Once Were Radicals

Book Review

Once Were Radicals (my years as a teenage Islamo-fascist)
by Irfan Yusuf
Allen & Unwin, Australia, 2009
paperback, 310 pages, $22.95 in the U.S.


What would it be like to grow up in an Islamic family? What if you were growing up in Australia and were the only dark-complexioned boy at your school? What if you were regularly attacked by bullies just for being a Muslim?

It sounds grim, but Irfan Yusuf is an exceptional writer who is able to deliver his memoir with a deep sense of humor. He is able to walk us through the many facets of Islamic religion, culture, and politics because from the very beginning he was the curious type, the type that asked why, the type that would not accept pat answers.

Irfan was born in Pakistan to middle-class, educated Islamic parents who then moved to Australia when he was four. His mother insisted that he master Urdu and Islam while maintaining grades that kept him at the head of his class. His childhood persecution by Christians made him an ardent believer, but he also began to discover that Islam was not monolithic. Even among the Pakistani emigres who were friends of his parents there were differences in degrees of faith and adhesion to different sects. Most seemed happy just to be living the good life in Australia, and so worked at blending into the materialistic culture, just as most Christian did.

Irfan became an explorer. He read book after book on Islam, but the books did not agree. He heard the intense anti-Islamic propaganda of the West and was attracted by Christianity's kindler, gentler image. But when he joins the Christian Fellowship at his private (Episcopal) high school, he is ready to analyze Christian theology and finds it lacking.

The thing about Irfan is, he is Modern. So no matter how much he searches for the true Islam, he has a modern eye. Even when he demands that modern Islamic women wear traditional dress, or at least head-scarves, some part of him knows he is being a hypocrite.

Through Irfan you can meet dozens of Islamic schools of thought. You will meet Sunni and Shia and Sufi, but you will also learn that each of them has many sub-schools. Every nation, and sometimes every tribe, has its own cultural take on what it means to be a Muslim. You will meet men and women who think Islam is Peace, and those who believe it is Jihad, and those who think it should not get in the way of Money.

Every American should read this book, and not just to learn about one of the world's largest religious groups. Once Were Radicals is a lesson in humanity. One Prophet, One Text, a thousand interpretations, and a billion individuals.

Also, you will learn a lot of Australian vocabulary. They have a word for everything, including some that I could not quite cipher out.

Confusing Muslim Childhood

Last night I started reading Irfan Yusuf's Once Were Radicals, My years as a teenage Islamo-fascist. I got to page 93. You must read it.

Once you get past the I-am-not-a-terrorist Prologue, Irfan's story gets really funny, really fast. His family is Pakistani Muslim, middle class emigrants to Australia. He gets picked on as a child because he is different. His developing understanding of religion, both Muslim and other, is wonderfully portrayed through the eyes of a six year old, then as he matures.

I can relate, if my experiences were no where near as extreme. Irfan's mother was his main religious influence. Compared to my own mother she seems quite tolerant. I was raised by a mother who had converted to Catholic Christian from old school Baptist/Methodist, in a community (Jacksonville, Florida) where Catholics were still a minority clumped in with Jews and Blacks by the local KKK.

I have not gotten to the point in the book where Irfan goes militant, but in my own youth I did a back flip on that idea. Irfan rebels against Australian society by becoming, for a time, a militant Muslim. I dropped the Catholic Church like a hot potato and was attracted, instead, to Marxists, Anarchists, and even Buddhists.

The great thing is that Once Were Radicals allows you to see the varieties of Islam (it is just as varied as Christianity or atheism) from the inside, with an overlay of being able to have the sharp critical insights that usually come only from outsiders.

Buy this book and circulate it. Americans need to read it, especially those few remaining Americans who are religious intolerants.

The Great Wave

The Great Wave:
Gilded Age Misfits, Japanese Eccentrics, and the Opening of Old Japan

by Christopher Benfey, reviewed by William P. Meyers

Random House
year of publication: 2003
hardcover 332 pages

For Americans Japan was once a land of mystery. By the time the United States separated from Great Britain, Japan had been closed to the outside world for more than a century (since 1637). The U.S. attack upon Japan by Commander Perry in 1854 started an episodic war that ended with the occupation of Japan in 1945 [See my work in progress, The United States War Against Asia].

Christopher Benfey's The Great Wave is only marginally about war and politics. It is a series of portraits of Americans who traveled to Japan after its "opening," and of Japanese who traveled to the United States. Art, culture, and philosophy are what interested these travelers. The lived during the Meiji Era, but their interest was in the culture prior to that era, that of Old Japan.

The first chapter excited my imagination. It tells of Herman Melville, the New England writer of Moby Dick, who sets the epic battle of man and whale off the shores of Japan. Even more interesting is the story of John Manjiro, a fisher boy who was blown out to sea and rescued by an American whaling ship. He was adopted into a New England family, educated as a westerner, and then eventually returned to Japan to play an important role in its rapid post-Perry development.

Many of Benfey's characters are art collectors; most were famous enough in their day and are now mostly forgotten: Edward Morse, Isabella Gardner, Henry Adams and John La Farge among others. The Boston social elite, bored with Christianity, were fascinated with Buddhism even as scientific materialism began to its steady cultural march in Japan. We learn the story of how a book about the Japanese Tea Ceremony came to be so influential in the U.S.

Generally Benfey weaves his stories skillfully, though I was bored with much of the Henry Adams material. The best part of the book is the Epilogue. Here the relationship of Existentialism to Japanese aesthetics is told not in the abstract, but in specific contacts between Japanese figures, American fans of Japanese culture, and such European luminaries as Ezra Pound, Marcel Proust, Henri Matisse, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Albert Camus. I would love to see the ideas and events of the Epilogue developed into a full-length book.

I read The Great Wave slowly, in bits and pieces, and it cast a great deal of illumination on small things about me. The aesthetic of the house I live in, for instance: it was the residence of Haiku Jane, a Mendocino poet who was once given a prize by the Emperor of Japan for her poetry. There is a Bishop Pine log in my garden that is in the last stages of decay, a shell of its former self, riddled with insect tunnels. Some times it strikes me as the most beautiful thing in my garden. And that makes me appreciate the chapter on Lafcadio Hearn, who loved the soft decaying remains of pre-U.S. New Orleans, and who also was a seeker after Old Japan.