COMMENT: Zero tolerance at Ground Zero

Imam Feisal Abdur Rauf, regarded as one of the softest voices in North America
n Islam, wants to establish a new mosque and cultural centre some 2 blocks from the site of what was once the World Trade Centre in New York.

Opposition to the project is led by a blogger named Pamela Geller and author Robert Spencer who have formed a group calling itself Stap the Islamisation of America.

So who are these people? Here is how one local website covered the group's protest:

Only a handful of victims' relatives came on Sunday.

Sunday's crowd included representatives of the conservative Tea Party movement, some of them wearing anti-tax T-shirts that had nothing to do with Ground Zero, Islam or terrorism.

"We must take a stand and we must say no," shouted rally organizer Pamela Geller as the crowd roared approval. Moments later, another keynote speaker, Robert Spencer, sparked more cheers when he asked, "Are you tired of being lied to?"

Spencer, however, did not explain precisely what lies he was referring to.

Many protesters held American flags. Many carried signs ...

Clearly these people weren't very smart. Here's why.

At one point, a portion of the crowd menacingly surrounded two Egyptian men who were speaking Arabic and were thought to be Muslims.

"Go home," several shouted from the crowd.

"Get out," others shouted.

In fact, the two men – Joseph Nassralla and Karam El Masry — were not Muslims at all. They turned out to be Egyptian Coptic Christians who work for a California-based Christian satellite TV station called "The Way." Both said they had come to protest the mosque.

"I'm a Christian," Nassralla shouted to the crowd, his eyes bulging and beads of sweat rolling down his face.

But it was no use. The protesters had become so angry at what they thought were Muslims that New York City police officers had to rush in and pull Nassralla and El Masry to safety.

"I flew nine hours in an airplane to come here," a frustrated Nassralla said afterward.

Yep, if you look like Jesus, you ain't welcome! Another "Tea Party" protestor decided to drag monkeys into the controversy:

... the proposed mosque has also drawn criticism, including a blast from a Tea Party bigwig who said it would serve as a tribute to the 9/11 terrorists "for the worship of the terrorists' monkey-god."

Words © 2010 Irfan Yusuf

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COMMENT: The athiest who wants Muslims to become Catholic ...

No, I kid you not. Self-confessed migration fraud and evangelical athiest Ayaan Hirsi Magaan argues in her new book Nomad that Muslims should be converted to Catholicism.

Many Muslims recognize the weaknesses in Islam... But they will not join me in atheism because they still believe there must be a God. This is not easy for an atheist like me to admit, but it appears that the painstaking construction of a personal ethic is not enough for many people ...

I explained to Father Bodar [a Dutch priest living in Rome] why I had asked him to meet me. 'I'm not a Christian and I'm not here to ask you to help me convert and become one," I told him. "But I think the Christian Churches should begin dawa (proselytizing) exactly as Islam does. You need to compete, because you can be a powerful tool to reverse Islamization. You should start with Muslim neighborhoods in Rome. Europe is sleepwalking into disaster - cultural, ideological, and political disaster - because the authorities of the church have neglected the immigrant ghettos.

The churches could go into Muslim communities, provide services just as the radical Muslims do: build new Catholic schools, hospitals and community centers, just like the ones that were such a civilizing force under colonialism in Africa. Don't just leave this in the hands of governments - take an active role. The churches have the resources, the authority, and the motivation to convert Muslim immigrants to a more modern way of life and more modern beliefs. Teach hygiene, discipline, a work ethic, and also what you believe in. The West is losing the propaganda war. But you can compete with Islam outside Europe and vigorously assimilate Muslims within it.'

Father Bodar positively beamed with happiness.

So Catholicism is like a half-way house on the way to atheism. Christianity is a sheltered workshop for Muslims not yet ready to embrace the athiest faith.

Many in the so-called Christian Right will probably be too imbecilic to see just how insulting and patronising such an attitude is to their faith. Presumably Hirsi Magaan is counting on that to keep them on side. But I doubt many genuine Christians would be happy to see their faith treated as some kind of temporary arrangement.

I also wonder why Ms Magaan doesn't choose other faiths for Muslims. Why, for instance, does she not want Muslims to become Jews? Surely Jewish doctrine is far more close to Islam than Christianity. Rabbis play a similar role to Imams. There is a sacred law and an emphasis on maintaining scripture in its original language. Dietary laws are similar. And Muslims don't have to forcibly wrap their heads around a trinity.

What about Buddhism? Or Javanese spirituality? Or Mormonism?

Hirsi Ali appears to have seriously lost the plot. And I have no doubt that many Muslim atheists (as in atheists with a Muslim cultural heritage) will agree with my assessment.

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.

____________________

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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COMMENT: Miranda Devine and the coming Muslim demographic winter ...

New Zealand Conservative Catholic columnist Miranda Devine writes about the coming demographic winter about to hit the human race largely because people no longer link sex to having babies.

As the tattered sexual revolution spawned by the pill hits middle age we can see the consequences of unmooring sex from the possibility of children, and the rejection of the age-old imperative to be "fruitful and multiply".

The result is a so-called contraceptive culture, societies which regard children and childbearing as a nuisance, a burden and an expense, rather than a blessing.

This is truly an international phenomenon. It affects even that nebulous and frightfully monolithic entity they call the "Muslim world".

Contrary to popular opinion, these trends of the past 30 years are being mirrored in the developing world, in Asia, Latin America and the Middle East.

"Barren wombs and empty cradles" are a phenomenon of both the Christian and Muslim worlds. Even Iran has retreated from its baby boom of the 1980s, with the fertility rate of 6.5 collapsing to 1.7. The same trend can be seen in the once fruitful United Arab Emirates, Tunisia, Bahrain, Kuwait and Lebanon. The world's most populous Muslim nation, Indonesia, has a birth rate just above replacement, at 2.31, according to the 2009 CIA World Factbook.

The birth rate for Muslim immigrants in Europe may be higher than the countries they come from, leading to the widely predicted Islamification of the continent in the next 50 years. But it is nonetheless declining.

So much for Muslims out-populating the rest of us.

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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COMMENT: An uncomfortable moment ...

Some days back I had the good fortune to perform my fajr (pre-dawn) prayers at a new institution established by a younging chap of Fiji-Indian extraction. The al-Mustapha Institute has been established by Noor-ul-Hassan Al-Hijazi, a graduate of Hijaz College in the United Kingdom.

Also present were a number of local Brisbane people as well as Hadhrat Imam Shaykh Afroz Ali, founder of the al-Ghazali Centre in Sydney and a qualified imam in the Islamic tradition. Regular readers of this blog will know that Allama Afroz was also once a graduate of the Islamic University of Madina, though his degrees seem to have been lost somewhere. Either that, or his studies have taken him to Madina and then onto somewhere else. You figure it out.

I couldn't help but ask the head of the Al-Mustapha Institute about his training. I asked him about ...

* where he studied;

* how many years he studied for;

* what subjects he studied;

* what qualifications he received;

* what form those qualifications took.

He answered all these questions without any hesitation. Indeed, he volunteered more information such as who some of his teachers were and even the nature of the graduation ceremony.

Sayyidina Ayatullah Afroz was present during these discussions, though he did look somewhat uncomfortable to say the least.

So will Maulana Pir Abul Bayaan Afroz provide us with details of his precise qualifications with the same degree of candor and honesty? I'm certainly not holding my breath.

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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