Once Were Radicals Read online

  Irfan Yusuf is a lawyer and freelance commentator who regularly writes for Australian and New Zealand newspapers and online media on political, legal, cultural and faith issues.

  ONCE WERE

  RADICALS

  ONCE WERE

  RADICALS

  My years as a teenage Islamo-fascist

  IRFAN YUSUF

  First published in 2009

  Copyright © Irfan Yusuf 2009

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.

  Allen & Unwin

  83 Alexander Street

  Crows Nest NSW 2065

  Australia

  Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100

  Fax: (61 2) 9906 2218

  Email:

  [email protected]

  Web:

  www.allenandunwin.com

  Cataloguing-in-Publication details are available

  from the National Library of Australia

  www.librariesaustralia.nla.gov.au

  ISBN 978 1 74175 826 9

  Typeset in 10.75/14.5 ITC New Baskerville Std by Bookhouse

  Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Without meaning to give too much of the story away, I flirted with and ultimately rejected the political Islam of my mother’s extremely generous aunt, who supplied our family with a huge amount of English-language literature. Most of these books were purely religious and devotional, but a fair wack had very strong political overtones. Naani Amma (as I was taught to call her) passed away late last year. This book is dedicated to her memory, and would never have been possible without her.

  This book is also dedicated to the memory of my late murshid (Sufi teacher), Professor Mahmud Esad Cosan. Professor Cosan encouraged Muslims to de-ghettoise themselves and settle in other cities and in regional towns. I knew nothing of his own politics in Turkey, which he never sought to impose on his non-Turkish students in any event. He died in February 2001 on the outskirts of Dubbo, soon after establishing a small Sufi hospice there.

  May God fill both of their graves with His Light and show them mercy on the day when we’ll all need God’s mercy in bucket loads.

  Contents

  Acknowledgements

  Prologue

  1 Cultural Islam and spicy pilgrimages

  2 Karachi culture shock

  3 Jewish brothers and Bollywood love

  4 Theology without scars

  5 Faiths, doubts and politics

  6 The Islamic industry and the Holy Trinity

  7 Discovering Islam and jihad

  8 The three non-Anglican musketeers

  9 Becoming and unbecoming a hijab messenger

  10 Fatwas and fanatical uncles

  11 Putting political Islam into practice … well, sort of

  12 Final flirtations with political Islam

  Epilogue

  Glossary

  Further reading

  Acknowledgements

  Believe it or not, the first person I’d like to thank is former US President George W. Bush for popularising the clumsy term ‘Islamo-fascist’. This delightfully hysterical label has joined an awesome array of spontaneous phrases we have come to know (and mostly love) as ‘Bushisms’. Indeed, these days the term has been adopted by an incredible array of whackos and fruitloops who clearly aren’t (in Bush’s words) among our ‘breast and brightest’ nor have more pressing concerns such as ‘putting food on their families’.

  I’d also like to thank Hassan Butt, a UK-based alleged ex-jihadi who became a darling of certain sections of the media after claiming he’d radicalised many British Muslim youth and channelled them into al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Butt also justified and vindicated that minority of prejudiced pundits who used national security as a tool with which to spread hatred against ordinary citizens who happen to be Muslim. Butt recently admitted to a UK court that he had lied all along, happily accepting hundreds of thousands of dollars from media outlets in return for imbecilic spin on how the problem isn’t with terrorists but rather with Islam itself. Until his admission before a UK court, Butt was writing his own exciting action-packed memoir which would have made my own memoir sound like a song from The Wiggles. I look forward to the publication of what will now probably be Butt’s debut novel.

  This book has been published thanks to the generosity of Allen & Unwin who decided to hand me the Iremonger Award for Public Affairs Writing at their 2007 Christmas party. They did this for reasons beyond my understanding and perhaps even theirs, and in this respect I’m grateful to whoever spiked the relevant decision makers’ drinks at the party. In the unlikely event I was actually meant to get this gong, I’d like to thank the award judges—my publisher Elizabeth Weiss, Sydney Morning Herald economics editor Ross Gittins and Kate Crawford. I’d also like to thank my fabulous editor Alexandra Nahlous for her editorial ruthlessness.

