Radicaliser? Undercover agent? Aftab Malik is used to dodging accusations

Aftab Malik’s earliest memory of Australia is getting thrashed in cricket. It was 1991, just before his final exams. Malik’s school team had travelled more than 14,000 kilometres from Bristol in south-west England to the unforgiving wickets of Perth for a tour in which they won only a single match.

But the losses didn’t overly faze Malik. He never dreamt of playing at the top level, he says. In fact, he’s never followed any kind of career plan.

Which makes sense. No child has ever gone to bed dreaming of becoming a special envoy to combat Islamophobia in Australia.

Even Malik, who became an Australian citizen last year, was wary when the new role was first advertised.

“I didn’t want this job,” he tells me. “I knew how difficult it would be to navigate this field within the Muslim community.”

Sceptics saw the position as an attempt to win back Labor votes in western Sydney, he says. Then there was the sheer scale of the prejudice he has described as a hidden cancer. Islamophobia Register Australia says reported incidents rose more than 500 per cent in the year after Hamas’ terrorist attacks on Israel.

But eventually, he was convinced to apply by colleagues and friends, including one who took him for a walk and told him, “stop being a wuss”.

Our discussion – which covers everything from al-Qaeda to a life-changing VHS tape – takes place at Volcanos Steakhouse in Blacktown in Sydney’s west. Malik, 50, arrives early wearing a bone-white suit, a fine-checked shirt and brown leather shoes. He’s eyed off the VIP booths on previous visits, and now we’re in one, near a glass-fronted storeroom full of dry-aged cuts lit by red neon.

Halal steak – a good choice for a scholar of Islam and this iron-deficient journalist. I opt for eye fillet and chips. Malik goes for a rump with mashed potato and salad.

For his sole meal of the day, Malik chose rump steak and swapped out fries for potato mash. Credit: Edwina Pickles

He reveals he’s a one-meal-a-day guy. That’s largely because he gets lost in work. When he recently left his old job, a colleague told him that in a decade of working together, she had never seen him eat.

But there’s religious justification, too. Malik, smiling, tells me of the Sufi mystic who was asked about people who eat once a day. “They are with the Prophet,” came the response. Twice a day? “They are with the saints.” Three times? For those, the mystic advised: “Get your head out of the trough”.

Malik’s parents, who emigrated from Pakistan to Britain, were both religious. His father, a custodian of the local mosque, “loved getting involved in the intricacies of centuries-old debates” about Islamic law. His mother preferred devotional poetry.

Malik did what Muslims were meant to: He fasted during Ramadan. He stayed away from pork. He prayed five times a day. But it was half-hearted. He felt like a “part-time” Muslim.

Then, at university, he was bombarded with questions from Muslim students who wanted to know which doctrines he subscribed to. Feeling theologically underdone, he visited an Islamic video store, where the proprietor insisted he spend £10 on a taped lecture by Hamza Yusuf, an American convert.

“It changed my life,” Malik says. “It really created a whole new vista of how I understand Islam, across literature, science, philosophy, history.” Yusuf opened his eyes to Islam as not just a set of cultural practices but a rich intellectual tradition. Malik began to read hungrily and to meet scholars.

Islamophobic graffiti in the western Sydney suburb of Chester Hill.

But September 11 changed his world again. Nineteen men, armed with box cutters and knives, had “hijacked” his religion.

Malik was working in England in the marketing department of the technology giant Intel, spending his spare time in intramural debates about Islam. After the attacks, he wanted a broader audience. Still in his 20s, he quit corporate life and started a publishing house, Amal Press, editing a series of books on the War on Terror and publishing his own work, The Broken Chain, which called for a new appreciation of the classical Islamic tradition.

That tradition, he says, was rooted in rahma, or mercy. It encompassed diverse schools of thought and emphasised humility. According to an old Arabic proverb, half of knowledge is saying, “I don’t know”.

Malik, who was designated a United Nations global expert on terrorism in the mid-2000s, says a deep knowledge of Islam protects against violence. He reminds me of a Quranic saying: To save a life is akin to saving all humanity.

“Classical Islam put very strong safeguards on the prevention of killing innocents,” Malik says. “ISIS, al-Qaeda got rid of those moral constraints and created an unfettered fetish of destruction and murder.”

