A Tale of Two Suburbs: Lakemba

Sydney becomes more faded the further west you travel. The paint on the houses is flakier, the cars have more rust spots, even the sunlight seems to lose some of its dazzle. This is where most of the city’s 4.5 million residents live, half a world away from the gleaming skyscrapers and glinting ocean that draw the tourists and the bankers seeking a better life.

Heading southwest from the city centre, you pass through places whose names still evoke the homesickness of the English settlers arriving in this harsh, alien land two centuries ago: Sydenham, Lewisham, Dulwich Hill, Canterbury. The western suburbs blend into one another, and you could easily drive straight through Lakemba without noticing anything unusual about it. Indeed you could spend all day walking around Lakemba without seeing anything out of the ordinary. Yet Lakemba has come to symbolise worrying divisions in modern Australian society: between the Europeans who have been here some time and more recent arrivals from the Middle East and Asia, between Muslims and non-Muslims, between good citizens and those who are dangerously “un-Australian”.

On the face of it this seems unfair. Lakemba is a predominantly Muslim suburb and home to Australia’s most important mosque, but it is hardly a fortress of segregation. Lakemba is not a no-go area but most Australians never go there. Too far west to draw middle class restaurant-goers with its Middle Eastern cuisine, it has largely been left alone. Walking down the wide streets, neatly lined with spacious houses and fragrant eucalyptus trees, you see typical Sydney scenes: children playing cricket, young men bent under the bonnets of souped-up cars, Australian flags hanging limply outside homes. The Islamic presence is also obvious, but not overwhelming. A sign in the window of one shop near the train station makes a declaration of war in English and Arabic, but this is only a “WAR OF PRICE”. A woman wearing a veil that completely covers her face uses English to scold her four small children. The notice board outside the local Anglican church pointedly boasts of “serving a culturally diverse community”.

The flags offer a clue to Lakemba’s anxieties. Many of Australia’s 350,000 Muslims feel their commitment to the nation is in question, that they will never be Australian enough for people like the Prime Minister, John Howard, and his centre-right Liberal Party. For some this gives them something to prove: at a bravery awards ceremony in Sydney I met a young Turkish-Australian Muslim who explained his courageous actions in terms of how immigrants should behave to show their pride for their new home. But others are left feeling isolated and angry.

Lakemba has come to be one of the main battlegrounds for these skirmishes over 21st-century Australia’s identity, and Lakemba Mosque at times resembles a citadel under siege. Despite its huge symbolic importance for Muslims and non-Muslims alike, the Lebanese-run mosque itself is rather underwhelming: invisible from the busy main road, its immediate neighbours include a petrol station and a window fitter. But visit on a Friday or an important Islamic festival and the street outside the mosque will be jammed with cars and worshippers – an estimated 20,000 people joined the Eid celebrations at Lakemba in October.

This is why Australian politicians nervous about racial conflict and home-grown terrorists keep a careful eye on Lakemba Mosque. In recent weeks there has been plenty to worry about. In September the nation’s most senior Muslim cleric, Sheikh Taj el-Din al-Hilaly, the ageing but sprightly Mufti of Australia and New Zealand, delivered a lesson at the mosque in which he apparently suggested that women who did not wear the veil were inviting rape. “If you take out uncovered meat and place it outside on the street, or in the garden or in the park, or in the backyard without a cover, and the cats come and eat it... whose fault is it, the cats or the uncovered meat? The uncovered meat is the problem. If she was in her room, in her home, in her hijab [veil], no problem would have occurred,” he said in the Arabic address, which was obtained and translated by The Australian newspaper.

Sheikh al-Hilaly admitted making the comments, but said their meaning had been distorted and insisted he was a strong supporter of women’s rights. The damage had been done, however. The remarks confirmed prejudices about dangerously out-of-touch Islamic clerics and made headlines around the world. More worryingly, they continued to make headlines in Australia for several weeks as politicians lined up to attack the Mufti and Muslim leaders fretted about whether they should distance themselves from him or show a unified front. Sheikh al-Hilaly did not help matters, repeatedly promising to keep quiet but delivering further provocative comments with a mischievous glee that could be described as very Australian.

Most politicians, including Mr Howard, said Sheikh al-Hilaly should be removed from his post, claiming he did not represent the majority of Australia’s law-abiding, well-integrated Muslims. Ordinary Australians were bemused, and in some cases amused: one playful entrepreneur has started selling “Uncovered meat” t-shirts and g-strings featuring a cartoon cat; among the hate mail sent to the mosque was a suspicious package that turned out to contain a can of cat food. Promising to maintain a low profile, at least for now, the Mufti has left Australia on a pilgrimage to Mecca. But he has also insisted he is not going to resign.

A calm has now returned to Lakemba. The bored TV camera crews, photographers and reporters camped outside the mosque have moved on, as have the tough-looking young Middle Eastern men keeping a suspicious watch on them. Despite the hate mail, which came from Muslims and non-Muslims alike, there has been no widespread backlash against Australia’s Islamic communities since Sheikh al-Hilaly’s comments were reported. The president of the mosque’s governing body, the Lebanese Muslim Association, an eloquent lawyer and councillor for Mr Howard’s Liberal Party called Tom Zreika, has steered a careful course between rebuking the Mufti for his remarks and recognising his popularity as a spiritual leader. The only person I met who was outright offensive about Sheikh al-Hilaly – describing him as “that facking fag with his dirty religion” – turned out to be a Lebanese Christian immigrant with more than a few grudges.

But the deceptively still surface does not mean there are no longer any dangerous undercurrents. The authorities realise this: police cars regularly patrol past Lakemba Mosque, on the look out for white thugs rather than Muslim extremists. And journalists realise this: Lakemba continues to feature regularly in front page stories, usually as the home of terrorism suspects or their families.

Sheikh al-Hilaly could be a metaphor for what is wrong with relations between Australia’s Muslims and its Anglo-Saxon majority. Despite living in the country for over 20 years, the Mufti speaks only broken English, albeit punctuated frequently with the word “mate”, and delivers his serious thoughts in Arabic to an audience of Middle Eastern origin. Most Australians feel no need to understand him, and he makes few efforts to explain himself until things come to a head. Lakemba is no ghetto, but it will become one if this failure of talking and listening continues.