  Malcolm Knox spent some of his precious time and expertise during the early stages of this project. Hanifa Deen, a phenomenal Australian writer of South Asian Aussie Muslim heritage, kept pestering me to stop blogging and start writing a book. Apart from also pushing me to write this book, my mother and Bilal Cleland pestered me to get off my backside and shed some kilos so I’d more closely resemble the body on the front cover.

  I was fortunate to be surrounded by people who recognised both the benefits and detriments of various strains of Islamic thought, and who shared with me a passion for collecting and devouring just about any book with even the most tenuous relation with the faith. Most prominent among them was Mahmud Kurkcu, who has for some time led the Melbourne-based Young Muslims of Australia (YMA). Mahmud was and remains one of the pioneers in communicating mainstream Islam to young Australians.

  A number of people have helped and encouraged me along in my journey as something resembling a writer. Among them is my old school buddy, Don. Don and I are the closest thing to those two old men sitting up on the balcony of the Muppet Show, laughing at everyone on stage when we aren’t laughing at each other.

  A number of Australian imams and scholars have been influential in correcting and shaping my views over the years, some without even knowing it. Most needn’t be named, probably not wanting to be put in the spotlight, and I’m grateful to them for keeping Aussie Muslims out of more unnecessary spotlight. I’d like to make special mention of Dr Abdurrahman Asaroglu of the Centre for Excellence in Islamic Studies and Imam Muammer Gulmez.

  Special thanks also to Shahed Amanullah and the awesome team at AltMuslim.com.

  Also thanks to all those loyal friends and colleagues who contributed to my writing this book in ways too numerous to mention: Jose Borghino, David Drennan, Nurudeen Lemu, Giovanna Wakila Volpe, the entire Kassem clan, Dado Shakoor, Professor Anthony Johns, Randa Abdel Fattah, Dr Stephen Mutch, the Kearns family and Nazeem Hussein.

  I want to especially thank Shakira Hussein, her daughter Adalya Nash Hussein, and their family for their support. Last, but definitely not least, I want to thank my family—my parents (from whom I inherited my sense of humour), my nephews (who inherited my good looks), and my sisters and their husbands (from whom I doubt I’ll inherit anything).

  Prologue

  Before I reached my teens,
I never had much interest in exactly how or why I ended up carrying the label of ‘Muslim’. I just knew that I did. It never occurred to me that being Muslim made me any different to anyone else having my combination of skin colour, ethnic and cultural background, let alone any of the other kids I grew up with. Well, apart from the refusing to eat pork. And getting inebriated just by inhaling alcohol fumes, a skill I honed at university parties and political functions of the Young Liberals.

  Being Muslim wasn’t such a bad ‘difference’ … until September 11, 2001. That was when two planes hit the World Trade Center, a third plane hit the Pentagon and a fourth crashed onto a field in Pennsylvania as it headed for the White House. Ever since, ordinary Muslim citizens have been held personally responsible for the actions of a handful of madmen. It didn’t matter that Muslims were among the people who died on September 11. It didn’t matter that the perpetrators regard ordinary Muslims as just as ‘infidelic’ as their non-Muslim countrymen and women. It didn’t matter that, for years and in years to come, more Muslims would be killed by these terrorists than non-Muslims. We were blamed and hated and pilloried to intolerable degrees.

  Every ordinary person who ticked the ‘Muslim’ box on their census form felt it. So did many people who might ‘look’ Muslim. The first victim of a hate-crime after September 11 was an American Sikh man who was planting flowers in the garden of his family’s business. After the 2005 London bombings, many British Sikh men sporting beards and turbans started wearing badges that said: ‘Don’t freak, I’m a Sikh!’ Arab churches across the Western world were spray-painted with graffiti and even firebombed just as mosques were. Orthodox Jewish men in beards and women in headscarves were subjected to abuse just as were orthodox Muslim men and women.

