CRIKEY: Stuff the dirty dunnies, it’s the religious violence that could halt Delhi

Yes, many Indians are very embarrassed over the poor state of the dunnies at the athletes’ village in New Delhi. They’ve openly been writing about it, not ashamed to lash out at the government or even at themselves. One columnist wrote that the urban elite were deluding themselves:

Just when we were patting ourselves on the back for having become an economic dynamo and a growing ‘soft’ superpower represented by Bollywood and yoga, basmati rice and tikka masala ready to take over the world, the Commonwealth Games debacle has come as a slap across the national face.

And Western reporters faithfully reported this collective masochism while ignoring the story Indians were genuinely nervous about. Having dust on one’s dunny is something many Indians can live with. But would the Games be enough to stop some ordinary citizens transforming into religious warriors and slaughtering one another over a 16th century mosque demolished in 1992 to build a Hindu temple? How do you explain to Australian readers that the Cronulla riots were a Sunday picnic compared to the rioting and looting and murder that took place across India after the demolition?

Indians are now nervously praying riots aren’t repeated in response to the recent judgment in the Allahabad High Court in what has become known as the Babri Masjid case. The ancient mosque was built by Mughal Emperor Babar on the alleged birthplace of the Hindu god Rama at Ayodhya in northern India. The decision awards one third of the property to the Muslim religious trust and two thirds to two Hindu groups. Some argue the decision effectively reward the fanatics who tore the mosque down, and who subsequently went on a rampage of violence and looting.

That incident also transformed India’s political landscape. Mahatma Gandhi was murdered in 1948, shortly after independence, by Hindu fanatics who resented his efforts to maintain inter-communal peace and who wanted to implement a virtual theocracy inspired by a far-Right ideology called Hindutva. For years, the Hindutva mob were considered freaks by the political mainstream. The destruction of the Babri mosque and the alleged restoration of the birthplace of a god millions of Hindus revere enabled the Hindutva crowd to hijack the private devotion of followers of perhaps the world’s most tolerate religion.

Eventually the ragtag Hindutva groups aligned themselves with a political party called the BJP. The current BJP website has removed essays such as Semitic Monotheism: The Root of Intolerance in India. But how do these ideas translate on the ground?

Suketu Mehta, author of the 2004 book Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found, describes meeting with Hindutva zealots who describe a typical scene from the 1992-93 riots as told to him by one “Sunil”:

“Those were not days for thought,” he continued. “We five people burnt one Mussulman. At four am after we heard of Radhabai Chawl, a mob assembled, the likes of which I have never seen. Ladies, gents. They picked up any weapon they could. Then we marched to the Muslim side. We met a pavwallah on the highway, on a bicycle. I knew him; he used to sell me bread every day.” Sunil held up a piece of bread from the pav bhaji he was eating. “I set him on fire. We poured petrol on him and set him on fire. All I thought was, ‘This is a Muslim’. He was shaking. He was crying, ‘I have children, I have children!’ I said, ‘When your Muslims were killing the Radhabai Chawl people, did you think of your children?’ That day we showed them what Hindu dharma is.”

The scene in Delhi was much the same. And it didn’t just happen in Delhi and Bombay immediately after 1992. It was repeated in the 2002 massacre in the state of Gujrat, where textbooks are being modified to glorify Hitler and downplay Gandhi.

And if you think Muslims have been the only victims, ask yourselves why our conservative Catholic commentariat ignored the story of the 2008 massacres of Catholics in Orissa?

This is the kind of stuff most Indians are scared of. The dust-sensitive backsides of foreign athletes don’t rate very highly when the prospect of communalist violence is very real.



First published in Crikey on 1 October 2010.

UPDATE I: An anonymous poet and former Christian Democratic Party official sent this lyrical response:

Imagine there's no nigg3rs
It's easy if you try
Blackheads in hell below us
Above it only whites
Imagine all white people
Living for today

Imagine no shit countries
filled with subhuman poo
Something to kill or die for
a subhuman zoo
Imagine all white people
Living life in peace

Words © 2010 Irfan Yusuf






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OPINION: Mad monk no more: Abbott's battle cry for Liberal supremacy

It's amazing how much spare time federal Opposition MPs have.

In Tony Abbott's case, the time was put to good use by his penning a sort-of-memoir and sort-of-manifesto entitled Battlelines. In it, Abbott sets out his vision for conservative politics which is at times useful in its coherence and at other times sycophantic to the point of nostalgia in its blanket praise of John Howard and his government.

Abbott's book starts with a useful reminder of why all wasn't lost for conservatives when John Howard lost his seat to Maxine McKew.

On election night 2007, few could have predicted the imminent fall of the WA Labor government or the electoral problems now besetting other state and territory governments. The Liberal Party is far from unelectable.

Indeed dysfunctional Labor governments in NSW and the Northern Territory could become a huge electoral burden for Kevin Rudd and lose federal Labor key seats in the next federal election.

Abbott writes in his introduction:

It won't be easy, but the Liberal Party can certainly win the next federal election. What's necessary is confidence that the federal Liberal Party has learned from recent mistakes and missed opportunities.

During a speech to the National Press Club on July 30, Abbott remarked:

I hope that Battlelines will turn out to be a significant contribution to the Liberal Party's policy development and political success. It won't be uncontentious even within the party. There's a difference, though, between fostering debate and rocking the boat.

But what if the boat is already sailing through choppy waters? Surely any contentious movement will make other passengers feel the boat is rocking unnecessarily.

And regardless of how much he denies it, one has to wonder how much Abbott's book is about making a tilt at the leadership. As conservative columnist Miranda Devine noted in the Sydney Morning Herald on July 30, the Sydney launch of Abbott's book was significant as it

... came on the very day that Malcolm Turnbull recorded his worst Newspoll rating as preferred prime minister 16 per cent to Kevin Rudd's 66 per cent.

Devine, frequently the recipient- of-choice for some of the choicest factional leaks from the conservative wing of the NSW Liberal Party, perhaps reflected the wishes of her informants when she described the book as

... Abbott's first crack at remaking himself as a real contender for the Liberal leadership. Abbott has never shown any sign of disliking the inference.

Some will wonder whether the Australian electorate would be ready for "Captain Catholic" to rule over a country where Buddhism, Hinduism and Islam are the fastest growing faiths. Then again, many wondered during the mid-1990s whether John Howard, the man who suggested that Asian migrants may not make a neat cultural fit, could one day become Prime Minister of a country located closer to Kuala Lumpur than London.

Abbott is certainly conscious of this, and devotes some time in his book to explaining his interest in the priesthood and what Catholicism means to him. Abbott's clear preference seems to be enjoying the company of men of faith whilst not being as faithful as he would like. Hence he gave up on the priesthood and realised that the "living Jesus" was "only a second-hand presence" in his life.

There was a time when Abbott's alleged Catholic fundamentalism led to the accusation of his wishing to impose his rosaries on the ovaries of Australian women. Yet in Battlelines, Abbott takes a decidedly unorthodox view on the subject, placing himself in the same category as former US President Bill Clinton who declared that abortion should be safe, legal but rare.

