Article written by Nahid Kabir author of Muslims in Australia.
Muslims in Australia and the Global War on Terror
In 2001, Australian Muslims numbered 281,578 which formed 1.5 per cent of the total population (Australian Bureau of Statistics). They are an ethnically diverse group but some of them have become disadvantaged because of their religion. The government has passed anti-discrimination laws for the protection of minorities. Yet prejudice can not always be eradicated from a small section of the wider community. In Muslims in Australia: Immigration, Race Relations and Cultural History, the author explains within a time span of 140 years how the discriminative factors − race and colour – have been replaced with religion ‘Islam’.
The alarming world events since September 2001 are impacting on the daily lives of Muslims. With the increase of political Islam’s aggression against the West, the moderate Australian Muslim minorities are confronted with the question of loyalty and patriotism. Apart from the traditional factor of racial threat, the visibly conspicuous Muslims are at times also considered both a security and a cultural threat. However, these moderate Islamists reject any form of violence as a means of achieving the objectives of political Islamists and endorse Australia as their home. They have rejected the September 11 attacks as unacceptable, and are distressed to learn that Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda network have used Islam to achieve their nationalistic goals. Australian Muslims have disassociated Islam from extremism and are appalled by those who have presumed to act in its name to take innocent lives, whether at home or abroad, and thereby place Muslims everywhere under siege in one form or another.1
The global war against terrorism may well contain the Al Qaeda group – Osama bin Laden, Dr Ayman al-Zawahiri, Khaled Sheikh Mohammad, the Taliban leader, Mullah Omar, the Jeemah Islamiyah leader Abu Bakar Bashir, Jordanian extremist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and an Al Qaeda leader in Saudi Arabia, Abdel Aziz al-Muqrin – however some political analysts anticipate it may also only attract more radical Muslims to Al Qaeda’s anti-Western ideology. Support for political Islam has already grown further with US intervention in Iraq. The bomb attacks against Westerners in Istanbul, Riyadh and Madrid clearly exhibit it. The beheading of US civilians Nicholas Berg in Iraq and Paul Johnson in Saudi Arabia that were claimed to be a response to the Abu Ghraib prison abuses have once again revealed the extent of radical Islamists anti-US hatred.
Although US President George W Bush has said repeatedly that the war on terrorism is not a war against Muslims, the failure of US occupation to bring stability to Iraq, the Abu Ghraib scandal and Bush’s past support for Israeli’s tactics against Palestinians have led many Arabs – Muslims or others – to question that claim. Edward Walker, a former US ambassador to Israel and Egypt and now president of the Washington based Middle East Institute insists that “The way we are going is leading us toward the very thing we say we want to be against, which is (a) clash of civilizations”. Husain Haqqani of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace agrees that many Muslims now see the world as a clash between Muslim and the West.2
Like the Bush administration, the Howard government has emphasised its involvement in Iraq in terms of national security. The capture of terrorist suspects David Hicks and Mamdouh Habib reveals that Australia is not immune to the Islamists’ threats. Charges against Jack Roche for conspiring with key Jemaah Islamiah and Al Qaeda terrorists to bomb the Israeli embassy in Canberra, and against Bilal Khazal, a former Qantas baggage handler who was charged with collecting or making documents likely to facilitate terrorist acts only confirm this.3
The Howard Government recognises the West’s vulnerability to the extremists’ aggression and has introduced 17 pieces of anti-terrorist legislation. It is also currently promoting a new Anti-Terrorism Bill. While such a response (and Australia’s contribution to the war in Iraq) is framed in terms of national security, some lawyers and the civil libertarian groups are concerned that the country has become a police state. The new piece of legislation is considered to further jeopardise freedom and civil rights of minorities.4 In their 2004 publication, Australian Citizenship, political analysts Brian Galligan and Winsome Roberts claim that this recalls “the darker side of jingoistic patriotism that can blight citizenship” and lead to further restrictions on democratic freedoms.5
In the aftermath of the 2002 Bali bombings, the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) raided the homes of some Australian Muslims in Sydney, Melbourne and Perth. New South Wales Council of Civil Liberties President Cameron Murphy said that on the surface these incidents looked like a campaign of harassment, and that the lack of charges resulting from the 30 or so raids indicated nothing more than a “fishing exercise or publicity stunt”. He claimed ASIO had relied on “speculation, innuendo, rumour and conduct taken out of context.”6
In March 2003, Australia’s Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission launched a project in response to the growing complaints of discrimination from Arab and Muslim communities. The Commission listened to the experiences of over 1400 Arab and Muslim Australians and found that a majority felt that there has been increasing racist, abusive and violent behaviour against them since September 11, 2001. People who were identifiable as Muslim because of their Islamic attire, language, name or appearance, were subjected to racial abuse and suspicion. Others, mistaken for Muslims, have also been attacked – including Sikh men wearing turbans and Christian Arab men and women who were targeted because of their Arab names.7
This is reminiscent of a disturbing mood during the 1990–91 Gulf Crisis, when some Arab and Muslim people became victims of hate crimes. In Muslims in Australia certain factors leading to such discriminatory incidents have been analysed. In recent years some Muslims and members of the wider community remained critical of the Coalition’s involvement in Iraq and their international tactics to combat terrorism because with hindsight it may increase Australia’s vulnerability to Islamic militants’ aggression. While many Muslim people pledge allegiance to their host country, their loyalty has not convinced some sections of the wider society.
