COMMENT: Hirsi Magaan and the loopy bloggers ...

I have a google alert on the name "Ayaan Hirsi Ali". I'm interested to find out what kind of publicity can be gained by abandoning Islam and adopting far-Right pseudo-liberal politics. Each day, I receive at least 3 places where Hirsi Magaan (her real name) is referred to. Mostly these mentions are in far-Right blogs where she is promoted as some poor suffering brave woman forced to seek sanctuary and faced with the burden of counting so much cash from her best-selling autobiography.

Yep, it's a tough job but someone has to do it.

One such blog mention sent to me today is at this blog. I almost vomited when I read the references to bravery. Seriously, what planet are these loopy bloggers living on? I couldn't help but leave this response ...

There is nothing brave about people like Ibn Warraq and Ayaan Hirsi Magaan (Hirsi Ali is the false name she used to defraud Dutch immigration authorities).

The fact is that Ms Hirsi Magaan travels freely around the world, with little or no threat from anyone.

I myself interviewed Ms Hirsi Magaan when she was in Sydney for the Sydney Writers' Festival. I sat within 30 cm of her, and no guards were present.

However, ultra-Right cultural warriors determined to generate war with anyone not as culturally chauvinistic as them will always paint the Hirsi Magaans as brave.

There are Muslims working within Muslim communities seeking genuine reform.

They risk their lives trying to work within the communities. They don't take the easy (and lucrative) option of just giving up on their faith and communities and seeking (often by dishonest means) "refuge" in Western countries.

I myself have received death threats because of stands I have taken. What do I do? Do I go crying to Daniel Pipes begging him to write a column about my bravery? Do I seek refuge in the EU under a false name? Or do I quietly struggle on?

Real struggle is carried on without behaving like a drama queen in a neo-Conservative pantomine. But I doubt readers of this and other far-Right blogs will appreciate that.

Words © 2008 Irfan Yusuf


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MEDIA: Did Dicky misrepresent Laurie Ferguson?

In the Crikey daily alert for 11 March 2008, ANU researcher Shakira Hussein suggests that my old buddy Dicky Kerbaj from The Australian may have been engaging in some poetic (or should that be journalistic?) license in relation to comments made by Minister for Multicultural Affairs (and Federal Member for Reid, perhaps the most multicultural federal electorate in the country) Laurie Ferguson.

I'd have to say I never suspected Dicky would be putting words and policies into Laurie's mouth. Further, Dicky's report (that any future Muslim Reference Group advising the Federal Government would focus less on male middle aged migrant religious leaders) was certainly a breath of fresh air compared to the coposition of John Howard's Reference Group.

Yet Ms Hussein actually appears to have spoken to Mr Ferguson on the issue.

This morning, the paper [as in The Australian] reports that the federal government is considering appointments to a new Muslim advisory board. The Muslim Community Reference Group established under the previous government was dominated by conservative religious leaders. It became a lightning rod for internal Muslim community conflicts and recriminations, and was eventually discontinued. The Australian reported that Ferguson is determined that any new government appointed body should represent a wider cross-section of Muslims, and include secular as well as religious figures.

But The Oz may have exaggerated the government's intentions a little with the headline "Rudd's quest for true blue Muslims." In an interview with Crikey this morning, Ferguson hosed down talk of a re-established reference group, emphasising that any such plans were at a very early stage. While the government is "mindful of the need for dialogue" with Muslim communities, it was impossible to say what shape that dialogue might take.

I sure hope that this government spends more time listening to ordinary Aussie Muslims, many if not most of whom aren't terribly observant. I hope they abandon the previous government's approach of talking about and at Muslims instead of talking to them.

© Irfan Yusuf 2008


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COMMENT: Four Corners episode "On Dangerous Ground" ...

Around 300,000 Australians tick the “Muslim” box on their census forms. They don’t have to tick the box. In fact, they don’t have to tick any religion box.

But the public image of these people is determined largely by the statements, actions and responses of (and reports about) the more religiously observant among them. Why?

