Once Were Radicals (13 page)

In Year 6 we spent a number of afternoons watching an animated video of
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
, a popular children's novel by C.S. Lewis. It was an extraordinary story of this lion sacrificing all for his people and then being killed in the process. He then somehow comes back to life and re-establishes his kingdom. This lion was an awesome figure, and the kids around me cheered and clapped when the lion returned to life. After the final instalment, our school chaplain (and Divinity teacher) Rev Alex told us that the story was about Jesus. The lion represented Jesus who died on the cross for our sins and then miraculously rose from the dead. Jesus now sat by the right hand of God and was the son of God. Jesus was also God, his divinity proven by the act of rising from the dead.

The idea that the son of God was also God was confusing. But I was so impressed by the awesome sacrifice that any niggling doubts about the logic of that two-thousand-year-old situation were filed at the back of my mind for future consideration.

Jesus seemed like a far more impressive God than Allah. Although I always understood God and Allah to be the same person, I associated Allah with getting beaten up for mispronouncing words I never understood from His book. Allah also expected me to stop work or pray at five set times a day, engage in ceremonial wash and then perform prayers that involved a fair bit of effort and physical exertion.

Of course, being in Allah's crowd had its fringe benefits. Mum was part of Allah's crowd, and she always boasted of having her prayers answered. Plus, instead of having one Christmas, we'd get two celebrations (
Eid
). Being part of Club Allah meant you could pick your own
Eid
presents because everyone gave money not gifts. Allah's mob ate less bland food, and we were generally much smarter as we spoke more than one language.

But Allah didn't guarantee you paradise like Jesus did. To gain Allah's reward and pleasure, you had to work hard. You had to pray and fast and give charity and even be prepared to spend thousands of dollars flying to Mecca and withstand fifty-degree heat. The price of getting into heaven was a lifelong effort.

You also had to make sure that your good deeds outweighed your bad ones. Each night before going to sleep, I would calculate in my head the number of good and bad things I did. If my bad deeds were more, I would
recite special prayer formulas by which Allah rubbed out the effect of the bad deeds.

Allah had a really efficient method of keeping track of our deeds. Apart from being able to see and hear everything, Allah placed angels on the shoulders of all human beings. The angel on our left shoulder recorded our bad deeds, while the angel on our right shoulder recorded the good stuff. In my case, Mum often said the left angel might run out of ink unless I behaved.

Jesus, on the other hand, wasn't such a stickler for records. All Jesus wanted from us was faith. We just had to believe Jesus was God and had died for our sins, and we'd get an automatic ticket to heaven. It was that simple.

My religious upbringing was being affected not just by my personal experiences at home and school. Events many thousands of miles from the safety of Sydney suburbia also began to impact on how I viewed myself and my ancestral religion. The drums of overseas conflict were beginning to play loudly.

It all started in 1979, the year before I started at St Andrews. Something really terrible had happened that involved Muslims and was being blamed on Islam. It was all over the TV news (that I rarely paid much attention to but was forced to sit through during dinner) or on the AM program on ABC radio that Dad listened to in the car.

This terrible thing—labelled a ‘revolution'—was happening next door to Pakistan in Iran, a country whose name I always remembered because it sounded so much like my own. My Anglo-Aussie teachers often accidentally called me ‘Iran'
when I introduced myself and then when I subsequently (and inevitably) had to spell it out for them.

The news reported Iran had been a very good place. People there liked America a lot. Mum, however, said that Iranians were in many ways just as bad and un-Islamic as Turks. They had lost their culture, they drank alcohol and went to nightclubs and their women all wore short skirts. Mum's phrase for Muslims suffering from this kind of corruption and decadence was they were ‘too modern'.

Iranians went from being too modern to a pack of screaming galahs marching through the streets. They had overthrown their nice handsome king and allowed a man with big nasty beady eyes to take over their country. He and his colleagues were strange people with big beards who wore long black coats and an austere black cloth tied around their heads, much unlike the colourful cloth my Sikh uncles would wear. Also unlike my Sikh uncles, these people rarely if ever smiled. They certainly never laughed or told jokes about Sikhs (again, most unlike my Sikh uncles).

The bearded men reminded me of my Molvi Sahib at
madrassa
in Pakistan. Except these men had titles like Mullah and Ayatollah. The angry ayatollahs were less like
molvis
and more like magicians, waving magical spells on Iranians and making them shout nasty slogans in the streets calling for entire countries to be killed. I'd see these frenzied crowds scream things like ‘Death to America' on my TV screen. It didn't sound like ‘Death to America', but that was what the English subtitles said.

This sort of thing disturbed me greatly because I had relatives and friends living in the United States, and I didn't
want them to die. Added to this was their violent, loud and nasty revolution was described as ‘Islamic'. Mostly I'd become accustomed to associating ‘Islamic' to describe something good, because it was done in accordance with Islam. Yet now I saw crazed people beating their chests shouting death to entire countries and even holding frightened American hostages and threatening their lives being described by news readers as Islamic. Was there something about Islam Mum and Dad were hiding from me?

