Once Were Radicals (12 page)

Mum and Dad didn't want me to feel left out because of their ancestral faith. In fact, they felt that attending church services and Divinity classes would make me a better
Muslim. As far as they were concerned, Christianity and Islam were similar enough that my intense exposure to Christianity would be good for me. Mum even encouraged me to establish friendships with boys at the school.

Mum impressed upon me that Christians were good people just like us. In many respects they were better people, which was why God gave their countries so much wealth. I guess Mum hadn't heard of Latin America or Eastern Europe at that stage.

What my parents liked the most about my new school was that St Andrews had a zero-tolerance policy on bullying. A number of kids in my class had mild intellectual disabilities, but anyone who poked fun at them was punished severely. My parents could see that I was much less fearful of going to school and much more relaxed after coming home. In fact, on the first day I was interviewed to go to the school, the deputy principal told me that I should approach him each and every time someone made even a slightly disparaging remark about the colour of my skin or my ethnicity. It impressed in my mind the idea that real Christians could never be racist.

In the first month or so at St Andrews, I was approached by the school captain. His name was Jackson and his parents were Pakistani. He sought me out and welcomed me to the school. I duly greeted him with the traditional ‘
assalamu alaykum
'. Because he was Pakistani, I immediately assumed he must be one of my mob (Pakistani = South Asian = Muslim = cricket fanatic). Jackson fulfilled all of these criteria except the third.

I felt proud to be at a school where the school captain was one of my mob. ‘Jacko' (as he was known) was popular among both teachers and students. He was a brilliant cricketer and frequently scored centuries when representing the school. What particularly impressed me was that he felt no embarrassment about being from Pakistan.

I went home after meeting Jacko and told Mum and Dad about him. My parents knew Jacko's father, an Anglican priest who had passed away some years before. Jacko's dad was a highly respected man among Pakistanis and had helped many (mostly Muslim) migrants settle into their new country.

One thing I never quite understood was why Jacko didn't return my greeting. For as long as I could remember, I was expected to greet all my South Asian uncles and aunts with the same greeting of
assalamu alaykum
. At the time, I didn't realise this was an Arabic greeting literally meaning ‘peace be with you' and generally used by Muslims (both Arab and non-Arab). I even addressed my Hindu, Sikh and other South Asian uncles with this greeting, and they would respond with
walaykum salam
(meaning ‘and peace also upon you').

But each time I said
assalamu alaykum
to Jacko, he would give me a slightly puzzled look, smile and then just say, ‘Hi Irfan.' However, Jacko could recognise the greeting I gave him when we would finish our conversation. It was the same departure greeting I'd give my Sikh uncle who lived down the road and the Jewish lady who ran the Indian spice shop in Bondi—
khudahafiz
.

It turns out that the departure greeting of
khudahafiz
was a traditional Persian greeting used by just about
everyone—Muslims, Jews, Sikhs, Hindus, Parsees, Jains and Christians from South Asia. It merely meant ‘may God be your protector'. In fact, the first time I learned what the greeting meant was when I was watching the Dave Allen show with my dad. Allen ended his show with ‘Goodbye and may your God go with you'. Dad looked at me and said: ‘See, he is saying
khudahafiz
. That is what
khudahafiz
means.'

The only problem I had with my parents exposing me to people of all faiths was that I couldn't imagine my very Indian Islam as something I could take with me to school, to show to my friends and to feel part of the mainstream. I could be Muslim at home, with uncles and aunties and occasionally at the mosque but never anywhere else.

Furthermore, Islam was taught to me by stern men sporting big beards and wielding big sticks. My experience at the
madrassa
in Karachi was that the Koran wasn't taught. Instead, it was bashed into you. At my state primary school, we did have kids receiving ‘the cane', but this was administered only for the most serious offences such as getting caught stealing. I never received the cane at Ryde East, and only occasionally at St Andrews. It seemed to me that Christianity was more a religion of love than of the stick.

Attending chapel services once a week at the Cathedral was almost a surreal experience. We would line up outside the Cathedral and walk into an old building that smelt of sandalwood, our shoes gently stepping on floor tiles so old that I sometimes wondered whether they had been laid by
Captain Arthur Phillip. The stained glass showed images of a white bearded Christ preaching while other white men and women listened intently. Christ was white, and so was his mother—no wonder they were played only by white children in the school passion plays.

