Once Were Radicals Read online

  I was actively encouraged to embrace this jihad in order to keep well away from another jihad led by Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini. I believed what I was fed by news outlets that the Afghan Muslim fighters were good while the Iranians fighting against Iraq were evil and were engaged in a futile war. It wasn’t until George Bush the elder declared Saddam Hussein to be ‘that evil dictator’ (his exact words) that I learned that all the Iranian propaganda about Iraq invading Iran and using chemical weapons was in fact true.

  As a young man growing up in a spiritual and cultural pendulum—swinging between being Indian, Pakistani, Muslim, Australian—I was confused. Political Islam, in the form of the Afghan jihad, provided some certainty and direction, even if it meant potentially cutting my life short.

  But Sheikh Fehmi was able to see through the façade of propaganda and emotion, and luckily for me and my friends, he steered us away from the idea.

  Sheikh Fehmi grew up in a Muslim family in Lebanon, a country whose culture and language had long hosted a large indigenous Muslim presence. Islam was as Lebanese as felafel and hommus. Sheikh Fehmi learned Islam not just from books but also from the general environment. He absorbed mainstream Islam from Lebanese culture just as his Maronite or Malekite or Orthodox neighbours had absorbed Christianity. I couldn’t question the orthodoxy of his arguments as he tried to discourage me from travelling to Afghanistan. Although I knew the ahadith he was quoting, at sixteen years old and outside a culture accustomed to Islam, I didn’t understand the wisdom behind them. I also didn’t understand the process of extracting rules and principles from religious sources.

  Instead, I was falling for a theology of jihad that had been written by CIA propagandists. That same theology was adopted by the likes of Osama bin Ladin, who really should be named Osama bin Reagan. That’s not to say the Afghan jihad (‘struggle for justice’) against the former Soviet Union was wrong or false or unworthy. It’s just that the reasons presented to young people like myself about joining the jihad had their own political agenda.

  This same propaganda was being promoted by anti-Soviet politicians and columnists in Australia, including by the man I always knew of as my local member, John Winston Howard.

  Young Muslims like me, brought up in culturally Muslim families and with little exposure to mainstream Islamic theology, could easily get sucked into heterodox fringe cults. Today, conservative columnists and politicians harp on about the dangers of Saudi-style Wahhabi Islam. I wonder where these conservatives were back in the mid-1980s when Wahhabi Islam was regarded as an excellent antidote to communism and Iranian-style revolutionary Shia Islam. Then again, it doesn’t surprise me that many Australian conservatives still maintain friendly relations with Saudi religious and political authorities. After all, old alliances are as hard to kill as old habits. And, of course, there is that minor issue of access to cheap oil.

  Not much has changed in our society: Muslim kids and converts continue to get sucked into fringe Islam; Western governments are still picking and choosing which fringe Muslim group they wish to deal with; Australian Islam remains largely an ethno-religious relic; mosques are still run along ethnic and cultural lines of little relevance to most young Muslims; and women are still barred from many mosques.

  Regardless of which religion or non-religion you are affiliated with, we all need a source of certainty. As a minority group, it’s hard enough for Muslim kids like me to always stand out in the crowd because of our skin colour and our names which no one seems to know how to pronounce (is it ‘Eefaan’ or ‘Urfaan’ or ‘Earphone’ or ‘iPhone’?) let alone having to swing between the cultural expectations of my parents and the cultural realities of Australian life. Islam provided me with that certainty. The problem was that I needed to learn Islam from somewhere.

  I couldn’t relate to most imams (apart from Sheikh Fehmi, but then he lived in faraway Melbourne), so I had to rely on books, newspapers, magazines and other sources. I read widely, struggling to understand the competing arguments and trying to find common ground somewhere, but reading is a lonely exercise.

  When I was in my late teens and early twenties, I got involved in Muslim organisations and became a community activist. It was here that I discovered another kind of Islam: the ethnic cultural Islam of mosques and institutions that were run like ethnic and tribal fiefdoms. I discovered nepotism, corruption and sleazy political deals with foreign governments.

  By 1991, I was burnt out. I left the Muslim organisational scene and focused on mainstream politics. I decided to take my thus far casual involvement in the Liberal Party more seriously.

  By this time, the war in the new Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina had broken out. It was a time of enormous disillusionment. I could see these innocent people—Muslims, Catholics and Orthodox Christians—committed to setting up a multi-ethnic and multi-religious state where power was shared between the three communities, yet they were being fought by forces of brutal medieval tribalism from the outside.

  I never saw Bosnia as a Muslim conflict. Rather, it was a conflict in which indigenous European Muslims played a leading role in defending a liberal democratic state. I also knew that most of the victims of this vicious war were culturally Muslims, even if they had lost all the religious and spiritual trappings of their faith.

  Still, I saw and heard the patronising manner in which the media referred to Bosnia’s ‘Muslim-led’ government, its ‘devoutly Muslim’ president Alija Izetbegovic, of its ‘mainly Muslim’ army. I also saw how the international arms embargo effectively worked in favour of Serbia which already had plenty of weapons to provide its cronies.

