REVIEW: "Once Were Radicals" reviewed by Gabrielle Rish in the Sunday Tasmanian ...

To the core of Islam
GABRIELLE RISH

DESPITE the jokey cover, Sydney lawyer, writer and one-time Liberal political candidate Irfan Yusuf has a serious intent in his memoirs.

In an easy-to-read, if sometimes disorganised fashion, he manages to tease out the religious, political and cultural strands that entangle the concept of Islam so that each strand can be illuminated.

By the end of this process, he concludes that Islam is primarily a matter of personal spirituality, and that a Muslim's quest is to change him or herself, not to remake the world.

It's a conclusion that suggests how to embrace Islam and being an Australian at the same time.

Yusuf, born in Karachi, Pakistan, in 1969, was brought to Sydney by his university lecturer father and Urdu scholar mother as a baby.

His early days growing up in the middle-Australian suburb of Ryde -- John Howard's electoral base -- involved a colourful extended family of "aunties" and "uncles" of all religious persuasions from the sub-continent -- Sikhs, Parsees, Christians, Jews and Muslims.

It also involved bullying at the local primary school because of his name and skin colour.

A move to St Andrews' Cathedral School brought a flirtation with Anglicanism, motivated in part by his disenchanted view of Islam as administered by the working-class Arab migrants and non-English-speaking imams who dominated the Sydney mosque scene.

Young Irfan also experienced the Pakistani style of religious education as a six-year-old on a visit back to Karachi, where the Arabic alphabet was instilled in pupils with the aid of a stick across the back.

To him, Christianity seemed a civilising religion by comparison.

But as he enters his mid-teens, Irfan begins to ponder his identity more deeply. His great aunt, a prominent member of Pakistan's Jamaat-i-Islami (Islamic organisation) sends him books about Islam by former journalist Syed Abul Ala Maududi, which spurs his politicisation.

There is a thrilling meeting with visiting British Muslim education proponent Yusuf Islam, who was once the '60 pop star Cat Stevens. At Muslim youth camps he encounters imams from other parts of Australia.

Later, his university Muslim group organises another camp, under the spiritual leadership of the imam of Lakemba mosque, Sheikh Hilaly.

Hilaly, so repellent in his anti-Semitism, turns out to be much more tolerant and progressive in other respects.

As well as starting up a women's group at Lakemba [other mosques had no women's activities, according to Yusuf] he offers the students a case study in tolerance at the camp, held at a coastal campsite, when a woman in a bikini wanders into their group.

Sheikh Hilaly chats to her and after she departs, tells his scandalised acolytes: "Ostraalyan beebul goodh, nice friendhly beebul. Vee Muslims fighth thoo mush. Vee should lurrn from za Ostraalyan beebul how show rrespect."

Despite the gun-wielding image on the cover, Irfan never gets any more militant than asking the Dean of Sydney a curly question about original sin at a public forum.

But his formative years had, as a background, the Iranian Revolution, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the war in the former Yugoslavia, the Palestinian Intifada and other events that helped shaped young Muslims like him into jihadis.

"Had I been 15 years younger, I may have shared a jail cell with David Hicks," he says.

First published in the Sunday Tasmanian on 17 May 2009.

REVIEW: "Once Were Radicals" reviewed by Peter Kirkwood in The Sydney Morning Herald ...

Portrait of a young radical
Two Muslim men chart the path from youthful turmoil to mature moderation.

Once Were Radicals: My Years As A Teenage Islamo-fascist
By Irfan Yusuf
Allen & Unwin, 300pp, $26.99

Leave To Remain
By Abbas El-Zein
University of Queensland Press, 288pp, $32.95

THESE two very readable books share a common theme of great concern to many Australians. Each relates the story of a Muslim male negotiating the troubling years of youth and young adulthood and both could easily have gone off the rails. But the authors explain well how they worked through deep cultural and religious conflict to become productive citizens.

The two books are very different in style and detail. Irfan Yusuf is Sunni, was born in Pakistan and, though he is a devout Muslim, his outlook is more political. Abbas El-Zein is from a Lebanese Shia background and while he's a secular Muslim, his sensibility is more poetic, philosophical and spiritual.

