Once Were Radicals (37 page)

Until the mid-1990s, the only English-language religious books available to Aussie Muslims taught that mainstream Australian culture was something to avoid, not something to embrace. The Islam promoted by Muslim religious organisations, the anti-Soviet Islam that was endorsed by media pundits, the West-backed jihadist Islam that formed the backdrop of the Afghan war against the Soviets was the only Islam we knew.

Islam was something foreign to us. However, we were lucky that we had our parents (and for those few fortunate enough to attend camps, our wise sheikhs) to help us see beyond the politicised use of texts. But converts such as Damien had to navigate through Islam on their own.
Virtually all converts I know found being Muslim to be like grabbing hold of a pendulum. Sometimes cultural Muslims placed you on a pedestal and made you leader of some religious body. Others (often in response to convert leadership) treated you with suspicion. Like home-grown Muslim youth, converts were often targeted by fringe sectarian and extremist groups. Some even travelled overseas and ended up fighting other people's wars. One even found himself at the Guantanamo Bay concentration camp.

I spent much of my teenage and early adult life exploring the ideas that led many to fight the wrong battles in Afghanistan, Kashmir and other flashpoints. Had I been fifteen years younger, I may have shared a cell next to David Hicks. This is no exaggeration. The vast majority of former Guantanamo inmates were picked up merely because they were at the wrong place at the wrong time. A fair few were associated with political Islamic movements deemed at war with the West. Yet members of other political Islamic movements had the protection and support of American, British and Australian soldiers. After September 11, if you were deemed part of the enemy, whether Taliban or Hekmatyar's Hizb-i-Islami, or if you might have had even the slightest association with bin Ladin, you could be tortured and detained at Bagram airbase or sent to Guantanamo or even a friendly Muslim dictatorship with lax torture laws. But if you happened to be equally jihadist but on the right side at the right time, you'd probably end up as a Minister in a Western-backed government.

Fifteen or twenty years ago, Dr T (the Iraqi Shia from Senior Usrah) would have been considered a dangerous pro-Iran Shia revolutionary. Today, with many Iraqi Shia
parties allied to the United States, Dr T would probably be welcomed with open arms in Western capitals. Mahmud Saikal, once a former Afghan jihadist leader and Senior Usrah organiser, eventually served as Deputy Minister for Foreign Affairs in the pro-American post-Taliban government of Hamid Karzai. They were the lucky ones. Their ideological successors, such as former British Guantanamo detainee Moazzam Begg, weren't so lucky.

The targets of today's hysteria are people somehow linked with the Wahhabi sect. I myself regard Wahhabism as a heterodox—fringe—form of Islam. But not every heterodoxy spells danger to our security. Still, there are those ‘analysts' and commentators that make an issue of even the slightest influence of Wahhabism. Last year, an Australian newspaper made much of a postgraduate research facility in a Queensland university receiving $100 000 from the Saudi embassy. The newspaper ran a vicious campaign against the academic in charge of the facility. That campaign mysteriously ended when someone pointed out that at least 8 per cent of shares in the company that owned that newspaper were held by a Saudi prince!

This kind of imbecilic discourse has dominated anti-terrorism talk. The irony is that political leaders most prone to acting on this kind of hysteria and rough justice haven't managed to catch either Osama bin Ladin or Taliban leader Mullah Omar. Instead, they invaded Iraq and gave al-Qaeda a new battleground.

My more recent exploration through classical Islam and Sufism after my 1994 Pakistan trip led me to realise just
how radical and unqualified many Islamic movement writers were. Maududi was a journalist who taught himself Arabic and studied classical Islamic texts without benefitting from the wisdom of experienced teachers. Syed Qutb was the same. Their views on a range of theological issues have been the subject of trenchant criticism by Muslim religious scholars.

Similarly, bin Ladin's training was in economics while Zawahiri is a physician. None of them had any real expertise in classical Islam. Their views on jihad, democracy and relations with non-Muslims are far more extreme than those of more established Islamic political movements. Indeed, they regard these movements with as much disdain as they regard the West. They are even further to the theological fringe than writers I read. And yet these men are regarded by many as representative of mainstream Islam.

In the so-called ‘War on Terror', ordinary Muslims are damned if they do and damned if they don't. Muslim terrorists haven't been able to invent a weapon that only kills non-Muslims. Indeed, the likes of bin Ladin have killed more Muslims than non-Muslims. Similarly, the rhetoric, actions and wars of moronic religious supremacists and conservative pundits don't hesitate to hold ordinary Muslims collectively responsible for the actions of bin Ladin and his allies.

So are people deemed Muslim or having even some cultural or ancestral link to Islam. If you or one of your ancestors may feel inclined to tick the ‘Muslim' box on a census form, you're automatically a suspect. This reached absurd proportions during the 2008 US Presidential election when an issue was made of Barack Obama's middle name
and the ethno-religious heritage of his Kenyan father and Indonesian step-father. Those at the forefront of demonising Obama on this basis were the same people who'd often harp on about Muslims despising democracy. Prejudice and logic don't mix terribly well.

