OPINION: Column for the December/January edition of the Crescent Times

How to make a Shaykh’s sides split

A traditionally trained Islamic scholar visited Sydney in September 2005 for a “Deen Intensive”, a funky way of saying that he had 30 ignoramuses like me sitting around him trying to learn something about their religious heritage.

The scholar was named Naeem Abdul Wali, though his American parents christened him Gary Edwards. For the purposes of this article, I’ll call him Gazza.

So Gazza needs somewhere to perform his evening prayers and to rest. Alf, a young Turkish Aussie who lived on a farm was hosting Gazza that evening. Alf and I go back perhaps 10 years. Alf had spent much of his youth as a Buddhist, before being brought back to Islam by his Aussie Sri Lankan wife who happened to have converted from Buddhism to Islam.

Alf took Gazza along to an old mansion in Auburn that once served as an x-ray and pathology lab but was now a hospice run by the followers of the Sufi order associated with the late Shaykh Muhammad Zahid Bursawi (also known as Mehmed Zahid Kotku).

Some years before, the hospice was located a few streets down. In 2001, I lived in the hospice for around 6 months.

Alf and I met up for coffee one day and decided that one of us should run for Parliament. It was the post-September 11 period, and we were sick of getting all jittery and nervous and defensive.

I was already thinking of throwing my hat into the ring for the Liberals in Reid, a federal seat that took in the Turkish heartland of Auburn. Alf encouraged me and promised to assist “whenever I could”. In Alf ’s case, “whenever I could” basically meant full-time around-theclock assistance. I have never seen anyone work so single-mindedly on a project. Alf was as convinced as I was that it was good for both of us for me to run. He insisted that we make a serious go of it.

At the time, I was living and running a little law practise from the hospice. Believe it or not, the hospice ended up being on the front page of the Sydney Morning Herald. My opponent was sitting member Laurie Ferguson, then Shadow Minister for Multicultural Affairs. My old mate Ross Cameron (then Federal MP for Parramatta) warned me about Laurie.

“Irfan, Laurie may look like a dill, but seriously he is no dill. Watch your back. Laurie likes to play hard. He’s a lovely guy socially, but politically he is an animal!” Ross warned.

And within a few days, I found out what he meant. I got a call from a Sydney Morning Herald journalist Pilita Clark who said Laurie had made a complaint about my not living in the electorate and telling fibs to the Australian Electoral Commission about where I lived. She asked me whether Laurie was telling the truth. My response to the journo was simple.

“Come and have a look for yourself.” 45 minutes later, she rang me again to tell me she was on her way. Alf and I quickly got the place as tidied up as we could without having a vacuum cleaner or even a broom.

Pilita was accompanied by a cameraman who seemed to enjoy the exotic surrounds of a very European bookshop. I posed for the camera in a variety of spots, including lounging like a beached whale on my mattress.

The next day, 24 October 2001, that image greeted readers of the Sydney Morning Herald. Months later, Liberal Senator Bill Heffernan was to describe the event as one of the highlights of the campaign. He cornered me at a Party meeting and politely remarked: “F**ing marvellous, Yusuf! You really showed those pr*cks, didn’t you! Absolutely f***ing marvellous.”

Here are some classic excerpts from the article that put the sufi hospice on the
front page of the election campaign …

There is a thin rubber mattress on the floor. A red sleeping bag. A phone cord
trailing across the drab carpet. A gym bag half-full of clothes, an outside toilet, no fridge, no chair and no table.

But this murky space at the back of a tiny Islamic book shop in downtown Auburn is home, insists Irfan Yusuf, the Liberal Party’s somewhat unconventional candidate for the western Sydney seat of Reid.

“Here it is,” he says, gesturing about the gloom. “I live here.”

Mr Yusuf’s Labor opponent, the longtime member for Reid, Laurie Ferguson, is not so sure, however, and neither is the Australian Electoral Commission …

Lounging on his mattress, he challenged Mr Ferguson to come down and check things out for himself. “Laurie can come here any time, day or night. Just get him to ring me on the mobile first, because I’m usually at Mustafa’s [the nearby kebab shop]. I’d be happy to introduce him to the Yusuf residence. And after that, we’ll go over and have a look at his bedroom.”

Acknowledging his rudimentary surroundings, Mr Yusuf said: “I’m a bachelor.”

“Obviously when the better half comes along, she will be insisting on some
improvements.”

… Mr Yusuf said: “At the end of the day, what counts is how you relate to the people you are claiming to represent.”

“The guy’s obviously desperate,” he said of Mr Ferguson, who won just under 72 per cent of the vote in the last federal election in 1998, making Reid one of the safest Labor seats in the country.”

Later, my old friend Emine, a waitress at Mustafas, told me how proud she was of me after reading the article. “It shows you are just an ordinary guy, just like all the other ordinary people in Auburn.”

But the proudest people of all were my Naqshbandi brethren. They felt their 5 seconds of fame for many weeks as the incident was widely reported in the local and overseas Turkish press. For the next few weeks, my poster was up across the wire fence that covered at least 5 blocks of a major Auburn street. It was later dubbed “The Great Wall of Irfan”.

But now, some 4 years later, Shaykh Gazza and the rest of us were on our guided tour. Abdul (a hospice teacher) showed Gazza an example of the technique being used to teach Arabic letters to the Sufi novices. But Gaz seemed more interested in what was on the back of the white plastic sheets. He turned one around and then looked in my general direction. He then showed me what he was looking at. There was my mugshot surrounded by green and black lettering and a Liberal Party logo.

“We put these to good use. There is a whole pallet of them in the other room,” Abdul said after we completed the night prayers. Gary looked at me and Alf. We looked back and him and at Abdul. Within a few seconds, we were rolling on the floor in hysterics, laughing till our sides nearly split.

