Finding My Place Read online

  Dedication

  This one’s for David John Allen

  Till the end . . .

  Contents

  Dedication

  Preface

  Prologue

  1 Child of the Naksa

  2 Mahmoud Osman

  3 Journey to Australia

  4 Rumpus Room

  5 Of Droughts and Flooding Rains

  6 My Australia

  7 Ignorance

  8 The Shadow of a Man

  9 The Art of Flower Arranging

  10 The Year of Invisible

  11 Honour

  12 Ana Hurra – I Am Free

  13 Private Lives

  14 The Hardest Years

  15 Parenthood

  16 Ten Parts of Desire

  17 A Plus

  18 Because They Hate Us

  19 Evil Foes and Willing Friends

  20 Question Time

  21 Terrorism 101

  22 Survivors

  23 Grounded

  24 Pracademic

  25 Drown Her in Pig’s Blood

  26 365 Days

  27 The Campaign

  28 So Help Me God

  29 Disruptor

  Photos Section

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Preface

  I have never been one of those people with a head full of stories. I am in awe of those who are – of the George Martins, Umberto Ecos and J.K. Rowlings of this world – with an unfathomable ability to weave words into fantastic tales of imaginary worlds; of dungeons and dragons, wizards and witches and shit like that. Even as a child my mind was more consumed with questions about this world. Questions like what if I had been born in a different place and different time? Would I still be me or some other version of me? What if my parents had gone to the United States, instead of Australia, as they had originally planned? I guess you could say I am more into meanings than dreamings.

  I’ve grown fond of other people’s stories though. Listening to their stories has helped me connect with them, see the world through their eyes and contextualise my own life experiences. I’ve had the opportunity to meet some pretty impressive people in my life – famous people, influential people and some very important ones. I’ve met world leaders, ambassadors, heads of big government departments, policy makers, business people and even a couple of monarchs. But the most inspirational people I’ve met have never been on the cover of a magazine. They’ve never spoken at conferences or written opinion pieces for the New York Times. They haven’t been on Oprah and they don’t have two million followers on Instagram. People like the mother doing it tough with five kids on a single income. People like the teenager looking after his drug-addicted mother and his little sister while managing to get himself to school every day. People like the young refugee whose family fled civil war in Somalia and who went on to meet the Queen of England.

  Most ordinary people have extraordinary stories to tell. Stories of love, of loss, of grief or joy. Stories hidden deep beneath the mundane and away from the everyday. Stories that sit like crumbs on an empty plate waiting patiently to be scooped up by a hungry child. And yet, in comparison, I don’t see my own life’s journey as particularly extraordinary – though I am often told it is.

  My life to date has not been defined by substantial loss or grief. I haven’t mourned too many loved ones and I’ve not experienced the pain of loss that I see etched on the faces of those who have. My face does not bear the scars of a difficult life. That could just be good genetics or interventions of a different kind. I’d like to say it’s healthy living and that I drink three litres of water a day, practise daily yoga and have a fastidious skin-care regime that consists of weekly therapies with organic avocado and grape-skin concoctions made up in my very own kitchen. Truth is, I do none of those things.

  I was born Azza Mahmoud Fawzi Hosseini Ali el Serougi. Yes, I know it’s a mouthful. When my parents came to Australia there just wasn’t enough space on the form for a five-word family name, so I became Azza Aly. Aly with a ‘y’ being the anglicised version of Ali with an ‘i’.

  From the age of ten, I have been known as Anne Aly. And this is my story.

  Prologue

  From my designated seat in the House of Representatives chamber, I watched the pomp and ceremony that presides over the official opening of parliament with wide-eyed bemusement. We don’t do pomp in my house – if I really want to impress someone, I set the table.

