Once Were Radicals (9 page)

Among South Asian Muslims, the word ‘purdah' is used to describe strict segregation between men and women in conservative and traditional Muslim communities. As mentioned earlier, ‘purdah' literally means curtain, and in practice was a kind of social snobbery. Its religious justification was found in the practice of restricting the Prophet's wives to speaking from behind a curtain.

Purdah isn't as absolute a form of segregation as the harem scenes in Hollywood movies make out. Muslim jurists agree Muslim women needn't worry about absolute segregation or covering their hair in the presence of their fathers, husbands, brothers and certain other male relatives. Most observant Australian Muslims don't practise purdah, preferring the views of religious authorities who interpret the Koran and other sources to read that women leaving their homes need not cover their face and hands.

Jamaat women emulated the Prophet's wives by wearing a face veil when going outside their homes. Others would stay at home altogether and would not appear before men other than certain male relatives. This explained why Mum's Jamaati aunt would only speak to my dad from behind a screen, and would not enter a room when he was around. My dad found this behaviour somewhat extreme and even offensive, especially when later she was quite happy to appear in front of me when I was in my twenties.

Mum's aunt wasn't always with the Jamaat. Her late husband was a successful businessman, and while he was alive, they lived for many years in the United Kingdom. Hence, Mum's first cousins all spoke fluent English. Mum also showed me pictures of her aunt as a young, beautiful and fashionably dressed woman who, like many middle-and
upper-class Pakistani women, would walk around in public unveiled.

In fact, it was only after her husband passed away that Mum's aunt felt drawn to religion. Like many conservative upper-class people, she was attracted to the ideas of Maududi.

We always understood our stay in Pakistan to be temporary. We knew that eventually we would be moving on and returning to Australia. But for the next year or so, ours was to be a nomadic existence. That overseas trip left lasting impressions on all of us.

After spending almost a year in Pakistan (it was actually only six months, but it felt like a year!), we spent a week in London and Paris before arriving in Princeton, New Jersey, where Dad was spending his sabbatical.

Because my parents strictly enforced the rule that we were not allowed to speak English in their presence, I became so saturated with Urdu that I had to re-learn how to read and speak English.

I was enrolled in a local school and another culture shock was in store for me. For starters, there was no uniform. Imagine the reaction I received when I turned up on the first day at school wearing a Pakistani school uniform and an embroidered skullcap. I soon realised this wasn't exactly the College of Success, so the next day, I wore ordinary Western clothes.

In the playground, I noticed other kids wearing embroidered skullcaps. Feeling a sense of affinity with them, I struck
up a conversation with a rather large lad whose nickname was ‘King Kong'.

‘So, are you learning to read the Koran?'

‘Yes, I have a man with a big beard come over every afternoon to teach me the Torah.'

‘Korah? It's called the Koran. Do you read it from right to left?'

‘Yeah, of course!'

‘Do you have a big party when you've finished reading it?'

‘Yeah, we get lots of presents too.'

‘We don't get presents in Pakistan. We get money instead.'

King Kong and his friends wouldn't eat food from the canteen. Once I went with King Kong and his mum (or rather, his ‘mom') shopping. Kong's mom wore a small headscarf, and she made a point of showing me which aisles to point out to my mum. When I did this, Mum told me that the food sold in these aisles had no pork in it. As such we Muslims and Jews could eat from there, even if there was pork everywhere else in the supermarket.

I could understand about Muslims eating from there. But who were these people called Jews? I assumed King Kong and his friends were Muslims, just like me. They all wore embroidered caps and had men with big beards teach them to read a book from right to left. Mum had to give me another lesson on religious differences. She reminded me of the family that ran what was then Sydney's only Indian spice shop on Bondi beach.

‘Dhey J'wish peepul, just like yor firrend King Kong.'

‘No they aren't. They're Muslim. They wear a
topi
just like we do. And King Kong has a
molvi
come to his house to read the Koran.'

‘Hee not lurn Kooraan. He lurn
Thauraat
. It diffurunt book.'

All these years, I presumed that kind old lady who gave me free ice creams at the Bondi spice shop belonged to the same religion as me. I assumed that anyone who spoke and looked and ate like us were us. Even after Mum explained that the ‘J'wish' were different, I still thought of them as virtually the same. Mum never tried to dispel that thinking.

Growing up in Sydney and Princeton surrounded by people who wore skullcaps (especially on ceremonial occasions) led me to regard Jews as brothers-in-faith. It was only years later, when I attended my first Muslim youth camp, that I was first exposed to anti-Semitism.

Our family returned to Australia in 1977. I went back to my old Ryde East Public School where once again, I felt like an outsider. There were no
madrassa
kids and no friendly Jewish kids. I couldn't just go to a school friend's house and assume his mom … woops, sorry … mum wouldn't serve me a ham sandwich.

