Once Were Radicals (33 page)

There was a huge falling out between Damien and Imran. It had something to do with Imran getting a job in some Muslim religious body that Damien once had but was dismissed from after a dispute with the Chairman who had held that position for at least a decade. I was friends with both of them, though this didn't last too long as they followed the George W. Bush mantra of, ‘You're either with me or against me'. Eventually the executive committee became completely dysfunctional. An interim committee was appointed, on which I sat. We organised a few picnics, including a cricket match against a team of complete cricket fanatics from a South African mosque on the edges of Sydney. I am not sure if Hashim Amla was there (he's the South African champion batsman who sports a beard
and is a devout Muslim), but if he was then his presence didn't help the team who we easily demolished.

It was around this time that Shaf and I approached Rambo to arrange a coup and take over the IYA. It was agreed that I'd be president, Shaf treasurer and a Lebanese guy I met at Jindabyne named Carter would be secretary. We needed one more exec member to make it five. Shaf insisted on an odd-numbered executive as it was
sunna
(i.e. consistent with the example of the Prophet Muhammad. Shaf often gave us his expert opinion and became our resident theological adviser, a position he assumed having spent lots of time with the Tabligh Jamaat (TJ). More on this mob later.

The fifth person of our plot was to be a young prankster of Acehnese background. Bambang's dad was involved in an Indonesian mosque, and Bambang himself had attended the last IYA camp at Glenrock. He had a wicked sense of humour, making him very popular with the sisters.

The five of us decided to stack out the next AGM with our cronies. Shaf, Carter and I engineered the date, time and place of the AGM in a manner that suited our numbers. Rambo insisted he didn't want the feminist sisters anywhere near the AGM, though Bambang wanted their younger sisters and cousins to be present. We agreed that AGM notices wouldn't be sent to any women we deemed feminist. Bambang was given the task of ringing their younger sisters to tip them off about the AGM, a task we knew he'd complete with utmost efficiency.

We planned a huge surprise to be announced before the AGM. We wanted to organise another IYA camp for the last week of December 1990. The problem was that our
AGM wasn't until late October. Hence we had to secretly arrange the camp before the AGM without anyone on the interim caretaker committee getting wind of our plans.

One day Rambo borrowed someone's minibus and the five of us co-conspirators drove up to a campsite in Tiona Park, just near Forster and some five hours' drive north of Sydney. We booked the campsite there and then after a thirty-minute inspection we drove the long five hours back. I got home at around midnight, and Mum was furious. My exams were only a few months away.

We prepared brochures and had them printed. We had our numbers ready and easily swept to power. We then handed out the brochures. Members of the outgoing caretaker committee who weren't aware of the camp preparations were livid.

We had a tight budget, and all of us had to pay to attend the camp. This was unlike AFIC camps where supervisors and organisers went for free.

Although I was elected IYA president, the five of us had agreed to do things according to what we thought was the
sunna
. Our understanding of what the
sunna
actually was turned out to be simplistic and disastrous. For Shaf and I, the
sunna
basically meant whatever we could extract from his (and to a lesser extent, my) TJ experiences. It also meant whatever we could extract from terrible translations of various religious texts.

So what was the
sunna
way of managing a committee? It meant using
shura
and having an
amir
. The idea of
shura
came straight out of the Koran. It meant that the leader (or
amir
) always consulted with people. There was plenty of guidance on the importance of
shura
and its benefit,
but there wasn't much guidance on exactly how decisions should be made and how the
shura
should be structured.

We hoped that by using the
sunna
method, we could avoid the sorts of political battles that plagued more senior organisations. In the end, and in the absence of a clear model of
shura
, the IYA turned into a virtual dictatorship. In the weeks leading up to and at the camp, our
amir
made huge decisions without consulting us, and we made our own decisions without talking to him. Some more experienced Malaysian overseas students who joined us at the Tiona Park camp couldn't help but shake their heads and wonder what half our arguments were about.

One such decision made by the
amir
was to have Sheikh Hilaly as camp imam. Shaf and I argued strenuously against this, as we knew Sheikh Hilaly was controversial and because he simply couldn't communicate with the kids, at least not in English. On the second matter, we were completely wrong.

