Good Muslim Boy Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Foreword by Andrew Knight

  Prologue

  Mortar melodies

  The day God died

  A merciless magic

  The tall male was of excellent hygiene

  Cheeky son of a cleric man

  Sipping tea with sugar

  Girls, girls, girls

  We’ll get there when we get there

  The great escape

  Thank you for your cooperation

  Culture shock

  Sleeping rough

  Lessons to learn

  Paperwork is paperwork

  Truth isn’t the best medicine

  Inshallah

  Faking it

  Market trading

  Stolen dreams

  Clearance

  Repentance

  Man of a thousand senses

  Copyright Page

  For my father—

  my confidant, friend and absolute hero

  FOREWORD

  By Andrew Knight

  I first met Osamah at filmmaker Tony Ayres’s home in Elwood. Tony had approached me to co-write a film with a first time writer, the son of the head cleric of Melbourne’s shiite community. On the short walk to Tony’s house I was rehearsing the many ways I could politely say, ‘Get me out of this’. Tony and I often talked about working on something, but a political tract on the complexities of Islamic life in Melbourne seemed a bridge too far.

  Also, the fact that it meant working with a first time writer for whom English wasn’t his first language didn’t exactly thrill me. But this was a time when this country’s abuse of refugees and the growing fear campaign was reaching its now-permanent crescendo—so I saw some merit in at least having the chat. On the phone I had pushed Tony on the theme. He duck-fudged a bit before admitting it really wasn’t that kind of story. ‘It’s more—it’s a…well, it’s a kind of fucked-up romantic comedy about a… it’s…can you just meet this guy? You’ll really like him, he’s super talented and he’s very good looking.’

  So I found myself sitting in Tony and Michael’s living room with its alarming crack in the wall (then more window than crack) talking to this…yes, annoyingly good-looking man. Six hours later I left not only agreeing to do the movie, but believing I had just collided with one of the most gifted young people I have ever met.

  What do you need to know about Osamah—he of the unfortunate first name? He is a lousy Muslim. He tries hard. He is committed to his faith and loves its central teachings and rituals, but man does he wrestle with it. His private life is always in chaos and deeply amusing to observe. You find yourself laughing at him as much as with him. He speaks with a first generation Australian twang that disguises the fact he speaks six other languages. In the time we worked together, he taught himself near-perfect French on the internet and has probably added another tongue since last we spoke a few weeks ago. He is a genuine polymath with a formidable intellect. He reads far and wide. He is a great sportsman—though I only have his word for this. He thankfully barracks, loudly, for Essendon and holds a 1st Dan black belt in karate. He plays cricket and football and builds and plays ouds and several other instruments. He does fine calligraphy, can fix my computer, never pays a parking fine and as a result is always in some pointless dispute with authority. He has a great and compassionate heart, an unquenchable enthusiasm for life, great humour, two children and, oh, he can act—very well as it happens—and for someone for whom English is only his third (or is it fourth?) language, he writes beautifully.

  This book chronicles some of the least sane periods in Osamah’s already insane life; the fact that these events are true beggars belief. This book will delight the reader.

  We need someone in the world to be our yardstick, a benchmark by which we may assess our own gaffs and shortcomings. Osamah is our man.

  His writing affords a reader a genuinely warm and hysterical insight into an Islamic community struggling to make sense of and fit into a purportedly liberal, secular Australia. That tussle provides endless material for this writer.

  As Osamah’s mother says in our script: ‘The Koran was written before this country was discovered—the Prophet never saw Australian beaches.’ Being with Osamah, reading his words, you can not help but gain some appreciation of this singular, largely Arabic world secreted in our inner suburbs. You grow to love these people—as wonderful, flawed and crazy as the rest of us. In that sense, perhaps Osamah’s writing is more seductively political and life affirming than any trenchant criticism.

  Andrew Knight 19.04.15

  PROLOGUE

  Melbourne, Australia, 2013

  When you’ve grown up the way I did, an Iraqi boy born in Iran while the two countries were at war, you think there’s not much left that can scare you.

  And yet, here we were, gathered in the house behind the mosque in Melbourne, where my father, the cleric, had summoned me, an adult man, away from my own wife and daughter, almost like I was seven years old again. Almost like back in Iran.

  He wore a familiar facial expression: absolute benevolence tossed with a natural flair for absolute ass-kicking justice.

  ‘So a caravan of elders came to the mosque today,’ he breezily said. ‘They demanded I disown you. Even better, they demanded I send you to Iran so that you could face the death penalty.’ He smiled.

  I remained silent and flicked through the index of crimes that might have upset the community. Was it my marriage? My work? My education? Something I’d done long ago, in the past?

  My father put me out of my misery. ‘Son, it’s about YouTube,’ he said.