Abbott's views on marriage are hardly a reflection of Canon Law:

It's not realistic to expect most young adults in this hyper-sexualised age to live chastely for many years outside marriage. People have not so much abandoned traditional mores as found that the old standards don't so readily fit the circumstances of their lives.

Abbott's book isn't just about de-frocking his "mad monk" image. He shows useful leadership in key policy areas and often in a manner that could put him at odds with key Liberal stakeholders. Abbott supports paid maternity leave and believes that employers (including small business) should carry the burden. Abbott acknowledges that this isn't a traditional conservative position.

Conservatives have been ambivalent towards maternity-leave schemes lest they encourage women to forsake their traditional roles.

Yet again, Abbott shows his conservatism to be "a pragmatic, eclectic creed", and his views on the issue were changed after discussions with former colleague Jackie Kelly and other female MP's

... who often felt torn between the demands of parliamentary life and the duties of motherhood.

Seriously lacking from Battlelines is a refusal to acknowledge serious policy (as opposed to mere strategic) mistakes of the previous government. This is especially the case in key areas of foreign policy such as the disastrous Iraq war. Abbott reminds us that during his first trip to the United States as an MP, he was described as

... a 'strong Liberal' and 'very anti-republican'. Most of my hosts thought I was a virtual communist!

Yet the manner in which Abbott defends the Iraq war would make any American host regard him as naive, if not imbecilic.

Tellingly, Abbott doesn't mention words like "torture" and "water boarding" in his discussion on foreign policy and the war against terrorism, despite his repeated references to conservative values such as support for the Rule of Law. Which I guess means that, should Abbott ever become Prime Minister, our nation's foreign policy battlelines will continue to be drawn by Washington.

Irfan Yusuf is a Sydney lawyer and former federal Liberal Party parliamentary candidate. This article was first published in the Canberra Times on Tuesday 8 September 2009.

UPDATE I: For more stuff on Abbott's terrific book, you can read my review in New Matilda here.

UPDATE II: My goodness! even Bob Ellis has nice things to say about Abbott's book.

REFLECTION: Hurried thoughts on Mumbai ...

Well, it looks like this is going to be an all-nighter. Lots to read and write after having spent virtually the entire day with my eyes glued to the TV screen. My mother has spent a fair bit of time making and taking phone calls and speaking with family friends who have relatives living in Bombay.

We still refer to the place as Bombay. The name “Mumbai” seems like a kind of strange political and cultural correctness, an attempt to impose a provincial dialect on what is essentially a city for people across India. And now across the globe.

It sickens me that the people who could pull off such a coordinated and deadly attacks could dare call themselves “mujahideen”. They may use Iraq and Afghanistan and Kashmir and countless other causes for rhetorical purposes. But what they do bears little relation to jihad and to Islam as most Indians (and broader South Asians) know it.

I saw images on TV and in newspaper reports of people in Bombay hiding behind barricades and walls to avoid shooting. It reminded me of scenes of innocent civilians in Sarajevo having to crouch down behind concrete slabs and makeshift walls and anything else they could find to dodge sniper bullets. The so-called mujahideen are behaving like the goons of Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic.

Mumbai or Bombay, call it what you will, simply doesn’t deserve this. India doesn’t deserve this. Neither does the broader South Asia, Asia and the world. Nor do Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Jains, Jews, Catholics, Parsees and the followers of any number of indigenous Indian faiths.

Terrorists regard nothing as sacred. Just a few months back, they attacked a hotel in Islamabad in the heart of Ramadan. Now they have attacked innocent civilians in a crowded Indian city. They even kidnapped an elderly rabbi, a man of God, Clearly these people have no shame.

Soon the Mumbai locals will be burying or cremating their dead. They will pray to God / G-d / Bhagwaan / Allah to have mercy on their deceased relatives. Other people from a host of different countries (including Australia) will be mourning their dead. I urge even hardened atheists to pray with me that God gives them strength.

In the meantime, let’s hope that the perpetrators are caught and brought to justice.

CRIKEY: News Ltd outrage patronises ordinary Australian Catholics ...

Australian believers of all faiths, and of no faith in particular, read newspapers. However, when newspaper editorialists (and some columnists) try to read believers and their sentiments, they often miss the mark.

Certain columnists and editorialists at The Australian and other metropolitan News Ltd papers have heavily criticised the ABC and Fairfax reporting of sexual abuse allegations against Catholic priests. You can read some of these criticisms at the ABC Media Watch website here. That criticism was repeated again in today’s editorial in The Oz.

The gist has been that widespread reporting of the issue is an affront to World Youth Day pilgrims and ordinary Catholics. The goal seems to be defending the sentiments of ordinary Catholics. The effect is that the editorialists and columnists are patronising Catholic believers. It’s as if Catholics must necessarily be offended by reporting of the misdeeds of Catholic clergy.

On Saturday night, I attended a gathering of Jesuits in Melbourne. These devout Catholics had no hesitation in using the strongest language against the comments of Cardinal Pell and Bishop Fisher about sexual abuse victims. It reminded me of the colourful language many Muslims (including myself) used when Sheik Hilaly was caught out using Ramadan sermons to develop new advertising copy for the cat-food industry.

These Catholics had no hesitation in criticising their religious leaders in the presence of a non-Catholic. They said it was an issue of human rights that affected everyone regardless of faith. Indeed, the Pope himself showed far more leadership and openness on this issue than some News Ltd editorialists.

The concern shown by some News Limited editorialists and columnists for Catholic sentiments wasn’t present when these editorialists commented on another religious leader caught out making disparaging remarks about rape victims. In one edition, The Oz devoted an entire 7 pages of broadsheet copy to Hilaly’s cat-meat comments. Further, editorialists and columnists had no hesitation in casting aspersions on Australian Muslims and indeed Muslims across the world.

Indeed, when yours truly argued in Crikey that The Oz’s Hilaly overkill was only making Hilaly’s position stronger, The Oz ran a highly offensive editorial accusing me of "covering up Islamic outrages", and even suggested I was letting ...

... intolerant attitudes fester in the shadows before exploding and catching Australia unawares, as has happened in countries such as England, Denmark, Spain and The Netherlands.

As if I spent most of my time defending Hilaly.

So on the one hand, editorialists at The Oz and its sister papers think it’s ok to use the insensitive words of a Muslim "cleric" to pillory some 360,000 Australians who tick the "Muslim" box on their census forms. On the other hand, these same writers and editors think Catholics are so over-sensitive that they won’t be able to cope with reporting of sexual abuse by Catholic clergy.

Both are extreme positions, patronising and offensive to believers. The presence of both extremes in the same newspapers takes media hypocrisy to new levels.

First published in the Crikey daily alert for 24 July 2008.

Words © 2008 Irfan Yusuf

UPDATE: Stuff published elsewhere ...

Cricket fans will be completely couldn't-give-a-rat's-backside to learn that this piece about my namesakes was published in NewMatilda recently.



I've started writing for Eureka Street, a fantastic online magazine published by a group of exceptionally funky Jesuits in Melbourne. Apparently the magazine got its name because of profound historical reasons. Its first office was located in a street named Eureka Street. My first submission is here.

Apart from that, I really don't have much to announce. Except that I am getting hitched soon. Who is she? Who would submit herself to a life of such creativity, excitement and over-consumption of Turkish pide?

