Ray Cassin     September 1, 2007
Ray Cassin is a senior Age, Melbourne newpaper writer

“… if you’re even vaguely familiar with classical Islamic tradition, you’ll recognise at once that we’ve had our reformation, and it’s called al-Qaeda,” Waleed Aly, prominent Australian Muslim and media commentator

THE world, as the pundits ritually remind us at this time each year, changed drastically and irrevocably with the terrorist attacks on the US on September 11, 2001. And for no group of people has this been more true than for Muslims living in the West.

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They experience not only the general anxiety caused by the heightened awareness of terrorism, but the hostility of many in the wider society who regard them as an alien, potentially dangerous minority. Meanwhile, their own communities are riven by conflicts about how best to respond to that hostility.

Waleed Aly is an Australian Muslim who was catapulted onto the public stage by the discontents unleashed after 9/11. In contributions to this and other newspapers, and in his book People Like Us: How arrogance is dividing Islam and the West, he has explored ways of forging a deeper understanding between Muslims and non-Muslims.

“I’ve been through a very rapid evolution in the past 10 years,” says Aly, 29. “Before September 11, really I was an Egyptian kid. That’s the way I was brought up, that’s the way I was treated.”

Aly, who was born and raised in Melbourne’s eastern suburbs, explains his Egyptian heritage this way: “We were certainly aware of the fact that we were Muslims: Islam was part of our life. But the thing about Egyptians is that they tend to have a disposition that is quite flexible. I think the way they deal with religion is in many ways quite similar to that.

“Egypt’s a world away from Saudi Arabia — though that is changing.”

The change he is talking about is not confined to the growing influence in Egypt of Wahhabism, a puritanical form of Islam that is dominant in Saudi Arabia and which, in its most extreme form, has inspired terrorist movements such as al-Qaeda. Wahhabist ideas can be encountered in Muslim communities around the world, including Australia, and Aly warns that many Western commentators have routinely failed to understand them.

Such commentators tend to say that Islam needs to undergo a reformation, akin to the 16th-century Reformation in Christianity. “But if you’re even vaguely familiar with classical Islamic tradition, you’ll recognise at once that we’ve had our reformation, and it’s called al-Qaeda,” Aly says.

Classical Islamic jurists and theologians thought in ways that accommodated cultures, whereas modern reformist movements such as al-Qaeda and the Taliban tended to set religion and culture in opposition.

“One of the hallmarks of this radicalism is not that it’s anti-Western culture but that it’s anti-culture. It sees culture as corrupting and religion as pure, and tries to separate them.”

Aly believes that what Islam needs is not a reformation but a renaissance — a renaissance of its classical traditions. “When people say that, for example, the Taliban in Afghanistan were a medieval government, my response is to say, ‘If only they were!’ If you look at classical Islamic civilisation in, say, Moorish Spain, you get a picture of Islam that is very different from the one you get watching CNN today.”

Aly concedes that his own acquaintance with the classical tradition came gradually.

“My relationship to Islam, and particularly to Islamic knowledge, wasn’t hugely developed through school. It was when I got to university that I got swept up, as happens to a lot of kids at that age, so that Islam became the focus of my life — but in a way that wasn’t integrated with everything around it.”

Aly studied law at Melbourne University, where he was president of the Muslim Students Association, and he describes his attitudes at the time as fundamentalist.

“What I mean by that is that I had come to a state of mind that regarded my view of Islam as unimpeachable. I still think of that as the essence of fundamentalism.

“I think this is quite common: you go through that because you’re looking for some kind of authenticity. But then you run into complexity.”

For Aly, running into complexity meant encountering other Muslims who were clearly not inauthentic in their faith, and not stupid or insincere, either. Fundamentalism could not make sense of these other ways of being Muslim, but he found that by reconnecting with the classical tradition he could.

“The thing about classical Islamic thought is that it’s highly engaged with the subtleties of societies. The way you analyse and think about the society in which you live becomes important, and that’s often where fundamentalist approaches break down. The fact that I was a law student helped. I fell in love with classical Islamic jurisprudence. At the end of the day these were people engaged with texts, trying to derive a meaning from them.”

And while the young law student was discovering the need to grasp complexities, along came September 11. He thought that the dangers of oversimplifying — of dividing the world into “people like us”, who are good, and others we deem to be evil — could not have been made more manifest.

But in the aftermath of 9/11 the oversimplifiers were not only to be found among Muslim sympathisers of al-Qaeda. Non-Muslims in Western countries were notably susceptible too, and Muslims, of whatever allegiance, found themselves to be objects of suspicion.

Aly remembers being abused by the driver of a car he had stopped beside at traffic lights. “I’ve experienced racism. I’ve played a lot of cricket and football at a fairly high level, and you encounter it there. This was different. It really shook me, but it wasn’t really racism. It was actually more intense.”

But that kind of abuse has been a relatively rare experience for Aly. It is Muslim women who experience it all the time, if they wear the veil that proclaims their faith.

Aly’s wife, Susan Carland, who like him is a lecturer at Monash University, wears the hijab, and he says she has regularly been subjected to abuse because of it.

“The number of times she’s been told to go back to her own country, it’s outrageous. (Like Aly, Carland is Australian.) It got to a point where she would make a decision on where she was going to do her shopping according to where she thought she was going to be abused least.

