Hostility is ever-present and bewilders the ordinary followers of Australia’s fastest-growing religion. Margaret Simons meets the Muslims who want nothing more than that much-vaunted national ideal, a fair go.
They pray. It is spring. The air outside is warm and sweet but on their way to prayer these worshippers have encountered many bitter and difficult things – reminders of how intense, how complicated, it is to be a Muslim in Australia today.
There are bare-shouldered women in the street. The Koran insists on modesty. Around the corner a bank is advertising low-interest mortgages and high-interest term deposits. The getting or receiving of interest is against Islam.
Now the imam, Sheik Isse Musse, is telling his congregation about when the Prophet Muhammad came to Medina in AD622. Muhammad was still receiving the divine revelation from God, through the Angel Gabriel. These revelations were to become the Koran.
Traditionally sermons are in Arabic, but Sheik Musse speaks in English. There are so many nationalities in front of him. Australian Muslims come from more than 70 countries, and most of them are not Arabs. English is the language most likely to be understood.
A taxi driver has given up his place on a rank to be here. Office workers have taken a break not endorsed by their employers. Students are missing lectures. Most of the women wear headscarfs, but some don’t. The men are in overalls, smart suits or jeans. There is a four-year-old girl dressed in pink, with a lollipop in her mouth and her socks falling down.
Earlier in the week a talkback radio caller described Muslims as “human sewage”. The presenter did not contradict the caller. The tabloid newspapers are full of anti-Muslim articles. Even the more intellectual press is preoccupied with the talk of a clash of civilisations. Of secular modernism against Islamic fundamentalism. Of how Muslims supposedly resist modernism, and cannot assimilate.
“There is so much hostility it bewilders me,” says one Muslim woman, a computer operator in a call centre who has taken an unauthorised break to be at prayer. “I don’t recognise what these people say about me. The things they say Muslims are, I am none of these things.”
The human rights co-ordinator for the Islamic Council of Victoria, Bilal Cleland, says, “The media have to realise they may be contributing to the atmosphere for a pogrom to take place. They will attack our young girls first.”
Already, mosques have been burnt and vandalised, and Muslim women report they are regularly abused in the street. Some have had their headscarfs torn from their heads. In a Sydney shopping mall, one Muslim woman’s face was smashed into the floor. She was reportedly told by her attackers to “go home”, which is ironic. She is an Aborigine.
The news isn’t all bad. Islamic organisations have also been flooded with offers of help. Sheikh Fehmi Naji El-Imam, of Melbourne’s Preston mosque, is one of the longest-standing members of the Australian Muslim community. When he arrived from Lebanon in 1951, most Australians were benignly uninterested in Islam. Over the past year he has had “wonderful phone calls and beautiful correspondence. People saying ‘I hate what is happening, please give me something to do to help you’.”
Islam is the fastest-growing religion in Australia. According to the latest census figures, there are 281,578 Muslims, an increase of more than 80,000 since the 1996 census. Half of Australia’s Muslims live in Sydney. Melbourne is the next biggest Muslim centre, with about 30 per cent of the total.
The Australian Muslim population is quite different from that in many other Western countries. Most Muslims here are not of Arab ethnicity, although it is true that Lebanese is the largest single ethnic group, closely followed by the Turks. Nearly half Australian Muslims were born here. Other significant groups are Fijians, Indonesians, South-East Asians, Bosnians and Egyptians.
Islam has a strong ideology of the unity of all believers, but in reality Australian Muslims have brought with them an enormous range of cultural practices and understandings. The heart of religious society for most remains a local mosque or community association. Dealing with the diversity is one of the main challenges.
Ask “What is it like to be a Muslim?” and there is almost nothing that is true of everyone. Not all Muslims pray five times a day – some don’t pray at work but “catch up” at home – but for those who keep the regular prayer times (which take only a few minutes each) the experience punctuates their day. Bosses have to give permission, students have to be granted leave from lectures and tutorials.
