THE nation must confront deep-rooted issues troubling Muslim Australians or risk inciting a "tectonic" event such as the 2005 London bombings, warns a British Muslim scholar embedded for three months in southwest Sydney's Muslim community.
Aftab Malik, 37, said a "sense of uneasiness" existed in Muslim Australia that he recognised in British Muslims before the July 7, 2005, suicide bombings by Islamist terrorists that killed 52 people, prompting a dramatic reassessment of issues.
"Unfortunately, it took the 7/7 terror attacks for Brits to really consider the fact we have to go beyond issues of Halal meat and the length of one's beard," Mr Malik said.
The visiting member of the UN Alliance of Civilisations, a group formed by then UN secretary-general Kofi Annan in 2005 to "counter the forces that fuel polarisation and extremism", said Australia needed to have discussions "about culture, about meaning, about belonging".
Well that is one mullah's opinion. A more popular view -- outside Lakemba, at any rate -- might be that Australia needs to confront community leaders who drop broad hints of the bombings to come unless their followers are granted immediate "attention" to their issues.
And what might those issues be, the factors that might inspire home-grown Australian Muslims to ape the explosive protest of their British-born London counterparts? Nobody seems to know, and certainly nobody quoted in the Australian's report.
Mullah Malik is on his way back to England, that shining example of multicultural unity.
The pity is that he wasn't thrown out