  I couldn’t help wondering whether the West in general and Europe in particular really had room for Muslims. The hypocrisy and inaction of Europe and the West in Bosnia has led to many in the Muslim world losing all faith and trust in the West. Even in Australia, when Muslims imagine a time when they might be persecuted, they refer to Bosnia. Here were these Muslims who drank, ate pork, intermarried with other faiths and had completely lost their own faith. Yet they were still being murdered just because they had some ancestral link to Islam. I told a non-Muslim friend at the time: ‘Seriously, if Europeans hate us even when we make compromises and try to be like them, why should we even try? We might as well be what we are.’

  Perhaps in this environment of tribal warfare, I was retreating into a kind of Muslim tribalism of my own. After Bosnia, I grew a beard. It was my act of defiance, of showing that I was prepared to stand with a culture that was being subjected to genocide. How ironic it is that beards are a religious symbol of both Jewish and Muslim men. Even more ironic was that few Bosnians, including their devout president, sported beards on their faces.

  For me, Bosnia was confirmation that with some people, Muslims can never do the right thing. And with the advent of September 11 and the more recent Bali and London bombings and their aftermath, I knew that I could no longer be silent.

  After the London bombings, ordinary Australians were quite naturally scared of the possibility of home-grown terrorism. Muslim religious elders, virtually all of them middle-aged migrant men, simply had no idea how to address these understandable fears. Instead, they gave conditional condemnations: ‘Yes, we’ll condemn Islamist terrorism if you support us in Palestine.’ As if some tradeoff was necessary.

  There have been plenty of Muslim voices in Australia and across the Western world. Australian novelist Randa Abdel Fattah and British comic Shazia Mirza are great examples of young Muslims emerging and talking about their experiences. I don’t agree with everything they say, but I’d rather engage with them than with middle-aged leaders and imams who patronise me and refuse to accept their own limited communication skills.

  What follows is therefore just one Muslim voice. I don’t pretend to speak for anyone except myself, nor do I claim to be an expert on Islam. I have no doubts that some will read this with a view to finding words with which to hang me as a former or current security risk or extremist. They will hold up the
book and issue a fatwa against me declaring that I am not a ‘moderate’ enough Muslim. Some will even claim I am an apologist for the process which recruits for terrorist groups. That I am doing al-Qaeda’s work.

  Let me get this out of the way: I’ve never met Osama bin Ladin (are you relieved now?), but I have read books about him written by people who have spent extended periods of time with him and his lieutenants (got you worried again?). I understand that al-Qaeda and similar groups recruit young Muslims by convincing them that their host communities will never accept them, that their governments are opposed to Islam and that they will never live as equals in Western liberal democratic states.

  Bin Ladin and his ilk try to convince me to join their false jihad by telling me that the powers that be in Australia hate me. Now I ask readers to honestly ask themselves: Who is doing bin Ladin’s work? Is it people like me who want others to know why some kids get caught up in the false jihads, or is it writers and columnists and editors and shock jocks and politicians whose words and articles and statements confirm bin Ladin’s claims?

  I have tried to make this book as accessible as possible, and have deliberately employed simple language. I have written about the books I read (as well as the videos I viewed, the places I visited and the people I spent time with) over my long journey inside Islam, a journey that took me to Pakistan, the United States, various Muslim youth camps and university libraries. No doubt readers more familiar with authors of these books may challenge my conclusions as simplistic or even inaccurate. However, what I am describing isn’t so much the books and authors themselves but more the impression they left me with at that time. This is an exploration of youthful reflections, not a work of scholarship.

  The bulk of material in this book is original. Only in a few places have I drawn upon material contained in articles I have written elsewhere. Furthermore, all events described in this book took place well before the turn of the twenty-first century. By the time the first jets hit the World Trade Center on September 11, I was well over the kinds of political Islamist movement politics that is often blamed for such attacks.

  In the so-called ‘War on Terror’, the claim that any and all forms of political Islam are necessarily dangerous has become commonplace. There is even the belief that political Islam is a monolith. As I show in this book, nothing could be further from the truth. Many political Islamist groups operate within the mainstream democratic processes of their countries. Many of yesterday’s political Islamists are today’s mainstream democratic conservatives. The people who were once religious politicians opposed to the Turkish constitution are now mainstream democrats protecting liberty from the encroachment of allegedly secular generals and seeking Turkey’s entry into the European Union. These so-called ‘Islamists’ speak of Turkey’s Islamic heritage in the same manner as many conservative politicians in Western countries speak of their nations’ Christian (or in a rare moment of ecumenism, Judeo-Christian) heritage.

  The fact is that people’s politics are often informed by their religious faith and values. Not all forms of political Christianity represent an attack on our democratic freedoms. Not all Christian politicians want to start illegal wars in other people’s countries or limit the availability of abortion to women who need it. Not all Christian politicians insist true Christianity involves voting for right-wing parties. Not all Christian politicians view their nation’s foreign policy as a prelude to Divine genocide and Armageddon. Not all Christian politicians wish to play sectarian wedge politics and make non-Christians feel uncomfortable. There is a huge difference between Christian politicians Kevin Rudd and Peter Costello, and between Christian politicotheologians Fred Nile and Tim Costello.

