Australia an estranged country to many Muslims including Sheik Omran
CHIP LE GRAND THE AUSTRALIAN MAY 23, 2015 12:00AM
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Ali Kadri of Holland Park, Brisbane, reports growing unease among fellow Muslims. PictureAli Kadri of Holland Park, Brisbane, reports growing unease among fellow Muslims. Picture: Lyndon Mechielsen. Source: News Corp Australia < PrevNext >
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Sheik Mohammed Omran remembers clearly the day he was meant to become an Australian citizen. He had bought himself a pair of shiny new shoes and a new suit. He had told the handful of friends he’d made during his three months here to come and celebrate with him.
He turned up on the day of the ceremony, a Jordanian in a wide, welcoming land, only to realise he had made a terrible mistake.
He was a week late.
The woman behind the desk soon put him at ease. No worries, luv. All he needed to do was sign a note saying he still wanted his Australian citizenship and they would mail him the certificate.
When it came to applying for a passport, he realised there wasn’t anyone in Australia who’d known him for the requisite six months to vouch for him. Again, no worries. The local post office manager was happy to bear witness for a stranger in need and scrawl his name on the dotted line.
“This is how life was,” Omran says. “Beautiful and easy. Everything was nice and helpful. It meant so much to me.”
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The year was 1983. Bob Hawke had just been given the keys to the Lodge. Australia would soon win the America’s Cup. In the Middle East, war was raging between Iraq and Iran and within Lebanon, but in his adopted home of Wollongong, Abu Ayman — as his friends know the sheik — was a young man at peace. “That life I really appreciated Australia for. I came to see it and live it and wanted it for my children and grandchildren.”
Australia’s most senior Salafist cleric says if he knew then what he does now, he wouldn’t have come at all. On a Saturday night in Coolaroo, an industrial northern Melbourne suburb where more people consider themselves Muslim than any other religion, the sheik speaks with disappointment, a tinge of bitterness and overwhelmingly a deep sense of dismay. He says he feels like a foreigner in his own country.
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“If I knew that one day this would happen in Australia, I swear by the almighty God I will never step foot in my — in your — country,” he tells Inquirer from his office inside the Hume Islamic Youth Centre, where young families are starting to drift in for pizza and prayers. Omran gestures to his adult son Osama, who is quietly serving tea to the older men in the room. “He feels he is not wanted because his name is Islamic. Everyone gets devastated by that.”
Across Muslim Australia, the sheik’s dismay is widely shared. Against a backdrop of tightening anti-terror and citizenship laws, the creeping threat of online radicalisation and corrosive influence of Islamophobia, Muslim communities are confronting a crisis of cohesion, community and leadership. In the south Brisbane suburb of Holland Park, where a mosque has stood since the early years of Federation, Ali Kadri recounts stories of women being too fearful to go to shopping centres wearing their hijabs, of second and third-generation Muslims being abused for growing their beards, of neighbourhood streets that no longer feel safe. It has been this way only in the past two years, he says.
He invites non-Muslim Australians to step into the shoes of a friend of his, a chemical engineer who works for a large company in central Brisbane. Recently at work, he took a crowded lift to his floor. When he got off, someone behind him remarked they could all feel safe now. The man’s ears burned as the lift doors closed to sniggering laughter.
“When he came and talked to me about the incident he said it doesn’t matter if his life is in danger, he would rather live in Pakistan than Australia now,” Kadri says. To that experience, the unmarried Kadri adds a personal insight: “I wouldn’t want to bring a Muslim girl into this country any more. I would marry someone here. I don’t want to bring her into an unsafe environment.”
Even community leaders who fully support the federal government’s $1.2 billion crackdown on terrorism and acknowledge the unique threat posed by Islamic State recruiters say Muslim Australia has never felt this uncomfortable.
“It is very hard to be an Australian Muslim these days,” says Jamal Rifi, a GP who has become a prominent voice within the Australia’s largest and most concentrated Muslim community in Lakemba and the surrounding suburbs of western Sydney.
“It has always been hard but it is even harder now. The community is unfortunately in the situation where it is being attacked from the outside, attacked from overseas and eaten up from the inside. We are at the crossroads. The soul of this community is actually being lost, to be honest.”
Rifi believes Australia’s peak Muslim body, the Australian Federation of Islamic Councils, is not capable of providing the leadership its communities need. He will get no argument from the AFIC’s founding president Haset Sali, who this week described the “tragic power vacuum” at the heart of the organisation. What leadership Muslim Australia has is fragmented and ineffective.
