Good To Meet You Brothers!

This morning I went to Liverpool to a friend’s place with some other classmates. No, not that Liverpool in UK. This is Liverpool, New South Wales, about an hour journey by train from Sydney. We are basically working on a group project for Engineering Design subject. Her father offered to help us and he happens to own a factory there, so we decided to go have a look and work.

It was 5.30pm when we boarded the train back, which means Maghrib was looming. True to the nature, I had this uneasiness feel of not being able to make it on time to reach home for Maghrib. Having three Muslim counterparts out of four people with me did not give any help either; they simply did not seem to care about performing their obligation. So I decided to stop in the middle of the train route at Auburn, a small, very nice Muslim town. I had been here once before, and I knew they have a mosque where I decided to pray.

I performed solat jemaah with a few locals, and finished praying when I realized that there was someone observing me. After I was done with my doa this guy approached me, and decently asked, “Where’re you from?” To which I replied, “Malaysia.” This guy seemed to be excited at seeing a foreigner at that mosque and probably keen to find out more from me, which drove to more dialogue between us, and apparently more questions from him,

“So what’re you doing here?”
“How long have you been here?”
“So how do you find Australia?”
“Well I actually have a friend who just came back from Malaysia, he went there to watch the Formula One. Do you watch Formula One?

After a series of conversation, he finally revealed his actual intention for approaching me. Apparently he noticed that I did something in my solat that is not right, and he made it a point for him to show me to right way. Later a friend of his saw us and joined in the conversation,

“Assalamualaikum. Chinese?” (as you might have expected)
“Oh Malaysia! I’ve been there!”
“Malaysia’s very nice. I found that people there’re very humble.”

To those people who read my previous two postings in my blog and decided to judge me as always trying to find a way to be critical to my home country, this piece proves that I am actually not.

By the way, the first fellow’s name is Yasser, while the second one is Mustaffa. Both are locals, but I believe hail from some Arabic countries.
The conversation continued.

“So you’re a university student? Petroleum engineering? Wonderful! It’s good to learn that we’ll be getting plenty of Muslim professionals in the future.”

I am posting this not because this was my first time meeting other Muslims in this country. My Petroleum Engineering class itself in fact has Muslims covering more than half of its students, mainly from Saudi Arabia, Brunei as well as Malaysia. Besides, I encountered hundreds of them every week during the Friday prayer. But as far as I am concern, my meeting with Yasser and Mustaffa was the first of its kind I experienced. I found that most of Muslims I am living with here choose to segregate themselves according to background, countries where they are from in place of one genuine label; Muslims. Those from Saudi never bother to greet Malaysian blokes, and pretty simply the other way round. Again, I am not referring this bigotry to all of the Muslims here. I am merely saying most of us. Those who decide not to live in such way, I take my hats off in praise for them.

Well, back to my trip to Auburn. Yasser and Mustaffa apparently had some other serious concerns and left before Isya’ while I decided to wait for one, so here goes their final dialogue,

“Good to meet you Brother.”

Indeed, it was good.