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. If you don’t like it, leave. How many of our 300,000 enemies are on social security?34 The politics of marginalisation became part of populist discourse for politicians and community leaders who assumed the role of ‘good white nationalists’, in Ghassan Hage’s terminology. ‘Arrest the bastards and the ship them off to their homeland’, proclaimed former Democrat leader Don Chipp,35 while Graeme Campbell (the then federal Labor member for Kalgoolie) had allegedly expressed imposing an immediate ban on people ‘where this type of religion [Islam] is a problem’.36 RSL president Bruce Ruxton’s much-publicised diatribes37 encapsulate the ‘fantasy of control’: They [Arabs] come here for the good life. If it’s so good back there, why don’t they go back. It’s about time the Arab community started treating Australia like their country.38 The above passage underlines Hage’s thesis on toleration, whereby the ‘white acceptor’ decrees the ‘Australianess of the ethnic other’.39 The ‘strategic intent’40 of Ruxton’s discourse reveals the ‘social conditions of the possibility’41 of being tolerant where the other is depicted as being intolerant of its host country. Ruxton was one prominent speaker in the contemporary period who initiated the ‘politics of narcissism’,42 which asserted the ‘essential goodness of Australia’.43 For Ruxton et al., the fact that Muslims had migrated to Australia implied the moral superiority of the nation, a logic that would not only be pathologically defended by future public figures but was also increasingly expressed as moral outrage on behalf of the Australian populace: I am sure all Australians share with me my outrage and disgust at the sight of Iraqi and other demonstrators in Melbourne at the weekend spitting on and burning the Australian flag. Just who does this rabble think it is?44 Moreover, Ruxton’s accusation that Arab Australians had burned the Australian flag during a rally in 1990 highlights the extent to which paranoid nationalistic discourses were circulating in Australia, regardless of the facts.45 The vice- president of the Australian Arab Association, Dr Anice Morsy, accused Bruce Ruxton of ‘shooting from the hip before he had the facts’, and denied that any Arab Australian had burned the Australian flag.46 Whether spurious or factual, images or reports of events such as Muslims burning an Australian flag work strategically to estrange the Other. In Jackson’s terms, the mobilisation of national anxiety provides a dynamic for generating a kind of transcendence. Jackson explains transcendence as a way of reconfiguring one’s relationship with the Other.47 It is in this light that the Muslim Other has been reinvented in what Jackson calls ‘acts of projected paranoia’.48
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The aftermaths of the 1991 Gulf war and the attacks on the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001 prompted waves of racist attacks on Muslim and Arab Australians. The Committee on Discrimination Against Arab Australians notes that Muslim and Arab Australians experienced various forms of harassment, ranging from physical assaults, damage to property (such as attacks on mosques, the most noteworthy being the firebombing of the Kuraby Mosque post–September 11),49 racial vilification in public, ‘hate’ mail, death threats and unwarranted police attention. In October 2001, the Australian Arabic Council in Melbourne reported ‘having received more than 10 threatening letters, 14 abusive phone calls, as well as several emails’.50 In one high-profile attack, ‘A schoolbus packed with Islamic children in Brisbane has been stoned in the wake of the terrorist attacks in the US’.51 According to the Committee on Discrimination Against Arab Australians, some Muslim and Arab Australians believed that police were ‘unresponsive to their complaints of harrassment’ and in some instances engaged in racist behaviour.52 Brunswick/Coburg, Melbourne. Police repeatedly referred to the busy Sydney Road, with a substantial Arab and Muslim population, as the ‘Gaza Strip’. Arab youths picked up by police were often referred to as ‘Saddam’. In one incident, an Arab woman was being harassed by four intoxicated people. A Lebanese man who intervened was beaten up. Police arrived and told him ‘this is not Iraq’. He was the only person arrested.53 Following the September 11 World Trade Center attack, assaults on Muslim women became widespread, as indicated in the following excerpt from a Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission report: In Sydney, the NSW government’s Community Relations Commission established a hotline staffed