  I face-palmed. I knew what he meant.

  The son of the cleric had appeared in a gay movie on the internet.

  My relationship with the community was already under strain—as it had been my whole life to this point, for a variety of colourful reasons. Lately, all these reasons had had to do with my acting career. I’d appeared opposite Claudia Karvan as a refugee who slept with a married woman (Community Outrage O’Meter: eight). I’d most recently displeased them by playing a Lebanese man engaged to a lesbian (that was a nine).

  Playing a gay man—well, we needed the Richter scale for that one. It was one giant earthquake that would leave aftershock after tremor after aftershock for a long time yet. But this hadn’t been a high-profile role, the kind the community would notice. It had been a small role in a short film project, filmed years ago.

  In retrospect, I probably should’ve predicted that a community member would somehow manage to stumble upon a gay flick on YouTube. It was remarkable how often our nosy neighbours would ‘accidentally’ dig up evidence of my sins in exactly this fashion. Of course, once they’d seen it, what could they do but send a mass email blast to hundreds of local Iraqis? Every Iraqi with bluetooth enabled had a chance to freeze-frame the exact moment I embraced a—gasp—white man—double gasp—bare-chested.

  I’d had a long time to m
ake my peace with the judgement of our community. But the problem with a small immigrant community was you were never quite a lone ranger. For every casually abusive comment I’d get, thanks to my Western behaviour, Dad always received ten times the letters, ten times the questions. His role as the visionary local imam was coveted by a handful of hopeful aspirants. Every wrong step I took was exactly the ammo they needed against Dad.

  ‘I think we should get out of this place and have you blow off some meaningful steam,’ Dad suggested.

  My wife was interstate at the time; Dad pronounced, ‘So let her be. Bring your daughter, your mother will look after her. We’ll go away for a few weeks, get you freshened up, and come back with a new perspective.’

  He grinned at me while sipping his pineapple juice. This suggested he’d planned a holiday somewhere tropical: maybe Hawaii or Bermuda. None of this was plausible when we were talking about my dad.

  Still, he went on. ‘It’s important to connect with yourself before you can recharge,’ he said.

  He was speaking slowly, naturally having a conversation with himself out loud, convincing himself this would be a good idea, exactly what he and I needed.

  ‘I’m not saying the change of scenery alone will change your state of mind. For if inside you are trapped, you will always remain trapped. No matter where you are. Even on the moon!

  ‘But these experiences will change you. I’m sure you’ll do amazing things and come back, I dare say, a different man.’

  I nodded in tentative agreement.

  ‘I just want you to know, Osamah, that, as always, there is no judgement on my end on any aspect of your life, even the parts of it which I am sure you personally regret.’

  He set down his pineapple juice and dusted his hands, clearly wrapping up the conversation.

  ‘So, we will go together and God willing have a great time.’

  He finished with an enormous, fatherly smile.

  Well, so far, so good, I thought. Free holiday with Dad.

  ‘You’re right,’ I said. ‘I need a new wave of energy to wash my mind and body clean. And what better way than a trip with a man I admire and love?’

  We smiled at each other. This would be good.

  ‘And Iran is beautiful this time of year,’ he said.

  My stomach dropped a hundred kilometres. ‘Iran?’ I swallowed a hot ball of saliva.

  If I’d known what the trip would really be like, I would’ve thrown up all over the carpet.

  MORTAR MELODIES

  Abadan City, Iran, 1988

  The six-year-old man of the house

  I was a child in unfortunate circumstances.

  It was a freezing winter in late ’80s Iran, right on the Iraqi border. Anywhere there was oil, there was turmoil—so Dad liked to say—and in Abadan, oil was produced faster than on a teenager’s face. My city of Abadan had been swapping flags with Iraq since the war began. One day it was theirs; the next it was ours. I didn’t even know who we or they—us or them—were, and I don’t know now, either. I’m an Iraqi by heritage who was born in Iran, so I’ve always been at war with myself.

  The Iraq–Iran War had started eight years before for the same reason as most other wars: no reason, or at least none I could fathom. All I knew was the Ayatollah of Iran and Saddam Hussein of Iraq didn’t exactly want to sit down and settle this with some homemade lemonade and a game of Monopoly—which was probably for the best, given how people sometimes feel about each other after they play Monopoly.

  These days Abadan belonged to Iran, so the green, red and white flag was proudly anchored on every building in town except ours. Dad was an Iraqi, therefore I was an Arab, therefore the neighbourhood hated us. I couldn’t even say hello to the five-year-old Persian girl across the road. Our apartment block, mainly peopled with Iraqis like ourselves, flew our flaccid ‘peace flag’ from a drainpipe on the rooftop. We couldn’t raise the Iraqi flag—that would constitute treason. Nor did we have the heart to put up the Iranian flag, so we made a peace flag from our overused white dishdashas (long Arab dresses) and solemnly displayed our wish to end the brutal years.