  At last, my name was called. I had to will my legs to stop shaking as I made my way to the Despatch Box to take my place alongside ten others waiting to be sworn into the 45th Parliament of Australia. The Despatch Box, originally used to transport documents to the chamber, rests on a grand wooden table adorned in worn green leather. The table sits in the middle of the House of Representatives chamber, separating the Government and opposition. At one end, closest to the Speaker’s podium, sit the clerks clothed in ceremonial black robes. At the other, an ornate gold staff called the Mace rests on brackets. The Mace, originally a weapon of war, symbolises the authority of the House.

  I was about to become the first ever Muslim woman elected to the Australian Federal Parliament – the first Muslim woman MP. It wasn’t something I’d set out to do. It wasn’t like I had ‘become first Muslim woman MP’ written on my bucket list between ‘break the world record for number of Zoolander viewings’ and ‘get a job as one of those people who taste new flavours of ice-cream for a living’. Throughout the election campaign, it had been raised with me once or twice, but I’d shrugged it off each time with a nonchalant meh. I wasn’t interested in being the ‘first’ anything – first Muslim, first Arab, first Egyptian-born, first African, first graduate of Edith Cowan University, first expert in the art of hummus making. It didn’t matter to me if I was the first or second or thirty-fifth. I never wanted to make history. I wanted to make a difference.

  For me, my election meant a win for my party and for my electorate, but there were those for whom my win carried more meaning than I could have ever imagined. So while I might try to play down the significance of it all, I couldn’t ignore it. Every journalist who interviewed me wanted to know the same thing: ‘How does it feel to be the first Muslim woman in parliament?’ It’s a funny question really. I suspect it didn’t feel any different for me than it did for any of the other 149 people who’d been elected. I responded to these questions with something about it being good to have a diverse parliament and looking forward to taking part in some robust debates, but the truth was, I really didn’t know how I was supposed to feel about it – if indeed I actually felt anything about it at all.

  The days immediately following my election win are a bit of a blur, but there are the occasional moments that stand out in my memory. It’s like driving through a torrential downpour with the windscreen wipers going full-bore, and not being able to make out anything more than obscure shapes and sounds amid the white noise. And then suddenly, without warning, you reach a moment – a few seconds or half a minute or so of clarity – when the windscreen wipers part and you recognise where you are and where you’re heading, and you breathe a sigh of relief because you know you didn’t miss the turn-off.

  One such moment was a pre-recorded interview with SBS Arabic broadcast. I’d just finished and was off the record when the interviewer said: ‘It’s so great to have you in parliament. You know, I tell my daughter every day that she can be whatever she wants to be. But you? You’ve made it real.’

  It was the first time I actually thought about just how significant my ‘first’ was – if not in my own mind then for young girls who, like my twelve-year-old self, were searching for some kind of validity in a place that often made them feel less than v
alid. Perhaps, after all, I was still searching for that validity and for my place.

  1

  Child of the Naksa

  Egypt 1967

  The blaring summer heat; evening walks along Corniche el Nile; ice-cold carob juice from a street vendor; the songs invoking a ‘greater Arab homeland’; Mohamed Hassanein Heikal’s weekly column, ‘Frankly’ in the Akhbar al Youm (Daily News); the cries from women in their house dresses greeting the familiar clang of the gas-bottle man; the taxi fare starting at a meagre six piastres; the Friday matinee at the Cinema Metro; the Voice of the Arabs radio; Abdel Halim Hafez; the Muslim Brotherhood; Gamal Abdel Nasser and Arab nationalism. The fading promise of a better Egypt.

  If the 1960s symbolise the era of making love not war, of blowing in the wind, the Beatles, liberation and hope, it was not the world that greeted my arrival. I was born in a period when war and conflict marked time, in a country when the birth of a girl child, especially a second girl child, was greeted not with ululations, cigars and approving nods, but by the clicking of tongues and commiserations.

  On Monday 5 June 1967, I was just ten weeks old. It was a day when humiliation replaced pride, defeat and disillusion replaced hope, mourning replaced celebration. The labour pains of war birthed a new Egypt, where the symbols of the future – Arabism, the power of the people and national liberation – were suddenly relegated to a bygone era: the hollow ruminations of old men sipping dark coffee and over-sugared black tea in alfresco cafes.

