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Islamophobia in Australia: the response of the academy

By Jake Lynch - posted Wednesday, 20 March 2019


Scholarly research on Islamophobia in Australia needs to be expanded and strengthened in the wake of the Christchurch shooting. Connections between the views and attitudes contained in the sinister 'manifesto' placed online by the suspect, Grafton-born Brenton Tarrant; the decades-long anti-Muslim campaign by the Murdoch press; the normalisation of hate through the lavish media exposure granted to far-right speakers both visiting and home-grown (including Pauline Hanson), and mainstream politicians' proclivity to foment and exploit divisions for electoral gain – all have been the subject of speculation in recent days, with debate rapidly dividing along familiar lines.

In the process, we have realised – or, at least, should realise – how little we actually know about such connections. Researchers should be able to furnish us with evidence about where Islamophobia 'comes from'; what it consists of; how it is promulgated and spread, by whom and for what ends, and what can be done to roll it back from the status of legitimacy it has enjoyed in our public sphere. In the process, Australia academia needs to show its mettle. Cowed by media attacks and political interference going back over many years, the official body for funding scholarly inquiry in social science, the Australian Research Council, has a marked tendency to support 'safe' projects, with no potential to expose or contest the ideological constructs commonly used for exerting and maintaining political control. Given the importance of winning research grants as a performance indicator for academics, this pattern exerts a chilling effect throughout the 'industry'. But academics – particularly, but not only, those who assess funding proposals – now need to locate their backbone.

Where could they start? I reproduce, below, a proposal I submitted five years ago to the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia (ASSA), to hold a workshop at the University of Sydney. In terms of research funding, this is entry-level stuff: worth a measly few thousand dollars, and intended to spark further inquiry. That it did not even get to first base, but was instead rejected out of hand, shows how the academy has been part of the problem with regard to Islamophobia in Australia, not part of the solution. The proposal sets out some initial precepts for a public service Australia needed its academic research community to perform, in 2015. After Christchurch, the need is still more urgent.

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Workshop title

The resurgence and exploitation of Islamophobia in Australian politics and media.

Summary of proposal

This workshop will enable scholars to exchange perspectives, with each other and with senior figures from the non-academic community, about the nature, extent and influence of Islamophobia in Australian political and media discourses, policy formation and dissemination. Outcomes will include plans for collaborative, multi-disciplinary research, using a framework based on the Runnymede Trust definition of Islamophobia. They will include recommendations for media reporting of conflicted political and social issues, and principles for informed community representations to media organisations; as well as recommendations to policy-makers seeking to build on principles of dialogue, nonviolence, equity and inclusiveness in the formation and dissemination of public policy.

Summary of proposal for public release

This workshop will consider how Islamophobia may influence – either overtly, or in implicit form – the ways in which political views are exchanged, and social affairs reported, in Australia. It will produce a plan for research, and recommendations for journalists, community groups and policy-makers who wish to counter this influence, for the sake of equity and inclusiveness in the Australian community.

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Description

This workshop will examine the social and rhetorical construction of Islamophobia as a mediated form of political control in Australia. Islamophobia is defined by Zuquete as "a widespread mindset and fear-laden discourse in which people make blanket judgments of Islam as the enemy, as the 'other,' as a dangerous and unchanged, monolithic bloc that is the natural subject of well-deserved hostility from Westerners".

When it is discussed in the Australian public sphere, Islamophobia is often dismissed using a reductive behaviourist analysis: demanding evidence of its existence in the intentional, literal words and deeds of identified actors, who can be written off as 'ignorant' and therefore aberrant in the context of a "big-hearted country". However, Islamophobia is conceptualised in recent scholarship as diffuse and therefore insidious: a discourse that is activated by invoking fears and resentments through a series of much more subtle signals, implicit in public texts including, notably, political speeches and news journalism, and exerting generative force on levels other than that of manifest content. "Rather than understanding Islamophobia as a series of actions and beliefs that target Muslims and arise from a general misunderstanding of… Islam", Stephen Sheehi urges a view of Islamophobia as "an ideological phenomenon which exists to promote political and economic goals".

