Finding My Place Page 18
The trouble with Polo’s lyrical account of the Ismaili-Nizaris – a minority Shia Muslim sect that launched a protracted campaign of terror against the Sunni rulers between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries – is that, well, it’s mostly bullshit. The Ismailis did exist and they were known as one of the most brutal religious terrorist groups in modern history. Their victims were predominantly religious and political leaders who refused to acknowledge their particular interpretation of religious doctrine. They became notorious for their martyr operations and total disregard for their own lives – a precursor to modern-day suicide terrorism. But the myth of the Assassins, the old Sheikh of the Mountain and the beautiful garden of paradise has been debunked.
Still, the idea that young Muslim men could be enticed to commit horrific acts of terror using their own bodies as weapons in exchange for the promise of halal sex and drugs and rock’n’roll in heaven, has persisted. It’s one of the most simplistic and uninformed explanations ever put forward. But as suicide terrorism became one of the most well-known tactics used by violent Islamist terror groups, it became one of the most popular.
‘So why do they do it? What drives someone to blow themselves up like that?’ I’d been asked the question a thousand times by my students at Edith Cowan University, where I was teaching the counterterrorism units of a new course offering a bachelor’s degree in Counter Terrorism, Security and Intelligence. It was a smart move by the university to develop a degree that would help professionalise the burgeoning industry of counterterrorism. I had witnessed men with degrees or even a passing interest in anything Middle Eastern, culture, business, even poetry, change their business cards literally overnight from Expert in Middle Eastern Whatever to Expert in Middle Eastern Terrorism. They were the industry cowboys – the talking heads called upon to feed a hungry audience the lines they wanted to hear.
At one of my very first conferences run by the security industry, I was the only woman presenter and one of only a handful of women present. This was a man’s world and I would have to work hard to prove that women had a place here too. I attended a gathering in the country’s capital that was focused on safeguarding Australia from terrorism. It was mostly attended by engineers and law enforcement, who proceeded to explain how they could blast model a vehicle-borne bomb in Sydney’s Central Business District. Basically, it involved being able to model the trajectory of a static bomb in order to design safeguards that would lessen the damage caused by the bomb. I listened with great interest, all the while thinking about the research I was doing on trends in terrorism tactics. At the end of the presentation I raised my hand to speak – again the only woman in the room. ‘You’re saying you can blast model a bomb planted in a truck or van in the middle of a big city? Can you model a smart bomb?’
The engineers looked puzzled, they looked at each other, huddled and then asked, ‘What do you mean?’
‘Well,’ I explained, ‘if you consider that the trend in terrorist tactics is moving towards person-borne explosives because they cause the most damage and can circumvent security and basically move around to avoid being detected, can you blast model a moving bomb?’ The answer was no. I’d figured that’s what it would be.
I tried to teach my students these things. I tried to teach them to think laterally about terrorism and see it not just as a threat to our physical security, but also to understand that how we define it, how we try to understand it, will make our responses either effective or just a really, really big waste of time. I tried to show them that terrorism did not start with the September 11 attacks in 2001 – though for many of them it was the first time they had ever heard of it. I felt like my generation had failed them. We had neglected to teach them about terrorism and violence and all the horrid things that they were seeing on a daily basis on their screens and in their newsfeeds. Perhaps we were scared to or else we just didn’t know how to talk about something that we had never prepared ourselves to talk about. Whatever the reason, we were raising generations of young people for whom terrorism was a part of their daily lives, but who had no real answers and no real ways of finding them. We were leaving them to wade through the rivers and oceans of conflicting information about terror, war, conflict, ideology, politics and power, and we had no way of throwing them a lifejacket.
I’m not a fan of housework. I don’t really know that many people who are. I suppose there are some strange people out there who enjoy scrubbing toilets – but I’ve never really been one. I do like a clean house though and so every second weekend, when it was my turn to clean the house, I would try to make the most of those few hours of torture by busying my mind with important things while sucking up dust and wayward crumbs from the carpet. And so it happened that one Sunday morning in 2010 as I was vacuuming the lounge-room floor and silently complaining to myself about the lack of any Australian books about terrorism that I could use in my lectures, I had one of those lightbulb moments. I put down the vacuum cleaner, pulled out my computer and proceeded to write an email to a publishing company pitching my idea for Australia’s first book on terrorism designed explicitly for the Australian market. I ended the email with an offer to send through a sample first chapter should they be interested. I didn’t actually have a sample chapter ready, but I figured that they wouldn’t get back to me for a while, if at all.
The next day, I had a reply and a request for that sample chapter I had casually mentioned in my introductory email. If there is a moral to this story, it is that I should avoid all types of menial housework tasks, especially vacuuming, but not limited to other tedious chores like dishwashing, dusting and hanging out the washing as it only serves as an opportunity for me to come up with hare-brained schemes and leaves my mind free to wander. Or that I should not stretch the truth and then have to stay up all night to write chapters that I said were already written. Six weeks later I had signed a contract to write Terrorism and Global Security: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives.
