The Australian face of Islam
April 28, 2007
The much maligned faith is attracting more and more followers - and they are changing the mainstream perception of what it is to be Muslim. Deborah Snow reports.
It is a late summer Friday evening outside the Al-Ghazzali academy, a private Islamic study centre in Roselands. The last light is draining from the sky and peak-hour traffic rumbles nearby as 30 people unfurl a blue tarpaulin and lay it carefully across an open-air courtyard next to a small commercial arcade.
The men shuffle into rows facing Islam's holy of holies, Mecca. The women group behind them, heads and shoulders draped in loose headscarves or long veils, shoulder touching shoulder. Murmuring the words which open the sunset prayer, the Maghrib, an imposing figure in floor-length gown and cap leads the worshippers through the elaborate choreography of the Muslim ritual, concluding with a final prostration.
Prayers over, Afroz Ali leads the group back into a lecture room where he keeps them glued to their seats for several hours more with a heady mix of instruction, verbal jousting, anecdote and humour. A camera relays the performance in real time to Melbourne, Adelaide and New Zealand.
Every week scores of young people, many of them professionals, are turning up here to discover more about Islam. Ali's standing as a religious teacher is not fully accepted in some parts of Sydney's Islamic community. Some question his knowledge of Arabic, and the nature of the religious training he has received abroad.
But for his mainly young audience this is an irrelevance. Aside from his charisma, what they find appealing is his open encouragement of interaction with other faiths, and his independence from those major Sydney mosques involved in ethnically based power struggles.
"What won me over is that he isn't preaching fire and brimstone and he doesn't badmouth non-Muslims," one man in his late 20s says.
Ali says: "Most of these mosques don't want to think about Australia. They think that they are living in some little island. To them it's all about power and influence and not really about the community. I estimate that no more than 5 per cent of the Muslim community actually supports any of these structures."
Several groups in particular seem drawn to independent centres such as Al-Ghazzali. Prominent among Ali's students are young professionals, born and raised as Muslims, who want to separate what is "cultural" from what is religious in what they have learnt from their migrant parents.
Then there are converts to Islam, or "reverts" as they often call themselves - a term meant to signify their return to a state of submission to God.
Over the past three months, the Herald has spent hours talking to some of these younger Muslims about the spiritual journeys they have embarked on: their quest to seek the core of their religion. If one theme emerges above all else, it is the many different faces Islam in Australia now wears.
Jeena and Sharif are a striking couple, both in their early 30s. Jeena Joyan was born in Afghanistan and migrated to Australia as a child. She married Sharif Hassanen, of Egyptian parentage, early last year. They were wed within six months of a meeting arranged through mutual friends. If that seems like haste to a non-Muslim eye, Joyan says it's customary in Islam. Long betrothals sit hard with chastity.
Both are tertiary-educated professionals, Joyan working in marketing and Hassanen in banking before recently taking a job in health management. It's the second marriage for both, and they say that while love and companionship have a place, this time around matrimony is as much about a joint quest to live as better Muslims.
It was the events of September 11, 2001, which galvanised Joyan. Against that backdrop she says she was determined to discover and demonstrate to herself that Islam was not the "destructive force" that had been unleashed on the twin towers.
Hassanen, whose habits of religious observance had drifted during his late teens, was on a similar trajectory when he met Joyan in August 2005. Recently he's started growing a beard. Just over a year ago, Joyan began wearing the headscarf, or hijab. These were very deliberate choices to reflect their growing desire to make overt visual statements about their Islamic identity.
"There are some non-Muslims who have an us and them attitude, and there are some Muslims who have an us-and-them attitude," Hassanen says. "And some government members and parts of the media are breeding that atmosphere. But for Muslims like myself, I feel more of an obligation now to be more adherent in how I follow my religion.
"And this is one of the reasons I have grown my beard thicker, so that if someone looks at me and says, 'Oh, he's probably a Muslim,' and he sees that my actions are good, then that person says 'Oh, that's not what they were talking about on CNN."'
