Once Were Radicals

by Irfan Yusuf

  A famous sixteenth-century Indian Sufi scholar named Sheikh Ahmed Sirhindhi wrote that the believer goes through various stages until they reach a stage of wahdat ash-shuhood. This is a stage where all you perceive is God. It’s a bit like taking a torch and placing it in front of the midday sun. All you’ll see is the sun, whose bright light will make the torch invisible. You’re so lost in God that you forget yourself. Surely this must be the highest stage a Muslim can reach.

  In fact it wasn’t. Sheikh Sirhindhi taught the highest stage was when you returned to planet Earth and directed yourself to serving God’s creatures. The essence of Islam was public service and public engagement. This was the work of God’s prophets—Ibrahim (Abraham), Nuh (Noah), Moussa (Moses), Younis (Jonah), Yahiya (John the Baptist), Issa (Jesus) and Muhammad. The weird thing is that you don’t have to immerse yourself in God to reach the highest level of proximity to Him. And you can work with people of all faiths and no faith in particular.

  This message was reinforced some years later one Friday at the King Faisal Mosque by a Bangladeshi man wearing a dhoti (the same dress Gandhi used to wear) and a long white shirt. He looked like a beggar, but was in fact a physics professor from Dhaka University in Bangladesh visiting Australia with a TJ delegation.

  ‘My dear brothers, you are so fortunate to have migrated to this country. The people here have behaved in a most Islamic manner toward you. The Prophet Muhammad taught us that we should endeavour to give and share from the things we value. Australians understand the Prophet’s message even if they don’t believe in him. They share with you things they value: wealth, prosperity, just laws, education, tidy streets, good homes. They even share with you political power, making you equal citizens and giving you a say in their country’s affairs. What have you shared with them in return? What do Muslims value the most? Surely we should share our shared religious values with our fellow citizens. We must show by our actions that we want to contribute to this society.’

  He then reminded us of the Hilf al-Fudul (Alliance for Virtue), an organisation founded fourteen centuries ago in Mecca years before Muhammad received his first revelation. This was the time of jahiliyyah, of profound ignorance and lawlessness when men worshipped idols of wood and stone, when you could only feel safe if you were part of a tribe or sponsored by a tribal leader. A merchant from outside had sold his goods to a Meccan tribal chief who refused to pay. The merchant had no one to turn to. A group of merchants and tribal leaders, including Muhammad, formed the Alliance of Virtue, perhaps the world’s first trade union, in direct response to this merchant’s plea.

  After becoming a Prophet and moving to Medina to escape persecution, Muhammad would reminisce with his companions about the Alliance. ‘Before Prophet-hood in Mecca, I raised my hand when requested to pledge allegiance to the Alliance. If asked to do so now, I would gladly raise my hand.’

  Muhammad was prepared to join a just cause even with people from a city that persecuted him and that was threatening the very survival of his city-state. My theological journey had to incorporate some kind of public service. Which raises the obvious question—why on earth did I join the Liberal Party? Perhaps that’s a discussion for another time.

  In the weeks leading up to 9/11, I was involved in an election campaign in Auburn, a Sydney suburb with the largest Muslim concentration of any suburb in Australia. I was engaging with all major political parties, their candidates and their members of parliament. The Auburn by-election was on the Saturday before September 11.

  After September 11, that engagement with the mainstream continued when I was endorsed as a candidate in the Federal Election. Like many Muslims, I suffered from a case of 9/11-itus, trying to make up for lost time.

  The Arabs say that a boy only becomes a man when he reaches the age of forty. By the time this book is first published, I’ll be a few months short of my 40th birthday. If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that no group has a monopoly over extremism. The best antidote to extremism is engaging with people. It’s the Hilf al-Fudul philosophy: work with people you otherwise disagree with on just causes you do agree with. Build coalitions with all kinds of people across the cultural, philosophical, religious and political spectrum.

  Until the mid-1990s, the only English-language religious books available to Aussie Muslims taught that mainstream Australian culture was something to avoid, not something to embrace. The Islam promoted by Muslim religious organisations, the anti-Soviet Islam that was endorsed by media pundits, the West-backed jihadist Islam that formed the backdrop of the Afghan war against the Soviets was the only Islam we knew.