I always expected Sheikh Hilaly to be some firebrand preacher who would shout on for hours. I'd rarely met him since the controversial Intifada seminar. I'd been at the Imam Ali ben Abi Taleb Mosque in Lakemba on some occasions when he had led the prayers. But I never actually spent much time with him until this camp. The first thing that struck me was that he wasn't wearing imam gear most of the time but rather a tracksuit and sandshoes. The sheikh had dark skin and a very short afro, and it made me wonder just how a senior Egyptian imam could so much resemble champion West-Indian batsman Viv Richards.

Hilaly also had a wicked sense of humour. He especially became a favourite with the sisters, insisting that they always
ate first at meal times and that no activity be allowed to take place unless participants of both genders were able to partake. At many previous camps, the guys would go swimming while the girls would miss out. Our Tiona Park campsite was across the road from a nine-mile beach. Sheikh Hilaly insisted that no boy could swim until he found a spot private enough for girls to swim. One morning he was late to a camp supervisors' meeting. We became a bit worried, and Rambo went for a walk around the campsite to find him. While Rambo was gone, Sheikh Hilaly suddenly walked in with sand all over his feet. It turned out he had walked up and down a huge chunk of the beach to find a spot private enough for the sisters to swim at.

It's true that Hilaly couldn't speak much English at the time. However, his presence turned out to be a saving grace and ended up saving this ten-day camp from turning into an administrative bunfight. Hilaly led the prayers and also gave short talks after prayers on historical and ceremonial matters. One of these was a talk on marriage and the rights of husband and wife. Some of the more chauvinistic crowd were shocked to hear Hilaly say things like women didn't have to do housework and could demand that their husbands hire a maid, failing which the wife could ask for a religious divorce. Hilaly also spoke about his own work as an imam and how he's had to resolve numerous domestic disputes.

Apart from prayers, Hilaly's main involvement in the camp was to keep people from fighting and arguing with each other. In the case of our
shura
, this meant mediating disputes. Outside the
shura
, it meant refereeing soccer matches. Hilaly was a soccer fanatic and an enthusiastic
referee who often took it upon himself to suddenly turn striker for an underdog team. It was a classy display of cheating.

Shaf and I wondered if Hilaly was any good at cricket. We set up some stumps and invited him and a few other boys and girls to join us. Shaf had to teach Hilaly how to hold the bat, and I confidently came in to bowl my tennis ball. I expected to have Hilaly out for a duck. Instead, he hit me for six. It seemed the sheikh didn't just resemble Viv Richards. Either that, or he really did have God on his side.

Halfway through the camp, a few private couples began using the campsite. This upset us organisers greatly as we specifically insisted the campsite managers give us exclusive access to the campsite free of any people walking around in bikinis or swimsuits. What we didn't envisage was that the camp managers couldn't do much about the owners' relatives turning up.

On one occasion we were saying our afternoon prayers when a woman in a bikini accidentally walked into our prayer hall. Sheikh Hilaly was giving us a religious talk. Some of the boys expressed their disapproval of the woman's presence by muttering Arabic phrases like
Astaghfirullah
(‘God have mercy on me'). The sheikh did nothing of the sort. He called out to the lady, ‘Can I helb you?'

The woman then asked for directions to a certain part of the fishing lake, and the sheikh stood up and walked towards her. Here was this sheikh in his full religious robes calmly chatting to a woman in a bikini. After instructing her on directions to the best fishing location, the sheikh returned to his young Muslim audience and castigated us
for being so judgmental in his broken English: ‘Zis zayr contree too. You should respect all Ostraalian beebul.'

On another occasion, Shaf and I went fishing by the lake with Sheikh Hilaly. Shaf and I got into a rather heated argument about whether Maududi or the TJ were more representative of true Islam. We referred the matter to Hilaly who was in the process of advising us of the relative merits and problems with both when the woman in the bikini showed up to have a swim. She immediately recognised the sheikh, and struck up a brief conversation with him.

‘G'day, mate.'

‘Goodhay luv.'

‘Howya goin'?'

‘Brittee goodh. How you go-in?'

‘Ah, pretty good. Listen, thanks for showin' me the fishin' place the other day.'