by bilingual staff. In the first five weeks following 11-9-01, the Arabic and Punjabi hotlines received over 400 calls. Just over half (55%) of callers were women and women were more likely to report both a physical and verbal assault (16% of female callers). Some of the assaults reported were serious and caused injury, even hospitalisation.54 In some assaults, Muslim women’s head scarves were violently pulled off. Some women were also beaten and spat upon by their assailants. Ghassan Hage interviewed some assailants regarding their reasons for assaulting Muslim women. He discovered that many attacks were motivated by the perceived undesirability of Muslims as Australian citizens. Typical answers were ‘ I don’t see why we have to have them here’ and ‘They’re really not the sort of people I would like to see coming to this country’.55 In response to questioning regarding why the Muslim head scarf posed such a threat, one interviewee replied: This is a Christian country. I don’t see why such backward forms of putting down women ought to be allowed. Soon there will be too many of them.56 If Hage is right, then concepts of undesirability demand a space where ‘the undesirable is defined as such’.57 Here, Hage draws an intriguing parallel between Australian national practices of undesirability and ants. While ants, Hage surmises, are not perceived as being an undesirable species, they are only considered harmful when invading human spaces or when their numbers increase
53 Colour in a way seen as threatening to the dominant space users, thereby prompting actions to exterminate them. The essence of Hage’s discourse is illustrated by a resurgence of ‘ant-like discourses’58 after the Bali bombings on 12 October 2002, which left over one hundred Australians dead or maimed. In November, the Christian Democrat MP Reverend Fred Nile urged the New South Wales parliament to ban Australian Muslim women ‘from wearing the chador in public as they could be used to conceal weapons’.59 While Nile’s insistence that Australian Muslim women should not wear the chador was linked to an idealised ‘Australian’ social space, he did not propose a total ban. He suggested that Muslim women be allowed to wear the chador at the mosque, when in their homes or when walking in the Sydney ‘Muslim’ suburbs of Lakemba and Auburn. Another interesting example of ‘chadorphobia’ came in the way of a letter to the editor in the Herald Sun, in which Sarah Potter wrote: Why must motorcyclists remove helmets before entering banks and GPOs, yet increasing numbers of fundamentalist Muslim ladies, dressed head to toe in black, with only eyes visible, don’t.60 The chador’s entrance into Australian national discourse is perhaps not surprising, given the west’s apparent fixation with Muslim veiling practices. For Nile, an outspoken proponent of the Australian right, the chador is disturbing because it allows the possibility of subterfuge. Nonetheless, intrinsic in his discourse is the west’s tendency to frame the Muslim Other as a figment of terror.
Rituals of allegiance By its nature, prejudice is rooted in fantasy; it is an exercise in offsetting the indeterminacy of the Other. In this way, fear of the Other demands an imaginative redressal where, as Levi-Strauss observes, the Other is ‘quantitatively diminished’, making it less formidable.61 Similarly, Jackson avers that the imaginative manipulation of the Other is crucial for managing its apparent incongruence.62 Pan-western fear of Muslims found its apotheosis in the aftermath of 11 September 2001. The organised stealth of the hijackers was given blanket media coverage and served to promote the myth of the ungovernability of Muslims. The western imagination has attributed Muslims with invisibility, arguably the most terrifying form of chaos. In this new era of global terrorism, the cry ‘where is the enemy?’ has spurred various nations, including Australia, to pursue strategies for reconciling their apparent impotency. In the wake of September 11, the possibility of terrorists living among us has elicited a united response — the ritual of allegiance. Here, the public’s attention is strategically directed to measure whether the level of a person’s ‘Otherness’ is a threat to Australia. On 12 September 2001, a young Muslim Australian religious leader appeared on the channel Nine Morning Show to explain that the terrorists’ actions had no mandate in Islam. The Morning Show’s presenter then asked him where his loyalty lay. He replied that he was loyal to his creator. For many incensed Australians, the Muslim leader’s failure to give an ‘appropriate’ response was reprehensible.63 The issue of Muslims and their loyalty to Australia had also surfaced in the first Gulf
