Once Were Radicals (14 page)

St Andrews Cathedral was so clean and tidy, and Christian worship so much nicer and friendlier. Our local Surry Hills mosque may have looked brand new on the outside, but inside was a different story. Each year, we would go for the annual general meeting and election for the committee of the mosque. Each year there would be arguments and fights over who would lead to the point where security guards had to be posted at the mosque entrance.

We never had imams who could speak English. The people who managed the mosques seemed completely disinterested in whether we—the young people—learned or understood Islam. Instead, they were more interested in getting imams from overseas who never spoke to us except to scold us for making too much noise in the mosque.

Islam just wasn't a religion with anything in English. The Koran seemed too jumbled and in no particular order. The few books that were available in English were printed on cheap paper and contained numerous spelling and grammatical errors. Islam as we had learned it was so alien to our lives in Australia.

When Indians adopted Christianity, they wore European clothes. Even Indo-Pakistani Christian women wore Western clothes. Other South Asian kids also wore Western clothes, even if our mums insisted on wearing
shalwar kameez
or saris. My parents moved to the Christian West for a better life. The Jesus Club was the richest club in town and its membership fee only required you to believe in something. In return, you would be saved both here and after you die. The Allah Club involved fighting wars and reciting things.

By the time I was in secondary school, I wanted to join the St Andrews choir. Choral music and chapel services were like heavenly experiences. I imagined heaven to be like a big church hall with stained-glass windows and majestic organ music playing all the time. I wanted to be part of Allah's choir, and surely joining the world-class St Andrews choir would be a plus in the eyes of the heavenly choirmaster.

The other plus of joining the choir was that parents of choristers received a massive discount on their school fees. Mum was working overtime at the pharmaceutical factory just to pay school fees. I had no doubt she would agree to my going for an audition.

So one Tuesday afternoon, I went for an audition with the choirmaster Mr AC Deasey (or AC/DC as we used to call him in honour of a most ungodly heavy metal rock band). He heard me sing and said my voice was almost perfect. He then provided me with a letter setting out the time commitment expected of a chorister. There was also a spot for my parents to sign their consent.

I took the document home to show Mum. I thought she'd be happy that I was wanting to reduce her financial burden.

‘Mum, Mr AC/DC said I am good enough to sing in the choir. He just wants you to sign this paper.'

Mum responded in her usual bilingual (Urdu/Hindlish) manner. ‘Hmmm, allow me to read the document. Okay. Hmmm. I believe there will be a substantial commitment of time both before and after school.
It say here dhat yoo muss is-spend extra ten aavar veekli. How yoo do homevark?
When will you have time to revise for your examinations?'

‘Mum, I'll be able to manage.'

‘I have full confidence in your ability to manage study and choir, my son,
Yoo manij now. But vaat hapun ven do HSC?
How will you find time to revise to an extent sufficient to be enrolled in medicine? If only you could fulfil my dream and become a medical practitioner.
I vaant yoo be daakter!
'

At St Andrews, I got to know a completely different Jesus to the baby doll I saw in the state school passion play. Jesus was frequently mentioned as the Lamb of God, the one who was sent by God to die for our sins. I'd heard something about this at state school scripture classes, but it went in one ear and out the other. I felt the full force of this salvation formula one morning before my first high school exams in Year 7.

That morning is etched in my mind. Mum had psyched me up very hard, warning me that life would never be the same if I didn't come first in the class in each and every exam. With all these new extra kids coming into my class, there was more competition. I also had a gut feeling that I hadn't studied enough in order to come first as Mum expected. Hence, I needed all the help I could get, whether from Allah, Jesus or anyone else prepared to assist.

One of the Christian Fellowship coordinators noticed I was feeling down. He was a somewhat older boy in Year 10, and like many religious Christians I'd met he had a very gentle and soothing demeanour. He invited me to join another group of boys in a small prayer room near the chaplain's office. At first I wondered whether this was the first step down the slippery slope towards abandoning my ancestral religion. But it turned out that my fear of copping a thrashing from Mum for screwing up my exams exceeded any fear I had of Allah. Now I was so desperate that I decided to see if Jesus could be of some academic assistance. The Christian Fellowship coordinator could see that I was hesitant, but decided to try his luck again.

‘How about you join us for Christian fellowship? It's in the prayer room. We can all pray that your exams go well.'

‘But I don't want to arrive late for my exams. They're in half an hour.'

‘It's okay. We only take around fifteen minutes. Hardly anyone turns up, so we'll probably finish early.'

In fact there were so many boys in the room that there was hardly any space left to sit. The room was of octagonal shape with benches lining the walls upon which boys would sit in a circle. We somehow all squeezed in as one boy read some verses from the Gospel of John. The verses ended with the famous verse: ‘For God so loved the world that He gave His only Son that whosoever should believe in Him would not die but enjoy everlasting life.' We then went around the room, each person saying a prayer. That was when I realised why the room was so packed out.

‘Dear Lord, please help me in my exams.'

‘Heavenly father, I fear I haven't prepared enough for my exams. Please help me.'

