Living in a material world - Page 3
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 7: The Lure of Fundamentalism
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Randa Abdel-Fattah
HAVE MUSLIMS CHANGED SINCE 2001? IF YOU LIVE AS A HEADLINE, as a stereotype, as a debatable citizen, is there a temptation to retreat? To go, say, from Jamilah to Julie? To hide your faith in front of your work colleagues? I'm no statistician but there seems to be an overwhelming resistance to this temptation to withdraw to the safety of anonymity. When one opens the newspapers and hears of the expulsion of French Muslim girls from French schools for failing to abide by the new secularism rules or scans television guides with an inordinate amount of documentaries "demystifying" Islam, something is often provoked – defiance and an even stronger will to stand up with pride and conviction in one's faith as a testament to the inaccuracy of the misconceptions and labels. Mostafa insists he will be not be nicknamed "Mo". He does not shy from telling his colleagues that he is on his way to pray at the mosque on Friday.
Mixed up in the spiritual reasons for donning the hijab is, for some women, a spirit of defiance. The hijab represents independence and a refusal to subordinate the right to express faith to societal dictates and assumptions. It takes courage to decide to wear it. With an increasing number of younger Muslim girls and women making that decision, one can only suppose that to do so in the midst of the war on terror, to voluntarily render oneself a visible "symbol" of Islam, suggests that there might just be something more than spirituality at work – perhaps an attraction to living life boldly, courageously, defiantly, with spunk and daring.
If the Arab traders that brought Islam to Indonesia had brought Islam to Australia and settled, or spread their faith amongst the indigenous population, our country today would be vastly different. Our laws, our institutions, our economy would all be vastly different. But that did not happen... Our society was founded by British colonists. And the single most decisive feature that determined the way it developed was the Judeo-Christian-Western tradition. As a society, we are who we are, because of that heritage...
– Peter Costello in the keynote address on National Day of
Thanksgiving Celebration in Melbourne, May 2004.
I READ THAT SPEECH AND I FELT I WAS BEING THREATENED. Threatened against daring to ever think I form a part of my country's heritage, identity and core. I am 25. I have found love and am happily married. I enjoy secure employment. I believe I have been bestowed with enough blessings and luck to resist such threats and to hold tight to who I am. But what about my young Muslim sisters and brothers, a generation behind me, still in school, still trying to forge their identities, still desperately seeking to make sense of their place in this country? Will the threats anger them? Terrify them? Repel them? Sadden them?
Do our leaders care?
Last year, one of the college's top Year 12 students, on her way to school, was waiting at a bus stop. She had one of her VCE exams on that day. A car approached and slowed down.
Rima was spat at.
She remained composed until she arrived at school when she saw a staff member and broke down crying. The teacher tried to comfort her, then got her a clean hijab.
There's no doubt that the incident affected Rima's performance in the exam. The subject was one of her strongest and yet it was the one for which she received the poorest mark, barring her from obtaining the enter score she required for her first university preference.
Walid rides his bike to school. One morning, three adult men pushed him off his bike, slashed his pants with a knife and ran off. He deserved it. September 11, remember?
Several months ago rotten eggs were thrown at the college. The scale of this attack was too enormous to suspect a gang of bored, destructive kids. It appeared to have been a planned operation by adults. The gates and all the doors and entrances into the school were coated with rotten eggs. Carpets had to be replaced. The stench was unbearable. The staff and cleaners stayed back late to clean up.
SHORTLY AFTER THE BALI BOMBINGS, I SAT ON A BUS WITH A FRIEND who wears hijab. The bus driver took a look at us, issued our tickets, and was at once grumpy and annoyed. We took our seats and the bus wound on its way as we gossiped and laughed. Then slowly we noticed that the volume of the radio had been raised, drowning out our voices. A voice on the early-morning talkback radio shouted words of outrage about "Muslims being violent" and how "they're all trouble" and how "Australians are under threat of being attacked by these Koran-wielding people who want to sabotage our way of life and our values". Our faces went bright red; my stomach turned as the bus driver eyeballed us in the mirror, a triumphant expression on his face, as though we represented a vindication of the words blasting through the loudspeakers for everyone to hear.