54 Arthur Saniotis war. In his article ‘Whose side are you on?’, Barry Cohen made an unequivocal response to Alan Cadman’s64 controversial harangue by stating: What I want to say here and now, and at the top of my voice: WE ARE MOST COMMITTED TO AUSTRALIA.65 Other interesting examples in this vein are the spate of public apologies by Australian Muslim organisations during and after 11 September. The most noteworthy of these public declarations against ‘Muslim’ extremism came in the way of a joint media release by the Australian Federation of Islamic councils on 6 November 2002, entitled ‘Message to all the extremists of the world’. This document implored extremists to ‘reconsider their actions’. Such sentiments were also conveyed in community gestures in response to the Bali bombings: In the immediate aftermath of the Bali bombings, Muslim leaders lined up to give blood, Sydney’s Auburn Gallipoli Mosque sent a delegation to public memorial services and teachers and students from Lakemba’s Rissalah College brought floral tributes.66 Such social responses disclose the extent to which Muslim and Arab Australians have been compelled to locate themselves post–September 11.67 Since the moment President George W Bush divided the world between those nations who were with or against the United States, Muslims in the west have had to reformulate their existential boundaries — and for good reason. In a post–September 11 world, silence or avoidance in denouncing the actions of terrorists is increasingly viewed as incrimination. In some instances it has precipitated a ‘culture of apology’, where Muslim Australians are compelled to proclaim their loyalty in public. One such declaration was provided by Nadia Jamal and Mustapha Kara-Ali, who wrote: The wider Australian community needs to be reassured that Australian Muslims do not support extremism, indeed, that extremism represents the common enemy.68 Ghassan Hage contends that those who embody otherness (such as Australian Muslims, asylum-seekers and migrants) defer the unification of nationalist imaginaries between a ‘vigilant fatherland’ and a ‘gratifying motherland’.69 Hage argues that in the national imaginary, vigilance (imagined as the fatherland) regulates how much the national mother is allowed to nurture her subjects. Promising to be a good Australian is one way in which the ‘“good father” of the national imaginary’70 allows subjects to access the ‘good national breast’.71 When Democrat senator Aden Ridgeway spoke on behalf of Australian Muslims in 2003, he captured the essence of the ‘good father’ offering the ‘good national breast’ to its deprived Muslim subjects: Like all Australian schools, Australian Muslim colleges teach their students to be proud Australians and to participate positively in building a prosperous, harmonious and safe Australia … Though it has been a difficult time for the Islamic community in Australia, students at these schools are being told that, by their actions and beliefs, they can affect the way the broader community sees the Islamic faith. As part of the values of the charter, students are also taught to be model citizens, to respect the rights of others and to understand the different backgrounds that make up Australia’s culturally diverse society.72
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Ridgeway’s statement exemplifies the discourse of tolerance in relation to the Other, which has gained strength in Australia over the last ten years. Ridgeway tells us that we should accept Muslim Australians as they are striving to be ‘model’ Australians. Here, he is actively positioning the other ‘within specific limits’ in the national imaginary.73 In other words, the ‘tolerated others’ are only tolerated insofar as we accept them. In this way, while Muslim Australians are present within the national body, their existence is contingent upon those who are ‘empowered to set the limits of tolerance’.74 This is precisely the sentiment inferred from a 1995 study commissioned by the World Conference on Religion and Peace, which found that only 24 per cent of non-Muslim Australians would want a Muslim friend and 15 per cent a Muslim as a neighbour.75 Similarly, BBC correspondent Dominic Hughes wrote on 19 February 2003 that a new survey had shown an increasing pattern of Islamophobia in Australia. In addition, ‘More than half of those surveyed said that they would be concerned if a relative married a Muslim’.76 For Hage, the existence of the Other is always ambiguous, as he/she never exists in their own right, for they must be given permission to exist.77 In this way, Australian Muslims embody ambivalence.
