Mission & Justice

Irfan Yusuf; 27/6/08

Listeners to Triple J’s Hack program learned this week that some Muslims want Muslim men to have the right to marry more than one wife. Indeed some Muslim men, including Keysar Trad, president of the Islamic Friendship Association (whose members, I suspect, share the same surname and hold dinner meetings each night in the same home), have made serious attempts at it. Really? Australians committing the offence of bigamy? Muslims wanting to introduce sharia into Australia? Is the dream of Camden’s fundamentalist mayoral candidate (and comedic character on SBS’s new talk show Salam Cafe) Uncle Sam coming true? Then again, we are talking about Muslims. Even in Australia, the thinking goes, some traces of their weird Middle Eastern faith and culture must exist. And, as always, some of our media tend to jump on the pronouncements of self-styled Muslim “leaders” for clues about the secrets this allegedly non-integrating fifth-column is hiding from the rest of us.

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Padraic Murphy; 27/6/08

The small but determined Muslim community in Cairns has finally won the right to build the city’s first mosque after an eight-year battle against an at-times hostile community and claims the religion was trying to “spread its tentacles” to north Queensland. Work is expected to begin on the mosque within weeks after the Planning and Environment Court dismissed the final group of objections, noting freedom of religion was part of the fabric of the Australian community. “It is in the public interest that persons who choose that faith, just as those who choose any other faith, have access to a safe and reasonably comfortable place of gathering and worship,” judge Keith Dodds said.

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Michael Pelly; 26/6/08

Even though polygamy is banned under Australia’s marriage laws, there is nothing to stop polygamists from going to the Family Court to settle their disputes. Marriage is defined as “the union of a man and a woman to the exclusion of all others”, but the Family Law Act says a polygamous union “entered into in a place outside Australia, shall be deemed to be a marriage”. Although a Family Court spokeswoman said the court had never heard a case involving polygamy, a leading family law solicitor said he was aware of one man who had come from Ethiopia with three wives. Ian Kennedy, head of the Law Council of Australia’s family law section and a senior partner at Kennedy Wisewoulds, said Muslims who “took another wife” in Australia - without making those unions official - were now covered because of changes to the Family Law Act.

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25/6/08

Members of Sydney’s Islamic community believe polygamous marriages should be legalised to protect the rights of women. Sheikh Khalil Chami, of the Islamic Welfare Centre in Lakemba, said polygamous marriages existed in Australia and should be recognised. “Not an open door, but in a way everyone will have control,” he told Triple J’s Hack program. “It’s a bit hard, very difficult, but unless we face it, how (do) we overcome it?” Sheikh Chami said he was asked almost weekly to conduct polygamous religious ceremonies. While he declined, he said, other sheikhs, many of whom did not have qualifications, performed them.

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Ashleigh Wilson; 14/6/08

Australia’s reputation will be at risk in Muslim countries if aplanned appeal against a council’s rejection of an Islamic school on Sydney’s southwestern fringe fails. Islamic Friendship Association of Australia president Keysar Trad accused Camden council of acquiescing to a “vocal minority” by rejecting a planned development of an Islamic school. Mr Trad told The Weekend Australian he did not believe the council’s decision last month to reject the proposal was based solely on planning grounds, as it had stated. “We market this country for foreign students and send exports to many Muslim countries,” Mr Trad said. “So how are you going to show these people we respect them if we won’t even allow our own citizens to have a school for their children? I think it’s already done damage, but people are waiting to see the appeal.” The Quranic Society applied to build an Islamic school for 1200 residents just outside Camden, a small rural town about an hour’s drive southwest of Sydney’s CBD.

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Irfan Yusuf; 7/608, Irfan Yusuf is a Sydney lawyer and recipient of the 2007 Allen & Unwin Iremonger award for public affairs writing.

- Inside Muslim Minds; Riaz Hassan; MUP
- Who Speaks For Islam: What a Billion Muslims Really Think; John Esposito and Dalia Mogahed Gallup Press

We don’t often associate the skin tones, exotic culture and poverty of the world’s largest Catholic continent with Catholicism. Few Australian Catholics would recognise the popular beliefs and practices of their Latin American co-religionists. So if I were to make an ambit criticism of Christianity based on the extreme poverty and draconian politics of Latin America, Catholics would be justified in poking their fingers at me and ridiculing my simplistic reasoning. But among those pointing at me in ridicule would be the polemicists and cultural warriors with three fingers pointing back at themselves. Google jihad. Featuring prominently is Jihad Watch, a blog moderated by far-right Catholic polemicist Robert Spencer.
It takes a certain degree of intellectual laziness (often combined with irrational prejudice) to attribute negative characteristics to an entire group of people, especially when members of this group rarely, if ever, regard themselves as sharing some uniform identity.

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Dalia Mogahed & Ahmed Younis; 6/5/08

The Gallup Organization — a world leader in global opinion research — has recently self-funded a World Poll which gathers opinion data in the areas of leadership, law and order, food/shelter, work, economics, health, well-being, citizen engagement from the peoples of 130 countries. The World Poll gathers opinions around the world annually following Gallup’s guiding principles of independence and integrity. The Coexist Foundation, a UK-registered charity, has a mission to promote better understanding between members of the Abrahamic faiths and also their relations with other religions and the secular world through education, dialogue and research. As part of the World Poll, Gallup gathers data from the Muslim World and the West about people’s beliefs about education, religion, culture and democracy.

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5/6/08

Turkey’s highest court has ruled that Islamic headscarves cannot be allowed at universities. The decision is a defeat for the ruling Justice and Development (AK) Party, which tried to allow the wearing of scarves as a matter of religious and personal freedom. The verdict of the constitutional court was issued on Thursday and says that amendments passed by parliament in February violated the secular principles of the constitution. Some observers think the verdict may bode ill for the government in a separate case in which Turkey’s chief prosecutor is seeking to disband the AK Party because it is “the focal point of anti-secular activities”.

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Annabel Stafford; 2/6/08

There is a new face of Islamophobia in Sydney. Gone are the images of angry young men draped in Australian flags and brandishing beer bottles as they rampage through Cronulla terrorising anyone who looks Middle Eastern. In their place is middle-aged, earnest-looking Kate McCulloch, wearing a large Akubra hat plastered with Australian flag stickers. She tells the TV cameras that she is not racist, but Muslims take our welfare, do not live by our rules and are not welcome in Camden.
They are different faces, but their message is the same. They do not want Muslims on their beaches, in their streets, in their suburbs.

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Paul Daley; 1/6/08

In the past few days Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has missed a golden leadership opportunity. …  Sometimes a leader needs to call a wrong for what it is, and damn the immediate consequences. … Local resident Kate McCulloch, wearing a towering hat covered in Australian flags, declared that the outcome was a victory for “decency”. “The ones (Muslims) that come here oppress our society, they take our welfare and they don’t want to accept our way of life,” said McCulloch, eerily reminiscent of another woman who burst into national consciousness 12 years ago, Pauline Hanson.

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