Once Were Radicals (23 page)

Imam
also had excerpts from the speeches and writings of other writers whose names I noted. One famous name was Murtaza Mutaherri, who I found out was close to Khomeini and was murdered just prior to the revolution. It seemed that the Shah of Iran, who had been opposed by Mutaherri, had in fact been an evil dictator. The Shah's legacy of torture chambers and piles of skulls was now being published in overseas newspapers (such as
Le Monde
and the
Guardian
) but hadn't quite filtered into Australia.

One day, I took my copy of
Imam
to school. I'd mentioned it to our debating master (who was also my English teacher for a short time), an Englishman named Mr Cox. I felt quite proud of the fact that my English teacher was a real Englishman! Mr Cox used to enjoy having political discussions with me, and he'd often talk to me about this strange thing called ‘Christian socialism'. He imagined that the Iranian revolutionary experiment was a kind of Islamic socialism.

Mr Cox asked if he could borrow the magazine, and promised to return it the next day. Unfortunately he lost the magazine, which upset me a great deal as it was the only one I had. For some reason, I suspected some intrigue on Mr Cox's part, and imagined he must have handed my copy to some James Bond-type spy character who would
come in the middle of the night and interrogate me. I never quite trusted Mr Cox after that. It was a hysterical way of thinking, but we were living in times of hysteria and paranoia about a secret ‘them' who ‘we' assumed were out to destroy ‘us'. Not much has changed.

While Mr Cox was a huge fan of Christian socialism, the Divinity teacher Rev Alex's politics seemed to be in the opposite direction. He was a huge fan of a group called the Festival of Light, which taught that God's law should play a role in politics and government.

During one class, Rev Alex explained to us Jesus's saying about rendering to Caesar what is owed to Caesar and to God what is owed to God. The impression I got from Rev Alex's explanation was that we shouldn't take this idea all the way. He often said that God had to play a role in social and political spheres.

In Year 11, Rev Alex and Mr Martin arranged for us to view a series of videos featuring an eccentric-looking philosopher named Dr Francis Schaeffer. The series was called
How Should We Then Live?
and our entire year would watch this in the school amphitheatre. Mr Martin would provide an introduction to each episode and explain to us the various stages of ancient, medieval and modern history and culture that were being discussed.

Rev Alex later told us that Dr Schaeffer's ideas were being implemented in groups like the Festival of Light in the United Kingdom and Australia, and the Moral Majority in the United States. One thing I remember Schaeffer discussing in the series was this contemporary diseased
thinking called ‘secular humanism' which grew out of that period of European history called the Enlightenment. Schaeffer left me with an extremely negative view of the French Revolution, which he said was characterised less by liberty and more by the liberal use of guillotines.

Dr Schaeffer seemed totally disillusioned with contemporary Western thought and philosophy. He wasn't just concerned with the Bible and theology (though he did often quote from the Bible) but also with history, art, science, education and a range of other subjects. His basic claim was that, by removing God and biblical ethics and values from the social and political equation, Western civilisation was facing an abyss as it nears the end of the twentieth century. Secularism and humanism combined may have produced material wealth, but it had also given us a general sense of meaninglessness, not to mention two world wars and numerous acts of genocide.

This was a compelling message which matched many of the ideas of Maududi that I had studied at home. However, there were some differences. Schaeffer only discussed European history, and mentioned little or nothing about the Middle East or Asia. I was reading various books sent by Naani Amma that mentioned the great strides Muslims had made in science, art and philosophy at a time when Europeans were still in the Dark Ages. At school, we had only touched briefly on this in Year 8 history when we studied the impact of the Crusades on Europe.

The biggest problem I saw with Schaeffer's approach was that it could only be implemented in a very general way. Each time Rev Alex would talk about how our laws and politics had to reflect biblical values, I would ask him
how this should specifically be done. What sort of legal and economic and other systems should we have in place?

Maududi and Muhammad Qutb spoke about Islamic law, Islamic economics and the Islamic political system. Qutb's work contained specifics on how Islamic teachings could directly influence economics and even literature and film. It seemed to me then that the basic problem Schaeffer's vision had was that he didn't have enough to work with—as in, Christianity simply didn't have a legal and political tradition to refer to. And what little tradition it had in the Old Testament had been deemed unnecessary thanks to Christ's death and resurrection. Christians might end up having heaven in heaven, but their individual and social lives would be a kind of blind hell where they would try to find their way from avoiding one fire to finding and avoiding the next.

In contrast to Schaeffer, Qutb, Maududi and other theorists and practitioners of what became known as the ‘Islamic movement' did have these traditions to refer to. Christ's example only lasted thirty-three years, of which we had very little in the New Testament compared with the numerous detailed biographies of the Prophet Muhammad available. These biographies outlined his social, political and economic policies in establishing the world's first Islamic state in Medina in the seventh century.

I was convinced by Schaeffer's logic and by his rejection of secular humanism. I was too young to understand how inherently silly it was to reject an entire legal and political tradition before even bothering to study it in any systemic fashion. If anyone was influential in leading me down the path of theocratic and political Islam, it was an eccentric
twentieth-century American Christian theologian! Of course, none of this thinking took into account the masses of juristic, philosophical and political work undertaken within the Eastern Orthodox and pre-Reformation Catholic tradition, nor does it take into account the work of modern ‘liberation theology'. But then our Divinity teachers weren't in the business of promoting non-Protestant Christianity any more than many Sunni imams in those days were in the business of exposing me to Shia theology, law and politics. Just as many Sunni imams would curse Ayatollah Khomeini from the pulpit, it wasn't unknown for certain Divinity teachers to suggest that the beast ‘666' in the Book of Revelation (i.e. the Antichrist) was none other than the Pope himself!

