Finding My Place: From Cairo to Canberra - the irresistible story of an irrepressible woman

By Anne Aly

From Cairo to Canberra -- the irresistible story of an irrepressible woman

'Anne Aly's ... influence will be felt for years to come ... It sinks in how significant she may be to public life.' -- The Good Weekend

In 2016, Anne Aly was the first Australian Muslim woman, the first Egyptian-born woman and the first counter-terrorism expert to be elected to federal parliament. She was also most probably the first parliamentarian to have seen Zoolander 23 times.

'What am I doing here?' she asked herself as she was sworn in with her hand on her English translation of the Quran.

It's a question the former professor has raised more than once since she arrived in Australia aged two bearing the name Azza Mahmoud Fawzi Hosseini Ali el Serougi. The answer is a fascinating and moving story of a Muslim girl growing up in suburban Australia in the seventies, a girl who danced the divide between the expectations and values of their parents' culture and that of their adopted land, and whose yardstick for 'a normal' Australian family was The Brady Bunch.

Told with warmth, humour and insight, Finding My Place is an irresistible story by an irrepressible Australian woman who has truly found where she belongs, and who continues to make her mark internationally and in public life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Australia
• Release date: Apr 1, 2018
• ISBN: 9780733338489

Anne Aly

Federal parliamentarian Dr Anne Aly was born in Alexandria in Egypt in 1967 and migrated to Australia at the age of two. Formerly a professor at Edith Cowan University, Anne is an internationally renowned expert in counter-terrorism and counter-radicalisation, and was the only Australian to be invited to President Obama's White House conference on violent extremism in 2015. As a single working mother of two young boys she worked for years on the minimum wage to send her two boys to school and put food on the table. She is the Founding Chair of a youth-oriented not-for-profit organisation that harnesses youth entrepreneurship and innovation to address global issues at the local level.

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Preface

I have never been one of those people with a head full of stories. I am in awe of those who are – of the George Martins, Umberto Ecos and J.K. Rowlings of this world – with an unfathomable ability to weave words into fantastic tales of imaginary worlds; of dungeons and dragons, wizards and witches and shit like that. Even as a child my mind was more consumed with questions about this world. Questions like what if I had been born in a different place and different time? Would I still be me or some other version of me? What if my parents had gone to the United States, instead of Australia, as they had originally planned? I guess you could say I am more into meanings than dreamings.

I’ve grown fond of other people’s stories though. Listening to their stories has helped me connect with them, see the world through their eyes and contextualise my own life experiences. I’ve had the opportunity to meet some pretty impressive people in my life – famous people, influential people and some very important ones. I’ve met world leaders, ambassadors, heads of big government departments, policy makers, business people and even a couple of monarchs. But the most inspirational people I’ve met have never been on the cover of a magazine. They’ve never spoken at conferences or written opinion pieces for the New York Times. They haven’t been on Oprah and they don’t have two million followers on Instagram. People like the mother doing it tough with five kids on a single income. People like the teenager looking after his drug-addicted mother and his little sister while managing to get himself to school every day. People like the young refugee whose family fled civil war in Somalia and who went on to meet the Queen of England.

Most ordinary people have extraordinary stories to tell. Stories of love, of loss, of grief or joy. Stories hidden deep beneath the mundane and away from the everyday. Stories that sit like crumbs on an empty plate waiting patiently to be scooped up by a hungry child. And yet, in comparison, I don’t see my own life’s journey as particularly extraordinary – though I am often told it is.

My life to date has not been defined by substantial loss or grief. I haven’t mourned too many loved ones and I’ve not experienced the pain of loss that I see etched on the faces of those who have. My face does not bear the scars of a difficult life. That could just be good genetics or interventions of a different kind. I’d like to say it’s healthy living and that I drink three litres of water a day, practise daily yoga and have a fastidious skin-care regime that consists of weekly therapies with organic avocado and grape-skin concoctions made up in my very own kitchen. Truth is, I do none of those things.

I was born Azza Mahmoud Fawzi Hosseini Ali el Serougi. Yes, I know it’s a mouthful. When my parents came to Australia there just wasn’t enough space on the form for a five-word family name, so I became Azza Aly. Aly with a ‘y’ being the anglicised version of Ali with an ‘i’.

From the age of ten, I have been known as Anne Aly. And this is my story.

Prologue

From my designated seat in the House of Representatives chamber, I watched the pomp and ceremony that presides over the official opening of parliament with wide-eyed bemusement. We don’t do pomp in my house – if I really want to impress someone, I set the table.

