His dad wanted him to be a doctor – but now Osamah’s on a different healing mission

This story is part of the September 23 edition.See all 18 stories.

Most successful actors and directors are, by necessity, incorrigible optimists, staunch in the face of funding shortfalls and cranky critics. But Osamah Sami, the Iraqi-Australian writer and director, is more quixotic than most. In 2005, just four years after the 9/11 attacks in the US and amid a global pandemic of Islamophobia, Sami touched down in San Francisco with his theatre group – in all, seven actors of Middle Eastern extraction – intending to tour a comedy called The Trial of Saddam, led by a guy – him – whose first name was Osamah.

The play, in which Sami played Saddam Hussein, was written by his father, a Shi’ite cleric in Melbourne, and had done well in Sydney and Melbourne. It was bound for Detroit, home to the largest Iraqi community in the US, where it had sold out three shows at the 2000-seat Dearborn Theatre. But the US border guards had other plans. “They interrogated us separately, for hours and hours,” says Sami. “We were even handcuffed at one stage.”

In the end, the group was turned around and sent back to Australia. It was a traumatic experience, so much so that some members of the group gave up
acting. Sami, however, was made of sterner stuff, and some 18 years later is still working, only this time on a markedly bigger and more ambitious production called House of Gods. The six-part series, which Sami co-wrote with Iranian-Australian writer Shahin Shafaei, is set among the Shi’ite community in western Sydney. Much of the action takes place inside a fictional mosque, called The Prophet, the leadership of which has recently been won by a shrewd and charismatic patriarch, Sheikh Mohammad (Kamel El Basha). Mohammad’s authority is both spiritual and temporal; he oversees community events and religious functions, and is a faithful shepherd to his flock. But his power doesn’t go unchallenged, not just by rival religious leaders but also by his three children, whose conflicting agendas see them struggle for his favour.

“Within any group situation you have friction and internal clashes, especially if you have big egos and people who are anxious about their status,” says Sami, who I met on set one morning in May (the series premieres on ABC TV and ABC iView early next year). “It’s no different in a mosque.”

Much of the action takes place in the fictional mosque’s capacious prayer room, which has been built from scratch in a sports centre in western Sydney with a truly transfigurative attention to detail, from the two dozen internal arches to the chandeliers, prayer beads and ornate glass cabinets stacked with volumes of Islamic jurisprudence. Twenty per cent of the script is in Arabic; there is only one Anglo-Australian character, and three of the cast speak no English at all.

A scene from House of Gods, with co-writer Osamah Sami (left) and Kamel El Basha, who plays a mosque leader. Sami grew up in a mosque, where his dad was lead cleric.

“We also have an Arabic speaker in almost every department,” says producer Sheila Jayadev. “The whole undertaking feels epic. Not just the set but the story, with all the suspense and intrigue and lies and betrayal.”

Sami, who turned 40 this year, is cheeky, charming, gentle and, not always the case with actors, utterly unpretentious, something that derives either from his humble background (migrant family, eldest of seven children) or the fact that he’s simply too busy for bullshit. In just under 20 years he has variously written, directed and/or acted in some 40 plays, TV series or movies, including the 2017 rom-com Ali’s Wedding, which he co-wrote with Andrew Knight, co-creator of the hit TV series SeaChange, and which earned him
an Australian Academy of Cinema and Television Arts (AACTA) award and an Australian Writers’ Guild (AWGIE) gong. This year sees him star in two psychological thrillers, Tennessine, which he also co-wrote and produced, and Shayda, with Cate Blanchett as executive producer. His 2015 memoir, Good Muslim Boy, which won the multicultural division at the 2016 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards and was turned into a play that ran in 2018, is now being developed as a movie. In between all this, he’s somehow managed to learn several languages, become an accomplished oud player and maintain a poetry blog.

But House of Gods is special, not least because its central character, Sheikh Mohammad, is based on his father, Sami Sabih Al-Ghazi. Al-Ghazi, who died in 2013, was for 20 years the lead cleric at the Fawkner mosque, the biggest Shi’ite place of worship in Melbourne. The family grew up in the same building, and Sami spent much time at the mosque observing his father’s day-to-day work. “Dad was progressive,” Sami tells me. “He welcomed everyone: Bosnian Muslims, Lebanese, Syrians, Bangladeshis. And he wrote plays and had them performed at the mosque.”