‘I’m going to f*** you Leb-style’: violating the ‘national body’ Drawing on R Handler’s concept of the collective body,78 Eva Mackey argues that in western contemporary societies, personhood is based on the notion of an individualised ‘self-sufficient and self-contained monad’.79 Each person ‘possesses a unique identity’ and strives toward achieving personal autonomy.80 The primacy of human agency is vital in order to achieve a sense of personal authorship over one’s life. We are ‘the authors of ourselves’, writes Barbara Myerhoff,81 ‘active agents in the construction of our lifeworlds’.82 For Deborah Lupton83 and Mackey,84 contemporary western notions of the body can be traced to the Middle Ages, when the ‘closed’ body was idealised. The closed body was identified as autonomous, ordered, controlled and individuated from other bodies.85 Its antithesis was the ‘open’ body, which was unordered, unbridled, sexual and volatile.86 Mackey explains that modern nation states, like bodies, are viewed as bounded, self-regulating entities, ‘and do not allow uncontrolled penetration of body boundaries, either by other bodies or substances’.87 Like the individual body, the national body incorporates a coded regimen for maintaining personal wellbeing. In the latter, this is achieved mainly by what Mackey calls ‘civic nationalism’, in which citizens regard the nation as needing protection ‘from penetration from without and disease from within’.88 ‘Any uncontrolled penetration of bodily boundaries’89 not only results in the loss of its ‘boundedness’ but also, as Jackson notes, demands that the imbalance caused by the penetration be diminished.90 In Jackson’s terms, unbridled violation by the Other conjures up the terror of nullification. In contemporary Australia, the theme of the violation of the national body is conveyed by the gang rapes that occurred in August–September 2000. A gang of Muslim Lebanese-Australian youths from southwest Sydney raped teenage women on seven separate occasions, and also attempted to carry out other rapes.91 The gang members used mobile phones to coordinate attacks upon their victims.
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The Guardian Unlimited magazine stated that ‘during the rapes the victims were threatened at gunpoint, beaten, insulted [and] forced to perform oral sex’.92 The raped women testified that they had been subjected to racist taunts by the gang members. The court was also told that the rapes were racially motivated.93 A fourteen-year-old victim said that she was called an ‘Aussie pig’ and a ‘slut’.94 Another victim, aged eighteen, told the court that she was also called an ‘Aussie pig’ during a six-hour ordeal in which she was repeatedly raped at three Sydney locations.95 In remembering one of the fourteen men who had raped her, she said, ‘I looked in his eyes. I had never seen such indifference’. One of the gang members had allegedly hosed her down while saying ‘I’m going to f*** you Leb- style’.96 The apparent racially motivated nature of these crimes became the focal point for the New South Wales Government and the media. New South Wales Premier Bob Carr and Police Commissioner Peter Ryan were chief proponents in linking the rapes to the ethnicity of the gang members. According to the Guardian Unlimited magazine, both Carr and Ryan had ‘defended the use of ethnic descriptions’ such as ‘Middle Eastern appearance’.97 Similarly, the Australian ‘directly alleged that Muslims of Middle Eastern origin from western Sydney were gang rapists’.98 The ‘racist’ gang rapes became the trump card for a plethora of editorial letters and right-wing commentators such as the Sydney radio presenter Alan Jones, who described the rapes in terms of ‘Muslim rapes of Australian women’.99 Jones went on to state that the gang rapes were ‘the first signs of an Islamic hatred towards the community that welcomed them here years ago’.100 Campbell Reid, editor of the Daily Telegraph, also indulged in this kind of incendiary reporting when he justified his 21 August 2001 front-page headlines ‘You deserve it because you’re Australian’ and ‘Ethnic Rape Debate: Brutal Truth’. However, the most notorious diatribe was declared by Pauline Hanson, leader of the ultra-nationalist One Nation, who stated, ‘A lot of these people are Muslims, they have no respect for the Christian way of life that this country’s based on’.101 On the ABC Four