Travelling for work was becoming much more common, and I had overcome the initial nervousness and anxiety I had when I took those first steps out of Heathrow Airport that day a few years earlier. I was getting invitations from countries to meet with their national security and counterterrorism authorities. I don’t think it’s wrong to say that some part of that was the novelty of being a woman in the field – and a Muslim woman at that. I hoped that it wasn’t entirely true and that I could also hold my own and earn my reputation through merit, hard work and having something important to contribute. But it is a taxing battle to constantly have to prove oneself. To continuously be aware that the standards by which you are judged are not the same standards as those around you. That how you look, your gender and your identity are like veils that you have to peer through, pull apart or shout down before your voice can be heard and you can be taken seriously.
On 10 February 2010, I answered an email from a stranger I had met seven years earlier when I was working at the Office of Multicultural Interests. It was Dave Allen. Since I had lost touch with him, he had moved into a law enforcement agency working in the intelligence field. He had chanced upon my email when he was looking up a colleague of mine he’d met a few weeks earlier. ‘Well, well, well,’ he wrote, ‘Dr Anne Aly? Counterterrorism?’ I smiled as I remembered that very first meeting in his office and the pleasantries we had shared working in the same building. ‘Dave Allen?’ I wrote back, ‘what a blast from the past. So much has happened since we last spoke. Let’s catch up.’
Three weeks later I was sitting opposite Dave in a cafe in Perth picking at my lunch. He hadn’t changed much in the previous seven years. His temples were a little whiter than I remembered, but he had the same sense of humour. I hadn’t given him much thought in those years – only the occasional ‘whatever happened to . . .?’
‘How’s things at home? How’s your family?’ I asked him.
Dave’s face changed and his smile vanished. ‘Not so good actually. I really want to get a divorce.’
Timing is everything. Seven years earlier, Dave and I had met because I needed a question answered and we became friends who shared pictures of our children and stories about our families. And now, here we were, once again brought together by chance: two people contemplating divorce. We finished lunch with a promise to stay in touch, even if just as sounding boards for each other as we navigated the stormy waters of relationship breakdown and the inevitable pain that brings. I don’t think he was as prepared as I was for what was to come. I had been there before and I knew that it wouldn’t be easy.
‘Where will you be in five years?’ It’s one of those questions that seems to be a staple of team-building strategy-planning future-vision days. It gets written on white boards in CAPS and ‘quotation marks’. I sat in a room with other male academics – professors, lecturers and tutors at Edith Cowan University. When it came my turn to respond to the question written in CAPS and ‘quotation marks’ on the board, I didn’t hesitate, ‘I’d like to be a professor in counterterrorism and continue my research.’ I watched the faces of the men in the room. Some smiled sympathetically. Others grimaced. And some didn’t even bother to stifle their laughter. ‘That’s nice, Anne,’ said the head of school leading the discussion, ‘but it’s really rare to make professor in five years.’
That was early in 2011, almost ten years after the September 11 attacks that were supposed to have changed the world and that had started a series of events that had led me to become a lecturer in counterterrorism, researcher and author. In February of that year, I was offered a research fellowship at Curtin University. Research fellowships are hard to come by. They are usually very competitive and I had beaten hundreds of candidates from around the world to secure an opportunity to spend the next five years devoted to researching terrorism and counterterrorism – a luxury rarely afforded to academics who also have to teach full-time.
I started my research fellowship in 2011, just days before my book was launched by Kevin Rudd – then Australia’s Minister for Foreign Affairs. It was not long after the infamous leadership spill that saw Julia Gillard installed as prime minister and Rudd given the foreign affairs portfolio. I wasn’t much interested in the politics of it all and was just really excited that Rudd’s office had agreed for him to launch the book. Looking back though, I am pretty sure that one of the most compelling reasons for Rudd to come all the way to Perth to launch a book on terrorism by someone he had never met was that Julia Gillard was in town launching something much more exciting and probably more important.
For the next two years I taught courses in counterterrorism, wrote articles and books, and travelled to national and international conferences talking about my research into how governments and publics define terrorism, how they respond, how people fear terrorism and what the latest trends were. I felt privileged that I could spend my life delving into the intricate details of a phenomenon I not only found intriguing, but that I had so much personally invested in it. It wasn’t like I left my curiosity at the door when I turned off the lights in the office at the end of the day. I took this home with me. It was there while I prepared dinner, when I loaded the washing machine, as I packed lunches and folded clothes. Nothing scared me more than the thought of my own sons falling prey to a malevolent ideology that preyed on their insecurities and doubts about their sense of belonging. I thought about the kind of mother I would become if Adam or Karim showed me any signs – even the slightest – that they were being drawn into a view of the world that constructed it into a battlefield – ‘us versus them’. I wondered what those signs might look like and even developed a model that could pinpoint gradual signs of radicalisation to terrorism. Eventually, I abandoned the model after further research into the lives and backgrounds of terrorists I had been studying showed me that it was pretty futile to even attempt to find any kind of commonalities that could hint at someone’s future intentions to become a terrorist. It’s not like there’s a checklist of who becomes a terrorist and who doesn’t. There actually aren’t any particular traits. There’s no ‘birthmark’ or 666 scratched on the back of their head that identifies them as future enemies of humanity.