Church music proved mesmerising for me, even if I couldn't understand half of what the choir was singing. The procession of the choir into the Cathedral wearing their white and purple robes, with the organ playing some majestic tune, was a profoundly moving experience. At first it felt a little scary, like sitting in a haunted house, but as I got to know the hymns and their tunes, the music grew on me.

Mum had often taught me that listening to music was a sin, but she was a voracious consumer of classical Indian lyrical songs and songs from Bollywood films. We couldn't drive anywhere without her putting on a cassette of Indian songs and asking me to explain the meanings. Sometimes these Indian songs contained references to serving and drinking wine and becoming intoxicated. This was strange as my parents were strict teetotallers and impressed upon us that we should never touch alcohol. We also tended not to mix with people who openly drank alcohol. I couldn't imagine South Asian people drinking, let alone singing about the joys of drinking.

Although South Asians had a strong religious culture and openly wore their religious symbols, they also enjoyed joking about religious prohibitions and were quite irreverent about men of religion such as gurus and
molvis
.

On one occasion I missed chapel as I wasn't sure if I was committing a sin by attending church. I was also worried
by the attraction I was feeling to this new kind of worship. But my parents weren't at all worried. They believed the Christian faith was so similar to ours that it was natural for me to feel attracted to it. Christians believed in God just as we did, and they worshipped God just as we did.

Yet I couldn't see any similarity between the two faiths. I had learned to read the Koran but never understood its meaning. Our prayer involved physical postures and exercises and reciting prayers that seemed strange to me. I used to cringe when we would go on picnics with South Asian uncles and aunts and some of the men spread out mats to perform
nemaaz
on the grass. It looked like such an embarrassing spectacle seeing these men wearing tight pants prostrate and pointing their bums in the air whilst having a (presumably snotty) handkerchief wrapped around their head like an undersized bandana.

Sometimes we would go to the mosque and take our shoes off to pray, only to find our shoes had been removed and placed in another spot or even just taken. My family were life members of the Islamic Society of NSW (the organisation that managed the Surry Hills mosque) but there was a change in the committee and all life memberships were cancelled. On one occasion, Mum went to the mosque for an annual general meeting and an election of the mosque committee which descended into a match of shouting and throwing chairs. The police had to be called to keep apart members of competing factions.

It all seemed so barbaric when compared to the grace and gentleness of Christianity at St Andrews. Muslims just seemed foreign, uncivilised, violent, embarrassing, poor, dirty and dishonest. Dad often spoke disparagingly of people
who were part of what he called the ‘Islamic industry', people who had spent years drinking and gambling then suddenly were growing beards and lecturing people on why they should only eat halal meat just because they had secured a job at a religious body that made money from halal certification.

Islam was also extremely disorganised. We didn't have a central Cathedral with offices and a hierarchy. We didn't have our own archbishop. We just had people with thick accents (that's if they could speak English) fighting over executive positions and halal meat income. And the few mosques I saw were often dirty and grotty and poorly maintained.

By the end of Year 6, I was beginning to have serious doubts about whether I wanted to be a South Asian Urdu-speaking Muslim when I grew up. I wondered why I had gone through so much suffering at
madrassa
and so much teasing at school just to be a passenger in what looked like a ship of absolute fools.

One thing I liked about the Christian religion was that it was all in English. I already knew from my previous school that Jesus and Mary were white, but I wasn't sure what language they spoke. But at St Andrews, I learned that the Gospels were written in Greek. I assumed that meant Jesus spoke Greek and felt terribly guilty about referring to my old Greek friends sometimes as ‘wogs'.

The New Testament may have been in Greek, but we always read the Bible in English and our church services
were always in English. Even the choir sang hymns in English, though it often sounded more like Latin.

Christianity was also a religion for the downtrodden. The word ‘Christian' was first used as a label to insult Jesus's disciples who apparently used to get bullied a fair bit after he ascended to heaven. It felt good to be hanging around with people whose religious heritage was basically about bullied people wearing their wounds with pride.

What impressed me most was that you could learn the Bible without getting bashed by some overweight bearded dude with a stick. This seemed most enlightened when compared with the
molvi
who taught me the Koran in Karachi. We learned Bible stories and basic Christian theology without being scarred in the process.