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Embodying Ambivalence: Muslim Australians as ‘Other’ Arthur Saniotis This article explores the ways in which Muslim Australians are attributed with ‘otherness’, and how such constructions are articulated in social practices. More precisely, it sketches out how contemporary social constructions of Muslim Australians, and their social expressions, constitute a means of restoring existential control among non-Muslim Australians post–September 11. Generic misrepresentations of Muslims throughout the western world can be identified within the current Australian milieu, where many Muslim Australians are treated as pariahs. In this social context, orientalist tropes are selectively played out in the representation of Muslims in media and public arenas, a process that has contributed significantly to ‘Islamophobia’. However, the current Australian Islamophobic practices do not merely serve to perpetuate the constructions of Muslims as Other but are also prompted by the national concern for redressive action. The polemics of ambiguity and control In his insightful book Minima Ethnographica (1998),1 the anthropologist Michael Jackson explores how otherness is constructed and experienced intersubjectively. Jackson views the Other as allowing the restoration of existential control through the disarmament of its perceived or actual threat.2 For Jackson, the ambivalence that is often ascribed to the Other violates our taken-for-granted lifeworlds. Consequently, the self is prompted to strategise ways for maintaining its integrity. Any encounter with the Other entails ‘ontological risk’, which must be redressed.3 Seen in this way, the ‘Other’, for Zygmunt Bauman, evokes a polemics of risk and loss:4 ‘The threat he [the other] … carries is more terrifying than that which one can fear from the enemy’.5 This ‘horror of indetermination’6 the Other provokes precipitates what Jackson calls ‘existential stratagems’ of control.7 Jackson’s and Bauman’s descriptions of the Other as a source of ambivalence suggest a postmodern condition of the type suggested by Ziauddin Sardar.8 Where modernism’s fetish is the meta-narrative, postmodernism’s hallmark is the apotheosis of indeterminacy. The bane of indeterminacy is not new. Heidegger spoke of it in terms of ‘throwness’ (geworfenheit); human beings are born into the world not of their choosing, a world that existed prior to them and which will continue to exist after their passing. Jackson opines that human beings revoke the indeterminacy of their ‘throwness’ through various strategies, including resistance, fantasy, manipulation, coercion, criticism and fabrication.9 Richard Rorty takes the idea of the porous nature of reality further by constructing a world predisposed to magical realism. Truth is a narrative — the inventory of maya (illusion).10 Using Rorty’s theorem, the stranger who does not adhere to our version of the truth must not be permitted to deny our sense of Colour existence. As a consequence, the Other must be dispossessed of his/her ‘irrational’ power. In a similar vein, Bauman concludes, ‘If the stranger cannot be made non- existent, he can at least be made untouchable’.11 For instance, when Cynthia Ozick speaks of the German ‘final solution’ as a ‘job of editing’,12 it does not preclude untouchability (the forced exclusion of European Jews) as a method of effacing Jewish ties from the German psyche prior to their ultimate extermination. The German final solution was a landmark in the aesthetics of magical realism. Never before had the Other been made so irrationalised by the myths of the state propaganda machine. Similarly, as I will show, the construction of Muslim Australians as Other is also tainted by negative projections, and such construction has led to a rise in xenophobic practices by non-Muslim Australians. Australian Muslims as ‘matter out of place’ In her seminal text Purity and Pollution (1969), Mary Douglas demonstrates people’s apparent fixation with conceptually ordering their lifeworlds according to categories of cleanliness and dirt.13 According to Douglas, anything that does not fit neatly into a specific category is invariably considered to be anomalous and dangerous; in other words, ‘matter out of place’. In this light, placing shoes on tables, eating in toilets or strolling naked down the street all contravene western notions of social classification — they constitute things that are out of their proper order.14 In western societies, such acts often induce levels of anxiety and demand redressive measures as a way of restoring the social order. In Jackson’s terms, ‘matter out of place’ may be suggested to highlight universal concern for the retrieval of existential control when the conceptual order is either violated or perceived to be under threat. In Australia, the idiom ‘matter out of place’ finds its homologue in the way in which Muslim Australians have been consistently marginalised and misrepresented for over one hundred years. Muslim Australians were frequently represented by the press and ordinary citizens as morally reprobate, and they were associated with a series of pejorative images. The