  In this environment of hysteria, the Australian government released TV advertisements about terrorism, asking us to ‘be alert but not alarmed’. But politicians from the same government, together with their allies on talkback radio and in the media were creating an environment where we were all too alarmed to be alert. Irresponsible Muslim spokespeople and imams also did not help the situation.

  It seemed like all Muslims were suddenly on trial. I personally felt it. I may well believe in liberal democracy; I might have a track record of service to the broader community and even to a mainstream political party; I may be committed to Australia and never have held any other citizenship or nationality. But, because my names are ‘Irfan’ and ‘Yusuf’, anything I do will, naturally, be presumed to be some kind of deception or cover. I am part of some giant conspiracy to destroy the West, one of Osama bin Ladin’s henchmen. I am part of the ‘Muslim question’.

  The first time I heard the term ‘Muslim question’ was in December 2006 during a seminar at Parliament House, NSW, on ‘The Journalist and Islam’. There, a conservative opinion editor of a broadsheet newspaper talked about Australia’s need to ‘resolve its Muslim question’. He wasn’t very happy when I asked him what he proposed would be the ‘Final Solution’, and he certainly didn’t have an answer.

  But before you start making up your mind about me, let me tell you, this book is no ‘poor Muslim’ story. I simply refuse to be a victim, but I also refuse to be described as a ‘problem’ or a ‘question’ or a ‘challenge’. I also refuse to see cultural Muslims pretending to understand what I have gone through. I am part of the broad and varied Australian landscape, even though I once dabbled and experimented in an ideology that could have seen me having tea, or even carrying arms in solidarity, with others who didn’t grow out of that ideology, many of whom found themselves fighting on the same side as Osama bin Ladin.

  In 1985, I made an important decision. At age sixteen, I decided the time had come to join those prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice. I was confident my decision was the right one and would be blessed by at least some members of my extended family in Pakistan. True, if my parents found out they would lock me in my room and throw away the keys, but then, I didn’t want to tell them.

  I did, however, want to tell the imam at the first national Muslim youth camp I attended in Harrietville in country Victoria. Sheikh Fehmi el-Imam was a softly spoken religious scholar of Lebanese background who spoke flawless English and had lived in Australia for decades. Sheikh Fehmi had been camp imam at some fifteen previous youth camps and was accustomed to dealing with kids of my age.

  Confident of my resolution, I consulted with some friends who shared the same wish and we decided to approach Sheikh Fehmi as a group in private, away from the other camp participants. Of course, I did the talking.

  ‘Sheikh Fehmi, you know there is a jihad going on in Afghanistan. The mujahideen are fighting for liberation from the communists. We would like to join the mujahideen. What do you think? Can you help us?’

  The sheikh stared at us in silence. He looked somewhat perturbed by my question. I continued.

  ‘But Sheikh, this is jihad. If we die, we will go straight to paradise. We are fighting communists. We aren’t asking to do anything wrong.’

  After another moment of quiet contemplation, the sheikh sat us down and addressed us in his usual calm manner. He took out his notebook and read two sayings of the Prophet Muhammad called ahadith (plural of hadith) in Arabic.

  The first hadith was as follows. A young man approached the Prophet wanting permission to fight in the Muslim army to defend the Prophet’s city. The Prophet asked the boy two questions: Do you have elderly parents who need you to look after them? Do you have your parents’ permission? The boy replied that he had elderly parents who needed him. The Prophet then said: ‘Look after them. That will be your jihad.’

  Just as the sheikh finished this story, I interrupted him. ‘Sheikh, my mum reads that hadith to me all the time. She uses it as an excuse to stop me from getting involved in Muslim activities. If I listen to her, how will I be a good Muslim? Why should I miss out on paradise because of my mum?’