Seyed Sheriffdeen – Sri Lankan-born, and now president of the Federation of Australian Muslim Students and Youth – rises in the early hours to pray with his family. The hours between the early prayer and going to work are his special time with his children. Sometimes the conversations are difficult. His eight-year-old daughter heard on the television that Islamic fundamentalists had killed people. “Is it true, Dad? Did we kill people?”
Aziza Abdel-Halim lived most of her life in Alexandria, Egypt, and worked in a prestigious girls’ college. In Australia she has been a school teacher and is now active in the Muslim Women’s National Network. She says prayer is “my island of peace in a troubled world”.
She finds that recently arrived Muslim women can be fearful of Australia because of the media focus on crime and promiscuity. They get the impression that Australia is a degenerate society. “They worry about letting their children go to friends’ birthday parties, and I have to say ‘Australian families care for their children. They have the same morals as us in this. Exactly the same.”‘
For Muslims not born here, all sorts of everyday things can be exotic. Muslim women traditionally are used to private areas for the women. Kitchens overlooking family rooms and dining areas are uncomfortably public. One woman interviewed for a Department of Immigration study by Samina Yasmeen, a senior lecturer in international politics at the University of Western Australia, said, “Most of the houses in Australia are practically windows”.
The same study countered some stereotypes. Out of 114 migrant Muslim women interviewed, only about 5 per cent had received no education. A third had received secondary education, and 45 per cent were tertiary-educated. Asked about their needs, the women put education at the top of the list, followed by employment, health care, safety, housing, recognition and acceptance and the availability of halal food.
A particularly Australian character of Islam is developing. Muslims described it to me as “no bullshit” or “very straight” or “egalitarian”. Abdullah Saeed, head of Islamic Studies at the University of Melbourne and an internationally respected expert on Islam, suggests that its characteristics include a focus on the heart of the religion, rather than the many cultural practices that have grown up in different countries.
Australian Muslims tend to be very clear about what the Koran does and does not say. Even Muslims in the street give sophisticated explanations about the way in which various phrases of the Koran should best be interpreted. Whether the Koran orders women to “obey” or “respect” their husbands, for example. It’s all in the translation. The Prophet said men and women were different, but equal.
The Prophet demanded that both men and women be educated. When the Taliban banned women from education, they acted against Islam, Australian Muslims will tell you. In a counter to the stereotype, a higher proportion of Muslim Australian women are attending university than Australian women in general, according to a recently published analysis of Australian Bureau of Statistics data by a University of Sydney academic, Christine Asmar.
Abdullah Saeed estimates the Islamic community could be divided roughly into equal thirds. First, there are the strict observers, who might even give up hope of owning a house because of the religious ban on mortgages and interest. Second, there are observers of only core requirements, such as prayer and fasting. Finally, there are non-observant “cultural” Muslims, whose relationship to their religion is similar to that of non-practising Catholics.
It’s child drop-off time at the Rissalah College in Haldon Street, Lakemba. Today is special. Students are dressed as characters from their favourite books. The hijabs, or headscarfs, of the girls are mixed with intimations of rabbit, princess and bear. The parents gather and chat in the same unselfconscious confirmation of community visible outside any Australian primary school.
By 9.30am most of the women in Haldon Street are wearing hijab and big loose-fitting coatdresses. They shop for fast food at the halal hot chicken shop, for meat at the halal butchers. They pass the travel agents advertising twice-weekly flights to Beirut. A women’s clothing store across the road displays coatdresses and headscarfs in complementary colour combinations. It is a street scene both exotic and very ordinary.
Half a dozen women are gathered in a Lebanese cafe, enjoying the coffee and sweet cakes. They agree to answer questions. Why do they wear hijab? Because Allah commanded it, says one. Because it is comfortable, says another. Because it is good to be modest. “Do your husbands make you wear it?” Their laughter in reply is loud enough to draw glances from the street.
