Author: irfan-yusuf

I’m a child of the 70’s. Born in 1969 in Karachi, my parents dragged me kicking and screaming to Sydney. My parents bought me a bike when I was 7 years old, and I was only allowed to ride it up and down my short street. I rode past the guys and gals standing next to their Sandman panel van with the surfboard on top. “Howya goin”, one of the girls would say. I was too shy to respond. Plus mum told me how bad “gori larkiyan” (white girls) were. In fact, within our small South Asian community (consisting...

The big news is that the legislative definition of marriage will soon change to include Adam and Steve. The results of the postal vote have been released, and there’s been lots of hoo-hah about the majority of folk in Western Sydney electorates voting against gay marriage. One columnist from The Weekend Australian managed to include Hizb ut-Tahrir as a possible cause. Another columnist from the Sunday Telegraph praised members of her own faith for attacking a mural in inner-Sydney “to the horror of locals”. The justification for the attack? The mural was blasphemous. Lord only knows what the columnist would have written has those attacking...

Dr Susan Carland’s first book Hislam has pulled off an enormous achievement.  A PhD is the highest degree one can achieve in a Western university. The PhD dissertation, however, is often barely read by a handful of people. Dr Carland has transformed her dissertation into a relatively short and easy-to-read book for general readership. Making her job even more difficult is that the topic – how Muslim women fight sexism inside and outside their communities – is one fraught with controversy. It’s a topic that often involves the least knowledgeable assuming expert status. Within the first few pages of...