At last, my name was called. I had to will my legs to stop shaking as I made my way to the Despatch Box to take my place alongside ten others waiting to be sworn into the 45th Parliament of Australia. The Despatch Box, originally used to transport documents to the chamber, rests on a grand wooden table adorned in worn green leather. The table sits in the middle of the House of Representatives chamber, separating the Government and opposition. At one end, closest to the Speaker’s podium, sit the clerks clothed in ceremonial black robes. At the other, an ornate gold staff called the Mace rests on brackets. The Mace, originally a weapon of war, symbolises the authority of the House.

I was about to become the first ever Muslim woman elected to the Australian Federal Parliament – the first Muslim woman MP. It wasn’t something I’d set out to do. It wasn’t like I had ‘become first Muslim woman MP’ written on my bucket list between ‘break the world record for number of Zoolander viewings’ and ‘get a job as one of those people who taste new flavours of ice-cream for a living’. Throughout the election campaign, it had been raised with me once or twice, but I’d shrugged it off each time with a nonchalant meh. I wasn’t interested in being the ‘first’ anything – first Muslim, first Arab, first Egyptian-born, first African, first graduate of Edith Cowan University, first expert in the art of hummus making. It didn’t matter to me if I was the first or second or thirty-fifth. I never wanted to make history. I wanted to make a difference.

For me, my election meant a win for my party and for my electorate, but there were those for whom my win carried more meaning than I could have ever imagined. So while I might try to play down the significance of it all, I couldn’t ignore it. Every journalist who interviewed me wanted to know the same thing: ‘How does it feel to be the first Muslim woman in parliament?’ It’s a funny question really. I suspect it didn’t feel any different for me than it did for any of the other 149 people who’d been elected. I responded to these questions with something about it being good to have a diverse parliament and looking forward to taking part in some robust debates, but the truth was, I really didn’t know how I was supposed to feel about it – if indeed I actually felt anything about it at all.

The days immediately following my election win are a bit of a blur, but there are the occasional moments that stand out in my memory. It’s like driving through a torrential downpour with the windscreen wipers going full-bore, and not being able to make out anything more than obscure shapes and sounds amid the white noise. And then suddenly, without warning, you reach a moment – a few seconds or half a minute or so of clarity – when the windscreen wipers part and you recognise where you are and where you’re heading, and you breathe a sigh of relief because you know you didn’t miss the turn-off.

One such moment was a pre-recorded interview with SBS Arabic broadcast. I’d just finished and was off the record when the interviewer said: ‘It’s so great to have you in parliament. You know, I tell my daughter every day that she can be whatever she wants to be. But you? You’ve made it real.’

It was the first time I actually thought about just how significant my ‘first’ was – if not in my own mind then for young girls who, like my twelve-year-old self, were searching for some kind of validity in a place that often made them feel less than valid. Perhaps, after all, I was still searching for that validity and for my place.

1

Child of the Naksa

Egypt 1967

The blaring summer heat; evening walks along Corniche el Nile; ice-cold carob juice from a street vendor; the songs invoking a ‘greater Arab homeland’; Mohamed Hassanein Heikal’s weekly column, ‘Frankly’ in the Akhbar al Youm (Daily News); the cries from women in their house dresses greeting the familiar clang of the gas-bottle man; the taxi fare starting at a meagre six piastres; the Friday matinee at the Cinema Metro; the Voice of the Arabs radio; Abdel Halim Hafez; the Muslim Brotherhood; Gamal Abdel Nasser and Arab nationalism. The fading promise of a better Egypt.

If the 1960s symbolise the era of making love not war, of blowing in the wind, the Beatles, liberation and hope, it was not the world that greeted my arrival. I was born in a period when war and conflict marked time, in a country when the birth of a girl child, especially a second girl child, was greeted not with ululations, cigars and approving nods, but by the clicking of tongues and commiserations.

On Monday 5 June 1967, I was just ten weeks old. It was a day when humiliation replaced pride, defeat and disillusion replaced hope, mourning replaced celebration. The labour pains of war birthed a new Egypt, where the symbols of the future – Arabism, the power of the people and national liberation – were suddenly relegated to a bygone era: the hollow ruminations of old men sipping dark coffee and over-sugared black tea in alfresco cafes.