  Islam was something foreign to us. However, we were lucky that we had our parents (and for those few fortunate enough to attend camps, our wise sheikhs) to help us see beyond the politicised use of texts. But converts such as Damien had to navigate through Islam on their own. Virtually all converts I know found being Muslim to be like grabbing hold of a pendulum. Sometimes cultural Muslims placed you on a pedestal and made you leader of some religious body. Others (often in response to convert leadership) treated you with suspicion. Like home-grown Muslim youth, converts were often targeted by fringe sectarian and extremist groups. Some even travelled overseas and ended up fighting other people’s wars. One even found himself at the Guantanamo Bay concentration camp.

  I spent much of my teenage and early adult life exploring the ideas that led many to fight the wrong battles in Afghanistan, Kashmir and other flashpoints. Had I been fifteen years younger, I may have shared a cell next to David Hicks. This is no exaggeration. The vast majority of former Guantanamo inmates were picked up merely because they were at the wrong place at the wrong time. A fair few were associated with political Islamic movements deemed at war with the West. Yet members of other political Islamic movements had the protection and support of American, British and Australian soldiers. After September 11, if you were deemed part of the enemy, whether Taliban or Hekmatyar’s Hizb-i-Islami, or if you might have had even the slightest association with bin Ladin, you could be tortured and detained at Bagram airbase or sent to Guantanamo or even a friendly Muslim dictatorship with lax torture laws. But if you happened to be equally jihadist but on the right side at the right time, you’d probably end up as a Minister in a Western-backed government.

  Fifteen or twenty years ago, Dr T (the Iraqi Shia from Senior Usrah) would have been considered a dangerous pro-Iran Shia revolutionary. Today, with many Iraqi Shia parties allied to the United States, Dr T would probably be welcomed with open arms in Western capitals. Mahmud Saikal, once a former Afghan jihadist leader and Senior Usrah organiser, eventually served as Deputy Minister for Foreign Affairs in the pro-American post-Taliban government of Hamid Karzai. They were the lucky ones. Their ideological successors, such as former British Guantanamo detainee Moazzam Begg, weren’t so lucky.

  The targets of today’s hysteria are people somehow linked with the Wahhabi sect. I myself regard Wahhabism as a heterodox—fringe—form of Islam. But not every heterodoxy spells danger to our security. Still, there are those ‘analysts’ and commentators that make an issue of even the slightest influence of Wahhabism. Last year, an Australian newspaper made much of a postgraduate research facility in a Queensland university receiving $100 000 from the Saudi embassy. The newspaper ran a vicious campaign against the academic in charge of the facility. That campaign mysteriously ended when someone pointed out that at least 8 per cent of shares in the company that owned that newspaper were held by a Saudi prince!

  This kind of imbecilic discourse has dominated anti-terrorism talk. The irony is that political leaders most prone to acting on this kind of hysteria and rough justice haven’t managed to catch either Osama bin Ladin or Taliban leader Mullah Omar. Instead, they invaded Iraq and gave al-Qaeda a new battleground.

  My more recent exploration through classical Islam and Sufism after my 1994 Pakistan trip led me to realise just how radical and unqualified many Islamic movement writers were. Maududi was a journalist who taught
himself Arabic and studied classical Islamic texts without benefitting from the wisdom of experienced teachers. Syed Qutb was the same. Their views on a range of theological issues have been the subject of trenchant criticism by Muslim religious scholars.

  Similarly, bin Ladin’s training was in economics while Zawahiri is a physician. None of them had any real expertise in classical Islam. Their views on jihad, democracy and relations with non-Muslims are far more extreme than those of more established Islamic political movements. Indeed, they regard these movements with as much disdain as they regard the West. They are even further to the theological fringe than writers I read. And yet these men are regarded by many as representative of mainstream Islam.

  In the so-called ‘War on Terror’, ordinary Muslims are damned if they do and damned if they don’t. Muslim terrorists haven’t been able to invent a weapon that only kills non-Muslims. Indeed, the likes of bin Ladin have killed more Muslims than non-Muslims. Similarly, the rhetoric, actions and wars of moronic religious supremacists and conservative pundits don’t hesitate to hold ordinary Muslims collectively responsible for the actions of bin Ladin and his allies.