Bulletin of 17 July 1886 describes how a group of Muslims were refused official permission to perform their prayers in a park, so prayed ‘on a piece of waste land on the St Kilda Road [Melbourne], to the great entertainment of a crowd of deranged larrikins who watched the proceedings’.15 In an article published on 13 March 1903 entitled ‘The Afghan Menace’, socialist editor of the Barrier Truth R S Ross ‘attributed everything from sexual depravity to brutality and gross superstition to Afghan Muslims who were by breed and nature a bird of prey’.16 Nineteenth-century Australian policy-makers treated Muslims entering Australia with circumspection, referring to them as ‘undesirable immigrants’.17 In 1903, two years after the Immigration Restriction Act was inaugurated,18 the Naturalising Act was introduced, barring Asians, Africans and Pacific Islanders (except for New Zealanders) from becoming naturalised.19 Males from these countries who had lived in Australia for ten years or more were also categorised as ‘undesirables’.20 While commonwealth policies of exclusion were aimed at banning unwanted Muslims from entering Australia’s ‘white’ borders, action was required to address the issue of Muslim Australian residents. The practice of 50 Arthur Saniotis marginalising Muslim Australians became an increasingly successful and strategic ploy for controlling the Other. There is a sense of déjà vu between the representations of Muslim Australians made in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and that of the present day. The image of the Muslim ‘encroacher’ who is out of place has again received resurgent support in the Australian national consciousness. In an examination of what may have propted this resurgence, H V Brasted’s idea of ‘Muslimness’ is useful. ‘Muslimness’, Brasted notes, has been reduced to a sweeping monolith, a truncated identity ‘regardless of cultural diversity and geographical location’.21 Muslims everywhere tend to be indiscriminately lumped together as an almost ‘identikit’ species; a people of fanatical faith, responsive to the call of religious leaders to topple liberal, secular governments and to set up in their place anti- modernist regimes.22 Like Frankenstein’s monster, whose human agency is misunderstood by others, Muslims are imagined as being hopelessly trapped in premodernity — not ‘fully human’; a veritable ‘Muslimstein’.23 The presence of the Muslim Other is represented as a ‘radical break’24 from Australian urbanity in a present-day revival of western cultural myths regarding Muslims and difference. Indeed, Samuel Huntington’s controversial essay ‘The Clash of Civilisations’ (1993) relies on a theory of mythical ‘fault lines’ of ‘civilisation’ forming boundaries delineating the west from the non-west. Huntington’s thesis underscores a view of the west that is concerned to define the Other according to ideas of civilisation.25 As Dorothy Barenscott contends: The West is most often signified in the images through its institutions, technology, and modernity, while Islam is pictured as traditional, religious, aggressive, and ubiquitous.26 The perennial pre-modern/modern binary informs Australian discourses of Islam and the west. It, too, is a discourse of ‘matter out of place’. Australia under siege: managing national space In Australia the 1991 Gulf war became a landmark in the politics of exclusion. The Australian media promoted itself as national gatekeeper. Negative depictions of Muslims and Arabs became routine. Where previously Muslim Australians had enjoyed some degree of social anonymity, they are now objects of the national gaze. A common media theme implements ‘nationalist practices of exclusion’.27 The public questioning by some Muslim Australians of Australia’s involvement in Iraq resulted in cries for them to be repatriated.28 John Laws (a prominent and influential radio announcer) of Sydney Radio 2UE came to the national rescue by declaring to those miscreants, ‘Go home … It’s all simple … If you wish to condemn Australia’s involvement in the Middle-East on personal grounds, then go home’.29 These disturbing commentaries were duplicated by an array of newspaper articles from late December 1990 to early 1991. Most noteworthy were articles written by journalists Greg Sheridan30 and John Stone.31 These articles elaborated David Pryce-Jones’s thesis of a monolithic ‘Arab culture’ inherently drawn to violence. In this scenario, Arabs emerged as the arch-opponent of an ‘understanding and progressive’ west. According to Sheridan, it was imperative 51 Colour that the west ‘intervene so forcefully that it breaks Arab attachment to Arab culture’.32 Similarly, Stone vented the so-called white Australian angst about ‘our ill-considered immigration policies and so-called multicultural policies’, which have allowed ‘many Arabs — and even more Muslims — into Australia’.33 One of many newspaper letters to the editor expressed such nationalist sentiments: To our 300,000 Arab enemies. There is an airport at Mascot with aircraft there to take you home. Do not interfere in our way of life. We have accepted you here and your religion.

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