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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.
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