I can't say. But I do find the following music clip extremely amusing.



Words © 2008 Irfan Yusuf


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MEDIA: Spiked?

Well, it was bound to happen at some stage.

The editor-in-chief of a newspaper in Australia has, at the last minute, decided not to run with an op-ed submission I provided on the topic of rape victims and violence against women. I'm not sure if it constituted a spike or if it was just a case of competing stories.

The article argued that certain media outlets and virtually all politicians have shown that they really aren't concerned about rape victims. Why?

Because they rightly condemned Sheik Hilaly on his catmeat remarks. However, they (especially the politicians) have been silent on the remarks of Bishop Fisher.

Effectively, it means that violence against women is being used as a sectarian wedge by monoculturalists, and this is now seeping into the mainstream. When that happens, it brings the attitudes of the entire community into question.

If we condemn some clerics who insult rape victims but not others, it clearly means we are being selective of which sexual assaults we deem offensive and which we do not.

On issues like violence against women, society must draw a line in the sand. Whenever someone crosses the line, the chorus of condemnation must be heard loud and clear. Both Hilaly and Fisher crossed that line. Both should be equally condemned. If we are loud on one but silent on the other, we clearly have little regard for all rape victims.

Words © 2008 Irfan Yusuf


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OPINION: Risk of marginalisation in Western talk of the universal ...

It takes a lot of guts for a non-Catholic to comment on World Youth Day, especially one like me who has an enormous soft spot for Catholics.

It all started in the mid-1970s, when I was the only brown-skinned boy at Ryde East Infants School in north-western Sydney. Having lots of female friends (it was more pity than attraction) wasn't the main reason I was bullied. Rather, it was that I looked like an Aboriginal, something a teacher advised me to take as a compliment as it made me more authentically Australian. Plus, my mum (in her exotic, gorgeous saris which made many a hippy mum extremely jealous) dressed differently.

As if that wasn't bad enough, some bullies used to accompany me home, demanding protection money in return for protecting me from even meaner bullies. It was schoolyard mafia at its worst.

Then, one day while walking home from school, I noticed a blond-haired, blue-eyed kid who wore a slightly different school uniform to me. He wore a blue shirt that had a small yellow cross embroidered onto it, and his school bag was emblazoned with the words Spiritus Sanctus.

I couldn't understand exactly why he was being teased and bullied. After all, he looked just like the bullies. This anomaly in playground mafia discrimination policies really confused me, and one day I confronted one of the bullies.

''Why are you teasing him? He looks just like you. I'll bet his mum doesn't wear a sari.''

''He's not like us at all. He's a f---ing Catholic!''

I ran home overjoyed by this news, which I excitedly shared with Mum. Her response was to befriend every Catholic in the street. Suddenly, I didn't just have South Asian aunties, I also had Maltese and Italian and Irish and even Aussie aunties as well. I became a culturally liberated six-year-old. For Mum, it was a case of showing solidarity with the fellow oppressed.

Many years later, during a divinity class at a low-church Sydney Anglican boys school, my very conservative chaplain (he was a huge fan of Fred Nile) joined the Ryde East playground mafia in indoctrinating me against Catholics. He was rather less ecumenical than my mum, and even claimed that the beast labelled 666 in the Book of Revelation referred to the Pope.

In fact, the chaplain always referred to them as Roman Catholics, to emphasise they weren't real Catholics. It was at that time that I learned the actual meaning of the word catholic universal. Surely the Sydney diocese of the Church of England had a greater claim to being universal.

Muslim Australians love to whinge and complain about discrimination. But what we've gone through at the hands of pseudo-conservative governments (often in response to the pseudo-sensible remarks of imbecilic thick-Sheiks) is only a fraction of what Australian Catholics have had to put up with for more than a century.

So it's with great joy that I watch members of my mum's coalition-of-the-bullied celebrate World Youth Day in Sydney. I'm really glad that Catholics have come this far, from the days when kids from Catholic schools in my street used to get bashed up, to now openly celebrating their faith in the presence of the Pope.

But based on my experience with so many official (and allegedly universal) Muslim gatherings, I have some reservations.

Both Islam and Catholicism are universal faiths. Islam, like Catholicism, has historically been fairly culturally neutral, taking on the indigenous cultural symbols of places it has settled in. Yet some Arabs always try to dominate so much of the Muslim agenda.

The largest Catholic country on earth isn't in Europe. It is situated in the largest Catholic continent on earth South America. I was happy to see images of Brazilian pilgrims playing traditional drums and swaying their hips. If only allegedly orthodox Muslims made more room for pulsating Indian qawwali songs and Indonesian wayang shadow-puppet shows. However, I wasn't terribly happy to hear Cardinal George Pell talking about declining birth rates in the West.

No doubt, I too am concerned about Albanian Muslims and Portuguese Jews reproducing less than their ancestors, just as I'm peeved about the offspring of European (and indeed Western) Muslim migrants engaging in cultural integration by having as few kids as their Christian fellow citizens.

However, I really can't see the need for Catholic clergy or Muslim media commentators to take on the role of Western demographers. What do European birthrates have to do with Catholics from Goa or Bolivia?

World Youth Day cannot be allowed to become a huge spectacle of Western Catholicism, and hence potentially unrepresentative of international Catholicism.

So much of the prejudice that underpins those claiming to speak on behalf of our Judeo-Christian heritage is the same prejudice that led Aussie bigots of yesteryear to despise Jews and Catholics. It is built upon transforming universal religious and cultural symbols into racial and sectarian weapons of mass exclusion.

I don't believe Cardinal Pell was playing with weapons of mass exclusion in his comments about population decline in the West. However, I must wonder at the wisdom of such remarks, given the presence of so many non-Western pilgrims who regard themselves as equally Catholic as my mum's old European Catholic friends.

Why reinforce the mistaken notion that the terms Christian and Western are synonymous?

When a truly universal sense of Christianity sinks into our nation's collective psyche, the chances of bigoted politicians and media personalities successfully using our Christian heritage as a cover for their un-Christian attitudes will diminish.

Perhaps then Australians who look different (including those resembling Jesus and his mum) won't feel like foreigners and outsiders. Amen to that.

Irfan Yusuf is a Sydney lawyer and writer. This article was first published in The Canberra Times on Friday 18 July 2008.

Words © 2008 Irfan Yusuf

COMMENT: Good for the goose ...

Back in January 2007, Gerard Henderson wrote the following words in the Sydney Morning Herald in relation to the Hilaly situation and Muslim responses ...

During the controversy of late last year Waleed Aly, a director of the Islamic Council of Victoria, wrote an article which at best rationalised Hilaly's comments and at worst went close to defending them. At the time Aly said there was "plenty of supporting evidence for those who wish to believe it" that "journalists are paid to defame the Muslim community with the goal of keeping us divided and weak". In other words, blame the media for the public's hostility to Hilaly's extreme language.

The other day, Henderson did some media-bashing of his own. I agree with many of his observations on the "sneering secularists". But he can hardly blame the ABC and other media outlets for reporting stories on child sexual abuse anymore than Muslims can blame the media for reporting stories on Hilaly's rants on the causes of sexual assault.

