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.)