No doubt many of you will be reading this and imagining that my thought processes were extremely simplistic. Some Christian readers might argue that I had misunderstood Schaeffer, and some Muslim readers will say that I misconstrued Maududi. Both judgments are quite probably correct. In writing this book, I have deliberately chosen not to re-read Maududi or watch or read Schaeffer's
How Should We Then Live?
, and have instead focused on what I recall of the impact of both men's work on my own thinking back in Senior High School in 1986 and 1987.

I thought long and hard about these issues, and discussed them with some of my more religious uncles. Uncle Asif had himself started reading Qutb's book and felt quite empowered by it. Uncle QAA had studied Maududi's work extensively in its original language—Urdu—and recommended I speak with my mum about it. I did. Mum's response?

‘Irfan, I honestly believe you should cease wasting your time thinking about such esoteric matters. If anything, focus on your prayers. I am disturbed that you sleep through your morning prayer.
Yoo must do fajr
nemaaz
and dhen is-studee Maath or Phizeek.
'

The Australian Federation of Islamic Councils (AFIC) was a body dominated by middle-aged men who had poor English-language skills and had little understanding of how young Australian-born and bred Muslims thought. AFIC spokesmen would pay lip-service to the idea that youth were the future, yet the reality of AFIC's operations showed that the future never arrived because AFIC operatives were too lost in the past.

AFIC was an umbrella representative body of State and Territory Islamic Councils which themselves were umbrella bodies of various mosque societies. In the main cities where most Muslims lived—Sydney and Melbourne—mosques were divided along ethnic and linguistic lines. Imams were employed to deliver sermons and talks in the language spoken by first-generation migrant members of the society which owned and managed the mosque.

At the same time, AFIC did hold national Muslim camps for young people from across the country. However, it seemed to me that most of those who attended were the kids, nephews and nieces of various officials of the Islamic industry. Still, Dad himself had once been part of that industry—he served as first secretary of the Islamic Society of NSW, the body which built and now manages the King Faisal Mosque in Surry Hills. Dad only stayed for twelve months and then resigned. The only time of year he ever went to that mosque was for the
Eid al-Fitr
prayers to commemorate the end of Ramadan, the closest thing we had to Christmas.

My approach to senior organisations like AFIC, our NSW Islamic Council and mosque societies was influenced by a mixture of the idealism of more ‘Islamic' uncles and the cynicism of Dad and others towards the Islamic industry. Uncle QAA and his colleagues insisted that the only way to solve the problems and clean out the rot in the Islamic establishment was for young blood to step forward. Dad and his colleagues insisted that these bodies were beyond help, and that our involvement in them would lead to our own disillusionment after having wasted precious years doing the dirty work of others when we should be studying hard, getting good grades and working on our careers.

Many of my elders who shared Dad's sensible and conventional wisdom could not quite understand what it was like to navigate and negotiate your identity in an environment where you looked different, where no one could even pronounce your name and where it was easy to feel marginalised. A large number of my friends from Indo-Pakistani background walked away from both their
culture and religion. Others spent much time in their parents' ‘home country', struggling to practise a culture they didn't understand and ending up almost completely confused.

The uncles could never provide us with activities and gatherings that would keep us within their cultural and religious tent. So it was only a matter of time before we organised our own events. After attending my first camp at Harrietville in 1985, I joined the Islamic Youth Association (IYA). I was happy to hear that my Turkish supervisor Refat was elected IYA President. That same year, Refat married a Turkish-Australian girl whose father was a prominent writer in Turkey. Most of the kids from the camp went to the wedding, and I was most upset that Mum and Dad made me go to some Pakistani uncle's house instead.

I looked up to Refat as a kind of religious leader, though Refat never regarded himself as such. He never claimed to be a sheikh and never put on a pious act, even if he did lead our weekly
usra
(discussion circle) at Lakemba where we would read and discuss an English translation of the same Maududi book of village sermons I read when I was younger.

The IYA was a place where I felt I could grow in my Islam. This was a more authentic Islam, less focused on South Asian culture and more on actual religious texts. After my first camp, I didn't mind that the IYA was less interested in changing the world and ridding it of neo-
jahiliyah
(ignorance or barbarism, especially pre-Koranic Arabia). It was enough for me to feel part of a group giving young Muslims somewhere they could socialise with other Muslims of all different backgrounds.

I'd talk about how much fun I had at IYA events to my Indo-Pakistani friends to the point where one of them became sick of hearing me blab on and on about the IYA. ‘Irfan, I reckon the reason you talk about the IYA so much is because it really stands for the “Irfan Yusuf Association”.'

I missed out on the 1986 camp at the end of Year 11. This camp was organised by Uncle QAA, and it had a more intellectually rigorous program that I would have enjoyed. The education program consisted of a thick set of readings from some names I had familiarised myself with at the university library and in the collections sent by Naani Amma in Karachi. The booklet included articles and book chapters from ideologues of a range of Islamic movements and parties of various Muslim-majority countries, including Maududi, Shariati and Mutaherri, Syed and Muhammad Qutb from the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, and also various Western writers such as Ziauddin Sardar. My next camp was in 1987, after finishing my Year 12 exams.