Last week Lateline began a campaign against Pell concerning his handling of a complaint of Anthony Jones who, at the age of 29, was sexually assaulted by a Catholic priest, Terence Goodall.

Henderson then asks this question ...

... Lateline interviewed a Canberra lawyer, Jason Parkinson, and the American journalist Robert Blair Kaiser. Both were critical of Pell. The former Catholic priest Paul Collins was also heard on Lateline that night. So was the academic Mark Findlay. They were also critical of the cardinal. Apparently Lateline could not find anyone who would put an alternative view.

Alternative view? That some influential people in the Church hierarchy have handled the matter fabulously? That victims don't deserve compensation? That Bishop Fisher deserves a Nobel Peace Prize?

If Henderson is suggesting Catholics and/or WYD pilgrims shouldn't be held accountable for the foibles of the Church hierarchy, I agree with him. But if he is suggesting the media should not report this story, I think he is as deluded as those claiming the Hilaly fiasco shouldn't have been reported.

In reality, the media has been relatively generous to the Church over this issue. Perhaps the enthusiasm and good cheer of the pilgrims that has captured journalists' imaginations.

Words © 2008 Irfan Yusuf

UPDATE: Stuff published elsewhere …

The New Zealand Herald today published some observations on World Youth Day. NZ Herald columnist Garth George was, for some reason, mistakenly mentioned on the website as co-author of the piece. As if George would be caught dead writing such trash!



Following up on a piece about polygamy, the wonderful folk at New Matilda have run a piece on WYD.



Meanwhile, the folk at ABC Unleashed have published my latest observations about thick Sheiks. The highlight isn’t the piece but the vibrant mass debate that follows beneath it.

And now that Alexander Downer has announced his resignation, let’s check out what he was telling (well, sort of) comedian Aamer Rahman when Aamer interviewed (well, sort of) Downer some years back.




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COMMENT: Where the bloody hell's my police protection?

Apparently over the Easter break, an Egyptian chap decided to convert to Roman Catholicism. His baptism was performed by the Pope.

No, not the Egyptian Pope. Not His Holiness Pope Shenoudah III. Rather, by that other Pope. The one Shanudah’s followers regard as an imposter.

Magdi Allam, an Italian writer of Egyptian Muslim heritage, is now known as Christian Allam. He has made his declaration public and has proceeded to make claims about his ancestral faith that would make migration fraudster Ayaan Hirsi Magaan proud.

ABC via Reuters reported that Allam ...

... has lived under police protection following threats against him, particularly after he criticised Iran's position on Israel.

Without meaning to sound like the future wife of a future Australian cricket captain, I’d like to know where the bloody hell is my police protection. After all, I’ve publicly criticised Iran’s position on Israel on numerous occasions.

For instance, a piece authored by me and entitled “Iran’s infantile attitude to Israel” was published on the Online Opinion site on 3 November 2005. Another piece of similar import was published in the New Zealand Herald some 24 hours earlier. Here's an excerpt of what I said there ...

The Iranian President's comments are more reminiscent of Crusader barbarism and ignorance than the moderation and tolerance of the great Saladdin. If Muslim nations follow the Iranian formula in their dealings with Israel, they will go down the same path of destruction as the medieval Frankish hordes that invaded the Holy Land.

i've also written extensively on why the governments of Muslim-majority states should recognise Israel. One such article was published in the New Zealand Herald on Thursday August 16 2007, and another was published recently on the ABC Unleashed portal on 20 March 2008.

Still, it's no skin off my spiritual nose if Christian Allam wants to become a Catholic. No doubt many of his Christian countrymen will have wished he'd picked a more orthodox denomination. My old school chaplain, who frequently told us that the Beast 666 in the Book of Revelation referred to the Pope, will probably still regard Allam as anything but a Christian.

People adopt and change religions all the time. It's a private decision. Mr Allam may claim that he will be the subject of death threats, but he certainly won't be getting any from me.

Thus far, I haven't found a single report of a death threat against Mr Allam. Nor has there ben any substantial report of his conversion in any Muslim newspaper or major newspaper of a Muslim-majority state. Admittedly, I have only searched through the English langauge press. The vast bulk of the reporting and editorialising has been from far-Right and/or Muslim-phobic publications such as National Review Online and TownHall.com.

It seems the violent responses from Muslims are a product of Allam's inflated view of his own importance and the active imaginations of cultural warriors. The fact is that many if not most Muslims would never heard of Allam until news spread of his conversion. Just as many of us had never heard of Usama bin Ladin until September 11.

I wish Allam well. He is entitled to make his religious choices. No doubt if he were a true Catholic and a true Christian, he would show compassion to both his former and current co-religionists. He will not allow his conversion to be used to spread racist and sectarian perversion. Nor will he play the extreme anti-religion rhetorical games of the likes of Ayaan Hirsi Magaan.

Words © Irfan Yusuf 2008

COMMENT: Some thoughts on Dr Tariq Ramadan ...

(Here are some excerpts from an article was published on the MuslimWakeUp website during Tariq Ramadan's last Australian tour in 2004/05.)



Ramadan Does Boxing Day in the Sydney Opera House

This year, I spent Christmas midnight for the first time at midnight mass at Sydney’s St Mary’s Cathedral ... I wanted to do something different for Christmas. Watching the majestic organs of St Mary’s playing whilst the magnificent choir circled the isles of the Cathedral was a truly amazing spiritual experience ...

Interestingly, the word “catholic” means literally “universal.” And that Christmas night at St Mary’s, I was putting into practice some of the universalism I had learnt from a certain Swiss citizen whose name appears in the heading.

Tariq Ramadan did not just come to Australia to enjoy a holiday with his family. He came to deliver a message. Had his journey been a mere holiday, he perhaps would have been one of the thousands of anonymous visitors to one of Australia’s cultural icons, the Sydney Opera House (SOH). But on the night of Boxing Day, 26 December 2004, Ramadan addressed a near-packed concert hall of the SOH ...

Ramadan repeated the same questions he has asked Muslims in numerous talks he has given, articles he has written and books he has penned over the years. How do we understand our faith in such a way that it really does become a universal faith? How do we as a Muslim community become truly accommodating, or need I say, truly Catholic in its literal sense?

It was refreshing to hear the grandson of Imam Hasan al-Banna citing the Brazilian Paulo Coelho’s book The Alchemist to illustrate a subtle shade of Qur’anic meaning. And in doing so, those who understand the message of Ramadan’s grandfather would know that he would not be turning in his grave at his grandson’s grabbing of a piece of wisdom that, like wisdom everywhere, is the believer’s lost property.

Ramadan spent a substantial amount of his address re-defining basic terms we use so often ... For Ramadan ... jihad['s] goal is not killing a maximum number of non-Muslims. Rather, its goal is resistance.

Ramadan said that there can be no Islam without jihad. Islam is peace, and so the goal of jihad must be a resistance that leads to peace. Resistance is the name of the game. And it does not just stop at one’s soul.

In this respect, Ramadan laid out a ground plan of how Muslims can practice jihad in their own communities and nations. How? By joining other Muslims to root out social problems in the Muslim community, problems such as racism. And also by joining with non-Muslims in peaceful action toward social change.

