Australians All

“No Free Man Shall… ”

Ali Roude

Speech to the Muslims in Australia: National Security and Harmony Summit, 11 September 2005.

I came across the globe to find sanctuary here in a land of opportunity. I came here to build my children’s future in wealth and work and prayer. I came here as a Muslim to become an Australian and to live as both at once.

Four years ago today, I enjoyed a sunny springtime Tuesday here in Sydney, working away quietly and patiently as a primary school principal trying to instil a sense of duty, of self-worth, of Australian character, in my charges.

Late that same night, friends and allies and family members called me at home and I watched (as we all watched) on those tragic little television screens as the boldest, brightest city in the world’s only remaining superpower fell to its knees in ash and flame and panic, weeping for its children.

At 2 am that night, our national broadcaster (the ABC radio network) added another voice – my voice, our voice – to the tumult.

Islamic Council of New South Wales chairman Ali Roude said tonight: “Every true Muslim – in Australia and worldwide – shares deeply the anguish, disgust and outrage of the American people. Let nothing be spared to bring the terrorists to justice. Free nations everywhere must defend themselves. All Australian mosques today will pray for peace.”

By dawn, our voice was silenced – in the endless din of smoke and sirens and commentary – and people continue to ask me to this day why we said nothing at the hour of great need.

Today, I still share the pain of the American people and the people of Madrid – and of London – and of Jakarta – and of Bali – and of Baghdad – and of Kabul – and of Gaza – and of Jerusalem.

Today, of all days, I weep again for their unbearable losses and I remember in prayer and consolation their widowed and orphaned families and their stolen futures and uncompleted promises of love and faith and hope.

I have prayed for peace in Sydney and in Dungog, in Canberra and in Bowral. I have worked with judges and police commissioners and premiers and prime ministers and junior constables and shopkeepers and imams and fellow principals to keep this nation safe and to shield it from its nightmares.

Yet still that dark, deep night surrounds us all. We jump at shadows, will not trust our neighbours, expecting violent death to knock our doors.

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I am to speak today on the “Community’s response to terror.” And so I shall.

It is a lived experience, one that affects all of us each and every day. I sat at a table in our national parliament almost three weeks ago and talked with our prime minister and his cabinet and my peers and colleagues around Australia and the rest of you at home via radio and TV.

We agreed to work together to protect Australia and to stamp out terrorism. The same commitment we have made to ASIO and the Federal Police and the State Police and our fellow citizens time and time again over the past four years. My friend, Commissioner Keelty here, himself has heard me say it at least five times. And yet we say it again. It still needs to be said again.

Two weeks ago, my sister Nada sat between an archbishop and an intelligence officer on national television and agreed to dob in her own children for Australia’s security – if that unimaginable day should ever break her heart.

Three days ago, our national leader decided to give us even stronger laws – against terrorism; and in the name of national security.

Three years ago, our national government asked for extra powers also – to strengthen the capacity of ASIO to deal with terrorism. At the time, we were promised sunset clauses – definitive and dated limits on such strong powers. Those powers expire now.

As we come back to review the temporary authority to hold people without trial or bail or access to lawyers or evidence of any crime or even intention to commit a crime, the Prime Minister asks the nation to grant him further sweeping powers.

With control of the Senate, it is a politeness. There is nothing standing in his way. Where such powers add to the safety and security and tranquillity of our community, neither should there be. Yet is that what we now face?

Many civil libertarians and public activists, former prime minister Malcom Fraser, and yesterday’s SMH editorial say No; this is too far. We are handing over our humanity and our freedom and our Australian-ness not to hooded gunmen or to sleeper agents, but to the very people we have chosen to preserve our way of life.

We have been told this is a response to London and the recent tragic bombings. I want you to remember how the people of that great kingdom dealt with another heedless grab for power by their leaders.

A nation under siege from its enemies abroad and suspected infiltrators, its fighting forces deployed in the Middle East on an uncertain war mixing politics and religion with a lust for righteous domination.

Daily assaulted there by guerrillas and assassins and neighbouring marauders – defending their homeland and their beliefs against invasion, refusing to believe or cooperate with their high-minded “liberators”.

At home, there was a call for further centralisation and security powers and expulsion and dispossession of mistrusted minorities of alien culture and creed.

The First World War? The Second World War? The Crimea? The Suez Crisis?

No, I speak of 1215 and the terror of King John. He who is called Lackland for his inability to govern men or money. He who sees treachery and treason in Jewish bankers and Welsh farmers. He who demands the right to confiscate goods and arms and people at his whim.

Eventually, even his own allies – the English barons – call “Enough”. In Runnymede Field, near Windsor, not far from modern Heathrow Airport, on 15 June 1215, the leader is called to account for his divisiveness.

In that Great Charter, the “Magna Carta”, is set forth the basis for our rights today. In future no official shall put anyone to trial merely on his own testimony, without reliable witnesses produced for this purpose. No free man shall be arrested, or imprisoned or deprived of his freehold or outlawed or banished or in any way ruined, nor will we take or order action against him, except by the lawful judgement of his equals and according to the law of the land. To no one will we sell, to no one will we refuse or delay right or justice.

