OPINION: False Prophecy ...

This article was first published in NewMatilda on 11 October 2006.

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The Australian's editorials and columnists frequently praise Muslim 'reformers' for doing little more than abandoning Islam altogether, writes Irfan Yusuf.

John Howard recently expressed his belief that 99 per cent of Muslims have successfully integrated into mainstream Australia and have adopted a set of uniquely Australian values.

Unique values. You know the ones like mateship. Just ask the current Telstra board.

And like democracy. Yes, apparently this is a uniquely Australian value. Howard has repeatedly lectured Muslims on why their countries should adopt democracy. His Treasurer lectures Muslims on why they should support secularism, separating Mosque from State.

Over the next few days, Howard will announce the new Muslim Community Reference Group (MCRG), a set of ‘leaders’ he will consult on matters affecting Australia’s 360,000 Muslims. The MCGR was formed in September 2005, and its first term recently expired.

And what democratic processes will be used to select these people? Will ordinary Muslims get to nominate people? Will Muslims get to vote on who is selected?

Yeah, right. The Government may have just enough of a majority of shares in Telstra to select one director but the Howard Government seems to hold 100 per cent of all shares in Australia’s Muslim communities.

When it comes to democracy, Howard will be misleading by example. He and his ministers will handpick which Muslims they wish to talk to. Who knows what the criteria will be.

Lately, one of Howard’s favourite newspapers has been busy supporting, promoting, and then condemning, certain current MCRG members.

Consider The Australian’s interest in Dr Ameer Ali, a former president of the virtually defunct Australian Federation of Islamic Councils, and outgoing chair of Howard’s MCRG. Some readers will remember Ali as the man whose organisation took 21 days to issue a letter condemning the London bombing, while taking less than 21 minutes to condemn Michelle Leslie’s dress sense.

Ali is now writing an academic paper on how some Muslims seem to be interpreting Islamic texts literally: an interesting theological and philosophical subject.

But for Richard Kerbaj, The Oz’s specialist reporter assigned to report on all things Muslim, Ali’s research findings have become a yardstick against which to decide who is and isn’t a moderate Muslim.

The circus began on 4 October with an article headlined ‘Prophet not perfect, says Islamic scholar’. The article followed a predictable script, with words thrown together randomly to produce a meaningless yet scary message. Try this sentence on for size:

The chairman of John Howard’s Muslim advisory board yesterday warned that Islamists would continue to breed jihadis unless the Koran was œreinterpreted  for today’s society.

So when Islamists do some horizontal folk dancing and one falls pregnant, you can bet your bottom dinar that nine months later out will pop a jihadi. The bastards are breeding like rabbits!

It gets better.

He also said mosques were increasingly being used by imams to deliver sermons that were not open to discussion.

What the? How can imams stop people from discussing their sermons?

Following this are quotes from Ali about how the Koran needs to be reinterpreted to suit modern times; that people should question its teachings; that Muslims should stop reacting to every provocation; and that Muslims should stop judging people’s religiosity by the length of their beards (presuming they are blokes).

It’s hard to know what to make of Kerbaj’s article. He treats Ali’s theologically benign statements as a virtual revolutionary manifesto for an all-Aussie Islamic revolution. Such a characterisation shows he has little understanding of current debates in Western Muslim communities.

Ali isn’t the first person to condemn Muslim responses to the Danish cartoons. He also isn’t the first to criticise literalism in Koranic interpretations, nor is he the first to call for honest dialogue with Islam’s critics.

The usual suspects roundly condemned Ali’s comments. The Oz then published a somewhat patronising editorial about the issue, which made out that the Alis of this world will rarely find support within Muslim communities. The article even went so far as to suggest that Ali’s remarks dealt with ‘some of Islam’s most controversial issues, which have already sparked widespread displays of anger and retaliatory violence around the world’.

I’m not aware of a single riot within the Muslim world on the issue of literalism in Koranic interpretation or on the notion of questioning Islamic teachings. Indeed, in the world’s largest Muslim country, followers of liberal reformers like Nurcholis Madjid are setting up foundations and even establishing universities. And the grandson of the founder of Egypt’s Islamist Muslim Brotherhood is openly calling for a limit to the application of Islamic sharia .

Most amusing was The Oz’s explanation of Ali’s scholarly authority.

Dr Ali’s standing cannot be easily dismissed. He is a doctor of economics who works at Murdoch University in Perth and is writing an academic paper entitled Closing of the Muslim Mind.

So let me get this right: an economics lecturer has the right to authoritatively comment on matters pertaining to religious law and esoteric theology. Presumably, this applies vice versa. I look forward to seeing Cardinal Pell appointed to the Reserve Bank board.