This is jihad and this is Islam according to Ramadan. It is not just about the outer aspects of sunna or prophetic tradition. It is about implementing the simple principles of islam in a complex world. And it is about doing all this in a way that emphasises what we have in common with others.

Ramadan laments the fixation which Muslims in Europe and Australia have with being minorities. It’s as if we want to receive strange looks because we are dying to be different. Yet we simply are not strong enough to achieve the goals of jihad. Yes folks, our jihad is to be conducted WITH non-Muslims, NOT AGAINST non-Muslims.

So my jihad has to be conducted not just with Tariq Ramadan’s audience at the SOH but also with the thousands who joined Cardinal Pell at St Mary’s Cathedral at Midnight Mass.

Put another way, jihad is spiritual love. And love is not just some flimsy emotion from a Robbie Williams song. Love is a spiritual struggle against its opposite and all that resemble that opposite. Negativity is so easy. For many of us, it is our position of inertia. If you want to unite a large group, invent an enemy. Being Daniel Pipes is easy. Being Tariq Ramadan is very hard.

Being a true lover and a true mujahid means being prepared to move beyond hate and resentment and negativity. It means finding commonality with people. It means learning to work with people of all colors, sects, faiths, religions, nationalities, genders … and yes, I will say it … sexual orientations.

That means that I, as a socially conservative Muslim, should be prepared to work with a leftist Catholic and a politically neutral Jew if all three of us believe that certain proposed legislation will curtail civil liberties and human rights. And I should oppose this legislation if the first people whose human rights are affected are refugee animists from Papua.

But try getting most Muslims to understand this sort of thinking. Try getting them to understand that good citizenship is part of taqwa, that there is even an ecological jihad. I could lament and go on and on for fifty more paragraphs, and achieve nothing. I just hope that perhaps Dr Ramadan has the good sense to give the United States the flick and migrate to Australia instead.

© Irfan Yusuf 2008

NB: To switch off the funky music, go to the playlist at the bottom of this homepage.


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OPINION: Christmas and Eid thoughts among the cane toads

A DECADE of primary and secondary education at an evangelical Anglican school was enough to get me addicted to church music. Each Christmas, I try to join friends at Midnight Mass at Sydney's St Mary's Cathedral. It is an extraordinary experience, with both organs playing simultaneously as the choir roams among the congregation in procession singing carols.

This year, I'm joining my partner and her family for Christmas on the Sunshine Coast. It will be my first Christmas in the land of the cane toad. It will also roughly coincide with Eid al-Adha, the most important feast of the Muslim calendar coinciding with the annual pilgrimage known as the Haj.

This year hasn't exactly been a bumper year for relations between the nominally Christian and Muslim sections of the planet. Muslims accuse Christians of taking hypocritical stands in the Middle East, and Christians accuse Muslims of behaving like drama queens in response to a dozen Danish cartoons and one papal speech.

Yet a recent report by a United Nations-sponsored High-Level Group of the Alliance of Civilisations has found that the apparently deplorable state of relations between Christians and Muslims has more to do with politics than theology.

And even the most cursory analysis of the message of Christmas and Eid will reinforce this simple point.

According to Islamic tradition, Abraham had two wives. He first married Sarah, who offered her Egyptian servant named Hajira (Hagar) to Abraham (Islamic tradition says Hagar was from royal stock and became Abraham's second wife). They had a son named Ismail (Ishmael). Eventually Sarah did have a son, despite her advanced years. The Koran describes this as a miraculous process, evidence of God's power to bend His own laws of nature to achieve His purpose.

Abraham's second son was Ishaq (Isaac). Sarah isn't exactly fond of Hagar. Poor Abraham feels Sarah's wrath and takes Hagar and the baby Ishmael in a remote desert wilderness named Bakkah.

Like all mothers, Hagar's primary concern is the survival of her toddler. But where will she find water in this wilderness?

That search for water is what provides the Muslim pilgrimage rituals with much of their meaning. Hagar heads for a hill, finds nothing and so heads in the opposite direction to another hill. She again finds nothing. In desperation, she runs back and forth seven times before setting eyes on her young boy kicking the dirt to uncover a rich spring.

Quickly she builds a makeshift well. Within a short period, the well attracts the attention of other travellers.

Hagar watches her son become a grown man, and receives a visit from Abraham again. The Koran says God orders Abraham and Ishmael to build a temple a simple cubic structure known as the Kaaba. The temple was a symbol of God's throne on Earth, with humans circling it in the manner angels were believed to circle the actual throne in the heavens.

The valley of Bakkah eventually became known as Mecca . The Kaaba (an Arabic word which means cube) is traditionally draped in a black embroidered cloth. The well kicked to the surface by the infant Ishmael is known as the well of Zam Zam.

Muslims on the pilgrimage also run seven times between the two hills, as well as circling the Kaaba and drinking from the well of Zam Zam. Hagar and Mary were both Middle Eastern women.

The Koran also mentions the Christmas story in some detail in a chapter named in honour of Mary. The chapter begins with John the Baptist (named Yahiya in classical Arabic), born to Zachariah, with both father and son revered as Prophets.

Mary is introduced as a chaste woman withdrawing from her family "to a place in the East", locking herself away from the rest of society. A man mysteriously appears in her private chamber. The following dialogue ensues:

MARY: I seek refuge from thee to God Most Gracious: come not near if thou dost fear God.

MAN: Nay, I am only a messenger from the Lord, to announce to thee the gift of a holy son.

MARY: How shall I have a son, seeing that no man has touched me, and I am not unchaste?

MAN: So it will be: Thy Lord saith: 'that is easy for Me: and We wish to appoint him as a sign unto men and as a Mercy from Us'. It is a matter so decreed.

The man was in fact an angel. Christ was conceived miraculously. Following birth, Mary took her son back to her family. Her father was a respected rabbi and Mary was always known for her modesty and chastity. Further Mary had made a vow not to speak to any man for a fixed period of time.

When she was first publicly accused of sexual impropriety, she pointed to the baby Jesus. The Koran thus describes the first miracle of Christ his speaking from the cradle in defence of his mother. His exact words were:

I am indeed a servant of God: He hath given me revelation and made me a prophet. And he hath made me blessed wheresoever I be, and hath enjoined on me prayer and charity as long as I live. He hath made me kind to my mother, and not overbearing or miserable. So peace is on me the day I was born, and the day I die, and the day I shall be raised up to life again!

I'm not sure if Joseph or the Three Wise Men appear in the Koranic account. But a number of Jesus' miracles are mentioned. These include healing lepers and restoring life to the dead. Also mentioned is Christ's ascension. The sayings of Prophet Muhammad mention Christ's return to earth to establish the kingdom of God toward the end of time.

Both Mary and Hagar were women ostracised by and from family and community. Both were humiliated by social mores that were essentially inimical to the far greater purpose their creator had chosen for them to play. In the end, God provided the means for each of these women to overcome family and social stigma Hagar through her son's miraculous discovery of a well and Mary through her son's miraculous defence from the cradle.

Both Christmas and Eid stories show how God doesn't judge his creatures by the standards they use to judge each other. Even if these same standards are applied in the name of divine religion.