Words © 2010 Irfan Yusuf

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OPINION: David Hicks finally gets to tell his story on his own terms

There are many good reasons to buy David Hicks’ long awaited memoir Guantanamo: My Journey. One is to find out what happened to this young man without any adverse filtering from nasty pundits who would have us believe Hicks is the anti-Christ.

Naturally not everyone is pleased with Hicks’ work. John Howard, the Prime Minister who left Hicks to rot at Guantanamo for years, recently said on the Q&A program that there was ...

... a lot of criticism of that book from sources unrelated to me and I’ve read some very severe criticisms of that book.

Writing in The Australian, Sally Neighbour claims that Hicks hasn’t been forthcoming and honest. She writes:

Hicks’s firsthand account was awaited with keen interest by historians, academics and journalists who have followed these events. It has also been anticipated by the thousands of Australians who joined the Fair Go for David campaign for Hicks’s release. Hicks describes the book as the first opportunity to tell his story. In fact he’s had many such opportunities, in the form of scores - probably hundreds - of interview requests, all of which he has declined, choosing instead to write his story himself, thereby avoiding the discomfort of having his version of events questioned.

Having gone through years of abuse and torture culminating in the kangaroo court officially referred to as the “military tribunal”, one can hardly blame Hicks for refusing to undergo a trial by media. Especially from journalists who don’t venture into international trouble spots without interpreters and whose knowledge of militant groups is limited to the latest offerings from socalled socalled terrorism “experts”.

It won’t surprise many Muslims to learn that Hicks’ first exposure to Islam was from some Tablighi Jamaat people in Adelaide. Some journalists would have you believe that the TJ are an extremist organisation with links to terrorist groups. I remember once receiving an angry phone call from a senior writer for The Oz about a posting on my blog in which I lampooned her characterisation of TJ as a “secretive group” with a hidden agenda. She claimed to have done thorough research on the TJ, yet did not know the six points of tabligh and was not even aware on which night and in which mosque the TJ met in Sydney.

Still, enough media-bashing. Time for some lawyer-bashing. In his book Torture Team: Deception, Cruelty and the Compromise of Law, international law professor Phillipe Sands, QC, exposes unethical Defence Department lawyers joining forces with neo-conservative politicians to produce the Acton Memo. This document, signed by Donald Rumsfeld on December 2, 2002, enabled interrogators at Guantanamo Bay (and later at Abu Ghraib) to lawfully commit acts of torture in violation of Article 3 of the Geneva Convention.

The Americans landed in Abu Ghraib partly because of “intelligence” provided by a CIA
prisoner. Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libbi, is said to have been subjected to waterboarding that proved so effective that he provided false evidence of a link between al-Qaeda and the former Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein which led to the 2003 invasion. Al-Libbi made these fabricated claims as he was terrified of further harsh treatment.

Still, that is all ancient history. President Obama is in power, embracing Muslims with open arms. The days of torture are gone. Or are they?

The Washington Post reported on February 1, 2009, that Obama issued executive orders allowing the CIA to carry on with renditions. He further allowed the CIA to detain suspects in facilities used only to hold people on a shortterm, transitory basis. America will effectively now outsource Guantanamo-type operations to the generals, sheikhs, colonels, dictators and presidents-for-life who will no doubt torture not just those deemed terror suspects by the US but also domestic political opponents.

Anyway, go out and by David Hicks’ book. Whether you believe him or not, his book makes riveting reading.

* Irfan Yusuf is a Melbourne based lawyer and author. He recently published his first book Once Were Radicals: My Years As A Teenage Islamo-fascist. This column was first published in Issue 25 of the Crescent Times in November 2010.

Words © 2010 Irfan Yusuf



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OPINION: Column for the October edition of the Crescent Times ...

Irfan, shut the hell up, you right-wing fascist bull artist!!

Recently a colleague told me that I almost didn’t get my job when I applied for it. I found this rather disturbing and wanted to know the source of the reluctance.

“They googled you,” she said. I wondered why my writing against racism, prejudice and bigotry would land me in trouble with a community organisation. Wouldn’t it be an asset in the community sector to be someone who sticks his neck out and advocates for the marginalised?

“They read you were a former Liberal Party candidate.”

It is true. I was a Liberal Party candidate in 2001. By 2002, I was no longer a member of the Party. I haven’t rejoined. Since 2005, I have lambasted the Party and Australian conservatives generally.

I printed out for my colleague a copy of all the articles I had published which lambasted, ridiculed and attacked the Right (or rather, the wrong) side of Australian politics. It went into over 100 pages. She read it. Her response? “They don’t read all this. They just read
Wikipedia.”

I soon realised that even after all this time, many people will see me as a raving right wing nutcase. There isn’t much I can do about it. When you enter into the public arena, especially when you enter into politics, people will judge you by your
affiliation and by the words and deeds of those who share your affiliation. It sux, I know. But it’s life. Life sux and then you get cross examined by two angels.

I might poke fun at Kevin Andrews’ immigration policies. I might joke about John
Howard’s statements about Asians. I might describe Tony Abbott’s views on foreign policy as infantile. I might attack the Howard government for its disdain for two Australian citizens who languished at the Guantanamo gulag. I might be repeatedly attacked by right-wing pro-Liberal columnists and editorial writers.

But in the eyes of many, Irfan Yusuf is the guy who ran for the Liberals in 2001 which must mean I am anti-migrant, anti-union, anti-welfare, anti-Muslim etc. You name it, I’m anti it.

The same must happen to my friends who feel inclined to join the Labor Party or the Greens. These days if you run for the Greens, many will assume you are plotting to murder their sick granny or want their kids to be forcibly adopted by a couple of dikes on bikes.

