FOR a great world religion, some of whose many followers are engaged in savage war with each other while others wish to take on the world, Islam needs a credibility makeover. Australia has thus far been extremely fortunate to have security agencies that have thwarted plots to target the 2000 Olympics, major sites including the Opera House and the MCG, and more recently, individuals. The notorious sheik had just returned from Lebanon, where the Arab press reported he had visited Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, then head of the terrorist organisation Hezbollah, and quoted him saying: “I blessed Hezbollah for liberating the prisoners and the bones of the shahids (suicide bombers) and I praised it and its sacrifice. Hezbollah has become a model for all the mujahideen in the world. Most of the Australian people do not support the policy of the Australian government, which has placed Hezbollah on the terror list out of submission to the US, and the Australian Prime Minister will pay the price for this in the next elections ...” When challenged, his first response was to claim that he hadn’t spoken to the Arabic media and that he’d never issued a call to arms against any nation but he admitted to sentiments that “support the resistance”, though he said he condemned the targeting of civilian targets. In a subsequent interview in Arabic with SBS radio, translated for me by Trad, the mufti did say he didn’t regard members of Hezbollah as terrorists. Hezbollah was listed as a terrorist organisation by the Australian government less than a year later. Subsequently, Al-Hilaly achieved increased notoriety with his comparison of women to raw meat and the revelation that he had been caught vandalising his own mosque. Thus was the Mufti, hitherto the go-to spokesman for Islam in Australia, gradually brought down. Australia now has the new Grand Mufti Ibrahim Abu Mohammad. He spoke earnestly for the cameras on Wednesday just after the attempted murder of two policemen and his translator said he had declared the calls for a jihad against Australians had no religious authority. But when Islamic religious authorities are so obviously in bloody disagreement with each other, who do we believe? Last week a young Muslim woman, who doesn’t wear any head cover and who had written a book about burqas and niqabs, told an ABC audience that she was an Alawite, an Islamic sect that permits women greater public roles than almost any other sect. Though she was sympathetic to those who did cover up, she admitted she would be targeted in certain Australian suburbs if she, as a Muslim, didn’t wear at least a scarf. This may seem a petty issue when security agencies believe major crimes are being contemplated but the arguments about the burqa and chador and niqab are literally in our faces. Those women who publicly argue most fiercely for the burqa have so far been either Muslim converts or women who don’t cover up. If there has been a woman in a burqa arguing for the burqa she appeared on an SBS channel I wasn’t watching. In July, the European court of human rights upheld the right of France to ban the burqa to preserve the notion of “living together”. France’s law, introduced in 2010, also covers balaclavas and hoods but has been seen as targeting Muslim women. According to a report in The Guardian on July 1, Isabelle Niedlispacher, representing the Belgian government, which introduced a similar ban in 2011, declared the burqa and niqab “incompatible” with the rule of law. Aside from security and equality, she added: “It’s about social communication, the right to interact with someone by looking them in the face and about not disappearing under a piece of clothing.” The French and Belgian laws were aimed at “helping everyone to integrate”. If Muslims complain about a sense of alienation, dumping the alienating burqa and niqab would go a long way to making them feel more at home here.blogs.news.au/dailytelegraph/piersakerman/
Posted on: Sun, 05 Oct 2014 04:32:22 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015