Sex, death and Islam the issues in Osamah Sami’s Good Muslim Boy

Sex and death feature prominently in comedian Osamah Sami’s amusing and moving memoir Good Muslim Boy.

Osamah Sami puts his skills as a comedian to good use in his memoir. Picture: Jason Edwards

Melbourne-based actor, writer and comedian Osamah Sami is only 32 but has led an eventful enough life to fill several long memoirs. Instead, Good Muslim Boy takes the form of a travelogue — or rather, two interlocking travelogues.

The book is structured around the story of a 2013 journey Sami makes with his father, a respected Muslim cleric in Melbourne, to his childhood home in Iran. After his father’s sudden death, aged 50, in their hotel, Sami not only has to fend for himself but also grapple with a complicated and unfamiliar bureaucracy to have the body shipped home to Australia before his own visa expires.

This tale of a father-and-son homecoming gone tragically wrong is intertwined with the story of the family’s journey from war-torn Iran to Australia when Sami was 13. Warm, often comic scenes of family life and cross-­cultural misunderstandings in Melbourne suburbia are interspersed with moments of sudden, shocking violence: a public execution, a suicide, the death of a young sibling when the family home is bombed during the Iran-Iraq war.

As an Arab child growing up in Iran, Sami became accustomed to living as an outsider long before he found himself sharing the first name of the world’s most wanted terrorist in the wake of the September 11 attacks.

Sami puts his skills as a comedian to good use in recounting the various occasions on which the good Muslim boy was not so good. There never seems to have been any serious doubt that he remained Muslim, regardless of transgressions that led some community elders to demand his father disown him or, better still, return him to Iran so that he could face the death penalty.

Fortunately, Sami’s family was a lot more understanding, even after he was discovered to have spent a year pretending to study for a medical degree after failing to gain the necessary marks for university admission, then fled from the wedding his parents had arranged for him.

Sami manages to provide lighthearted explanations of various topics that are unfamiliar even to many Muslims, let alone non-Muslims. Given Good Muslim Boy is (among other things) a teenage coming-of-age story, it includes much discussion of attitudes about sex and sexuality both in Iran and within the Iranian community in Melbourne. In particular, there are lengthy descriptions of sigha, a Shia concept that allows couples to enter into a marriage for a fixed length of time, sometimes as little as half an hour. In Iran this has provided a space for a thriving commercial sex industry, with some clerics “effectively becoming an imam version of a pimp”.

But it also provides some young Muslims with a way of engaging in illicit relationships without abandoning their commitment to their religious values. In Melbourne, Sami undertakes a secret sigha with a young Lebanese woman, whose parents seem as unlikely to approve of his family as his family is to approve of hers.

If sex is a major theme of Good Muslim Boy, then so is death. The death of Sami’s father is the central event of the book, and it provides a point of entry for many conversations about death and bereavement with the various officials, taxi drivers, hotel staff and random strangers who variously help or hinder Sami’s quest to repatriate his father’s body to the country that had become his homeland.

Grief makes cameo appearances at regular intervals throughout the book, somehow blending seamlessly with childhood fart jokes and the story of Sami’s starring role in Saddam: The Musical (if that piques your interest, the clips are still available on YouTube). The impact of these brief, grim scenes is all the more powerful for being set against such a lively and hopeful backdrop.

To his credit, Sami manages to highlight the absurdity that can arise from Iranian attitudes towards life and death without representing his characters as inherently and inexplicably ­bizarre. Or at least they seem no more bizarre than the non-Muslim classmates, neighbours and authority figures who feature in their lives. In the (over)crowded field of post-9/11 memoirs, Good Muslim Boy stands out from the pack for its success in rendering the strange as familiar, and the familiar as deeply strange.

Shakira Hussein’s new book, From Victims to Suspects: Muslim Women Since 9/11, will be published by NewSouth in November.

Good Muslim Boy

By Osamah Sami

Hardie Grant, 320pp, $32.95