Once Were Radicals (22 page)

I managed to find a book by Said which spoke briefly about Palestine but dealt mainly with media attempts at covering islam (as in give Islam and Muslims media coverage whilst in the process cover up its reality and make it look ugly)—also called
Covering Islam
. There was an entire section devoted to the movie
Death of a Princess
which I had seen on TV many years before. Said was scathing of the Saudi government's attempts to censor the film as well as its extreme punishments. At the same time, Said criticised the contents of the film and questioned whether the filmmaker was really wishing to increase understanding of Muslim societies. This kind of fair-mindedness and nuance was something many of my Indo-Pakistani uncles lacked.

I gradually became used to reading university-level books about religion and politics. I'd spend hours devouring
books, reading hundreds of pages in a single sitting. I would often keep a place mark in a book so that I could return to it the following day or the next weekend to continue reading.

By now, I had some idea of the history of the Palestinian struggle. I was able to meet my friend Brian's claims with hard facts. And what I knew was that the Palestinian struggle, which continues today, was not just about Palestinians and Israelis fighting over land, it was about Palestinians fighting for their survival as a people. You see, in 1948, just like India and Pakistan were divided, the British divided up Palestine, and gave half to Jews who had escaped the European Holocaust. This ‘half' was renamed Israel. But, as we've seen since 1948 through several wars, the Israelis have taken over the majority of the land, even though there are more than 4 million Palestinians still living in the West Bank and Gaza (not counting the millions who live as refugees all over the world). The result is that Palestinians don't have their own country, don't have their own government (even though there is one, it isn't allowed to function like a normal government), they have no economy to speak of and so most people live in poverty, and they are living under Israeli military occupation. The most recent example of what the military occupation means for Palestinians can be seen in what happened in the invasion and destruction of Gaza in January 2009.

One question that is often asked is: Why do even non-Palestinian Muslims support Palestinians so strongly? There's no one answer to this, but the reasons listed above are a good start.

Brian had a real brain for politics. He told me he had joined the Young Liberals at age sixteen, a fact which the other boys (and even our largely pro-Labor teachers) mocked but which I secretly admired.

Perhaps the only subject in which I had some natural talent was English. It made me quite pleased and proud to learn that someone like me, someone of Indian ancestry, could be better at the English language than the possible descendants of India's English colonial masters.

Having had the same jovial English teacher for the first four years of high school, I was faced with the prospect of a new teacher. Mr Scott had dark-brown curlyish hair and glasses, and frequently wore eccentric ties with polka dot designs. Mr Scott taught us to appreciate the humour and cynicism of T.S. Eliot. He also taught us Shakespeare, and even tipped us off about Samuel Taylor Coleridge's illicit drug use. Contrary to objections from many parents and the school chaplain, Mr Scott taught us a play called
Equus
, by Peter Shaffer, which was the story of a boy who allegedly enjoyed fantacising about having sexual intercourse with horses. He believed in treating us like mature men, not immature, smutty kids. Though I'm not sure to this day what is so manly or mature about studying a drama concerning sex with horses.

Mr Scott impressed upon us the importance of reading a quality newspaper every morning. For him, that meant reading the
Sydney Morning Herald
. He particularly encouraged us to appreciate the dry humour of one David Dale, who wrote for the back page of the main section,
called ‘Stay in Touch'. Often he would go through ‘Stay in Touch' with us, bringing to life even the silliest cartoons of a chap who signed his name as ‘Reg'. A fair few of these cartoons were related to penises.

Mr Scott was also a huge fan of a late-night news reader named Clive Robertson, who read the news in a rather entertainingly cranky manner. Mr Scott encouraged us to stay up late (often until after midnight) to watch Robertson's unique cynicism and spontaneous witticisms. He would test us the next day on some witty remark ‘Robbo' had made the previous night.

Spontaneity was a quality Mr Scott also appreciated in his students' writing. He hated clichés, and once was scathing of a poem I had written that mentioned ‘the milk of human kindness'. It was a poem I wrote as part of a poetry test, and to ram home his point about spontaneity Mr Scott awarded the top mark to a chap named Hobbs, a grumpy self-declared socialist whose four-line poem went like this:

Me hand is shakin'

'Cause me arm is shakin'

And me arm is shakin'

'Cause the earth is shakin'

A few months later, Hobbs added this profound ending to his poem.

So why don't you just fuck off!

To our surprise and appreciation, Mr Scott thought it was quite an appropriate final verse.

One week, Mr Scott asked us to write down what we wanted to study should we reach university. We were to write down our answer on a piece of paper. I wasn't sure
what to put down, and so kept the page blank. After the following English class, Mr Scott asked me to stay behind after class.

‘I notice you didn't say what you wanted to study at university.'

‘Well, Mum and Dad want me to study medicine.'

‘That might be the case, but what do
you
want to do?'

‘I'm not sure.'

‘Well, what do you enjoy doing right now? That could give us some clues.'

