Yassmin’s Story Read online

  It is not just Sudan or other countries in the East that have issues with strict gender structures. Countries like Australia still battle to define what a ‘good woman’ or a ‘good man’ looks like, acts like and is like. If anything, our discussions in the West are more complex, cloaked behind a screen of superficial equality, when the reality is far from it. In Australia, the gender pay gap is growing, violence against women is rife and bias still limits the future of half the population. There has been progress; we have significant legislative change and a public discourse that we can engage in. However, if we are to continue to improve we would do well to listen to other cultures and learn from their experiences.

  My time in Sudan was short-lived. A year and a half after my ungraceful entry into the land of the living, my folks made the brave decision to travel to the other side of the globe and raise their family in the land down under.

  Australia.

  Migrant parents do not often talk about why they made the move to a new country, and mine are no exception. Most of what I know about the reasons and motivations behind our move was learnt from listening to stories relayed to others – to family friends and at public forums and dinner parties.

  My father tells a few stories but only ever shares them when asked directly why he moved to Australia.

  Well, he says, they were the kindest people he met on his travels around the world. Dad lived for four years in the United Kingdom (UK), a year in Rugby training with GEC and the other three living in London and completing a PhD in electrical engineering at Imperial College. On his return from his studies in the UK he taught at the University of Khartoum for a number of years; he was one of the youngest academics in the university. It was during his years in Europe that he met Australians and found them welcoming, a scarce trait in England in the 1980s. While positive experiences with Australians led my father to favour this nation out of all the possible places to migrate to, my mother has a much more concrete reason for picking the lucky country, although it took some digging on my part to uncover the details.

  Sometime in 1982 or 1983, a ten-year-old Queenslander placed an advert for a penpal in a British educational magazine at the encouragement of his father, Ian Hamilton. Ian thought it would give his son some writing practice and expose him to the experience of others around the world. The advertisement garnered four or five responses, some well written and others not. Ian, seeing his son’s reluctance to pen his own messages, resorted to replying to three of the letters himself. One didn’t respond, but the other two did: a girl on Christmas Island and a university student in Sudan. Ian eventually lost contact with the girl on Christmas Island but kept in touch with the architecture student, Faiza, my mother. The exchange of letters continued throughout my mum’s university degree, first job and engagement to my father. Eventually, Ian and his wife sent my parents the migration forms to help us move to the land down under, and gave us a roof over our heads until we found our feet. The Hamiltons were a large Jehovah’s Witness family and their love of community connected with the Sudanese experience and helped forge a truly international friendship. It turned out that although writing wasn’t his son’s forte, at least half of Ian’s plan worked. His family didn’t just get exposure to different communities; they took it a step further and welcomed the people with those experiences into their home.

  On 30 June 1989, Colonel Omar Hassan Ahmad al-Bashir overthrew the government of the democratically elected Prime Minister, Al-Sadiq Al-Mahdi. With the support of the National Islamic Front (NIF), Bashir claimed to be saving the country from the six-year civil war between the ethnically Arab north and the tribal south. The war, which scored a bloody rift into the nation, crippled the economy and left hundreds of thousands dead, became Africa’s longest civil battle and gave birth to a generation now known as the ‘lost boys’. The war ended in 2005.

  Initially, Bashir’s new government was known as the Revolutionary Command Council for National Salvation (RCC). It was later, in 1993, that Bashir abolished this body and appointed himself President of the nation. After the coup, Bashir instituted a version of the common law that governs Muslims, a destructive form of Sharia law that warped its true form.

  ‘Sharia’, as a word and as a concept, is globally misinterpreted and misunderstood. It is important to understand the notion of Sharia to understand the flaws in Bashir’s implementation, and appreciate why the fear of Sharia law in Western countries is unfounded.

  The word ‘Sharia’ is Arabic for ‘path or road to a watering hole or place of salvation’. The five objectives of Sharia are protection of life, mind, religion, property and offspring; rulings in Sharia law are based around the protection and promotion of these areas. Logically, decisions that lead to their degradation are considered fundamentally unIslamic.

  In practical terms, traditional Sharia is quite unlike any legal system in the modern West. Rather than law referring to a number of acts and legislation sitting in a library, Sharia is actually what is known as a common law structure: a constantly changing and evolving process aimed at ensuring society operates intelligently and ethically, although it should be noted that Sharia has an unchanging core; the protection of the five areas a constant that underpins all rulings. With that core in mind Sharia was meant for constant revision and improvement. Like a computer user too busy to update their systems, however, governments and religious institutions have simply been unable to adequately update Sharia to today’s context, perhaps finding the version they are using more politically convenient or simply more comfortable. It is tremendously important that the rulings of Islam are interpreted to fit the framework in which we live because that is what makes religion relevant and powerful. If this does not happen, we stagnate and stagnation only serves to breed disease.

