From Muhammad to Anthony Mundine

In January 2007, the controversial Grand Mufti of Australia, Sheikh Taj Uddin alHilali, claimed that Muslims had a much greater right to Australia than non-Muslim white Australian citizens. “Anglo-Saxons came to Australia in chains,” he told an Egyptian chat show, Cairo Today, “while we paid our way and came in freedom. We are more Australian than them. Australia is not an Anglo-Saxon country—Islam has deep roots in Australian soil that were there before the English arrived.” [1]

On one point he was correct. Islam has had a long connection with Australia’s Aboriginal people. From the 1650s or c. 1720 (depending on one’s source) [2]to the lucrative markets of South-East Asia. This was no small quantity of arrivals: “in any one area,” according to Ian McIntosh, “Aborigines were totally outnumbered by the visitors”.[3] Thus large numbers of technologically-advanced foreigners in sea-going vessels encroached on Aboriginal land, accessing and removing natural resources for export. , Muslim traders from Macassar (modern Sulawesi) travelled yearly to northern Australia to harvest trepang (sea cucumber) which were dried on the beaches before being transported

Such social realities created a dissonance in the Aboriginal mind, and began to find a place in Dreaming myths. The now-deceased Aboriginal elder and informant David Burrumarra MBE related such a narrative:

In one Dreaming account, in the beginning, Aborigines were “white” and rich and Macassans “black” and poor and the visitors worked for the Aboriginal land owners. But events were turned around when a mythological Dog representing Aborigines[4] was rude and uncooperative to the visitors, and so the wealth of Macassans, which was seen to originate from Aboriginal land, was lost to them. From that point on, Aborigines were “black” and poor and Macassans “white” and rich.[5]

Ian McIntosh suggests that contact with the Macassans may have imprinted a subliminal message on the Aboriginal psyche, preparing them for later European settlement: “Aborigines are confronted with the idea of being forever impoverished and bound in a state of dependence upon the non-Aboriginal Other … When Macassans departed from Arnhem Land, Europeans inherited their place as usurpers of Aboriginal wealth.”[6]

The relationship between these early Muslims and the Aboriginal people was not always positive. According to Peta Stephenson: 

“Macassan” goods brought both benefits and problems for Indigenous communities—knives and alcohol, for instance, proved lethal, especially combined with angry retribution over the abductions of Aboriginal women … “Macassans” were routinely accused of debasing Aborigines with alcohol, introducing diseases and exploiting Aboriginal labour … Aboriginal songs … bespeak a period of conflict and bloodshed that brought intense social turmoil and disruption for the Yolngu.[7]

 These events, too, became lodged in dreaming stories:

Greed and jealousy on the part of Aborigines emerging from an insatiable appetite for material possessions led to bloodshed, murder and then revenge murders until nearly the whole population, both “black” and “white”, was killed. It is not spoken of as “black” killing “white” or “black” killing “black” in the narrative however, but rather law breakers killing law breakers. The killers were said to be under the influence of the “spirit of the dead”, the Grokman or Wurramu, which would land on them from above and turn them from an orderly existence. People would forget ceremonial obligations, forget kinship, and indeed who they were.

In later Aboriginal thinking, Wurramu became identified with the devil.

The coming of Islam brought social, economic and cultural upheaval. One result was a phalanx of new vocabulary drawn from the language of the Muslims, as Ian McIntosh explains:

male or female thieves, husband and wife stealers, liars, doublecrossers, and murderers. They go by names such as Balala, Bakurra, Bawurramu, etc., and are said to be based on the activities of actual people who lived in north-east Arnhem Land in the distant past which is also simultaneously the beginning of time. All of the words for the Wurramu are drawn from the Macassarese language [8]and this strongly suggests a close interaction between the visitors and Aborigines in this time of turmoil.9]

For these reasons, there appear to have been few conversions of Aborigines to Islam during that period. The trepang trade ended in 1907,[10] but the first Muslims had left behind a fatal legacy in a changed Aboriginal worldview: “In the here and now, there will always be strife, poverty and domination by Others. This, I suggest, is a previously unrecorded legacy of contact between Aborigines and Indonesians,” writes McIntosh.[11]

Following British settlement, the interior of Australia was opened up with the use of “Afghan” cameleers in the 1850s. Polygamy was practised, according to Bilal Cleland:

Some of those who had left wives back in India or Afghanistan also took wives here. Stevens mentions the history of Nameth Khan, a camel-driver with a wife and two daughters back in Peshawar, who took an Aboriginal wife as well, marrying her in the Registry Office in Alice Springs.  [12]

There is evidence of sexual exploitation of Aboriginal girls and women by the cameleers.[13] Most of the “Afghans” had returned to their own countries by the 1920s, generally leaving their Aboriginal wives and children behind.[14]

Islam sometimes proclaiming itself on the side of justice and liberation to the oppressed peoples of the earth, and asserts that it is the “black man’s religion” which will throw off white domination.[15] The US-based Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, who visited Aboriginal communities in 1998, has proclaimed the innate supremacy of the black races over whites, as have some other black Islamic groups.