Joyan grew up in a household that was observant, but not strictly so. The second youngest of seven sisters, she went to the local government school where her friends were Chinese, Indian, Greek and Italian Australians. None of her sisters wore the headscarf. Even today, only one sister does. Now Joyan wears it proudly, like a flag.
Does she feel she is more religious than her parents? "Not necessarily," Joyan says. "But the main difference between my practice of Islam and my mother's is that I am going out and learning about it from teachers and from a more in-depth perspective. Her practice is heavily influenced by cultural traditions rather than Islamic jurisprudence."
Hassanen feels similarly. "I guess putting it simply, sometimes I feel that I am practising my religion more 'according to the book' than my parents. There is a lot of cultural influence in their practice," he says.
In Britain, recent research by the British think tank Policy Exchange found a growing religiosity among young Muslims which it attributed to a search for "meaning and identity" .
The study also found a "desire of younger Muslims to return to a purer Islam, which does not rely on received cultural traditions inherited over the generations".
In some cases, the researchers said, that could mean some taking a "more strict or puritanical approach to religious practice which pits them against the culture of the mainstream of British life".
However, young Muslims the Herald spoke to dismissed suggestions that more fervent embrace of their religion placed them at odds with the society around them.
Hassanen: "There is nothing to suggest that a Muslim cannot, I don't want to use the word 'assimilate' - to me that implies that two people become the same - but co-exist harmoniously. I know it can be done. In the Golden Age of Islam, Christians, Jews and Muslims lived harmoniously in the same cities that were run by Muslims.
"I can't wait for the day when somebody from here goes [overseas] to learn how to become a sheik and comes back and does a sermon in an Aussie accent like I'm speaking to you now."
Their friend Amanda Alassad-Bruun cuts in: "It's not about 'tolerating'. It's about accepting. I love this country with all of my heart and soul. I'm an Australian - but I'm Muslim. Why are you forcing me to choose one or the other?"
She says she sees non-Muslim friends from work, plays football with them, goes to Manly for the day. "I've got no problem hanging out with them. I know my boundaries. They know my boundaries. We went to one of our friend's 30th birthday and they rang us and said 'look we've got halal sausages for you [where the meat is slaughtered according to Islamic law], we'll cook them first before we put the pork sausages on'. Things like that."
There have been small struggles to combine work and religion. Islam prescribes five different prayers a day, from the earliest hint of dawn through to evening, and like many Muslim workers, Joyan and Hassanen initially found this posed practical problems. Joyan solved her dilemma over where to pray when a sympathetic mailman found her a disused training room.
"The training room had doors with slivers of glass you could see in through. When I went to pray he had boarded those slits up with paper so no one could see in, and I was so moved by that."
The media environment is a topic consistently raised by young Muslims. They feel they have been drafted into a propaganda war their parents did not have to contend with.
Alassad-Bruun says: "You know what? It's the Muslim time to be demonised. [In Australia] we demonised the Japanese, we demonised the Jews, every race or religion has had its time to be demonised, so OK, now it's ours."
Among the small but growing body of Anglo-Australians who have converted (or "reverted") to Islam, some feel they can play a bridging role.
Sean McNulty , who became a Muslim four years ago after growing up an Irish Catholic, sees people like himself forging a kind of "third way" for Islam in Western countries.
"We don't have the 'old-country' thing, so it is easier for us to roll with the blows dealt out in the Australian media," McNulty says.
"[We] relax in the knowledge that it will be someone else tomorrow. We're not so easily offended or wound up, nor are we pressured into doing silly things or stunts when questioned about our loyalty to Australia."