The Israeli forces led by none other than Ariel Sharon had launched a pre-emptive attack on the Egyptian air force stationed on the Sinai Peninsula. The forces had been there since May as the nation became engulfed in the swell of anticipation. Victory was inevitable – or so they thought. Egypt would prove its might and, with a united Arab force, reclaim the Sinai. One hundred thousand troops had been mobilised to the region. Israel’s show of force consisting of 700 tanks and 70,000 troops, paled in comparison. But the Israelis had taken them by surprise. The plan was well coordinated, precisely formulated and immaculately executed. It was anticipated that the battle would be fought at Abu-Ageila, a strategic access point in the north of the Sinai Peninsula close to the Israeli border and only forty-five kilometres south-east of El Arish. Instead, the Israelis launched an offensive at the Um-Katef plateau to the east and mobilised two brigades from the north of Um-Katef.

The first broke through the defences and the second blocked the road to El Arish. Israeli paratroopers rained destruction on Egypt’s artillery, preventing it from engaging. Combined forces then attacked the Egyptian troops on all fronts, effectively ambushing them.

Word was that the Egyptian Minister of Defence, Abdel Hakim Amer, panicked and ordered all units in Sinai to retreat. The pride of the Egyptian people, the largest and most heavily equipped Arab army, had been defeated. Egypt had yielded: broken and humiliated. The screams of the Sinai – now littered with the empty shells of tanks and ashen remains of burning vehicles – resonated through the heart of Egypt.

The Naksa, literally the ‘setback’, as it came to be known, marked more than just the disheartening defeat of the united Arab armies. It marked an entire generation – like a giant birthmark smack bang in the middle of our foreheads.

I first heard the term ‘children of the Naksa’ the year I turned forty. On 28 July 2007, Mona Eltahawy – an Egyptian-born international journalist, with whom I had worked – wrote in the Washington Post: ‘My birth at the end of July 1967 makes me a child of the Naksa . . . We Children of the Naksa were born not only on the cusp of loss but also of the kind of disillusionment that whets the appetite of religious zealots.’

Somehow, reading about the circumstances of my birth put everything into context for me. Though my parents left Egypt in 1969, the significance of the setback felt so familiar to me. I had always felt that my life was eclipsed by an indelible stain that I couldn’t quite put my finger on. I’ve always felt like I was never quite good enough – a setback – and I have spent much of my life striving to prove that I am good enough – most of the time to the wrong people.

My parents were part of Egypt’s massive working class. They were not the elite who holidayed in Europe and sent their children to be educated in private boarding schools in the United Kingdom or the United States. They weren’t the uneducated poor masses either, who lined up for weekly rations of sugar and flour at the public co-op. They were mediocre. Much like the tens of millions of middle-class, educated and practically poor of Egypt. They lived on modest incomes, in modest homes and exuded middle-class morality.

And yet, despite the circumstances of my birth, at least in my public life, I have managed to rise above the Naksa. I have enjoyed opportunities that many people would consider extraordinary: an extensive education, travel, an international reputation as a researcher and practitioner in countering terrorism and radicalisation, and a political career. Though I, and those close to me, know my struggles, to others it often feels like the most extraordinary thing about any of my achievements is that I managed to pull it all off while being female, brown and Muslim. As if somehow this particular combination presents an insurmountable challenge, the enormity of which can only be explained by some kind of extraordinariness on my part; or by the extraordinary freedoms imparted to me by the society I grew up in. There is a sense that what belies the marvel of ‘how did she do it?’ is an inherent belief that, had I been female, brown and Muslim in some other part of the world, I most definitely couldn’t have done it. Maybe there is some truth in that. I’ll leave that to you to decide.

I’ve never looked at my life through a rear-view mirror that reflects only gender, colour or religion. In fact, it’s safe to say that I rarely look at my life through the rear-view mirror at all. Occasionally, I’ll look back to see the path I’ve come down, but only occasionally. Some people manage to cruise through life like a scenic drive through the countryside. Others find themselves stuck in peak-hour traffic. Others still travel down the highway of life at maximum speed, never stopping, never letting others in and never taking in the scenery. Then there are those who road trip through life – changing lanes, taking wrong turns, stopping on the way to pick up a hitchhiker or two, constantly eyeing the next exit.

I don’t know that my starting point as a second girl child of the Naksa born to a modest working-class couple in the spring of 1967 had much bearing on my own journey. I do know that our starting lanes, or at least our perceptions of them, must have some influence on how we navigate our paths. Had the Naksa never happened, would my parents have ever thought to leave their home, their families and their lives in search of a better life?

