Once Were Radicals (35 page)

The men walked outside behind Mum. Within a few minutes, these skinny dudes struggled lifting and carrying extremely heavy furniture—bookshelves, sofas etc—from the garage to various awkward spaces in our home. This also involved re-arranging furniture already inside the house.

The poor TJers performed all this heavy lifting without any complaint. Not only did they end up with sore backs, they also missed the prayers and talk at the local mosque to which they had come to invite me.

‘Dhaat vill teech dhem! Dhey not come to bodhar you is-studee,' Mum said with some satisfaction. She was right. The next time a TJ delegation turned up at her house was in 2006.

Like Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses, TJs always turn up unannounced. They're always polite, only knocking on your door three times. If you don't answer, they walk off even if they can hear AC/DC playing full blast from your bedroom.

You can always tell it's them. They stick out like sore thumbs in their long robes and skullcaps wrapped with turbans. Many sport long beards. The Punjabi ones look almost like Sikhs. Many of their people aren't in the group full time—in fact, most are part-timers. Others join them occasionally.

Some newspapers have recently started running stories linking the TJ to Saudi terror cells and Wahhabi infiltrators. Which makes little sense to me since virtually the entire Saudi Wahhabi religious establishment has condemned the TJ for being a deviant group. One Australian newspaper even claimed the 9/11 shoe-bomber Richard Reid and two of the 7/7 London bombers sat in TJ meetings. But I doubt you could stick around after a prayer service at any mosque (apart from a hardcore pro-Wahhabi anti-TJ mosque) and not hear a TJ talk.

Among those known to have frequented TJ talks and gatherings include former Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, former Indian President Dr Zakir Hussain, a host of Pakistani cricketers, the lead singer of a Pakistani pop band and members of an Indonesian rock band.

Muslims have every reason to believe they are being unfairly singled out when even groups like the TJ are being linked to al-Qaeda. How long will it be before declaring even the most nominal Muslims ‘terrorists' becomes normal journalistic parlance?

A strict rule of TJ was that we were never allowed to talk about politics. This included areas of politics where there was complete consensus among most people within and outside the Muslim communities. I saw this rule strictly enforced during the Afghan jihad against the Soviet Union. Just before the Soviets had withdrawn, the TJ had held their large annual gathering in Melbourne. It was attended by thousands of Muslims from across Australia. Dr Abdul Aziz Majidi, the representative of the Hizb-i-Islami Afghan faction in Australia, wanted to address the crowd. The TJ elders refused, citing their strict rule against any political discussion at the gathering. This was regarded as so scandalous that it was discussed in the magazine of the Australian Federation of Islamic Councils (AFIC). One AFIC executive member wrote that it was unfair that TJ could preach whatever they liked in the mosques of other people, but wouldn't allow a jihad leader to speak at their gathering.

Another strict rule of TJ was that we were to avoid theological and sectarian controversies. These included differences between Shia and Sunni or between Barelwi and Deobandi. Although the TJ was a Deobandi movement, I never saw TJ elders use the word Deobandi in public gatherings.

I enjoyed spending time with Shaf and other camp kids who hung around the TJ. The TJ
amir
Brother Muhammad
always had a smile on his face, and apart from his broad Aussie accent he could also speak fluent Arabic, Indonesian and Urdu (and probably a host of other languages).

Brother Muhammad always had interesting stories to tell of his TJ
khurooj
trips across Australia and all over the world. He once went to northern India in the middle of winter. There, he travelled between isolated hill stations on the foothills of the Himalayas. Brother Muhammad would describe how local villagers would teach him how to perform pre-prayer ablutions in mountain streams without having his hands covered in ice (if not frozen off) when he removed them from the water. His
jamaat
would move at nights from one Muslim house to the next with minimum visibility when it snowed.

On one occasion, Shaf and Brother Muhammad went on
khurooj
to an island off Cape York on the northern edge of Queensland. After they returned, Shaf told me about the island's small Muslim community, some of them indigenous and some Malays. Many had converted to various forms of Christianity, but the few that wanted to hold on to their faith would rarely be visited by other Muslims. Yet they could always rely on TJ brothers to visit them.

I grew to respect the TJ. They travelled to outback locations searching out Muslims who were otherwise forgotten by the rest of us. They quietly did work that no Muslim religious organisation was prepared to do. They had no office, no secretariat and all their funds were generated from whoever was in each individual
jamaat
at the time. The TJ never asked for money. All they asked of Muslims was that they give some time. And they never turned anyone away.

It's almost impossible to visit a mosque in any part of the world without finding TJ people there. Sometimes they would be in a
jamaat
visiting locals and inviting them to the mosque. Sometimes one of them would be reading from their textbook, usually stories of the Prophet Muhammad or his companions or Sufi stories. They kept long-abandoned or discarded mosques buzzing with activity.

The only thing TJ people could never do was organise or manage a mosque. When they did this, you could expect administrative disasters. My ‘ancestral' mosque (if I could call it that) was the King Faisal Mosque at Surry Hills. During the late 1980s my friends Rambo and Damien were on the mosque committee. Rambo set up a mosque library, and a large number of people donated books to the library. Some were religious books while others were encyclopaedias or textbooks. Rambo may have had a mouth full of four-letter words, but he had a heart of gold and donated much of his time to managing the library.

