It is just 30 minutes from the centre of Australia’s biggest city but it is easy to imagine that Haldon Street, Lakemba, is in some faraway country. The shops, the foreign signs, the languages, the clothes, the religion – it’s all a world away from the suburban Australia most of us know. It’s little wonder that tags like Muslim enclave and Islamic heartland have stuck.
The first thing that hits you is the way women are dressed. There is much variety, from the schoolgirl in jeans and a headscarf called a hijab — the name also means modesty — to a prampushing mother wearing a black niqab which shrouds her entire body, leaving only the eyes visible. The more extreme burqa, which includes a mesh screen to cover the eyes and which gained notoriety for being compulsory female attire in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, can be spotted on occasions.
Girls are covered from an early age. At Boutique Nour Al Houda in the heart of the Haldon Street shopping strip, the bargain bin sign spruiks “$5 kids’ hijabs”. The issue of female modesty has been thrust into the spotlight by controversial comments by Australia’s top Muslim cleric Sheikh Taj el-Din al-Hilaly and Perth cleric Abdul Jalil Ahmad. |