Corners program of 26 August 2002 , Ghassan Hage posed the idea that the gang rapes were constructed by some Australians as ‘a white Anglo-Australian civilised Australian versus uncivilised Muslim Lebanese people’.102 For Hage, the rapes provoked the age-old male conundrum: ‘Can a tribe protect its women?’103 In other words, were the rapists actually using their victims as a means of provoking Anglo-Australian males? Tied to this logic is the idea that the failure of men to protect their womenfolk reflects the ‘climate of insecurity today in Australia’ where Anglo-Australians no longer view themselves as being ‘top dog’ in the Australian social hierarchy.104 This interesting argument has historical parallels: in the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina during the 1990s, the mass rape of Muslim women by Serb forces was used as a weapon to nullify Muslim males; it is an ancient strategy to castrate one’s foe without contesting them. The violation of Anglo-Australian women through rape belongs to the genre of unspeakable transgression. However, for Media Report journalist Nadya Stani, not all violations of Australian women are given equal public condemnation. She concluded that while 140 women are gang-raped in New South Wales each year,
57 Colour the incidents seldom receive public attention or initiate outcries for tougher sentencing.105 Responding to a police reporter from the Sun Herald, Stani went on to say that Bankstown police were worried that ‘gang rape was becoming culturally institutionalised’.106 The rape trials soon became a vehicle for reasserting the Anglo-Australian ‘top dog’ fantasy. Consider, for example, the media’s valorisation of the womens’ courage, whose horrendous ordeals were, in the words of presiding magistrate Judge Finane, one of the gravest affronts ‘perpetrated on the Sydney community’.107 The victims became virtual heroines, and the highly ethnicised gang members were given some of the longest jail sentences for rape in Australian criminal history.108 In such ways, the rapes were configured as battles in a war. The demonisation of the gang members was most pronounced in representations of their leader, Bilal Skaf. According to the Age, Skaf ‘scoffed at police and made a mockery of the court proceedings’.109 Skaf’s lack of contrition is a case in point: when Skaf treated the justicial process with contempt, he threatened the national will — he became, in effect, a ‘national counter-will’.110 According to Hage, nationalist practices are often posited on a need to construct a ‘national will’ or ‘national body’.111 Just as the body’s immune system fights the onset of disease, Hage contends that the national will aims to nullify the emergence of a ‘national otherness’ and restore control of ‘the totality of the national body’.112 Hage posits that the national will is engaged in a constant struggle not with the Other, per se, but against the capacity of the Other to constitute itself as a national counter-will.113
Conclusion This article fleshes out the ways in which Muslim Australians are constructed as Other in contemporary Australia. The construction of Muslim as Other is grounded in a series of interrelated cultural myths and stereotypes, largely based on the opposition of a ‘primitive’ Islamic culture and ‘civilised’ western culture. This opposition configures the Muslim presence in Australia, and in other western nation states, as ‘matter out of place’. As I have shown, the vilification of Australian Muslims continues the historic xenophobia by non-Muslim Australians, embodied in commonwealth policies aimed at discouraging ‘undesirable’ immigrants from coming to Australia. From the nineteenth century onward Muslims were increasingly viewed as inimical and debased. These attitudes have informed non-Muslim Australian conceptions of Muslims living in Australia to the present day. Drawing from Jackson’s concept of existential control, I have delineated several ways in which non-Muslim Australians have ‘managed’ the widely perceived undesirability of Muslim Australians. Such events as the 1991 Gulf war and the destruction of the World Trade Centre on 11 September 2001 dramatically increased western paranoia about Islamic people and their allegiances. Despite public assurances of Australian Muslims’ loyalty to Australia, racial vilification centred on Islamic culture became more widespread. These events became modern watersheds in foregrounding Islamophobia. The horror of indetermination of these events elicited a series of existential stratagems of control, such as racially based attacks on Australian Muslims or by practices of excluding them from