Then there was a change of guard. A group of TJ leaders joined forces with a small fringe Lebanese sect called the al-Ahbash known for their close links to the Syrian government and were staunch enemies of Sheikh Hilaly. The TJ had been infiltrated by a number of al-Ahbash members who took advantage of the TJ's loose (if not nonexistent) structures and open-doors policy. Anyone could join in TJ activities, and apart from a few regular leaders like Brother Muhammad, virtually any fringe group with a political or sectarian agenda could become influential.

The new mosque management committee was dominated by the al-Ahbash, as the TJ executive members were forever out of town on
khurooj
trips. In their absence, the
al-Ahbash burned all but a few books in the library. It was unbelievable that in the late twentieth century, allegedly orthodox Muslims could do something as medieval as burn books. One of the al-Ahbash executive members told me that the books were burned because they did not teach true Islam.

Later, the joint TJ/al-Ahbash executive decided to do what most mosques did and ‘import' an imam from overseas on a three-month trial basis. The imam they invited was a young chap who had served as a mufti in Pakistan. Mufti Feisal was a very young man (I later found out he was a few months younger than me!) who had reached the rank of a mufti after many years of study. A mufti was a kind of Muslim scholar whose job it was to give non-binding but authoritative opinions on Islamic sacred law (or
sharia
) for novel situations. Effectively a mufti is like a Queen's Counsel or Senior Counsel, a more senior barrister you would go to for advice on a unique area of the law.

Apart from holding this senior rank among Islamic scholars, Mufti Feisal was also a
hafiz
(someone who had memorised the entire Arabic text of the Koran). The al-Ahbash were very happy to have Mufti Feisal around because they could claim their mosque also had a mufti and that he was younger and more accomplished than Sheikh Hilaly.

However, Mufti Feisal was fluent in Arabic and could tell a fringe sect when he saw one. The al-Ahbash soon tired of Mufti Feisal objecting to some of their more extreme sectarian rhetoric. Eventually he orchestrated the quiet expulsion of the al-Ahbash from the mosque committee. Sadly, by then the books in the mosque library had already been converted into ashes.

In 1994, I made my last trip to Pakistan. This trip would become the final nail in my political Islam coffin. Karachi at that time was in the middle of a nasty factional spat between competing sectarian and political factions, none of which made any real sense to me.

Those Muslims who, like my dad's family and some of Mum's relatives, had moved to Pakistan at Partition had largely settled in Karachi. They became known by the label of
muhajir
and some of them formed a political party called the Muhajir Qaumi Movement (MQM). The leader of the MQM was Altaf Hussain (no relation to Saddam of Iraq or even Barack of Washington DC for that matter). I saw posters of Altaf Hussain on walls and telegraph poles everywhere in Karachi. Altaf Hussain had to go into exile and live in the United Kingdom after falling out with the then prime minister, Benazir Bhutto.

The MQM had split into two factions, with each faction battling it out on the streets of Karachi. At the same time, a sectarian war had started between rival Sunni and Shia factions, both of which had rather long bombastic Urdu names. The Sunni faction called itself the Anjuman Sipah-i-Sahaba Pakistan (‘Movement for Preserving the Reputation of the Prophet's Companions', also known as SSP). Their name derived from the commonly held view of many Sunni scholars that Shia Muslims said nasty things about certain companions of the Prophet Muhammad. SSP was a breakaway Deobandi group believed to be Saudi funded. They were so extreme that they made Sydney's supersonic Sunni faction look like nuns from Mother Theresa's order.

The Shia faction called itself the Tehrik-i-Nifaz-Fiqh-i-Jafiriyya (TNFJ), which means ‘Movement for the Preservation of the Jafri School of Islamic Sacred Law'. Many orthodox Sunni Muslims believe there are only four schools of sacred law that have reached us in complete form. Shia Muslims claim to have their own school of sacred law which they called the
jafri
school.

All these theological and legal differences may sound highly esoteric and complicated. They certainly are, and probably went right over the heads of paramilitary fighters from these movements. For the vast majority of Muslims, the reality is that if your family are Sunni then you are Sunni. You don't think much about it or even try to understand it, any more than people in Northern Ireland tried to understand the centuries-old theological disputations of the Catholic Church, Martin Luther and John Calvin.

The sectarianism of Islamic movement types in Sydney almost turned me off political Islam. But to find myself in the middle of a city living under sectarian siege put me completely off. It all seemed so senseless. SSP would attack the TNFJ, killing some of its leaders. Within days, SSP leaders would be gunned down. And so on. Neither side seemed interested in breaking the cycle of stupid sectarian violence.

I sought refuge in the familiar surrounds of the TJ headquarters, whose weekly gatherings in the Madni Mosque of Karachi were held on Thursday nights. Outside the mosque, vendors sold all kinds of religious paraphernalia including rosary beads, prayer caps and tape recordings of religious scholars. One vendor was selling cassette tapes of speeches by the SSP founder Molvi Haq Nawaz Jhangvi. I was curious as to what Jhangvi's basic message was. I purchased
the tape and was horrified to hear Jhangvi calling for Shia Muslims to be declared a non-Muslim minority in Pakistan. In a nation where around one-fifth of the population were Shia, Jhangvi's call would mean a virtual sectarian civil war if implemented in full. Meanwhile, his fighters and their opponents were killing each other and innocent people from both sects were caught in the crossfire.

And so in my place of birth, two civil wars were taking place simultaneously. One day, competing factions of MQM would fight each other. Mohammed and Ali from one faction would be hiding behind the same car, shooting in the general direction of Hassan and Hussein from the other MQM faction. The next day, Ali and Hussein from TNFJ would be hiding behind the walls of a Shia mosque, shooting in the general direction of Mohammad and Hassan from the SSP.