I thought for a while. Cricket was fun, but it was hardly a career choice unless I was extremely lucky. I was a good swing bowler, but I was no Dennis Lillee or Michael Holding. I was very good at debating, and our Year 10 team was unbeaten in the Independent Schools Debating Association competition, even triumphing over those pompous wankers from Sydney Grammar School. I seemed to write okay, always coming first or second in the top class in all exams. I enjoyed watching the news and reading not just the
Herald
but also the three-in-one weekly paper that arrived from England.

‘Well, sir, I enjoy debating and reading the newspaper. I also think I'm okay at writing …'

‘When you write spontaneously and remove clichés, you're a very good writer. Have you thought of becoming a journalist? The University of Technology has a really good course on mass communications.'

Being a journalist sounded fun. I could see myself going to far away places and reporting what I saw. I also thought I might be able to throw light on stories that were rarely told by the mainstream media, stories like the plight of the
Palestinians in refugee camps. I could also help alleviate the bias against Muslims that I began to notice in the mainstream press. I might even grow a moustache and sideburns as impressive as George Negus's.

My parents weren't too keen on Mr Scott's suggestion. As far as they were concerned, medicine (or some course that would get me into medicine) was the only option.

One day in a Year 11 English class, Mr Scott told us that he would be leaving the school. We thought he might have landed a job at a better school such as Sydney Glamour (an implicitly homophobic nickname we gave to Sydney Grammar to denote its proximity to Oxford Street, Sydney's gay heartland). In fact Mr Scott told us that he had accepted a job writing speeches for a Liberal Party politician. We were sad to see Mr Scott go. He proved to be a very popular teacher, someone who treated us like grown men and enabled us all to learn and appreciate all kinds of written word. Under Mr Scott's leadership, our English class resembled a Dead Poets' Society minus the fatalities.

One Friday during the school holidays, I went to the King Faisal Mosque for prayers. I noticed a book and a magazine almost ripped in two sitting in the bin. The book was an exposé of corruption in the halal meat certification industry in Australia. It included an interview with Sheikh Tajeddine Hilaly, the new imam of the Imam Ali ben Abi Taleb Mosque in Lakemba. Many Pakistani uncles used to say nasty things about this new imam, complaining that he couldn't speak English and that he had extreme views.

The magazine was called
Afkar Inquiry
and looked like an Islamic version of
Time
magazine. It was printed on the same kind of glossy paper. I carefully used sticky tape to put the pages back together. I then devoured all its articles, reading many of them two or three times.

This magazine was professionally written. It opened my eyes to a new perspective on world events. One of the authors whose name appeared repeatedly was a man called Ziauddin Sardar. Of particular interest to me were the book reviews. One of the books mentioned was by an Iranian named Dr Ali Shariati and was called
On the Sociology of Islam
.

I kept going to the university with Dad, taking my textbooks with me so that he'd think I was studying. My interest this time was not just in the politics of Israel/Palestine. I had always assumed that the revolution in Iran was something evil. But the religion section of the library carried a book by Ayatollah Khomeini. The book was a guide to worship for followers of the Shia sect. Many things in the book, such as how to perform pre-
salaat
/
nemaaz
ablution, were already familiar to me.

I then found
On the Sociology of Islam
, the book by Ali Shariati reviewed by Ziauddin Sardar in the
Afkar Inquiry
magazine. I spent the rest of the afternoon trying to understand what this book was about. I always imagined that an ideologue of the Iranian revolution would use the same kind of organised and structured writing method as Maududi or Qutb. Yet Shariati had a very fresh and spontaneous style of writing, as if he was having an informal conversation with people.

In fact, most of Shariati's books were just transcripts of tape recordings of his speeches. I noted that Shariati rarely if ever attacked Western culture. He was sent by his father, a traditionally trained Shia scholar, to complete a PhD in France. Shariati spoke about such writers as Jean-Paul Sartre, Louis Massignon and Bertrand Russell. I expected an Iranian revolutionary writer to declare death to all Western writers, but he seemed to praise many of them and applied some of their ideas to Iran's contemporary situation.

I was particularly impressed with a set of lectures Shariati gave and which had been gathered in a book entitled
Marxism and Other Western Fallacies
. Shariati used quite sophisticated arguments to criticise the work of Marx. The year 1986 was still in the era of the Cold War, and so anyone who hated Marxism and communism was to be regarded as good.

I remember we once went to a function at Uncle QAA's house. Uncle QAA took time out to talk to me about what Islamic books I was reading. He was most impressed when I told him I was reading Ali Shariati. However, he did sound a warning: ‘You should be careful with Shariati's work. He writes for the Iranian situation, and we face different challenges here in Australia. We don't want to have an Islamic revolution here. Australia is already more Islamic than most Muslim countries.'

Because Iran was so maligned in the popular press, I felt excitement in dabbling with the dangerous ideas of its ideologues. In a copy of a glossy magazine published in England titled
Imam
, a chapter was included from Muhammad Qutb's book
Islam: The Misunderstood Religion
about the need to implement Islam in its entirety, and how
the Islamic economic and political systems were better than anything either the Communist East or the Liberal Capitalist West had to offer. Qutb's agenda didn't sound like he was suggesting a complete reinvention of the wheel. He said that the Islamic political system should be based on
shura
(consultation), and I got the impression that he broadly supported the idea of democratic elections.