For those residing in (or passing through) Sydney, it is well worth a visit to the NSW State Library for the World Press Photo exhibition before it closes on June 5. Entry is free and the exhibition displays a collection of award-winning photographs from around the globe. They are exceptional photos and viewing them should prove satisfying not only for those with an interest in photography but also for those who can appreciate the power of a single image.

It is a decidedly sombre collection which, I suppose, can be put down to the fact that our world is drowning more in sorrow than in joy. There are many memorable photographs, but I lingered at the Benazir Bhutto assassination photographs: you won’t see her after the attack, but the image of the dead — innocent onlookers, naked and charred from the explosion — will capture your attention like little else. It is incredibly moving.

Of course, the beauty of these photographs is that they are so educational without needing words and hours of reading time. It will remind you of how many varied stories there are to be heard, and just how fragile life is. From the 14-year-old victim of rape to the US soldier collapsing from exhaustion after a mission in Afghanistan. It’s easy to think, from a distance, that we understand what’s going on. Yet life is never so simple.

Nigel’s latest journal series is even more grim. In From Ramallah to Rikers, he shares with readers his agonising period of incarceration at Rikers Island, highlighting the devastating deficiencies in the US criminal justice system. It’s shocking and crushing to read — but it’s important.

You can imagine my further disappointment when the most controversial things Tariq Ramadan, the source of the controversy, said, would be more likely to offend some Muslim sensibilities than the non-Muslims in attendance. In fact, Ramadan, who is an incredibly engaging and charismatic speaker, presented his very sensible points softly but with clear conviction. There was absolutely nothing that might require monitoring by authorities.

Admittedly, the Brisbane conference on the “challenges and opportunities” of Islam in Australia was my first true introduction to Ramadan and his thesis. I understood the following: he is a “reformist”; he believes Muslims need to try harder to reconcile their beliefs with those surrounding them in their particular Western nation; he is dubbed Islam’s Martin Luther; he lacks mainstream appeal; he is more successful in Europe than Australia and the US.

Most of this was confirmed in his keynote speech. Ramadan covered a lot of material, but not before addressing the news reports circulating prior to his arrival. He was disappointed that the Australian media was adopting such an exaggerated fear-mongering stance: focusing on his grandfather, Hassan al Banna (founder of Egypt’s the Muslim Brotherhood) and the revocation of his US visa a couple of years ago, which prevented him from taking up a post at the University of Notre Dame. He called these reports “unacceptable” and noted that there were several factual mistakes in the articles he read (four in one, eleven in another); apparently journalists had visited his website and attributed things to him that Tariq Ali had said (fair enough: having the same first name could confuse even the most intelligent of our species).

Ramadan’s discussion centred on citizenship and a sense of belonging. He acknowledged the practical challenges facing pluralistic societies, and also for Muslims in terms of their faith. He suggests that we are lacking discourse on spirituality and universal ethics (politics, etc). He wants to see more Muslims taking up academic positions, writing literature, learning and teaching Islam within their Western nations and, overall, participating socially and politically. He advocates commonality — in other words, send your children to state schools and provide strong supplementary guidance at home. I thoroughly enjoyed his talk and struggled to remember the last time I was so interested and, at times, moved, by what a Muslim scholar had to impart.

Ramadan does not hold back in his critical assessment of the issues plaguing Muslims today. While I took many notes, rather than write them all up (I was told the audio of Ramadan’s speech would eventually be available online), I’ll set out his closing remarks, which reflect his essential arguments. Ramadan concluded with the following:

- Shed the ‘victim mentality’; psychological isolation is what caused the UK bombers to undertake their crimes.
- Rid yourself of the minority mindset; there is no minority citizenship, the law applies equally to all and Muslims are not second-class citizens.
- Women have to be more involved practically in society.
- Social and economic problems should not be “Islamicised” and “culturalised”. Deal with these problems in their appropriate social and political realms. While there are overlapping realities (ghettos), many of these issues are simply not Islamic or cultural.
- Move from integration to contribution.
- Move from contribution to culture.
- Do not focus on the ones who are destroying, focus on the ones who are building.

