The Ark

In 1992, Hanifa Deen journeyed through Australian Muslim communities and wrote a sensitive portrait of them in her book, Caravanserai. A decade later she revisits those communities and finds them profoundly changed.

Transcript

This transcript was typed from a recording of the program. The ABC cannot guarantee its complete accuracy because of the possibility of mishearing and occasional difficulty in identifying speakers.

THEME

Rachael Kohn: 'Caravanserai' refers to the central court of an inn where caravans pull in for the night. Caravans, or covered wagons, were the mobile homes of many Muslims who later came to Australia to make a living hawking goods.

Hello, this is The Ark, and I'm Rachael Kohn.

Caravanserai is also the name of a book by Hanifa Deen, who's documented the lives of a diverse collection of Australian Muslims in order, as she says, to put a 'human face' on Islam. First published after the Gulf War, Hanifa Deen revised the work in light of September 11 and the Bali bombing.

Hanifa Deen: The people I speak to all around Australia, my old friends that I've been revisiting nine years on, they see 2001 as a defining moment in their existence, as Australian Muslims. I found that when I went around Australia in '94, that was after the first Gulf War, Muslims were more or less a contented lot. The average Australian didn't know much about them, probably didn't want to know much about them, but they could their schools, they could build their mosques, of course there'd be the usual problems with local councils, but the law was even-handed.

There had been some incidents where buses were stoned, school buses, and where women's veils were pulled, but what I noted nine years ago was a remarkable standing together of Australian political leaders, a coming together of institutions, unions, churches, educational groups, sort of saying to the tabloid media and to the hotheads, they're Australians.

But this time as I went around in 2002, the climate was different, and the Muslims I spoke to had changed, they were very, very saddened, they were traumatised, they were shocked, they looked at people and they saw repulsion in their eyes.

Rachael Kohn: Well certainly the average Australian knows Muslims usually only by seeing them on the street, anonymous people passing, women are the ones who are easily identified because they were scarves and long dresses, perhaps men run kebab shops. Is that why you chose the particular style you did in Caravanserai which is personal encounters with individuals, windows into their personal lives?

Hanifa Deen: Well I wanted to take the Australian, mainstream Australians, into the kitchens and the lounge rooms of Muslims whom they never had any personal contact with. I wanted to try and reduce this enormous social distance. I really wanted to show the human side, the human face. People who go on diets, who mow their lawns, who fall in and out of love and tell their kids bedtime stories. That side, the three-dimensional, the human side, has been lacking. I'm not the person to write religious books, and it seemed to me at the time that there were quite a few books on the market that explained Islam and that's all very well, but it wasn't opening the doors.

Rachael Kohn: Well your book begins with the story of a man who actually shares your last name, but I gather is not a relative, from the Punjab. Now he seemed to come to Australia and think of Australia in very adventurous terms, in enthusiastic terms. It was an Australia that was a country of opportunity.

Hanifa Deen: That's exactly how my grandfathers came to Australia, with the same spirit of adventure. I had a Kashmiri grandfather who jumped ship in Melbourne, I had a Punjabi grandfather who came in the wake of the camel men, and started up hawking, as many of the men right around Australia did. They would make their money and go to Haj, go to Mecca, and then go home, and they would gather everyone around them in the village and tell tales about this strange land, and the people with white skin, yellow hair and blue eyes, and say, 'You can make money there, and it's good.' And talk about the kangaroos and the strange sights, and of course in those days, a lot of Indians, because it was British India then, a lot of Indians went to South Africa, and some came to Australia. This was well before our White Australia Policy of course.

Rachael Kohn: Well a lot has changed since those early days and the White Australia Policy has now gone, and there are whole sections of cities that are virtually Little Lebanons, one thinks of Lakemba and Blacktown in Sydney. Now they've become strongholds of an orthodoxy that is fairly new, that is fairly evident for example in women, who have more readily taken on the hijab. Is that a trend that's growing?

Hanifa Deen: I think we're talking about perhaps migrant enclaves and they've always existed, going back to the Chinese when they first came out, the Greeks and the Italians have always done that. So you get that chain migration, you get families, and relatives, all assisting one another, and it's natural that they sort of congregate together.

Look at the Australians who all used to head off to the UK, and end up in Kangaroo Valley or Earl's Court as it was called then. I think what you're talking about are the specific mosque communities, people who pay additional money to live near Lakemba mosque etc. because they want to stay very Muslim, very orthodox in a country where they are a minority.

Rachael Kohn: In fact I think one of the people in your book says if you want to be a Muslim, you have to live here, and if you don't want to be one, don't live here.

Hanifa Deen: I of course would disagree with her, because she was very, very orthodox and had changed. She was a South African woman actually, who was very well educated, but something happened in her personal life and she retreated into her spiritual self and found comfort by wearing a long robe and a hijab, and when I pointed out to her that really that's not your national dress, etc., she wouldn't have a bar of it. But she did crack a smile when I called it the Lakemba uniform.

Rachael Kohn: Well converts have played a significant role in this mix. They seem to be outdoing the born Muslims in maintaining the tradition. Are they propelling a more assertive Islam?

Hanifa Deen: I don't think a more assertive Islam. They will challenge born Muslims. They find the cultural practices that have come across Islam, they find that rather confusing, puzzling, something is said to be un-Islamic and they will question it, so in a sense I think that they have tended to intellectualise Islam rather than take it further down the path of orthodoxy.

Rachael Kohn: You make the point in your book, Caravanserai that Islamic bookshops in Australia don't carry books by Muslim feminists or sociologists, but have a surfeit of pamphlets on explaining Islam, subsidised perhaps by Saudi or Malaysian religious bodies. How is that affecting the Australian Islamic voice?