  Similarly, when the politics of Muslims is informed by their faith, it doesn’t always lead to jets flying into buildings or bombs going off in nightclubs. One of my favourite Muslim religious scholars is a man who spent much of his youth with an Indian Muslim missionary movement called the Tabligh Jamaat (TJ). His TJ involvement led him to study in Pakistan and complete the long and difficult course before he was given the scholarly title of ‘Maulana’ (religious scholar and jurist). Yet throughout much of this time, this scholar was also active in the struggle against apartheid in his home country of South Africa. His Islamic beliefs led him to campaign for the rights of Christians in Pakistan. His Islamic values led him to be appointed by President Nelson Mandela as South Africa’s first post-apartheid gender equity commissioner. Those who claim that political Islam leads to suicidal plane crashes should show us where such terror can be found in the work of someone like Maulana Farid Esack. There is no comparison between Turkey’s President Recep Erdogan and Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad. Nor can one compare Swiss theologian Dr Tariq Ramadan and Indonesia’s Jemaah Islamiyah leader Abu Bakar Bashir.

  Indeed, one may ask exactly where does religious faith end, and political or economic faith begin? Is there a clear distinction between different kinds of belief? And why are followers of one religion allowed to ask such questions but not followers of another?

  We all have layers of identity. Our religious faith (for those of us who have one) isn’t all that defines us, and our religions affect us in different ways. In this day and age, Muslims come in all colours and sizes and viewpoints and opinions. Some are more observant than others, and some are observant in different ways.

  Yet hysteria about Muslims has become so extreme that allegedly conservative analysts made an issue about the religion of the Democratic candidate in the 2008 US presidential elections. They claimed that Barack Obama had to be Muslim because his middle name was ‘Hussein’ and because his father belonged to a Kenyan tribe who were known to be Muslim. The fact that a man with a name like Hussein could well be Christian (or in the case of a rabbi who was a contemporary of the Prophet Muhammad, even Jewish) was irrelevant.

  Hatred of Islam has become so intense that being labelled Muslim is a slur, a political liability. Newspapers are openly printing opinion articles predicting Europe will become Eurabia, overrun by Muslims out-breeding Christians. There is talk of taqiyya, a doctrine which supposedly allows Muslims to lie about their faith just as Jews were once accused of praying to God to relieve them of their commercial contracts. Yesterday’s conspiracies about Jewish bankers have been replaced by today’s conspiracy theories about Muslim financiers, Muslim ‘clerics’, Muslim terrorists, Islamists, radical Islamists, Islamo-fascists, etc. At least one media mogul has made statements to the effect that Muslims cannot be trusted as they always put their religion before patriotism. This kind of rhetoric is also used by politicians and in election campaigns.

  The result is that the most nominal Muslims are now beginning to feel uneasy. They are suddenly expected to understand all the nuances of their faith and any politics remotely associated with it. Muslims who have never been to Indonesia are suddenly expected to explain the motives of the Bali bombers. Anyone deemed Muslim is now pigeonholed in a manner that would be considered absurd (if not racist or bigoted) if applied to other groups.

  This book does not in any way suggest that my own experiences and ideological flirtations are reflective of any other Australian or Western Muslim. Obviously, not every Muslim experience is the same. But I hope this book might be reflective of all of us.

  Before this book went to print, I showed a draft to one of my older sisters. She could hardly believe some of the phases in my life I had written about. She is half a generation older than me, and left our home for work and marriage when I was still in my mid-teens. Although she did not go through the same phases of religious and political explor ation that I did, she could relate to the general experience of searching for one’s identity when growing up. This search afflicts all of us, regardless of whether we feel part of a majority or a minority. Perhaps adolescence and early adulthood could be described as the feeling that one belongs to a minority of one, and the ultimate goal is to discover exactly who that one is.

  This book is the story of my search
for who I was. I had to decide how I would balance and manifest the sometimes competing layers of culture and religion. Hopefully other readers can recognise aspects of their own journey in this work.

  1

  Cultural Islam and spicy pilgrimages

  I was five months old when we landed in Sydney. Obviously I can’t recall the landing or the first week we spent staying in a motel before moving to a rental house in Ryde and eventually to our own house in East Ryde, but I do have very early memories of how different we were to everyone around us.

  We looked different. My skin was darker than any other kid’s on our street. Mum wore looser and stranger clothes than other women. She never wore dresses or skirts like they did. Dad wore trendy Western clothes and funky sunglasses all the time, and he drove a rather sporty-looking and loud car he called an ‘MGB’ that had a large leather and plastic demountable roof we helped him assemble when it rained.

  Virtually all our family friends were different to most other Australians in the same way we were different. Most of our family friends were from the northern end of the Indian subcontinent—Hindus, Sikhs, Muslims, Parsees (descendants of ancient Iranian Zoroastrians), Catholics, Jews and even a Pakistani Anglican priest. My parents and their friends spoke the same language, listened to the same music (lots of sitar), watched the same lengthy movies with predictable story lines and ate the same spicy food.

  We often celebrated each other’s religious festivals. For our parents, religious differences mattered little; the common language and culture were far more important.