58 Arthur Saniotis certain Australian public spaces. The global threat of terrorism further fostered the perception of the unmanageability of Muslims and the subsequent concern for controlling them within nation states. In Australia, public figures attempted to marshal national opinion by scaffolding their rhetoric around the possible threat of Muslims within the homeland. Consequently, Australian Muslims have been compelled to publicly denounce the actions of terrorists as a way of proclaiming their allegiance to Australia. Despite public condemnation by Australian Muslims of Islamist based terrorism, racial vilification centred on Islamic culture was widespread. Fear of the Muslim Other culminated in the infamous Sydney gang rapes, led by Lebanese Muslim Bilal Skaf in 2000. The Australian media were quick to frame these crimes in terms of Muslim violation of white Australian culture. For Hage, the trials of Skaf and his accomplices concerned the playing-out of the Australian social imaginary, where the national will pitted itself against a counter- will. These trials became a crucible for stamping the national will’s authority onto a perceived social contagion. In the current climate of fear of terrorist attack, western discourses continually render Muslims as ‘bogey’ people who must be ‘put in their place’. Such discourses ultimately diminish the possibility of challenging popular myths.
59 Notes to pp 45–49
‘appropriate other’ — the object of the white gaze that is firmly within the frame, and thus completely marginal and other. 47 Chow, op. cit., pp 125–51. 48 bel hooks, Black Looks: Race and Representation, South End Press, Boston,. 1992, p 168. 49 Rutherford, op. cit. 50 Boyce, op. cit., p 65. 51 Greg Lehman, ‘Telling us true’ in R Manne (ed.), Whitewash: On Keith Windschuttle’s Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Black Inc. Agenda, Melbourne, 2003, p 175. 52 Lehman, op. cit., p 183. 53 Kitzinger, op. cit., pp 63–72. Kitzinger defines the rhetoric of pseudoscience as ‘an attempt to persuade the reader that certain alleged findings should not be believed’, the implication being that ‘pseudoscience’ is poor or bad science. ibid., p 62. See also Damien W Riggs, ‘The Politics of Scientific Knowledge: Constructions of Sexuality and Ethics in the Conversion Therapy Literature’, Lesbian and Gay Psychology Review, vol 5, 2004, p 6–14. 54 Boyce, op. cit., p 18. 55 Ryan, op. cit., p 233. 56 Donna Haraway, ‘Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective’, Feminist Studies, vol 14, 1988, p 587. 57 Warwick Anderson, The Cultivation of Whiteness: Science, Health and Racial Destiny in Australia, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 2002; Damien W Riggs, ‘Challenging the Monoculturalism of Psychology: Towards a More Socially Accountable Pedagogy and Practice’ Australian Psychology, vol 39, 2004, p 110–26; Wetherell, op. cit. 58 Jenkins, op. cit. 59 ibid., p 36. 60 Nicoll, op. cit. 61 Jackie Huggins, Sister Girl, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 1998. Obviously such a position may be read as suggesting a form of cultural relativism, whereby all ‘perspectives’ are equal. Yet as Keith Jenkins suggests, this demonstrates a rather naïve reading of historical research that seeks to be accountable for its location. Rather, a focus on individual perspectives does not negate a moral standpoint on issues of violence; instead, it suggests that we must prioritise the ‘perspectives’ of those whose experiences are ones of oppression and violence, and whose truth claims exceed relativising through the sovereign rights of their knowledges. Thus the point here is not one of relativism but one of accountability. 62 Shome, Raka, ‘Whiteness and the Politics of Location: Postcolonial Reflections’ in T K Nakayama and J N Martin (eds), Whiteness: The Communication of Social Identity, Sage, California, 1999. 63 Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, Picador, London, 1992. 64 Chow, op. cit., p 126. 65 Hadyn White, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism, John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1978. 66 Jenkins, op. cit.
