Australian Muslim Research Articles

Globalised Islam: Does it have any Impact on Australian Muslim Youth?

Globalised Islam: Does it have any Impact on Australian Muslim Youth?

Contemporary racism and Islamaphobia in Australia

Contemporary anti-Muslim sentiment in Australia is reproduced through a racialization that includes well rehearsed stereotypes of Islam, perceptions of threat and inferiority, as well as fantasies that the Other (in this case Australian Muslims) do not belong, or are absent. These are not old or colour-based racisms, but they do manifest certain characteristics that allow us to conceive a racialization process in relation to Muslims. Three sets of findings show how constructions of Islam are important means through which racism is reproduced. First, public opinion surveys reveal the extent of Islamaphobia in Australia and the links between threat perception and constructions of alien-ness and Otherness. The second data set is from a content analysis of the racialized pathologies of Muslims and their spaces. The third is from an examination of the undercurrents of Islamaphobia and national cultural selectivity in the politics of responding to asylum seekers. Negative media treatment is strongly linked to antipathetic government dispositions. This negativity has material impacts upon Australian Muslims. It sponsors a more widespread Islamaphobia, (mis)informs opposition to mosque development and ever more restrictive asylum seeker policies, and lies behind arson attacks and racist violence. Ultimately, the racialization of Islam corrupts belonging and citizenship for Muslim Australians.

The Nature and Structure of Muslim Religious Reflection

Muslims are often stereotyped as having rigid, fundamentalist attitudes. To date, studies have not examined the degree to which Muslims endorse a questing approach to religion, thus displaying openness to the exploration of religious practices and beliefs. A sample of 123 Australian Muslims and 74 Malaysian Muslims completed questionnaires including measures of: questing, as measured by Batson and Schoenrade's 12-item Quest scale (1991b) and Altemeyer and Hunsberger's 16-item Quest scale (1992); conservative religious belief, as measured by the Religious Fundamentalism Scale (Altemeyer & Hunsberger, 1992); and Muslim religious reflection, as measured by a newly developed and validated measure named the Islamic Reflection Scale (IRS). The psychometric properties of the IRS are reported with associations between the other religious measures. Findings are discussed in terms of levels of Islamic openness and questing, and implications of a targeted measure of Muslim Religious Reflection for understanding the ...

Muslims in Australia: The Double Edge of Terrorism

Self-improvement is often seen as the driving force behind international migration. In other cases, people are forced to depart because of social or political upheaval, oppression or national disaster. Finally, people may migrate for family reunion. Immigrants acquire new identities as they settle into the new society and learn to refer to themselves as, for example, ‘Australians’ or ‘British’. In doing so, a former national identity may become an ‘ethnic identity’. As they settle into a new country, migrants face numerous challenges as ethnic or religious minorities. In this paper, an historical perspective is given to settlement issues of various religious migrant groups in Australia, with a special focus on Muslims. The paper examines how a religious group can become the victim of resistance from the wider society when the group is perceived to be a direct or an indirect threat. It concludes that Muslim Australians have become the ‘current enemy’ because the perceived international threat of militant Islam is negatively impacting on them. This paper relies on both primary and secondary sources, including oral testimonies.

Australian Muslim Responses to the Discourse on Terrorism in the Australian Popular Media

The media is often referred to as a social institution in that it is a major element of contemporary Western society. Through the media, social processes create narratives or stories within interpretative frameworks that are embedded in the cultural and political assumptions of the wider society. Since the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centre in September 2001, the media has played a crucial role in the developing discourse on contemporary terrorism. In the Australian context, this discourse has emerged as one which implicates Australian Muslims, constructing them as a homogenous monolith with an underlying implication that Islam, and by association Australian Muslims, is secular resistant and at odds with the values of the liberal democratic state. Several textual analyses attest to the bias against Muslims in the popular Australian media discourse. However, there have been no studies into how Australian Muslims are interpreting and responding to this discourse. Based on research into the attitudes and perceptions of the media among Australian Muslims, this paper argues that the interpretation of the media discourse as defiantly anti‐Muslim and the perception of the media as a powerful purveyor of public opinion has impacted on the construction of Australian Muslim identity. In responding to this discourse, Australian Muslims are creating new narratives of belonging which either reinforce or reject the underlying messages that situate them outside mainstream Australia.

