Book Reviews 169

Caravanserai: Journey among Australian Muslims
Hanifa Deen

Australia: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 2003. 400 pages.

A cavaranserai was an inn where travelling Muslim merchants would gather
at night to relax after a hard day’s journey, share meals, and tell stories to
each other. These themes of travelling and storytelling set the scene for
Hanifa Deen’s wonderful book about these people, who, originally trav-
ellers themselves, arrived on the continent around the eighteenth century.
Moreover, the book is a story of Deen’s journey around Australia to collect
the stories of her fellow Muslim compatriots.

Caravanserai was originally published in 1995. The impetus behind
the book was Deen’s sense during the first Gulf War (1991) that Muslims
in Australia did not have a human face – they were known by the general
public only through negative stereotypes. She sought to tell some of their
stories to show that Muslims, just like any other group, were human



beings who “mow their lawns, are preoccupied with losing weight, worry
about their jobs and mortgages, play sport, swap jokes or tell their chil-
dren bedtime stories” (p. 8). She set out across Australia to collect their
stories. 

At the time, Deen found that Muslims were making their way in
Australia, becoming more accepted by the wider community and estab-
lished as one of many others in Australia’s multiethnic, multireligious soci-
ety. The 9/11 tragedy changed all that, and Muslims in Australia, as in other
western countries, found themselves treated as “enemy aliens.” Believing
that the clock had been set back, the author felt an urgent need to retrace
her steps to find out how her country’s Muslim communities were faring.
The result of the second journey appears as part 4, and its three long chap-
ters make up nearly one-third of the book.

Deen writes that she was asked time and again what kind of book she
was writing and, surprisingly, found that answering this question was
rather difficult. As she travelled, met people, and collected their stories, the
style of Caravanserai emerged: part storytelling and part commentary.
This combination has served her well, for her renditions of her intervie wees’
stories are beautifully written. She describes the people she meets, the
scene and ambiance of their meeting, and her thoughts and emotions as she
retells their stories. She writes so well that I often felt that I was in the
room with her, interacting with the people around her. This was all the
more poignant for me, since I am an Australian from Perth, like her, but
who became Muslim only after emigrating to Canada. Deen’s stories con-
nected me with the Muslim community in Australia that I have never
known.

Caravanserai is not an academic book, but her commentary and
insights into the state of the Muslim community are penetrating and there-
fore make the book exceedingly useful for any academic study of Muslims.
Time and again I found myself nodding at her analysis of the situation of
Muslims in Australia, since they echoed with academic observations of
Muslims in North America and Europe: the different strands of Islamic
practice and belief; the infighting and turf wars; the struggles with keeping
an Islamic identity in a secular, multicultural environment that is largely
hostile to Islam even as it promotes tolerance and multiculturalism; and the
immigrants’ struggles to settle into their new abode. 

On the other hand, her descriptions of Muslims show that Muslim com-
munities in the West are not uniformly the same. I was fascinated by her
description of Eid al-Adha in Lakemba, the largest Muslim community in

170 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 21:3



Australia. Located in suburban Sydney, this predominately Lebanese-
Australian community gathered from dawn on the street facing the mosque:

Flocks of young men stood around like peacocks or, from time to time, cruised a
little, posed a little, and sent out their messages in non-verbal code. What resem-
bled the old 1940s zoot suit – wide padded shoulders, long jackets and trousers –
came in the most amazing hues: deep purples, brilliant emerald greens, mustard
yellows and oleander pinks. Lebanese boys, with their modish hair styles and
shiny shoes, displayed a style of formal dressing that I had not seen en masse for
many a year – “cool” was everywhere. (p. 162)

Carpets are brought outside for the overflow from the mosque to pray
on, and a village-like festival occurs. Non-Muslim Australians are gathered
on their balconies, watching the spectacle. 

The last section of the book, written after 9/11, has an entirely differ-
ent tone from the rest of the book. Deen explores how a gang rape case in
Sydney, in which 14 Lebanese-Australian boys gang raped seven white
girls, became a lightening rod for Islamophobia, as part of the backlash by
non-Muslim Australians to 9/11 and the Bali bombings. Australia’s main-
stream society and media presented this incident as an example of what is
wrong with Arab and Muslim culture. And, Muslim voices condemning
the rapes were treated as suspect. The book closes with a distressing pic-
ture of how Australia treats its refugees: They are put into mandatory
detention center surrounded by barbed wire and called by numbers rather
than their names (not surprising, given that these centers are operated by a
for-profit company that runs prisons in the United States).

Although Deen is still telling stories in this section, the commentary
aspect has a stronger hand and, in fact, overshadows the storytelling aspect
evoked by a caravanserai. The commentary is a rather harsh analysis of
Australian society and its seeming inability to deal humanely with its Muslim
citizens. The book’s initial goal of showing the Muslims’ human face is
somewhat lost in these last pages – here the aim is to try and sensitize a com-
munity that is going down a racist track to the sufferings of Muslims.
However, her tone may well alienate well-meaning, but ignorant, white
Australians and undo the bridges built through the first part of the book.

I thoroughly recommend Caravanersai to anyone interested in
Muslims in the West.

Katherine Bullock
Editor, AJISS

Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Book Reviews 171