  So are people deemed Muslim or having even some cultural or ancestral link to Islam. If you or one of your ancestors may feel inclined to tick the ‘Muslim’ box on a census form, you’re automatically a suspect. This reached absurd proportions during the 2008 US Presidential election when an issue was made of Barack Obama’s middle name and the ethno-religious heritage of his Kenyan father and Indonesian step-father. Those at the forefront of demonising Obama on this basis were the same people who’d often harp on about Muslims despising democracy. Prejudice and logic don’t mix terribly well.

  This book started writing itself after the London bombings of 7 July 2005. All available evidence suggests this event was the work of home-grown British Muslim youth mainly of Indo-Pakistani extraction. They were kids of my cultural background. The combination of their parents’ cultural Islam and the fringe political Islam that dominates so many British Muslim institutions did not save them from falling prey to extremism. The illegal and immoral war in Iraq which spawned terror attacks in Iraqi cities on the scale of 7/7 almost every week, hasn’t made London or other Western cities feel safer.

  The London attacks led to assaults on Muslim targets across the Western world, including vandalism on several mosques across New Zealand.

  Yet in all this hysteria, no one seems to remember the victims. The first funeral of a London bombing victim was of Shahara Islam, a 21-year-old bank clerk described by her family as being ‘an East Ender, Londoner and British, but above all a true Muslim and proud to be so’. Having the surname and religion of Islam didn’t diminish her Britishness. She represented a modern multicultural success story—the daughter of migrant parents whose religious and cultural heritage she shared. At the same time, she was a thoroughly modern woman on her way to work. She was a typical victim of terrorism.

  In many circles, it has become fashionable to attribute extremist violence and terror to the heritage of the young British woman. Presidents and prime ministers speak of the ‘war against Islamist terror’ in her name. Columnists and talkback hosts rally against ‘Islamic terrorists’ and ‘Islamofascists’ in her name. Yet they, and the Muslim extremists they mimic, keep forgetting what her name is.

  I don’t live in denial. Fascism with a Muslim face does exist. There are people using Islam to pursue violence. But then there are Christians, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists and followers of other faiths who use religion to justify violence. And there are atheists engaging in mindless violence, among them the Marxist FARC rebels in Columbia.

  The next flashpoint could well be the place where my parents were born. As I write these lines, India and Pakistan have been trading accusations over terrorism. Yet as I discovered at the tombs of Muslim saints in Pakistan, South Asian Islam is inherently pluralist. So are South Asian Hinduism, Christianity, Buddhism, Judaism and other indigenous Indian faiths.

  American academic Martha Nussbaum writes extensively about religious conflict in India. There were plenty of Western observers with little knowledge of India who saw the Mumbai attacks in 2008 as just more proof that (to use Nussbaum’s words) ‘the world is currently polarised between a Muslim monolith, bent on violence, and the democratic cultures of Europe and North America’. These same commentators ignored the fact that one of the police officers killed by terrorists was in the process of investigating a secret cell of extremists with a Hindutva agenda, the same kind of religious extremism that inspired Mahatma Gandhi’s assassins.

  We all need to remember Nussbaum’s message that the real clash is the clash within civilisations, ‘a clash within virtually all modern nations: between people who are prepared to live with others who are different on terms of equal respect, and those who seek the protection of homogeneity, achieved through the domination of a single religious and ethnic tradition’.

  Enforced monoculturalism. Enforced homogeneity. There lies the real fascism.

  Glossary

  Allahu akbar: This is a religious phrase that means ‘God is always greater than all else’.

  azaan: The call to the compulsory worship made from mosques five times a day.

  Bollywood: Every Aussie Indo-Pakistani kid’s worst nightmare, it is India’s film industry that churns out more movies than any industry on the planet. A world where every park has a couple dancing and singing to the tunes of an orchestra hiding behind the bushes, and where every villain can have his face rearranged without feeling the barest touch of a righteous fist.

  eid: Twice yearly celebration or feast. The greater Eid was known to me as Baqarah Eid (its proper Arabic name is Eid al-Adha). The second Eid (called Eid al-Fitr) is held to commemorate the end of the fasting month of Ramadan.

  fardh: In religious terms, it means compulsory.

  gunna: Urdu and Turkish word referring to negative divine currency which leads us to spend time in Islamic purgatory or hell.

  hadith/ahadith: Saying/sayings of the Prophet Muhammad transmitted by his family members and companions.

  halal: Permissible.

  haraam: Forbidden.

  iman: Faith.