‘No broblem, dearr. You have goodh Christmas.'

‘Yeah, thanks mate. You have yourselves a good Christmas as well.'

She then walked off about ten metres and jumped into the water. The sheikh turned to us and said: ‘Ostraalyan beebul goodh, nice friendhly beebul. Vee Muslim fighth thoo mush. Vee should lurrn from za Ostraalyan beebul how show rrespect.'

This was the first, last and only camp where I saw an imam conversing with a woman in a bikini, let alone teaching us how to learn respect from her.

Sheikh Hilaly continued mediating in the theological dispute between Shaf and myself. He told us that overseas Islamic movements had their advantages and disadvantages. Our task wasn't to replicate overseas struggles in Australia.
Instead, we should try to figure out how to understand and practise our religion in an Australian context.

Sheikh Hilaly often used his talks to show how there was no single right or wrong answer to a religious question. He showed instances from the lives of the Prophet Muhammad and his companions where people often agreed to disagree on religious questions. Hilaly gave the kind of contextual approach to Islam that I hadn't heard for years.

I left the camp early along with my Indonesian buddy, Bambang and my old friend, Abdullah. After a few false starts, the IYA had a final election before dissolving. Many of the new kids from the camp went off doing their own things, occasionally keeping in touch. I went back to my university studies and my MSA for one last flirtation with political Islam.

I started writing for the
Salam
magazine of the national Muslim student body. The vast majority of my articles were about simple administrative matters such as advising MSAs on how they could secure funding from their student unions and what sort of activities would attract local undergrads and not just the usual array of fifty-something PhD international students.

One day I was sitting outside the uni library when a young student of Lebanese background approached me.
Hilmi was a science student who occasionally attended Friday prayers at uni. He'd also read some of my articles, and invited me to write for a new magazine he was involved in. The magazine, called
Nida
'
ul Islam
, would be in both Arabic and English and was being published by an innocent-sounding group called the Islamic Youth Movement (or Harakat al-Shebab al-Islamiyya in Arabic). He showed me the first edition, which contained articles translated from Arabic by a chap named Keysar Trad. Some articles were sermons by Sheikh Hilaly. After the camp, my opinion of Sheikh Hilaly had improved somewhat.

I agreed to write, and started writing more hard-edged political pieces. However, as I had no ability to read the Arabic articles, I had no idea who was writing or what was being written in that section.

Among the articles I wrote was one criticising Muslim responses to a Bangladeshi writer named Taslima Nasrin, who was receiving death threats from some over-excited Muslims in Bangladesh. I argued that Muslims were repeating the same silly errors they had made in the Rushdie case. Their screaming and shouting only resulted in giving these writers greater attention and making them rich.

Another article concerned media responses to the Oklahoma bombings. I castigated Western media outlets for getting it so wrong in assuming that the bombing had ‘Middle Eastern characteristics' when those actually responsible were from a conservative paramilitary organisation. If only the media had got it wrong again on September 11, 2001. (Actually, they did. The first photos of September 11 suspects included two Sikhs! I guess the turbans and beards and funny names must have been dead giveaways.)

I soon fell out with the people from
Nida
'
ul Islam
when they edited an article I had written about the French banning of books by two prominent Muslim authors (including my adolescent favourite, Ahmed Deedat). I thought they had made my article sound more radical than it really was. Later, I really fell out with them when I saw them backing one faction in the Afghan civil war. After the Soviets left Afghanistan, the different mujahideen factions began squabbling amongst themselves. The two main factions were the Hizb-i-Islami led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and the Jamiat-i-Islami led by Ahmed Shah Masud. Both organisations were represented in Australia—Jamiat by the architect Mahmud Saykal (I knew him from the Senior Usrah days) who went on to become Afghanistan's Ambassador to Australia and then Deputy Foreign Minister, and Hizb by a chap named Dr Abdul Aziz Majidi (who turned up to my last AFIC camp at Hazelbrook and even delivered the Friday sermon). To their credit, I never saw Majidi or Saykal say a single nasty thing about each other or their opponent factions. Indeed, Saykal always refused any of my attempts to enter into a discussion about intra-mujahideen factionalism. He was always a true gentleman.