Embodying Ambivalence: Muslim Australians as ‘Other’ Arthur Saniotis 1 Michael Jackson, Minima Ethnographica: Intersubjectivity and the Anthropological Project, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1998. 2 ibid., p 48. 3 ibid., p 18. 4 Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and Ambivalence, Polity Press, Oxford, 1993, p 55. 5 ibid. 6 ibid., p 56. 7 Jackson, op. cit., p 30. 8 Ziauddin Sardar, Postmodernism and the Other: The New Imperialism of Western Culture, Pluto Press, London and Chicago, 1998, p 13.
180 Notes to pp 49–52
9 Long before postmodernism took umbrage at modernism, William James developed a theory of the Other engendered by the term ‘ontological imagination’, which presages the way contemporary thinkers such as Sardar and Richard Rorty subscribe to a blurring between fiction and reality. William James, The Varieties of the Religious Imagination, University Books, New York, 1963, p 72. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Cabridge University Press, Cambridge, New York, 1989. 10 Similarly, Stanley Grenz asserts that ‘there is no absolute truth: rather truth is relative to the community in which we participate’ Stanley J Grenz, A Primer on Postmodernism, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1995, p 8. 11 Bauman, op. cit., p 66. 12 Cynthia Ozick, ‘Art and Ardour’, Postmodern Culture, no 2, vol 3, May 1984, p 165. 13 Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1969. 14 I am referring here to the Judeo-Christian notions that underpin western constructions of hygiene. 15 Bilal Cleland, Muslims in Australia: A Brief History, 2002, p 5. Hosted on the Islamic Council of Australia website.
181 Notes to pp 52–56
39 Hage, op. cit., p 102. 40 ibid. 41 ibid., p 101. 42 Ghassan Hage, Against Paranoid Nationalism: Searching for Hope in a Shrinking Society, Pluto Press, New South Wales, 2003, p 76. 43 ibid., p 77. 44 Media statement by Bruce Ruxton, ‘Desecration of the Australian flag by local Arabs’, Australasian Legal Institute website. 22 August 1990.
182 Notes to pp 56–58
78 R Handler, ‘Who Owns the past?: History, Cultural Property, and the Logic of possessive individualism’ in B Williams (ed), The Politics of Culture, Smithsonian University Press, Washington, DC, 1991. 79 Handler cited in Eva Mackey, ‘Constructing an Endangered Nation: Risk, Race and Rationality in Australia’s Native Title Debate’ in Deborah Lupton (ed), Risk and Sociocultural Theory: New Directions And Perspectives, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1999, p 114. 80 Handler, op. cit., p 66. 81 Cited in E M Bruner, ‘Experience and Its Expressions’ in V W Turner and E M Bruner (eds), The Anthropology of Experience, University of Illinois Press, Chicago, 1986, p 12. 82 Arthur Saniotis, ‘Sacred Cosmos: Domains of Mystical Mastery’ in ‘Sacred Worlds: An Analysis of Mystical Mastery of North Indian Faqirs’, Unpublished Phd thesis, Department of Anthropology, University of Adelaide, 2002, p 18. 83 Deborah Lupton, Risk and Sociocultural Theory: New Directions And Perspectives, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1999. 84 Eva Mackey, ‘Constructing an Endangered Nation: Risk, Race and Rationality in Australia’s Native Title Debate’ in Deborah Lupton (ed.), Risk and Sociocultural Theory: New Directions And Perspectives, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1999, pp 108–30. 85 ibid., p 115. 86 ibid. 87 ibid. 88 ibid. 89 ibid. 90 Jackson, op. cit., p 130. 91 ‘2000 gang rapes’, Wikimedia Meta-Wiki website.
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