This book started writing itself after the London bombings of 7 July 2005. All available evidence suggests this event was the work of home-grown British Muslim youth mainly of Indo-Pakistani extraction. They were kids of my cultural background. The combination of their parents' cultural Islam and the fringe political Islam that dominates so many British Muslim institutions did not save them from falling prey to extremism. The illegal and immoral war in Iraq which spawned terror attacks in Iraqi cities on the scale of 7/7 almost every week, hasn't made London or other Western cities feel safer.

The London attacks led to assaults on Muslim targets across the Western world, including vandalism on several mosques across New Zealand.

Yet in all this hysteria, no one seems to remember the victims. The first funeral of a London bombing victim was of Shahara Islam, a 21-year-old bank clerk described by her family as being ‘an East Ender, Londoner and British, but above all a true Muslim and proud to be so'. Having the surname and religion of Islam didn't diminish her Britishness. She represented a modern multicultural success story—the daughter of migrant parents whose religious and cultural heritage she shared. At the same time, she was a
thoroughly modern woman on her way to work. She was a typical victim of terrorism.

In many circles, it has become fashionable to attribute extremist violence and terror to the heritage of the young British woman. Presidents and prime ministers speak of the ‘war against Islamist terror' in her name. Columnists and talkback hosts rally against ‘Islamic terrorists' and ‘Islamofascists' in her name. Yet they, and the Muslim extremists they mimic, keep forgetting what her name is.

I don't live in denial. Fascism with a Muslim face does exist. There are people using Islam to pursue violence. But then there are Christians, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists and followers of other faiths who use religion to justify violence. And there are atheists engaging in mindless violence, among them the Marxist FARC rebels in Columbia.

The next flashpoint could well be the place where my parents were born. As I write these lines, India and Pakistan have been trading accusations over terrorism. Yet as I discovered at the tombs of Muslim saints in Pakistan, South Asian Islam is inherently pluralist. So are South Asian Hinduism, Christianity, Buddhism, Judaism and other indigenous Indian faiths.

American academic Martha Nussbaum writes extensively about religious conflict in India. There were plenty of Western observers with little knowledge of India who saw the Mumbai attacks in 2008 as just more proof that (to use Nussbaum's words) ‘the world is currently polarised between a Muslim monolith, bent on violence, and the democratic cultures of Europe and North America'. These same commentators ignored the fact that one of the police officers killed by terrorists was in the process of investigating
a secret cell of extremists with a
Hindutva
agenda, the same kind of religious extremism that inspired Mahatma Gandhi's assassins.

We all need to remember Nussbaum's message that the real clash is the clash within civilisations, ‘a clash within virtually all modern nations: between people who are prepared to live with others who are different on terms of equal respect, and those who seek the protection of homogeneity, achieved through the domination of a single religious and ethnic tradition'.

Enforced monoculturalism. Enforced homogeneity. There lies the real fascism.

Allahu akbar:
This is a religious phrase that means ‘God is always greater than all else'.

azaan:
The call to the compulsory worship made from mosques five times a day.

Bollywood:
Every Aussie Indo-Pakistani kid's worst nightmare, it is India's film industry that churns out more movies than any industry on the planet. A world where every park has a couple dancing and singing to the tunes of an orchestra hiding behind the bushes, and where every villain can have his face rearranged without feeling the barest touch of a righteous fist.

eid:
Twice yearly celebration or feast. The greater
Eid
was known to me as
Baqarah Eid
(its proper Arabic name is
Eid al-Adha
). The second
Eid
(called
Eid al-Fitr
) is held to commemorate the end of the fasting month of Ramadan.

fardh:
In religious terms, it means compulsory.

gunna:
Urdu and Turkish word referring to negative divine currency which leads us to spend time in Islamic purgatory or hell.

hadith/ahadith:
Saying/sayings of the Prophet Muhammad transmitted by his family members and companions.

halal:
Permissible.

haraam:
Forbidden.

iman:
Faith.

Islam:
Literally means ‘peace' but also carries connotations of holding up one's white flag to God. One Scottish Muslim writer named Ian Dallas describes it as a ‘life transaction' where you sell your free will to God in return for paradise. Writers from allegedly Islamic political movements frequently describe it as a ‘way of life' or a ‘complete system of life' encompassing all aspects of one's individual and social (and even political and economic) sphere. Like many other faiths, Islam could also be described as the remnants of a once great civilisation, a beautiful old vase that now consists of chards of various sizes that modern believers are struggling to put back together without cutting and injuring themselves or people around them.

Islamist:
Also called ‘Islamic fundamentalist', ‘extremist' or (my personal favourite, mainly because it sounds so hysterical) ‘Islamo-fascist'. The term generally is used to describe someone who believes Islam has a political dimension. Sometimes it also refers to someone holding extreme views and/or who engages in (or at least supports) violence or terrorism.

jaahil:
Used in Urdu to describe someone with no education, or someone uncivilised and bad-mannered.
Jaahil
is actually an Arabic word used in the Koran to describe idol-worshippers who lived during the time of the Prophet Muhammad.