Mum said this kind of thing wasn't Islamic at all. Her idea was that people shouldn't suddenly change from being too modern to becoming too religious. She described people who went through such sudden transformation as ‘fanatics'. It was a word I would hear Mum and Dad use to describe my own behaviour in the years to come.

Khomeini became the embodiment of fanaticism. He belonged to a small group within Islam called Shia. I knew some things about the Shia because one of Mum's closest friends was Shia. Of the two kinds of Muslims, Sunnis were the majority around 80 per cent and the Shia comprised around 20 per cent.

What was the difference between Sunni and Shia? According to the news, Shia Muslims were extreme and fanatical while Sunni Muslims were sensible and moderate. The truth is that the differences are minor, and mainly to do with history and politics. Essentially, we believed the same things, but that wasn't the picture being fed to Western audiences.

My Muslim uncles began arguing about Iran and whether the new ayatollahs were good or bad people. I could soon tell which uncles were Shia and which were
Sunni. The Shia ones supported Iran's ayatollahs and attacked the journalists, while the Sunni ones opposed Iran and supported the journalists.

Confusingly, however, some Sunni uncles began supporting Iran, while some of the Shia ones criticised both the ayatollahs and the journalists. It was all doing my head in, which got worse when Iran started a war with Iraq.

One episode of
60 Minutes
showed the parents of Iranian boys only a few years older than me. Thousands of these boys were crossing fields littered with landmines which were laid on the ground by the Iraqi army to stop Iranians from crossing over. What really disturbed me were the boys' mothers happy for their sons to die so they would be transformed into heavenly people called ‘martyrs'. What kind of martyrdom was this? I was taught that if someone killed you for being Muslim, you became a martyr. I'd learnt something similar in Divinity classes at St Andrews, about the Roman emperor Nero who had fed Christians to the lions in public stadiums full of cheering infidels. But how could you become a martyr by fighting a war against other Muslims? And how could your mum be happy to send you to die?

By now, I was almost completely put off by Islam. It seemed to be just about war and death. The road to Islamic heaven was paved with bodies and blood, while the road to Christian heaven was much more peaceful.

Thankfully there was one group much worse than the Iranians. They went by any number of names: Soviets, communists, socialists and Russians. These people were
really evil, though again I wasn't exactly sure why. Apparently people living in their countries were unable to think or speak freely, and they were always being watched by secret police. The communists had awful bombs called ‘atomic bombs' which could potentially destroy the world. They were also anti-religion, which was certainly a bad thing in Mum's books.

Around the same time as the ayatollahs had entered Iran, the communists had entered a country north-west of Pakistan—Afghanistan—and the poor people were forced to become communists. The evil empire had come close to Pakistan. My father's homeland was now wedged between a crazy kind of Islamic revolution and an even crazier communist Afghan revolution.

The Afghans didn't take this communist takeover of their country sitting down. Using World War I weapons, they formed a small army who were known as the mujahideen and they fought a war called
jihad
.

These days, any talk of jihad will have people reaching for their phone and their national security fridge magnet. But back in those days, jihad was a great thing. Jihad meant fighting the communists, and everyone was supporting it. In Australia, supporting the jihad meant possibly not sending our athletes to the 1980 Moscow Olympics. In fact, in my first year at St Andrews, our class had to write an essay on whether politics and sport should mix, with special reference to the ‘Soviet Intervention in Afghanistan' (as our allegedly left-wing media called it) and the Moscow Olympics.

I remember one Sunday night at home, the family all crowded around the TV set to watch
60 Minutes
. The
news was that the Russians were thinking of invading Pakistan. We were all very nervous and wanted to know what was happening. In those days, we couldn't just go on the internet or use the Skypephone to talk to one of our uncles in Pakistan. Telephone calls to Pakistan were very expensive, and most people in Pakistan had no idea what was going on because all media was censored by the very Islamic military dictator General Zia. Our only option was to hope
60 Minutes
had a very in-depth report on the invasion.

The reporter spoke of the Afghan mujahideen as ‘freedom fighters', and the Afghan jihad as a fight for freedom. Images were shown of men wearing
shalwar kameez
and huge turbans being invited to the White House and welcomed by President Reagan.

I had mixed feelings about the mujahideen. On the one hand, it made me feel proud that their funny clothes, which I would also wear on ceremonial occasions, were now respectable. I even wanted to wear these clothes the next day to school. I also planned to wrap Mum's blue
dupatta
(a thin piece of cloth she'd suddenly wear on her head the moment someone said something religious) around my school boater so that I didn't look completely out of uniform.

On the other hand, I could see that once again Muslims were being associated with wars and fighting and guns and blood and death. Why were we always fighting? Why couldn't we all just get along with the rest of the planet? And why were we always so poor? I learned that most Muslim countries were very poor. Even rich ones like Saudi Arabia didn't distribute the money evenly across the whole
community. That meant the Saudi leaders were rich while the rest of the country was poor.

More than ever Islam seemed to be a religion for ugly, foreign and violent people who sent their children to die in desert wildernesses or be beaten in a
madrassa
. Christianity seemed like a religion for decent, peaceful, civilised people whose religion made them so wealthy that they could send their children to expensive private schools.