The trials of being a role model
Rick Feneley
December 13, 2008
Fresh face ... Iktimal Hage-Ali, Abdul Rahman Deen and Sheik Fehmi Naji El-Imam at John Howard's anti-terrorism summit in August 2004.
Photo: AFP/Torsten Blackwood
JOAN OF ARC was a teenage heroine until she was burnt at the stake for heresy at 19. At the same age, Iktimal Hage-Ali was well on her way to becoming a feted Australian - and a "role model" for young Muslims - until her reputation was torched in a blaze of headlines about a cocaine bust.
Unlike Joan of Arc, Hage-Ali is no saint. By her own admission she was a regular cocaine user for at least a few months in 2006, even while a hand-picked member of the Howard government's Muslim advisory panel, and even as she worked for the NSW Attorney-General's office as a much-valued project officer.
But before the news of her arrest emerged, there were already mutterings among fellow Muslims about the small heresies of Hage-Ali, then just 22.
This daughter of Lebanese immigrants did not wear the hijab. She wore make-up and, by some observations, dressed immodestly. Her outspokenness on Muslim affairs upset even her father and brother, she revealed this week.
She had dared to tick off John Howard when he singled out Muslims for failing to speaking English and embrace Australian values. And she had the audacity to broadcast her disgust at her fellow advisory panel member, Sheik Taj el-Din al Hilaly, when he said women who wore make-up and no hijab were "uncovered meat" and asking for trouble.
"She was a very modern girl," the chairman of the now-defunct advisory group, Ameer Ali, told the Herald this week. This had not troubled Ali, who said she made a positive contribution, but it did bother Hilaly.
And then Hage-Ali took it too far. On November 30, 2006, she sipped champagne at the Art Gallery of NSW to celebrate after she was named the state's Young Australian of the Year. Talkback radio and The Daily Telegraph leapt to defend her against a "hate campaign" on Muslim websites. The Telegraph gave Hage-Ali her own, albeit short-lived, blog.
Little did her accusers know, but eight days before she accepted her award at the art gallery, police had knocked on the door of the Hage-Ali family home at Punchbowl. They had been tapping her phone calls for the past three months and had taped her coded conversations with her childhood friend and cocaine supplier, Mohammed "Bruce" Fahda. When police from the Middle Eastern organised crime squad arrested her that day, they say her mother protested: "Not Iktimal. She's the good one. You must have got it wrong."
Hage-Ali's friends have suggested, anonymously, that she was arrested and persecuted because of her thoroughly modern approach to Islam.
But for the past week, the humiliating details of Hage-Ali's drug abuse and questionable connections have played out in the District Court, in a case that she has initiated. Now 24, she has been in self-imposed exile in Dubai, where she fled in December 2006, citing threats against herself and her family. But she has returned to sue the NSW Government for damages of up to $750,000 for false arrest and false imprisonment.
Indeed, she is suing the same government that would welcome her back to her job with open arms, according to testimony in the court from the assistant director-general of the Attorney-General's Department, Michael Talbot. He called her an "outstanding young officer".
Hage-Ali was released without charge on the day of her arrest, and the nub of her case is that police arrested her only for the wrongful "collateral" purpose of catching Fahda and his cohorts. When being questioned, she claims, she was subject to ridicule and racist threats, including from an officer who had told her: "You said you were no one's meat, but in here you're everyone's meat."
For their part, the police will argue they had a reasonable apprehension from their phone taps that Hage-Ali was involved in drug trafficking, even if there turned out to be no such evidence. She had told Fahda that she needed more drugs to supply to others, but Hage-Ali argues this was a lie and they were all for herself. Among her reasons: she needed to stock up but did not want to admit - even to her drug dealer - that she would be using cocaine during Ramadan.
Regardless of the merits of her case, this week's hearings have brought Hage-Ali more embarrassment, even shame. She admits she made mistakes but she told the court she was not ashamed that she took cocaine. "I still did a good job." But she had tried unsuccessfully to have her name suppressed and she has undoubtedly felt the peculiar burden of being not only a young Australian role model but also a young Muslim role model. She never claimed this mantle. It was foisted upon her and it has made her fall from grace all the more humiliating.
Hilaly is out of the country but his former spokesman, Keysar Trad, president of the Islamic Friendship Association, told the Herald that Muslims never chose her to represent them - she was imposed on them by the Howard government. Rather, he suspects Hage-Ali - young, attractive and unveiled - was chosen as a photogenic face of Islam for non-Muslim Australia.
"A so-called Muslim leader drinks champagne and takes illegal substances - and this sends a terrible message to young people. And the government sees her as a role model. The Muslim community never did."
A young Muslim woman who has worked alongside Hage-Ali in community forums, Zouhour El-Ghoul, said yesterday she was "devastated" by her actions.
"Whether she likes it or not, she did put herself forward as a role model - and she abused that trust," said El-Ghoul, a 24-year-old youth worker and soon-to-be-admitted lawyer. She said the whole community was "under the microscope" and, unfairly, the actions of one reflected on all Muslims. By suing the state, Hage-Ali was drawing more attention and discredit to the community.
In court, Hage-Ali revealed her family had not approved of her boyfriend and this was among the reasons for her depression at the time she was taking cocaine. This was the time that, publicly, she was on her pedestal.
In an interview with the Herald in late 2006, she said she "would never pretend to speak on behalf of all Muslims". But she was happy to speak out to defend the rights of young Muslims. (This role had included her veiled sisters who were abused and vilified for choosing to wear the hijab.)
She saw her future then more as a political adviser than a politician, although, if someone offered her the job of minister for youth, "I wouldn't turn it down".
Such an offer now seems highly unlikely. Whatever comes of her case against the state of NSW, Iktimal Hage-Ali has learnt one hard lesson. At the dawn of the 21st century, it is no easy thing to be a thoroughly modern Muslim girl.
Sydney Morning Herald
