EVENT: Film launch ....

Come along and support the students and staff of both these fine state schools.

REFLECTION: Bhangra Pluralism

Tonight was my nephew’s engagement party. My nephew was born at Royal North Shore Hospital in Sydney some two decades ago. I was there in the waiting area when he arrived into the world. I was also given the task of whispering the adhaan (call to ritual Islamic worship) in his ear.

Now, after all these years, I see him doing the traditional bhangra dance with his three mates – one Jewish, one Hindu and one Sikh. And masha-Allah (by God’s will), he is sensible enough to know that having these friends in no way compromises the adhaan his uncle whispered into his ear at a time he would no longer remember.

No doubt my nephew would have shared his best friend’s bar mitzvah. It’s likely that he’ll be best man when his friend ties the knot at his home or their synagogue. And when my nephew ties his knot, his Jewish best mate will be his best man.

One day, his uncle will also tie the knot. The role of my best man is already reserved for my best mate from school. The fact that he is an Anglican and a chorister has little bearing on the matter. Just as I was best man at his wedding in the Cathedral when he was marrying his Japanese wife, who was then still Buddhist.

Allah sent us to this world to live in peace and to spread peace. Pluralism is perhaps the highest and most sublime collective human expression of peace. It isn’t enough for us to tolerate those different to us. We must understand them, accept them as they are and befriend them.

The wonderful thing about Australia is that it allows us the freedom to develop such friendships. No doubt Jews and Muslims in Hebron would be shocked to learn that a young Muslim man who prays five times a day could have a young Jewish man as his oldest and best friend.

But why should this surprise anyone? The Prophet Muhammad married a woman who was a Jewish family. Indeed, she was a Jewish princess named Safiyya. Why should it surprise us that a Sikh and a Hindu are also part of this circle of friendship? One Indian Muslim gentleman told me today that Muslims are breathing much more easily in India. I asked him why. He said that the political winds had changed now that India had a Sikh Prime Minister. We also spoke of Mohandas “Mahatma” Gandhi, a practising Hindu some of whose closest friends and benefactors were Muslims.

So many of our Muslim brothers and sisters across the world live in virtual mono-cultural and mono-confessional societies where ethnic and religious differences are forcibly ironed out or kept hidden. Allah has saved us living in countries like Australia, New Zealand, United States etc from such a misfortune.

In Australia, we are enjoying the experiences of medieval Andalusia, but our convivencia has been established by the Australian constitution and protected by the rule of law and liberal democracy.

May God preserve our convivencia for generations to come. God bless Australia.

© Irfan Yusuf 2007

COMMENT: On Muslim professionals and professional Muslims

There are two kinds of Muslim people in Australia. You have Muslim professionals. Then you have professional Muslims.

The former are too busy getting on with their work and/or business and/or study and/or family commitments to worry about the management of religious institutions. They make up the overwhelming majority of the 300,000-odd Australians who tick the “Muslim” box on their census forms. Many visit the mosque once or twice a year, and quite a few regard religion as being only a secondary source of their identity.

Then you have the latter who derive their legitimacy from being seen as leaders of organisations, from being photographed with politicians and from holding titles and positions. They form a tiny minority, but insist on always claiming to speak on behalf of the majority which their over-active imagination labels “the Muslim community”.

Politicians know that these people cannot deliver any votes or influence. Yet many politicians insist on being seen to consult with them. And when a politician refuses, these people go rushing to whichever media outlet that will listen and demand to be heard.

I cannot help but think that calls for reinstatement of the “Muslim Community Reference Group” (as reported by my old buddy Sheik Dicky Kerbaj in The Australian recently) are yet another example of the professional Muslims seeking the legitimacy which they know they will never get from those they claim to represent.

He cites Azizah Abdel Halim, a retired school teacher and one of the few women hand-picked by former PM Howard to sit on his Reference Group. Sadly, poor Richard still cannot get over the fact that Muslims are not Catholics and simply don’t have priests or nuns. Hence he refers to Mrs Abdel Halim as “Sister Abdel Halim”. Yes, she wears a piece of cloth on her head, but this sister certainly doesn’t practise celibacy.

Kevin Rudd doesn’t need some committee of professional Muslims advising him whilst undermining each other. I’d like to think Kevin Rudd has more respect for his Muslim constituents than hand-picking a group of middle aged blokes with poor English skills to represent religious congregations the majority of whose members were born here, are overwhelmingly young and educated. And many of whom are not overly religious.

Until the management of mosques becomes more democratic, until women and young people are encouraged to participate and until we see less Bangladeshi and Pakistani and Lebanese etc mosques and more Australian mosques, I think the current lot of professional Muslims should be ignored by the government as much as they are by the people they claim to represent.

© Irfan Yusuf 2008

COMMENT: Ordinary Australians, extraordinary stories ...

One of the great things about Melbourne is its newspaper, The Age. And this Australia Day edition is no exception. Under the heading “Looking at the bigger picture”, a number of Age writers profile ordinary Australians with extraordinary stories.