It's times like that when you realise that to some people it doesn't matter that you were born here. It doesn't matter that your father has a PhD and is in the world's Who's Who of Science; that your mother has a psychology degree, a diploma of education and has worked her way to deputy director of a college that teaches children to feel nothing less than Aussie Muslims. It doesn't matter that you can call no other country except this one home. To some people, you are just an ignorant wog, an evil Muslim, a waste of space on this landscape called Australia. And with leaders who make no effort to correct such views, who generate an atmosphere that allows such poisonous ideas to flourish in a rotting, fermenting citizenship increasingly based on difference and prejudice, it is terrifying to think it even remotely possible that "some people" will become "most people".
Yes, I'm angry. Yes, Australian Muslims are angry. Fed up with labouring under the stereotype of terrorists. Fed up with fear campaigns. Fed up with leaders whose hearts beat to the drums of war and violence. Fed up with the hypocrisy and lies. We do not sit at night and watch the news broadcasts with mere academic disillusionment. We do not utter an abstract tut tut. We are weary of feeling under siege.
There are a great many people who understand, who don't pity but who extend their support, exercise logic and reason, show compassion, apply sensitivity, seek the truth, conduct research, listen to our politicians and journalists with a critical mind. In doing so, they have applied the minimum standards of what it means to be a thoughtful citizen, a fellow human being; to see one another as idiosyncratic individuals whose actions do not represent or stand to be represented by others.
Oh, but if only they were the majority.
Do you want to know how it feels to be an Australian Muslim in the Australia of today?
You are a hyphenated identity.
An Australian-Muslim-Lebanese-female.
An Australian-Muslim-Palestinian-male.
An Australian-Muslim-Turkish-of-second-generation.
Sooner or later you are going to have to learn to come to terms with your identity hyphens – but you have to do that in the aftermath of September 11, the Bali bombings and in the midst of the war on terror. If you are a teenager, you want to get caught up in things like fashion, sport, music, movies, personalities, alliances and the minor dramas of your family. Yet you will struggle to get on with puberty and the teenage angst thing and have your crushes and go through your diets and perve at chicks while being a prefix to terrorism, extremism, radicalism, any ism.
Do you want to know how it feels to be an Australian Muslim in the Australia of today?
Then turn on the television, open a newspaper. There will be a feature article analysing, deconstructing, theorising about Islam and Muslims in which your fellow Australians will be offered the chance to make sense of this phenomenon called "the Muslim".
This is what it means to be an Australian Muslim today. It is to try to live against the perception that one represents a synonym for terrorism and extremism. It is to realise that whenever Muslims appear on the world stage, challenging an existing situation, they will be defined as fundamentalists, terrorists. It is to see the faith you embrace with such conviction defiled and defamed because acts that defy Islamic law and doctrine are still prefixed by the media with the word "Islamic". It is to have the reasonable, peaceful statements of your leaders ignored and the ignorant ravings of the minority splashed across the headlines. It is to be the topic of talkback radio rant and raves.
It is to come to accept that although atrocities are committed in the name of all religions around the world, it is Islam alone that will be judged by the actions of those who purport to be its followers. It is to refuse to lay blame for the behaviour of so-called Christians at the feet of Christ because you respect the intent of Christ's words and actions and because you know that even those acting in his name are misguided. It is to see Palestinians slaughtered and oppressed by a brutal Israeli occupation that arrogantly parades its defiance and utter contempt of international law and human rights, without pointing at the Torah and disrespecting the great religion of Judaism which you know, as a matter of logic, cannot condone such an unconscionable and heinous occupation.
So what it means to be an Australian Muslim today is that you will often sit alone, in the silence of your hurt and fury, and wonder why it is so difficult for Islam, a religion followed by 1.3 billion people, all of whom cannot be uncivilised, unintelligent, immoral, unthinking dupes, to be treated with the same respect. ♦