All of this, Ramadan argues, will be the “silent revolution” of Muslims in the West.

For most of Western history, they didn’t, because marriage was a private contract between two families. The parents’ agreement to the match, not the approval of church or state, was what confirmed its validity.

For 16 centuries, Christianity also defined the validity of a marriage on the basis of a couple’s wishes. If two people claimed they had exchanged marital vows — even out alone by the haystack — the Catholic Church accepted that they were validly married.

The view of marriage as a private contract between individuals is very similar to the Islamic conception of marriage which, like a conventional contract, consists of an offer, acceptance and, I suppose, consideration (in the form of mahr etc).

The privatisation of marriage is usually discussed in the context of same-sex marriage but it also has ramifications for Muslims. If marriage was simply a contract, the parties could define whatever terms and conditions they wished — describing, for example, how divorce would be handled, how property would be split, how disputes would be judged, and so forth. In the case of Muslims, this might be in accordance to the shariah rulings on these matters; or, in the case of others, it might be based upon pre-nuptial negotiation with the conditions individually tailored.

Click here to view the embedded video.

But as usual in these situations, the responses are quite hysterical:

A Camden Advertiser reader who identified only as Hayley said she felt sick. “The thought of our beautiful Camden accommodating to this religion is a disgrace … This Islamic school will change the town forever,” she said.

Oh, honey. This isn’t 1955.

A resident of 14 years, Gary Wright, said if Camden Council wished to bring crime and corruption to Camden and make it a “dirty looking town like Lakemba I supose (sic) they will go ahead anyhow”.

That’s … pretty deep.

But my favourite:

Some residents have also been circulating a text message urging people to voice their opposition to council.

“The council requires 600 written dated n signed letters objecting2the proposal of the muslim school in camden. DONT MISS the oppoutunity2have your say before its2late,” the message says.

It gives a postal address for the mayor and tells recipients to forward the message to everyone they know.

Fingers crossed they spelled the mayor’s address correctly.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Another prescient example of this is Danny Nalliah, pastor of the fringe church “Catch the Fire Ministries“. Nalliah has previously been alleged to have expressed the desire for God to burn down mosques. For this and other comments Nalliah was taken to VCAT by the Islamic Council of Victoria for inciting religious hatred. The ICV action was a failure both legally and in the wider court of public opinion. It allowed Nalliah to portray himself as the victim of a secretive religion which was furiously trying to avoid scrutiny as it infiltrated the nation. Money, sympathy and support flooded into Catch the Fire Ministries and Nalliah became a celebrity in the Evangelical community. The federal treasurer Peter Costello appeared on stage with Nalliah and embraced him, as did the then deputy Prime Minister John Anderson.

The case was finally settled earlier this year, with a points victory to Nalliah. This has allowed him the confidence to discover his voice once more and to bless us with the profound insights that can come to those whom God speaks to directly.

This is the best bit:

The Lord told me to spend some personal time with Prime Minister John Howard and to prophetically prepare Federal Treasurer Peter Costello as the future Prime Minister of Australia. (I don’t know the exact timing, but I was obedient to the voice of God).

Nalliah goes to to declare his prophethood:

I know this prophetic declaration is very controversial, but at this critical crossroad in our nation’s destiny, it’s not time to tickle the ears of man, but to please the Father in Heaven, by boldly proclaiming His Authoritative Word of Righteousness, Justice, and Truth to the Church and Nation!

The mainstream readership of the News limited papers took a less charitable view of Nalliah’s intervention.

Still blissfully unaware of the wider community’s perception of him, Nalliah has met with the League of Rights, a fringe group who deny the Holocaust and peddle the authenticity of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. This is not the first time Nalliah has shared a platform with the league.