Hanifa Deen: I think it has a definite effect, in that people will become concerned only with ritual. A woman will want to wear hijab because she believes that she must wear hijab, she believes that that makes her a better Muslim woman than perhaps me or other women who dress modestly but don't believe that they should wear the hijab. Now they will concentrate on that and yet I know so many non-hijabis if you like, who talk about they have the hijab of the soul or the mind, and I agree with them, I think that is very, very important, but in Australia of course, wearing the hijab, wearing the scarf, is a matter of choice, and I know many young women who wear it as a message 'I'm Muslim, and I'm proud'. Or there are feminists who say, 'It gives me my own space. No man can come into that.'

There are other women who say 'I've been to haj, I want to move closer to God, this is my way of doing it.' I remember the woman who said to me 'Why are the Australians so against us just wearing the headscarf? The Queen of England used to do it, walking does funny dogs around Buckingham Palace. She wears a headscarf. Or even Mary, the mother of Jesus used to wear the hijab, why do people point the finger at us?"

Rachael Kohn: Well indeed, how about your own Muslim voice? It's quite an independent one.

Hanifa Deen: I think you're right. Some people call me a Muslim Maverick, but I've never had anyone point the finger at me, and I wondered about how Muslims, particularly the more devout Muslims would receive Caravanserai, because I have written what I see and if I don't like something, I will stand up and say it. But I was absolutely amazed and delighted that no-one ever pointed the finger at me.

Rachael Kohn: One of the messages in fact in your book overall, is that Australian Islam is diverse, there's a range of religiosity from low to high. In your experience interviewing Australian Muslims around the country, did that diversity melt away when political issues were in the foreground, like the Tampa crisis?

Hanifa Deen: That was one of the things when I went back and spoke to people in the shadow of September 11th, that there was on political matters, a more standing shoulder-to-shoulder, a sympathy shown by let's say Turkish Muslims for instance. There seemed to be more of that standing together because the vilification was quite dreadful, I have never seen such indescribable hate mail that was coming in to the Mosques, that people wanted to put a face to their fear and it became the Muslim kid next door.

For instance, at a Perth Islamic school, usual end of the year excursion, the teachers took the kids to the zoo. And then they found themselves being stalked by a middle-aged couple. This was in, of course, the wake of the Bali blasts, but it was late 2002 and the children couldn't understand why these people were mouthing obscenities. Now that was contemptible enough, but what horrified me was that nobody interfered with that. All the other onlookers just turned away. So that's the climate that was around when I was revisiting my old haunts.

Rachael Kohn: Well your book, Caravanserai is very much from the perspective of Muslims who feel under siege, particularly by the obvious preoccupation in the press with Muslim extremism and terrorism aimed at Western targets. But there's not so much in your book about Muslim views of that and I would say that's probably what Australians want to hear.

Hanifa Deen: Well Australian Muslims need to hear that, because they think that everyone else is allowed to have an opinion about Middle East politics, about Iraq, except they have to hide theirs, which is quite ridiculous. You can feel for two countries, even if you're a citizen of Australia, that doesn't mean you've cut your ties with your homeland as my halal butcher, who lived out near Lakemba said, 'Loving two countries is like having two children, you don't love one more than the other.' He was a very, very wise man.

You see, it's the social distance that has to be reduced so that Australian Muslims have the confidence to say outside what they say inside. And of course there's a great deal of sympathy for the Palestinian cause, for what happens in Iran and Iraq, but people are not sharing that, and I think that comes from a position of not having the confidence to do that.

Rachael Kohn: Indeed I wonder whether Caravanserai is opening the door to a new kind of literature, in which more Muslim Australians actually write about their life. Is that what needs to happen, to bridge this social distance?

Hanifa Deen: Well that's what I wanted to do with writing Caravanserai. I wanted to say 'Look, you can write about your lives, your stories, you can open yourself so that people will understand you.' But I'm rather surprised that this has been very, very slow in developing. I'm hoping that perhaps when I've got more time, that I can start talking to younger people from the islamic community, Bosnians, as you said, this enormous diversity of languages, ethnicity, plus a diversity of religious attachment which also needs to be stated, needs to be seen as being part of Islam. I also want to encourage people I call the invisible Muslims, people like myself who don't wear hijab, to not turn away but to come out more publicly and make their feelings known as well. So that there's a broader base to what passes for the opinions of Australian Muslims.

Rachael Kohn: One woman's journey into Australian Muslim life. Hanifa Deen is the author of Caravanserai.

THEME

Rachael Kohn: Next week we're breaking plates. How modern Jews are creating old traditions. That's on The Ark next Wednesday at 2.15 here on ABC Radio National, with me, Rachael Kohn.

THEME

Guests

Hanifa Deen
is an award-winning Australian author, a human rights activist and social commentator. Hanifa was born in Kalgoorlie, WA and educated at the University of Western Australia. She has held a number of high profile positions including: Deputy Commissioner of the Multicultural and Ethnic Affairs Commission of WA; Director on the Board of Directors of SBS; and Hearing Commissioner with the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission. She now works as a full-time writer and is an Adjunct Senior Research Fellow with the Department of Social Sciences at Curtin. Her first book, Caravanserai: A Journey Among Australian Muslims, (Allen & Unwin) won a NSW Premier's Literary Award in 1996 and judges described the work '...as an outstanding contribution to Australian literature.' A completely revised and updated edition of Caravanserai, rewritten in the shadow of the September 11 tragedy, has been published by Fremantle Arts Centre Press.

Publications

Title: Caravanserai: Journey Amongst Australian Muslims
Author : Hanifa Deen
Publisher: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 2003