At times, life has felt more like something that happened to me rather than something of my own design. It has felt as if I have been taken along a path on some kind of conveyor belt. At times, I have had to stop and ask myself, ‘How the felafel did I get here?’

2

Mahmoud Osman

I did not know my maternal grandfather: he died long before I was born. By all accounts, Mahmoud Osman was a simple man. He never had the opportunity to complete primary school, let alone high school. He made his living running a small textiles shop on the commercial road in the township of Minya.

The Egyptians, who like to invent euphemisms for everything, called Minya ‘the bride of the Nile’. The name seems fitting enough for a country that is known to its natives as ‘the mother of the world’. Minya sits around 265 kilometres south of Cairo in the region still known as Upper Egypt, despite the unification of the ancient lands of Upper and Lower Egypt around 3000 years BC. Colloquially, Upper Egyptians are known as Sa’idis and have long been stereotyped as mulish, unrefined simpletons, and made fun of in Egyptian popular culture and jokes. Have you heard the one about the Sa’idi who wanted to watch porn? He climbed up on the roof and hung his underwear from the antenna (it’s funny in Arabic).

Urban Egyptians like to think of themselves as more sophisticated than their conservative rural counterparts, and the Sa’idis like to think of themselves as morally superior, tougher and less feminised than the city slickers. This is not unlike the low-level cultural tensions between the city and the bush in Australia, or indeed in other countries where the stereotypical divide between ‘country bumpkins’ and ‘urban feminazis’ has been the theme for novels, films and television shows like the Beverly Hillbillies and the old Dad and Dave comedies. There’s a steady stream of fish-out-of-water movies in Egypt which draw their comedy from putting Sa’idis in situations likely to induce hilarious culture-shock moments. Most of the situations aren’t actually that far off reality. When one of my mother’s sisters, Aunt Nafeesa, who had never left Minya before, came to visit us in Australia, she had never seen automatic doors and screamed when she stepped onto an escalator for the very first time.

Considering its reputation for being the conservative heartland of Upper Egypt, my mother’s hometown produced some pretty impressive social, cultural and political change makers – poets, novelists, politicians, actors and scientists. It is the city where the Codex Tchacos – an ancient Coptic Christian manuscript containing the only known surviving copy of the Gospel of Judas – was discovered in the 1970s. But to me, it’s most notable for being the birthplace of Huda Sha’arawi – a pioneer of the Egyptian feminist movement and one of my heroes.

Sha’arawi was born in 1879 into a well-to-do family and raised in the harem system, where Egypt’s wealthy women were kept secluded and veiled. They lived in the shadows, were denied civil rights and were made to wear face veils in public. In 1923, she returned to Cairo after a meeting of the International Women’s Suffrage Alliance in Rome, at which she delivered a blistering speech on equality for Arab women: ‘The Arab women will not agree to be chained in slavery and to pay for the consequences of men’s mistakes with respect to her country’s rights and the future of her children.’ Sha’arawi stepped off the train at Cairo station and removed her face veil. It was one of those watershed moments in history that become part of the story that defines a nation’s character.

According to official accounts, she stepped off the train, scanned the crowd then removed the veil slowly and silently, either as a statement or because the act itself was carried out with trepidation. That’s not how I like to imagine Huda. I prefer to think of it this way. Huda descends the steps onto the platform at Cairo station. She eyes the crowd, draws her hand to her mouth and lets out a shrill whistle. Suddenly, everyone stops and turns their attention to witness Huda reach across her face, dramatically whip off her veil and cast it to the wind. They let out a collective gasp. The old men divert their eyes at the sight of Huda’s bare face, muttering curses under their breath. The young women smile from behind their masks, wary that their eyes might betray their hidden excitement. They watch the wind carry the black veil up, up into the sky like a wayward balloon, before turning their gaze back to Huda as she proclaims, ‘I will no longer don this oppressive symbol of patriarchy. Be gone. Be gone, oh shackle of tyranny. Let the wind carry you far as I lift my face to the light, for I will no longer live in the shadows. I will no longer be hidden and I will no longer stay silent.’ For a minute the crowd is still and then one by one the women in the crowd remove their veils, and Huda’s spectacular gesture is met with cheers and applause. That’s how I would have done it.

Although the real story is not as eventful or entertaining as my dramatic retelling, Huda Sha’arawi’s actions that day sparked a trend across Egypt as women all around the country cast off their veils in solidarity and defiance. So how ironic that nearly 100 years since the day when Egyptian women cast off the face veil as a symbol of an oppressive patriarchy, women in Australia should be having a conversation about the right of Muslim women to wear a full-face veil. More on that later, but suffice it to say that the face veil has long been considered a political tool of oppression and one that many women fought hard against.