The Oz editorial then manufactured facts, claiming that the entire Muslim world was on fire as a result of the Pope’s speech and the Danish cartoons. The paper suggested that violence was a default position to be expected of Muslims:

Thankfully, the response of Australia’s Islamic leaders has been rhetorical and not vengeful, in stark contrast to the response overseas to publication of the Danish cartoons and the Pope’s speech and the treatment of French philosophy teacher Robert Redeker, who has been forced into hiding for linking Mohammed to violence.

I am the first to admit that some Muslims behaved in an extreme and inappropriate manner, to say the least. But seriously, these responses represent a minority. The vast majority of Muslims protested peacefully. Some voted with their wallets by boycotting Danish goods. Others organised peaceful rallies. There are 1.2 billion Muslims on the planet, if even half of them each lit a match, global warming would soon become global boiling.

The Oz would have us believe that Ali is a brave lone voice in the wilderness. The paper’s editorials and columnists frequently praise Muslim ‘reformers’ for doing little more than abandoning Islam altogether. Openly ex-Muslims like Wafa Sultan and Ayaan Hirsi Ali are put on pedestals. Rushdie-wannabes like Irshad Manji are frequently quoted making outlandish claims that they single-handedly rediscovered ijtihad , a fundamental concept and process used by just about everyone from Osama bin Ladin to Anwar Ibrahim.

(Ali has since criticised the headline and slant taken on his comments by The Oz .)

People should be free to enter or leave Islam as they wish. They should be free to practise whatever religion, if any, takes their fancy (so long as it doesn’t involve blowing themselves and/or others up). And they should be able to define who they are, instead of having pseudo-conservative newspapers and politicians trying to impose alien definitions on them.



Words © 2010 Irfan Yusuf

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COMMENT: The Irrelevant Men's Club ...

The following article was first published in NewMatilda on 5 April 2006.

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Australia's 300,000 Muslims - more than 40 per cent of whom were born in Australia and are under 40 - are being represented by a bunch of middle-aged and muddle-headed migrant blokes with poor English skills, writes Irfan Yusuf

There are two really exciting events coming up in the Aussie Islamic calendar. And, as is the case with most organised religious events, both are dominated by blokes.

The first is the Australian Federation of Islamic Councils (AFIC) elections, timed to coincide with its congress in late April.

And who are these guys?

They are the peak body of middle-aged men who apparently speak for anyone who has anything to do with the Aussie version of the world’s most disorganised form of organised religion. (They claim to speak for all Muslims. Unless, of course, you decide to start modelling underwear, in which case the AFIC leadership will outlaw you regardless of how many days you spend in a Bali prison cell with your head covered.)

Clause 26 of AFIC’s constitution sets out the selection criteria for nominees wishing to fill the elected positions of President, Vice-President, Secretary and Treasurer. The other positions are appointed. Each of the criteria is different except for the first word. Subclauses (a), (b) and (c) begin respectively with ‘He must be ,’ ‘He has served ,’ and ‘He is not in receipt of any ’

AFIC hasn’t had a female executive member for over 20 years. And the last female executive member was appointed, not elected.

In case you’re wondering, AFIC is an umbrella body of nine councils representing various Australian States and Territories, including Christmas Island. Only accredited delegates from each council can vote on who gets to rule the halal roost. The average Muslim punter doesn’t get a vote and cannot even attend the meeting as an observer.

The councils are interesting creatures, frequently changing shape to suit the powers-that-be in the AFIC. In the past 5 years, AFIC has fallen out with the Islamic Council of NSW. It then endorsed the Supreme Islamic Council of NSW, before falling out with them and creating a third council.

Before this third council was officially named, Muslim Sydney-siders already called it the ‘Super-Supreme Council of NSW’ and now all three competing councils are collectively labelled the ‘Pizza Councils.’

The amazing thing about AFIC’s newly endorsed council is that no one quite knows who runs the show. Try dialling their number as it appears on their website good luck if someone picks up the phone. Or send an e-mail to the address taken directly from the AFIC website and it bounces back as having ‘permanent fatal errors.’

But I shouldn’t say anything nasty about AFIC. After all, they are the PM’s favourite Muslims. Howard knows that, when he wants to pass legislation giving ASIO the power to lock people up if they are associated with terrorism, he can always rely on the AFIC to rubber stamp his proposals in public.

The PM would rather deal with middle-aged men with poor English skills than with, say, the former CEO of Citigroup, the current Managing Director of a major telecommunications company, or even a senior bureaucrat responsible for implementing immigration policy.

