[taSneem]

Sheik is lost in translation
By Keysar Trad
January 16, 2007 12:00am

HENRY Lawson and Banjo Patterson are our literary masters, whose styles stretched the imagination with tall tales and exaggerations.

This type of lively story telling has been overtaken in the West with the modern-day novel, usually a fact-based fiction.

But the use of exotic, colourful or exaggerated generalisations – familiar to readers of Lawson and Patterson – remains a feature of contemporary Arab culture.

Linguists who teach the Arabic language in Arabic-speaking countries believe that the mark of a good writer is how much he or she can exaggerate in illustrating a point.

Give this gift of exaggeration to a man of the cloth whose domain is fire and brimstone euphemisms and you will get very colourful and exotic analogies. You may have read a few in the past few days.

Arabic writers exaggerate to stretch the reader's imagination and to ensure that they present a story without offending individuals.

The aim with exaggerated story telling is to make it easier for people to draw moral lessons and conclusions.

Any student of Islamic Studies in an Arabic country will show you that in their work they have to understand discourse that has two meanings: a casual meaning and a deeper meaning.

Sometimes it takes a trained eye to distinguish whether a particular line – for example, that might compare a person to a dog – is meant to be praise or an insult.

As Arabs, quite often we make general references about our own society when we seek not to offend individuals and we are specific when this is the only way to deal with an issue.

So when the mufti makes a generalisation about Australian culture, he is indicating that he is part of that culture.

His critique is that of an insider and not a foreigner.

Another point often missed about the Mufti of Australia, his eminence, Sheik Taj al-Din al-Hilali, is his keen and playful sense of humour.

He was not offended in the slightest when I told him recently that a men's magazine voted him as Australia's funniest man of 2006 or that News. com.au referred to him as the "Muslim Seinfeld".

Here is a man who loves to see people around him smiling or laughing.

If they are not, he will crack a joke. If they don't laugh, he will take the lead and show them how to laugh.

Even when he is dealing with the most serious issues, he will crack a joke. Egyptians are famous for their sense of humour, even though some of this humour is a distinct mark of the mufti's own personality.

If I had the space I would share many examples and personal stories of the mufti and his down-to-earth demeanour which has won him the hearts of many of his parishioners and whose scholarship has cemented his position on the international stage.

It means very little whether some "leaders" or "imams" try to strip him of the title that he has held for nearly 18 years. If they attempt to remove him, history will record them as the cowards of the three Ps: "Public Opinion", "Political Correctness" and "Public Relations".

The first rule in public relations is to maintain one's integrity and dignity. There is no dignity in mealy-mouthed pandering to a self-appointed lynch-mob.

Let us also not forget that the mufti was the man who risked his life outside the Green Zone in Baghdad and spoke to people everywhere to try and get information to help in the rescue of former Australian hostage Douglas Wood.

He is the man whose door many people knock on at late at night to take to their home so that he can resolve a domestic dispute or reconcile a teenage daughter with her parents.

While dealing with all these issues, the mufti may sometimes make a public statement involving a generalisation. Quite often he couches it with humour and exaggeration.

The colour and spice the mufti adds have led to him being celebrated as one of the best orators in the Arabic-speaking community.

Recently, we have found audience members trained in picking ambiguities to sensationalise the mufti's speech to a non-suspecting English audience.

They smear the man and betray the audience which is asked to judge without knowing the peculiar nuances.

Keysar Trad is the founder of the Islamic Friendship Association of Australia.

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