Before the marches: They were already here

The names of the Muslim men who stood to pray five times a day under the red dust of Australia’s interior and did the work that made modern Australia possible have largely been lost, but their legacies endure, writes Wayne Hawkins.

PICTURE A desert road in central Australia, 1872. Land Telegram The line that will connect a continent to the world runs through the country that disrupted European expeditions and killed European men. Heat is in the Bible. Supply chains collapsed. The project is on the verge of failure.

And then the camels come.

With them come men who know how to do it read that country. Guys from Baluchistan, Punjab, Afghanistan.

Men who stopped to pray five times a day in the red dust of the Australian interior. Muslim men doing the work that makes modern Australia possible. Their names are largely lost to us. However, the telegraph line remained. And Australia is connected to the world thanks to them.

I watch footage of nationalist marches in Australia and Europe. The iconography looks familiar now. Flags, slogans, and the same claim repeated with some self-confidence express an obvious truth: Islam does not belong here. It never happened.

This is incompatible with our way of life; Foreign intervention into a civilization built upon. Judeo-Christian its foundations threaten something ancient and coherent that existed peacefully before his arrival.

This is an interesting story. It is also almost completely wrong.

It’s not wrong, as political claims often are; exaggerated, selective and misleading to the extreme. Fundamentally wrong. The coexistence of Muslim and non-Muslim communities is not a modern and progressive experiment. This is one of the oldest and most documented features in the civil record.

Go back eight centuries. The Iberian Peninsula was home to one of history’s most remarkable experiments in human coexistence. Andalusia. Its Arabic equivalent is “convivencia“. Living together.

In the 10th century, Muslim mosques, Christian churches and Jewish synagogues were within walking distance of each other in Cordoba. Scholars of all three traditions shared libraries and translated ancient texts side by side.

The intellectual heritage of this civilization (mathematics, medicine, philosophy) flowed into European universities and formed a significant part of the foundation on which the Renaissance was built.

The nationalist who declares Islam incompatible with Western civilization is unwittingly standing on intellectual ground built in part in that Cordoba library.

A note on nuance: Convivencia was not a golden age of perfect equality; There were tensions, especially in later periods. Almohad rule.

However, there is no sustained and documented coexistence between the three communities. Umayyad Caliphate The period is a historical fact. What does not survive consideration is the old claim of innate incompatibility of nationalists.

Discovery ended. Christian kingdoms expelled the Muslims and Jews who founded this civilization. It was not Islam that destroyed Convivencia. This was the insistence on homogeneity; the idea that a civilization can only survive if everyone in it believes the same thing.

As one scholar working in medieval Spain wrote, the result was a society like this:

‘…a closed, suspicious place that suppresses and eliminates differences.’

This idea has a long and destructive history.

Come to Norman Sicily in the 12th Century. A Christian king spoke Arabic, employed Muslim rulers, and collaborated with a Muslim geographer to produce the most complex map of the medieval world. Muhammad al-Idrisi.

Roger II’s Court in Palermo described like:

“The most intellectual court in Europe” [Roger II’s] personal enthusiasm, “Sicily became a cultural exchange center where Christian and Islamic scholars could meet on equal footing for the first time.”

Al-Idrisi Tabula RogerianaCompleted in 1154, the map remained the most accurate world map for three centuries. It was built by a Muslim scholar for a Christian king, in a palace that was too multicultural for the nationalist imagination to accept.

Tabula Rogeriana was created by Muhammad al-Idrisi in 1154 for King Charles II of Sicily. An old world map drawn for Roger. (Konrad Miller | Wikimedia Commons)

Then come home.

Afghan cameleers didn’t just build the telegraph line. They enabled the construction of the transcontinental railroad. For decades they kept remote communities in the hinterland alive.

They built mosques in country towns from Broken Hill to Bourke to Marree, some of which still stand today. oldest surviving mosque It was founded by these men in Broken Hill, Australia, built in 1887.

They intermarried with Aboriginal communities and produced descendants whose ancestry was simultaneously Indigenous Australian and Muslim; This is a fact that completely demolishes the claim of incompatibility.

Burke and Wills’ expedition in 1860 took Afghan cameleers into the interior. Dost MahomedBurke, a Muslim from Ghazni in Afghanistan, was chosen by Burke himself to accompany the advance party to Cooper Creek; This was a testament to how indispensable these men were considered.

The only European survivor of this expedition, John Kingultimately not by any European rescue team, Yandruwandha Aboriginal people at Cooper Creek who provided food and shelter until a relief party arrived in September 1861.

The two forms of knowledge (Muslim and Indigenous) that the nationalist narrative erases are woven into the founding mythology of the country it claims to defend.

Before any of the camel drivers arrived, Muslim traders from Macassar in what is now Sulawesi were making seasonal journeys to the northern Australian coast from at least the 17th century; Oral histories and genetic evidence indicated that they likely made contact centuries ago.

Their presence is recorded in Aboriginal rock art in Arnhem Land, in Aboriginal languages bearing loanwords from Macassan, and in oral histories commemorating their arrival and mourning the end of trade. The South Australian Government banned trepanning in Macassan in 1906; this ended a trading relationship that completely predated British settlement.

There is no short history of Islam in Australia. Ignorance of this history is short.

The men who march with anti-Islamic iconography believe they are defending something old and consistent. They defend a myth created by erasing real records.

Call to prayer and church bells have shared the same sky for longer than the nation states these marchers claim to protect. This is not an argument for any immigration policy or political position. That’s what happened.

History doesn’t care about the march. He already knows what the hikers don’t know.