As for the ALP, they only believe in ... um ... what do they believe in? Stabbing each other in the back? Mash’Allah, they have becoming Muslims! Julia Gillard for
AFIC President!!

In the last issue of this august publication, someone decided to have a go at a bloke who happens to be a member of the Greens. No doubt the poor brother’s marriage prospects have been affected. Then again, as we all learned from the article, Greens are anti-marriage.

If the article proved anything, it is just how little political sophistication exists in many devout Muslim circles. Heck, I wouldn’t stick my neck out and claim that the Prophet would have been a card-carrying member of the Liberal Party of
Arabia were he alive today. And despite the fact that green was one of his favourite colours, it is a bit much to argue that Bob Brown’s policies are more Islamic (whatever that means) than those of Julia Gillard or Tony Abbott.

At the same time, this is a newspaper read by people who share a common faith, even if they don’t share the same misunderstanding of the faith. And yes, there are some Green values that are arguably more Islamic in the same way that they are more Jewish or Christian or Hindu or Buddhist. Religions are about social justice and
preserving the environment. If someone from the Greens says this, why should this annoy anyone?

Let me end with two more remarks. Firstly, although I am listed as opinion editor, I had nothing to do with the commissioning or editing of either article. These days I have little to do with commissioning or editing any article (other than my own).

Secondly, the headline is a quote from a comment made to me by my fiancé during the
early days of our relationship. She will only allow me to use it here if I disclose that she stands by it to this minute.

Then again, she’s a Labor girl, which probably makes her a Feminist Communist Socialist Maoist Leninist Trotskyist Stalinist.

Talk about political sophistication!

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OPINION: Terror Recuitment by Remote Control ...

One of my all-time favourite movies is The Naked Gun. For those who can’t recall the plot, an LA businessman (played by the late Ricardo Montalban of Fantasy Island fame) is hired by terrorists determined to have Queen Elizabeth II assassinated. His solution? A special key ring with a button that, when pressed, will turn anyone into an unwilling assassin.

And in case you thought this only happens in hilariously bad comedies, now al-Qaeda is using the same strategy in its jihad against anyone who isn’t them. Al-Qaeda’s slaughter of tens of thousands of Muslims in Somalia, Iraq, Iran and Pakistan obviously hasn’t convinced Muslims to join its cause. Hence it has had to resort to
remote control non-Muslim wingnuts in the United States to help things along.

One of them is a goofy pastor from Florida named Terry Jones who wanted to gather his flock to burn copies of the Quran on the anniversary of September 11. Jones thought this crazy act would somehow send a message to crazy suicide bombers.

President Obama agreed. Except that he thought the event would be a “recruitment
bonanza for al-Qaeda” and similar groups looking for even more people crazy enough to “blow themselves up” in American, European, Middle Eastern, Asian etc cities. As if the Americans bombing Middle Eastern and Asian cities isn’t enough incentive.

Of course, Muslims who understand their faith will understand that no amount of burning Qurans will have any effect on the book’s appeal to its believers. They believe the promise contained in the Quran’s text that God will preserve and protect the Quran.

Muslims who understand their faith will know this. But here’s the bad news. There are lots of Muslims who don’t understand their faith very well at all. There are Muslims whose dictators, kings, emirs and presidents-for-life hold special key rings. At the press of a button, thousands are transformed into nutty crowds that behave like attendees at a KKK rally.

We all saw how much damage these crazies did in response to the Danish cartoons. And - in a touch of irony - the Danish cartoonist who drew the most offensive one - depicting the Prophet wearing a bomb for a turban - has also come out and condemned the Florida pastor.

In fact, it’s hard to find anyone who won’t condemn the nutty pastor. Sarah Palin has
refudiated him, as has Angela Merkel of Germany and David Cameron of Britain. One Indian politician has even asked media not to print or broadcast images of the event.

Perhaps the wisest words came from a French government spokesman who declared the event would be a grave insult to the 9/11 victims and their families.

For one victim, this especially rings true. On the morning of September 11 2001, Baraheen Ashrafi joined her husband Mohammad Chowdhury for morning prayers and recitation of the Quran. He then left for his work as a waiter at the Windows of the World restaurant, on the top floors of Tower One. Reciting the Quran was one of their last acts together.

Pastors burning Qurans and wingnuts protesting outside proposed mosques won’t reduce Baraheen’s pain. Still, those who share the same types of hatred as terrorists would hardly care for the sentiments of victims.

First published in the Crescent Times Issue 23, September 2010.

Words © 2010 Irfan Yusuf

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Seventeenth Column in Crescent Times - My Childish Mawlid ...

Muslims like me of Indian heritage make up one in four of the entire world’s Muslim population. The North Indian ones have their own unique sectarian divides that cannot be found among any other cultural Muslim group. And it’s around this time of year that these cultural divides become especially prominent.

Some non-South Asian readers will be familiar with controversies about the permissibility or otherwise of celebrating the birthday of the Prophet Muhammad. In most nominally Muslim countries, there really isn’t any controversy. Everyone celebrates, with only minor variations between different groups.

But among South Asian Muslims, the meelad is always a source of controversy. Those who insist on doing meelad a certain way regard themselves as “sunni” and label anyone else as wahhabi or deobandi (a “sect” I doubt anyone in Indonesia or Bosnia has heard of). Those who prefer not to perform the meelad in that particular way label their opponents as barelvis (a “sect” I doubt anyone in Mauritania or Kazakhstan would have heard of) or qabar pujaris (grave worshippers) or ahl-i-bidat (innovators). Yes, it’s all gentlemanly good fun.

I grew up in a family where meelad was less about learning and applying sectarian labels and more about forcing your kids to attend boring functions and watching bearded boofy blokes sing devotional songs that none of us wheatbix kids could understand. The imams and uncles would give speeches in Urdu and occasionally in Hindlish (a special form of English unique to the Pakistani imams and the Pakistani medical doctors who dominated these proceedings).

