Once Were Radicals (2 page)

In 1985, I made an important decision. At age sixteen, I decided the time had come to join those prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice. I was confident my decision was the right one and would be blessed by at least some members of my extended family in Pakistan. True, if my parents found out they would lock me in my room and throw away the keys, but then, I didn't want to tell them.

I did, however, want to tell the imam at the first national Muslim youth camp I attended in Harrietville in country Victoria. Sheikh Fehmi el-Imam was a softly spoken religious scholar of Lebanese background who spoke flawless English and had lived in Australia for decades. Sheikh Fehmi had been camp imam at some fifteen previous youth camps and was accustomed to dealing with kids of my age.

Confident of my resolution, I consulted with some friends who shared the same wish and we decided to approach Sheikh Fehmi as a group in private, away from the other camp participants. Of course, I did the talking.

‘Sheikh Fehmi, you know there is a jihad going on in Afghanistan. The mujahideen are fighting for liberation from the communists. We would like to join the mujahideen. What do you think? Can you help us?'

The sheikh stared at us in silence. He looked somewhat perturbed by my question. I continued.

‘But Sheikh, this is jihad. If we die, we will go straight to paradise. We are fighting communists. We aren't asking to do anything wrong.'

After another moment of quiet contemplation, the sheikh sat us down and addressed us in his usual calm manner. He took out his notebook and read two sayings of the Prophet Muhammad called
ahadith
(plural of
hadith
) in Arabic.

The first
hadith
was as follows. A young man approached the Prophet wanting permission to fight in the Muslim army to defend the Prophet's city. The Prophet asked the boy two questions: Do you have elderly parents who need you to look after them? Do you have your parents' permission? The boy replied that he had elderly parents who needed
him. The Prophet then said: ‘Look after them. That will be your jihad.'

Just as the sheikh finished this story, I interrupted him. ‘Sheikh, my mum reads that
hadith
to me all the time. She uses it as an excuse to stop me from getting involved in Muslim activities. If I listen to her, how will I be a good Muslim? Why should I miss out on paradise because of my mum?'

The sheikh then became a little impatient.

‘So Irfan, you think that martyrs automatically go to
jannah
[paradise]? You think that by running away from your duties and dying on the battlefield, you will earn God's pleasure? You don't understand your religion.

‘The Prophet did not say that all martyrs go to
jannah
. If you die as a martyr, all your sins are forgiven. All your obligations are satisfied. All with one exception. Do you know what that is?'

We shook our heads.

‘Debt. If you owe money to someone, you must pay it back. You can't avoid paying your debts just by flying off to Afghanistan. And who do you owe a greater debt to than your parents?

‘The Prophet also taught us that the first man to be brought for judgment on the Last Day will be someone who died in jihad. God will remind the man of all the divine favours the man has been given. God will then ask the man what he has to offer God in return. The man will say: “God, I gave my life for you. I fought your enemies and died as a martyr so that your word could be proclaimed.” God will then say to the man: “You are lying. You only died so that people would glorify you after you were gone. You
wanted people to sing your praises and write eulogies to your sacrifices. And they did. You've already received your reward, and I have no reward to offer you. Go to hell.”

‘This martyr will then be dragged by the face and thrown into hell. You see, boys? He was a martyr and he went to hell. Why? Because he had the wrong intentions. Even people prepared to give their lives can have wrong intentions and motives. They will be punished for this.'

I was familiar with all the
ahadith
Sheikh Fehmi had cited, but had never thought of them in this manner.

‘But Sheikh, there are so many people dying in Afghanistan. Innocent kids. Women. Who will save them?'

The sheikh responded in his calm way. ‘Irfan, they are being protected by their men folk, by the mujahideen and by Allah.'

I still wasn't persuaded by the theology. The sheikh then addressed the politics.

‘Irfan, do you think all the mujahideen are united into one army?'

‘Of course they are, Sheikh. They are also getting weapons and support from outside.'

‘Yes, Irfan, they are getting support from the United States. But if you think all the mujahideen are united, you are mistaken. You remember my words. The mujahideen will win this jihad
insh'Allah
[God-willing]. But if they are not fighting for the right reasons, they will start fighting each other.'

Sheikh Fehmi's prediction became a reality. Within a few years, the Soviets withdrew and the major Afghan factions started fighting each other. Soon, the city of Kabul was locked into a brutal civil war, with neither side showing any
mercy towards civilians. The mujahideen I so desperately wanted to join had turned into tribal thugs. The jihad I thought so worthwhile had turned into a war on innocent civilians. The sheikh was right. I was wrong. My youthful vigour could have led me to hell.

It is not difficult to understand why I had reached the conclusion that jihad was for me. Powerful forces were responsible for creating powerful images which I adopted as truths. In other words, I was sucked in by conservative American news and propaganda.

I remember watching episodes of
60 Minutes
on TV showing images of the bravery and sacrifices of the mujahideen, of their being forced to buy expensive bullets and other small arms from Pakistani arms dealers, of Afghan refugees telling horrific stories of their children being blown to bits by landmines shaped as toys, of mujahideen leaders dressed in turbans and sporting beards being called to the White House and hailed as freedom fighters by the then US President Ronald Reagan.

