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.