The reality is that these last three guys are more reflective of mainstream Muslim Australia than most of the PM’s favourite Muslims. They won’t react nonsensically to every alleged criticism of Islamic culture. And the next time the PM or the Treasurer want to wax unlyrically about the burqa or sharia law, their only response will be to point in Commissioner Cole’s general direction.

The PM relies on the AFIC to make sure those nasty critters known as ‘imams’ are kept in line. This is absolutely crucial for national security. After all, we cannot have a bunch of guys unable to speak English and hardly able to draw a crowd of 1000 each Friday, corrupting our English-speaking Aussie Mossie kids by turning them into terrorists!

Which brings me to the second huge event on this year’s Islamic calendar.

As I write, the AFIC is holding its National Summit of Imams. I’m not sure if any TV channels are providing live coverage of what promises to be a sectarian football game that would match the best stoushes held at Sydney’s Anglican Synod.

Howard and other senior ministers want a system of accreditation for imams. During a recent visit to the UK, Phillip Ruddock observed that imams should give sermons in English, not in Arabic or Urdu. (My Urdu-speaking mum will be so upset! Then again, most Urdu-speaking mosques probably wouldn’t let her through the front door. She has to use the separate entrance, usually out the back at the end of a dark lane, where she has to dodge used needles and inebriated street people.)

The National Summit of Imams was meant to be in mid-February, but had to be delayed after some nasty people of the female persuasion complained about the absence of women at the summit. (Female imams! What would the Jensens say?)

The Summit will be attended by the Mufti, Sheik al-Hilaly, who also doubles as the adviser to the AFIC on youth affairs. Now that makes sense: a non-English-speaking imam in his 60s advising a group of middle-aged male migrants about young people in Australia.

What is the role of the Mufti in Australia? Apart from spitting the halal dummy at the prospect of his role becoming redundant should a National Council of Imams be formed, I don’t quite know. Nor, dare I say, does the Mufti. Or his employers.

Not that the elderly Sheik has no role to play whatsoever. He did, after all, have a hand in what our Foreign Minister described as the ‘Team Australia’ effort to free Douglas Wood from his Iraqi captors.

According to an article by The Australian’s Richard Kerbaj, there is a push to get rid of Sheik Hilaly as Mufti. At least, that’s what the elusive President of the Super-Supreme Pizza Council (properly known as the Muslim Council of NSW), Na’il Kaddoumi, reckons.

Sheik Hilaly appears to have made a few too many enemies over the years. Mosque leaders aren’t used to having imams who speak out on controversial social or political issues. In fact, the only thing Hilaly has in common with the rest of the subservient imams is his inability to speak English.

One Imam told me that Sheilk Hilaly is not even qualified to pronounce fatwas (the literal meaning of the word Mufti). His major qualifications are apparently not in Islamic law but rather in Islamic literature. (Imagine John Howard appointing Colleen McCullough to the High Court bench.)

So there you have it: Australia’s 300,000 Muslims from over 60 different nationalities, more than 40 per cent of whom were born in Australia and are under 40, are being represented by a bunch of middle-aged and muddle-headed migrant blokes with poor English skills.

It’s a pizza well past its use-by date with perhaps too much cheese and all the wrong toppings!

Words © 2010 Irfan Yusuf

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CONGRATS: To Mustafa ...

Mustafa Qadri is a lawyer and an upcoming journalistic voice who has been published in the UK, Australia and online. He recently got married to another young lawyer who once presided over the same campus Muslim Students' Assoc as yours truly. She also doesn't mind being referred to as an "Aussie Mossie".

Congrats to both, and we hope they have a long life together.

Words © 2010 Irfan Yusuf


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MEDIA: Mission of Hope knocks back NewMatilda.com

Some weeks back, I decided to nominate NewMatilda.com for the prize of "Media Outlet of the Year" as part of Mission of Hope's Austrlian Muslim Achievement Awards.

In my nomination, I noted that this news and commentary website had provided an outlet for numerous emerging Muslim voices to comment on a range of issues affecting Australia and the world. Among the Muslim voices heard in NewMatilda.com were Mohammed El-Leissy, Sarah Malik and Saeed Saeed.

The judges of AMAA clearly didn't regard NewMatilda.com as being a suitable recipient of this award, preferring to instead shortlist MuslimVillage.net, a site known less for encouraging and more for silencing emerging and critical Muslim voices on its forums.

