His response, delivered in a thick Lebanese accent, gave us all reason to chuckle. ‘Bruzzer, I not have recording cassette in za kemra. I bring za kemra viz no equibment. Just bretend to film. Make za Zeeonist nervous!’
Some weeks later, the Jewish students had their own seminar entitled ‘What price Israel?’. We prepared our own brochure entitled ‘What pri£e I$rael?’, replete with facts and figures of US aid to Israel and various atrocities committed by Zionist militias in the years leading up to the creation of Israel, not to mention atrocities of the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) afterwards. We were busy distributing these at the entry to the talk to passers-by, expecting a huge turnout. What eventuated was a gathering of hardly six Jewish students and an academic. There must have been twice as many of us as them.
Imran, the Malaysian dude from the Senior Usrah, was there. He ended up walking out in disgust after the speaker (a Jewish academic) made some anti-Palestinian remark. As Imran was sitting in the far corner in a room already crammed with desks and tables, his exit was rather dramatic. He literally stepped onto a desk, Doc Marten boots and all, and jumped over a few other desks before walking out.
One Iranian chap seemed to be sounding a conciliatory note, insisting that we are all humans and should work towards peace. My over-excited politicised mind imagined he was obviously some kind of Zionist plant or perhaps even a Mossad agent. Imran later told me he was in fact a visiting Post-Doctoral Fellow in a scientific field at some university. He also happened to be the brother of a prominent Iranian political leader seen at rallies leading the cries of ‘Death to Israel’!
The Sydney Uni MSA came under enormous pressure, with some senior members even paid visits from Special Branch officers of the NSW Police. The MSA was even threatened by the university with having its funding cut. I personally was shocked at just how much hysteria was whipped up about a political seminar over a Jewish state. Almost as much hysteria is today reserved for seminars calling for the establishment of an Islamic state!
The ironic thing was that all the pressure wasn’t what killed the MSA. Instead, the MSA imploded thanks to sectarian wrangling. The young Lebanese Shia Muslim law student who spoke at the Zionism seminar was nominated for the position of vice president. A bunch of supersonic Sunni guys, led by a Saudi overseas student, threatened to boycott the MSA and set up a rival MSA. They wanted the MSA constitution amended so that Shia Muslims couldn’t hold key positions on the executive. It was an MSA with hardly thirty active members, and was ripped apart by historical controversies arising from events that took place fourteen centuries ago.
My mate Shaf was also a key player in the anti-Shia faction. At the nearby University of NSW, an equal but opposite sectarian process was taking place. UNSW had a large number of overseas students from Iran, and they had the numbers to take over. The existing executive, made of Sunnis and anti-Shia supersonic Sunnis, wanted to resist a Shia takeover.
This unusual sectarian spectacle resulted in a large number of nominally religious Muslim students avoiding MSAs altogether. The UNSW MSA attempted to change the constitution to deny Shia students full voting rights. The Iranian students complained to the student union, who tried to mediate the dispute. The supersonic Sunnis at the helm of the MSA were warned that any constitutional amendment that discriminated against any student was a breach of the affiliation rules and would mean that the MSA would be disaffiliated and hence not eligible for student funding.
I wasn’t quite sure who to support. I started reading polemical literature from both Sunni and Shia texts. One book I managed to pick up was entitled Khomeini, Iranian Revolution and Shi’ism by an Indian Deobandi scholar named Mohammed Manzoor Nomani. Mum used to read to us from one of Nomani’s Urdu books called Islam Kya Hai (literally ‘What Islam Is’), which was a popular primer in the Indian subcontinent.
However, the Nomani who wrote that primer and the sectarian Nomani who rallied against Shia Islam seemed like two different people. He tried to use uniquely Shia sources to claim that Shia Muslims were never honest about the true nature of their beliefs. Nomani claimed that Shia Muslims practised this thing called taqiyya (‘concealment’ or ‘dissimulation’) which allowed them to dissimulate (or rather, to tell outright lies) as a way to slowly infiltrate and then take over the institutions of Sunni Islam.
What put me right off Nomani’s book was his postscript, written at the height of the war between Iran and Iraq (and which I was reading just as Iraqi troops were entering Kuwait). Nomani seemed to present Saddam Hussein as a true Sunni leader facing the scourge of Shia Iran almost completely alone. I was shocked and surprised that anyone, let alone a respected scholar of Islamic sciences, could repeat almost wholesale the propaganda of other people.
