It's easy to hate people of a particular race or religion when we've never spent time with them. One student discovered that understanding the person behind the veil made all the difference.

By MARLENE MILLOTT

On September 12, 2001, 10-year-old Harry* woke up, saw the TV, and got his first taste of Islam. The images of planes seized by terrorists destroying the World Trade Centre buildings in New York were burned into his brain, and fuelled a hatred of the religion.

More than a decade later, Australians are being confronted by images of Islamic State militants beheading Westerners. The Government responded with new military action in Iraq, and Islamophobia was once again on the rise.

But now Harry is in love with a Muslim woman, and he is seriously considering converting to Islam.

Harry, a 23-year-old former trainee mechanic, is studying a Bachelor of Arts at Monash University. He grew up in the Bayside area, in a predominantly Anglo-Saxon community, with little exposure to people from different races or religions.

The attacks of September 11, 2001, went a long way in shaping the community’s attitudes and opinions of Islam, including his own.

“The idea that seeped into the community where I grew up was that it was an evil religion and an evil force," Harry said.

“My idea of Islam was people who flew planes into buildings and men who enslaved their women and made them wear certain clothes and stay at home.”

The turning point came last summer.

As part of his Arts degree, Harry has been studying the Indonesian language. Over the summer, he was given the opportunity immerse himself in Indonesia for two months during a program called the Australia-Indonesia Youth Exchange Program (AIYEP).

Each day in the Muslim-majority country, adzan would echo from the mosques calling the faithful to prayer. In time, he found it brought him peace.

“(Before AIYEP), I had a very fixed view of what I thought a Muslim was and what Islam is,” Harry said.

“I had those views changed through AIYEP by really getting to understand and know some people.”

It wasn’t just the experience of living with Muslims that changed Harry’s perspective; he fell in love with a woman who embraced everything he had previously hated about the religion.

Harry had long taken issue with the headscarf or hijab, viewing it as a symbol of Islam’s repression of women. He could not understand why women would wear it voluntarily.

He said that when he first met Cinta*, a 24-year-old devout Muslim from Banten, he thought: "You’re obviously stupid because you let men wrap a tea towel around your head.”

As the weeks passed, he began to see her fun and caring personality, rather than just her hijab.

“Meeting Muslim women who wore hijabs humanised it. Interacting with them and working together closely with people and becoming friends with them made me see the person, not the headscarf, and that changed a lot of attitudes for me.”

Harry fell in love with Cinta during his two months in Indonesia, and they have since stayed in touch through Facebook.

In early July, he flew to Jakarta to visit her, and realised that to make their relationship a reality, something would have to change.

“If a relationship was going to work, either she would have to change her religion or I would. She’s not going to, so I will.”

“That’s when I decided to take it more seriously … things started to make sense.”

As he seriously considers this drastic change in his life, Harry worries about how his family will respond to it. While he believes his mother would eventually understand, he knows it will be an issue with his father and brother.

“I think shock would be the first reaction, and anger ... there’s some very prejudicial attitudes there that would be hard to overcome.”

“My brother, I think he’d be very annoying and hard to deal with. I’d expect comments like ‘you f---ing Muslim'.”

But as a convert from hate to love, Harry isn’t too bothered about what others think.

“Getting to know Cinta completely changed a lot of my attitudes to life, and a lot of my prejudices and how I view what life was all about.”

“I wouldn’t have got to this point now if I hadn’t met (Cinta) … it feels like meeting her was part of somebody else’s plan, not mine, it was fate.”

*Not their real names