So swore King John; and English law was born.

The law good lawyers like John Howard and Tony Blair swear to defend. The law policemen swear to uphold – and I believe they do. The law – transplanted to these shores and uttered again in our own words – that constrains and defines and maintains our way of life as Australians all.

On that day in 1215, Muslims ruled in Baghdad, Kabul, Jerusalem, Madrid. The Christian Europeans were losing their own Crusades. Many people – including popes and princes – predicted the end of the world. Yet faith in British justice came to birth.

Eight centuries later, we stand together a world away in Sydney under that same rule of law, that same belief in justice for everyone, that thirst for evidential truth before sentence.

Yes, the drug-addled “hashishans” survive today – and wreak havoc on our world, whether from the cockpits of jetliners or the forecourts of nightclubs or the gateways of embassies or the back seats of buses.

They are not us – nor will they ever be.

I came across the globe to find sanctuary here in a land of opportunity. I came here to build my children’s future in wealth and work and prayer. I came here as a Muslim to become an Australian and to live as both at once.

Why on earth would I believe that Allah intends for me to destroy this life’s work? Why on earth would my sister Nada allow her children to bomb her fellow Australians? Why, under heaven, would we betray our friends and neighbours and colleagues in the name of a God we worship daily as The All Merciful, The All Compassionate? To even think such a divine intention seems to me as blasphemy.

This is not to say that others think not so. This is not to say that people calling themselves Muslims do not commit evil in our name. This is not to say that people who we meet and live near by and pray beside will not so speak or think or act. Their weapons and their methods are brand new; their insanity is ageless.

This is why I told the Prime Minister and the Premier and Commissioner Keelty and our Supreme Court Judges and our District Court Judges and ASIO and the Senate and Reuters and Fairfax and News Corp and John Laws and Mike Carlton and our local mayors and councillors and the Bankstown Command of the New South Wales Police and Jews for Refugees and Cardinal Pell and Archbishop Jensen and anyone else who asks me anywhere, anytime, that we will stand with them and fight the infernos of the heart and hand and mind.

Not merely stand with them, stand with us – for they are us and we are them. We are guardians of this ancient soil with the Eora People. We are settlers and explorers with the English and the Irish and the French. We are innovators and deep thinkers with the Germans and the Spanish and the Japanese. We are peacemakers and peacekeepers with the Catholics and the Hindus and the Jews. We are Children of Adam. We are People of the Book. We are specks of mud infused with the breath of God and placed here to care for one another.

We will continue to debate “habeas corpus” and mandatory detention and who becomes a citizen and how and when and why. We will continue to challenge our Government when it is stupid or unjust or simply mean. We will support its acts of wisdom; and condemn its acts of cowardice, deceit or greed. We will work with the police and the armed forces and the security services. We will bring to justice anyone who would destroy us. We will cast away from us anyone who disgraces Allah with their hate or lies.

While John stood in a meadow at Runnymede and signed that charter, his brother’s memory was still fresh to his people.

We recall that Salah-ah-Din took the ice from the mountains and cooled the fevered brow of his enemy, Richard the Lionheart, because he was his brother under God.

Today, we shield that same ice in metal caskets – refrigerators – and cover them with magnets teaching us how to fear.

Yes, I am angry and I am tired and I need to rest and rebuild but there is no time or place for such excursion here. The work to do is too immense to pause.

Our phones will be tapped in search of hidden voices. This is our fate – from Alice Springs to Darwin, it was Muslims who laid the telegraph. We built the infrastructure connecting Australia to the world and to each other. We will live with its limitations as well as with our own.

Our trains will be scanned for suspect parcels and bags searched at random. It was the Afghan cameleers who provided our first freight and parcel services, who brought packages to the bush when no one dared, whose names live on in our grandest train today.

Our brothers and sisters fleeing oppression across the globe will continue to face suspicion and mandatory detention if they arrive without papers.

Our first Immigration Minister, the man who founded Canberra, was an illegal boatperson – the American bounder King O’Malley jumping ship in Queensland – later rehabilitated as a Minister of the Crown. No more like him shall be made welcome here.

We must defend our borders from intruders. Just as Lieutenant Matthew Flinders did in 1803, circumnavigating this island continent for the first time, providing maps and intelligence to the resident British Navy. His friendly greetings from the Makassan sailors trading trepang with the local Aborigines, as they and their ancestors had done for centuries, must not be allowed to continue today. Indonesian fishermen are people not like us – or so we hear.

Despite all this, our national anthem still proclaims that “for those who’ve come across the seas, we’ve boundless plains to share.”

We must not bow to terrorism; neither should we surrender our rights and freedoms to oppression. We must work for safety, but not at the price of our shared humanity. We must share our minds and hearts and spirits, as well as our parched earth.

Otherwise, my promise to Australia on your behalf in the middle of the night four years ago will be an empty lie. Terrorists must be brought to justice; free nations must defend themselves; and our mosques must pray for peace. Anything less is un-Islamic and un-Australian.