Once Were Radicals by Irfan Yusuf

coming home. In fact, on the first day I was interviewed to go to the school, the deputy principal told me that I should approach him each and every time someone made even a slightly disparaging remark about the colour of my skin or my ethnicity. It impressed in my mind the idea that real Christians could never be racist.

    In the first month or so at St Andrews, I was approached by the school captain. His name was Jackson and his parents were Pakistani. He sought me out and welcomed me to the school. I duly greeted him with the traditional ‘
assalamu alaykum
’. Because he was Pakistani, I immediately assumed he must be one of my mob (Pakistani = South Asian = Muslim = cricket fanatic). Jackson fulfilled all of these criteria except the third.
    I felt proud to be at a school where the school captain was one of my mob. ‘Jacko’ (as he was known) was popular among both teachers and students. He was a brilliant cricketer and frequently scored centuries when representing the school. What particularly impressed me was that he felt no embarrassment about being from Pakistan.
    I went home after meeting Jacko and told Mum and Dad about him. My parents knew Jacko’s father, an Anglican priest who had passed away some years before. Jacko’s dad was a highly respected man among Pakistanis and had helped many (mostly Muslim) migrants settle into their new country.
    One thing I never quite understood was why Jacko didn’t return my greeting. For as long as I could remember, I was expected to greet all my South Asian uncles and aunts with the same greeting of
assalamu alaykum
. At the time, I didn’t realise this was an Arabic greeting literally meaning ‘peace be with you’ and generally used by Muslims (both Arab and non-Arab). I even addressed my Hindu, Sikh and other South Asian uncles with this greeting, and they would respond with
walaykum salam
(meaning ‘and peace also upon you’).
    But each time I said
assalamu alaykum
to Jacko, he would give me a slightly puzzled look, smile and then just say, ‘Hi Irfan.’ However, Jacko could recognise the greeting I gave him when we would finish our conversation. It was the same departure greeting I’d give my Sikh uncle who lived down the road and the Jewish lady who ran the Indian spice shop in Bondi—
khudahafiz
.
    It turns out that the departure greeting of
khudahafiz
was a traditional Persian greeting used by just abouteveryone—Muslims, Jews, Sikhs, Hindus, Parsees, Jains and Christians from South Asia. It merely meant ‘may God be your protector’. In fact, the first time I learned what the greeting meant was when I was watching the Dave Allen show with my dad. Allen ended his show with ‘Goodbye and may your God go with you’. Dad looked at me and said: ‘See, he is saying
khudahafiz
. That is what
khudahafiz
means.’

    The only problem I had with my parents exposing me to people of all faiths was that I couldn’t imagine my very Indian Islam as something I could take with me to school, to show to my friends and to feel part of the mainstream. I could be Muslim at home, with uncles and aunties and occasionally at the mosque but never anywhere else.
    Furthermore, Islam was taught to me by stern men sporting big beards and wielding big sticks. My experience at the
madrassa
in Karachi was that the Koran wasn’t taught. Instead, it was bashed into you. At my state primary school, we did have kids receiving ‘the cane’, but this was administered only for the most serious offences such as getting caught stealing. I never received the cane at Ryde East, and only occasionally at St Andrews. It seemed to me that Christianity was more a religion of love than of the stick.
    Attending chapel services once a week at the Cathedral was almost a surreal experience. We would line up outside the Cathedral and walk into an old building that smelt of sandalwood, our shoes gently stepping on floor