Silma Ihram, who became a Muslim 30 years ago after a privileged upbringing in a wealthy North Shore family, reckons embracing Islam back then was not the "big politics" it is now. 'When I first came back as a Muslim [from Indonesia] more than two decades ago there was mild interest. If people discovered Islam through travel or marriage, it was seen as a personal journey, all offshore and romantic. Muslims now are in the media almost every single day, not to mention Iraq, Hicks and those things."
Just how many Australians are converting to Islam from other faiths is hard to say, but the Australian New Muslim Association in Sydney says it has had about 250 a year passing through its doors in the past five years.
Peter Gould, who converted before marrying his Muslim-born wife, Inshirah Khan, an Australian-born South African, says: "I've met dozens and dozens and dozens of couples just like us. Overall I think Islam here is growing but in a good way."
But what draws a young Australian man or woman, raised in a non-Muslim family, towards Islam?
There are many individual answers to that question but recurring themes emerge: a sense that Islam provides a whole-of-life set of guidelines to live by; the power and mystery of the Koran; and rejection of what many of these young people see as the ultra-materialism and hyper-individualism of the West.
Gould, 25, came to Islam in his late teens, partly through his interest in Inshirah, whom he knew from the school bus run. "I started to question her a little bit about her beliefs and then started my own research. It really turned out to be just a beautiful philosophy. I identified a lot with its universal principles. The Koran is a phenomenal document."
For many months he hid his growing interest in Islam from his family. "I went through at least a year of hiding my Koran under my guitar magazines."
When he finally broached the topic with his parents they were initially shocked but now accept his decision.
"We have a good relationship in that we see each other often, we chat on the phone, but its going to take them a long time to get to the point where they want to know more about the religion. At this point they just want to know, you know, 'Is my son still my son? How does it affect us?' rather than how does it affect me? I believe it will be positive in the end."
Peter and Inshirah's friends are not as lucky. So hostile have "Susan's" parents been to her conversion five years ago that she begs for her real name not to be used.
She has not dared tell her parents that she and her North African-born Muslim husband have wed. It is less offensive to her family to think she is merely living with him. The stand-off has meant that for now, Susan cannot have the children she would so dearly love. Her mother has declared they would be "little aliens".
Despite her family travails, Susan says Islam has brought her great happiness. She says it "orders her life" and "answered a lot of questions that Christianity had left niggling for me, like, how could a man [Jesus] who had walked this Earth, be God?"
"A lot of people don't realise how similar Islam is to Christianity … it's just a step up," she says. "I love the fact that Jesus is still considered a prophet in Islam."
Families often see the act of conversion as a betrayal. One woman says that seeing her sister become a Muslim had triggered a period of grieving for other members of the family. "It's losing a sense of your past together," she says. "It's like a loss of someone that you knew."
Karen Turner, who has surveyed for a PhD thesis nearly 60 Victorian women who converted to Islam, says some of the biggest family disputes are over seemingly small issues, such as the long-time pet dog (canines are considered unclean in Islam).
Yet what draws many of these women so powerfully to Islam is its sense of providing a set of rules by which to live.
"It's a very strong theme," Turner says. "Most people start by telling you that the Koran is the truth. At a basic theological level they believe it … it also appeals to those who feel a growing dissatisfaction with Western ideology, the lack of social cohesion, the relativism, and the growing sense that there's no tradition. A lot of the women I spoke to say Islam is not just a religion, it's a way of life; it helps them organise every aspect of their life."
Turner says some of the women she surveyed also saw Islam as having some of the trappings of feminism: "The emphasis on sisterhood, regaining control of one's body, women-only spaces, very clear ideas about gender, work, divorce and motherhood."
What then do these converts feel about the plight of women trapped in the harsh tribal environments of the Sudan, Afghanistan, or remote parts of Pakistan, where Islam combines with cultural traditions that completely subjugate the female?
"That's an issue I'm trying to muddle through in my head. What I'm discovering is that Islam is complex, and how it manifests itself in different cultural contests varies greatly. It's much more a question of what kind of Islam people are attracted to, and why."
http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/...page=fullpage#