Perhaps the real reason the AMAA judges decided against shortlisting NewMatilda.com is because it published an article containing these remarks:

The Council's last major initiative, earlier this month, was to prepare a petition complaining about an undergraduate course taught by an academic at the Centre for Excellence in Islamic Studies. The course, Women in Arabic & Islamic Literature, has earned the ire of the Council because it allegedly doesn't reflect "normative" understandings of gender relations in Islamic sacred law. The lecturer, Dr Samar Habib, has written extensively on homosexuality in the Middle East.

Why would ANIC expect a course on Arabic literature to necessarily reflect "normative" understandings of Islamic sacred law? Is this a course on law or on literature? Don't they understand the concept of academic freedom?

Even more concerning is that the petition is being distributed by a person who moderates a popular Muslim youth internet forum. This person has previously used her position to promote among Muslim youth the work of North American "scientists" who allege that
homosexuality is a disease that can be cured.

Muslims aren't the only religious congregation to frown on homosexuality or to struggle with gay believers. But when religious leaders become captive of persons promoting homophobia through bad science, it's something we should all be concerned about.

And who is the person distributing the said petition? Why none other than the President of MoH!

Words © 2008 Irfan Yusuf


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ESSAY/PROFILE: An Unreliable Narrator

When I was growing up, there weren’t many English language books on Islam available in Australia. The ones that were available were usually about current events. Hardly the stuff my mother could use to teach me about my ancestral faith.

Instead, my mum’s aunt in Pakistan used to send over books printed in Pakistan and India. Mum’s aunt was a senior member of the women’s wing of Pakistan’s Right-wing religious Party, the Jamaat-i-Islami (which literally means ’the Islamic Group’ — not to be confused with the nasty Jemaah Islamiyah of Indonesia, the dreaded Gemaah Islamiyyah of Egypt or the ruling Jamiat-i-Islamia that dominates the Northern Alliance Government of Afghanistan.)

Hence, most of the books we received were written by officials and ideologues of the Pakistani JI. They used bombastic Indian English and were filled with spelling and grammatical errors.

In 1983, I was in my third year attending an Anglican school. I had a huge chip on my shoulder and assumed my divinity teachers conspired to convert me. I was always on the lookout for anything vaguely related to comparative religion.

Then a shipment arrived, containing an intriguing book by an American woman living in Pakistan. I opened the book, but I couldn’t tell if she really was American. Her photo showed her covered head to toe by a large black veil. Not even her hands or feet were showing — just a black figure with 'The Author' typed underneath.

The woman’s name was Margaret Marcus. She claimed to be from a New York Jewish family, growing up in a secular Jewish household and later studying Jewish theology and literature. She also had a history of mental illness, writing of being hospitalised.

Eventually Marcus struck up a chain of correspondence with the late Abul Ala Maududi, founder and head of the Pakistani JI.

Marcus abandoned Judaism, adopted Islam, left her parents, changed her name to Maryam Jameelah and moved to Pakistan. There she wrote books about political Islam; her underlying assumption always being that Islam and anything she deems Western (including Judaism and Christianity) are necessarily on a collision course. Marcus managed to beat Huntington’s thesis on the clash of civilisations by at least three decades.

The book I had in my hands was entitled Islam versus Ahl-i-Kitab: Past and Present, a summary of which can be found here. The phrase ‘Ahl-i-Kitab’ is an Urdu corruption of the phrase Ahl al-Kitab (literally ’People of the Book‘) that appears in the Koran and is a respectful term used to describe Christians and Jews.

Marcus’s book mentions a letter she received from her parents. They enclose for her a newspaper clipping of a New York imam who visits a synagogue and speaks of peace between Jews and Muslims. That imam was none other than Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, who has visited Australia at least twice.

Marcus shows contempt for her parents’ overtures, declaring there could never be peace between Jews and Muslims until Israel was destroyed and its leaders executed. I was hardly 14 when I first read the book, and even at that age I could tell Marcus wasn’t exactly the most objective source on her ancestral faith.

Sadly, for many Pakistani Muslims, Marcus’s views on Judaism are all they ever get to read. Pakistanis assume this Muslim convert Maryam Jameelah must be telling the truth. She must know what many Jews try to hide. She has ‘insider’ knowledge.

Despite having a fair few Jewish friends at school and as family friends, I always wondered whether they were hiding the things that Jameelah/Marcus revealed. And now, I’m sure some of my non-Muslim friends must look at my mother and wonder if she has been mutilated.

For many non-Muslims, the first book on Islam they read will be Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s The Caged Virgin, or her autobiography Infidel. No doubt many non-Muslims will regard Hirsi Ali as a reliable source; someone who was brought up as a Muslim and now wants to reveal all the secrets that Muslims have allegedly tried to keep swept under the carpet.