Introduction Special Edition: Australian Muslims and Secularism

Ten years ago, Samuel Huntington (1996) solidified his contentious diagnosis that the world was entering a new phase of geopolitical dynamics, characterized by a clash of primordial civilizations. Academically, his thesis drew scathing criticisms, not least because of his essentialist and ahistorical reification of civilizational blocks (Berman 2003, Said 2001). At a more popular level, however, the image he drew of a globe divided along clear civilizational lines, with Islam and the European/North American/ Australian West representing two of the major opponents, has attained a mythic quality. Indeed, the niceties of academic critique aside, the putative fault line between 'the Islamic world' and 'the West' now serves as a rhetorical justification for what is undoubtedly one of the driving political and social forces of our time, the 'war against terror'. It is equally forcefully used by some Muslim militants to justify engaging in terrorist activities. In an increasingly integrated world, reading and constructing social space in terms of hermetically sealed civilizational blocks has a significant effect on everyone. The most direct impact, however, is on those who find themselves situated at the fault line, Muslim Australians amongst them. Certainly, latent tensions between 'Muslim' and Australian' identifies have long been present in Australian nationalist discourses; but since September 2001, the two parts of the designation Muslim Australian have seemed to pull in diametrically opposed directions. For the people who bear that designation, this means having to negotiate their identity against a novel and often hostile social map. There are no doubt highly convincing reasons for this shift in the way Western countries like Australia have forged an ideational link between Islam and political violence and threat, specifically the appeal to Islam that those responsible for the September 11, Madrid, Bali and London bombings invoked. In truth, however, the link between faith commitments and terrorist activity, is as remote for most Muslim Australians as it is for most Christian, atheist or agnostic Australians. Nevertheless, Muslim Australians are now living in an environment where the significance of their ascribed religion is being reshaped through media discourses, public policy and, at a conceptual level, the newfound salience of the apparent incompatibility of Islam and modern secular political forms and societies. In turn, these shifts in the putative significance of Islam are made manifest both in public institutions (including laws) and the lived experience of Muslims. Muslim Australians, however, just like any other citizens, are not passive recipients of changes in public discourses about their identifies. They are actively responding to the situation by reshaping the public significance of their religious ascription themselves. For some, this has meant vigorously asserting the compatibility of their faith commitments with full and active Australian citizenship. For others, as this volume disturbingly documents, it has meant turning to sources of information and discourses that place Islam at the centre, not at the margins, taking refuge in a more closed and separate sense of identity, and in some cases, imposing these more closed inflexible interpretations of Islamic identity on others, principally women. This special issue of the AJSI originally grew out of a symposium on Islam and Secularism held at the Centre for the Study of Contemporary Islam at Melbourne University at the end of 2005. Some of the papers in this volume were originally presented at that symposium, others, consistent with the concerns of the volume were written subsequently. While the current collection of papers takes a broader focus than the issue of secularism itself, the question of both the compatibility between Islam and secularism and popular perceptions of this compatibility remains a strong theme throughout. …

If Islam is our other, who are ‘we‘?

Since September 11, the Australian media has increasingly represented Muslim Australians as essential outsiders threatening standards and values of the modern liberal democratic polity. This article traces a similar trend in a number of Western European countries, finding a link with backlashes against multiculturalism and a call for a return to putatively universal and absolute values that are being contravened by Muslims. The article also connects both the dehumanising portrayals of Muslims, as enemies of humanity, and the concomitant depiction of Western nations as the embodiment of universal values with Carl Schmitt's theory that, under such circumstances, all constraints on how the enemy is to be treated are rendered nugatory. It argues that US policies regarding torture are consistent with Schmitt's analysis. Drawing on recent literature on the historical and sociological construction of secular forms, the article then asks whether Muslims are regarded as radical enemies because they are a threat to the West's self conception as modern and secular, or whether the conflict is of a religious nature. It concludes by looking at recent political rhetoric and educational policy in Australia to argue that despite the dominant note appearing to be one of secularism, there is a notable presence of references to Christian values, indicating that it is not simply religion per se that is seen as problematic, but Islam in particular.

Home

Home

Why I Call Australia ‘Home’?

Why I Call Australia ‘Home’?

“They want us to be Afraid”: Developing a Metric for the Fear of Terrorism

There is a range of scales to measure different psychological and behavioural responses to fear in the research literature. However, there is no summative measure for community fear. In this paper the authors report on a major national survey of Australian Muslims and the broader community that creates a metric, or barometer, to measure fear among communities in Australia after 9/11. The paper will also report on major qualitative research investigating community responses to the media and political discourses on terrorism and fear. These quantitative and qualitative data provide a picture Australian Muslim communities under siege. The findings reported in the paper are a part of an Australian Research Council (ARC) project on the responses of Muslim communities to media reporting on terror.

