No one can be a leader to all Muslims

By Waleed Aly

April 10, 2006

TO his supporters, Sheikh Taj al-Din al-Hilali is a tireless, selfless, charismatic community worker and scholar who gives hope and guidance to disadvantaged youth, and who bravely risked his life to rescue Australian hostage Douglas Wood from the clutches of terrorists in Iraq. To his opponents, he's the shady imam who doesn't speak English and relied on The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a Tsarist forgery, to construct wild anti-Semitic conspiracy theories about Jews controlling the world through sodomy. When such an enigma is given the grand sounding title of Mufti of Australia, controversy is inevitable.

So there was a monotonous familiarity to speculation surfacing last week of a move by the Muslim Council of NSW to depose him. The council insists this is not its intention and that it supports al-Hilali, but al-Hilali's backers were out in force anyway, placing abusive calls to the council and warning it would be a huge mistake to undermine him.

So, the fervour in Sydney is undeniable. But the view from Victoria of this undignified scenery is utterly bemusing. For all the considerable public attention he has attracted over the years, and for all the unshakable support we are told he has in Lakemba, al-Hilali remains of more interest to tabloid columnists than to Victorian Muslims. All the voices in the debate are from Sydney. The arguments in defence of al-Hilali focus on his following in Sydney. Elsewhere, the conversation evokes little more than a giant, collective yawn.

The reality is that al-Hilali's controversy has more to do with the murky community politics of south-western Sydney than anything else. That might be fair enough if he was the mufti of Bankstown, but this is being played out on a national stage. Sydney is not yet Australia. It is madness that the rest of the nation's Muslims are involuntarily caught up in this mess.

The problem is not so much al-Hilali as it is the office of the Mufti of Australia. Traditionally, the job of a mufti is to be a source of religious guidance to the community on contemporary religious questions. But the reality in Australia, as in all Western countries, is that religious authority is radically decentralised. People tend to find someone local with whom they feel comfortable, or borrow from a range of religious sources to navigate their own path through the spiritual challenges of contemporary life.

No wonder so many Muslims are regularly bewildered by descriptions of al-Hilali as the "spiritual leader of Australia's 300,000 Muslims" (as though there is one) or "the nation's most senior Islamic cleric" (as though Islam were a church with a formal hierarchy). In truth, no one in Australia, however brilliant, fits these descriptions. Nor is it possible in a Muslim community as dizzyingly diverse as Australia's. In that context, the idea of a national mufti is utterly meaningless, which is why no other Western country has one.

Perhaps unwittingly, al-Hilali's supporters have admitted as much. Take Keysar Trad, who asserted that even if al-Hilali was deposed, this could not "undermine the sheikh's standing in the community". Or al-Hilali himself, who quipped: "A position does not make a man; a man makes a position." The fact is that no one seeks al-Hilali's guidance because he is called the Mufti of Australia. His support base will remain without the title, and his knockers will continue to malign him with it. The only difference it makes is that it falsely projects that Muslims across Australia have a sole religious representative.

With the position itself being such a nonsense, it should be abolished.

Waleed Aly, a Melbourne lawyer, is an executive member of the Islamic Council of Victoria.

This article originally appeared in The Australian.