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The loaded concept of citizenship

By Jamila Hussain - posted Tuesday, 19 December 2006


The Australian Government has a series of web pages about citizenship. They provide information on why citizenship is important, an invitation to the 900,000 permanent residents who are eligible but have not yet taken up citizenship to do so promptly, the rights and responsibilities of citizenship and similar matters.

For the majority of Australians, the concepts of citizenship, nationality and identity are so closely connected that there is never a need to consider any distinction between them. If you are born in Australia of parents of Anglo-Irish or northern European descent, you are automatically an Australian citizen, have Australian nationality and will almost certainly identify yourself solely as an Australian.

If you are a migrant or a child of migrants, you or your parents may have taken out Australian citizenship, and acquired Australian nationality, but you may still retain a strong connection to the country of your birth or of your parents’ birth. Your identity then may be not so clearly and exclusively “Australian”.

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Even if you do not feel that you have a strong connection to any other country and are proud to be an Australian, you may be identified by others in the community as an outsider.

This may be because of your appearance - if you have dark skin or features which mark you as coming from Asia, or if you are of “Middle Eastern appearance”, your identity in the eyes of others may be fixed by that appearance, and or by your observable cultural and religious customs if they are noticeably different from those of the average Anglo-descended Australian.

In the words of one of my students, a young woman born in Australia but of Middle Eastern descent:

Although I was born and bred in Australia, I often found myself wondering how I was going to fit a certain mould that I thought being Australian was. … Maybe these early years of being called “wog” and “Arab” (like that is a bad thing) … forever kept within me the feeling of inferiority … I feel compelled to defend myself and my cultural background and religion all the time … all Arabs are perceived as Muslim and thus terrorists.

In recent years, it seems that the people the government, and probably the majority of Australians, who would least like to become citizens are migrants from Muslim countries. There is a deep-rooted suspicion of Muslims that has been fed by events in the past few years - the Tampa crisis, 9-11, the Bali, Madrid and London bombings, and nearer home, the horrific pack rapes committed by a few young Australian men of Lebanese Muslim background, and on account of which the reputation of the whole Lebanese community was blackened.

The prime minister appeared to be particularly alarmed by the news that the London bombings were perpetrated by home-grown terrorists having British nationality and citizenship.

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How to overcome this problem - that those who attack Australia might emerge from the ranks of Australian-born citizens?

One response advocated by many police and military experts is to increase the powers of police and ASIO and to bring in increasingly restrictive anti-terrorism laws. These inevitably have the effect of limiting civil liberties so that law-abiding Australians, Muslim or otherwise, may inadvertently be caught in the net by perhaps making a donation - in good faith - to an overseas aid organisation that may be found to have links to organisations designated as terrorists by the Federal Government, or meeting socially someone who is later suspected of being a member of such an organisation.

A second effect of stringent anti-terrorism laws is to increase the alienation of local people of Muslim background.

In this regard, it was recently reported that a committee of security and legal experts appointed by the Federal Government and headed by retired Supreme Court judge Simon Sheller has expressed serious concerns about the way in which recent anti-terrorism legislation is perceived by some in the Muslim and Arab community. It was quoted as saying that the legislation had led to a “growing sense of alienation from the wider community and an increase in distrust of authority” among Muslims and Arabs.

In fact, virtually the whole Australian Muslim community has felt itself to be under siege. Some have coped with this quite well, but for others it has been a deeply traumatic experience, feeling rejected by the country they had adopted as their own.

In 2004 the Islamic Human Rights Commission in the United Kingdom commissioned a series of reports looking at the importance of citizenship and civic values in the British Muslim community.

The reports are much too long to discuss in detail here but to summarise: the majority (80 per cent) of respondents saw no contradiction between being good Muslims and good UK citizens; the majority felt there was no serious respect for Muslims either from the government or the majority society; respondents generally appreciated the religious freedom accorded to them in Britain, but at the same time felt under continuous pressure to defend Islam because of factors such as negative media coverage, lack of legal protection from discrimination, feeling rejected by the majority society and government; and that while accepted as British citizens in theory, they were still in practice considered outsiders by the mainstream population.

While 41 per cent felt a sense of belonging to Britain, 27 per cent felt no sense of belonging. Quite likely a similar survey here would uncover similar attitudes.