  Our place was a tiny, one-bedroom, women-filled space—some boys, but we were severely outnumbered. There was Mum, two aunts, two wives of uncles, Grandma and ten little girls. By the time I was six, I was the man of the house. My brother Mohammed, aka Moe Greene, was four, my other brother was in nappies and, apart from my two young cousins, all the other men were on the front line.

  We lived here because we were a tight family unit—or that’s what we were told to tell the neighbours. Truth is, we couldn’t afford anything bigger.

  Only the bedrooms had mattresses, and although they were thin, they were still better than sleeping in the hallway, where we rolled our blankets on top of us to sleep in a cocoon. Five metres, a dozen people, all side by side, waiting to rotate into the bedroom. We split up time on those three mattresses as fairly as we could. Every six days it was my turn; the rest of the time, my back really ached for it.

  In such a situation, aside from an exit strategy to get to the bunkers during an air raid, the issue of utmost importance was maintaining your oral hygiene. In the hallway, you could always smell five breaths at the same time: a cocktail of toothpaste, the acids you get in empty guts and general dental wear and tear. Some days, my cousins and I played games of breath-volleyball: we tried to lob rancid breath into each other’s nostrils, a deep, rounded gust of rotten air directly up the nose of your opponent. If your opponent acknowledged the rotten breath and screamed—‘Pwaaahhh!’—you scored a point.

  There was a strict one-minute limit on the showers. Shampoo: ten seconds; wash face: ten seconds; wash body: twenty seconds. If you got this right, you had a cool twenty seconds of luxury left to do as you pleased. Sing folklore songs, dream of escaping the war…anything. But if you didn’t wake up at 5 am, forget it—even the cold water ran out, under daily restrictions.

  Also, everyone yelled that their shit didn’t stink; it had to be the person before them. I was amazed at how much of a stink the girls could make. I’d always thought girls took more feminine shits, but they could really outdo the boys in that department.

  Therapy from a fortune teller

  So my dad, the Iraqi, was fighting for the Iranians—but his brothers, my uncles, fought for Iraq.

  Like any six-year-old, I had a galaxy of questions.

  ‘Mum.’

  ‘Yes, sowmeh love.’ (She called me sowmeh when I was in her good books. Otherwise, it was ‘you little son of a shit’, or ‘you two-legged goat’, which was her classic.)

  ‘Iran is the good side.’

  ‘Yes, you know this, sowmeh.’

  ‘And the people who fight them are evil. How evil?’

  ‘Enough that they’ll all go to hell.’

  ‘All of them?’

  ‘Yes, dear. Regardless. Stop asking these questions.’

  ‘But the good people, they go to heaven. Right?’

  ‘Yes. We call them martyrs.’

  ‘So. If Dad died in the war, he’d be a martyr.’

  ‘Sowmeh! That’s your father you’re talking about.�
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  ‘Don’t you always say heaven is a good place? Why wouldn’t you want Dad to go there?’

  ‘We don’t want your dad killed. You should be praying for him.’

  ‘I always pray.’

  ‘Good boy.’

  ‘I have one last question.’

  Mum let out a bowl’s worth of air. ‘You’re getting on my nerves,’ she said, palms widening, ready for a smack.

  ‘Why do my uncles fight for the evil side?’

  ‘That’s a question for grown-ups, sowmeh.’

  When I thought this through at bedtime, it was increasingly confusing. I wanted to pray for Dad to stay alive; I also wanted to pray for his brothers. And because I knew they were evil, and that they didn’t deserve my prayers, I wondered if this made me a bad person.

  I looked up at my mum. She was a very young woman, about twenty-two. She was staring into nowhere. I got upset. I didn’t want her to cry. Most of my questions led to this scenario.

  Eventually, in lieu of having the appropriate answers, she took me to see a specialist. Or, her version of a specialist: a fortune teller.

  The fortune teller was old. Like, really, really old. My point of reference for an old person was Noah, who’d lived to a thousand; I was pretty sure this woman was older.

  Her hands freaked me out while she examined my palm. It was like death and history and ghosts and shedding skin were all touching my flesh at once.

  She looked at me with her one green eye—the other looked like one of those tunnels that they blow through the mountains using dynamite. She paused for an entire minute and then revealed her prophecy: ‘Osamah, when you grow up, you’re going to become a therapist.’

  Mum’s response was whip-quick. ‘You mean he’ll need a therapist when he grows up. For a long, long time.’ She took my hand and stormed out of the small, smelly tent. I remember her hands—so soft after the fortune teller’s, like winter turned to spring. I had never in my life felt more comforted.