Laurie Ferguson, Parliamentary Secretary for Multicultural Affairs, had some sound answers which my old pal Dicky Kerbaj has reported in front page story in the 11 March edition of The Australian:

Parliamentary Secretary for Multicultural Affairs Laurie Ferguson told The Australian yesterday… religious leaders were not representative of the mainstream Muslim community …

“A lot of it is about symbolism; it's about who gets promoted and who gets identified and who gets an option to be seen by Australian society.

“Australia has produced (Muslim) academics, business types, sporting types and it's often not celebrated enough."

Mr Ferguson said the idea that all Muslims were religious was a "misconception" he wanted debunked.

Well hurrah for Mr Ferguson! I know few people (including imams) more qualified to speak about the variety within Muslim communities than an MP with more Muslims and a greater ethnic and linguistic mix of them in his electorate than any other Federal Member of the House of Representatives.

Sadly, Monday’s episode of Four Corners largely repeated the tired old stereotypes and interviewed the usual suspects. The only young Muslims we heard from were habibs with omogaud accents and long beards together with their young macho students.

(And girls wearing Lebanese-style head scarves. Though they couldn’t get a single word in.)

By the end of the show, a tourist watching in their hotel room could be forgiven for believing our nation was just one huge battleground between redneck skips and alienated Arab/Lebanese Muslims. The vast majority of (non-redneck) Anglo-Europeans and (non-alienated Aussie-born) Muslims (many of whom are also Anglo-Europeans) were left out of the “Dangerous Ground” picture.

So how do the 40% of Aussie Muslims born in Australia and having ancestry from over 60 different countries actually feel about foreign policy, youth alienation, national security and other issues about which they are supposed to be obsessed with? The simple answer is: I wouldn’t have the faintest.

And I doubt anyone else does. Because no one, in particular no religious body claiming to represent Aussie Muslims, has bothered to ask these forgotten Muslims what they actually think.

One important message from the Four Corners episode was that the most effective weapons in fighting terrorism are communities. But how can you engage communities until you actually know who they are and what they are thinking? Or do we just rely on the kinds of middle-aged male religious leaders that our former PM placed on his Muslim Community Reference Group? Or self-serving young “leaders” of one ethnicity playing the same “gate keeper” games as their elders?

UPDATE 1: The Austrolabe blog's insightly comments on the story can be found here.

Words © 2008 Irfan Yusuf


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CRIKEY: Dr Ramadan and slur by association

Some Crikey writers have speculated about a change in government possibly leading to our national broadsheet toning down some of its far-Right cultural warrior ways. But if the journalistic lynching of Swiss-born philosopher and author Dr Tariq Ramadan in The Australian is anything to go by, monocultural hawks at the paper aren’t giving up without a fight.

Leading the sectarian attack against Dr Ramadan over the weekend was new Opinion Editor of The Oz Rebecca Weisser. She makes a huge issue of the fact that Dr Ramadan happens to be the grandson of the late Hasan al-Banna, the founder of an Egyptian organisation called al-Ikhwan al-Muslimeen (literally “Muslim Brotherhood”).

Yes, and? Is Weisser alleging that Dr Ramadan agrees with everything his grandfather’s movement stood for? Using the same reasoning, would Ms Weisser also allege that Senator Eric Abetz is a neo-Nazi? After all, Senator Abetz’s great uncle played a senior role in a rather nasty political movement that held sway over much of Europe during the first half of the 20th century.
Abetz rightly refers to those who play the game of “slur … by association with such a distant relative” as being completely unfair and un-Australian. It would be a shame if an editor of a newspaper calling itself The Australian would engage in such un-Australian conduct.

It’s hardly surprising Weisser provides space on her page to tabloid columnist Melanie Phillips. Some readers might recall Phillips’ visit to Australia some 12 months back to promote her book Londonistan, which makes the extraordinary claim that political Islamism is the dominant strain in contemporary Muslim societies. I’d love to see her make that claim in Pakistan, where Islamist parties suffered near-annihilation in recent elections.