This latter view has, increasingly, commended itself also to organisations working in, and speaking for, sections of the Muslim community in Australia. A statement, denouncing the Coalition government's proposed 'anti-terror laws', was supported by 82 signatories, including representative bodies and leading Muslim speakers. In devising and promulgating such laws, the statement said: "An alleged threat is blown out of all proportion as the pretext, further 'tightening' of the laws is claimed necessary and rushed through, without proper national debate or community consultation".

A "dripfeed" of government announcements to receptive media, raising fears of the "threat" posed to Australia by home-grown "jihadis" visiting Iraq or Syria to fight for Islamic State, then returning home intent on mayhem, was at that stage – August 2014 – effectively changing the focus of political debate, away from an unpopular budget and the regressive measures it contained. In Edelman's terms, a "political spectacle" was unfolding through a "mediated psychological drama"- one that "personif[ied] an issue by identifying it with an enemy… (thus) masking the material advantages the perception provides" to the authors of the drama.

The Muslim community statement closes with a call for "the wider community to take stock and properly debate these matters, instead of continually being misled by the politicians and their fearmongering". This workshop will therefore bring together both scholarly researchers, and prominent professionals from outside academia, including some of the signatories to the statement, to discuss how to foster such a debate.

London's Runnymede Trust published, in 1997, a report on relations with UK Muslims, which identified the ideology of Islamophobia as displaying eight typical framing characteristics:

  • The perception of Islam as a monolithic, static bloc;
  • As separate and 'other';
  • As inferior to 'the West';
  • As violent and engaged in a 'clash of civilisations' with the West;
  • As primarily a political ideology rather than a religious faith.
  • The routine dismissal of criticisms of 'the West' by Muslims;
  • The justification of discriminatory treatment of Muslims;
  • The normalisation of anti-Muslim hostility.

Contributors to this workshop will discuss how to operationalise these points, to derive evaluative criteria for content analysis of social artefacts such as political speeches and media reporting, in today's Australian context. What and where are the triggers for audiences to process content categorised under these headings, and what historically constructed meaning structures are thus invoked?

A second theme will be the implications of Islamophobia for social relations in Australia as a multicultural society. The workshop will look specifically at the "resurgence" of Islamophobia amid evidence that the salience of multiculturalism, as a principle in public discourse and for governmental action, has recently declined. In 2008, the incoming Rudd government established the Australian Multicultural Advisory Council, to provide advice on "practical approaches" to promoting social cohesion through positive engagement with diversity.

AMAC's first report noted the continuing importance of multiculturalism, recommending steps to tackle discrimination, prejudice and racism, and provide opportunities to all Australians for participation in community life. However, by the time the Gillard ministry took office in 2010, both government and opposition had dropped multiculturalism from relevant ministerial responsibilities.

Participation in community life must include the opportunity for diverse views to be heard, and projected into the public sphere, on matters of concern including key issues of foreign policy. This is one point of crossover between concerns over Islamophobia in the domestic political arena, and biases in Australia's orientation vis-à-vis conflict issues further afield. The Muslim community statement, referenced above, notes: "It is instructive that similar issues about Australian troops travelling abroad to fight or Jews travelling to train or fight with the Israeli Defence Force are simply never raised".

The workshop will, therefore, consider three overlapping areas of enquiry – the nature and modalities of Islamophobia, in Australian political and media discourse; its consequences for community cohesion, and its implications for Australia's responses to international conflicts.

To bring us back up to date: it was the workshop-that-never-was, but – if it had taken place – it would have been intended to lead on to a range of outcomes, both scholarly and public, in its own right; and to establish a network of academic and non-academic experts, capable of working towards being able to provide authoritative answers to the questions now on everyone's lips. It's never too late to start; so perhaps its time has come. Just don't hold your breath for any funding from Australia's tame official research establishment.

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About the Author

Associate Professor Jake Lynch divides his time between Australia, where he teaches at the Department of Peace and Conflict Studies of Sydney University, and Oxford, where he writes historical mystery thrillers. His debut novel, Blood on the Stone, is published by Unbound Books. He has spent the past 20 years developing, researching, teaching and training in Peace Journalism: work for which he was honoured with the 2017 Luxembourg Peace Prize, awarded by the Schengen Peace Foundation.

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