The loaded concept of citizenship

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.