Once Were Radicals, Yusuf's first book, won the 2007 Iremonger Award "for works of political, social and cultural commentary with contemporary Australian relevance". He is a Sydney lawyer and commentator. His opinion pieces appear regularly in newspapers and he is a prodigious and provocative blogger.

In the prologue he jumps to the heart of the matter. In 1985, at age 16, he "decided the time had come to join those prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice". He believed the best thing he could do as a Muslim was join the mujahideen in Afghanistan to fight the Russian invaders. He was prepared to die and "go straight to paradise".

He usefully sums up the inner conflict driving this decision:

As a young man growing up in a spiritual and cultural pendulum swinging between being Indian, Pakistani, Muslim, Australian I was confused. Political Islam, in the form of the Afghan jihad, provided some certainty and direction, even if it meant potentially cutting my life short.

Fortunately, he and his friends, then on a Muslim youth camp, talked this through with the gentle and wise religious leader Sheik Fehmi el-Imam. Using Islamic arguments, he steered them away from this course. This is a recurring theme in the book: how the headstrong young Yusuf's views are tempered by influential and moderate relatives and mentors.

After the prologue he backtracks and relates his life story: coming to Australia as a baby and growing up in the security of a close and rambunctious extended family, trips back to Pakistan including an extended stay when he went to school there St Andrew's Cathedral School in Sydney and university, where he became a vocal Muslim activist.

The book bears the marks of the polemical blogger. It is stream-of-consciousness in style, feisty and satirical in tone, and it uses direct street language. For instance, he describes one of his teachers in Pakistan as believing ...

... the best way to teach kids how to make the proper sounds of the Koran was to bash the shit out of them using either a very hard cooking utensil or a stick of some sort.

Leave To Remain has a different feel. It is obviously the work of a more sensitive and artistic soul. Though El-Zein is a scientist, now working as a lecturer in environmental engineering at the University of Sydney, he is an accomplished essayist. This is his second book, the first being a novel set during the Lebanese civil war.

El-Zein charts his life growing up in multicultural Lebanon and his wandering career as an engineer, studying and working in England, the US and Japan and finally settling in Sydney and starting a family. The descriptions of his early family life are most evocative, including the shocking death of his grandmother in an Israeli bombardment. So he gives a very personal account of the connections and tragic fault lines between different cultural and religious groups in Lebanon.

His Shia background provides a fascinating window into that troubled minority faction of Islam. His grandfather was a highly regarded sheik from the Shia sacred city of Najaf in Iraq. I suspect something of his religious spirit and insight lives on in his secular grandson.

El-Zein's writing is spare but elegant and he's adept at working the telling metaphors of his life. For example, the title of the book, Leave To Remain, is the term the British use for a residency visa. This combination of the seemingly contradictory words "leave" and "remain" becomes a symbol for the author of his deep ambivalence of belonging but also not belonging to his family, homeland, adopted countries, culture and religious heritage.

The concluding chapters of both books are moving as the authors tell of their position in maturity, a position that's less dogmatic and more introspective. For Yusuf it's the discovery of Sufism, the mystical side of his religion:

My journey inside Islam moved beyond what Muslim states should become. I was now concerned about what I should become. To use Gandhi's words, I wanted to be the change I wanted to see.

For El-Zein it's the tentative holding together of contradictory elements of his life:

For what is one's life but the story at once painful and sublime of coming to terms with the savage intimacy between self, history and culture?

Irfan Yusuf and Abbas El-Zein will be guests at the Sydney Writers' Festival; see swf.org.au.

(First published in the Sydney Morning Herald on Saturday 16 May 2009.)

MEDIA: Once Were Radicals on Radio NZ ...

Irfan Yusuf, author of Once Were Radicals: My Years as a Teenage Islamo-fascist, recently appeared on Radio NZ's popular Nine To Noon Show with Kathryn Ryan.

You can listen to the program by clicking here. You can also download the interview by clicking here or here.

VIDEO: Learning Urdu the Bollywood way ...

