Once Were Radicals (19 page)

Then there was another book I started reading. It was by a man named Muhammad Qutb and was called
Islam: The Misunderstood Religion
. I was intrigued by the title, as well as by the author's claims that many Muslims had also misunderstood Islam. The book had been sitting in
our library at home for many years and was in such poor condition that it was missing a front cover.

Qutb taught that Islam was not just a religion. Rather, it was a divinely ordained system of living. Islam was a system that governed all areas of individual and collective life including economics, politics, family relations and law. Qutb admitted that his book was about defending Islam from its critics, and for me it provided confident and mostly logical answers to questions about such things as polygamy and capital punishment. It also answered questions about gender segregation and a range of other issues, though I was put off by some of the sweeping generalisations (e.g. that women were more emotional and less rational beings) and the embarrassing spelling and grammatical errors.

I felt empowered by this knowledge and spoke to Mum about all these wonderful things I had learned. Far from being impressed, Mum impressed upon me the need to read more about the Koran and Islamic worship, and she handed me a book of
hadith
.

Although a short book, I found it difficult to understand. One
hadith
concerned the Angel Gabriel dressing up as a traveller and approaching the Prophet in the presence of his companions to ask questions. These were basic questions like ‘What is Islam' and ‘What is
Iman
' (
Iman
= faith). Then there was another
hadith
that spoke about the Day of Judgment. It mentioned three people who had done really good things. One had died defending Muslims, another had been wealthy and given lots away in charity while the third was learned and had memorised the Koran. All three were sentenced to hell.

I was really troubled by this
hadith
and asked Mum to explain it to me. Mum said that only God knows who gets to heaven and who doesn't, and so we shouldn't feel proud about the good things we do because we could still end up in hell. I found this notion—that even good people could go to hell—really troubling. Mum could see this, and so she gave me another book by Maududi. It was one of sermons called
Khutbaat
(literally ‘sermons') which were delivered in the early 1940s to villagers in a region of Punjab called Pathankot. She gave me an English translation of
Khutbaat
which was titled
Fundamentals of Islam
. I found this book quite easy to read, and soon learned about the significance of various acts of worship such as
nemaaz
and fasting (which we called
roza
). However, the book also had a chapter on another word I had seen used on the news—jihad.

I knew of jihad as a war the Afghans were fighting to rid their country of nasty Russian communists. I assumed it must have been a special word used in the Afghan language to describe war against communism. However, Maududi taught that jihad was in fact any struggle, whether using arms or one's pen or even one's will. Hence, fighting one's desire to commit a sin is a form of jihad. Still, the most important jihad was to struggle against one's enemies. These enemies could even be other Muslims.

Maududi taught that the ultimate task of a Muslim was to establish God's order on the earth. This meant establishing Islam in every area of one's personal and social life. Both Maududi and Qutb spoke about the Islamic ‘state' and the Islamic ‘system'. Islam was no longer just about beliefs and scriptures, or about going to the mosque. Rather, Islam was
about power, who held it and whom God wants to hold it on this earth among human beings.

Jihad was the struggle to establish this system. However, Maududi insisted it was not to be a military war unless the war was imposed by outsiders and Muslims needed to defend themselves.

God demanded obedience, and not just in the mosque or on the
nemaaz
rug. Maududi's books spoke of Islam as an ‘ideology'. The struggle to establish Islam is largely an ideological struggle against other competing systems such as socialism, capitalism, liberalism and democracy. The Islamic ideology had much in common with these ideologies, but Islam wasn't made up by men but was revealed to men by God. Hence, Islam was more balanced and consistent with human nature.

So how did jihad work in practice? Maududi spoke about the jihad fought during the time of the Prophet Muhammad. I recalled some of these battles from a movie I once saw called
The Message
. Maududi taught that all battles fought by the Prophet were defensive. Muslims fought because they were unjustly invaded. They had no choice but to defend themselves, their families, their lives and their properties. If they fought and died, they would reach paradise without any judgment or reckoning. A few minutes' or hours' pain on the battlefield in exchange for eternity in paradise with God. It sounded like a terrific deal. And it was available in Afghanistan, with full backing from the United States and the West.

Mum had no idea I was toying with these notions. She was too busy convincing herself that my being Dux of Year 10 meant I would end up with enough marks in Year
12 to satisfy her (as opposed to my) aspirations. That, of course, meant studying medicine. She kept horrifying me with motherly (and in my mind, overly surgical) terms of endearment such as
kaleje ka tukra
(piece of her heart), and made sure every Indian and Pakistani (by now I knew the difference) aunty in Sydney knew the difference.

Mum's ultimate gift to me was that she sent me to my first Muslim youth camp. Dad was appalled with her decision, as she didn't allow my sisters to go despite the fact that their best friend Lubna used to go. However, Mum dug in her heels and paid the camp attendance fee herself.

This camp would be the beginning of my discovery of the Muslim
ummah
, a word I learned at that camp but whose meaning I've found hard to explain ever since. In my mind, the
ummah
represented the religious glue that sort-of kind-of binds Muslims across ethnic, racial, linguistic and other boundaries. Or at least it's supposed to.

My Uncle Asif worked at the offices of the Australian Federation of Islamic Councils, who organised the camp. He picked me up and we arrived at the AFIC headquarters around an hour late. I was scared we might miss the bus, but he assured me everything would be okay and that Muslims were never on time.

