Islamophobia and Everyday Multiculturalism in Australia

Randa Abdel-Fattah

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781138894532
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351717823
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book explores Islamophobia in Australia, shifting attention from its victims to its perpetrators by examining the visceral, atavistic nature of people's feelings and responses to the Muslim 'other' in everyday life.

Based on ethnographic fieldwork, Islamophobia and Everyday Multiculturalism sheds light on the problematisations of Muslims amongst Anglo and non-Anglo Australians, investigating the impact of whiteness on minorities' various reactions to Muslims. Advancing a micro-interactional, ethnographically oriented perspective, the author demonstrates the ways in which Australia's histories and logics of racial exclusion, thinking and expression produce processes in which whiteness socializes, habituates and 'teaches' 'racialising' behaviour, and shows how national and global events, moral panics, and political discourse infiltrate everyday encounters between Muslims and non-Muslims, producing distinct structures of feeling and discursive, affective and social practices of Islamophobia. As such, it will be of interest to social scientists with interests in race and ethnicity, migration and diaspora and Islamophobia.

1Islamophobia and racial Australianization

Theoretical discussions about the meaning and usage of the term Islamophobia are plagued by debates about the appropriate definitional, conceptual and epistemological approach. Islamophobia remains a contested term, defined in different ways by scholars across multiple disciplines. Is it a ‘multifarious and wide-ranging’ phenomenon, capable of being incorporated under a single neologism (Allen 2010: 21), or is it a distinct ideology (Allen 2010: 190) in the tradition of Thompson? Does the ‘phobia’ in Islamophobia reduce the term’s meaning to ‘fear of Islam’, or is a focus on the word’s semantic origins, simply ‘etymological fundamentalism’ (Sayyid 2010: 13)? Should we instead look at how the word is used; its use in language (Wittgenstein in Klug 2014: 447–448)? Is it the case that the theoretical history of race and racism offer an understanding of the phenomenon’s meaning by approaching Islamophobia as an expression of racism in a world–historical perspective (Taras 2013: 420; Grosfoguel 2012)? If so, is Islamophobia a form of ‘new racism’ (Barker 1981) or ‘cultural racism’ (Modood 1997; Grosfoguel 2012)? Is it epistemic racism, ‘subalternizing and inferiorizing Islam to downgrade Islam as spirituality but also as an epistemology’ (Grosfoguel 2012)? Alternatively, can the phenomenon be framed through a moral panic model (Morgan and Poynting 2012)? Still yet, is the problem not Islam or Muslims per se, but religion itself, so that Islamophobia represents a form of ‘religiophobia’ (Geisser 2003 in Lopez 2011: 557)? Or, should it be the case that because Islamophobia cannot be ‘broken down analytically’ as it has no ‘essence’ or ‘constituent elements’, we should instead look to its ‘range of deployments’, in other words, its repertoires of practices and uses (Sayyid 2014)? This is, in fact, the understanding of Islamophobia that I consider most productive and is certainly borne out in my participants’ accounts.

I locate my book among arguments that contemporary manifestations of Islamophobia are contingent on the world–historical, ‘rooted in the historical inheritance of a conflictual relationship that has developed over many centuries involving the overlap of religion, politics and warfare’ (Weller and Purdam, 2001 in Allen 2010: 25), while still evolving in distinct ways across different national contexts (Zebiri 2008: 43). As a settler colonial project of the British empire, Australia was constituted through the dispossession, genocide and domination of its indigenous population. The epistemological, ideological and Christian organizing frames for this colonizing mission were rooted in European ideologies of race, and entangled in the global cartography of power ‘heterarchies’ that emerged in the modern/colonial world system (Grosfoguel 2006). Acknowledging this inherited history is not, however, a call for a transnational, blanket ‘model’ or definition of Islamophobia. This would fall into the trap of what Pugliese (2002: 150) describes, in the context of whiteness studies, as ‘atopicality’, namely, the disregard of ‘the critical differences of historically situated and discursively embodied subjects’. I want to therefore stage a critique that attends to the geopolitical location and historically situated emergence and logics of Islamophobia’s Australian formation. To do so, I enroll David Theo Goldberg’s (2006) interactive and relational methodological framework of racial regionalizations. Goldberg (2006: 332) seeks to emphasize that ‘the force of race assumes its power in and from the thick contexts of the different if related geopolitical regions in which it is embedded, the specific conditions of which concretize the notion of race representing them’. He argues a concept of racial regionalizations to outline ‘regionally registered racisms’, ‘regional models or mappings’, which link to their dominant state formations and which enable us to identify racism’s ‘socio-material and intellectual conditions of emergence, logics, social manifestations, effects and implications’ (Goldberg 2006: 333). Importantly, this analytical scheme emphasizes ‘a logic of historical interaction’. ‘Particular countries or regions’, he argues, ‘have taken on elements of such racial modalities developed and finessed elsewhere, out of related histories of racial articulation not quite their own’ (Goldberg 2006: 334).