From the mainstream side, it has frequently been claimed that Muslims are incapable of integrating into a modern Western society because Islam is intrinsically a violent and aggressive religion; that Muslims are engaged in a continuous war against democracy and Western values, and that in line with Francis Fukuyama’s theory of a clash of civilisations, there is no way in which Islam and the West can co-exist.

Interestingly, Fukuyama himself seems to have moved away from this theory, arguing that the war on terrorism should be demilitarised. In his speech at the Philadephia Free Library in the US this year, Francis Fukuyama observed that he receives a lot of emails saying that Islam is a violent religion and that Koran and hadith (the written record of the sayings and actions of the Prophet Mohammed as recorded after his death) mandate jihad and that this is the threat which must be faced.

(But the meaning of jihad is struggle - a difficult concept. It can mean a struggle within oneself to overcome character faults and also an external struggle to overcome faults in society. It may be conducted by speech, by writing or as a last resort by force - but only for defensive purposes.)

Fukuyama rejects this argument invoking threat saying that the form of Islam which exists in traditional Muslim societies is not the problem: the problem is with the political Islamist ideology which is most actively pursued by people who have been radicalised, principally in European societies.

For example, Muhammad Atta, the ringleader of September 11, was radicalised in Hamburg, Germany, and Muhammad Buery who killed the Dutch film maker, Theo Van Gogh, grew up in Holland and was the second generation of his family to live there. Zacarias Moussaoui grew up in a French orphanage and was a French citizen; Richard Reed, known as the shoe bomber, and the London bombers grew up in England, and so on.

Fukuyama suggests the problem lies in the disappearance of identity experienced by Muslim youth in Western, European societies, in that they reject the religiosity and cultural practices of their parents’ generation, yet feel rejected by the European society in which they live.

As an instance, he says a person of Turkish descent living in Germany, could not become a citizen until 2000, unless that person had a German mother. A Turk in Germany, a North African in France, a Pakistani in Britain and dare I say it, a Lebanese in Australia, whatever their formal citizenship status, is not accepted as a normal citizen of the country. There are exceptions, of course.

Add to that the problem of unemployment, and the result is an attraction of disenfranchised people to the ideas of people like Osama bin Laden who offer membership of a global umma (the global or national body of believers) and therefore an identity which is absent in the society in which these people grew up.

It is also claimed that Islamic theology divides the world into darul Islam (darul means the place or abode of) and darul harb (the abode of war), and all Western nations form part of the abode of war. Muslims should not live outside the Islamic state.

While mediaeval Muslim scholars divided the world in this way, the vast majority of modern scholars reject such a dichotomy as completely out of date, and argue that so long as a Muslim is free to practice his or her religion in a non-Muslim country, there is no objection to them staying there, provided that they maintain their religious beliefs and practices.

Muslims living in Western countries may in fact enjoy more freedom of religion than they would in their home countries under repressive regimes.

Swiss Muslim philosopher Tariq Ramadan, noted Egyptian scholar Yusuf al-Qaardawi, and American imam Feisal Abdul Rauf - who was invited as guest speaker at an interfaith gathering by Premier Bob Carr in 2004 - argue that it is perfectly possible for a Muslim to be a good citizen of a Europe, America or Australia.

Providing they are not required to do anything contrary to Islam, they can take up citizenship, vote and join the army - possibly to fight against Muslims in a just cause. In other words, there is no Islamic reason that they cannot undertake all the responsibilities and privileges of citizenship in the same way as any other citizen is expected to do.

It is true that traditional Islamic scholarship rejected the concept of nationality, or tribalism (asabiyyah) and required all believers in Islam to recognise each other as brothers and sisters in the universal family of Islam. In practice this ideal did not last long before the Muslim community split into a number of individual states. Nevertheless, there remains a deep feeling of community between Muslims regardless of the nation state they occupy today.

However, when a person becomes a citizen, there must be a two-way process of acceptance. There should not be first- and second-class citizenship. Just as new citizens are expected to abide by the law, respect Australian values and take pride in being Australian, so older Australians should be prepared to learn a little about the customs and beliefs of migrants and tolerate beliefs and practices which may be different from their own.

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This article is based on a talk given at a seminar hosted by The Independent Scholars Association of Australia Inc in August 2006.



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About the Author

Jamila Hussain lectures at the University of Technology, Sydney in Islamic Law and Asian Law and Culture and at the University of Western Sydney in Comparative Law. She is Australian born, of Anglo-Irish descent and a convert to Islam.

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