Randa Abdel-Fattah is an award-winning author and an Honorary Research Fellow in the Department of Sociology at Macquarie University.

Dear Daily Telegraph,

It has recently come to the attention of your readers and people with Google alerts for Islamophobic and racist media coverage that you are extremely concerned about a current law course being taught at Australia's "most prestigious law school": Muslim Minorities and the Law .

What a remarkable piece of investigative journalism! I can only imagine how your journalist stumbled across this breaking news?

Even more incredible was your scoop that the prescribed set text for the course is about - wait for it - Muslim minorities and the law. I was shocked too. A law course that actually seeks to teach students about how citizens interact with the law?

I recall the days I studied law. We, too, were indoctrinated with courses teaching us about law. What is Australia coming to?

Perhaps I'm being facetious. Because the text is clearly more sinister than that. Entitled Accommodating Muslims under Common Law: A Comparative Analysis , it is written by Sydney University academics Dr Ghena Krayem and Associate Professor Salim Farrar. And it is published by one of the world's most renowned and reputable academic publishers, Routledge. Somebody should have a word with them. They've obviously been recruited as shari'ah law propagandists and are seeking to infiltrate Australia and shake the very foundations of our legal system with ... a law textbook.

Maybe your reporter hasn't been around legal textbooks. Take it from me, a former law student and practising lawyer: most academic law books are lucky to attract a readership of a few dozen people (including Krayem's and Farrar's families, who would have likely bought the book to show their support and read the acknowledgments and blurb for good measure).

Of course, we shouldn't dismiss the possibility that even one reader can make a difference. That appears to be, after all, the essential message of the article (your entire newspaper's philosophy, actually), which is that our society and education system are no place for provocative, challenging, even controversial arguments and ideas. Perish the thought.

Was the fear of a society of thinking, critical, well-informed, global citizens possibly what led your reporter to contact Sydney University and ask it to comment "on running a course that teaches students about Sharia Law"? Though I'm wondering if the term "common law" and the word "comparative" in the book's title confounded your reporter? Perhaps your reporter is not aware that university law courses all over the world teach comparative law courses, including courses on Islamic Law. You can take an "Introduction to Islamic Law" course at Harvard University, for example. (I mean, that university is so damn prestigious that Mike from Suits pretends to have graduated from it!)

Australia could get rid of comparative law units, remove all international legal systems and contexts from the curriculum and simply offer a single unit- Australian common law. The settler colonial origins of our common law system might make it difficult to teach this unit without mentioning the words "British," "colonialism," "indigenous law," "legal pluralism" and, heck, "genocide." But I'm sure Australia's "most prestigious law school" will be able to bring together some of the finest legal minds in the country to achieve your paper's goal that our education system remains as parochial, insulated and globally irrelevant as possible.

I want to commend you on a particularly effective part of the report in which quotes are cobbled together to add authoritative weight to this fear-mongering rant - sorry, I mean your "exclusive report."

Federal Education Minister Simon Birmingham is to be commended for honouring his ministerial profile, reminding readers of the importance of facts over hysteria and the need for universities to provide world-class courses that equip law graduates with the skills and knowledge that will make them competitive in a global context.

Or maybe I dreamt that.

Instead, we had the Federal Education Minister essentially suggesting that the teaching of shari'ah law amounts to an effort to undermine the principle of equality under the law and subvert Australia's legal framework. Even more disconcerting was the minister's office responding to the report by issuing a cautionary tale to warn universities that they must "keep in touch with Australian community expectations and that includes respect for and adherence to Australian law," and issue a reminder that "taxpayer funding" to universities is "used to deliver benefits to all Australians."

The coding behind this warning appears to be: a course on Islamic law taught to around less than thirty students is an attack on Australia's legal system, is anathema to expectations in the Australian community (the implication being that Muslims clearly don't belong to the Australian community) and delivers no benefits.

And I love how you also quote Ali Kadri from the Australian Federation of Islamic Councils (AFIC) - which is of course the leading national, respected organisation representing the entire Muslim community (that's sarcasm, by the way). It's always a good idea to get a "Muslim spokesman" to provide a story with some authority from the natives. Kadri points out that he doesn't "think we need to have religious connotations with any law because we are a secular country." I guess AFIC missed the memo on that one with its halal certification system, which operates within the bounds of Australia's legal system.

And finally, you quote "family law expert Robert Balzola" who is concerned about public funding awarded to academic research into the "Response of Australian Family Law to Islamic Community Processes." It might be a good thing to inform your readers that Robert Balzola has a few more credentials up his sleeve beyond "family law expert" - he also represented opponents of the construction of the mosque in Bendigo.

Lastly, I have a confession to make. In my first year of law at Melbourne University in 1997, I wrote an essay on legal pluralism and argued for the recognition of parts of Islamic inheritance law into Australia's legal system. My queer, atheist law lecturer gave me a distinction. I know this gives you no comfort as this is merely further evidence that the left has sold out to jihadists. But the moral of the story for me is what a narrow escape. You were after "Asians" then, or goodness knows I would have been all over the pages of the press too!

Sincerely,

Randa Abdel-Fattah

Randa Abdel-Fattah is an award-winning author of 11 books. She was a lawyer for ten years and has a PhD in Sociology, focusing on the topic of Islamophobia in Australia. She is currently an Honorary Research Fellow in the Department of Sociology at Macquarie University. Her latest novel, When Michael Met Mina, won the 2017 Victorian Premier's Literary award for Young Adults and the People's Choice award.