Ironically, Muhammad, the founder of Islam, was white, not black. Twenty of the earliest traditions (hadith) of Islam testify to this. When a man asked the early Muslims: “Who amongst you is Muhammad?” They replied, “This white man reclining on his arm.”[16]

Nor was he a liberator of indigenous populations, for Muhammad was a slave-owner, maintaining a retinue of black and white slaves.[17] He used them for personal services, such as tailoring.[18] Rather than closing down slave markets, Muhammad participated as a slave-trader.[19]

His conduct towards his slaves was inconsistent. Before he became a prophet, Muhammad was given a young Syrian slave, Zaid bin Haritha, and he freed him and adopted him as a son.[20] But when he assumed the role of a prophet at the age of forty, Muhammad acquired more slaves. Despite telling others to set slaves free as an act of piety,[21] Muslims who wanted to set slaves free to gain heavenly merit could do so at little cost, since their troops were frequently raiding other villages and taking more slaves. When his wife Aisha wanted to free a slave, Muhammad said, “The captives of Bani al-’Anbar are coming now. We will give you one whom you can set free.” [22] Muslim slaves were not encouraged to seek their freedom. Muhammad said: “If a slave escapes, his prayer would not be accepted.” [23] he did not manumit all his own slaves.

Muhammad ordered the flogging of one of his female slaves. His son-in-law Ali reported that Islam’s prophet “committed me to flog her. But she had recently given birth to a child and I was afraid that if I flogged her I might kill her. So I mentioned that to [Muhammad] and he said: ‘You have done well.’”[24] He also sanctioned the beating of another female slave. “The servant was called in and Ali immediately seized her and struck her painfully and repeatedly as he commanded her to tell the truth to the Prophet of God.”[25]

Exploitative legislative practices were enacted. Muhammad told slave-owners that if they set a slave free, they could keep the slave’s inheritance for themselves.[26] Women and children captured in war were given to his soldiers as slaves. When the Jewish village of Bani Qurayza surrendered to Muhammad, he beheaded all the men (600 to 900 of them) and distributed the women and children to the Muslim fighters as booty.[27]

Muhammad’s legacy continued as the history of Islam unfolded. In later years, the international slave trade was facilitated by Arab Muslim traders who set up colonies on the coast of Africa and bought captured villagers from African tribesmen. Although proscribed in the West, slavery continued as an institution within Islamic countries, being banned in Saudi Arabia only in 1962.

Aboriginal people in Australia can hardly look to Islam as a society lacking racism and oppression.

The numerical impact of Islam on Aboriginal people so far has been small. Debra Jopson reports that:

The spectrum of Aboriginal identification with Islam includes fundamentalist and militant anti-Western supporters as well as ecumenical polytheists who adopt Islamic and other religious traditions simultaneously. It also encompasses those who have chosen not to convert to Islam but whose lives have nonetheless been shaped by their or their forebears’ contact with various Muslim communities … Today there are an estimated 1000 Indigenous Muslims nationwide. [28]

This figure includes recent converts as well as non-practising descendants of followers of Islam, such as Arnhem Land people with Macassan ancestry and those descended from the Afghan cameleers.[29] High-exposure converts, like the boxer Anthony Mundine, have raised the profile of Aboriginal Muslims, and made them seem more numerous and influential than they really are. Despite the long and close connection with Muslims, very few Aboriginal people have been attracted to Islam.

This may be about to change as Muslims concentrate on the Australian indigenous people to exploit social fault lines, following their practice elsewhere. A Lebanese-American writer, Brigette Gabriel, in her New York Times best-seller Because They Hate, notes the Islamic use of communal “wedge politics” in her native and adopted countries. Of the tension between Muslims and Christians in Lebanon in the 1970s, she writes:

the PLO exploited the ancient hatreds and rivalries that had always simmered below the surface of Lebanese society. This is exactly what al Qaeda and radical Islamists are exploiting in America today in the African-American community, which is the largest community converting to Islam. They are using the race issue to attract converts, increasing the Muslim population in the US. [30]

Significant recruiting to Islam is occurring in Australian prisons, where both Aborigines and Muslims are over-represented. Although only 2.2 per cent of Victoria’s population is Muslim, they contribute 7 per cent of the state’s prisoners. Aborigines make up 14 per cent of the national prison population. Both communities suffer from an unemployment rate of nearly three times the national rate. They are joined together in suffering.

Hopefully Australians, Aboriginal and otherwise, will be aware of these trends and respond appropriately.