Once Were Radicals  
by Irfan Yusuf  

Two years ago I begged Irfan Yusuf whom I once labeled ‘the Emir of the Bloggers’ to stop his damned blogging and write a book. In 2008 he won the prestigious Iremonger Award, wrote his book and since then he’s been busy travelling around the country from one writers’ festival to the next promoting his book in his usual anarchistic style. His highly amusing and very readable memoir hit the bookshops in August this year. This man can write and he has a wicked sense of humour to boot which anyone who’s read his columns (he writes for a number of papers around the country) well knows.

Irfan provides a wealth of detail to describe what growing up in Australia was like for a young man from a Pakistani family and I’m sure it will strike a chord with many young Muslims both here and overseas. More importantly it needs to be read by non-Muslims who think that Australian Muslim men are either complete misogynists or terrorists in the making.

Nevertheless, there will be quite a few Australian Muslims—young and old who will not be happy with what he’s written. I’ve heard on the grapevine that a few Muslim critics have taken him to task publicly, telling him in no uncertain terms that he’s ‘let down the side’. Irfan has used his ‘right of reply’ to confront his local critics via his numerous blogs—once again he uses humour to counter attack, for he’s really a satirist at heart.

What Irfan does really well is to show the ‘coming of age’ and the mixed up emotions that a Muslim teenage boy, born in Pakistan, feels growing up in Sydney. He experiences many symptoms of not belonging although his symptoms of alienation are somewhat milder than other Muslims in his peer group (migrant worker families from Turkey or Lebanon) because he is protected by the security, status and socio-economic background of his family—an expensive private school with a university education in the offing is not the automatic birthright of many Australian Muslims.   

The author is really a joiner at heart and samples many groups; this allows him to discover their flaws by participating. He has sampled a multitude of subcultures including: an Anglican private school in Sydney; a Madrassah in Pakistan; the Australian ‘Islamic industry’; youth camps; some wise and moderate imams and some less wise, hotheaded writers and leaders.

In the end, Irfan the student has grown wiser. He leaves ideas of a political Islam behind and turns to an idea of Islam as public service and personal piety inspired by Sufism while rejecting another side of Sufism, the folk Islam of worshipping Sufi saints and pirs. His personal development leads to a message of tolerance and acceptance of religious and cultural diversity. In accepting pluralism in the world around him, he can continue a tolerant, mainstream version of his ancestral tradition.