  What is often forgotten is that the foundation of Islamic law was not linked to a state’s authority, because when it was introduced in the seventh century the ‘nation-state’ as we know it today didn’t exist. Islamic law was about finding a balance for society through rational thinking and religious morality, determined by scholars of Sharia rather than any government or rulers. Today, however, many governments and political rulers use the guise of Sharia law to bestow divine legitimacy to their actions – regardless of how true they are to the core tenets of the faith.

  Because Sharia relies on a large element of interpretation, finding an answer to any one question can be very difficult. At any particular time there can be a number of different interpretations of the same set of facts – but this interpretive element allows Sharia the flexibility to be relevant to all times and places, as long as it adheres to Islam’s original principles and the protection of life, mind, religion, property and offspring.

  Bashir’s move to ‘Arabise’ Sudan, which meant that the public institutions would now operate in Arabic rather than English, was about discarding the remnants of British colonialism, and was an effort to make the nation more ‘Islamic’ by employing superficial changes the government believed were significant. These changes included the policing of women’s clothing, switching the language of education and encouraging polygamy, rather than focusing on deeper, more socially impactful Islamic measures like charity and integrity within governance.

  These shifts in society affected my family deeply and were the catalyst for our eventual migration. My father is a practising Muslim, but he believed the political Islam that was being touted by the new government was destructive. Baba also believed teaching classes in Arabic would mean preventing Sudanese students from accessing global education and institutions. It was more difficult for a Sudanese student who studied in Arabic to be accepted into a leading university in England or the USA, much less awarded a scholarship, and thus Arabising education made the Sudanese less competitive on the world stage. My father wanted his nation and his students to be the best engineers possible, so to him, this move seemed regressive.

  From the government’s point of view, Arabising their universities was part of challeng
ing the West in a postcolonial push as they focused on finding an independent identity for the nation. In attempting to remove the Western education and thinking processes entirely, though, they indiscriminately dismantled many of the institutions that the British had created, rather than preserving the good and removing the bad. Decolonisation is an unimaginably difficult and delicate process to navigate; there are few countries that have been able to successfully recover from this destructive form of oppression. However, not all aspects of the Western education system in Sudan would have necessarily been oppressive. It takes nuance and courage to see the benefits in a system that is associated with so much pain.

  My father is a man who always sticks to his principles and he vehemently disagreed with the Arabising process. It was his vocal protest and subsequent actions that eventually had consequences for us as a family.

  ‘There were eighty others. Eighty-one of us lecturers signed a petition refusing to set exams in protest against the Arabising movement,’ my dad said. ‘United, we were fine, but when I came back from holiday, seventy-eight of those lecturers had set exams. They got to seventy-eight of them. Only three of us stood against the university, and we were fired.

  ‘None of us worked as engineers again. One of these academics was brilliant; he was a world leader in his area and now he’s tutoring A-Level students. The other academic, also an authority in his field, now runs a building services company installing lighting fixtures. I moved to the other side of the world. But I would never do anything differently, and don’t regret it, not one bit. Someone has to stand up for what is right.’

  My mother has her own stories of rebellion. She studied architecture in a politically volatile time, and her college experience was full of demonstrations, strikes and unrest. It gives her a different perspective on ‘tough times during university’, one that my grumbles about too much assessment don’t quite stack up against.

  The first I heard of my mother’s student action at university was over the traditional Sudanese breakfast we had every Saturday morning as a family, after I had begun my first semester of engineering and was talking about the upcoming exams. We were sitting under the pergola in the backyard, the weekend papers covering the large timber table, eating fool-u-bayd (broad beans and eggs, garnished with tomato). I asked my mother about the architecture exams she sat at university and unwittingly opened a can of worms.

  ‘When I was at the University of Khartoum we didn’t have exams for the first two years!’

  ‘How, Mama? What are you talking about?’

  The conversation then became less about assessments and more about making change, the Sudanese way.

  ‘It seemed like every time there was an exam, something would be happening with the government and people would start to riot. They would have to shut down the university. It was great, until we had to do the exams for first, second and third year all in one year so we could catch up!’

  I laughed, imagining the chaos that would ensue if we tried to shut down the University of Queensland because we disagreed with the government.

  Mum continued, a piece of Lebanese bread in her hand, using it to punctuate her passion as she schooled my brother and me on our lack of radical action. ‘You’re all so quiet and tame here; you need to be vocal. Protest and riot more!’

  ‘Mama, that’s crazy! Right?’ I looked at my father and brother for support but Dad just shook his head slightly and returned to reading the newspaper; this was not a conversation he was going to get involved in.