Phillips’ diatribe against Dr Ramadan includes the extraordinary claim that he supports the implementation of sharia (Islamic sacred law) as the law of the land in all (including Western) countries. She obviously hasn’t read Ramadan’s call for draconian criminal punishments often associated with sharia to be the subject of an indefinite moratorium where they exist in Muslim-majority states. She also doesn’t refer to Ramadan’s criticism of the recent sharia speech by the Archbishop of Canterbury.

Ramadan is attending a 3-day conference in Brisbane starting today. Prior to his arrival in Australia, Dr Ramadan visited New Zealand where his tour was supported by the Ministry for Foreign Affairs & Trade. None of the Kiwi papers made a fuss about the visit.

First published in the Crikey daily alert on Monday 3 March 2008.

© Irfan Yusuf 2008


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COMMENT: Obama the Antichrist?

Writing in the New York Times on 9 March 2008 under the heading "Obama and the Bigots", columnist Nicholas Kristof mentions a new kind of bigotry entering the US Presidential race.

He notes that normally gender is a bigger factor than skin colour with American bigots. However, a new factor is trumping them all - religion. Or in Barack Obama's case, deemed religion.

The whispering campaigns allege that Mr. Obama is a secret Muslim planning to impose Islamic law on the country. Incredibly, he is even accused — in earnest! — of being the Antichrist.

Proponents of this theory offer detailed theological explanations for why he is the Antichrist, and the proof is that he claims to be Christian — after all, the Antichrist would say that, wouldn’t he? The rumors circulate enough that Glenn Beck of CNN asked the Rev. John Hagee, a conservative evangelical, what the odds are that Mr. Obama is the Antichrist.

These charges are fanatical, America’s own equivalent of the vicious accusations about Jews that circulate in some Muslim countries. They are less a swipe at one candidate than a calumny against an entire religion. They underscore that for many bigoted Americans in the 21st century, calling someone a Muslim is still a slur.

Wierd. On a mainstream media outlet like CNN, a talkshow host actually poses a question about the odds that a presidential candidate might be the antichrist. Have Americans lost their collective senses?

Believe it or not, Obama isn't the first candidate to have his ancestry (actual and alleged) used against him. Kristof mentions how ...

... the Federalists charged that Thomas Jefferson was “the son of a half-breed Indian squaw, sired by a Virginia mulatto father.”

But so what is this was Jefferson's ancestry? And who cares about what Obama's ancestry is?

I guess it's best to let Kristof speak for himself ...

... with countless people today spreading scurrilous rumors that Mr. Obama is a Muslim, the most appropriate response is a denial followed by: And so what if he were?

A 2007 Gallup poll found that 94 percent of Americans said they would vote for a black candidate for president and 88 percent for a woman. In contrast, a Los Angeles Times poll in 2006 found that only 34 percent of respondents said they could vote for a Muslim for president.

Even if a prejudice is directed to a matter of choice, like religion or long hair, it’s still prejudice. It’s possible to believe that Catholics have every right to be president while opposing a particular Catholic candidate who would ban contraception; likewise, it’s possible to believe that Muslims have every right to hold office without necessarily embracing the candidacy of particular Muslims
who advocate enveloping all women in burkas.

To his credit, Mr. Obama has spoken respectfully of Islam (he told me last year, on the record, that the Muslim call to prayer is “one of the prettiest sounds on earth at sunset”). If he were to go further — “and so what if I were Muslim?” — many Americans would see that as confirmation that he is a Sunni terrorist agent of Al Qaeda who is part of a 9/11 backup plan: If you can’t reach the White House with a hijacked plane, then storm the Oval Office through the ballot box.

This is a case where Hillary Rodham Clinton and John McCain should take the initiative and denounce the fear-mongering about Mr. Obama as hate speech. The wink-wink references to “Barack Hussein Obama” and lies about his going to a madrassa are the religious equivalent of racial slurs, and Mr. McCain and Mrs. Clinton should denounce them in the strongest terms. This is their chance to show leadership.

When Mrs. Clinton was asked in a television interview a week ago whether Mr. Obama is a Muslim, she denied it firmly — but then added, most unfortunately, “as far as I know.” To his credit, Mr. McCain scolded a radio host who repeatedly referred to “Barack Hussein Obama” and later called him a Manchurian candidate.