Three hours after we arrived at the AFIC headquarters, he was proved correct. There were people of various ages there, including my Uncle QAA and Dr Wang. What struck me was the enormous variety of ethnicities represented there, groups that I never imagined would learn and worship together. I met Muslims from Sri Lanka, South
Africa, Albania, Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan and even New Zealand. There were also the usual suspects—Pakistanis, Indians, Lebanese, Egyptians, Turks, Indonesians and Yugoslavs. It was a veritable United Nations.

When we finally boarded the bus four hours after schedule, Uncle QAA asked me how many
surah
s of the Koran I had memorised. I had never heard this word
surah
as a way of dividing the Koran, and assumed he must have been talking about a thirtieth part of the Koran which we called
sipara
. When I was attending
madrassa
in Pakistan in 1976, I had memorised two entire
sipara
s, but I had since forgotten them. I felt very guilty about this as Mum had warned me that forgetting bits of the Koran would earn me plenty of negative spiritual currency and may land me in hell for a while.

Dr QAA told me that the camp participants would be divided into two sections—beginners and advanced. This division would be based on a test which had an oral component (reciting twenty
surah
s from memory) and a written component testing our knowledge of Islam. He said that I should be able to pass the written component, but that I had to memorise at least twenty
surah
s. He explained that a
surah
was different to a
sipara
. Whilst all
sipara
s were of the same length, a
surah
could be as short as three verses or even longer than a
sipara
. Every
surah
of the Koran (except one) began with the same sentence which in Arabic sounded like
bismillah hir-rahman ir-rahim
and which meant words to the effect of ‘in the name of God who is most gracious and most merciful'. Mum had taught me to say this formula (we called it the
Bismillah
) before doing anything, whether it be eating or drinking.
I only knew of it as a special spiritual formula to bless what we did.

I spent the entire bus ride memorising
surah
s (roughly translated as chapters) of the Koran. When we arrived at the camp, we all sat for the test. The questions were really basic, and I finished them in no time. I was sure I'd be in the advanced group, and was shocked when told that I would be in the beginners class. I asked for my marked exam, and saw that the person marking the exam had made several mistakes. I took my exam paper to Uncle QAA who immediately diagnosed the problem.

‘Irfan, you are using Urdu words instead of the Arabic originals. You described the five daily prayers as
nemaaz
when the proper word is
salaat
. You described fasting as
roza
when the proper word is
sawm
.'

‘But Uncle, these are the words Mum taught me. Was Mum wrong?'

‘No, she was not. It's just that her words aren't used in the Koran.'

Uncle QAA then issued the following ruling to camp administrators: ‘Put this mummy's boy in the advanced class.'

After arriving at the campsite, located in a gorgeous little Victorian town called Harrietville, I continued learning more new Arabic words. Not all of these words were fit to form part of the Koran. I became friends with a group of young Arab boys—Abdullah, Kamal, Faris and Bilal. Faris was Egyptian and the other three were Lebanese. Faris kept calling us
bayekh
, which isn't a nice way of describing someone. Soon enough, this word became Faris's nickname.

Kamal and I were of the same age, and enjoyed talking theology, whilst the rest of them just listened and occasionally spoke about their favourite musicians—Prince, Freddy Mercury and (in Bilal's case) Elvis Presley. Kamal wanted to be an engineer. He asked me what I wanted to be.

‘Mum wants me to be a doctor.'

‘But what do
you
want to be?'

‘Um, I'm not sure. A doctor, I guess.'

Kamal couldn't believe how much Mum had control over me, and began teasing me by referring to me as a ‘mummy's boy'.

Hardly anyone at the camp had difficulty pronouncing my name. Just about every Turk or Yugoslav (or ‘Yugo' for short) or South African had a cousin or uncle named Irfan. However, the Arabs did have trouble. Apparently my name sounded like an insulting description. There was another Pakistani boy named Arfeen who had the same problem. The first syllable of our names sounded like
bi'arrif
, an Arabic word meaning ‘he disgusts', and the Arabs kept getting Arfeen and I confused. Finally, one kid named Mamoun started referring to us as Bi'arrif-1 and Bi'arrif-2.

It was at this camp that I met someone whose ability to provide calm and rational explanations to even the most controversial religious issues reminded me of Yusuf Islam. Imam Fehmi was an interesting man. For a start, he had very fair skin and looked like an Anglo-Australian. He spoke fluent English with an ever so slight Lebanese accent. And he was somehow lucky enough to have the word imam as his surname. However, it sounded strange calling him Imam el-Imam. Instead, we just called him Sheikh Fehmi.

My new friend Kamal was like Sheikh Fehmi's understudy. Kamal would deliver the
azaan
(or call to prayer) over the microphone, and Sheikh Fehmi would lead us in
salaat
. By now I was getting used to calling this form of worship
salaat
(instead of
nemaaz
). We would perform
salaat
in congregation in straight lines facing Mecca, boys' lines at the front of the hall and girls' lines at the back. Then after we had completed the congregational
salaat
in a seated position, Sheikh Fehmi would turn around facing our lines and nod to Kamal, who would lead us in a special form of worship called
zikr
that involved the repetition of certain religious phrases, including possibly the most well-known Muslim prayer:
Allahu akbar
(meaning ‘God is always greater than all else').

Sheikh Fehmi taught us that normally we would perform the
salaat
five times a day. However, as we were travelling, God gave us concessions. This included joining the two prayers of the afternoon and evening respectively, meaning we would perform three prayers in total instead of five. After each
salaat
, Sheikh Fehmi would deliver a talk about some topic and would invite us to ask questions.