Following Goldberg, we might then ask, what has race and Islamophobia meant in and to Australia, with its ‘histories of racial thinking, expression, imposition and exclusion’? What are the ‘material and intellectual history, prior conditions and typical modes of articulation’ of race, in an Australian context? Because this model emphasizes the historically interactive and overlapping landscapes of racial mappings, Australia’s foundation as a settler colonial outpost of Britain in the eighteenth century reveals much about the principal source of ‘racial Australianization’. Because the focus of my study is Islamophobia, my discussion is largely confined to ‘the Muslim’ in racial Australianization, and so I will begin with an overview of the Muslim presence in Australia.

The Muslim presence in Australia

According to the 2011 Australian census, Australian Muslims constitute 2.2% of the population, with 476,290 Muslims in Australia, making Islam Australia’s third largest religion. Australian Muslims come from 183 countries. The largest proportion (38%) are Australian born. Two fifths are of North African or Middle Eastern origin (41.9%) and about a quarter are of South and Central Asian origin. While the first Muslim contact with Australia in the seventeenth century took place before European settlement by way of Macassar people coming to the north coast on fishing expeditions, official Muslim migration to Australia dates back to the mid 1800s, with the arrival of a number of Afghan camel drivers (Kabir 2004: 5). Brought to Australia with their ‘ships of the desert’ to assist with the development of semi-arid regions, the discrimination and exploitation the Afghans experienced were based primarily on economic grounds. This is not to fall into the trap of assigning what Patrick Wolfe criticizes as a ‘rational calculus of interests’ to accounts of race and racism. The economic was inextricably bound up with the ‘emotional intensity’ (Wolfe 2002: 53) of the appeal of the Afghan as inferior. The claim that the Afghans were justifiably exploitable had purchase in a climate of racial theories that delineated non-white peoples as degenerate. Employing Afghans as cheap labour was, however, an ongoing cause of resentment among the white working class, culminating in significant labour disputes between European carriers and Afghan camel drivers in the 1890s, particularly with an exacerbation of white economic competition, following the discovery of goldfields in Western Australia in the late nineteenth century. Various efforts were made to curtail the presence of Afghans who, as Frederick Vosper, a key figure in the Anti-Asiatic League at Coolgardie, lamented ‘flock into our fields to compete with the men of our own race and blood (Kabir 2004: 51). The risk of not acting to remove the Afghan camel drivers and other non-Europeans from the colony was ‘that a low degenerate mongrel race of human beings will follow where they lead’ (Kabir 2004: 51). Vosper’s anti-Afghan tirade reflected the entanglement between race and economic factors – white unemployment, competition and economic depression – in the 1890s. The trajectory of moral panics around the Afghans can also be traced to Afghan inter-marriage with Aboriginal women and European women from the lowest socio-economic levels, which provoked the rhetoric of the perverse Muslim man whose deviant masculinity threatened to ‘contaminate’ white women (Aly and Walker 2007: 206). Discriminatory legislative measures eventually culminated in the Immigration Restriction Act 1901 or ‘White Australia Policy’, which reduced the Afghan and overall Muslim population to a few hundred (Kabir 2004: 58).

According to Jayasuriya, the idea of a ‘unique and distinctive’ Australian culture was integral to the definition of nation (2002: 41). The framing of Australia as a white island continent, as a ‘far-flung outpost of Europe’, was based on the logic of racial inferiority and inequality. But, as Ang (2003: 57) argues, there was more to this racist ideology. Australia’s geography – its ‘empty’ distant, vast land mass on the south-eastern fringe of Asia – produced a paranoid ‘threat ethos’ of invasion and annihilation of white Australia by the ‘Asian hordes’. The White Australia Policy was intended to serve as an antidote to this potential threat of ‘foreign’, non-white contamination. As Perera argues, Australia, as a racially exclusionary state, was constituted by an attempt to ‘replicate the ersatz racial purity of Europe through its policies for elimination, by a barrage of means, of the Indigenous population’, and then its legislative measures for racial purity (2005: 31). The goal was to ‘build a white man’s paradise in the South Pacific’ (Wolfe 2001: 872). The effect was to render whiteness ‘a palpable, material and eminently quantifiable category against which those to be excluded were measured, rather than one that functioned as an implicit structuring presence’. ‘Those to be excluded’ were ‘multiple racial others’: non-white others, indigenes and aliens (Perea 2005: 31).