  The Israeli forces led by none other than Ariel Sharon had launched a pre-emptive attack on the Egyptian air force stationed on the Sinai Peninsula. The forces had been there since May as the nation became engulfed in the swell of anticipation. Victory was inevitable – or so they thought. Egypt would prove its might and, with a united Arab force, reclaim the Sinai. One hundred thousand troops had been mobilised to the region. Israel’s show of force consisting of 700 tanks and 70,000 troops, paled in comparison. But the Israelis had taken them by surprise. The plan was well coordinated, precisely formulated and immaculately executed. It was anticipated that the battle would be fought at Abu-Ageila, a strategic access point in the north of the Sinai Peninsula close to the Israeli border and only forty-five kilometres south-east of El Arish. Instead, the Israelis launched an offensive at the Um-Katef plateau to the east and mobilised two brigades from the north of Um-Katef.

  The first broke through the defences and the second blocked the road to El Arish. Israeli paratroopers rained destruction on Egypt’s artillery, preventing it from engaging. Combined forces then attacked the Egyptian troops on all fronts, effectively ambushing them.

  Word was that the Egyptian Minister of Defence, Abdel Hakim Amer, panicked and ordered all units in Sinai to retreat. The pride of the Egyptian people, the largest and most heavily equipped Arab army, had been defeated. Egypt had yielded: broken and humiliated. The screams of the Sinai – now littered with the empty shells of tanks and ashen remains of burning vehicles – resonated through the heart of Egypt.

  The Naksa, literally the ‘setback’, as it came to be known, marked more than just the disheartening defeat of the united Arab armies. It marked an entire generation – like a giant birthmark smack bang in the middle of our foreheads.

  I first heard the term ‘children of the Naksa’ the year I turned forty. On 28 July 2007, Mona Eltahawy – an Egyptian-born international journalist, with whom I had worked – wrote in the Washington Post: ‘My birth at the end of July 1967 makes me a child of the Naksa . . . We Children of the Naksa were born not only on the cusp of loss but also of the kind of disillusionment that whets the appetite of religious zealots.’

  Somehow, reading about the circumstances of my birth put everything into context for me. Though my parents left Egypt in 1969, the significance of the setback felt so familiar to me. I had always felt that my life was eclipsed by an indelible stain that I couldn’t quite put my finger on. I’ve always felt like I was never quite good enough – a setback – and I have spent much of my life striving to prove that I am good enough – most of the time to the wrong people.

  My parents were part of Egypt’s massive working class. They were not the elite who holidayed in Europe and sent their children to be educated in private boarding schools in the United Kingdom or the United States. They weren’t the uneducated poor masses either, who lined up for weekly rations of sugar and flour at the public co-op. They were mediocre. Much like the tens of millions of middle-class, educated and practically poor of Egypt. They lived on modest incomes, in modest homes and exuded middle-class morality.

  And yet, despite the circumstances of my birth, at least in my public life, I have managed to rise above the Naksa. I have enjoyed opportunities that many people would consider extraordinary: an extensive education, travel, an international reputation as a researcher and practitioner in countering terrorism and radicalisation, and a political career. Though I, and those close to me, know my struggles, to others it often feels like the most extraordinary thing about any of my achievements is that I managed to pull it all off while being female, brown and Muslim. As if somehow this particular combination presents an insurmountable challenge, the enormity of which can only be explained by some kind of extraordinariness on my part; or by the extraordinary freedoms imparted to me by the society I grew up in. There is a sense that what belies the marvel of ‘how did she do it?’ is an inherent belief that, had I been female, brown and Muslim in some other part of the world, I most definitely couldn’t have done it. Maybe there is some truth in that. I’ll leave that to you to decide.

