Saturday, 8 March 2025
The Grand Hall, Salamah College
Her Excellency the Honourable Margaret Beazley AC KC

In the tradition of Acknowledging Country, I pay my respects to the Darug peoples and Elders, past, present and emerging, whose culture, beliefs and relationship with land, water and peoples are of continuing importance to our community.

• Your Eminence Professor Sheikh Salim Alwan, Grand Chairman of Darulfatwa Australia, Islamic High Council of Australia
• Distinguished and Special Guests, all: “As-salamu-alaykum.”^[1]

Thank you for your warm invitation to join you for Iftar. It is always wonderful, and I have to say – so normal – normal for you – and increasingly normal for us as Australians of differing traditions to join with you, enjoying the hospitality that is such an important part of your traditions and which, as I understand it, extends back to the Bedouins in the 7^th century.  

It was the custom of the Bedouin tribes to share food, water and shelter with other tribes as they travelled across the vast deserts of the Arabian Peninsula.  This sense of hospitality, of sharing is reflected in the Hadith: “The food for two persons is sufficient for three, and the food of three persons is sufficient for four persons.”^[2]  

The Bedouins were early adopters of Islam and it is said that the Prophet spent his early years in a Bedouin family and thus understood the importance of extending hospitality to others. Indeed, the Prophet is reported to have said: “There is no good in the one who is not hospitable.”

True hospitality, thus, has a deep philosophical and spiritual meaning, as the Islamic scholar Professor Mona Siddiqui of Edinburgh University reminded us when she wrote: “(Hospitality) is the virtue which defines humanity itself.”^[3]  

This is the 31^st Annual Ramadan Iftar. The Association was one of the first to extend the hospitality of Iftar to people of different faiths.

It is only in coming together, hearing stories, learning and experiencing the traditions of others, in making and in reconnecting with friends that we develop understanding and grow, not as a divided community, but united in the good of humankind.  Your embrace of the community, of course, extends beyond this dinner, as is well known, and we also thank you for that. 

Tonight is an occasion of peace and harmony.  But we do know that there are some outside these doors who would seek to disrupt that, not only in your community but in others. So let me return to that word ‘hospitality’. The French philosopher Jacques Derrida, in deconstructing the meaning of hospitality in a contemporary sense, considered that it is about ‘crossing boundaries between self and other’.^[4]  

Thank you for your hospitality and the generosity and friendship of your Iftar that brings us together.

Ramadan Mubarak[5]

[1] “Peace be among you”

[2] https://hadithcollection.com/sahihbukhari/sahih-bukhari-book-65-food-meals/sahih-bukhari-volume-007-book-065-hadith-number-304

[3] Mona Siddiqui: Hospitality and Islam: Yale University Press, 2015: page 1

https://www.google.com.au/books/edition/Hospitality_and_Islam/N3OhCgAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1

[4] https://www.abc.net.au/religion/mona-siddiqui-hospitality-as-welcoming-in-gods-name/12503800

[5] “Blessed Mubarak”