The Tempest-Tossed Church by Windsor Gerard;

Author:Windsor, Gerard;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of New South Wales Press

PORTRAIT 6

OPEN DAY AT LAKEMBA MOSQUE In October 2015, for the second successive year, I went to the Open Day at the Lakemba Mosque. The non-Muslim crowd seemed a bit sparse – largely the educated middle class and a few semi-cranks. As previously I was edified by the large number of men rushing in for the midday prayer, and by the mosque’s readiness to have an almost continuous Q&A. Young enthusiasts offered a grin and a handshake and more than you wanted to hear about the impact on them of the Koran.

The panellists for the Q&A were all imams. One man I had seen previously on the ABC’s Q&A. He was the automatic first responder to all the questions. He was also long-winded and bobbed along on a rhetoric of platitudinous velleities and abstractions with the word ‘holistic’ his motif. During a break I approached one of his colleagues, younger, beardless, and responsible, he told me, for the prayers in a smaller Lakemba mosque. I came to my point straight away. I said I did not believe Islam was a religion of peace, that the Prophet had been a soldier, had fought numerous battles to establish his creed and had ordered massacres, not least of Jews. To my surprise the young imam merely said that these statements needed to be nuanced. That Islam was a religion of peace. But also of justice. As was Christianity – ‘an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth’. I took him up on that, saying Christ had explicitly rejected that Judaic code. The imam began to go through all the Prophet’s twelve battles, arguing that each was defensive. I conceded that Islam had not always, perhaps not even mostly, been spread by the sword.

Backwards and forwards we went, both nuancing somewhat. European meddling in the Middle East on the one hand, but on the other Sunni and Shia conflict dating from the death of the Prophet. I thanked the imam. He was informed, he was ready to discuss. I told him I hoped he could get a higher profile, that we all needed his readiness to engage with fact and actual doctrine. He might be confronting; I have seen his hard orthodoxy on the faces of the zealous young right-wing priests who are coming to dominate my own Catholic Church. And he had left Australia on leaving school, and all his further education had been in Yemen and Syria. But for the sake of honest and factual public debate we need him more than we need, say, prominent or glamorous Muslims being featured for their religious identity but without any specific explanations of their Islamic faith.

In the undercroft all visitors were invited to a bar-becue. I had with me a friend visiting from Ireland. We sat at a bench with our beef sausage hot dogs, and several women in niqabs passed us bottles of water and sat at the next bench and made clear that we were all part of the same happy crowd.

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