My parents resumed their fascistic language regime which involved us not being allowed to speak English at home ... My linguistic education included a regular regime of Bollywood movies.
(from Once Were Radicals: My years as a teenage Islamo-fascist)

Bollywood movies like Namak Halal, starring Amitabh Bachchan. Here is the big man playing the character of Arjun Singh, a villager who has just arrived in the city for a job interview.

REVIEW: Richard Begbie in the Canberra Times ...

The following review was published in the Canberra Times on Saturday 2 May 2009.

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Getting to wisdom through the Muslim maze

When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could barely stand to have the old man around. When I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.
Samuel Clemens (probably)

Irfan Yusuf was really just another Aussie kid. He loved cricket, listened to AC/DC and U2, and lived in the electorate of Bennelong.

In most things his family were conservative. They sent him to Sydney's St Andrews Cathedral Choir School, a good church school. He even went to church camps lots of them. But there the stereotype ends.

These camps were run by the Australian Federation of Islamic Councils, and Once Were Radicals offers a window into the complexities and often hilarious confusions of a Muslim boy growing up in Australia in the late 20th century.

Yusuf, who went on to do law and become something of a commentator on religion, culture and politics, has lived in Australia since his Pakistani-Indian parents migrated when he was five months old.

The book, winner of the 2007 Iremonger Award for writing on public issues, explores most areas of Islam in both its political and spiritual dimensions. For Muslim readers the territory will be familiar, though large parts of Yusuf's experience will surely bring both encouragement and relief to younger Muslims dealing with their faith in a Western, secular context. The non- Muslim, on the other hand, will find here a mass of detail and unexpected diversity that can verge on the bewildering.

While Australia likes to think of itself as multicultural, our chance brushes with other cultures pale alongside the boy Yusuf's experiences. His first awareness was of an Australian culture, refracted through the eclectic community in which his parents had immersed themselves. Practising Muslims both, they nevertheless encouraged their children to join in every aspect of the new life.

So that by the age of six, when Irfan returned with the family to Karachi for an extended visit, the experience was almost as alien to him as it would have been to most Aussie kids. The traffic, the toilets, the beggars, and especially the local madrassa (Islamic religious school), came as a shock. His Molvi Sahib (teacher) "had three sticks. One was short and hard, to cause pain. The second was long and malleable to cause a stinging sensation. The third was both long and hard. To provide us with the necessary incentive to memorise the Koranic sounds faster."

Since Arabic was as impenetrable to the boy as the Latin Mass to most Catholics, the experience was not a fruitful one. ''Little wonder,'' Irfan writes, "I began to associate Islamic learning with big boofy-bearded blokes brandishing sticks." And little wonder that his ever-sane mother removed him from the school.

Another school awaited the boy in Princeton, New Jersey, where his father was bound for a sabbatical. There he discovered orthodox Judaism through friends who, for some confusing weeks, he identified as Muslims. Once again his parents were able to enlarge the little
fellow's world to embrace and accept the followers of another ancient faith. "It was only years later, when I attended my first Muslim youth camp,'' recalled Yusuf, ''that I was first exposed to anti- semitism."

Back in Australia for his formative growing-up years, he was exposed to a great deal more than that. The highly diverse and, in that period, very fragmented pockets of Muslim culture around his native Sydney left the boy with a confusing hash of often-contradictory belief and practice.

The divide between those who focused on spiritual practice and those for whom Islamic politics were all-consuming formed a kind of ground bass to his development. By paths far too tortuous to trace here the rather brash young man makes his way through the maze of sects, theologies, value systems and political ideologies informing the tangled labyrinth of Muslim cultures.

In his late teens he becomes heavily involved in the politics of Sydney's Islamic youth, and in line with the book's heavily ironic subtitle, flirts only briefly with fatwas, fanatics, and political Islam in its more extreme forms.

Yusuf's narrative tends towards the meandering and repetitive, and this reader at least would have preferred a firmer editorial hand. However, it is the content of the book that will shield the interested reader against any stylistic failings.

