 Today is your last day of a tour that's taken you through the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and here finally to Beirut you're off home this afternoon. We're delighted that you came. In most of those countries I know that you've met with academics, students, clerics, journalists, members of parliament, government officials and ministers. You came to speak to them about Islam in Australia, about its diversity, about the community successes and its problems. How was it? How did you find their knowledge and understanding of Australia and of Islam in Australia? Well first it's been an amazing trip for me. It's been fantastic to have this opportunity and I've got to thank you for even thinking of inviting me out here and the range of people I spoke to is unbelievable. I mean you can list them by profession but it doesn't really capture the range of people and as far as their knowledge there's also a huge amount of diversity. I met people for whom Australia I think barely existed as a country in their consciousness and certainly Muslims in Australia barely existed. It's a failure on my part. Well no, Beirut was not in that situation but I think it's just a function of the evolution of some of their societies. If you look at a country like the UAE there are people coming from all over the world all the time to make money and occasionally they'll run into an Australian that they're not really thinking about it very much and Muslims in Australia it's just it's not a concept that they would ever think about and I think a lot of that continued actually for most of the tour. The level of knowledge about Muslims in Australia particularly was very small. Even in a country like Turkey where you have a huge Turkish population in Australia overwhelmingly most Turks don't have family in Australia because there are so many of them so you kind of think that there would be these strong familial connections that pervade through society and it isn't really the case because the size of the country and so Turkey of course has very strong relationships with Australia based on a range of things that Anzac experienced and so on but it's not necessarily connected to the Muslim communities so I was you know it was great to have that opportunity to talk to them because their experience of Islam as a community and also as a religion is highly contextual. Our context is radically different and so anything that we have to solve that I had to say to them just merely the stuff that I thought was mundane that was kind of boring and let's get to the good stuff that seemed to be the stuff that immediately interested them because I think it was so far removed from anything they thought about before as far as Islam in the world and then in Western nations. I would say Beirut was in many ways an exception to what I've said there because the connection between the Lebanese sort of the Lebanese elite if I could put it that way here and Australia seemed to be a lot stronger. They seemed to have a much better understanding of not so much the Muslim communities but the Lebanese community which of course is a very significant part of the Muslim community and then the Christian communities in Australia and even the Jewish communities they sort of had that connection more strongly and so the conversation became a much more sophisticated one immediately which was a great experience as well. Terrific. I found it fascinating myself and amazed how much I learned about the Muslim community in Australia and I sat in on the seminars that you did in Lebanon. There was great interest I thought in what you were saying about the communities in Australia particularly the diversity and I think the people you spoke to have walked away from those meetings with a much greater understanding of Islam in Australia. Did you sort of feel that? Yeah, I did get that sense. I mean I think it varied from city to city in the sense that some were coming off a low place and others weren't. But yeah I think because in the case of Lebanon you're dealing with a country that already has a diversity within it. There is no clear majority within Lebanon and so they understand the dynamics of community politics. Obviously it's played out on a much more epic scale here but they get the idea I think. They get the idea of what contestation within communities and between communities can look like. It's very different in the Australian context because you have culturalism, you have hyper diversity in Australia and a lot of that diversity is fueled by migration not merely by geopolitics and sectarianism but nonetheless I felt that there was a logic that they were trying to unlock as they were talking to me about the way that Australia works and I was really fascinated. I mean yesterday with that lunch engagement we had with some politicians and clerics Sunni and Shia and it was really fascinating because I've never spent that much time at a lunch talking about effectively local government regulations. And what was intriguing about that was the stuff they were interested in and what they were trying to figure out it seemed to me was the relationship that Islam in Australia or Muslims in Australia or really anybody in Australia has with the state. What is the basis on which that relationship is constructed? Is it constructed on a sectarian basis? Is it constructed on a civic basis as a citizen with a state? A lot of questions about religious affairs that seem to be influenced by the knowledge of France. It was just fascinating to see the local context unfold in the questions they're asking about Australia and I think that's a really important lesson for me which I always knew at an intellectual level was to see it emerge that any question you get asked from anywhere in the world has imported into it a whole lot of assumptions from that local context and our relationship as Muslims or as Australians or as both must take that into account. Well as I said it was a great experience for us and I'm sure that you've broadened the understanding and the knowledge about Australia and Islam in Australia and we thank you very much for coming. I know that in January we're hoping to get you back to the region to Egypt Jordan and to the Palestinian territories in Ramallah so all the best with that and safe journey home. No thank you very much for having me and it's been a huge thing. I mean whatever impact I've had here the impact on me has been enormous. That's the same. Thank you very much. Thanks a lot.