Notwithstanding these efforts, demographic studies in the 1930s predicted a population decline (Lopez 2000: 44), culminating in the federal government of the Australian Labor Party (ALP) committing itself, in 1945, to a programme of post-war mass immigration. ‘Whiteness’ was the criterion for migrant selection in order to preserve the dominance of Australia’s Anglo-Celtic majority and guarantee entry of only the most assimilable migrants. Most desired were Britons and then Northern Europeans. Southern Europeans ranked lower, followed by the least desired: Asians and other non-whites (Lopez 2000: 43). Pugliese (2002: 153) has written about how ‘whiteness’ as a category was not a ‘homogenous thing-in-itself’ but defined ‘topically, with its “historically contingent ethnic variations”’. He cites the following 1920s lament regarding Italian entry into Australia:

I admit this vast hemisphere [Australia] needs population, but for heaven’s sake, if we must import it, let it be the right sort, and something we can physically and morally assimilate. The fair-haired, blue-eyed, pure-blooded Northern European, no matter what nationality, I have always found to be a good citizen, but when it comes to the hybrid scum and backwash, the hucksters and beachcombers of the Mediterranean shores and islands, it is up to someone to protest. Some of these people were good men 2,000 years ago … That, however, was in the long ago, before the Moor invaded the southern portion of Europe and tainted the different races with his blood and discoloured their cuticles.

(North Queensland Register, 29 March 1920: 49)

Pugliese’s critical examination of how Southern European races were considered degenerate in a wider history that invoked the Moors’ invasion into Southern Europe (2002: 159) speaks to the legacy and enduring impact of Europe’s encounter with Muslims on ‘whiteness’ as imagined and constructed in Australia. Under the White Australia Policy, the only acceptable Muslims were Turkish Cypriots with British passports, European Turks and a small number of ‘white’ Muslim refugees from Albania (Cleland 2001: 24). Between 1947 and 1971, the Muslim population of Australia increased from 2,704 to 22,311 (Cleland 2001: 24).

An implied policy of assimilation underpinned government migrant settlement policy during post-war immigration, between 1945 and the early 1960s (Lopez 2000: 2). Immigrants were expected to abandon their foreign ways, language and traditions. Assimilationism was explicit in its valorization of a national ethnocentrism that constructed ‘Australianness’ as British-Anglo (Forrest and Dunn 2007: 701). The emergence of ethnic clubs and organizations, as well as the use of foreign languages, was perceived as a threat to the hegemony of British–Australian culture. For all the ‘lofty’ goals of creating a nation of assimilated individuals, material settlement assistance and migrant welfare needs were generally limited (Poynting and Mason 2008: 233; Koleth 2010: 4). Institutional support did not change to accommodate the influx of migrants because catering to migrant needs ‘was not egalitarian and unfairly favoured migrants over Australian-born’ (Lopez 2000: 49).

A critical response to assimilationism emerged in the early 1950s (Lopez 2000) with assimilationist policies coming under attack from church and interest groups, and reformist elements in the ALP opposed to the White Australia Policy. The political campaign to reform the ALP and challenge the notion of a racially classified society laid the groundwork for the ALP to contribute to subsequently establishing ‘multiculturalism as a basis for migrant settlement, welfare and community relations policy during the early 1970s’ (Lopez 2000: 53). Lopez argues that the failure to support and resource migrant settlement and welfare constituted the ‘Achilles’ heel of assimilationism’, facilitating an informal shift towards integrationism (Lopez 2000: 57). Integrationist thinking, while still considering national unity under a dominant Anglo-Celtic heritage and identity as the supreme end, considered greater cultural diversity more positively (Poynting and Mason 2008: 233) and tolerated migrant cultural practices, save those that transgressed common ‘core values’ (Lopez 2000: 58).

A combination of domestic and international factors, during the 1960s and early 1970s, influenced the progression towards multiculturalism, including increasing global migration from non-Western European sources, post-war decolonization and heightened international anti-racism consciousness, higher rates of return migration f...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Series editor’s preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: crudely Islamifed mannequin man
• 1 Islamophobia and racial Australianization
• 2 Muslim religiosity, symbols and spaces
• 3 Multiculturalism and indigestible muslims
• 4 ‘Lebanese Muslim’: a Bourdieuian ‘capital’ offence in Bayside
• 5 Affective registers and emotional practices of Islamophobia
• 6 When the other otherizes
• Conclusions: ‘attention to inattention’
• Appendix
• Index