But times have changed. On Saturday I went to a meelad function in Brisbane which was
largely in English. I looked forward to seeing how English-speaking Muslim communities kept the Indian meelad tradition alive. I looked forward to listening to songs kids of my nephews’ generation could understand. I looked forward to being spiritually energised by a lecture in English delivered in a manner my nephews would relate to.

And was I to be disappointed? You betcha! Some 2 hours was spent listening to naat devotional songs sung in Urdu so chaste that even Kevin Rudd would not be able to understand it despite his mastery of Asian languages. The singer was some dude whose claim to fame was that he was the nephew of a famous naat singer from Pakistan. And the name of the naat-nephew? Who cares?

At one stage, our naat dude asked the audience in Urdu: “How many people here can understand Punjabi?”. Two hands rose from the audience. Mine wasn’t one of them. This didn’t stop Mr Naat from singing an incomprehensible Punjabi hymn.

And if you think that was bad, the singer then decided he wanted to provide some entertainment for a group he described using the mixed Urdu-English phrase of yooth keh log (literally “people of youth”). His effort consisted of the following naat in words even the most eminent linguists may find difficult to decipher. Here is the chorus:

Svit Madeenah, svit Madeenah svit Madeenah
Veree lowlee

Finally the English-speaking imam stood up to speak. This chap claimed to be a barrister and Islamic jurist (“faqih”) whose main claim to fame was that he had some association with an institution in the UK called Hijaz College.

This young barrister-cum-faqih then decided to use the occasion of the Prophet’s birthday to remind the Prophet’s followers gathered that we are divided into 73 sects, 72 of which are headed for hell. What better way to celebrate the birth and life of the man who united Muslims of all sects.

I almost fell off my chair when the Pommy imam made this fantastic claim: “I have been giving lectures since I was four years old!” Amazing. Imagine what kind of wisdom would emanate from the mouth of a 4 year old. The following examples immediately come to mind:

“Mummy, for God’s sake, give me an ice cream!”

“Wallahi, that toy is mine!!”

And finally, this classic:

“Waaaaaaah!!!!!!!!!!!!”

If the meelad event I attended proved anything it’s that, despite the level of discourse being rather infantile, not even the infants and kids found the proceedings at all interesting. They were outside listening to their iPods. I joined them. Kate Ceberano proved much more enlightening than the mob of manic mullahs on stage.

Words © 2010 Irfan Yusuf




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OPINION: Thirteenth Column in Crescent Times: Why should we bother writing for a Muslim newspaper?

One of the best books I’ve read this year is entitled Leave to Remain. It’s a memoir by an associate professor of environmental engineering at the University of Sydney. The author talks about his experiences growing up in a country wracked by civil war, his studies and work in the United Kingdom and his eventual settlement in Australia. Of particular interest to me was reading about how the author gets along with people of his own ethnic and religious heritage.

That author’s experiences are somewhat similar to my father’s. Dad completed his PhD in Canberra during the 1960’s before moving back to his home country of Pakistan. He was about to be transferred to what was then East Pakistan when he was offered a job in Sydney. Had that job offer not come through, he and his family may have been caught up in a civil war.

My father has an Indian Muslim heritage. He privately practices his faith. The author of Leave to Remain, Dr Abbas El-Zein, has Lebanese Muslim heritage. He publicly professes to be a non-believer. They could both be described as “Muslim migrants”. They both migrated in similar circumstances.

But can these migration experiences really be compared? Isn’t it like comparing chalk
and cheese? And isn’t comparing one Muslim experience to another a little silly?

Greg Sheridan, the Foreign Editor of a foreign-owned newspaper calling itself The Australian, doesn’t seem to think so. Recently he wrote a column suggesting we need to have a debate in this country about the desirability of having Muslim migrants. Or migrants from Muslim backgrounds. Or migrants from Muslim-majority states. He message wasn’t very clear.

Sheridan’s editor gave him the headline of “Uncontrolled Muslim influx a threat”. He acknowledged in the 4th paragraph that:

It is extremely difficult to talk honestly about Muslim immigration. All generalisations about it are subject to countless exceptions. Muslims are very different from each other.

Sheridan then proceeded to praise a book which made all kinds of outlandish generalisations in the service of a conspiracy theory that Muslims are on the verge of taking over Europe. It was real “Eurabia” stuff.

Apparently Muslim migration leads to certain problems for host societies that Sheridan describes as “the Muslim problems”.

These problems include: they outbreed us; they tend not to integrate, they have a strange kind of victimhood, they all seem to hate Jews.

Sheridan says that the solution is that we should not have uncontrolled Muslim immigration. Since when has Australia had uncontrolled Muslim immigration? Indeed, since when has Australia had an immigration policy that is built on religion? Yes, we had the White Australia Policy. But this policy did not stop Albanian Muslims from migrating here in the 1920’s or Yugoslav Muslims in the 1940’s and ‘50’s.

You’d think an experienced editor of a national newspaper would get his facts right. But sadly when it comes to issues even vaguely related to something vaguely related to something deemed Muslim, facts and logic are thrown overboard. This is what happens when we allow others to write our story instead of writing it ourselves.

If for no other reason than this, we need a national newspaper that reflects the diversity of opinion among those Australians who feel inclined to tick the “Muslim” box on their census forms. The newspaper you are holding in your hands or reading on your screens is put together by a bunch of writers and editors who disagree on more things than they agree on.

Yet we still are civil in our disagreements and appreciate each other’s criticisms. After all, as the greatest of men said, disagreements among his followers are a mercy from God.

So celebrate the first anniversary of the Crescent Times. And if you disagree with anything I or anyone else writes here, put pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard) and give readers a piece of your mind. You’ll only be adding to our collective store of divine mercy.