“These are ordinary citizens trying to cope with extraordinary pressure and they are probably ill-equipped to do it,” Rifi says. “Muslim Australia, or what they call AFIC, they are almost nonexistent in this debate. They control the most funding, they control Islamic schools, yet they are not playing an active role.”
Muslim Australia is itself a misnomer. Its communities are varied, disparate and in some cases fiercely at odds over what the problems are and how to address them. To appreciate the fault lines, look no further than the conflicting responses offered to the touchstone issue of radicalisation.
Omran, emir of the Ahlus Sunnah wal Jama’ah school of Islamic thought characterised by literal interpretations of the Koran, believes the global threat represented by Islamic State is exaggerated and the national security risk posed by Muslim Australians seeking to join its ranks is grossly overblown. “There are so many issues to be more worried about than terrorists,” he says. “How many Australians have been killed by terrorists? Skin cancer, breast cancer kill thousands every year.”
Mustafa Abu Yusuf, an adviser to the sheik and a spokesman for the ASWJ, goes further. He describes terrorism as a fabricated issue that cynically has been used by successive governments to create a Muslim bogeyman. “There is an old Arab proverb,” Yusuf says. “ ‘When you believe that someone is good all you hear from them is good. When you believe someone is bad all you can see is bad.’ You marginalise and demonise elements of the community, then you push them beyond the limits, where they don’t feel like they belong. If it wasn’t for the half-decent people in Australia most of the Muslim community would be pushed out on to the fringes.”
In raw numbers, the core problem of youth radicalisation is dwarfed by the scale of the federal government’s policy response. Intelligence agencies believe there are 104 Australians fighting for Islamist groups in Syria or Iraq. Between 20 and 30 people have been killed or in combat or murdered by their Islamic State comrades. About 100 Australians have had their passports cancelled on the grounds they were planning to travel to take up arms in the conflict zone.
Kadri says the appeal of Islamic State (also known as ISIS) among young Muslims here is already waning. “I believe that most of the young boys who were going to go have either gone or had their passports cancelled. For the first time since this ISIS phenomenon, the young boys are disillusioned by ISIS. They see ISIS as something that has deviated the whole focus of the Syrian revolution and the (Assad) regime’s atrocities to a terrorist group, to the disservice of the Syrian people. ISIS has caused a bigger problem than it has solved.”
Rifi believes the biggest threat facing Muslims in Australia is the risk of young people being drawn to Islamic State and other proscribed groups. A generation ago, the path to radicalisation was slow and involved. Joining a group such as al-Qa’ida involved time, training and winning trust within a complex organisational hierarchy.
Recruitment to Islamic State’s murderous cause can take place within weeks in the confines of a teenager’s bedroom. Those who cannot travel to Syria are encouraged to kill in Australia. Given this, Rifi sees anti-terror laws that restrict travel to Syria and Iraq and entail passport confiscation and intrusive surveillance by counter-terrorism police and intelligence agencies as necessary evils.
“The priority is to protect the kids’ safety right now because it is being preyed upon by devil recruiters,” he says. “They are taking advantage of the vulnerability of our young people to lead them to their deaths. The safety and security of Australia should be as important to us as to anyone else. We shouldn’t allow anyone in our community to pose a risk to the safety and security of Australia.
“At the same time, I need to tell the government that they can’t win it on their own. They need the help of the community.”
This help will not be forthcoming if Muslim communities do not trust government. Proposals to mesh anti-terror laws with citizenship and welfare policies, the passage of metadata laws that erode the privacy of electronic communications, a revived push to reduce protections against racially offensive speech — for Muslims these cannot be isolated from dog-whistle debates about burkas and halal food certification. The risk is further social and political disclocation within Muslim communities.
On the fringes of Australian politics, European-style Islamophobia is finding voice.
In October this year, the Australian Liberty Alliance, a spin-off of the “Islam-critical” Q Society, will be launched by Dutch parliamentarian Geert Wilders. In its published manifesto, the ALA pledges to “stop the Islamisation of Australia”. This week’s proposal by the Abbott government to strip dual-citizen jihadis of Australian citizenship faintly echoes one of Wilders’s most contentious policies: stripping Dutch citizenship from Muslims who commit crimes.
With the ALA preparing to field candidates in next year’s federal election, life is will not get any easier for Australian Muslims.
In this climate, the Australian media is viewed with deep scepticism by young Muslims. This in turn perpetuates cultural stereotypes and mutual misunderstanding. The usual charges against the government and media are hypocrisy and selective outrage.