For in Once Were Radicals we are introduced to the extended family warmth and cultural richness of the Muslim world. This is a narrative to draw the sting for many who have only really become aware of Islam in the wake of September 11, 2001. And it will help the non-Muslim understand that when it comes to shades of belief and practice, Islam is about as variegated and complex as they come.

Like Mark Twain, Yusuf reinforces some of his stronger views with a wry and occasionally laugh-aloud view of human foible. And it is Twain who actually brings us to the book's recurring counterpoint. Like the spirited offspring of sane and loving parents the world over, by the story's end Yusuf has travelled old Sam Clemens's full circle of discovery.

"Enforced monoculturalism. Enforced homogeneity. There lies the real fascism." So Irfan Yusuf concludes his story. And so he echoes the openness with which his parents embraced their new life Down Under, while retaining all that was culturally and spiritually important to them. This was their and now their son's real gift to us all.

Richard Begbie is a Canberra writer and farmer. Once Were Radicals will be launched at Paperchain Bookstore, Manuka, on Sunday, May 31, at 3pm.

ARTICLE: What I'm Reading

The following "article" by me is in fact authored by Stefanie Menezes and was published in The Sydney Morning Herald on Saturday 2 May 2009.

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Irfan Yusuf, writer and lawyer

"I've always had a childhood fascination with cricket, so I've been reading Ian Botham's Head On - Ian Botham: The Autobiography. It's interesting because Botham was playing around the time I was growing up in the '70s and '80s, so it's like taking a walk down memory lane.

"When I was young I was really obsessed with The Adventures Of Tom Sawyer, by Mark Twain. I could almost memorise it [IY: Actually, I had memorised huge chunks of it]. I loved the idea about this young boy who was so free and lived in a place where he was meeting new people all the time. His interaction with his mum was also very similar to mine so I related to him.

"I enjoy reading political books, and recently finished P.J. O'Rourke's Give War A Chance. He's an irreverent writer. Few American writers can poke fun at the conservatives like he does [IY: What I actually said was that few conservative American writers poke fun at people on their own side]. This book tackles everything from communism to Saddam Hussein as he writes from his coverage of the 1991 Gulf War. His writing is not terribly sophisticated [IY: actually what I said was that his writing wasn't exactly high-brow] but it makes politics fun and I enjoy making that reading light sometimes.

"I'm a regular reader of Mungo MacCallum, who's a writer for Crikey. He's on the opposite side of the political spectrum and does the same thing as O'Rourke but uses fewer f-words.

"I've found over the last few years I've been reading a lot more online blogs and news websites than I do books. It's a pity, though, and it's something I hope to change. With everything going online and becoming electronic these days, it would concern me if books stopped sticking around. There is a real charm to actually holding a book. Writing a book takes discipline. If people don't value that and writing is only measured by the amount of hits, well then everything would just turn into which celeb slept with who."

Once Were Radicals: My Years As A Teenage Islamo-fascist by Irfan Yusuf is published by Allen & Unwin, $24.99. He will be a guest at the Sydney Writers' Festival.

REVIEW: "Once Were Radicals" reviewed by Mahir Ali in The Australian ...

The following review of Once Were Radicals: My Years as a Teenage Islamo-Fascist was written by Maher Ali, a senior writer for The Australian.

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IT is a very multicultural moment. At a camp for young Muslims in northern NSW, a bikini-clad woman strolls into the prayer hall during an afternoon congregation.

Some of those present mutter among themselves, but their spiritual guide hails the intruder and, after ascertaining that she is seeking directions to a nearby lake, goes out of his way to assist her. On returning to the gathering, he reminds the youngsters that they ought to respect all Australians.

Sometime later, while out fishing in a lake, he again runs into the same woman, who greets him with a "G'day mate". "Goodhay luv," he responds. "Howya goin'?" she wants to know. "Brittee goodh. How you go-in?" he says. "Ah, pretty good. Listen, thanks for showin' me the fishing place the other day."

"No broblem, dearr. You have goodh Christmas." Once she's plunged into the lake, he turns to the two young men with him and tells them that Australians could teach Muslims a thing or two about how to show respect.