Words © 2009-10 Irfan Yusuf


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OPINION: Fourteenth Column in Crescent Times: How to burn Swiss chocolate?

Next week, I’m organizing a huge bonfire. Hundreds of people dedicated to freedom of religion will be joining me. We have decided to show our solidarity with four Swiss minarets by burning the symbols of Swiss culture at our disposal.

Some will bring chocolate to burn. Others will turn the bonfire into a huge toasted sandwich by emptying their fridges of imported cheese.

Still others will be targeting cuckoo clocks. The wealthier ones will bring records of their secret bank accounts (I assure readers I’m not in that category).

I’m shocked that Muslims are not repeating the imbecilic spectacle that accompanied (or rather, that followed by 6 months) the publication of the Danish cartoons. Remember the burning of embassies? Remember the huge protests in Arab and other nominally Muslim countries where normally you cannot even sneeze without the secret police reading the contents of your handkerchief to make sure the blood and mucus don’t spell some criticism of the king or general or emir?

I doubt any crazed crowds will be protesting or burning Swiss embassies. Why? Because let’s be frank and honest about this. Where will the corrupt Muslim rulers store their ill-gotten and embezzled wealth if they tell their people to boycott all things Swiss? Which other country has such liberalized banking laws that allow corrupt despots to hide their loot?

Swiss Muslims are largely of indigenous European - Albanian, Bosnian and Turkish – extraction. Their mosques are likely to be designed along Ottoman lines, with flat domes and skinny minarets that look like scud missiles (and would probably be about as inaccurate if filled with explosives and launched). Ottoman mosques are modeled on the St Sophia’s Orthodox Basilica in what was once Constantinople. Apparently when the city was taken over by Fatih Sultan Mehmed, he ordered the Basilica to be surrounded by a bunch of minarets but otherwise left the structure intact. He also ordered mosques across the empire, including in European cities like Sarajevo, to be designed to resemble the cathedral/mosque.

And so mosques across the Ottoman empire resemble Eastern Greek churches. But where did Fatih Sultan Mehmed get the idea of minarets anyway? After all, the first mosques built by the Prophet in Quba did not have big tall minarets. Neither did his mosque in Madina. The minarets were added after he passed away.

So where did the minarets come from? Well, when the first generations moved out of Arabia, they modeled their mosques on the existing architecture. One of the oldest mosques in existence can be found in China. It was built by a companion of a companion (tab at-tabi’i). If you walked in the street where it was located, you could not tell it was a mosque from its architecture. Why? Because it looks just like a Chinese pagoda.

Similarly, mosques in Syria were modeled on existing Byzantine churches, which had towers for bells. Muslims also decided to build towers for their muezzins.

And so the minaret is little more than an act of architectural plagiarism. Muslims added minarets to mosques so that they did not stick out like sore thumbs in the environment.

The early Muslims were happy to build mosques that looked like the houses of worship of the dominant cultures where they settled. Australian Muslims, of course, don’t need to follow this precedent. We prefer building mosques that look like something out of 1965 Karachi. We cry “racism” when residents get upset at our insistence at always being different. Then we spend tens of thousands of dollars taking local councils to court. All for the right to build domes and minarets that our ancestors copied from churches and synagogues anyway.

Still, try telling moronic Swiss voters that they are seeking to maintain their Christian heritage by objecting to what are essentially (or at least historically) Christian religious symbols. It isn’t just their clocks that have gone cuckoo.

Words © 2010 Irfan Yusuf


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OPINION: Fifteenth column in Crescent Times - Bloody politics of division in my birthplace ...

One of my relatives is visiting my birthplace of Karachi at the moment. She hopes to see siblings she hasn’t seen for years, in some cases, decades.

Visiting Karachi at this time is always a little risky. The city is an ethnic and sectarian melting pot. Ethnic Pathans (also known as Pushtuns) dominate the transport industry. Most other businesses are owned by so-called Muhajir - Muslims who migrated from various parts of India after the 1947 Partition. There are large Shia communities of various denominations, and the Sunnis are also fragmented in various ways. To give readers an idea of just how prevalent the sectarian divide is, the last time I was in Karachi during the mid-90’s, my cousin took me for Friday prayers one day. We had to walk past 3 mosques to get to the mosque. I asked my cousin what was wrong with the first three. “One is barelvi, the other is shia and the third are ahl-i-hadis.”

Back then, Karachi experienced a multilayered civil war. No one quite knew who fought who or why. There was conflict between rival factions of the Muhajir political party. Then there were Sunni and Shia groups fighting a proxy war on behalf of their respective Saudi and Iranian sponsors. One anti-Shia party called ASSP (which probably stood for the “Absurdly Silly Saudi Party”) fought pitch battles against the Shia TNFJ (which probably stood for “Totally Nuevo Funky Jihad”).

Exactly whose side you fought on depended on which conflict you were fighting. One day, you’d be in a trench with Ahmed shooting in the general direction of Javed and Ali from that nasty Muhajir splinter group. The next day, you and Javed were in the same trench shooting in the general Absurdly Silly direction of those nasty pro-Iranian TNFJ infidels Ahmed and Ali.

Now things have taken a definite turn for the worse. For my elderly relative to visit Karachi during Muharram took plenty of guts. Like many traditional Sunni families, we commemorate Muharram in certain ways. We fast on Ashura (the 10th day of Muharram when Imam Hussain was martyred along with most of his family at Karbala) and we also refrain from certain forms of entertainment.

Pakistan TV channels frequently have religious programs commemorating Muharram, which my parents in Sydney get to watch thanks to the dish on their roof. But this time Muharram in Karachi is bloodier than ever. Much blood is spilt during religious processions when men and boys perform rituals that many Shia religious authorities condemn as innovation. Still, these practices have entered South Asian Shia culture in much the same way as circling and prostrating to the graves of saints has entered South Asian sunni culture.

