Reflections on Community
the cycle of enchantment, disenchantment and re-enchantment
by Jourdan Sungkar
When I moved to Melbourne in my late teenage years, I was enchanted by a rich sense of community and sociality. Around the year of 2010 there was a significant number of exciting events such as visiting scholars, comedians, academics and community leaders flying in from as far away as the US. There was an unexplainable buzz in the city. New friends, new knowledge circles, new initiatives.
When I had moved to Melbourne I had the intention to become closer with my fellow brothers and sisters in the faith.
For the first few years I kept a steady commitment to community such as the knowledge circles and community service volunteering.
I was certainly benefitting from several aspects of the community.
It was probably at the midpoint half way through my first initial 10 years in the broader community that I began to notice triggering issues that left me bothered to say the least. These issues I noticed in the community were related to inconsistencies and questionable positions that my fellow sisters and brothers in the faith held.
One of the first issues I noticed was the lack of empathy and understanding some Muslims held for people suffering from homelessness and socio-econmic disadvantage. I once gave a presentation on the issue of homelessness and more accurately, housing and accommodation insecurity. One of the listeners in the crowd made a remark that homeless people are merely lazy and should just get a job. I raised this issue with a friend and he explained that some, not all, but some individuals from successful migrant backgrounds think if they could secure a good life in Australia, then homeless people and those suffering from social issues should also.
The lack of compassion for those suffering from adequate housing and livelihoods bothered me. It bothered me as it was the same community who provided food-aid for those struggling.
This whole issue of perceptions of the homeless and the struggling began to lead into a major area of concern in the Muslim community. And that being social class, wealth, career status and what divided people amongst the community.
For a young Muslim man in his mid 20s, intentions to be married was normal. Culturally and religiously, we saw friends getting hitched as the years went by. For my own personal journey, this goal of marriage was one of the most difficult things I had to wrap my head around.
It took some years of engaging with the community but what I learnt towards the later half of my 10 years changed my life.
I learned that those attributes of perceived social class, wealth, career status and ethnic culture was a strong divider in the community. This is not to say that there aren’t married couples in the community that cross these social dividing lines. However, through my own personal experience, ethnic families can have a brutal and inhumane standard when dealing with people external to their family or culture. This sobering and stark realisation of the social divides in the Muslim community left me greatly dis-enchanted with my fellow brothers, sisters, uncles and aunties who make up the local Australian Muslim community. This understanding of social division greatly altered my perceptions of social congruency of the Muslim community.
This unfortunate feeling of dis-enchantment led me to simply try to live life and resolve this issue of social cohesion in my public and personal domains. I began my first years in Melbourne’s Muslim community enchanted and positively stimulated. And at the end of my first 10 years, my challenges with people in the community left me feeling the total opposite. The result of these experiences left me questioning the actions of people that I had engaged with for several years. This cycle of enchantment soon lead to be re-enchanted with the Muslim community at large through witnessing caring support and the existence of goodness in daily Muslim life across the Metropolitan community.
Over 14 years I have been through a cycle of enchantment that had both bitterness, sweetness and everything in between. My hope for the reader is to acknowledge the intense challenges young Muslims have in Australia, and particularly to Muslim parents who neglect the community at large and individuals within it.
I aim to hold a general sense of mercy with the broader community as we have a long way to go and need to develop in several aspects of our lives and community. However, I will forever be troubled by the lack of social responsibility and moral decency that I have witnessed in individuals and families I have dealt with in my time.
To be continued,
Jourdan Sungkar