Osamah Sami as Ali and Helana Sawires as Ali’s true love, Dianne, in his 2017 rom-com Ali’s Wedding. Plotlines, including an aborted marriage, were based on his life.Credit: Ben Timony

Al-Ghazi wanted the community to integrate with Australian life. Seeking more autonomy, he cut ties with the grand ayatollahs in Iraq, a move that inflamed conservative elements in the Islamic community. In 2016,
a Supreme Court battle erupted over ownership of the mosque. Later that year, in an unrelated attack, the building, including the part where the family lived, was graffitied with Islamic State slogans and set on fire.

‘We lost everything,” says Sami’s younger sister, Roah. “Furniture, toys, books. We had to start again, with no money.”

Al-Ghazi’s rivals accused Sami and his brothers of torching the building to get the $6 million insurance. “Osamah was the head of the family,” says Roah. “He and Ali [Sami’s younger brother] took on a lot of that pressure. They became very withdrawn and stressed, but I was so proud of them, the way they dealt with it.” (In 2017, three young men from Melbourne’s north-west were charged with lighting the fire and with terrorism-related offences. They were jailed in 2019.)

The parallels with House of Gods are clear; the murky politics and moral complexities, the pressure on religious leaders to serve both God and man. One of the series’ main characters, a conservative cleric named Sheikh Seyyed Shaaker (played by Simon Elrahi), nurses an opium habit, which he takes to alleviate the post-traumatic stress disorder he suffered, as a younger man, opposing Saddam Hussein. “I witnessed holy men after holy men resort to hard drugs,” Sami wrote in an essay that accompanies the show’s production notes. “You’d be shocked to learn the actual number of Imams who deliver their Friday prayer sermons while high on opium.”

Osamah Sami comes from a long line of survivors. Both his parents were from Iraq, but his mother, Ahlam, was Kurdish and was deported with her family to Iran in 1979, when Saddam Hussein took power. Sami’s father, meanwhile, was arrested at the age of 18 for speaking out against Saddam, and taken to a detention centre in Basrah, near the border with Iran. There he was hung from a ceiling fan and tortured for 58 days, including by his own uncle. Finally, two soldiers came to take him away to be executed. As it turned out, the soldiers were his oldest friends, wearing fake uniforms and carrying forged papers. The three men drove to the border, dumped their car and swam across the Shatt Al Arab river, into Iran. Sami’s father spent time in a refugee camp nearby, where he met Ahlam, in 1981. The couple married and moved to the holy city of Qom, in northern Iran, where Al-Ghazi entered a seminary and became a cleric. Sami was born in 1983.

Sami and his father on the lawn of Melbourne’s Fawkner mosque in 2001.Credit: Courtesy of Osamah Sami

When Sami was young, his parents moved between Qom and Abadan, a mid-sized city on the southern border with Iraq and home to Iran’s Arab minority. During the Iran-Iraq War, which ran from 1980-88, the city was disputed territory. “I remember tanks rolling through town,” Sami says. Sami got bullied at school for being Iraqi. “I tried to mask the fact that I was Iraqi but it’s hard with a name like Osamah.”

After the war, Sami’s father enrolled him in art school in Abadan. “It was a bit risqué but Dad was ahead of his time.” There Sami befriended the drama teacher, who cast Sami in one of his plays, an action drama with supernatural elements. “I played the wind,” he says. “That was my first role!”

Seeking a better life, the family moved to Melbourne in 1995 and settled in Fawkner. “It was hard,” says Sami, who was 12. “I had no English. I read all the signs back to front, the way you do in Farsi.” Other kids called him a “monkey” and told him to go back home and “drive a camel”. But he learnt to play cricket – “My Iraqi mates were like, ‘It takes five days to finish one game?’ ” – and fell in love with Aussie rules football. “We followed Essendon,” he explains. “I mean, we’re Muslims, mate. Of course we were going to follow the Bombers!”

Sami was confident and outgoing. “I admired him so much,” says Roah, who is 10 years his junior. “He was always up to something, and I just thought, ‘How cool is he?’ ”

“It’s hard... As an Islamic actor, you either don’t exist or you’re a villainous presence.”Credit: Kristoffer Paulsen

But Sami was also caught between two cultures. As the oldest son in a migrant family, he was expected to pursue a career with financial security; in his case, medicine. Yet his heart was in the arts, especially theatre. And so, in 2002, when he failed to get enough marks to get into medical school, he did what any good actor would do and faked it. “I’d wake up every day and go to the local library and study anatomy and biology and physiology,” he says. “I’d even go to Melbourne University and sit at the back of the lectures, even though I wasn’t enrolled.” His plan was to learn enough to be able to pass the GAMSAT, the graduate medical schools admissions test. “But I was doing it for the wrong reasons, so the motivation wasn’t there.”

