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Diversity the destination for journey into Islam

By Irfan Yusuf - posted Friday, 1 February 2008


That middle ground can exist in any country, Muslim or otherwise.

After all his time in various zones of conflict in the nominally Islamic world, Burke realises the enormous variety of Islams (as opposed to a single Islam) that exists. This is a lesson anyone who has travelled and spent time in more than one Muslim-majority state will take for granted. It is also a lesson that self-serving Muslim spokespersons in Western countries should learn.

Surely the easiest way to demonise a group is to portray them in a monolithic fashion. Muslim leaders in Australia who pretend, in their own communal and political interests, that there is just one Muslim community (which they conveniently represent) are not only doing Muslims a disservice. Their claims reflect either complete ignorance or total dishonesty.

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Burke concludes with some reflections on the London bombings, to whose victims he dedicates his book.

And if the London bombings had taught me anything it was that to gather people together, whether hundreds of millions of people across huge swathes of the planet or fifty people in a tube carriage, and demarcate and label them and designate them simply as one thing or another, as enemies or friends, as Westerner or Eastern, as Muslims or non-Muslims, as believers or non-believers, is something no one should ever do.

In short, the things that divide us within communities are, in truth, the things that truly unite us as human beings.

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First published in The Canberra Times on January 12, 2008 and on the blog Madhab al-IrfyOn The Road To Kandahar: Travels Through Conflict In The Islamic World by Jason Burke. Penguin, 320pp.



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About the Author

Irfan Yusuf is a New South Wales-based lawyer with a practice focusing on workplace relations and commercial dispute resolution. Irfan is also a regular media commentator on a variety of social, political, human rights, media and cultural issues. Irfan Yusuf's book, Once Were Radicals: My Years As A Teenage Islamo-Fascist, was published in May 2009 by Allen & Unwin.

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