I was almost sucked into this jihadist stuff. I wanted to go fight in Afghanistan.
The only people who would have stopped me would have been my parents, elders and imams.
Religion and politics went hand in hand at that time, as they still do.
My understanding of religion was affected by the political prejudices of the day. To make matters worse, we had very few religious books. Most imams could barely speak English. The only imam I knew who could speak English was the late Shaykh Fehmi el-Imam, who skilfully talked me out of going for jihad.
That was the 1980s. I’m seriously jealous of Muslim Aussie kids now.
There are plenty of local imams who speak English. We even have a gay imam who provides support to LGBTIQ Muslims.
At age 16 I hated my parents’ South Asian culture and all the expectations it carried with it – arranged marriages, studying medicine and a whole heap of cultural protocols and restrictions I didn’t understand and had no relevance to my life in Australia.
Mainstream Islam can be found on the internet. I feel so proud to see women like lawyer Lydia Shelly, academics Susan Carland and Shakira Hussein and MP’s Anne Aly and Mehreen Faruqi speaking their minds in public.
At age 16 I hated my parents’ South Asian culture and all the expectations it carried with it – arranged marriages, studying medicine and a whole heap of cultural protocols and restrictions I didn’t understand and had no relevance to my life in Australia.
I resented being the cultural guinea pig of my parents’ generation.
I found the perfect weapon in religion. I read about Islam in books but rarely saw its reality in my ancestral culture.
Religion could be used to talk down to and escape South Asian restrictions.
Seriously, who could argue with religion? All my parents’ generation could say was “Irfan, you are going to extremes”.
The political environment of the time encouraged Islamic “extremes”. We were in the middle of the Cold War.
Media and politicians made everyone paranoid about communism. The Soviets could then destroy the Free World, or at least drive it broke.
The only thing standing in the way were a rag tag militia known as the Mujahideen (Arabic plural for jihadist) who were considered anti-communist heroes, openly preaching and raising money for jihad across the Western world.
I resented being the cultural guinea pig of my parents’ generation.
The people who today claim to despise jihadists now (usually as a cover for hating Muslims or refugees or immigrants) were loving jihadists back then. Jihadists . The jihadists were on our side, including the Arab volunteers led by a young Saudi named Osama bin Ladin.
What started as an innocent religious rebellion against culture eventually led me to wanting to fight in Afghanistan, just as some young Croatians I knew wanted to fight in what was then Yugoslavia.
My Islam was the Islam of Cold War paranoia. It was also the Islam of foreign embassies.
Medieval Arab regimes made wealthy by oil would flood our mosques with free books which presented an Islam that had little relevance to helping us understand how to apply our faith in Australia. At one mosque, Colonel Gaddafi’s Green Book was handed out after Friday prayers.
Our communities and mosques were divided along ethnic and linguistic lines. Religion usually came second, and many Aussie Muslim kids were pressured to put being Indo-Pakistani or Turkish or Yugoslav or Albanian before being Muslim.
Religious leaders spent most of their time arguing about the income from overseas governments or halal meat certification. Meanwhile, a small number of kids like me were almost “radicalised”, while most left both culture and faith.
Today, mosques are more youth-focused. Many Muslim kids have parents who themselves were brought up in Australia. They live in Aussie households where everyone speaks English. I know Muslim mums who wear hijab and swear like troopers. Islam is an Aussie faith.
Sadly, however, the link between minority politics and religion is still strong. A tiny proportion of third-generation Muslim kids think the only way to be Muslim is to hate their parents’ Australian culture and join some overseas war they don’t understand. Their parents, their mosques, their imams, their communities and the broader community are doing everything to stop them.
These kids imagine that their religion is hated by Australia and the West.
They hold onto a conspiracy theory that triggers them to join wacko groups like ISIL.
Every time a conservative politician, insists extremism is all about Islam and Muslims and burqas and “modest fashion”, it makes our job of convincing “radicalised” kids that Australia isn’t out to get them that much harder.
Each time Muslim figures are pilloried in public for minor infractions, the double standard is noted.
I’ve grown up with this double standard, which I know applies not just to Muslims but also South Sudanese Christians, LGBTIQ people, Indigenous Australians and so many others.
It is this constant identity tension, young Muslims kids still navigate.
For those on the margins or feeling trapped between worlds, creating a space for inclusivity is the only way to stem the exclusion and dysphoria that feeds radicalism.
Irfan Yusuf is a phd candiate at the Alfred Deakin Institude for Citizenship and Globalisation at Deakin University and the author of Once Were Radicals: My Years As A Teenage Islamofascist. You can follow him on Twitter .
What does it mean to be a Muslim in modern Australia? Ten Australian Muslims from diverse backgrounds move in to a house for eight days.
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