For all the theories and hypotheses and models that are out there that try to give some insight into who becomes a terrorist and why – the one thing they don’t do is explain why people don’t become terrorists: perhaps that’s the question we should be asking. I thought about Adam and Karim. Now young men who had weathered the awkward teenage years pretty well considering their mum.
Adam was by then in his first years of university with so much promise ahead of him – he had settled on a double degree in law and commerce and was just discovering student politics. It made sense that he had joined Young Labor. Not because I was particularly politically active – I wasn’t – but my parents had always voted Labor. ‘Labor is for us,’ they would say, ‘they look after the workers like us.’ I guess I must have passively passed on the same to my own sons, though I don’t ever recall actually saying anything similar out loud. Karim was now in his final year of school and was much less sure of his future path than Adam had been at his age.
My boys had grown up in a post-9/11 world with a mother who lectured them about why Disney’s Aladdin was racist. Think about it. All the baddies are dark-skinned Arabs with thick accents, while all the good guys are fair-skinned with American accents. They’d grown up in a family where politics and religion were never off the table and with a mother who taught them never to take their rights for granted. A family where issues were never discussed in calm voices during ‘family meetings’ where everyone spoke nicely to each other (like they did on the Brady Bunch) – they were shouted, argued loudly with hands flying and feet stomping. ‘Our family put the dis in dysfunctional,’ Adam would say. ‘No, son,’ was my response, ‘we put the funk in dysfunctional!’ Despite the dysfunction, despite their mum, despite growing up Muslim – my sons were actually okay.
Four years and nine months after I sat in that room with the sniggering blokes who told me that I probably wouldn’t make it to professor in five years, I accepted a professorial role back at that same university. Yes. Timing is everything.
22
Survivors
My mum always says that God never gives two things – you either get brains or beauty and you either get success in your career or in your love-life. Never both. According to my mother, I got brains and a successful career. This, she was certain, was the reason why I had such bad luck in love. I don’t know how it is she arrived at such a binary view of the world where your fate is neatly separated into categories of blessings bestowed by a god who is so mean that he can only grant you one thing at a time, but I get the feeling it’s a mother’s way of explaining why her daughter just doesn’t do marriage very well.
The day after Karim finished his final school exams, I took him out to lunch. Nothing special. Just a casual meal at a crowded food hall at the local Westfield. I think he got a burger and I picked at a salad. I wanted to tell him I was leaving Dennis after ten years of marriage, and I was worried because Karim had looked to him as a father for some of the most formative years in his life. I didn’t need to tell Adam, but when I did just a few days earlier, he smiled, breathed a sigh of relief and simply asked, ‘Are you gonna be okay, Mum? I’m worried about you.’
‘It’s not your job to worry about me,’ I assured him, ‘it’s my job to worry about you, remember.’ I needed more time to tell Karim. I needed to make sure he was going to be okay.
Karim made that face that people make when they’re trying to stop themselves from making a sad face. You know, the kind of face when you try to force your mouth into turning up, not down, but instead of a smile, all you manage is a brief second of something like a grimace before your body tells your mind to fuck off and leave it alone. I thought it was because he was so attached to this man that it was like he was losing a father all over again. The guilt tore at me. It was like the night when he was a baby and I held him in my arms and whisper
ed, ‘I’m sorry’ over and over again. Now, almost seventeen years later, here I was, this time staring into the face of the man my son had become as he held back tears, and I was saying sorry all over again.
But no. I was wrong. ‘I’ve watched you this last year,’ Karim said. ‘I’ve seen you sitting in your car in the garage with your eyes closed and I’ve wondered why you just sat there in the dark. Why you took so long to come inside. So many times, I’ve heard you sigh and mumble under your breath, “One more year, one more year.” All this time I wondered what was going on. And now I know. You stayed with him for my sake. Why did you do that? I hate to think that you stayed with him, as miserable as you were, just because of me.’
He knew. As much as I put on a brave face and tried to smile through it all to protect him from any more heartache, he knew.
‘I’m sorry, son. I haven’t exactly been very good at providing you with a strong male role model, have I?’
‘We didn’t need one, Mum. We had you.’
I’m not too sure that I had much to do with it. I’m not too sure that my sons didn’t turn out alright, despite their mum, not because of her.
My second marriage finally ended on 25 May 2011. That was the day Dennis finally left. It had been a long and bitter break-up and by the end of it I felt defeated and broken. God had given me two goes at getting this marriage thing right and I had stuffed it up both times. I resigned myself to the fact that I just wasn’t cut out for it. I would never make a good wife – never be Betty Baker Perfect Homemaker. I was too selfish, not romantic enough and, to be honest, just didn’t think I could ever get used to this idea of two people doing everything together.