When the Soviet Union intervened in Afghanistan, I was in Year 5. And like most people of my age, I grew to hate the Soviets. Some years later, during my mid-teens, I attended ‘Afghan Jihad' nights at the King Faisal Mosque in Surry Hills. These were held once a month and were addressed by representatives of both major Afghan factions. I presumed all these factions were united as one, just as their Australian representatives and the media had made out. Ironically, today the Hizb-i-Islami leader lives in Iran in exile. The Jamiat-i-Islami leads the current Western-backed
Northern Alliance government and, by default, Afghanistan's lucrative drug trade.

I was actively encouraged to embrace this jihad in order to keep well away from another jihad led by Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini. I believed what I was fed by news outlets that the Afghan Muslim fighters were good while the Iranians fighting against Iraq were evil and were engaged in a futile war. It wasn't until George Bush the elder declared Saddam Hussein to be ‘that evil dictator' (his exact words) that I learned that all the Iranian propaganda about Iraq invading Iran and using chemical weapons was in fact true.

As a young man growing up in a spiritual and cultural pendulum—swinging between being Indian, Pakistani, Muslim, Australian—I was confused. Political Islam, in the form of the Afghan jihad, provided some certainty and direction, even if it meant potentially cutting my life short.

But Sheikh Fehmi was able to see through the façade of propaganda and emotion, and luckily for me and my friends, he steered us away from the idea.

Sheikh Fehmi grew up in a Muslim family in Lebanon, a country whose culture and language had long hosted a large indigenous Muslim presence. Islam was as Lebanese as felafel and hommus. Sheikh Fehmi learned Islam not just from books but also from the general environment. He absorbed mainstream Islam from Lebanese culture just as his Maronite or Malekite or Orthodox neighbours had absorbed Christianity. I couldn't question the orthodoxy of his arguments as he tried to discourage me from travelling to Afghanistan. Although I knew the
ahadith
he was quoting, at sixteen years old and outside a culture accustomed to
Islam, I didn't understand the wisdom behind them. I also didn't understand the process of extracting rules and principles from religious sources.

Instead, I was falling for a theology of jihad that had been written by CIA propagandists. That same theology was adopted by the likes of Osama bin Ladin, who really should be named Osama bin Reagan. That's not to say the Afghan jihad (‘struggle for justice') against the former Soviet Union was wrong or false or unworthy. It's just that the reasons presented to young people like myself about joining the jihad had their own political agenda.

This same propaganda was being promoted by anti-Soviet politicians and columnists in Australia, including by the man I always knew of as my local member, John Winston Howard.

Young Muslims like me, brought up in culturally Muslim families and with little exposure to mainstream Islamic theology, could easily get sucked into heterodox fringe cults. Today, conservative columnists and politicians harp on about the dangers of Saudi-style Wahhabi Islam. I wonder where these conservatives were back in the mid-1980s when Wahhabi Islam was regarded as an excellent antidote to communism and Iranian-style revolutionary Shia Islam. Then again, it doesn't surprise me that many Australian conservatives still maintain friendly relations with Saudi religious and political authorities. After all, old alliances are as hard to kill as old habits. And, of course, there is that minor issue of access to cheap oil.

Not much has changed in our society: Muslim kids and converts continue to get sucked into fringe Islam; Western governments are still picking and choosing which fringe
Muslim group they wish to deal with; Australian Islam remains largely an ethno-religious relic; mosques are still run along ethnic and cultural lines of little relevance to most young Muslims; and women are still barred from many mosques.

Regardless of which religion or non-religion you are affiliated with, we all need a source of certainty. As a minority group, it's hard enough for Muslim kids like me to always stand out in the crowd because of our skin colour and our names which no one seems to know how to pronounce (is it ‘Eefaan' or ‘Urfaan' or ‘Earphone' or ‘iPhone'?) let alone having to swing between the cultural expectations of my parents and the cultural realities of Australian life. Islam provided me with that certainty. The problem was that I needed to learn Islam from somewhere.

I couldn't relate to most imams (apart from Sheikh Fehmi, but then he lived in faraway Melbourne), so I had to rely on books, newspapers, magazines and other sources. I read widely, struggling to understand the competing arguments and trying to find common ground somewhere, but reading is a lonely exercise.

When I was in my late teens and early twenties, I got involved in Muslim organisations and became a community activist. It was here that I discovered another kind of Islam: the ethnic cultural Islam of mosques and institutions that were run like ethnic and tribal fiefdoms. I discovered nepotism, corruption and sleazy political deals with foreign governments.

By 1991, I was burnt out. I left the Muslim organisational scene and focused on mainstream politics. I decided to
take my thus far casual involvement in the Liberal Party more seriously.

By this time, the war in the new Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina had broken out. It was a time of enormous disillusionment. I could see these innocent people—Muslims, Catholics and Orthodox Christians—committed to setting up a multi-ethnic and multi-religious state where power was shared between the three communities, yet they were being fought by forces of brutal medieval tribalism from the outside.

I never saw Bosnia as a Muslim conflict. Rather, it was a conflict in which indigenous European Muslims played a leading role in defending a liberal democratic state. I also knew that most of the victims of this vicious war were culturally Muslims, even if they had lost all the religious and spiritual trappings of their faith.