  Islam: Literally means ‘peace’ but also carries connotations of holding up one’s white flag to God. One Scottish Muslim writer named Ian Dallas describes it as a ‘life transaction’ where you sell your free will to God in return for paradise. Writers from allegedly Islamic political movements frequently describe it as a ‘way of life’ or a ‘complete system of life’ encompassing all aspects of one’s individual and social (and even political and economic) sphere. Like many other faiths, Islam could also be described as the remnants of a once great civilisation, a beautiful old vase that now consists of chards of various sizes that modern believers are struggling to put back together without cutting and injuring themselves or people around them.

  Islamist: Also called ‘Islamic fundamentalist’, ‘extremist’ or (my personal favourite, mainly because it sounds so hysterical) ‘Islamo-fascist’. The term generally is used to describe someone who believes Islam has a political dimension. Sometimes it also refers to someone holding extreme views and/or who engages in (or at least supports) violence or terrorism.

  jaahil: Used in Urdu to describe someone with no education, or someone uncivilised and bad-mannered. Jaahil is actually an Arabic word used in the Koran to describe idol-worshippers who lived during the time of the Prophet Muhammad.

  jahannum: An Arabic word meaning ‘Hell’.

  jannah: An Arabic word meaning ‘Heaven’.

  jemaat: Congregation.

  jihad: Literally means ‘to strive’. Muslims claim that military jihad can only refer to a just war, and the sharia stipulates strict rules that prohibit (amongst other things) the killing of civilians and the destruction of crops and places of worship. It is often translated as ‘holy war’, though this term appears nowhere in the Koran and other religious texts.

  khudahafiz: A tra
ditional Iranian, Afghan and South Asian greeting which means ‘may God keep you under His protection’.

  koran: Also spelt Qur’an, it is the scripture of Muslims, who believe it was revealed to the Prophet Muhammad through the Angel Gabriel in small bits over a period of twenty-three years, commencing when he was forty years old. The Koran is regarded as the literal word of God. The Koran is in Arabic. It has been translated into many languages, but Muslims don’t regard these translations as being a substitute for the Koran itself. The Koran is divided into 114 surahs (chapters) of varying lengths.

  madrassa: An Arabic word meaning ‘school’. Also used by paranoid pundits to describe a place where young boys are programmed to become part of the giant Islamist conspiracy to take over the world. Apparently both Osama and Obama studied this conspiracy in a madrassa.

  molvi: A religious leader, also known as ‘imam’.

  mubah: In religious terms, it means ‘neutral’.

  muezzin: Man chanting the ‘call to prayer’.

  nafl: In religious terms, while this isn’t compulsory it would still earn savaab or spiritual currency.

  qaida: A book teaching the Arabic alphabet and how Arabic letters are combined to make the sounds of words from the Koran.

  rakaat: A cycle of prayer.

  ruku: A bowing position used in prayer, where people bow down with their hands on their knees.

  sharia: The name of a legal tradition that grew out of the life and example of the Prophet Muhammad. Islam, like Judaism, consists not just of belief and ethics but also law. Sharia is a much-maligned term, often used to describe a system of non-anaesthetic amputation where people walk around handless, footless and maybe even headless (though certainly not legless) after committing some heedless breach of the law. Instead of police, imagine bearded blokes and sheilas (women whose burqas perhaps cover their facial hair!) depriving us all of privacy, patrolling the streets searching for spare limbs to amputate. In reality, sharia is just one of a family of legal traditions that includes English Common Law and European Civil Law. Sharia itself insists it has limited application to Muslims living in non-Muslim countries. In this sense, sharia becomes little more than liturgy. And I doubt you’ll see too many Muslim refugees and asylum seekers escaping from wacky sharia or Islamic states like the Taliban’s Afghanistan wanting to see sharia implemented in Australia or New Zealand in a huge hurry.