Australians All

Forward Nonetheless: Islam and Social Inclusion in Australia

Ali Roude

An edited version of a speech in the series of Chain Reaction Breakfast Cafe conversations, delivered on 12 December 2006

I thought social inclusion was a safe, non-political, bipartisan topic. I mean apart from Cronulla and Alan Jones and Stan Zemanek and Bronwyn Bishop and Janet Albrechtsen and all their friends.

Then I turn up at school yesterday: Risallah College, Lakemba, where I am the Principal, not a student (for the uncharitably minded among you). Our local Federal MP – Tony Burke – is suddenly the Shadow Minister for Immigration, INTEGRATION and Citizenship. Deputy Leader for Labor – Julia Gillard – has become the Shadow Minister for SOCIAL INCLUSION itself, as well as Employment and Industrial Relations. I will send her my speech notes as a starting manifesto. A generous gesture, no?

A Federal Department of Integration? A Federal Department of Social Inclusion? Decisions, decisions. Such decisions to make. Where should we all send our résumés? Do we want to be integrated - or socially included – or both? At least we have nine months left to decide. Or will Prime Minister Howard’s long-awaited holiday reshuffle leave us with a matching Government Front Bench? Decisions, decisions. Such decisions to make.

Whether you believe history is cyclical or dialectic or evolutionary, each of us here would concede it is not static. In the midst of the touring Robbie Williams juggernaut, it is still a Rolling Stone that gathers no moss. The history of Muslims and of Islam in Australia is similarly emerging and dynamic.

From the Macassar fishermen who traded trepang or sea cucumber with the Arnhem Land Aborigines for centuries, stopping to give Matthew Flinders directions and pilotage amongst the treacherous Arafura shoals during his circumnavigation; to the pearl divers who pioneered Broome in Western Australia; to the Afghan cameleers who laid the railway track from Adelaide to Alice Springs and the inland telegraph right through to Darwin, delivering the mail to outback missions and stations, opening mosques in Broken Hill and Adelaide decades before BHP or Adsteam came to town.

More recently, with the waves of post-war migration, and large-scale family reunion in the 60s through the 80s – including myself - and then refugees from Bosnia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran and the Horn of Africa. Some of them Muslims, some of them the victims of Muslim despots. People seeking shelter one and all.

The Australian Muslim population is young and fecund and largely native-born to these shores. A typical Australian Muslim is Australian-born, giving the lie to those Cronulla slogans last December. Yes, it is true that I flew here as a young boy, but my wife and five proud young sons of Australia all grew here. You do the maths. I am badly outnumbered and this is a good thing.

For decades, it has been MY generation of Australian Muslims who have stood as our community leaders: trying our best to serve our people well, sometimes succeeding, sometimes not. Now it is our young people who are stepping forward.

Last year at Cronulla, I wore a suit and my sister Nada the hijab. This summer, young Muslim Australian lifesavers are wearing the Burkini, a combination of effective surf swimwear and modest Islamic dress.

We rejoiced in Lakemba when Hazem El-Masri made the Bulldogs’ First Grade. In Brisbane today, there is a Muslim Rugby League competition where young men pray for safe sport and fair play before each match. Not street violence and despair, but health and wellbeing and teamwork. Not separate but equal, but separate and starting out - just like the Catholic Rugby Leagues and Tennis Clubs of the 50s and 60s. One day I hope to see an NRL premiership team loaded with Australian-born and proud Muslim players. I don’t care where they are from – the Brisbane Broncos, the Melbourne Storm, the Dragons, the Roosters, whoever they are, wherever they live and play. Of course, we all know it will be the Bulldogs, but I am a little bit biased.

More importantly than this will be the day when a young Australian Muslim woman – makes the national netball squad and helps us trounce the Silver Ferns again. I promise that I and my five sons will be cheering loudly on that great day – unlike my sister Nada, who wept tears of joy when Australia II beat Liberty in Newport. Greenacre boys don’t cry…

On Melbourne community television – Channel 31 – there is a talented panel of young Australian Muslims hosting the program Salaam Café without any need for endorsement from Sheikh Fehmi or Sheikh Taj or from me or my colleagues or their parents. The Affinity Intercultural Foundation plans community forums and invites people like Keysar Trad and myself to speak.

We are fast becoming the revered old sages of the Muslim community. This is not a bad thing. I can share a cappuccino and, maybe, a croissant with my fellow elders – Malcolm Fraser and John Dowd and Mick Keelty.

The mainstream media wants sound bites – the five second grab. Even our public broadcasters at the ABC and SBS prefer short stories. This is not to denigrate the exceptional exceptions – Dateline, Lateline, Australian Story, The 7:30 Report, Four Corners. Yet where are their equivalents on commercial networks?

For reasoned discourse, there were always the papers and periodicals. Now Newscorp declares war on Iemma, the Herald draws down to compete and John Howard breaks bread – or cake – with Quadrant. Yes, a reasoned and resourceful journal - but where are its Counterpoints?

Back to the core question: Burke or Gillard? Integration or Social Inclusion? Or is it Rudd? Trying to be both – and all - at once?

I am pleased to be here with you this morning a fortnight before Christmas, while Pauline Hanson tries to flee the country for Manhattan. She says she wants to experience a “real” Christmas - with snow and holly and Yule logs in the hearth fire – unlike our warm Australian summer celebrations.