Sha’arawi spent her life championing the rights of Egyptian and Arab women. She died in 1947, having received Egypt’s highest civilian honour but still unable to vote. She didn’t live to see Egyptian women finally granted the right to vote in 1956.

The feminist wave that had started to wash away the stain of inequality in the big cities of Cairo and Alexandria was yet to reach those on the urban outskirts. In the 1940s many women in Minya still wore the face veil. This, combined with the fact that he himself lacked education, was why my grandfather’s determination to ensure that his daughters were all educated was so curious.

The single photograph I have seen of my grandfather shows him looking very much like the quintessential Sa’idi male: a dark tan leathered by hours of working manually in the hot sun, a peppered moustache (but no beard), round eyes and a small nose. He wore the traditional dress that is still favoured among the Sa’idis – a long flowing robe, or galibeya, and a white turban wrapped around his head. My mother inherited many of his facial features, but most noticeably his distinctive eyes – small but piercing. I don’t have my grandfather’s eyes, nor any of the facial similarities that I see in many of my maternal cousins, nephews and nieces that characterise them undoubtedly as descendants of Mahmoud Osman.

Mahmoud Osman, had he been alive today, would be grandfather and great-grandfather to a clan of around 100. Egyptian families were big back then. I’m talking ‘Duggar family, reality TV, nineteen kids and counting’, big. My mother is the sixth and youngest child of Mahmoud Osman’s first wife. He went on to have another two wives – not unusual for the time – and fathered twelve other children (that we know of). My mother has not met all of her half-siblings but has remained close to her full-blood siblings (four older sisters and an older brother), and the half-siblings closest to her in age. It is also not unusual for the children of different wives to hold some animosity to the subsequent wives and their children. Though polygamy is permitted in Islam and men are allowed up to four wives (why anyone would want four wives or four husbands is beyond me), the practice has never enjoyed much social acceptance in Egypt, where women whose husbands took second and third wives were often treated as cast-offs.

The men who frequented my grandfather’s shop would counsel him on how to raise his daughters according to the social norms of the time. His brothers would tell him that their nieces did not need an education. That it was wasted on women. That all a woman needed to know was how to cook, clean and bear children. But my grandfather would not heed their words. He insisted that his daughters would all complete their school education and become qualified.

My mother’s face always lights up when she talks about her school days. She was cheeky and loved being spoiled by her father, who often overlooked her mischief because she was the youngest child of his first wife. She loved playing tricks on people, but would often end up hiding under the bed from her uncles, who were much less tolerant of her behaviour and often took it upon themselves to hand out the discipline my grandfather didn’t have the heart for. I find it difficult to picture my mother as anything but a boisterous and rascally child. Though she is old now, I can still see that mischievous smile that must have melted her father’s heart.

Minya has one of the highest concentrations of Coptic populations in all of Egypt, and most of her friends at the Francophone school she attended were Coptic. Ever since I was a young girl, my mother would tell me stories of growing up in a unified Egypt, where Muslims and Copts lived together harmoniously, united by national identity. Sadly, religious extremism has fuelled sectarianism, while Egyptians of my mother’s generation cling to the memories of a better time when churches and mosques were equally respected as houses of worship, when Muslims and Christians would walk down the street and greet a priest and a sheikh with equal deference.

My mother excelled at sport, especially basketball, or so she tells me. To her dismay, her International French Baccalaureate did not qualify her to attend Cairo University and her dreams of studying sport at a higher education level were crushed.

Unbeknownst to my mother, my grandfather was already making inquiries into her education and plans for her future. He asked about nursing school and was told that times were changing. Nursing was no longer seen as a profession for ‘loose’ women with low morals or women who had no male protector. Women in Cairo, even well-educated women from good homes, were becoming nurses and teachers. Perhaps my grandfather fancied himself as a progressive. Perhaps he just wanted the best for all his children. Perhaps having five daughters had taught him that women were created for more than just the pleasure of men.

By the time my mother had finished her schooling, my grandfather had already enrolled her into nursing school at Qasr El Eyni – the research and teaching hospital in Cairo. Established in 1827 as a military hospital, Qasr El Eyni became the first hospital to function as a medical school in 1837 when it became affiliated to the medical faculty of Cairo University. My