This all begs the question, why on earth would it be in our interests to shut this man up? Note that during the 5 years of the legal battle Nalliah was treated sympathetically by the mainstream press. This has changed immediately once the case was concluded.

The glare of the media spotlight has been especially unflattering to Nalliah and his views. It has been a much more effective tool against him than the legal process could ever have been.

Stage 3 Water Restrictions!

You know what, this is actually commendable on the imam’s part. I didn’t realise our imams were becoming so green. But I don’t see why we should stop there. Our religion gives us license to perform tayyammum when water is scarce, which allows us to purify ourselves with pure sand or dust. Taking the imam’s advice to its logical conclusion, we should disconnect the water from our wudu’ areas, and just have buckets of sand with which to prepare for the prayer.

What do you think?

Note: feel free to send us your own Friday Follies. We’ll post the more interesting ones for you to comment, kind of like a peer review for the community.

The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful, and nondull. He is the owner of a large personal library (containing thirty thousand books), and separates visitors into two categories: those who react with “Wow! Signore professore dottore Eco, what a library you have! How many of these books have you read?” and the others — a very small minority — who get the point that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market will allow you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary.

In other words, the majority of people see Umberto Eco’s books as a status symbol of sorts and make the assumption that all have been read. On the other hand, a minority of people realise that a library is simply a tool for discovering things and therefore regardless of what one has already acquired in knowledge (the read books), there remains much more to be learned (the unread books). Whereas the shelves of read books may lead a person to become conceited and sure of themselves, the unread books help to keep the person humble.

OVER the past two hundred years the influence of intellectuals has grown steadily. Indeed, the rise of the secular intellectual has been a key factor in shaping the modern world. Seen against the long perspective of history it is in many ways a new phenomenon. It is true that in their earlier incarnations as priests, scribes and soothsayers, intellectuals have laid claim to guide society from the very beginning. But as guardians of hieratic cultures, whether primitive or sophisticated, their moral and ideological innovations were limited by the canons of external authority and by the inheritance of tradition. They were not, and could not be, free spirits, adventurers of the mind.

With the decline of clerical power in the eighteenth century, a new kind of mentor emerged to fill the vacuum and capture the ear of society. The secular intellectual might be deist, sceptic or atheist. But he was just as ready as any pontiff or presbyter to tell mankind how to conduct its affairs. He proclaimed, from the start, a special devotion to the interests of humanity and an evangelical duty to advance them by his teaching. He brought to this self-appointed task a far more radical approach than his clerical predecessors. He felt himself bound by no corpus of revealed religion. The collective wisdom of the past, the legacy of tradition, the prescriptive codes of ancestral experience existed to be selectively followed or wholly rejected entirely as his own good sense might decide. For the first time in human history, and with growing confidence and audacity, men arose to assert that they could diagnose the ills of society and cure them with their own unaided intellects: more, that they could devise formulae whereby not merely the structure of society but the fundamental habits of human beings could be transformed for the better. Unlike their sacerdotal predecessors, they were not servants and interpreters of the gods but substitutes. Their hero was Prometheus, who stole the celestial fire and brought it to earth.

We want people to go learn and become scholars but then we get no benefit from it as people have families to support. If they are working 5-6 days a week where is the time left for teaching or studying? Many graduates for that reason have ended up just working normal jobs because their knowledge is not valued and the community is not going to support them. So whilst we lament the lack of knowledge in our community we also are generally not prepared to use money to support those with knowledge.

I believe Muslims are very cheap when it comes to knowledge. People will complain about paying $100 for a course but will not blink an eye buying a $5000 plasma TV.

Being the daughter of an Imam I really saw how undervalued people of knowledge are. Don’t you think it is sad that when you have an Imam for one of the richest communities in the Muslims that his family used to get a lot of things from the salvation army and church groups? That he never bought new clothes or shoes for himself for over 10 years and used to get them second hand? My mum used to say to my dad to go become a taxi driver because at least it paid to support his family.