They include a farmer, an AFL player, an activist for seniors and a surf lifesaver. But also rating a mention is my good pal Constable Maha Sukkar, whose name apparently means “very sweet” in Indonesian. I doubt some of those she arrests would agree.

Also profiled are a probationary constable Nadia Hammoud, youth worker Nadia Mohamed and SIEV-X survivor Faris Shohani.

About Faris, The Age writes ...

Mr Shohani’s life as a non-citizen began when, at the age of 13, his family was deported to Iran from Iraq. He is a survivor of the SIEV-X tragedy of October 2001, when 354 asylum seekers perished when their overcrowded boat sank en route to Australia. Among those who drowned were his wife, Leyla, and daughter, Zahra.

Other members of his family, including his mother, Fadilha, and son, Ali, had been on another boat and were in the Woomera detention centre when they were told of the tragedy.

While most of the 45 survivors were swiftly offered permanent protection in other countries, those such as Shohani with relatives in Australia had to wait almost nine months in Jakarta before he was reunited with his mother and son and afforded just temporary protection.

When The Age first met him in October 2002, his depression was palpable. Compounding the grief, and the conviction that the truth about the tragedy had not been told, was his temporary status.

"I have no hope, no future," he said. "I belong nowhere."

Well now, Mr Shohani, you belong to the big family of Australians. We’re sorry you had to go through that kind of suffering to reach this far And we as a nation are very fortunate to have you among us.

Words © 2008 Irfan Yusuf

REFLECTION: Blogging as charity?

It’s a well-worn cliché - you don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone. But it’s also true that, just as we often underrate what we have, we also underrate what we give. What am I talking about?

I’ll try to say this without sounding like an arrogant pompous shite. Some weeks back, I was visiting an inland town in New South Wales. I decided to join a small congregation of students, farmers and workers performing their Friday prayer.

After the prayer, a young man approached me.

Aren’t you Irfan? I follow your blog alot. I really enjoy what you have to say. I hope you write more frequently like you used to.

Or something like that. The young man was from a nearby town famous for its good food, its multiculturalism and for having one of the few NSW State MP’s from the Coalition worth voting for.

At first I thought the young man was just trying to be polite. But in looking at his words in that manner, maybe I was insulting him and myself.

So how should I view what he had to say? I guess it reminded me of how I felt about another blog which had suffered a hiatus recently.

Australobe is probably my favourite Australian-based group blog. Recently when its moderator announced a temporary hiatus, I realised just how important that blog was to me. I realised I visited it at least 4 times a week, which is alot for me as I don’t spend much time reading blogs.

So the Australobe gang were giving to me. They were providing me with a means of making sense of events. They probably didn’t realise how big a hole in my part of the blogosphere their absence left. And I didn’t perhaps appreciate that my own (frequently nutty and imbecilic) spin on things was giving voice (or at least food for thought) for others. Including people I had never met. Or might only meet by accident if I end up performing Friday congregational prayers in some unfamiliar place.

Unless I recognise that blogging isn’t just a past time or hobby but rather an act of charity, I’ll just end up only blogging occasionally. The kind words of the young man have given me incentive to keep blogging. And I hope the Australobe dudes (and dudettes?) will keep sharing their profound thoughts with me.

Words © 2008 Irfan Yusuf

COMMENT: Lessons from the Madrid bombing ...

Last night, SBSTV’s Cutting Edge documentary series featured the story of the two prime members of the terror cell responsible for the Madrid bombings of 11 March 2004.

Jamal was a drug dealer and hit man who escaped Morocco after being accused of murder by stabbing. He entered Spain using a false name and soon became involved in drug dealing and violent crime. He entered into a relationship with another drug user, a Spanish woman of nominally Catholic background. He went to prison and soon became addicted to heroin. His girlfriend meanwhile gave birth to their (illegitimate) child.

Sarhane was a middle class Tunisian who won a scholarship to study in Spain. His family in Tunis weren’t terribly religious, and Sarhane had little exposure to Islamic teaching. In Spain, Sarhane began to frequent the M30 mosque in Madrid. The imam (resident religious jurist) was Jordanian. Sarhane came under the influence of self-taught radicals who attacked the imam for refusing to sanction their violent paranoid heterodoxy that regarded anyone (Muslim or otherwise) who disagreed with them as infidels and legitimate targets.

Somehow Sarhane met with Jamal. It was also a meeting of an extreme fringe politicised Islam (free of the strictures of classical juristic authority and Sufi spiritual orthodoxy) with a violent underworld. The combination was toxic. Over 190 people died in the process.

Some days later, a package containing a video cassette was left near the M30 mosque entrance. It featured 3 men with heads covered with black cloth sacks claiming responsibility for the Madrid bombings on behalf of a group calling itself al-Qaeda in Europe (though the trial judges found no direct link between the cell and al-Qaeda). The men also had a message for the mosque parishioners: Anyone who refused to join this wacky pseudo-jihad was an infidel who could also be legitimately killed.

Could Sarhane’s tiny cell of outcasts from the M30 mosque have carried out this attack without the help of Jamal and his underworld thugs (including a fair few gangsters with no relation to any religion)? Who knows? What we do know from this is that al-Qaeda style ideology has only a tenuous relation with any religious orthodoxy.