Thousands take part in these processions. Sometimes sectarian riots take place. But Pakistan right now has much bigger worries than sectarian rioting. When even traditionally anti-American religious party leaders are using phrases like “war on terror” in a serious fashion to describe the fight against the renegade Taliban, you know there’s an unusual level of strife.

According to one Pakistani politician, in thelast year Pakistan has now had more suicide attacks than Iraq and Afghanistan. One recent attack targeted the women’s section of the Sharia Faculty at the International Islamic University of Islamabad. Talk about the Taliban implementing sharia! More recently, the notoriously anti-Shia Taliban attacked a Muharram procession in Karachi, killing over 40 people. And the most recent episode was an attack on a volleyball game that killed over 80.

So will we have special security set up for mosques (especially Shia ones), educational institutions and volleyball grounds? No way. Don’t be surprised if Murdoch bloggers start suggesting it’s more important for our security that we perform cavity searches on non-white people for explosive underwear.

Pakistan’s terrorist attacks have received little coverage and have led to little reconsideration of our policy toward that troubled country. Pakistan is always blamed for terrorism in various parts of the world, and it’s as if Pakistanis dying from suicide attacks is treated as a case of “serves you right”.

Still, for my relative in Karachi, the inconvenience to her schedule has been most disturbing. She may not be able to see third cousins she hasn’t seen for 40 years, presuming she even knows they exist. Which hopefully means her kids can remain single until the next trip.

First published in the January 2010 edition of the Crescent Times.


Words © 2009 Irfan Yusuf



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OPINION: Fourth Column in Crescent Times - Why Pain Matters More Than Prejudice ...

These days Alexander Downer finds himself working for the UN on a big fat tax-free salary. He travels between freezing New York, sweltering Adelaide and the even hotter Cyprus. Not bad for our longest serving (and some would say worst) foreign minister.

But things weren’t always so exciting for Mr Downer. Back in 1995, his reign as the Federal Liberal Parliamentary Party’s shortest serving leader ended with the release of a set of motherhood statements parading as policies entitled The Things That Matter.

In the presence of journalists, Downer made this ... er ... joke:

When we release our domestic violence policy, [it will be] the things that batter.

In one verbal swoop, he managed to offend at least a certain 51 per cent of the electorate born female. Downer later explained it was all a joke. His party colleagues weren’t laughing, and made sure he didn’t last in the job beyond a few days over eight months.

Jokes about domestic violence are no joke in Australia, making insensitive remarks about female and/or child victims of physical or sexual violence and their families
shouldn’t be seen as funny anywhere.

So one could hardly expect imams and Muslim preachers like Melbourne’s Samir Mohtadi (also known as Abu Hamza or “Hamza’s dad” presumably because his eldest child is named Hamza) to get away with advising Muslim men that it is permissible to bash one’s wife. Presuming, of course, that’s what he actually said. But anyone taking the time out to watch the 4 minute excerpt of Abu Hamza’s speech on the website of the Melbourne Herald-Sun and other News Limited tabloids across the country during the week of the Australia Day long weekend would soon realise Abu Hamza didn’t exactly endorse wife-beating.

However, the part of what Abu Hamza said that I think is worth focussing on is his suggestion that it’s impossible for a man to rape his wife. At least that’s how I interpreted what he said. We cannot be sure exactly what Abu Hamza meant by these words when he said them in 2002, since only a badly edited excerpt is available. Exactly why his words were reported by tabloids across the country on the eve of Australia Day in 2009 is also unclear. Is it yet another case of American-owned tabloids wanting to spread prejudice under the guise of Australian patriotism?

What we do know is that the vast majority of incidents of sexual assault are by men against women they have a pre-existing relationship with – an acquaintance, a date or even a partner or spouse. It is estimated that at least 10% of Australian women will be sexually assaulted by their husbands.

Rape is under-reported as it is, and too often its victims suffer in silence. Indeed, as the South African Muslim scholar Farid Esack says, female victims of rape are double victims. They are victims of the act itself and are then victims of a kind of enforced or pressured silence based on false notions of shame. Imagine being a victim and having an extra layer of shame due to the perpetrator being the father of one’s children.

What hurts much more than double standards and prejudice and bigotry of tabloid editors is the too-often silent pain of female victims of all races and creeds and classes. Violence against women is all too common in Australian households. What kind of sick man gets his kicks out of forcing any woman, let alone his own wife, to have s-x with him?

Sadly, the answer all too often is an Australian man. That man can belong to any religion or no religion at all. That man can be of indigenous or immigrant stock. But if we focus on one set of perpetrators, it means we ignore other perpetrators. And that does injustice to all victims.

When news reports of the words of imams create an environment of prejudice, inevitably it is Muslim women who suffer more. Your average Muslim bloke, even if he wears an impressive beard, could easily be mistaken for a Sikh or a fanatical ZZ Top
fan. But not a Muslim woman wearing a hijab or niqab.

It’s hard enough for our female folk to have to cop nasty stares and abuse for most visibly personifying a despised religious culture. But when these same women cannot even feel safe from their own husbands, when our sisters know that imams and shaykhs are teaching husbands that raping your wife is okay, surely this must magnify the burden of prejudice our sisters in faith already face.

In an environment like this, where non Muslim men and women abuse them and where Muslim husbands are taught it’s okay to rape them, is it any wonder so many of our sisters who would regularly wear hijab in public are now removing it? Why should Muslim women cop the lion’s share of abuse when Muslim men (including imams) are silent on issues of domestic violence?

Words © 2009 Irfan Yusuf


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OPINION: Sixth column in Crescent Times - Half-Baked Taliban Wisdom?