During World War I and World War II, propaganda, censorship and surveillance were practised in Australia, as they were elsewhere, in the interests of state security, and enemy aliens were interned. The international communist movement was also regarded as threatening. Syndicalists were imprisoned, strike action was routed by military intervention during World War I, and right-wing Home Guard vigilante groups made a brief appearance.8 In times of any political crisis, Australia’s nationalistic spirit reaches a peak.
However, when the Australian Government, with the onset of the Cold War, formally tried to outlaw the Australian Communist Party, Australians defeated the move by rejecting the referendum proposals.9 This positive sign revealed that Australians gradually began to experience liberty. Finally, in the 1970s, a major shift to equality and freedom took place and people of all ethnic backgrounds began to enjoy Australia’s established democratic heritage, which was less evident during the ‘White Australia’ period.
Regrettably, with the rapidly changing international political environment, some Australian Muslims are being perceived as “enemies of the time”.
The West Australian newspaper has reported that the Westpoll found that a quarter of Western Australians believe that allowing Muslim immigrants into Australia would increase the risk of terror attacks in the country. The poll also found that one in eight WA voters believes all Muslims should be banned from coming to Australia.10 Although this is a clear minority, what is reinforcing such negative perceptions? Is racism, cultural fundamentalism, identity conflict or nationalism the underpinning factor? Conflict analyst Daniel Druckman suggests that individual’s self-identity that results from religious or ethnic group membership is “critical to a sense of self-worth” and that people “learn to react based on their loyalties” to their group. Such loyalties “differentiate whom in their environment it is appropriate to support and whom to avoid” and “can foster a consensus among members that becomes self-fulfilling and difficult to change. The stronger the loyalty, the more likely members of a group are to hold similar views and endorse similar strategies.” Druckman emphasises that this group “approach the world in lockstep, perceiving and defining others in the world similarly. There is little, if any, chance for discrepant information to filter through or for reasons to change to be considered.”11
This indicates that collective identity and individual identity are not merely co-constituted – as political analyst Rodney Hall suggests, they are mutually reinforcing and therefore likely to become institutionalised.12 Under the circumstances, the cultural identity of the Muslim minority in the West is likely to remain in conflict with the ideas of the wider community. And as long as the war against the radical Islamists persists, the moderate Muslims are likely to remain in an unchanging environment of suspicion and surveillance.
Notes
1. Amin Saikal, Islam and the West: Conflict or Cooperation? (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillian, 2003), p. 19.
2. Author Unknown. “Killings Convince Muslims of the Clash of Civilizations”, The Australian, 21 May 2004, p. 7.
3. Ted Lapkin, “Prisoner of his Own Making”, The Australian, 21 May 2004, p. 13; Martin Chulov and John Kerin, “Terrorist Suspect ‘Tortured’”, The Australian, 21 May 2004, p. 1; Editorial, “Roche's Terror Trail Littered with Lessons”, The Australian, 31 May 2004, p. 6; Belinda Hickman and Gosia Kaszubska, “Roche Sentence ‘Pathetic’”, The Australian, 2 June 2004, p. 1.
4. Editorial, “Standing up for Liberties”, The Sydney Morning Herald, 13 April, 2004, p. 10.
5. Brian Galligan & Winsome Roberts, Australian Citizenship (Carlton, Victoria: Melbourne University Press, 2004), p. 137.
6. Author Unknown, “Muslims Condemn ‘Heavy-Handed’ Tactics”, The Age, 1 November 2002, pp. 1 & 8.
7. Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, Isma –Listen: National Consultations on Eliminating Prejudice Against Arab and Muslim Australians (Sydney: Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, 2004).
8. Galligan & Roberts, Australian Citizenship, p. 138.
9. Ibid.
10. Ben Martin, “1 in 4 says Muslims a Terror Risk”, The West Australian, 14 April 2004, p. 5.
11. Daniel Druckman, “Nationalism, Patriotism and Group Loyalty: A Social Psychological Perspective”, Mershon International Studies Review, supplement to International Studies Quarterly, 38, suppl. 1 (April 1994), pp. 43-66. Cited in Rodney Bruce Hall, “Collective Identity and Epochal Change in the International System”, in Yoshinobu Yamamoto [ed.], Globalism, Regionalism & Nationalism: Asia in Search of its Role in the 21st Century (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), p. 57.
12. Hall, “Collective Identity and Epochal Change in the International System”, p. 57.