Little wonder al-Qaeda and its fellow travellers are happy to shed blood even in mosques and shrines and even on the holiest Islamic religious days. And even threaten entire nations.

But it isn’t enough just to recognise all this. Imams and religious leaders must ensure their mosques don’t become havens for jihadist heterodoxy. And that those embracing or returning to the faith aren’t misled by the rhetoric of hate-mongers.

© Irfan Yusuf 2008


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QUOTE: In fighting terror, we must stop focussing on Islam ...

London experienced the new terrorism on 7 July 2005 when four bombs were detonated around the city. In the debate and discussion that followed I noticed that there was too much focus on Islam as a religion and Muslims as a community, as if each deserved examination as a likely pathology.

... what caused the terrorism was not Islam as a religion or even the lifestyle and culture of Muslims in Britain but an ideology, Global Islamism, whose nature had to be grasped if we were to fight terrorism.

... the ideology bin Ladin has fashioned, Global Islamism, remains a powerful force that will outlive him. Al-Qaeda is a threat not because it has training camps, finance and bombs, but because it is a brand of ideology which, like a virus, can spread globally ... [I]n fighting terrorism, we need to grasp the nature of the ideology, which is easy to spread and difficult to counter.

Meghnad Desai, Rethinking Islamism: The Ideology of the New Terror (2007) IB Tauris, London; Preface.

COMMENT: Sense and nonsense on Fethllah Gulen and the Australian Catholic University ...

Well the gloves really have been taken off in the battle between the radical fringe obsessed with finding civilisational conflict everywhere on the one hand, and the rest of the universe on the other.

It all started with an article appearing in Quadrant, authored by one Father Paul Stenhouse. Poor Mr Stenhouse was frothing at the pen at the decision by the Australian Catholic University to accept money from some allegedly secretive radical jihadist from Turkey.

And who is this nasty long-bearded beedy-eyed terror-loving mullah? It is none other then ... wait for it ... and try not to laugh too hard when his identity is revealed ... Muhammad Fethullah Gulen!

Yep, this chap who has been lambasted by Turkish Islamists for refusing to endorse Islamist parties, and who has even allegedly told his female followers to remove their hijabs to get a university education is being accused by Fr Stenhouse of being linked to his worst critics.

I'm in the process of completing the second part of a critique for the ABC's Unleashed opinion and commentary portal. The first part can be found here.

The issue has also ben picked up by The Australian here. Professor Greg Barton of Monash Unversity makes these sensible observations reported by The Oz as follows ...

But another scholar of Islam, Monash University professor Greg Barton, who has also made a special study of Gulen, has dismissed Father Stenhouse's objections.

Dismissing the article as poorly written and "not particularly well-argued", Professor Barton said the Gulen movement was marked by the commitment of its members to work hard, live modestly and to serve others, which often meant donating money to worthy causes, such as education and interfaith initiatives.

"Father Stenhouse conflates this quiescent Sufism with some of the rare examples of Sufi militantism," Professor Barton said. "For the most part, Sufis are accommodationists rather than confrontational."

"(The Gulen movement) is the antithesis of Islamist movements."

Later, in the letters section of the Higher Education section, one Ban Tzur manufactures the claim that the Muslim Brotherhood was

... an originally Egyptian Sufi movement responsible for the assassination of Anwar Sadat for making peace with Israel and the central inspiration for the Palestinian Hamas terrorists, for Algerian extremists, and for much else wrong with the Arab world.

It is true that the founder of the Ikhwan did attend sufi circles early in life, even writing a book of Sufi prayers (or wird). It is also true that the Ikhwan underwent a split, with some members going even further toward political extremism than even Syed Qutb.

What evidence does Tzur have that the Ikhwani Sufis were behind the assassination of former Egyptian President Anwar el-Sadat? To be fair, Tzur would hardly have a chance to present his evidence in a letter to the editor. Perhaps he can present his evidence in this forum.

One researcher from Georgetown University (a private Catholic University in Washington DC) had this to say ...

I HAVE had several years of close association with members of the Fethullah Gulen movement, which is associated not only with the new chair at the Australian Catholic University but with many initiatives across the world promoting education and inter-religious understanding. This is no Trojan horse, as Paul Stenhouse has insisted on calling it. Indeed he might be interested to know that the movement has received a lot of criticism from Muslims who fear that it is a Christian Trojan horse. Wags in Turkey like to joke that the cardinal named in secret in 2003 by pope John Paul II was Fethullah Gulen.

A charge of naivety is the weapon of choice used against those in either religion who refuse to resign themselves to the nightmarish vision of an endless clash of civilisations but who are game enough to try something new. The ACU and the Australian Intercultural Society are to be praised rather than pilloried for this small but courageous opening.

There's no doubt that the intellectual and educational reform movement led by Fethullah Hoca has been criticised by many Muslims as being too accommodatory to Turkish secular nationalism. That regular writers for Quadrant have found cause to attack even such a harmless group is further evidence of just how nutty and tunnel-visioned the far-Right have becomde.

© Irfan Yusuf 2008