One of my favourite sayings of the Prophet Muhammad (peace and blessings be upon him) goes something like this: “Wisdom is the lost property of the believer. Wherever
you find it, grab it”.

Yet for some reason, I don’t seem to find much wisdom at religious gatherings in Sydney. I don’t know what it is about Sydney Muslims – we seem to do things differently, in a more culturally fractured, more divisive fashion. I’m not averse to religious gatherings as such. In the past 12 months, I’ve been to a fair few events. But they’ve all been in Canberra, Brisbane or Melbourne.

And when you’ve represented so many religious institutions as a solicitor, you get to know enough about the religious establishment that watching these people talk piety compromises your faith.

There is one Sydney gathering I don’t mind attending. Perhaps it’s because I’ve never acted for him or his organisation! Dr Mohsin Labban is an elderly chap in Sydney who has been hosting Friday night gatherings for as long as I can remember. He once taught econometrics at the University of New South Wales. He’s now in his late 70’s or early 80’s (I’ve heard different ages from his regular attendees), and despite having two strokes Labban is still zealously spreading what he sees as a more nuanced and less “extreme” (whatever that means) form of Islam.

Around 150 men and women from all walks of life, all ages, all ethnic backgrounds and all religions attend these gatherings, held at a community centre in the outer-western suburbs Sydney. Perth readers might find the idea of a city having “outer-western suburbs” rather odd. Like I said before - we insist on doing things differently in Sydney.

Dr Labban speaks at a soft, measured, almost leisurely pace. If you’re looking for a firebrand sheik to compromise your eardrums, you’d better not waste your time with Dr Labban. I have no idea what Dr Labban’s religious qualifications are. And quite frankly, I don’t particularly care. I’ve never known him to claim he’s a religious scholar. It’s admirable that an elderly gentleman would spend his precious time sharing his knowledge with people. I’m not aware of Dr Labban entering into any controversies about moon sighting or the other silly stuff that so many imams and religious elders seem to harp on about.

So last Friday I joined an old friend to attend Dr Labban’s talk. We were running late, and arrived at the venue only to be told proceedings would commence in 20 minutes. Muslim standard time! When Dr Labban finally sat on stage, he started talking about the Taliban. I was about to switch off my brain when he said something quite profound.

He said that after the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan and the civil war that followed, the small rag-tag Taliban army emerged with super-dooper weapons and just took over the place. He also told us that the word “Taliban” meant “students”. He kept stressing this fact. A part of me wanted to scream out: “Dehhh! Of course that’s what Taliban means”.

I wrote it down anyway when the penny dropped. Students are people who should be studying. The Taliban were students from religious colleges in Pakistan. Here they were, trying to play politics and establish order in a civil war zone. They didn’t seem to notice that they were also manipulated by forces outside Afghanistan. They didn’t seem to care either.

Students of religion, establishing religious law before their religious studies have been completed? You can imagine what kind of strange and demented understanding of religion they must have had. Dr Labban claimed that no other religious group in 14 centuries of Islamic history came up with a justification for stopping women from pursuing even basic school education.

And to think that those enforcing such ignorant rules were themselves students. Perhaps they weren’t listening too carefully in class. Or perhaps their education didn’t involve too much wisdom. Now they, or people like them, are repeating the same madness in a gorgeous part of Pakistan called the Swat Valley.

When half-learned scholars implement half-baked sharia schemes, they make a mockery of religious law. The result is profound injustice and chaos. Makes sense? See you next month!

First published in the Crescent Times on 6 April 2009.

Words © 2009 Irfan Yusuf


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OPINION: Fifth column in Crescent Times - Show Us Your Memoirs!

Some months back, I completed the manuscript of my book, a memoir about my flirtation with certain forms of “political” Islam during the 1980’s and ‘90’s.

I got up to some pretty freaky stuff back then. But I couldn’t help wondering after I finished the manuscript – why would anyone want to buy my book in particular? After all, it’s not as if my activities were anything worth grabbing that fridge magnet for. (Isn’t it funny how no one seems to remember the phone number on that fridge magnet ...)

I did read a few books by the likes of Maududi and Shariati and Maryam Jameelah. I even contemplated heading off to fight jihad against the Soviet Union. I certainly never attended a terrorist training camp (though a representative of the Afghan Hizb-i-Islami faction did give a Friday khutba at an AFIC camp I attended in the late 1980’s). I certainly never did exciting things like recruit hundreds of Aussie Muslim kids for al-Qaeda or one of its franchises. The closest I got to the Taleban was going on khurooj (a word meaning ... um ... don’t ask me what that word means) with the Tabligh Jamaat in the Karachi suburb of Korangi. In fact, I reckon I came closer to embracing religious extremism when I joined the Liberal Party.

For a more authentic action-packed blockbuster account of jihadist fundamentalist islamo-fascist islamist terrorist extremist extremism, I’m afraid you’ll have to wait for the release of former al-Muhajiroun spokesman Hassan Butt’s memoirs. Entitled The Trouble With Islamist Infidel Caged Virgins, Butt’s book tells the story of a young man who once acted as al-Qaeda’s third-in-command, heading its UK operations and recruiting millions of young British Muslims for jihadi missions across the Milky Way.

In one of his more daring missions, Butt recruited suicide bombers from Mars for al-Qaeda’s first mission to the moon, hoping that their mission to destroy this huge piece of green cheese might lead to sufficient Muslim unity to launch bin-Ladin’s Caliphate-cum-dictatorship on Eid al-Fitr. If Muslims cannot find an agreed method for moon sighting, why not just martyr the moon?
And if you’re stupid enough to believe the previous two paragraphs, you’re probably as imbecilic as a host of British politicians and international media outlets, some of which paid Butt huge sums for his “exclusive” story of how he recruited hundreds of British youth.

