Islamic outreach group Ummah United says ASIO risks radicalising young Muslims in need of mentors
By the National Reporting Team's Mark Solomons
ABC
January 21,2014
It was the "gangster feel" of Muslim outreach organisation Ummah United that caught the eye of Tayyab Khan.
The young Logan man liked its ideals of brotherhood, sticking up for each other no matter what, and its image, the menacing black hoodies and T-shirts with their crossed-swords emblem.
Deliberately pitched to attract disaffected young men who might slip into the grip of street gangs, it was a high-risk strategy on the part of Ummah United.
"That attracted me," Mr Khan said.
"Yeah. That aggressive feeling."
Rather than reinforce what he calls his previous "bad habits", Mr Khan says Ummah United steered him away from the street gang lifestyle he once had.
"It's the same as hanging out with my boys from back in the day, but it's clean, it's a clean environment," he said, surrounded by other men from the group who have met to share snacks and gossip at a Lebanese cafe.
Young muslim man at Logan's Ummah United centre
"We speak about religion, we speak about good things, different topics, the same as hanging out, like we're doing here."I would have done the same with my friends. But it would have led to something else that wouldn't have been good for us."
Robbie, who did not want to give his full name, is an older man with even more of a chequered past, darkened by substance abuse, relationship breakdowns and run-ins with the law.
He once had a good job working for Centrelink, but then got involved with drugs while working as a bouncer in Brisbane's Fortitude Valley nightclub precinct.
"Within six months, I'd racked up pages of charges," he says.
He credits Ummah United - and his conversion to Islam - with keeping him out of trouble.
"I was hanging out with other Aussies ... our culture is to go out and get pissed in the pub, you know; if you don't have a beer there's something wrong with you," he says.
"So for me to walk away from that lifestyle completely, I needed to surround myself in a clean environment. Islam is a clean environment.
"Ummah United has given me a more intimate family within Islam."
Sharing a sense of alienation
Mirways Sayed, who set up Ummah United in 2012, can relate to the young men who attend the centre, their frustrations and sense of alienation.
He came to Australia as an Afghan refugee in the late 1970s and used to drift around and get up to no good on Brisbane's Southbank, before it was redeveloped. He still sometimes struggles with his English.
Mr Sayed says his idea was for a community centre with its doors open to everyone, Muslim and non-Muslim, to "get them off drugs, street violence, jail, and encourage them to become a better person".
However, the organisation's idealistic open-door policy has come at a price.
David Toalei, who has been linked to the Bandidos, was an Ummah member.
He made the news in June when he was Tasered and batoned into submission by police on the Gold Coast after a rampage in which it is alleged he fired a shotgun inside a taxi and tried to hijack a milk float.
If that was not bad press enough, Ummah made the news again in September after it emerged that people who had attended Ummah meetings included the brothers of a Brisbane man suspected to have carried out a suicide bombing in Syria.The ABC knows the man's full name but has chosen not to publish it.
It cannot be verified that the man, whose nom de guerre was Abu Asmaa, was involved in the attack on an airport in the east of Syria on September 11.
The only publicly available source material indicating Abu Asmaa was Australian are tweets in Arabic from Jihadi social media commentators including one called Abu Hasan, who claimed he had helped the man's bereaved family financially by buying his car.
The incident is a touchy subject for the close-knit community in Logan, many of whose members know the man simply as "Junior".
One Ummah United member who is close to the family interrupted 7.30's interview with Mr Sayed, saying the ABC was making too many assumptions about the man's involvement.
The group's potential links to radical Islam have excited the interest of the authorities, with Mr Sayed reporting multiple visits to the centre from the Australian Federal Police and ASIO officers.
The ABC asked Mr Sayed if officers had presented any evidence of wrongdoing. He said they had not.
ASIO visits give centre a bad rep
Some of the younger men privately complained to the ABC of frequent unannounced visits from ASIO at their homes.
The increasing attention has Mr Sayed worried that the pressure from the authorities has put the centre's future at risk.
"ASIO going to parents and going behind our backs and going to parents and asking questions ... people are a bit, you know, worried," Mr Sayed says.
"People are stopping their kids coming here and the place is getting emptier and emptier.
"Maybe if the authorities keep pressuring us like that, maybe this place will be closed."
According to Mr Sayed, if kids were not at the centre, "they'd probably be on the streets...in shopping centres, after the shopping centre's closed they're probably God knows where, in the city, outside, breaking and entering, stealing, all sorts of things".
A bridge back from radicalisation
Imam Uzair Akbar, from nearby Holland Park mosque, sees Ummah United not just as an alternative to the enticements of crime but, more importantly, as a fragile bridge between the mainstream and the radical fringe.
Appointed the group's spiritual adviser, the Imam aims his weekly religious talks at disaffected young men – and maybe even the women listening hidden in an upstairs gallery - who might be tempted to drift towards Jihad.
He acknowledges that he knows of young people "who are disturbed by what is happening in the Middle East".
The Imam is fighting a powerful force: radicalisation via the Internet. It was agreed early on that there should be no computers in the centre.
"If we do not occupy the youth, give them a purpose in life, then there is a possibility they may go to sites that incite hatred," he says.
"This centre will negate that. If people come to this centre on a regular basis, they will become part of the mainstream."
If the Imam is right, breaking Ummah United's link to the underground could be doubly counterproductive for the authorities, with the risk of shutting off a source of intelligence.
Says Imam Akbar: "If any person has any thoughts that can damage the fabric of this country, the beautiful fabric of this country, we will be the first to highlight that. We will not keep it behind closed doors."
investigations@abc.net.au
Topics: islam, religion-and-beliefs, drugs-and-substance-abuse, police, security-intelligence, logan-central-4114, qld, sydney-2000
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