"This was the ... only camp where I saw an imam conversing with a woman in a bikini, let alone teaching us how to learn respect from her," writes Irfan Yusuf. And this was no ordinary imam either. Well, he was at the time, but subsequently became the mufti of Australia. That's right, the same one who notoriously compared women in revealing attire with uncovered meat.

Sheik Taj Din al-Hilali has only a bit part in Yusuf's memoir of a misspent youth, and he isn't by a long stretch the strangest character in an intriguing and frequently entertaining -- but occasionally disturbing -- account of the evolution of a young Muslim in Australia.

In several respects, the phenomenon Yusuf describes is remarkably similar to the British experience whereby a large number of second-generation immigrants from the subcontinent turned out to be a great deal more radical in religious terms than their passively pious -- and often secular-minded -- parents.

To some extent, this was a consequence of the alienation they experienced. Their parents weren't spared the sense of being outsiders but, having volunteered to place themselves in societies that they knew would be very different from the milieu to which they were accustomed, they were not unduly alarmed by the disparities they encountered.

Many of them were determined, however, that their children should not be estranged from their ancestral culture. This often led to a focus on inherited religious concepts and values, facilitating a state of mind that caused youngsters confronted with overt or covert racism to pounce on faith as the primary point of difference helping to sustain their self-esteem. This may not in itself sow the seeds of extremism but it can serve as fertile soil.

By Yusuf's account, his parents, although reasonably devout, could hardly be blamed for his radicalism. His father, a Pakistani who decided to settle down in Australia after winning a scholarship to the Australian National University, is wary from the outset of what he characterises as the Islamic industry: the network of mosques, Islamic clubs and centres, halal butchers and the like that feed on Muslim vulnerabilities and insecurities.

His mother -- who grew up in India and whose lack of fluency in English is parodied relentlessly by her son, to the point where it gets jarring -- is somewhat more religious than her husband, but at least equally disturbed by her son's drift towards fanaticism. She wants him to concentrate on his studies and certainly has no objection to him following Islamic strictures at the same time, but whenever a discrepancy surfaces between the two aims, she comes down firmly on the side of academic excellence.

And she makes no secret of her resentment when Yusuf, during a particularly morbid phase in his religious journey, berates his elder sisters for not covering up adequately in front ofstrangers.

This, again, is part of a global phenomenon, and one that's by no means restricted to immigrant societies; it helps to explain why in recent decades various forms of hijab have become a great deal more common in Muslim countries such as Pakistan, Malaysia and Indonesia. Yusuf's sisters probably benefited from their chronological advantage: a younger brother's rants are a lot easier to dismiss than similar pressure from an older sibling.

It is intriguing to discover, meanwhile, that the teenage Yusuf was attracted by the idea of joining the mujaheddin in their US-sponsored war to liberate Afghanistan from its Soviet occupiers, but also flirted more than once with the idea of converting to Christianity. He was able to resist both temptations, in the first case thanks to sensible advice from a spiritual elder at a Muslim youth camp. His account is nonetheless a salutary reminder of the Afghan jihad's crucial role in firing the zeal of young people across the Muslim world.

Yusuf's peregrinations through all manner of theological disputes at the theoretical level and factional altercations on the practical plane convey a sense of wastefully squandered youthful energy. Chances are his intellectual exertions -- in grappling with the texts of Sayyid Qutb and Abul Aala Maududi, for instance -- would have proved more productive in a non-confessional context. After all, any quest for one true Islam is intrinsically futile, given that the purported word of Allah has always been open to conflicting interpretations. (Which is by no means to suggest, mind you, that any competing theology offers a surer path to salvation.)

Yusuf's frequently amusing account of his intellectual development, interspersed with healthy doses of (possibly retrospective) irreverence, is nonetheless valuable for its insights into the Muslim mind, not to mention its potential as a cautionary tale for young Muslims in Australia drawn to politically motivated exegeses of Islam.

The leap of faith that propelled Yusuf from political Islam into the arms of the Young Liberals is left unexplained. But that, he says, is another story for another day.

Mahir Ali, a senior journalist on The Australian, grew up in Pakistan but resisted the temptations of faith.

Irfan Yusuf will be a guest of the Sydney WritersFestival.