It was a full year before his father discovered the ruse. Sami was forced to make a public apology at the mosque. As part of his penance, his parents arranged for him to marry, but Sami literally ran away on his wedding night, leaving his wife in the car at a 7-Eleven on the drive home from the ceremony. “I’d been married for about three hours,” he tells me. (Sami has two young daughters with his second wife, with whom he split in 2013.)

The fake med degree and the aborted marriage would eventually provide the inspiration for Sami’s 2017 film, Ali’s Wedding. The movie is a rom-com;
tender and whimsical. But at the time, Sami’s life was anything but funny. He had tried to fit in but failed. Soon, he would have to follow his own path.

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“The screen industry is very middle-class,” says Australian director Tony Ayres, a long-time friend and collaborator of Sami. “If you don’t have educational privileges or you don’t have parental support, it’s very difficult to break in. And Osamah certainly doesn’t come from wealth.”

He did, however, have stamina. At 21, he began taking courses at the Australian Film and Television Academy in Brunswick. “The first thing we did was work on his accent,” says TAFTA artistic director John Orcsik. “It was very thick, and I said, ‘Unless people can understand what you’re saying you’ll have trouble getting cast.’ ”

Orcsik had Sami recite Shakespeare while stressing the hard consonants, such as t and d. “I was working at a servo at the time and I’d practise on customers,” Sami says. “I’d say ‘Pump thirteen, that will be thirty-seven dollars and twenty-eight cents. Cash or credit?’”

“The screen industry is very middle-class … it’s very difficult to break in. And Osamah certainly doesn’t come from wealth.”

Australian director Tony Ayres

After a while he began to get work, including a minor role in the 2007 comedy Lucky Miles, about a group of asylum seekers who become lost in Western Australia’s Pilbara desert after being dumped on the coast by people smugglers. A string of TV and stage roles followed, often as stock Middle Eastern characters. “It’s hard,” he says. “As an Islamic actor, you either don’t exist or you’re a villainous presence.”

He wanted to create opportunities to play more complex roles. But as a well-known member of Melbourne’s Islamic community – the son of a sheikh, no less – this inevitably involved risk. In 2009, he appeared opposite Claudia Karvan in Saved, as an Iranian asylum seeker who sleeps with a married woman. He later played a Lebanese man married to a lesbian. Then, in 2013, he appeared as a gay Muslim character in a short film on YouTube. “The reaction in the community was very, very bad,” says Mona, one of Sami’s sisters. “People saw him on screen and they didn’t get a sense that he was acting.”

From left: Sami, his brother Ali, his father and his sister Mona at home in Iran’s Khuzestan Province.Credit: Courtesy of Osamah Sami

Sami had a fatwa, or religious ruling, issued against him. Some of the elders came to his father and demanded that Sami be sent to Iran and face the death penalty. “But our dad was the most peaceful, understanding man in the world,” Mona says. “He and Mum were okay with all the disapproval.”

Sami’s subsequent success has only made him more visible. “There are lots of young people in Melbourne in the Islamic community who look up to him,” Mona says. “They wish they could do the same thing, and that their parents would let them.” Ayres agrees. “There are lots of different positions about morality that he has to navigate. He is still also the oldest son of a large family, and so he also has a role in that sense.”

Ayres met Sami on the set of 2009’s Saved, which Ayres directed. “Osamah was only 26, but he already seemed to have had a bigger life than most people.” The two men had both, in their own ways, lived on the margins of mainstream Australia; Sami as an Iraqi immigrant and Ayres as ethnically Chinese and gay. In 2010, they began collaborating on Ali’s Wedding, editing scripts and organising finance.

“We both see eye to eye on the value of creative work to illuminate worlds that are largely unseen to broader audiences,” Ayres says. They are developing a new TV series called Babylonia, which aims to explore notions of masculinity, religion and duty among Arab men. Ayres says the series will be centred around “an act of violence”.

Of course, conflict has long been a catalyst in Middle Eastern affairs, both in a macro and micro sense. It has certainly shaped Sami’s work, particularly with House of Gods, in which the contest for control over The Prophet mosque fuels a clash of attitudes and ideologies. “There’s nothing wrong with that,” he tells me. “You have to be sensitive when you’re making a show like House of Gods, but conflict, even if it’s at an ideological level, can be healthy if it results in debate and discussion.”

Venturing into uncomfortable territory is part of growing up. “You need it to show improvement,” says Sami. “That’s what I want when it comes to depictions of my culture. I don’t want this, ‘Hey, aren’t [Arabs] all great!’ or ‘Hey, we’re all terrorists!’ I want something more nuanced. I want to see something on screen and be able to say, ‘Yeah, I recognise that. That’s real.’ ”

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