‘Allah, please! I need to come in the top three or Mum and Dad will be angry!'

‘Jesus Christ! Help me!!'

After the last person said his prayer for examination success, there was a resounding and unanimous ‘amen'. The most senior boy there then opened the floor for discussion. Now feeling a little more secure about the exams, I wanted to discuss comparative religion. It would be the first of many such discussions.

‘I have a question. You know how we are taught that if you believe in Jesus you go straight to heaven, right?'

‘Yes, that's right, Irfan. If you believe that Christ died for your sins, you are guaranteed salvation.'

‘Well, does it matter how bad the sins you commit are?'

‘No, it makes no difference. You are still saved.' ‘

Does it matter how many sins you do?'

‘No.'

‘So does that mean that a murderer who believes Jesus died for his sins will go to heaven?'

‘Yes. You can kill millions like Hitler did and still be forgiven.'

I'd heard Hitler being mentioned on TV documentaries, but this was the first time I heard that he had killed so many people. I soon learned to regard Hitler as the epitome of evil. Still, this was no time to dwell on twentieth-century German history. I needed answers to my current doubts.

‘But doesn't that just make people more likely to kill and hurt people and sin more easily without feeling guilty?'

‘I'll ask the chaplain and get back to you.'

The idea of a loving God who sends his son to die for us so that we could sin as much as we liked certainly seemed more appealing than following a religion that involved getting beaten with a stick just to learn to read a ‘foreign' book. The Christian God did seem a God of love, even if His way of showing that love (killing His own son) seemed a little odd.

We had a major service in the Cathedral at the beginning of each term. In the Term 3 service in Grade 8, a number of boys had decided to take communion while others were going through a process of ‘confirmation'. Among them was a good friend Jay, who had joined St Andrews in my Grade 7 class after winning a scholarship. Jay and I became good friends through our common involvement in debating, an activity at which, at this stage, he was far superior to me.

Jay was sitting next to me at the service. He told me that I could also undergo a confirmation, and that this would be the same as becoming born again. Jay could tell I was very interested in Christianity, and I'd often confide in him some of the silly things I saw in Islam. I was now really tempted to join him in communion. I asked him what was involved. He told me I would eat some bread and drink some wine. I didn't mind the bread bit, but drinking wine worried me. Mum had always warned me that drinking even a small amount of alcohol would earn me lots of
gunna
, and the angel on my left shoulder would be busy and I would go to hell for a long time. I wondered
whether even Jesus's crucifixion was enough to wipe out so much
gunna
.

I resisted the temptation on this occasion. When it came to me and Christianity, things went downhill from there.

Quite a few of my new friends who had joined the school in Year 7 became involved in the Christian Fellowship. They used to talk about an American preacher named Billy Graham who ran huge meetings called ‘crusades'. People would go to these gatherings, and many became ‘born again'. Then they would earn the kind of unlimited forgiveness I was promised at my first Christian fellowship.

I never told Mum the fundamental doubts I was having about Islam. Then one day she found a Bible hidden in the bathroom window sill behind the toilet. Mum had been trying to get me out of the habit of reading in the bathroom for months. It was a habit I had picked up from my father, who spent sometimes half an hour reading the
Sydney Morning Herald
. She wasn't so much wondering why I was reading the Bible—she knew I had to do assignments for Divinity that involved reading the scripture—but rather why I showed so much disrespect to the book as to be reading it whilst sitting on the toilet!

This lack of respect may have also alerted Mum to the fact that I was going through a religious transformation. By now, I had my doubts about the Bible and indeed a range of issues fundamental to my proposed conversion to Christianity. In fact, I was having doubts about this Bible in particular.

I could tell by the nervous way in which the Christian youth leader answered my question that Christian teachings weren't beyond some forensic questioning. These doubts surfaced again when the school instituted a new rule that each boy was to purchase a special Good News Bible from the school's uniform department, then located around the corner from the canteen. I generally only went to the uniform department when I had to buy new trousers, a new boater or school socks. But now, I had to stand in a long queue to buy my special edition Good News Bible bound in a hard cover with the St Andrews school crest on it containing the Latin words
Via crucis, via lucis
(the way of the cross is the way of light). When I finally made it to the front of the queue, I was told the Bibles costed more than I had in my pocket (around $15).

I went home and asked Mum for $15 to purchase a Bible. She had other plans. That weekend, she went to a second-hand store and purchased a hardcover Revised Standard Version Bible that was published in 1952 and whose wafer-thin pages had that gorgeous old book smell. I was quite angry as I had specifically written down on a piece of paper the words Good News Bible which she had completely ignored. Like a true Indian mum, she went for the cheaper option.

At the next Divinity lesson, I prayed to God that the chaplain didn't see my Bible. As luck would have it, we were reaching the end of Christ's life when he was being crucified, resurrected and then ascended to sit on a throne to the right of God. It was now my turn to be crucified as Rev Alex addressed me in front of the whole class.

‘Yusuf, turn to the last chapter of the Gospel of Mark and read the final six verses.'