Good Human Beings

It’s a cold and grey Sunday morning, heavy with the threat of rain. Inside the cavernous and ornate prayer hall of the Sabah al Ahmad Mosque mosque in Monash, a man walks along the walls turning on heating units one by one. A few other men arrange fold-out tables and stacks of plastic chairs, and set up whiteboards bearing half-rubbed out traces of their last use. Near the entrance to the hall, a trolley is stacked high with plastic tubs of coloured pencils, folders of worksheets, and a printer connected to a laptop.

As makeshift classrooms start to take shape, students arrive in ones, twos and threes, waving goodbye to their parents once safely inside. The kids take off their shoes, place them in a rack, and sit in small groups on the plush carpet talking quietly and giggling.

At exactly 10 a.m., a woman stands in front of the children with a microphone.

“As salam alaykum,” she greets them.

“Wa alaykum as salam,” they respond unconvincingly.

“Let’s try that again,” the woman says. “As salam alaykum!”

This time the kids are awake. “Wa alaykum as salam!” they reply in unison.

Sumaiya Quasim did not mean to lead an Islamic school.

When she and her husband moved to Canberra in 2005, they enrolled their five kids at CIS. Sumaiya intended to drop the kids at Yarralumla Mosque for their classes and use the time to get chores done, but it didn’t quite work out that way.

At the time, the school was short of teachers. Sumaiya had previously taught a few classes at a small, family-run Sunday School in Sydney so she volunteered to help out. By the end of the year, Sumaiya was teaching every lesson she could manage and was doing her best to bring order to an organisation lacking structure.

At the CIS AGM in early 2006, most members of the executive team resigned to move on to other projects. Recognising Sumaiya’s emerging leadership, the outgoing committee asked her to take over.

“I said, ‘no, I don’t do principal, I just teach!’ [but] there was no replacement for the committee — it was just me and other dedicated parents. Within two or three weeks, after much convincing, I stepped forward to lead the new committee.”

And then, in early 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic struck. Like organisations around the country and the world, CIS found itself in uncharted waters. As Canberra settled into its first lockdown, CIS experimented with a series of sessions via Google Classroom to maintain a connection of sorts between CIS and families.

Maryam Mansuri has been a member of the CIS family since she started as a student at about seven years-of-age. Maryam now volunteers as a teacher and is a member of the CIS executive while completing her undergraduate studies at university.

When asked why she volunteers, Maryam asks, matter-of-factly in return, why she wouldn’t.

“There’s a need … It doesn’t make sense that if there’s a need and you can do it, you don’t do it. I used to be those little kids so I feel like I understand them. I can communicate with them in a fruitful way.”

Like Ashrof, Maryam believes that institutions like CIS are critical for young Muslims.

“If they don’t have a situation in which they can be normal human beings, entirely, without being shy about any aspect of themselves, then they will hide it. And it’s a great loss if you feel the need to disconnect yourself from Islam. It causes great difficulties in a person’s mind and a person’s heart in the future.”

Another student-turned-teacher is Fatin Iszam. Fatin enrolled at CIS as a senior student in 2017 after her family arrived in Canberra from Malaysia on a diplomatic posting. She volunteered as a teaching assistant in 2019 and now leads Arabic Language and Islamic Studies classes.

Fatin wants to work as a pharmacist and is remotely studying allied health at a Malaysian university, but she loves teaching at CIS and plans to continue doing so until her family is brought home from Australia.

Running CIS is a full time job and Sumaiya does it in any spare moments she can manage around her “real” job. By day, Sumaiya is a Research Assistant at the Centre for Conservation Ecology and Genomics at the University of Canberra; by night, she attends to the mountain of administration that keeps CIS running. The three hours of school on Sunday are when it all pays off.

CIS had a couple of very close calls in 2019 and 2020 with its departure from Yarralumla Mosque and the COVID-19 crisis. But to Sumaiya, the events of those years only reinforced the school’s importance. While closing down the school might have been the easy option, she says that doing so would have caused “serious damage” to the children and the community. Plus, there was a lesson about perseverance to be modelled to students.

“The youth are struggling with their identity. They don’t know where they belong. If they’re experiencing bullying or discrimination it challenges their religious identity because it’s so much easier to give it up and conform.”

CIS is as much a pastoral care organisation as it is an academic institution. And while the students’ academic performance is assessed and reported back to parents every second term, it is the less tangible outcomes of the program that primarily drive Sumaiya and her team.

“Most importantly, [we want our students] to be good human beings. You have to be a good human being before you can be a Muslim. You need to respect others and care for others to really understand God. Because it’s through our relationship with our peers and our parents and our elders and our teachers and our community, regardless of [who] they are, [that we] understand and appreciate those differences.”

As the final lesson of the day draws to a close, parents arrive to pick up their children. Some use the few minutes until class is dismissed to silently offer prayers at the front of the mosque.

Always busy but never rushed, Sumaiya stands to the side of the hall packing up materials as she talks with teachers and parents. 16 years ago, she meant to just drop off her kids and leave.

“Allah — God — has been very gracious with us. He has enabled us to do so much more than we ever anticipated.”