London echoes in Muslim centre

THE nation must confront deep-rooted issues troubling Muslim Australians or risk inciting a "tectonic" event.

Religious divide

THE nation must confront deep-rooted issues troubling Muslim Australians or risk inciting a "tectonic" event such as the 2005 London bombings, warns a British Muslim scholar embedded for three months in southwest Sydney's Muslim community.

Aftab Malik, 37, said a "sense of uneasiness" existed in Muslim Australia that he recognised in British Muslims before the July 7, 2005, suicide bombings by Islamist terrorists that killed 52 people, prompting a dramatic reassessment of issues.

"Unfortunately, it took the 7/7 terror attacks for Brits to really consider the fact we have to go beyond issues of Halal meat and the length of one's beard," Mr Malik said.

The visiting member of the UN Alliance of Civilisations, a group formed by then UN secretary-general Kofi Annan in 2005 to "counter the forces that fuel polarisation and extremism", said Australia needed to have discussions "about culture, about meaning, about belonging".

"Unfortunately, for British Muslims, it took a terrorist attack for us to have that discussion," he said. "We should learn from our mistakes. You need to pre-empt this. Don't wait till something tragic happens."

Mr Malik wrapped up his three-month stint in Lakemba, Australia's unofficial Muslim capital, with a reflective lecture on Tuesday. The lecture was titled Let's Be Honest and featured a few home truths for politicians and 476,000 Muslims alike.

Mr Malik took great interest in Julia Gillard's visit last month to southwest Sydney's Muslim communities. "It was quiet for two months and then suddenly when the election was announced there was a spate of activity in the Lakemba, Liverpool and Bankstown areas," he said. "I think the Muslims resented that. They said, 'We're not silly people, we're not stupid people'. I thought the Muslims felt they were being talked down to as opposed to engaged with. And I picked that up very quickly."

He said Muslim Australians were enduring an "identity crisis". Mothers struggled with patriarchal issues in modern Australia. Their highly politicised, 9/11-generation sons are torn between the traditional Islamic worlds of their dads at home and the iPhone worlds of friends.

Watching footage of protests in central Sydney last September, when a US-made anti-Islamic film insulting Mohammed sparked riots worldwide, Mr Malik saw young Australian men executing religion "in a grotesque way".

"You can't isolate these issues," he said. "It's tied up like a spider's web. The spider sits in the middle and even if right on the periphery of it a little twig hits the web, the spider knows. The Muslims are in a spider's web right now."

Multicultural Affairs Minister Kate Lundy said Mr Malik's reports of "uneasiness" among Muslim communities was a matter of "it depends who you talk to".

"You've always got to be diligent and thorough," Senator Lundy said. "(To) not take anything for granted and make sure you've got a constant conversation so you know what young people's frustrations are."

She said Ms Gillard's southwest Sydney visit was misinterpreted.

In a week immersed in Lakemba's bustling streets, The Weekend Australian discovered a new generation of leaders tackling serious issues of religious extremism, drug addiction, unemployment and the "normalisation" of Muslim Australians in their unique, culturally-specific ways, with little input from the federal government. There are Lakemba drug counsellors such as Haisam Haidar, 24, running Islam-specific 12-step rehabilitation programs while trying to raise funds for a 24-hour rehab centre.

"We feel like it is needed," Mr Haidar said. "There's a lot of ice users out there. Cocaine. Heroin. Marijuana is a big problem. They are getting younger and younger. That's the sad truth."

There are young leaders such as Sahar Dandan from the Lebanese Muslim Association. She's been nicknamed "AK-47" and "Dream Killer" by elders for the kind of thinking that saw her organising lectures challenging extremist thinking with titles such as The Counter Jihad and The Roots of Radicalisation.

"There's a huge gap at the moment between youth and let's call them the elders of the community," Ms Dandan said.

"I lived a double life. Who I was at school and who I was at home had to be different. That's difficult. A lot of the youth are in the same boat..

"There isn't anything that they can connect to in terms of where their elders are and they feel a disconnect between being Lebanese, Syrian, Pakistani, whatever you might be, and being Australian and being Muslim. I think it's manifesting itself in different ways amongst our youth. And we're losing some of them. Some are going really Australian, some are going really extreme, and some are in the middle."

Mr Malik said "in Britain, change came from the young, guided by the elders".