Once Were Radicals (15 page)

I started reading them out loud. Rev Alex looked at me curiously. ‘Yusuf, I told you to read the last six verses. What you've read isn't from the last six verses.'

‘Sir, these are the last six verses.'

‘No they aren't. The second last verse should read: “So then the Lord Jesus, after He had spoken to them, was taken up into Heaven and He sat down at the right hand of God”.'

‘Sir, I can't see it.'

Then Rev Alex said the words I had dreaded. ‘Show me your Bible, Yusuf.'

I passed over my Bible to him. The other kids could see it didn't have the right coloured cover and was without a school crest. So could Rev Alex, who looked at the page where the last few verses were and then addressed me in a rather stern and foreboding manner.

‘Yusuf, you heard what the headmaster said at assembly the other day. You know what the school rule is on Bibles. You've had days to buy the right Bible. Why have you brought this Bible?'

For some reason, I felt less fear and more defiance. I could see a chink in Rev Alex's theological armour, and I knew he couldn't cane me for exercising some religious freedom.

‘But sir, this is still a Bible. It is still the word of God, isn't it?'

‘That's not the point. The headmaster gave orders.'

‘Sir, are you telling me that the Bible I have is wrong? Why isn't it the word of God?'

‘Yusuf, see me after class.'

It is difficult to describe how elated I felt. It was a huge ego boost to feel like I had a reverend, who must have spent years studying the Bible and Christian doctrine, on the back foot about these important issues. After class, Rev Alex took me into his office and showed me a New Testament he had in the original Greek. He showed me that the verses missing from the main text of my Bible were in fact in the original Greek main text, but the main text took up one-third of the page, with the remaining two-thirds being alternative readings.

During this time, my father started spending extended periods doing teaching and consulting work overseas. In his absence, Mum started focusing more on our religious education. This wasn't at the expense of our Indian culture—we still had a rule that we were only allowed to speak Urdu at home, and we regularly went to the Footbridge Theatre at Sydney University to watch Indian movies on Sunday evenings. We also mixed with our usual Indian friends of all faiths.

At the same time, we started attending religious sessions with members of the Indian and Pakistani Muslim communities. Most of them lived in Sydney's northern suburbs, and their very middle-class Islam focused on outward ceremonial matters. They were also a very competitive mob, forever boasting to each other about their children's achievements in academia and sport. Religion (or at least kids reaching ceremonial religious milestones) was just another thing to boast about.

I was competing with another young Indian boy (with whom I shared my first name) to see who would be the first to complete reading the entire Koran in Arabic. Parents of a child who completed reading the Koran would then organise a party (known as a
khatm-i-Qur'an
) where the child would receive plenty of presents. After that, we only had to read the Koran at gatherings to commemorate someone's death.

I firmly believed that finishing the Koran meant not only reading but also memorising the text in Arabic. My mother insisted that I memorise each
sipara
(an Urdu word referring to a thirtieth part of the Koran) before moving onto the next
sipara
. As it turned out, Irfan the younger completed his reading some eighteen months before me. His party was a lavish affair, and I was jealous—not just at the presents he received but also at his boasting of having a better memory than me.

I later found out from his mother that Irfan Jnr had only read the text once from start to finish, not memorised it! I confronted Mum about this, and she admitted there was some element of misunderstanding (if not downright deception) involved. She promised I could have a
khatmi-Qur'an
after I'd read the text once from start to finish and gained a basic degree of fluency in reading. Within six months, I managed to finish the entire text and had my party.

The fierce competitiveness among these North Shore Muslims was even reflected at the party. Irfan Jnr turned up and boasted at how he'd beaten me by almost a year. I boasted that I'd be getting better presents than he. Sadly I was wrong.

The party started with me dressing up in fancy Indian clothes, including those embroidered slippers with the curly toes. I felt like the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan (the one who built the Taj Mahal) in one of those old Bollywood movies. Unfortunately the shoes were too small for me and their shape caused the leather to dig sharply into my feet. Wearing such painful shoes all the time might explain why Shah Jahan spent much of his time high as a kite on opium.

A Pakistani uncle named Sultan then sat me down in front of everyone and asked me to recite some Koran. I came to a verse which could have been recited in at least two ways. I recited it one way and the uncle started correcting an already correct recitation. A few of the Pakistani aunties started sniggering and whispering about how my mother didn't teach me properly.

The result of all this was a rather un-Islamic display of gossip and counter-gossip, with women taking sides between Mum and her detractors. My poor Uncle Sultan later telephoned and spoke to me. It was the first time an uncle had seen me as important enough to talk to at some length on the phone. Uncle Sultan was a true gentleman. He had not done anything wrong at all. He explained that he was just showing me an alternative way of reciting the same verse. It all sounded perfectly plausible and sensible, but his explanation didn't stop all the chatter.