But worst of all, I now had extra reasons to feel like an outsider. It wasn't just a case of having brown skin, chubby appearance and a mum who wore clothes that made hippy-chicks jealous. I now also had to contend with taunts about my thick New Jersey accent and a strong aversion to school uniforms. The kids would laugh at my multi-coloured
clothes and my mispronunciation of words like ‘girrl' and ‘worrld'. I had to re-learn the Australian accent, not to mention the rules of cricket and rugby league.

My parents' social circle was reduced because many of our old South Asian family friends had moved interstate or overseas. In fact, we had more friends from Pakistan, and most of them were distinctly Muslim (those months in Pakistan made me more capable of figuring out the difference between Muslim and non-Muslim South Asians). A simple reason for this was that there were more South Asians living in Sydney, and so people now mixed more with their own kind. But the definition of ‘own kind' among South Asians was no longer as universal as it once was. We did still spend time with some of our regular South Asian Hindu, Sikh and Catholic friends, but the change was marked.

My parents resumed their fascistic language regime which involved us not being allowed to speak English at home. This time, the regime was extended to my not being allowed to speak English to my parents at all. It was as if speaking to them in any language other than Urdu was an insult.

My linguistic education included a regular regime of Bollywood movies. Almost every Sunday, Mum would load me and my two siblings in the car and drive us to the Footbridge Theatre at Sydney University. There, we would join other South Asians for some overly spicy vegetarian samosa and a three- to four-hour musical that generally had the same plot as the one we saw last Sunday. More intriguingly, the different actresses all had the same singing voice. And when the men fought, their blows never seemed
to connect despite making some rather dramatic
tishun
-type sounds.

Mum had a cassette player installed in her car. She used this device to torture her children by forcing them to listen to Hindi film songs and more exotic (and indeed repetitive) Urdu
ghazal
(classical poetic songs). Mum would then test us on what message the singers were telling us through their highly nasalised voices.

With Indian film songs, it was fairly easy. When they weren't singing ‘la la la la laaah' and ‘hm hm hm hm hmmmm', the singers were lecturing us on how they had either completely lost the plot in love or completely lost it from losing love. The
ghazal
were a different kettle of fish altogether. In these classical songs, the singer would often spend a few minutes just clearing his or her throat by melodiously singing ‘aaaaaaah' to the sound of a harmonium and possibly even gentle tabla (the Indian equivalent of bongo drums). Once the singer's throat reached the requisite level of clarity, he or she would tell us how much they had completely lost the plot in love or losing love.

It seemed that Indians were fixated with romance and love. Yet all these songs and movies were about how destructive love was. The films showed couples not being allowed to marry each other notwithstanding their extreme love. Instead, they had to marry someone their parents approved of, even if it drove them crazy enough to sing God-awful songs.

What confused me even more was that all my Aussie friends told me how their parents fell in love and then married. Australia was such a rich country full of married
couples still madly in love. Meanwhile, India and Pakistan were full of poor people and religious teachers wielding big sticks. But where was the love? No wonder they're so poor.

To make matters worse, Mum taught me that there was this thing called adultery. She said it was a terrible sin, one of those sins given the label of
haraam
and which God rarely forgave. I wasn't sure exactly what adultery was. It reminded me of a trip we took to Las Vegas when we were overseas. We were stopped at a red light, and I looked out the window to the neon sign of a cinema. The sign read ‘Adult movies'. I was confused and sought the advice of my elders.

‘Dad, what are these adult movies?'

‘Son, you shouldn't worry about them right now. Wait until you are a little older,' Dad replied.

‘Okay, Dad. So what you're saying is that I can come back to watch adult movies when I'm an adult.'

For some reason Dad laughed while Mum was most upset. Now, many months after this incident, she was warning me of something that sounded similar.

‘Adulturry vairry bad
gunna
[sin]. It
haraam
!'

‘Mum, what is adultery? Is it something like adult movies?'

‘Adulturry iz lowe before marrij.'

Love before marriage? Now I was totally confused. Indian movies were full of stories about love before marriage. But I couldn't watch American movies showing the same thing until I became an adult. And even more confusing was that I wasn't allowed to love someone before marrying them.
This proved particularly troubling when I fell in love for the first time in my teens.

Part of our struggle in returning to Australia involved Mum having to find work. Despite holding a Masters degree and many years' experience in office management, Mum was satisfied with a job as a process worker.

Mum was embarrassed to socialise with Anglo-Australians, whom she would refer to as
gori
(white woman). At the time, I thought it was because Mum saw them as culturally impure in some way. In fact, it was because Mum was embarrassed about speaking English with a thick Indian accent.