Our terrorism discussion is interrupted by the arrival of mocktails, a complimentary selection fuming with dry ice. I settle into a Blue Lagoon, and Malik chooses the pomegranate-based Dark Knight. “That is compelling,” he says after a sip.

Volcanos Steakhouse, which does not serve alcohol, has a wide range of mocktails. Credit: Edwina Pickles

With his neat beard, glasses and refined voice, there’s something of the professor about Malik. But he’s a bit too well-dressed for the academy. He veers between earnestness and humour. When I ask if he’s a “neo-traditionalist”, as he’s been called in the past, he makes a joke about Neo from The Matrix.

While Neo dodges bullets, Malik dodges accusations. He says in his travels to give lectures after September 11, he was often questioned or stopped at airports. Once, he was asked whether his upcoming talk was “for terrorism or against it”. He also recalls a US official telling his seven-year-old son, “your father is a very dangerous man”. “My son, for years, kept asking me, ‘why did he say that?’”

At times, Malik has been viewed with distrust by Muslims. In 2012, when he came to Sydney as a Lebanese Muslim Association scholar-in-residence, some people called him a radicalising influence. Others thought he was a “counter-radicalisation agent” brought in by the government.

“When you’re trying to get people to think, you’ll get accused of everything,” Malik says.

After 15 months of working with young people in Lakemba, the country’s unofficial Muslim capital, he had fallen in love with the locals’ quirkiness, generosity and resilience. Plans to complete a PhD at Oxford on Salafism were shelved.

What followed was nearly 10 years with the NSW government, working on programs to counter violent extremism and promote “social cohesion” – in other words, to keep society from falling apart. Last year, he won the Premier’s Department secretary’s award for his efforts “in the wake of events in Israel/Gaza on October 7, 2023″.

The bill, complimentary mocktails not included.Credit: Patrick Begley

His task as the anti-Islamophobia envoy is to give independent advice to the Home Affairs minister and the prime minister. After Malik’s appointment was announced in September, academic Yassir Morsi questioned why the government had chosen someone with a background in countering violent extremism programs, which some Muslims see as stigmatising.

But Malik says in the five weeks he spent travelling the country late last year, talking to more than 130 representatives of Islamic organisations, only a handful expressed serious concerns about this work.

What people really want to know, he says, is what he will do.

Muslims told him of being spat on, threatened and refused rentals. Women, often accompanied by children, were asked if they were hiding bombs under their clothes. One mosque had discovered a pig’s head dumped at its gates.

“What was shocking was that everyone had a story,” Malik says. He asked each of them: “What do you want to hold me accountable for?”

Now in possession of a very long list, he’s starting to triage. Major priorities include holding Islamophobia perpetrators to account, co-ordinating better responses from authorities, dismantling harmful stereotypes and reducing systemic discrimination.

“Really, the onus is on me, and then the government, to ensure this office does not end up being a tokenistic office,” he says.

It was just after Malik finished his listening tour that Liberal senator Dave Sharma made headlines by calling Islamophobia “fictitious”. Malik has since met Sharma for “a really good conversation”, which they agreed to keep private.

Malik meeting with Prime Minister Anthony Albanese in December.

Only a few months in, he’s already met with the envoy combating antisemitism, Jillian Segal (who has also been approached for the Lunch With column), three times. I ask Malik about an unpublished book he wrote about the rise of antisemitism in the modern Muslim mind, which he described on a 2012 podcast as an attempt to “understand the plight of the Jews” from the time of the pharaohs through Christian Europe and into the 20th century.

“I handwrote that, three volumes of work,” he tells me, describing how he often cried during research. But he paused the work in response to Israel’s military actions in Gaza in the 2008–2009 war.

“I was just demoralised,” he says. “It wasn’t a protest; I just felt the wind had been knocked from my sails.” He gave a speech saying the freedom and safety of Israel could not come at the expense of Palestinian lives. Today, he describes himself as neither pro-Israel nor pro-Palestine but “pro-human dignity”.

When he goes back to his parents’ house in England, he leafs through those old notebooks containing the antisemitism work.

“I do believe that goodness ultimately prevails,” he says. “But it means that there could be many days of darkness until the sun shines.”

Passing the two-hour mark, our interview has run long. Malik has barely finished his steak, and his salad remains untouched.

It’s too late to find out how a Sufi mystic might view dessert.

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