My friend Abdullah from my first camp lent me a book published in Saudi Arabia. Its title was al-Khutoot al-Areedah. In Arabic it sounds really impressive, but don’t ask me for a translation. The book contained all kinds of weird and wacky theories about how Shia Muslims told lies (yep, good old taqiyya again!) to hide a sinister agenda of taking over the Muslim world and then the entire world. Similar stuff is written today by semi-literate buffoons in conservative magazines and newspapers, except that the accusation is made even against Sunni and Wahhabi sectarian propagandists spreading identical nonsense against Shia Muslims.
On one rather embarrassing occasion, I was at a Sydney Uni MSA meeting aimed at mediating between the sectarian factions. We’d reached agreement that the Lebanese Shia dude would stand down as vice president in favour of a Saudi overseas student seated next to me. Everyone was happy that all this was resolved. While we were having drinks, I noticed an Arabic book peeping under the Saudi student’s folder. I thought it must be a commentary of the Koran, and my curiosity got the better of me. I took the book out and asked the Saudi student what it was about. It was too late for him to grab it from me before the young Lebanese Shia guy approached us. He recognised the book as an anti-Shia tract which claimed that Shia Muslims were aligned with communists and Jews to take over the world—using taqiyya!
The more I explored the anti-Shia propaganda, the more I saw the political linkages to the anti-Shia religious establishment in Saudi Arabia. It didn’t surprise me when a prominent Saudi imam was sacked and imprisoned for making anti-Shia remarks in the presence of a senior Iranian politician who was in Saudi Arabia for an official visit.
I also found Shia sectarian literature equally un convincing. While I was at school, I’d sometimes visit the Adyar Theosophical Bookshop to see what Islamic books were being sold. I kept up this habit, and once found a book containing translations of correspondence between a Lebanese Shia imam named Abdul Hussein Sharifuddin and a senior Egyptian Sunni scholar from the prestigious al-Azhar University in Cairo. The Shia scholar apparently convinced the Sunni scholar that Shia claims about community leadership were correct, and did so using Sunni sources. At the time, I found the arguments unconvincing and overly intricate. I wondered whether the Shia scholar was quoting Sunni sources out of context in the same manner as Deedat quoted the Bible.
In such an environment, with so few authentic books available in English and with sectarian theology being used as an instrument for fighting political propaganda wars, theological intricacies were never explained. We learned our Islam from books and pamphlets, trying to figure out where we fitted in the sectarian scheme of things. Imams were of little or no assistance, since most spoke little English. Further, many imams simply aligned themselves with the interests of whichever faction was financing their mosque (and hence paying their wages). Too often this was the Saudis, and hence our mosques were flooded with anti-Shia Saudi literature, much of
it of little relevance to assisting us develop an Australian Islamic identity.
Saudi and Indian religious books displayed a complete disdain to what they saw as Western decadence. This fitted in quite well with the cultural attitudes of many ethnic Muslim leaders who saw Islam as some kind of cultural relic and only wanted to see it practised in the manner they last saw it being practised when they left Tripoli or Izmir or Mostar or Karachi decades ago. Our leaders had little or no interest in our learning religion in a cultural setting more relevant to our lives in Australia. In this sense, although we often bagged AFIC leaders for their butt-kissing of foreign leaders, the reality was that AFIC showed much foresight in organising national Muslim youth camps, even if it was largely the kids of members of the Islamic establishment who attended. Were it not for these camps, groups like the IYA would never have existed.
I saw my task as trying to bring the struggles of so-called Islamic movements to Australian Muslim organisations. But where did these movements sit in all this sectarian discussion? The vast majority of Islamic movement protagonists followed the twin Sunni methodologies of the Indo-Pakistani Jamaati-Islami or the Arab Muslim Brotherhood. None of these groups seemed to have any interest in changing the status quo of the broader Australian community. If anything, the people regarded as representing (or who claimed to represent) these groups in Australia openly expressed a wish that Muslim-majority states emulate the liberal democratic traditions of the West.
In terms of Iran versus Saudi politics, the movements were basically split down the middle. Some transformed their pro-Saudi sentiment into anti-Iranian feeling and then into a broad anti-Shia prejudice. Others transformed their anti-Saudi resentment into pro-Shia or pro-Iran sentiment. This was reflected in the magazine of a national umbrella Muslim student movement that called itself Ittihad al-Jamah al-Islamiya (‘The Federation of Islamic Groups’) or Ittihad for short.