“During the Commonwealth Games, it was very tough for her. One day she was walking through the city and there were these guys, wearing the flag, who began abusing her. It was like Cronulla.”

People Like Us contains a chapter on the veil and attitudes towards it. It is a discussion that Aly enters reluctantly, because he believes both critics and defenders of veiling tend to exclude those most affected by it and therefore most entitled to speak about it — Muslim women — from the debate. But it is also a discussion he has been unable to avoid, because it is a subject that non-Muslims almost invariably raise.

“What I object to is the kind of universalism that says: ‘Practice X is oppressive irrespective of the meanings you ascribe to it, irrespective of the effect that it has on you. It’s oppressive because I deem it so.’

“I’m not articulating a pro or anti-hijab position … If someone’s saying the hijab is inherently oppressive, for me that’s an incoherent statement. It has the capacity to be oppressive if it is used socially in a particular way, but it also has the capacity to be liberating.”

Western critics of veiling, Aly points out, typically assume that it is intended to shield women from the lustful gaze of men, an attitude that seems to make women responsible for male inclinations and behaviour.

Yet when Muslim women who wear the hijab speak of why they do so, he says, they usually talk about their faith, not sexuality. They will speak of veiling as a means of presenting the self to God. But doesn’t this still ignore, or evade, the obvious gender difference? Muslim men are not veiled. Aly responds that there is an Islamic dress code for men as well.

“It’s just that in a Western context you don’t notice it because it’s more consistent with the way Western men dress. But, for example, a devout Muslim man would be very unlikely to wear shorts in summer.

“And devout Muslim men may wear beards because it’s a connection to prophethood. So for some it’s a way of connecting the consciousness to God. There are all these symbols about, but the ones that are most discussed are the ones that are most noticeable in Western society. But they’re not the only ones that exist.”

Aly notes that when people do become aware of the complexities of symbolism, they sometimes deride Muslims as infantile, citing practices such as eating only with the right hand, or walking into their house with the right foot first and out of it with the left foot first. He sees this kind of criticism as patronising. “These are all practices that derive from the way the prophet Muhammad lived his life,” he says. “The point is that by being aware of yourself in these seemingly minor things you can facilitate a state of being that keeps you aware of your spirituality and helps to cultivate it.

“To do these things in a mundane way, by habit, defeats the purpose. But to connect by these mundane things to a spiritual tradition is, in a way, to turn the mundane into the sacred.”

Aly’s willingness to speak as a Muslim in the public realm brought him to the notice of the Islamic Council of Victoria, whose board he joined, first as a co-opted and later as an elected member.

He has recently left the council, partly because he wants to make clear that the arguments presented in People Like Us are his own, and partly because of divisions between Australian Muslims sparked by the controversial former mufti of Australia, Sheikh Taj al-Din al-Hilali. Aly was a prominent critic of Hilali, and believes Australian Muslims do not need a mufti.

“I increasingly found within my constituency that there was a growing feeling that it was time to bunker down, unify and defend, defend, defend.

“That comes from the experience a lot of people have of feeling under siege. But I’m not someone who feels you must always defend someone else merely because they have the same label attached to them as you. I could not, in all conscience, stand and defend the statements and conduct of Hilali.”

So Aly decided it was time to speak on his own, for the council’s sake as much as for himself.

“A lot of Muslims, particularly those engaged in community politics, hate nothing more than seeing Muslims criticising each other in public, which comes from that feeling of being under siege — ‘everyone’s attacking us, why do you have to do it?’

“And because I took a very strong stand on Hilali, I found myself open to the allegation of being some kind of government stooge, or if not exactly a stooge, then someone more concerned with being liked by the government than with standing up for a brother.”

Yet Aly makes an unlikely government stooge. People Like Us is not an overtly political book, at least in the partisan sense of “political”. But its arguments reflect his strong conviction that the public conversation in Australia is deeply impoverished.

“It’s impoverished because it’s oriented to self-validation,” so that people say and respond to and believe things that tend to exonerate themselves.”

That desire for self-validation, Aly says, is reflected in the instinct of some media commentators to brand as evil anyone who suggests that terrorism is not simply a product of an ideological movement in the Muslim world that is thoroughly, absolutely evil.

“But it’s not just about terrorism that this happens. Watch tabloid television: so much of it is geared towards making you feel better towards yourself and your society, as opposed to ‘them’.

“For example, you might get a story on which city is the least racist, a city in Australia or cities in Asia, and the conclusion is that it’s the city in Australia. That might well be true, but the instinct in this story is to think in self-validating terms, and I think that’s what’s driving the broader political conversation.

“So, where John Howard is confronted by the racist elements of an event like Cronulla, he has to say there is no underlying racism in Australia. And that, as a statement, might be true, but it was hardly addressing what happened.”

With People Like Us, Aly hopes he has written a book that resists the temptation to soothe, to appeal to the desire for self-validation. And the corollary of that, as he freely admits, is the book may offend some people, both Muslim and non-Muslim.

It is perhaps not the most tactful way to start a conversation. But then real conversations do not happen until people let go of the idea that the world is just about them.

People Like Us: How arrogance is dividing Islam and the West, Picador, rrp $32.95, is published today.

Ray Cassin is a senior Age writer.