This year, thirteen selected students headed out on the trip of a lifetime. I was one of them...
January 14th, 2012/ Rabbi al-Awwal 20th, 1433
It’s now less than a week until I set off on the journey of a lifetime. I’m launching into a three week tour involving three Islamic heartlands: Malaysia, Turkey and the Kingdom of Jordan. It’s not a holiday, it’s a study trip, though I hope to make it as rejuvenating as it will be educational, both spiritually and physically.
This journey is an incredible blessing for me. I am an Australian convert to Islam, married with three children, and an Islamic Studies and Sociology major at Griffith University. I am not well travelled. This will be the first time I have flown beyond Papua New Guinea since I was four years old, when my parents took us to England, the homeland of my father.
Practicing the religion of Islam for the last five years has been an exhilarating and at times painfully challenging path. Now my path will take a sharp detour into the lands and lives of three Muslim majority populations: where the religion is lived out not only as something personal, but something political, something intrinsic to the history and structure of the society as a whole. I have some idea what to expect due to some superficial study of each country.
My impressions of Malaysia are of a vital and progressive modern nation, moving forward on the global stage at an incredible rate, despite tug-of-war tensions between a nationalist, ethnic supremacy, with which Malaysian Islam is inextricably enmeshed, and a more pluralistic vision, also rooted fundamentally in strong Islamic values.
Turkey is an Islamic dinosaur, a cornerstone of Islamic civilization which somehow evolved into an extreme secular society ruled by the military. Now it seems the pendulum has swung back to a middle road with the leadership of the AKP party: a moderate, progressive Islamic democratic party. The stauncher secularists wait and watch: will the longevity of this government result in the loss of too many of their “freedoms”?
The Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan is widely considered to be the safest country in the Middle East, by a long shot. Although it has made much progress economically, politically and in terms of education and equality for women, it remains beset by social problems and within the grip of a King with too much power.
