Hanifa Deen
Hanifa Deen is a third generation Australian, of Pakistani-Muslim ancestry. She is a human rights activist and a social commentator. Her career has included a number of high profile positions including: Deputy Commissioner of the Multicultural and Ethnic Affairs Commission of Western Australia, Director on the Board of SBS, (Special Broadcasting Services) and Hearing Commissioner with the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission.
Hanifa’s first book, Caravanserai: Journey among Australian Muslims won a New South Wales Premier’s Literature Award in 1996 and was also short-listed for the Nita B Kibble Award. Her second book Broken Bangles, on the lives of women in Pakistan and Bangladesh was shortlisted in 1998 for the West Australian Premier’s Award. Another book, The Crescent and the Pen was published by Praeger in the U.S.A in 2006. The widely acclaimed The Jihad Seminar was published in 2008.
Hanifa’s new book, Ali Abdul v The King was recently published by University of Western Australia Press. She lives in Melbourne.
Website: http://www.hanifadeen.com/
Books by Hanifa Deen
-
Caravanserai
Nine years ago award-winning author Hanifa Deen set out on a journey to show the 'human face' of Australian Muslims. Now, in the shadow of September 11 and the Bali bombings, she revisits the people she originally interviewed to discover how recent international events have affected their daily lives.
Winner NSW Premier's Literary Award 1996
Details
Shortlisted Nita B. Kibble Award 1996 -
Broken Bangles
This fascinating book explores the many and varied lives of Muslim women from Bangladesh to Pakistan: mavericks, feminists, and starry-eyed foreign wives; actresses and socialites; urban professionals and rural women who have never left their native villages. Their stories are conveyed with humour, compassion and insight.
Shortlisted West Australian Premier's Literary Award 1998
Details -
The Jihad Seminar
In March 2002, three Muslims attend an evangelical Christian seminar promoted to reveal the inner secrets of Holy Jihad. Shocked by what they hear, they convince the Islamic Council of Victoria to lodge a complaint against Catch the Fire Ministries, under a controversial new hate speech law. A case expected to be over in three days turns into an unholy war of words lasting five long years. Freedom of speech versus freedom from vilification is under the spotlight.
Award-winning author Hanifa Deen follows this case from beginning to end, witnessing the religious impulse at its best and worst. Her very human account focuses on the personalities and motives of the two religious tribes: Muslims and born again Christians. Real people on both sides of the courtroom express their pain and their innocence at a hearing that turns into a nightmare.
Details -
Ali Abdul v The King
Award winning author Hanifa Deen enters the wonderful world of the archives and discovers a tribe of men with a hidden history – men whose stories are rarely told: the ‘Ghans’, cameleers, ‘sepoys’, hawkers, herbalists, and pearl divers, known collectively as ‘Mohammedans’ in early Australian history.
Mahomet Allum, wonder herbalist and ladies’ man, bush battler Ali Abdul, the feisty Afghan Rock men, and Sam the republican pearl diver, are some of Deen’s ‘men from the archives’. To others they are troublemakers and ‘lustful aliens’. Unwelcome and a threat to Australian workers, these are the dark strangers in the days of the White Australia Policy, when race was used to classify people and bar them from entering the country.
This fascinating collection of narratives combines Deen’s gift for storytelling with history and nostalgia as she takes the reader back into Australia’s past. These stories may even help explain some of the moral ambiguities and strange ironies that trouble us today.
Details