Martin Luther wasn’t a model of tolerance but even he took the position that, “I’d rather be ruled by a wise Turk than a foolish Christian.” In this presidential campaign, we should at least aspire to be as open-minded as 16th-century Germans.

If only the German leadership had such broadmindedness in the middle of the 20th century.

Words © 2008 Irfan Yusuf


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COMMENT: The Australian Christian Lobby and the Camden proposal ...

The Australian Christian Lobby recently ran a piece on the proposed Camden Muslim independent school. That piece was interesting in that it refused to condemn Fred Nile and others who use this issue as a divisive ethno-religious wedge.

Further, the ACL refer to me as "Islamic Spokesman". Do ACL think I would be stupid enough to claim such a position? In what sense am I an Islamic spokesman? Have I ever claimed this title? Do I represent any Muslim religious organisation?

ACL may have sufficient hubris to claim to represent all Christians. Jim Wallace may travel through the corridors of power agitating against Australia's Western secular democracy and promoting his fringe approach to social and moral issues, all the while claiming he represents all Christians.

I have never made any such representative claims, nor do I intend to. My opinion in the ABC Unleashed piece cited by ACL was my own personal view.

I would request that ACL correct their inaccurate post. ACL should understand that I don't wish to follow their example by claiming a leadership mantle that is not properly mine.

Words © 2008 Irfan Yusuf


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BOOK: Travelling through Muslim minds ...

Riaz Hassan is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at Flinders University in South Australia. You can find out more detail about his 4 decades of academic work here.

I'm in the process of reading his most recent book Inside Muslim Minds which I'll be reviewing for The Australian. That book is a continuation of his 2002 work Faithlines: Muslim Conceptions of Islam and Society.

The importance of work by sociologists and anthropologists of Muslim societies cannot be underestimated. It's one thing to talk about what one's preferred version of Islamic orthodoxy teaches. It's another to be able to definitively state how Muslims actually live out their faith.

So often we hear self-appointed religious leaders pretending to know what Muslims think and believe and do. We also hear self-appointed experts make similar claims, often with a view to projecting the most negatively monolithic (or should that be monolithically negative?) image of Muslim reality.

How do we rebut such claims? By talking to Muslims themselves and finding out the facts. And being prepared for some results that might make us feel somewhat uncomfortable.

Certainly my eyebrows have been raised a few times as I've ploughed through the first few chapters of Hassan's book. Questions raised in my mind include: Was his sample big enough? Has he considered the possibility that Muslims in different parts of the world may apply different connotations to the same concept?

For instance, Muslims from different parts of the world view the term sharia differently. For what they're worth, here are a few lines from something I wrote elsewhere in the context of the Archbishop of Canterbury's recent pronouncement on the subject ...

Different Muslim cultures understand sharia in different ways.

For instance, Indonesians tend to associate sharia with non-interest banking and ethical investments. In South Asia, where the common law has incorporated sharia codes in family law and inheritance, Muslims view sharia in these terms. Hence, it will be almost impossible to find any consensus among Australian Muslims as to exactly what sharia is.

Social research has its limitations. But this should not detract from nits importance. Those of us with some interest in building bridges across the broad Western and Muslim worlds should know how people in different parts of these world sectors view themselves and each other.

Riaz Hassan's book is useful because it gives us at least some idea of how many Muslims in various parts of the world approach both personal and social aspects of their faith. We need to know this information for at least two reasons.

Firstly, we need empirical evidence to answer the speculations of cultural warriors from all sides. But more importantly, if we are committed to social and spiritual reform in Muslim majority states, we need to understand where the objects of reform are now located. You cannot take a community with you toward a better path if you don't know on which path they are presently travelling.

Words © 2008 Irfan Yusuf


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EVENT: Fundamentalist comedy ...

For more details, check out their extremist fundamentalist website here.

NB: This show is rated M for Muslim. Not recommended for Fred Nile, Pauline Hanson, Mark Steyn, Daniel Pipes, etc etc.


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