  My father, for all his love of Noam Chomsky, Robert Fisk and conspiracy theories, is at heart a conservative man. He likes order, systems, and for things to follow due process. ‘It’s all about the process, following the process!’ he would say to me in frustration when venting about situations where he felt the correct procedure had been flaunted, like nepotism in his workplace. He would regularly deny me a last-minute favour because I hadn’t followed due process and asked at dinner, where we discussed important family matters. We reckon his love of order and discipline came from being brought up by a German nanny for the first four years of his life (the side effect of being born in a communist nation just after the war). My mother once said that my father used up his risk-taking quota on the big move to Australia, so once we arrived he retreated into a more conservative way of thinking, which is why he was strict in our upbringing. Honestly, though, I don’t mind. Not everyone has a large enough risk-taking quota to throw everything up in the air and hope it doesn’t break when it lands, like my parents did when they chose to migrate.

  Whatever the reason for his conservativeness, the chaos and risk a public protest would entail was too much for my father to entertain and so he tended to retreat and allow my mother to stand in the spotlight, as she did at breakfast that day, regaling us with stories of a truly tumultuous university experience and implicitly reminding us that Muslim women were powerful and would stand for what they believed in.

  It was Mum who first showed me that my religion was revolutionary and that her family had lived that story, the women in her family all bucking the cultural Sudanese norms in some way but always maintaining their Islamic faith. When I was growing up, Mum would tell me stories of the famous female scholars in Islamic history, stories of women doing things that today some Muslims would incorrectly say is impermissible. These women were strengthened by their faith, Mama would tell me, rather than weakened or oppressed by it. That was at the heart of my mother’s activism: an Islam that radically strengthened women despite their oppressive and often patriarchal environments. It belies the perception often touted in Western media. The public commentary about Islam is often so far removed from my actual experience of it that sometimes I forget they are talking about me, my mother, my family, the faith I hold dear and the values by which I live my life. My mother is a woman who fights inequality where she sees it, regardless of culture, and uses her faith and religious values to back her up. She has never accepted ‘cultural norms’ as an excuse for injustice, something I inherited. It also meant all the things I did that I expected would be culturally challenging for my mother did not even cause her to bat an eyelid.

  Many years later, when I asked whether she was okay with me flying the coop to follow my engineering career she answered, ‘Anything you’ve done, the women in our family have done already.’

  They had!

  My mother was one of eight: four girls and four boys who grew up in a nation that was finding its feet in independence from the British. While my mother was growing up, Sudan had not yet become an Islamised nation ruled by a government with roots in the Muslim Brotherhood as it is now, so in some ways it was a more open-minded society. Education was highly valued and of an internationally recognised standard, so scholars would travel around the world and exchange ideas, bringing back knowledge to improve Sudan. Policy making was thorough and based on global best practices, and companies brought investment into a nation that they saw as full of potential. Women were largely free to wear what they chose, and so there were fewer hijabs than there are today. In fact, photos of my grandmother, aunts and mother showed them wearing outfits that wouldn’t have looked out of place in Europe at the time, knee-length skirts and short coiffed hair all the rage.

  My mother’s eldest sister is a tall, fierce, almost Amazonian doctor who apparently used to entertain the family with stories of dissection and disease from her medical studies, whether they liked it or not. Gorgeous curls abound in her graduation photos as she chose not to wear a hijab until she was older; none of the sisters did until they were mothers themselves. Some of my aunts became more traditionally religious with age, putting on the hijab to demonstrate this. Others felt that if they were not visibly observant in their dress, how could they ever hope their children might be? For each individual it was a personal choice and journey. However, in Sudan there is also an element of social pressure around what is deemed appropriate, taken from the language used by scholars on TV through to what the neighbours
might think. These days it is sometimes simply easier to err on the side of caution. This echoes the reality all over the MENA region; after the decolonisation process, the sweep of Islamised governments (which, I remain staunch in believing, do not represent or implement Islam as it was intended to be) began to slowly restrict the freedoms and rights of their constituents, particularly women, and this is felt in different countries in varied ways.

  The next daughter was even more radical. Super stylish, she wore skirts and shoes that were the latest European fashion and studied Nile River fish at the University of Khartoum. Her PhD took her to Norway: a small Sudanese woman wandering naively into a cold northern winter.

  ‘I had no idea what I was getting into,’ my aunt told me. ‘People said it was going to be cold, so I took a cardigan.’

  The cardigan wasn’t enough. I can only imagine the shock that must have rocked my aunt’s body as she walked out of the airport for the first time, given that twenty degrees is considered quite cool in Sudan.

  My last aunt is the only one of the sisters to stay with the family in Khartoum, holding the fort. The youngest daughter, she studied architecture like my mother and is currently a lecturer at the University of Sudan, submitting her third or fourth thesis. Just, you know, the traditional thing to do.

  Mum was the third daughter, a tomboy by all accounts, ganging up with her brother to play pranks on the other siblings. She was also independently minded and took risks she thought had a high pay-off, like moving with her family to the other end of the world with nothing but a suitcase and a couple of thousand dollars.