Genuinely religious people, on the other hand, recognise that their creator's mercy is for every person. God sees the hearts of all, whether they be accepted or rejected by the society of men.

Muslims and Christians have a joint responsibility to ensure this message of hope and mercy is not lost. The message should remind us of our shared Abrahamic spiritual roots. Indeed, the things that unite us are far greater in number and importance than those which divide us.

Irfan Yusuf is a Sydney lawyer and columnist for AltMuslim.com. This article was first published in the Canberra Times on 23 December 2006.

Words © 2006 Irfan Yusuf


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OPINION: Tony Abbott's respectful message to Muslims

The old man lay on his death bed in Melbourne. Decades of political and ideological struggle were reaching an end. At his side during these last moments were his family and close disciples.

And few could claim to be a closer disciple of the late Bob Santamaria than Tony Abbott. Few ministers are maligned for their religious faith as the Federal Health Minister. Mr Abbott knows what it is like to hold unfashionable views.

If the religious and political culture of conservative Catholics is unpopular in most sectors of the media, the religious and political cultures of virtually all expressions of Islam are regarded in the current climate as sinister and dangerous.

Conservative Christians, including Catholics, have been at the forefront of demonising Muslims. Columnists like Mark Steyn use satire to hide their deepest hatred for all people and things Muslim. Polemical pseudo-intellectual websites like JihadWatch.com, maintained by conservative Catholic Robert Spencer, are relied upon even by men of the intellectual stature of Cardinal Pell.

In such an environment, one could imagine anti-Muslim hostility to be a comfortable fall-back position for an ambitious parliamentarian. One would expect that with influential persons like Rupert Murdoch openly questioning the loyalties of Western Muslims, and with his views being often parroted by his flagship tabloid columnists and string-puppet reporters, a man viewed as a possible future Prime Minister would be happy to move up the ladder by stepping on a tiny marginalised group of 300,000 people.

To his credit, Tony Abbott has resisted the temptation. He has consistently defended multiculturalism when the PM and his Treasurer have questioned its utility. Abbott has even delivered a speech defending it as an essentially conservative value to a hostile group of Young Liberals and allowed his views to be published in otherwise hostile publications such as Quadrant.

Indeed, Abbott has prepared to criticise even members of his own conservative wing in the NSW Liberal Party. Last year he criticised calls by colleagues to ban the wearing of the hijab in state schools, despite such policies being adopted and supported even by Liberals in Abbott’s own electorate.

Muslim Australians seem to have few friends in the present Federal Government (or indeed in the Opposition). Tony Abbott has defended Muslims at times when it was simply not in his interest to do so. Hence, when he speaks about Muslims in a sympathetic and non-hostile manner using measured and sensitive words, the least Muslims should do is consider his argument.

In an address to a religiously mixed crowd under the auspices of the Catholic Diocese of Parramatta on Friday 15 September 2006, Mr Abbott made some pertinent observations. Unlike his colleagues, Abbott did not pretend he was an expert on Islam or talk at Muslims in an insulting and patronising manner.

Mr Abbott made clear his observations were made “as an outsider”. He expressed his empathy with Muslim males lectured by pundits to show respect to women in a dominant culture objectifying women in media and popular culture. He also understood why many Muslims would be cynical of a civilisation which preaches peace but which massacres civilians even in just wars.

Abbott reminded his audience that ethnic and religious tension wasn’t new to Australia. He reminded us of the prejudice faced by Catholics and of their struggles in such incidents as the battle of Vinegar Hill.

Abbott seemed to scold his Liberal colleagues by observing that the cause of communal reconciliation and harmony was harmed by sermonising and sanctimony. At the same time, he reminded his audience that friends should be able to express their feelings frankly.

It was here that Mr Abbott began his tentative personal observations. He said that whilst there was no shortage of Western critics of Western culture, Muslim critics of Islamic cultures seemed few and far between. He felt that Islamic societies seemed to lack a defined pluralism, and that the demarcation between what belonged to Caesar and what belonged to God was not clear. Further, his impression was that Muslims found it hard to tell the difference between sins and crimes.

Abbott observed that Westerners would find Islamic cultures easier to appreciate if those speaking for Islam were visibly more keen to condemn terrorism and less keen to debate Western transgressions, especially considering most terrorist victims are Muslims. Further, Western Muslims able to observe both forms of culture could play a special role of helping both the West and Muslim nations understand each other.

Elements of Abbott’s speech are, in my opinion, plainly wrong. Perhaps he needs to read further on the matter and talk to Muslim Australians, including Muslims inside the Liberal Party. But Abbott was humble and honest enough to admit that he was speaking from hurriedly drawn-up notes and as an outsider.

Muslims honest with themselves will recognise the Health Minister is not alone in holding such views. They should also recognise that he is exercising not mere diplomacy or politics but genuine respect.

Perhaps the most important advice Abbott had for his audience was that religious people shouldn’t be afraid to allow their faith to be hung up for scrutiny. “Something which is from God will prevail. All else will pass”. This simple truth is shared by both Christians and Muslims.

Abbott showed the tolerance and respect for Islam that is to be expected of a genuine Christian. Hopefully genuine Muslims will consider carefully his sincere words of advice.

OPINION: On Pompous Popes & Futile Protests

Recently an Australian Catholic Cardinal expressed the view that the Koran preaches violence. His view was based on a partial reading of an English translation of the Koran coloured by the views of an Israeli polemicist known for her extreme hatred of Muslims. When pressed, the Cardinal admitted he could not even remember which translation of the Koran he had relied upon.

How do I know this? Because I spoke to him myself. I approached him at a gathering and asked him politely about his views. I used a reasonable line of questioning, and was able to illustrate to those listening that the Cardinal’s views were based on his own ignorance combined with reliance on limited and hostile sources.

Of course, I could have taken the absurd and pointless route again being taken by Muslim crowds in some parts of the world. I could always gather a mob together and march in the streets, wasting my time and everyone else’s and achieving nothing except a sore throat and awful media coverage.

I would like to think that Muslim mobs had learnt from the PR disaster that accompanied protests against the Danish cartoons. On that occasion, corrupt and unelected Muslim leaders manipulated state-owned media and government-employed religious leaders to incite their masses into frenzies of violent futility.

As I type these lines, thousands of Muslims in the Darfur region of Sudan face certain death, whether by disease or starvation or bullets. Lebanese Muslims are struggling to rebuild their homes and their lives.

Muslims in Gaza are facing economic and social collapse. Muslims in Afghanistan face civil war as the Western-backed government struggles to defeat a Taliban militia we were led to believe was defeated years back.

Muslims in Pakistan are still suffering from the effects of the earthquake. Muslims across Asia continue to rebuild after the devastating tsunami. Muslims in Kashmir find themselves caught between fanatical militants and merciless Indian troops.

With all these difficulties facing Muslims, of what significance are a few throw-away lines from an ageing Pontiff? And why allow the sheer absurdity of his words be overshadowed by the greater absurdity of violent and hysterical response?

Muslims are beginning to behave in the same manner as European Catholics have until recently. At the height of their power, Muslims were quite happy to allow non-Muslims to criticise their faith.

