From David to Daoud

By Terry Lacey

(December 16, Jakarta, Sri Lanka Guardian) There he was, a large round distinctively Mediterranean looking Muslim, with a huge beard and white cap, with an Indonesian family around him, sitting in Lollipop, a children´s play center in the Jakarta up-market Senayan City shopping mall.

He seemed a very happy Muslim surrounded by milling children, with the boisterous backdrop of Father Christmas giving out balloons, while the sound system bashed out Christmas carols.

At a time when Swiss activists portray minarets as missiles and see them as the symbol of the threat of Muslim domination of Europe was this jovial jollity and happy family image a carefully crafted creation concealing a Muslim terrorist mastermind or was this Muslim alternative to a jolly Father Christmas for real ?

He was real and his name was Daoud, but it had once been David, So was he from Egypt or Palestine, or the Lebanon ? Not quite. But nearly !

He turned out to be from Australia. But his parents were from Malta, the little island-state just next to Sicily that had been a British colony and is now part of the EU. “My parents were from Sliema he said”. “Did I know where it was ?”.

Of course I knew, since I went to the British Army primary school at Tigne Point at the entrance to Grand Harbour, and on the edge of Sliema, and learned to swim in Sliema Creek by holding onto the big toe of a British Royal Marine commando as he pulled me around in-between the moored British warships, and I also had ice cream in Grand Harbour, Valetta on the aircraft carrier Ark Royal.

He was really surprised that I went to school in Malta. So I told him to shut up and that he was crazy in Maltese and he smiled broadly, and he said he was not crazy. Maltese is quite like Arabic but has a European alphabet that looks like rows of XXX`s with names like Naxxar. Maltese culture is said to be influenced by Phoenician as well as Libyan Arabic, hence an historical connection with modern Lebanon.

So what was an Australian whose parents were from profoundly Roman Catholic Malta, doing looking every bit like an archetypal caricature of a Middle Eastern Muslim in a children´s play center in Jakarta in Indonesia ?

He was an Australian garage mechanic who found Islam ten years ago. “My heart was never satisfied. Something was missing”. So he found Allah, or Allah found him.

I asked him if he was interested in politics, but he was not. He was interested in God and being a good Muslim.

I asked him if it was difficult being an Australian Muslim. “There is some racism” he said, and there were “Some problems with the media”. “But Australia is very cosmopolitan, and we all get along with each other”.

He noticed a strong Turkish community in Australia as well as the Lebanese. “And there were lots of Chinese people in Australia now”.

I asked him what he thought about Father Christmas, who was busy having his picture taken as well as giving out balloons, and clearly attracting the attention of a very mixed bag of children, including lots of little Muslims.

He smiled and said “We all have to respect each other don’t we ?”.

Nurrohman, a lecturer at Sunan Gunung Djati State Islamic University in Bandung wrote recently in The Jakarta Post (15.12.09) about the lessons to be drawn from the Swiss ban on minarets.

He noted that surveys in the old-fashioned Muslim heartland of East Java showed that the local Muslims felt similarly to the Swiss.

When surveyed in 2008 86 percent supported a ban on church construction in their areas and 81 percent agreed Muslims are not allowed to send Christmas Greetings or attend Christmas celebrations.

This points to insecurity and some fear of diversity and to the parochialism of rural Java. More urban and middle class Jakarta Muslims would not have the same worries. Maybe Daoud the happy Muslim had the right idea. Look at least as happy as Father Christmas. Watch Out ! Happiness might conquer the world!

Terry Lacey is a development economist who writes from Jakarta on modernization in the Muslim world, investment and trade relations with the EU and Islamic banking.

-Sri Lanka Guardian