In this sense, Jameelah and Hirsi Ali are similar — both 'insiders' of their ancestral faiths (which they now reject), both writing critically about their upbringing and the communities and cultures they were nurtured in.

Furthermore, they have both been adopted by the lunar-Right of their respective societies. Jameelah remains an ideologue of Pakistan’s JI, her works cited and used by some of the most rabidly anti-Semitic Muslim groups and writers.

Hirsi Ali was elected to the Dutch Parliament on an anti-immigration ticket, and is now employed by a neo-conservative think tank. She continues to project herself as an authority on just about anything and everything even remotely associated with Islam and Muslims.

But the similarities end there. While her conclusions on Jewish theology and culture are far-fetched, Jameelah’s works on Judaism are impeccably researched and referenced. Further, she maintains a certain reverence for her ancestral faith and its symbols.

Hirsi Ali, on the other hand, is happy to lampoon and malign the symbols of her ancestral faith, even if it means unconsciously lampooning the faiths of non-Muslims (including Jews) who share these symbols.

Further, Hirsi Ali’s knowledge of Muslim societies is in many cases non-existent. I discovered this during a robust 45-minute discussion New Matilda editor José Borghino and I had with her last month in Sydney. Our interview covered political, social, cultural and theological issues. At the conclusion, Hirsi Ali said it was one of the better and more enjoyable interviews she had done in Australia.

I’d already reviewed Hirsi Ali’s The Caged Virgin for The Australian in October 2006. The book is a collection of speeches and articles written mainly during her period as a Member of the Dutch Parliament.

It's unclear whether Hirsi Ali will last very long in the lap of US conservatives. I have many doubts about Hirsi Ali's knowledge of Islam, but I have no doubt about her ability to speak her mind. Her views on abortion and Creation science will not sit well with a US conservative establishment that builds its support base on conservative protestant Christians.

Hirsi Ali openly describes herself as 'pro-choice', although she doesn't believe that abortion should be seen as a form of contraception. In this respect, her views are probably close to those of the mainstream position of the sharia (Islamic sacred law) she so despises.

Further, Hirsi Ali believes that creation science should not be taught in schools. She regards Creationism as unscientific, an attempt by religious people to impose religion on secular education. She even calls for people promoting Creation science to be jailed. Christian conservatives will therefore have two reasons to hate her.

Hirsi Ali's most unusual claim in our interview was that Indonesia’s dominant strand of Islam was Saudi-style wahhabism, and that Saudi Arabia funds the majority of Indonesia religious schools. I asked her if she had been to Indonesia. She replied: ’Do I have to go there to know a self-evident truth? Do I have to have lived in Salem to know of witch hunts?’

I’ll try using that line in court next time a judge asks me for evidence I don’t have.

Yet when I asked her evidence for her claims about Indonesia, it was clear she was the one conducting the witch hunt on the world's largest Muslim country. She stated that religious schools in Indonesia were called ‘madressahs’. She looked confused when I used the Bahasa Indonesia term ‘pesantren’, and even more so when I spoke of an organisation called Nahdatul Ulama, who run Indonesia's largest network of pesantren’s.

Hirsi Ali then claimed that Muslim extremists in Indonesia were now calling for sharia to be implemented in Indonesia. I asked her whether she had any evidence of this in terms of Indonesia's electoral politics. She had no idea. I advised her of a speech delivered to conservative Sydney think tank the Centre for Independent Studies by legal academic and Nahdatul Ulama leader Mohammad Fajrul Falaakh, who said that in each successive Indonesian election since independence, the number of seats held by pro-sharia parties has actually reduced.

Hirsi Ali makes sweeping statements about a diverse range of societies whose only common feature is some element of Islam. She hasn’t travelled through many Muslim countries, nor met the Muslim communities she comments on. She is the equivalent of the ignorant mullahs who condemned Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses without having even read it.

One would think that, as a former Dutch MP, she would have had occasion to meet many Indonesians living or studying in the Netherlands. Indonesian and other sources of classical Islam are freely available in universities such as Leiden, also home to the respected International Institute for the Study of Islam in the Modern World. The Netherlands has no shortage of scholarly material on Islamic cultures and theology, almost none of which is reflected in her book.

Yet none of this appears to have left any impression on Hirsi Ali. I left the interview feeling sympathy for Hirsi Ali after all the suffering she had been through as a child, but more so for all the Islam-haters out there who could not find a more credible insider to promote their cause.

It’s the same sympathy I feel for Islamist groups who use the works of a bitter and twisted ex-Jew to pursue an anti-Semitic agenda.

First published in NewMatilda.com on Wednesday 25 July 2007.

Words © 2007 Irfan Yusuf


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