Spain was home to a physician and religious scholar named Sheik Musa bin Maymoun. Sheik Musa spoke and wrote in Arabic. One of his many treatises was a work entitled (in English) “Guide to the Perplexed”. In this book, Sheik Musa sought to compare the three Abrahamic faiths of Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

Sheik Musa’s conclusion was clear. Judaism was superior to its sister Abrahamic faiths, Islam and Christianity.

The Muslim response? Muslims who disagreed with Sheik Musa’s views did so by writing reasoned responses. Spanish Muslims still consulted Sheik Musa’s expertise in medicine. Sheik Musa himself wasn’t attacked, and copies of his book were not burnt until Catholic armies took back Muslim Spain. Burning books and effigies was too uncivilised for those polished and proud Muslims.

Sheik Musa was in fact the great Andalusian rabbi Maimonides. His critique of Islam, together with his skills as a physician, led the Kurdish general Saladin to appoint him as chief medical officer to the army that eventually conquered Jerusalem from the Frankish crusader kings. Maimonides went onto become one of Saladin’s closest and most trusted advisers.

(And in case you are wondering what Maimonides looked like, check out the statue of the dude in the turban and robes on the top right-hand side of this blog.)

Islam was robust and strong enough in those times to withstand Maimonides’ criticism. Muslims were sensible and educated and civilised and confident enough to be able to accept criticism. They could debate their critics on an intellectual level without having to resort to violence or being highly strung and reactionary to even the mildest rebuke.

In an environment as free as Australia, a humble layman like myself can expose the relative ignorance of a Cardinal. I can do this using intellect and logic, far more powerful tools than behaving defensively or threatening violence.

Muslims offended by the Pope’s comments about Islam and history are better off addressing these arguments than condemning the Pope. If Muslims become defensive or even hint at violence, they will merely be personifying (and thus confirming) of the Pope’s claims.

Muslims should challenge the Pope to name even one soldier or military commander who took Islam to Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim country. He should be asked to show where a Muslim ruler has murdered 6 million Jews or where Muslims have conducted a Spanish-style Inquisition. He might also advise of which Japanese city Muslims dropped an atomic bomb onto.

The fact is that both Muslims and Christians have had blood on their hands at various points in their history. People have murdered, raped, terrorised, looted and burnt in the names of both Christ and Allah. We are all living in glass houses, and none of us is sinless enough to be able to cast the first stone.

It’s only to be expected that the leader of a missionary faith will criticise other missionary faiths. Just as we expect Don Brash to criticise Helen Clark or Kim Beazley to criticise John Howard or Hillary Clinton to criticise George W Bush. Thankfully, clerics tend to be more polite than politicians most of the time. But criticism (including self-critique) is part of the Abrahamic tradition.

Further, there are enough Christians (including Catholics) of goodwill who will be happy to criticise the Pontiff’s comments. Already, the leader of the Coptic Orthodox Church in Egypt has issued a strong response.

My advice to any Muslim genuinely perturbed by the Pope’s comments is simply this - if you can’t stand the missionary heat, you should think about getting out of Abraham’s spiritual kitchen. If you are unhappy with the reason and restraint your religious heritage insists upon, you should find yourself another religion.

OPINION: Get your own house in order before you go tearing others' houses down ...

Around 900 years ago, back in the days when most of Europe was lost in the Dark Ages, the then-deranged Muslim ruler of Jerusalem decided to tear down the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. He was quickly deposed, and the Church hastily rebuilt at Muslim expense. The Muslims apologised.

It was too late. Within a few months, reports of similar attacks on Christian pilgrims and symbols in Palestine had spread across Europe. Pope Urban II seemed powerless to respond. He was more concerned with corruption within the Vatican (much of it his own doing), and with the presence of other allegedly false competing claimants to the Pontiff’s throne.

The Pope's “solution” to the internal crisis was to seek a diversion. He declared the first Crusade. Historians agree that in leading this battle, the then-Pontiff was less interested in defending the honour of Christ or Jerusalem than in shoring up his own power and diverting attention away from crises within the Church.

Hardly 900 years later, the tables have turned. This time it is mainly Muslim leaders who are embroiled in corruption and scandal. The generals, emirs, kings and presidents-for-life that rule most Muslim-majority states (usually with the help of their Western patrons) have failed to effectively deal with the poverty, illiteracy and other economic and social ills too numerous to list here.

Today these rulers are also seeking a diversion. One obscure neo-Conservative Danish newspaper appears to have provided it. What they have also proven is that perhaps Muslims are in the midst of their own Dark Age.

In the past few weeks, two bastions of Middle Eastern liberty and democracy - Libya and Saudi Arabia - have withdrawn ambassadors from Denmark. In many Muslim countries, Danish goods are being boycotted.

In my birthplace of Karachi, frenzied Pakistanis hit the streets with protests that did more damage to the Pakistani economy than to anyone in Denmark. Don’t these people have work to do and mouths to feed? Then again, some of these men (Pakistani women have more important matters to attend to) will protest each time they think a Pakistani batsman is given out lbw unfairly.

And across the Arab world, supermarkets have removed Danish goods from their shelves. Recently, a Syrian Muslim rabble decided that the best way to defend the honour of their Prophet was to attack and burn embassies of at least three European countries. In Gaza, with Israel ready to cut the fiscal umbilical cord, Palestinian gunmen seem content to bite one of the few hands that feeds them by occupying and threatening workers at the headquarters of the European Union.

Had someone unaware of the cartoons viewed the response, they might think Denmark has invaded Bosnia or Iran and was unjustly occupying its territory. They might think Danish settlements replaced Israeli ones popping up in various places across the West Bank. Or perhaps the Danish government had passed laws banning girls from wearing headscarves in schools.

Of course, nothing of the sort happened. Instead, an obscure privately-owned newspaper in Denmark published cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad. One cartoon apparently showed the Prophet standing at the pearly gates of heaven in much the same way as St Peter in the Catholic tradition. Another portrayed the Prophet’s turban as a bomb.

The cartoons were first published in the Morgenavisen Jyllands-Posten. Most people living in Muslim countries would probably be unable to pronounce the paper’s name, let alone having heard of it.

And so today, I and many other Muslims feel compelled to stand up and be counted. To defend the honour of a man I grew up to regard as a Prophet.

No, not from a dozen cartoons published by a neo-Conservative Danish newspaper. Nor from their reproduction in newspapers across Europe and even New Zealand.

We feel compelled to defend the honour of the Prophet of Islam from the shameful actions of some people claiming to be his followers.

No, we are not ashamed of Islam. We are not ashamed of the Prophet Muhammad. We are not ashamed of the values many of us grew up with, values that are so similar to those of my Anglican school or my many Jewish colleagues and friends.

What upsets and shames us is the depths to which some Muslims have sunk.

I wonder at how low Muslims have stooped that some of them are prepared to resort to mob violence to display their religiosity. In doing so, they appear ignorant of (or worse still, reckless to) the fact that they are mainly targeting the innocent.

The Arabic phrase used by the Qur’an to describe the Prophet Muhammad is “rahmat al-lil a’alameen” (literally “mercy to the worlds”). Like the other Prophets recognised by Islam (including the Messiah Jesus), Muhammad always preferred forgiveness over revenge.