Representation of Islam and Muslims in the Australian Media, 2001–20051

Muslim Australians believe that prevailing media attitudes towards them and their religion, Islam, disadvantages them both economically and socially. The Western media is alleged to have aggravated anti-Muslim sentiment since the 1990–1991 Gulf Crises, and after September 11, 2001 and the Bali tragedy in 2002, effectively divided the world into the Muslim terrorists (“evil”) and the civilised Christians (“good”). Within the framework of national interest and security, this paper examines whether Muslims' allegation of media bias is valid. If so, then, it will address the question, why is the media demonising this group of people, and who is to blame for this phenomenon—the media, its audience or the militant Islamic groups? This paper is based on primary and secondary sources including oral testimonies.

Depiction of Muslims in Selected Australian Media

Depiction of Muslims in Selected Australian Media

Free

Free

Students “at Risk”: Dilemmas of Collaboration

Students “at Risk”: Dilemmas of Collaboration

The Atmosfear of Terror

The Atmosfear of Terror

Embodying ambivalence: Muslim Australians as ‘other’

This article explores the ways in which Muslim Australians are attributed with 'otherness', and how such constructions are articulated in social practices. More precisely, it sketches out how contemporary social constructions of Muslim Australians, and their social expressions, constitute a means of restoring existential control among non-Muslim Australians post-September 11. Generic misrepresentations of Muslims throughout the western world can be identified within the current Australian milieu, where many Muslim Australians are treated as pariahs. In this social context, orientalist tropes are selectively played out in the representation of Muslims in media and public arenas, a process that has contributed significantly to 'Islamophobia'. However, the current Australian Islamophobic practices do not merely serve to perpetuate the constructions of Muslims as Other but are also prompted by the national concern for redressive action.

Speaking up and Talking Back: News Media Interventions in Sydney's ‘Othered’ Communities

Since August 2001, Arab and Muslim communities in Sydney's western suburbs have been caught up in a spiral of signification that linked ‘gang’ activity in the area to the standoff over asylum seekers aboard the MV Tampa, a federal election campaign fought on the theme of ‘border protection’ and global news reporting of September 11 and the ‘war on terror’. Many people who live and work in the Bankstown area responded to this intense news media scrutiny by developing community-based media interventions that aimed to shift the mainstream news agenda. Through media skills training, forums, events and cultural production, Arab and Muslim Australians in the Bankstown area positioned themselves as the subjects rather than the objects of news. This paper analyses news intervention strategies in terms of media power and the politics of representation. I argue that the activities of those working with racialised communities suggest valuable models for the wider process of improving the reporting of cultural differences in multicultural Australia.

‘Dog-Whistle’ Journalism and Muslim Australians since 2001

‘Dog-whistle politics’ was much discussed around the 2001 federal election campaign in which the Howard government used the ‘ Tampa crisis’ and September 11 to appeal successfully to popular xenophobia and insecurities. The notion involves sending a sharp message which, like a dog whistle inaudible to humans, calls clearly to those intended, and goes unheard by others. This article argues that this sort of ideological manoeuvre has been abetted by an analogous process in the tabloid press, in which ostensibly liberal, reasonable stories speak at the ‘inaudible’ level to those whose insecurity and ignorance leaves them susceptible to populist claims that their relaxed and comfortable past has been stolen away by cosmopolitan, ‘politically correct’ elites and the ‘multicultural industry’. Three examples are analysed: the stories of the women's gym and the halal hamburgers in Western Sydney, and that of the Muslim man threatened with dismissal from his Sydney North Shore professional job for praying in his lunch hour. Each was originally run as a ‘good news story’ or as sympathetic to Muslim protagonists, but provoked a backlash which generated extended ‘news’ and comment — much of it racist — and irresponsibly exacerbating community tensions.

‘Bin Laden in the Suburbs’: Attacks on Arab and Muslim Australians before and after 11 September

‘Bin Laden in the Suburbs’: Attacks on Arab and Muslim Australians before and after 11 September

Postbook: Working the Ruins of Feminist Ethnography

Postbook: Working the Ruins of Feminist Ethnography