  The sheikh then became a little impatient.

  ‘So Irfan, you think that martyrs automatically go to jannah [paradise]? You think that by running away from your duties and dying on the battlefield, you will earn God’s pleasure? You don’t understand your religion.

  ‘The Prophet did not say that all martyrs go to jannah. If you die as a martyr, all your sins are forgiven. All your obligations are satisfied. All with one exception. Do you know what that is?’

  We shook our heads.

  ‘Debt. If you owe money to someone, you must pay it back. You can’t avoid paying your debts just by flying off to Afghanistan. And who do you owe a greater debt to than your parents?

  ‘The Prophet also taught us that the first man to be brought for judgment on the Last Day will be someone who died in jihad. God will remind the man of all the divine favours the man has been given. God will then ask the man what he has to offer God in return. The man will say: “God, I gave my life for you. I fought your enemies and died as a martyr so that your word could be proclaimed.” God will then say to the man: “You are lying. You only died so that people would glorify you after you were gone. You wanted people to sing your praises and write eulogies to your sacrifices. And they did. You’ve already received your reward, and I have no reward to offer you. Go to hell.”

  ‘This martyr will then be dragged by the face and thrown into hell. You see, boys? He was a martyr and he went to hell. Why? Because he had the wrong intentions. Even people prepared to give their lives can have wrong intentions and motives. They will be punished for this.’

  I was familiar with all the ahadith Sheikh Fehmi had cited, but had never thought of them in this manner.

  ‘But Sheikh, there are so many people dying in Afghanistan. Innocent kids. Women. Who will save them?’

  The sheikh responded in his calm way. ‘Irfan, they are being protected by their men folk, by the mujahideen and by Allah.’

  I still wasn’t persuaded by the theology. The sheikh then addressed the politics.

  ‘Irfan, do you think all the mujahideen are united
into one army?’

  ‘Of course they are, Sheikh. They are also getting weapons and support from outside.’

  ‘Yes, Irfan, they are getting support from the United States. But if you think all the mujahideen are united, you are mistaken. You remember my words. The mujahideen will win this jihad insh’Allah [God-willing]. But if they are not fighting for the right reasons, they will start fighting each other.’

  Sheikh Fehmi’s prediction became a reality. Within a few years, the Soviets withdrew and the major Afghan factions started fighting each other. Soon, the city of Kabul was locked into a brutal civil war, with neither side showing any mercy towards civilians. The mujahideen I so desperately wanted to join had turned into tribal thugs. The jihad I thought so worthwhile had turned into a war on innocent civilians. The sheikh was right. I was wrong. My youthful vigour could have led me to hell.

  It is not difficult to understand why I had reached the conclusion that jihad was for me. Powerful forces were responsible for creating powerful images which I adopted as truths. In other words, I was sucked in by conservative American news and propaganda.

  I remember watching episodes of 60 Minutes on TV showing images of the bravery and sacrifices of the mujahideen, of their being forced to buy expensive bullets and other small arms from Pakistani arms dealers, of Afghan refugees telling horrific stories of their children being blown to bits by landmines shaped as toys, of mujahideen leaders dressed in turbans and sporting beards being called to the White House and hailed as freedom fighters by the then US President Ronald Reagan.

  When the Soviet Union intervened in Afghanistan, I was in Year 5. And like most people of my age, I grew to hate the Soviets. Some years later, during my mid-teens, I attended ‘Afghan Jihad’ nights at the King Faisal Mosque in Surry Hills. These were held once a month and were addressed by representatives of both major Afghan factions. I presumed all these factions were united as one, just as their Australian representatives and the media had made out. Ironically, today the Hizb-i-Islami leader lives in Iran in exile. The Jamiat-i-Islami leads the current Western-backed Northern Alliance government and, by default, Afghanistan’s lucrative drug trade.