Why are they laughing? It is partly the rudeness of my question. They are embarrassed for me. But as we talk it becomes clear that it is also because the idea of hijab as being to do with men is so ridiculous. It is a woman’s thing. Their identity. Their way of being.
Not all Muslim women wear hijab. Some have dropped it because it makes them so vulnerable to identification and abuse. Some – a minority – are reinterpreting the Koran. They take from it the key injunction to be modest and not to draw attention to oneself – not to sexualise the everyday. In the Australian context, some argue, ordinary Western dress achieves these aims better than hijab.
Yet sitting with them, in my ordinary Western dress, I catch the ghost of why it is that hijab can provoke such hostility. Surrounded by women showing only their faces and hands, I feel oddly naked. I can see that it would be possible to feel implicitly criticised. Even pitied. I am caught between the fear of offending, and the fear of being offended.
Very soon, however, we are talking of the most ordinary things. Our children. Television. Even where to get a good coffee.
So what about fundamentalism? What about extremism? Jamila Hussain, an Australian-born convert to Islam, lectures in Islamic law at the University of Technology, Sydney. She says the word “fundamentalism” is inappropriate. Many observant Muslims would describe themselves as fundamentalists, in that they adhere to the “fundamentals” of their religion. But she knows of no Australian Muslim who fits the more commonly understood definition of an extremist who advocates violence.
Anyone who searches the World Wide Web for information on Australian Muslims will quickly find the Islamic Youth Movement, which describes its aims as “reflecting the views of the Jihad stream amongst the Islamic movements” and “standing up to the Zionist-crusade assaults against Islam and Muslims”.
The movement in the past has published articles sympathetic to the Taliban. But the Islamic Youth Movement is difficult to find outside cyberspace. One leader of a mainstream Islamic organisation told me he had been asked by their head not to talk about them. Emails to their Web site went unanswered, and many telephone calls rang out, before finally a nervous-sounding young man replied and promised a return telephone call that never came.
Mainstream Islamic leaders speak about three groups they categorise as “extreme” or “rigid”. The first is purely religious, made up largely of young devotees who centre their life on the mosques, insist on traditional dress and eschew politics and media attention.
Other groups are political. The Liberation Party, or Hizb ut-Tahrir, is best known for vehement criticism of Muslim regimes. “They talk tough, so they’re popular among some people,” said one leader. “They often stand outside mosques on Fridays trying to distribute their literature, running into arguments with leaders who don’t approve of their message.”
The final group, the Wahabi Muslims, are anti-American and were Taliban sympathisers. Some are in favour of the establishment of an Islamic state, by violence if necessary. The Islamic Youth Movement is said to be “of the Wahabi school”. But according to Australian Muslim leaders, even the most vehement don’t advocate violence in Australia.
It is on the latter two groups that ASIO has been focusing its attention, with several raids on Muslim homes in Sydney. But there have been no arrests, and the federal Attorney-General, Daryl Williams, said recently, “There is no known security threat within Australia at this time”.
Could the threat emerge? All the Muslims I met disagreed strongly with American foreign policy, and were dismayed or angry at the thought Australia might be allied with the United States in a war on Iraq. All of them were sympathetic to the Palestinian cause, critical of Israel and sensitive to the plight of Muslims in Chechnya, Bosnia and elsewhere. They were super-sensitive to the various hypocrisies of Western foreign policies.
Where would their loyalties lie if it came to war? It is hard to predict, though the vast majority, I think, would simply continue to live their lives. They are not looking for trouble. They have had enough of that already.
Bilal Cleland predicts a record involvement in peace movements by young Muslims. Seyed Sheriffdeen, says: “We talk. We discuss. We try to persuade. This is the way Australians who disagree do things, and we are Australian.”
A few years ago he took his daughter to his native Sri Lanka. She didn’t like it. She was homesick for Australia. “These are our children, and they are Australian,” he says. “They are our future.”