A rap video performed by Hussam Ahman, an Iraqi-born actor and activist living in Tampa Bay, Florida, has gained international prominence on social media. Ahman’s Expressions of an Angry Muslim captures the frustrations of young, politically engaged Muslims living in the West about the prominence given to Islamic State atrocities compared with the greater crimes of the Assad regime: “So you say ISIS is a crisis … You want to flip out when ISIS carries out crimes in the name of God but what about the drones and the bombs that we drop a lot on villages? We receive images of children in little bits and pieces in the name of freedom and peace. It’s mind-boggling how we condemn in others what we condone in ourselves.”
The rhymes could have been written by the two young Muslim men who speak to Inquirer inside the cafe of the Hume Youth Islamic Centre in Coolaroo.
The cafe is in a sprawling light-industrial and retail complex that includes an Islamic department store and prayer halls. On a Saturday night, the cafe is filled with families sharing a meal after prayers. Children have the run of the cafe floor. Most women wear the hijab, with one or two preferring the more conservative niqab so confronting to non-Muslim eyes. Outside on the footpath, young men share cigarettes and banter. When two police vans turn up with lights flashing, it causes barely a pause in the conversation. The HYIC, which is closely monitored by counter-terrorism agents, is well used to a visible police presence.
On a rainy midweek afternoon, the cafe is largely empty. Its manager, who declines to give his name, is at first annoyed at the presence of a reporter and gestures towards the door. But after a little encouragement, the young man and his friend agree to talk over a cup of coffee. They remain wary.
Normally, journalists visit the centre only in the aftermath of an anti-terror raid, looking for evidence of radical thought. The young men are frustrated that since the emergence of Islamic State, they see almost nothing in the local papers about the other side of the Syrian conflict: the indiscriminate killing of Sunni civilians by the Assad regime.
The manager insists that I watch videos he has stored on his phone showing the bloody aftermath of barrel bombs dropped on to residential streets, of children maimed and murdered, of victims of chemical attacks. He shares his experience of working on a building site where he was ostracised by his non-Muslim workmates. “We do feel like second-class citizens,” his friend says. “But we’re OK with that,” he facetiously adds.
Muslims have endured difficult times in Australia before. Ali Dirani is a prominent figure behind a campaign to build a mosque in Coolaroo. Council approval for the mosque was grudgingly given after Dirani and others took their case to the Victorian Administrative Appeals Tribunal. Dirani previously owned a charcoal chicken franchise in Albury, a large regional town in NSW. After the Cronulla riots, customers stopped coming into his shop.
Despite having established the business over several years, he was forced to close. With a heavy heart, he drove his large family down the Hume Highway to Melbourne. He now runs a successful business in Coolaroo.
Dirani remains optimistic. He describes Islamic State as an illness rather than an ideology. He says the cure cannot be forced, whether through punitive laws or other measures. Rather, young Muslims need to be convinced of the opportunities Australia offers, that Muslims can prosper and freely pray here, that Islamic State is anathema to Islamic values rather than an extreme expression of them. “No sane individual would believe that the creator of humanity is going to condone this,” Dirani says.
“People today, they want to make God a partner in their crimes. The individuals that are on the ground killing, the way they are doing it they have lost their humanity. My advice for the youth: try to live a purpose in life and try to have a vision and think positively. Disassociate yourself from anyone who would try to bring out the worst in you or sees negatives in everything around them. It is contagious.”
Sheik Omran does not like the word extremism. He prefers deviation. The image this conjures is not of brothers who have taken things too far but misguided souls who have lost their way entirely.
Through his involvement at the Brunswick mosque and more recently the HYIC, Omran has known some of Australia’s most notorious deviants: Abdul Nacer Benbrika before he formed a terrorist cell; Harun Mehicevic before he established the hardline al- Furqan Centre in Melbourne’s southast; Melbourne teenager Numan Haider before he lunged at two counter-terrorism taskforce officers with a knife outside a suburban police station.
The sheik has been accused of his own deviations, most notably in describing Osama bin Laden as a good man. Omran does not apologise for his past comments or previous associations. Nor does he consider himself a firebrand, as he is often described. Rather, he sees himself as a man grown old in a country that no longer as welcoming as it once was. This disillusionment, this otherness, is at the heart of the Muslim malaise.
“If they all feel this is their country, that they have the same rights, the same duties, then if a terrorist came, even if Osama bin Laden came to Australia and encouraged these children, they would tell him to get lost, that we are not going to ruin the country for you. But when everyone pushes everyone, labels everyone, everyone attacks everyone, then these people want to do it.
“We have to go to the root of the problem. As Australians, we are very good at treating the symptoms but not looking for the cause. Look for the cause and all this will be solved.”
