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.
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