  I’ve never looked at my life through a rear-view mirror that reflects only gender, colour or religion. In fact, it’s safe to say that I rarely look at my life through the rear-view mirror at all. Occasionally, I’ll look back to see the path I’ve come down, but only occasionally. Some people manage to cruise through life like a scenic drive through the countryside. Others find themselves stuck in peak-hour traffic. Others still travel down the highway of life at maximum speed, never stopping, never letting others in and never taking in the scenery. Then there are those who road trip through life – changing lanes, taking wrong turns, stopping on the way to pick up a hitchhiker or two, constantly eyeing the next exit.

  I don’t know that my starting point as a second girl child of the Naksa born to a modest working-class couple in the spring of 1967 had much bearing on my own journey. I do know that our starting lanes, or at least our perceptions of them, must have some influence on how we navigate our paths. Had the Naksa never happened, would my parents have ever thought to leave their home, their families and their lives in search of a better life?

  At times, life has felt more like something that happened to me rather than something of my own design. It has felt as if I have been taken along a path on some kind of conveyor belt. At times, I have had to stop and ask myself, ‘How the felafel did I get here?’

  2

  Mahmoud Osman

  I did not know my maternal grandfather: he died long before I was born. By all accounts, Mahmoud Osman was a simple man. He never had the opportunity to complete primary school, let alone high school. He made his living running a small textiles shop on the commercial road in the township of Minya.

  The Egyptians, who like to invent euphemisms for everything, called Minya ‘the bride of the Nile’. The name seems fitting enough for a country that is known to its natives as ‘the mother of the world’. Minya sits around 265 kilometres south of Cairo in the region still known as Upper Egypt, despite the unification of the ancient lands of Upper and Lower Egypt around 3000 years BC. Colloquially, Upper Egyptians are known as Sa’idis and have long been stereotyped as mulish, unrefined simpletons, and made fun of in Egyptian popular culture and jokes. Have you heard the one about the Sa’idi who wanted to watch porn? He climbed up on the roof and hung his underwear from the antenna (it’s funny in Arabic).

  Urban Egyptians like to think of themselves as more sophisticated than their conservative rura
l counterparts, and the Sa’idis like to think of themselves as morally superior, tougher and less feminised than the city slickers. This is not unlike the low-level cultural tensions between the city and the bush in Australia, or indeed in other countries where the stereotypical divide between ‘country bumpkins’ and ‘urban feminazis’ has been the theme for novels, films and television shows like the Beverly Hillbillies and the old Dad and Dave comedies. There’s a steady stream of fish-out-of-water movies in Egypt which draw their comedy from putting Sa’idis in situations likely to induce hilarious culture-shock moments. Most of the situations aren’t actually that far off reality. When one of my mother’s sisters, Aunt Nafeesa, who had never left Minya before, came to visit us in Australia, she had never seen automatic doors and screamed when she stepped onto an escalator for the very first time.

  Considering its reputation for being the conservative heartland of Upper Egypt, my mother’s hometown produced some pretty impressive social, cultural and political change makers – poets, novelists, politicians, actors and scientists. It is the city where the Codex Tchacos – an ancient Coptic Christian manuscript containing the only known surviving copy of the Gospel of Judas – was discovered in the 1970s. But to me, it’s most notable for being the birthplace of Huda Sha’arawi – a pioneer of the Egyptian feminist movement and one of my heroes.

  Sha’arawi was born in 1879 into a well-to-do family and raised in the harem system, where Egypt’s wealthy women were kept secluded and veiled. They lived in the shadows, were denied civil rights and were made to wear face veils in public. In 1923, she returned to Cairo after a meeting of the International Women’s Suffrage Alliance in Rome, at which she delivered a blistering speech on equality for Arab women: ‘The Arab women will not agree to be chained in slavery and to pay for the consequences of men’s mistakes with respect to her country’s rights and the future of her children.’ Sha’arawi stepped off the train at Cairo station and removed her face veil. It was one of those watershed moments in history that become part of the story that defines a nation’s character.