Author: irfan-yusuf

Growing up with Ramadan was always fun. I grew up in a family where we all fasted. Mum used to wake us up early in the morning. She’d cook lots of fried shami kabab that would keep us thirsty all day. To combat the thirst, we’d eat watermelon. I’d eat a meat pie or two. Then at iftar, I’d eat a third and a fourth. The best thing about Ramadan was late afternoon hunger when you’d feel like you were floating. The worst thing was the lack of sleep, especially during the long days. In high school, my mates...

It’s a terrible conundrum. You enjoy writing and being published. But if you live in Australia or the US or any other Western country and come from a minority background, you only ever seem to get published when you write about your background. It has happened to me too many times. My first article in a “mainstream” publication was when I hacked into an imam for implying that women who dress a certain way may be “eligible for rape”.  The piece was published in the Sydney Morning Herald in April 2005. Now I‘m serving a literary life sentence of...

As part of my doctoral studies, I interviewed young Muslims from Sydney. Some of my participants were from the African continent. One young Somali told me about how he was subjected to racism from Arabic-speaking Muslims in Lakemba. I thought of him when reading American Somali Abdi Nor Iftin’s 2008 memoir Call Me American. “Growing up with a huge number of Somali exiles returning from Saudi Arabia, I never understood why my mom and her parents dreamed of living in a place [Madinah] where Somalis are unwelcome. It would be many years before I realized that Somalis are pretty...