Once I had completed my reading and gained some fluency in the Arabic text of the Koran, I discovered we had an English translation at home. It was a very old edition, and
had lost most of its cover. The paper was brownish in colour and many pages were ripped. It was published in Pakistan in the 1940s, and the translation was by one Molvi Muhammad Ali. Each page had two columns—one with the Arabic text and the other Molvi Ali's translation.

For me, this was a godsend. Finally I could understand the meaning of the Arabic text of a book I'd suffered so much pain and so much boredom to learn. Then one day some North Shore uncles told me that this translation was wrong and that Molvi Muhammad Ali wasn't a true
molvi
but rather belonged to a heretical sect. They showed me proof—that the publishers were from a group called the ‘Ahmadiyyah'. Their explanations all sounded like double Dutch to me. Ahmad was a common name in Indian circles. Mum told me to ignore these uncles and to study the English translation so that I could actually understand what the book was saying. She also promised to get Naani Amma in Pakistan to send more translations.

The Koran revealed some familiar personalities. I knew of these from the scripture classes I attended at school. The Koran made reference to people from the Bible—Moses, Jacob, Noah, Mary and Jesus. It even contained the entire life story of Joseph and his ultimate triumph over his brothers.

The story of Joseph was one of my favourites in scripture. The Koranic version of the story referred to him as ‘Yusuf'. I was always embarrassed by my surname which few teachers or classmates could pronounce properly. Having a strange name made me feel more isolated and alienated, and it was good to be able to use the ‘it's just another way of saying Joseph' comeback line.

I was pleased that the Koran referred to such well-known biblical figures. It gave me a sense of belonging, of knowing that my ancestral religious heritage wasn't so alien after all.

Mum had read me excerpts from the Urdu translation of the Koran during the last year or so when I was completing my Arabic reading. This gave me a glimpse of the power of the words. Mum also showed me how many words in the Arabic text were also used in Urdu and had virtually the same meaning. I always looked out for these words in the Arabic text, and this made me feel like I could understand at least some of what God was telling me in the book.

One day Naani Amma sent a huge parcel from Pakistan. Included were a bunch of Islamic books in both Urdu and English. There were books about Islamic history, sayings of the Prophet Muhammad and other more advanced topics like ‘law' and ‘ethics' and the ‘Islamic State'. Mum told me not to bother reading such books and to focus on the translations of the Koran.

Thankfully, Naani Amma had sent not just one translation but a large number of translations as well as commentaries. These included a rather Shakespearian ‘King James' translation by an English Muslim named Muhammad Marmaduke Pickthall.

An English Muslim? How could that be? I read the introduction and discovered that Pickthall had changed his religion. He was brought up a Christian but then went through a process of ‘conversion'. I knew it was possible to convert to Christianity. In fact, I was still contemplating such a conversion myself. Reading about Muhammad Pickthall
was the first time I learned that it was possible to convert to Islam. Up until then, I thought Islam was something some of us were born with and forced to carry around with us like a squashed fruit hiding in the bottom of your school bag.

The translation of the Koran that I found easiest to read, and which became my favourite, was that of former English civil servant Abdullah Yusuf Ali. This was first published in Lahore during the 1930s by Sheikh Muhammad Ashraf. This name became more familiar to me as quite a few books we used to get from Pakistan were published by him.

Mum was a rapacious consumer of TV news. She used to make us sit through one hour of what was then known as
Eyewitness News
on Channel 10. I'd have to put up with watching a fairly sanitised reporting of local and world events.

Certain conflicts figured prominently on the news and these affected my earliest impressions of various parts of the world. I knew that there were Muslims outside of South Asia, but I had little idea of a broader Muslim world, and no sense of affinity with Muslims from the Middle East, Africa or South East Asia.

Mostly, Arab Muslims were seen as a source of embarrassment, as people who had lost their culture and wore Western-style clothes whilst flirting with Soviet-style politics. In terms of losing their culture, Turks were a complete write-off.

The net effect of the incident with Mum and the Turkish woman at her work was that we regarded Arabs and Turks
as sinful uncultured drunkards who wanted to drown all Muslims in a sea of beer and communism. The fact that our ancestors had Turkish blood didn't seem to alter our perspective. I didn't see such judgments as inherently racist in the way I do now.

The other problem with Arabs was that they were rather violent. I fully swallowed the popular propaganda of the ‘Arab terrorist'. Palestinians were particularly nasty because they used to hijack planes and kidnap people. For some reason, they also tried to harm the poor Jewish people who had suffered so much for two thousand years and had finally managed to carve out a country in the middle of the desert. I never learned about Palestinian refugees or of the illegal Israeli occupation of Palestinian land. All I knew was that the PLO (the Palestine Liberation Organisation) were nasty terrorists who were shaming us all.