Muslim academics must speak up

The difficulty in confronting these questions, and the relative comfort of silence, is not explicable in terms of conformity alone. Another cause is the complex identity that lies behind the popular image of a uniform Arab-Muslim community.

What Australians see as a monolithic community is in fact a disparate assemblage of religions and traditions: it includes Copts, Maronites, Assyrians, Druze, Chaldeans, Melkites, Jews and sundry Christians: 20 million souls in all. They have lived in the Middle East since the Flood.

They speak Arabic but are not Muslims. At least in Australia, most of these minorities rarely identify themselves as Arabs. Most of them believe - as do other Australians - that identity is self-defined.

Why then would they speak up about the behaviour of one errant cleric who is from another country, another religion, another culture, another world?

Some Arab-Muslim academics have offered a simplistic politics of identity. They maintain that the Arabic language is an identity marker and that being born in the Middle East results in a new form of Arab creation. They would be puzzled by the reply that just as the German language is not the province of Germans alone, neither is Arabic restricted to Arabs. Like English, the Arabic language spread through conquests; minorities had to adopt it to survive.

There is a misleading consensus among Arabists that Arab identity rests on religion: that is, that of Islam.

Rachel Bloul of the Australian National University, an expert on minorities, makes a similar point when she refers to academics who "seem to think that some of the major obstacles (to integration) come from the various Muslim communities themselves, or more properly from the particularistic (ethnic, national, sectarian) ties within" these communities. She is right to be sceptical about this argument.

Ultimately there is no substitute for self-criticism among the Muslim academics of Australia. An academic should by definition be enlightened and liberal in inclination. We no longer need a new Gandhi or Mandela to lead us: liberation must take place within each person. It is my hope that the silence of Australia's Arab-Muslim academics is a temporary period of introspection.