Pauline, as a son of the golden beaches of Beirut transplanted out to Western Sydney, I can assure you that there is nothing more Australian or more authentic than a sweltering family Christmas. After a halal barbecue with steak and shish kebab, or a roasted bird – no ham, remember – and passionfruit pavlova, an afternoon kip and cricket match in the back yard before a surf swim in January down at Cronulla or Maroubra: what more could any honest Aussie wish for? What more could any Muslim?

It was for this experience and hope and dream that my parents crossed the globe to plant us here. Not for civil war or “sectarian violence” (as President Bush describes Baghdad today) or for religious uniformity or theocracy did we come. We came to a land which sings out to the world: “For those who’ve come across the seas, we’ve boundless plains to share.” Almost anthemic: a proud, loud sentiment like that. No wonder we so seldom sing the second verse.

Do I want separate but equal, or separate but superior? Of course not. The only Roude claiming superiority is Nada, during our debates. Those I always lose as well. The only Roude claiming equality is my youngest son, Gibriel, who means by that equality with his parents against his brothers whenever there is chocolate or ice cream to be shared. In both those paths lie my ruin and my downfall. Would I embrace them willingly?

Yes, there are Muslim boys and girls in Australia - some of them even white – who would impose a fascist ideology on this nation and call it Islam. They are not of me or of my faith. “Islam” means “submission to the will of God”. Those people would rather have God submit to their will or to that of their misleaders: I will not deign to call them teachers.

I have met with John Howard and Phillip Ruddock and Morris Iemma and our Federal Police, our State Police and all the other agencies. While I share not all their strategies or their arguments, our common ground, quite literally, is this soil.

The misleaders are not my enemy: I am their downfall. For every Muslim and every Australian who, like me and mine, says NO to violence and separatism and bigotry and unfair preference is a slap in their face, a toe at their toe, a truth to their lie. And this is integration and social inclusion and leadership – all in one.

The Muslim at the water cooler in your office, driving your taxi or serving your breakfast, flying your Air Force jet or steering your Navy patrol boat, removing your appendix or completing your taxes, teaching your school children or mining your clean coal, she or he is one of me; and one of us; and one of you – without contradiction or illogic or denial. For this is Australia, the Great Southern Land.

But the journey is not always forward. Let me use a parallel example – for a great friend of Australia.

Two hundred and six years ago today – December 12, 1800 - the American Government established a fetid swamp as its chosen capital: the City of Washington, District of Columbia. Seventy years later to the day, after a devastating 5 years of Civil War against slavery and race hatred, the first black lawmaker was sworn into the House of Representatives – the Republican Joseph H. Rainey of South Carolina.

Seven years further on, after an impossibly tight Presidential race between Democrat Samuel Tilden and Republican Rutherford Hayes, resolved by a single solitary Electoral College vote, the Compromise of 1877 saw the Union’s army of occupation removed from formerly Confederate states. From this disarmament was reborn Southern Democrat segregation and voting laws, which saw the last southern African-American Congressman lose office in 1901.

No black man sat in Congress for another 28 years, until Republican Oscar dePriest won office from Chicago after the Great Migration to the industrialised North, in the state of Illinois – home to the Great Emancipator, Abraham Lincoln. Southern industrialisation had been a condition of the Compromise of 1877 upon which the Union quickly reneged – causing massive poverty.

Again on this day in the year 2000, after massive voter deregistration and ballot blocking largely to disenfranchise African Americans, the Justices of the U.S. Supreme Court found – by a margin again of one single solitary vote – that the recount ordered by the Florida Supreme Court was unconstitutional, thereby handing election to Republican Texas Governor George W Bush. Democrat Vice-President Al Gore – our newest weather warrior – conceded the election the following day.

Had they gone back a century? Not nearly.

Exactly one year later, on December 12, 2001, the US House of Representatives passed legislation implementing minimum federal election standards and providing funding to help states modernize their voting systems. Today, some five years later, there are 40 black Congressmen and women. 118 in total have served in that great chamber of democracy since Joseph Rainey took the oath of office on this day in 1870.

According to Time magazine recently, one of the likely challengers for the Democratic Party’s Presidential nomination next time round in 2008 is Illinois Senator Barack Obama - again the only African American Senator, one bold face in one hundred.

From slavery to Congress to segregation to exile within their own land to representation to injustice through political process to the possibilities of government through executive leadership – this is the story of black America on this day alone. Not faultlessly forward, but forward nonetheless. So too shall be the journey of Muslims in Australia.

Again this day, in 1896, Guglielmo Marconi gave the first public demonstration of radio at Toynbee Hall, London. Five years later to the day, in 1901 – Australia’s first year of Federation – the first radio signal to cross the Atlantic Ocean was picked up near St. John’s, Newfoundland, in Canada by Marconi himself. When his miracle reached these shores - it was the Inland Telegraph laid by the Muslim Afghan cameleers which brought it here to Sydney from Indonesia via Darwin, Alice Springs and Adelaide.

If you, my fellow breakfasters, will promise to join we Australian Muslims in keeping the lines of communication open and honest and free, be it radio or television, internet or print, the vision of Marconi and the hope of Rainey and the dream of Ali Roude will be achieved.