But don’t expect many of these media outlets to admit they got sucked into Butt’s lies. It turns out that evidence of Butt’s fraud was given before a British court in December 2008, but the court placed restrictions on Butt’s testimony being made public. Those restrictions were only recently lifted. And so it’s only now that the media can report that Hassan Butt told the court that he totally fabricated his stories and told stories “the media wanted to hear”. Here’s my recreation of the court transcript based on the few media reports available:

Andrew Edis QC: So, you were a professional liar then?

Hassan Butt: I would make money, yes.

Andrew Edis QC: If the money’s right you’ll say absolutely anything?

Hassan Butt: Absolutely anything, yes. If I wasn’t going to cash up on it, someone else was going to cash up on it.

Before his admissions, Butt had apparently dobbed in a host of people to various law
enforcement and intelligence authorities, claiming they were all terror “suspects” or part of “extremist cells”. Back in early 2007, Butt claimed on the US 60 Minutes program that he was an al-Qaeda insider for some 10 years, and had met the ringleader of the 7/7 bombers.

Butt went to Lahore in Pakistan after 9/11. From there, he made some highly publicised pleas for British Muslims to join him in fighting on the Taliban side in Afghanistan. By December 2001, Butt was back in England and trying to sell his story to a British tabloid for a cool £100,000. Apparently fighting for the Taliban wasn’t as lucrative as selling the story.

Since then, Butt has peddled his frauds to the highest media bidders. Butt’s high profile media appearances have also forced politicians and law enforcement officials to take him seriously. Only God knows how much time and public funds have been wasted on allowing Butt to peddle his fantasies.

Butt’s proposed memoir entitled Leaving Jihad [ed: which appears now to have changed its name to Leaving al-Qaeda] is already available from Amazon.co.uk, and you can sign up for a copy when it becomes available. If it becomes available.

In my case, I’d be happy to show you my memoirs.

Words © 2008 Irfan Yusuf


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OPINION: Third Column in Crescent Times - Muslims in Australia have no rights!

I have some terrible news for you all. Muslims in Australia have no rights.

This is no joke. And as if to make matters worse, Christians also have no rights. Nor do Hindus, Buddhists, Jews, Sikhs or even atheists. In fact, no one in Australia, no Australian citizen or permanent resident, has any rights.

And no, I’m not writing this because I have gone stark-raving mad. I’m giving you free legal advice. I’m telling you this as a lawyer, so you can trust me on this one.

When I was in first year uni, my law lecturer told me that Australia’s legal system is based on the English Common Law tradition. There are a number of countries that follow this tradition, including many Muslim-majority states like Malaysia and Pakistan. Of course, it’s no mystery to many of us that Muslims living in many Muslim countries have few if any rights. Recent media reports suggest Malaysian Muslims don’t even have the right to engage in yoga.

Then again, I doubt that the Malaysian Common Law could improve some of the wackier declarations of Malaysian muftis. Returning to that first year law class, my lecturer told me that the Common Law tradition doesn’t grant rights. Instead, it grants citizens these interesting legal creatures called “liberties”.

Citizens can always decide to limit or even dispense with these liberties. How so? By electing members of Parliament to represent them who decide to legislate these liberties out of existence.

But why would citizens wish to deprive themselves of their own liberties? There could be any number of reasons. People might decide that there are internal or external threats that need to be dealt with. Before it was unceremoniously booted out of office, the Howard government kept telling us that it needed to implement a range of strategies to meet the apparently new threats of al-Qaeda terror. This included starting a war in Iraq that created enough chaos to enable al-Qaeda to establish a new front, to wreak havoc in yet another Muslim country. No doubt Osama bin Ladin was clapping his hands in glee when Messrs Howard and Downer joined Messrs Bush and Blair in that disastrous invasion.

The Howard government also kept reminding us that the terrorists hate us because of our values and our liberty. And what better way to protect that liberty than by legislating it almost out of existence?

The weird thing is that Australia claims to be a liberal democracy. Now liberalism is a political philosophy that places emphasis on the rights of individuals to be free of the coercive power of the state wherever possible. But the Common Law gives a sovereign parliament the right to limit the freedoms and liberties of individuals. MP’s can make laws that take away our liberties. But they can also make laws to create rights.

By now, some readers will be completely confused. So let me get to the point. We need a Charter of Rights. Or perhaps we need what citizens of the United States take for granted – a Bill of Rights. The US Bill of Rights hasn’t stopped the Bush administration from implementing draconian laws. But it has provided US citizens with a means to challenge and fight these laws in the courts.

Catharine Branson QC was a Federal Court Judge for 14 years. She is now president of the Australian Human Rights Commission. In a December 2007 speech, she made this startling remark:

... neither Australian lawmakers nor those who make decisions under Australian laws are sufficiently conscious of people’s rights. I have experienced lawmakers restricting freedom of speech. I have experienced public decision-makers making incorrect decisions with harmful consequences for people.

We’re fortunate to live in a country where we have at least some say over the decisions made by our governments. But having elections every 3 years isn’t enough to establish or protect human rights. It certainly hasn’t been enough to stop our government from locking up children in detention centres or deporting citizens. Victoria and the ACT both have a Charter of Rights. The United Kingdom has implemented a Charter of Rights, as has Canada and New Zealand. In fact, the Commonwealth of Australia is one of the few English-speaking democracies without such a charter.

The risk in having a Charter is that it gives unelected judges the power to disrupt the law making processes of our elected representatives. In any event, this is a debate in which Muslim Australians have much at stake. Unfortunately Muslims are frequently used as political and legislative footballs. We often feel our rights are trampled on. The national consultation and debate over a possible Commonwealth Charter of Rights is one process we need to become involved in.

First published in the January 2009 edition of the Crescent Times.


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