This is an excellent point and one of the more pressing issues that our community needs to tackle. If we accept that religious knowledge is important — and some of us would argue it is the highest form of human knowledge — then how do we ensure the best people acquire this knowledge and then ensure that they can benefit the community with it.

The two problems are linked and come down to the issue of funding: how do we ensure our religious leaders are paid enough money such that we, firstly, make religious knowledge attractive to the best and brightest of the community; and, secondly, ensure that those who acquire this knowledge can lead a dignified life providing for their family in a similar manner as they might have been able to had they pursued a field other than the Islamic sciences.

Of those people who return from overseas institutions such as the Islamic University of Medina, they fall into one of the following categories: they go on the dole; they take up alternative employment such as taxi driving; they undertake further vocational study; or they become an imam of a mosque (assuming they can find a position which is actually very difficult).

If they return to study or take up other employment, it is possible that the community will not get the full benefit of their knowledge and, for the individual, he will become distracted from pursuing research and further study in the Islamic sciences. They will, however, be able to provide for themselves and their families: which for most people is their most pressing need.

If they go on the dole, then they will have free time to run classes, answer questions and benefit the community. They will probably be provided with cheap housing by the state and a variety of other benefits. There are, however, a variety of reasons why we don’t to see our religious leaders lining up each fortnight to hand in their social security forms.

If they become an imam of a mosque, they will be paid either by the mosque (which is itself funded largely through donations) and/or they will receive a small stipend from an overseas organisation. In Australia, the two largest funding sources for imams are al-Rabita al-Alam al-Islami (Muslim World League) or, in the case of the Turkish imams, the Turkish government. The amounts they are paid, as the comment above illustrates, are often fairly meagre.

Of all the options, the best, most dignified and most appropriate is to pay imams, religious leaders and scholars a wage which is commensurate to their importance in our respective communities. Of course, this assumes that religious knowledge is valued enough in our communities for this to even be a viable idea at all; and that is itself not necessarily a given.

However, what models or approaches are available to better fund our scholars, imams and religious leaders?

Here are some hastily brainstormed initial ideas (some of which will be entirely questionable or distasteful). In no particular order:

1. We could treat our imams and religious leaders like other specialists and professionals and pay a consulting fee when we avail ourselves of their services. We think nothing of paying a lawyer for legal advice, so we might pay a scholar for religious advice. For example, paying for classes or even, to use an extreme example, paying for personal consultations;
2. We, as a community, could establish foundations seeded with donations that then invest the money with the income being used to fund religious leaders;
3. Our mosques and other religious organisations that employ scholars and imams might look to establish future revenue streams beyond simple donations when they are first established. For example, when building a mosque, one could also build shops and offices on the site that could then be leased out to fund the maintenance of the mosque itself and the employment of the imams;
4. We stop seeing religious scholarship as a full-time job and accept that all imams and religious leaders will seek employment the same as everyone else;
5. We only encourage people to seek religious knowledge, which usually means time abroad, after they have acquired an appropriate vocational qualification;
6. We privatise our mosques and other organisastions such that people must pay a membership to use them. A mosque thus becomes like any other service provider or facility in which the people using it must directly contribute to its upkeep and operation. This is, of course, a rather extreme measure. Alternatively, mosques could sell memberships which carry particular entitlements beyond that available to normal visitors. A member might be entitled to the front row during Ramadan (for example);
7. We could actively and more aggressively promote philanthropy within the Muslim community. For example, many private schools have full-time fundraising managers whose job it is to ‘target’ companies and individuals for donations, sponsorship and the like. At one end of the spectrum, this may mean money bequeathed in people’s wills to the mosque and, at the other end, it could mean corporate sponsorship of particular mosques or events;
8. Mosques and other organisations could provide Islamic finance. There have been recent changes to the regulation of non-bank financial institutions in this country that make it easier (and cheaper) for Islamic organisations to provide financial services to their members (as many Christian denominations currently do).

Any ideas?