Australia's Will Establish First Islamic Museum Early 2014

For three years a corporate banker has been striving to realise his dream of establishing Australia's first Islamic museum.That dream will be a step closer to reality with a formal announcement tonight that the project will go ahead.

Simon Lauder visited the site of the museum in Melbourne and discovered some little known connections between Australia and Islam.

SIMON LAUDER: Just a few kilometres north of Melbourne's CBD, Moustafa Fahour is planning to transform an old warehouse into a cultural hot spot.

MOUSTAFA FAHOUR: This part of the building is sort of three levels so I'll first show you upstairs...

SIMON LAUDER: He wants the museum to have a distinctly Australian flavour.


MOUSTAFA FAHOUR: This is a working model of what the museum will look like. Using that red desert colour you can see the metal mesh with Islamic traditional calligraphy that swivels right around but inside here is a billabong.


SIMON LAUDER: So even in the design I can see you are deliberately blending Islamic culture and Australian.

MOUSTAFA FAHOUR: Exactly, and that's why it called the Islamic Museum of Australia because most of the board, we're all Australian Muslims.

SIMON LAUDER: Mr Fahour has dedicated years to this project and there's still a long way to go.

MOUSTAFA FAHOUR: I should have realised building a museum can't be done on the side of my full-time job as a corporate banker. I had to commit to this full-time and I really wanted to see this museum come up and that is how much I believed in it.

SIMON LAUDER: The museum will have four permanent exhibits - Islamic Practices, Islamic Art, the Contribution of Islam to Civilisation, and Australian Muslim History.

That's the one Mr Fahour feels most passionate about. He undertook a tour of the Australian outback to gather that history first hand.

MOUSTAFA FAHOUR: We covered 13,000 kilometres. We were at five states, a territory including Arnhem Land. We sat with a number of academics and said let's hear the story.

SIMON LAUDER: He was surprised to learn that visitors from Indonesia brought an Islamic influence to Australia before European settlement.

MOUSTAFA FAHOUR: To see that the Indigenous traded, inter-married with Indonesian Muslims is amazing and just to hear that history and to see that influence and we were lucky enough to be there and be invited in Arnhem Land is phenomenal and to be able to document that history and put it together and have it in one centre and to share it to everybody, all Australians, that makes me excited.

SIMON LAUDER: Do you think a lot of Australians will be surprised to learn about it?

MOUSTAFA FAHOUR: Being myself an Australian-born Muslim and I didn't know about it, I probably was able then to take, use probability and work out that most people wouldn't know about it let alone some of the Muslims as well.

 SIMON LAUDER: Tonight Mr Fahour is hosting a soil turning ceremony to celebrate the success of his fund raising efforts. The private sector and governments have both contributed enough funds to turn the warehouse into a museum.

Mr Fahour says the cultural backlash against Islam which followed the September 11 attacks highlighted the need for Muslims to do a better job of educating others about Islam. He says the centre will be the first Islamic museum in Australia.


MOUSTAFA FAHOUR: And it is not something that you know, I tried to be sort of proud about because I think something like this probably should have been done a long time ago.

SIMON LAUDER: Why do you think it hasn't?

MOUSTAFA FAHOUR: Maybe because of the new wave sort of, you know, if you look at Muslims in Australia, all the migrant stories, most of them are migrants like many other nationalities and religions so the time here in Australia hasn't been that great and I think it was just a matter of time.

SIMON LAUDER: The Islamic Museum of Australia is due to open by late next year or early 2014.

Source : ABC