Instead of following his example, many 21st century Muslims are behaving in similar vein to the then uncivilised medieval Europeans did during the Crusades.

Today, some Muslim mobs are attacking anything deemed Danish. They are being egged on by selfish, undemocratic and dictatorial kings, generals, emirs and presidents-for-life.

Muslim countries are suffering problems taller than the tsunami waves that brought so much misery to hundreds of thousands of Muslims in Indonesia.

Muslim women in various countries are being murdered by members of their own families for the sake of defending some false notion of “honour”.

Millions of Muslims are living in poverty and disease in Pakistan following the devastating earthquake. Millions more are starving in refugee camps in Nigeria and other parts of Africa.

Muslim-majority nations are riddled with corruption. Their leaders are squandering resources and wealth whilst their citizens live below the poverty line.

Yet today some governments of Muslim-majority countries are encouraging their citizens to attack European embassies. For many dictatorial and undemocratic Muslim regimes, the cartoon controversy represents a wonderful diversion away from the real problems facing their communities.

Instead of protecting the honour of their Prophet, some Muslims seem intent on destroying their own honour by behaving in a manner their Prophet had condemned 14 centuries ago.

What appears to have (quite understandably) upset Muslims most is one cartoon depicting the Prophet wearing a bomb as a turban, suggesting that he preached terrorism. Yet surely the worst way to protest against this is to commit acts of terror such as tearing down and burning embassies.

Boycotting Danish goods may be a more peaceful and preferable manner of protest. Yet even such a boycott effectively punishes the innocent and attributes the disrespectful manner of one newspaper to an entire nation. To blame all Danes for the actions of one newspaper editor claiming to defend freedom of speech is as absurd as blaming all Muslims for the acts of terror of a few lunatics claiming to defend of Islam.

Those Muslims who really care about the honour of their Prophet should focus their attention on improving their own situation. They might start by considering what sort of deal non-Muslim minorities get in Muslim countries, and how non-Muslim religious symbols are abused in Muslim publications. Perhaps they would then understand why some Muslim minorities leaving peacefully in Western countries (including Denmark, New Zealand and Australia) may cop plenty of flack due to their antics.

The Muslim mobs might also consider how the Prophet responded to attacks on himself. I am not aware of any biographical record of the Prophet taking any revenge for attacks on his person. I remember one recorded incident of a Jewish neighbour who was in the habit of pouring faeces over the Prophet. One day, the faeces stopped. The Prophet’s response was to inquire about the neighbour’s health.

How far some of today’s Muslims are from the golden example of the man in whose name they are causing so much destruction. Don’t they have enough problems of their own to be concerned with? In the grander scheme of things, in the context of poverty and natural disasters and culturally-related oppression of women.and so much else, are some Muslims so narrow-minded and infantile as to ascribe so much importance to 12 cartoons?

My message to Muslim mobs is simply this - before you consider tearing down the houses (and embassies) of others, think about cleaning up your own.

(The author is a Sydney-based industrial and commercial lawyer and a freelance columnist whose articles have been published in the Sydney Morning Herald, Australian Financial Review, Daily Telegraph, Courier-Mail, Canberra Times and New Zealand Herald. He is a columnist for Online Opinion and altmuslim.com and regularly controbutes to the Web Diary. This article has also been published at Online Opinion on 6 February 2006 and in the Dominion Post (published in Wellington, NZ) on 8 February 2006.)

Words © 2006 Irfan Yusuf


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COMMENT: Howard Should Think Twice Before Listening To Muslim Peak Bodies

Muslim community governance mirrors that of Australian government. Just as we have local councils, Muslims have local mosque societies. These come together to form state and territory councils, similar to our state and territory governments. These councils there come together to form the Australian Federation of Islamic Councils (AFIC).

Every catholic has heard of Cardinal Pell. Every Anglican has heard of the Jensen’s. But take a walk down Auburn Road in Auburn. Ask the average Muslim whether he or she has heard of AFIC.

Huh? AFIC? Is that some kind of new chocolate ice cream? Cadbury Afic – creamy chocolate filled with extra nuts.

AFIC’s meetings are closed to ordinary Muslims. Further, in NSW, AFIC has made it a practice to create its own rotten borough Islamic councils when it disagrees with existing ones. Already, within a space of 5 years, it has created 3 Islamic councils.

In 2001, it established the Supreme Islamic Council of NSW to replace the Islamic Council of NSW. Then, when it fell out with the Supreme Council, Muslims were already cracking jokes about its replacement and predicted it would be the Super-Supreme Council.

AFIC now has eyes on closing down the Islamic Council of Victoria, one of the few bodies that have acted constructively in relation to the London bombings. AFIC is attempting to find legal loopholes to replace ICV with a Victorian pizza council.

As a result, Muslim New South Welshmen refer to their peak bodies as “the 3 pizza councils”. It all makes for good after-dinner humour. But with the hundreds of thousands of dollars spent in legal fees in Supreme Court battles, few Muslims are now finding it a laughing matter.

AFIC projects itself to governments as the voice of Muslim Australia. Yet it rarely if ever consults with Muslim Australians. The extent to which it is out of touch with Muslim Australia was illustrated after the terrorist attack on Istanbul.

Turkish Australians are perhaps the largest and most established ethnic group in the Australian Muslim communities. Turks control more mosques than any other community, including in rural and regional areas. But when Istanbul was the subject of a terrorist attack, AFIC described the attack as one on the capital of Turkey.

All AFIC had to do was ask one of 200,000 Aussie Turks what the capital of Turkey was. Even “Crazy” John Ilhan knows the answer to that question. Then again, at least they issued a press release on the Istanbul bombing. AFIC’s website has no release over the London bombing.

Believe it or not, the Department of Immigration awarded AFIC a large grant under its “Living in Harmony” project some years back. AFIC spent the money on hiring a media adviser and publishing a few issues of a newspaper. When the grant moneys finished, so did the paper.

AFIC has no idea of who it is representing. It has never conducted any survey or study on Muslim needs or attitudes or social trends. Before the Iraq war, AFIC claimed Muslims as a whole were against the war. And on what basis did they reach this conclusion? Who knows.

Among AFIC’s more controversial decisions was the creation of the position of “mufti” as a means of securing permanent residency for Sheik Taj Hilali. The Sheik’s appointment was particularly controversial given his inability to speak fluent English and his being imam of a mosque whose executive only allows Lebanese to be full members.

Now it seems that AFIC will be representing Muslim Australians at a proposed terror summit. And what steps has AFIC take to consult with local Muslims on the matter? What surveys or structured consultations has AFIC held with mosque congregations, university students, academics, business people and professionals that make up this dynamic and upwardly mobile faith-community?

Mr Howard needs to involve Muslim Australians in national security issues. Muslim Australians have a knowledge and understanding of terror groups which will prove invaluable to fighting this scourge. But Mr Howard and other mainstream leaders should think twice before taking the representative capacity of bodies like AFIC for granted.

Like their Jewish cousins, Muslims are not fond of consuming pork. But for many Muslims, pigs will sooner fly into the mosque to lead the Friday prayer before they will feel AFIC is representing them.

© Irfan Yusuf 2005


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