Islamic and Muslim Studies in Australia
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Welcome to Our Ramadan Fast Breaking
behavior, many mosques like MCC have separate About the MCC seating areas designated for single men and single We are so happy you have visited the Muslim women. Families may choose to sit together as a Community Center - East Bay. We serve a diverse Muslim unit, or family members may choose to sit down population in the East Bay. We provide a safe place for with their friends in their respective areas. Seating individuals with multiple points of entry to learn, pray, arrangements will vary from one community to socialize, and utilize a space situated at intellectual and another. Welcome spiritual crossroads. During Ramadan Muslims begin their meal with the prayer, “0 God, for You I fasted, and in You I believe, and with Your provision I broke my fast.” After eating, Muslims say “Alhamdulillah (“Thanks be to God”).” to Our The Night Prayer The final of the five daily prayers is said as night falls. Like the four other prayers, it is preceded by the adhan and is carried out in congregation. Ramadan The Tarawih Prayer A special, lengthy prayer called tarawih is said only during the month of Ramadan, after the night prayer Join our community supporters email group to is completed. It is an optional act of worship carried receive the latest interfaith events and activities out to gain God’s pleasure. The tarawih is sometimes Fast at the MCC. Join at: mcceb.org/community- characterized by long recitations of the Qur’an, and can last from twenty minutes to over one hour. Some supporters imams recite one-thirtieth of the Qur’an nightly during this prayer. -
Representations of Islam in the Politics of Mosque Development in Sydney
REPRESENTATIONS OF ISLAM IN THE POLITICS OF MOSQUE DEVELOPMENT IN SYDNEY KEVIN M. DUNN Lecturer, School of Geography, The University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW 2052, Australia. E-mail: [email protected] Received: August 2000; revised January 2001 Abstract The negative constructions of Islam which circulate at (inter)national levels include Muslims as fanatical, intolerant, militant, fundamentalist, misogynist and alien. The various constructions of Islam had varying utility for mosque opponents in Sydney, Australia, during the 1980s and 1990s. Fanaticism and intolerance are constructions of Islam which have now had centuries of articulation in the West. These constructions have attained great potency as a result of their reiterative deployment. In Sydney, they were used to influence planning determinations and political decisions within local authorities. The charges of militancy and misogyny did not easily convert into a planning ground for opposing a mosque, but they were used to heighten public unease and widen opposition. Local authorities also refused development consent for mosques on the grounds that the proposals were ‘out of character’ with surrounding development, drawing on the construction of Muslims as alien and ultimately out of place. The discourses of opposition to mosques did not simply rely on the stereotypes of Islam, but also drew heavily on cultural constructions of what constituted a local citizen and the local community. Mosque supporters attempted to deploy counter-constructions, of Muslims as moderate, tolerant, peaceful, clean living, family-orientated, ordinary local citizens. A social construction approach is used to examine the politics surrounding mosque development in Sydney. This reveals both the socio-spatial impacts of identity constructions (of a minority group and the imagined dominant community) as well as the important role of space and locale. -
From the Editor
EDITORIAL STAFF From the Editor ELIZABETH SKINNER Editor Happy New Year, everyone. As I write this, we’re a few weeks into 2021 and there ELIZABETH ROBINSON Copy Editor are sparkles of hope here and there that this year may be an improvement over SALLY BAHO Copy Editor the seemingly endless disasters of the last one. Vaccines are finally being deployed against the coronavirus, although how fast and for whom remain big sticky questions. The United States seems to have survived a political crisis that brought EDITORIAL REVIEW BOARD its system of democratic government to the edge of chaos. The endless conflicts VICTOR ASAL in Syria, Libya, Yemen, Iraq, and Afghanistan aren’t over by any means, but they have evolved—devolved?—once again into chronic civil agony instead of multi- University of Albany, SUNY national warfare. CHRISTOPHER C. HARMON 2021 is also the tenth anniversary of the Arab Spring, a moment when the world Marine Corps University held its breath while citizens of countries across North Africa and the Arab Middle East rose up against corrupt authoritarian governments in a bid to end TROELS HENNINGSEN chronic poverty, oppression, and inequality. However, despite the initial burst of Royal Danish Defence College change and hope that swept so many countries, we still see entrenched strong-arm rule, calcified political structures, and stagnant stratified economies. PETER MCCABE And where have all the terrorists gone? Not far, that’s for sure, even if the pan- Joint Special Operations University demic has kept many of them off the streets lately. Closed borders and city-wide curfews may have helped limit the operational scope of ISIS, Lashkar-e-Taiba, IAN RICE al-Qaeda, and the like for the time being, but we know the teeming refugee camps US Army (Ret.) of Syria are busy producing the next generation of violent ideological extremists. -
70% of Victorians Approve of the Way Premier Andrews Is Handling His
Article No. 8518 Available on www.roymorgan.com Link to Roy Morgan Profiles Thursday, 10 September 2020 70% of Victorians approve of the way Premier Andrews is handling his job, but 76% say the Victorian Government should compensate small business The third Roy Morgan Snap SMS survey on Victoria’s Stage 4 restrictions shows 70% approval of Premier Daniel Andrews. However, a large majority (76%) of Victorians say the Victorian Government should provide compensation to all small businesses in Victoria forced to close by the Victorian Government’s COVID restrictions - only 24% say they should not. For the first time in three weeks of surveying a majority of Victorians 53% (up 6% in a week) say Melbourne residents should now be able to visit the homes of immediate family members. A rising majority of 67% (up 10%) of older Victorians aged 65+, say Melburnians should be able to visit the homes of their immediate family. This is despite being the age group at the greatest risk during the pandemic. Other groups, in which majorities say Melburnians should be able to visit their immediate families, include Melburnians (54%), Victorians aged under 35 (51%), aged 50-64 (54%), men (57%) and L-NP supporters (69%). Melburnians are far more likely than Country Victorians to want to be able to travel more than 5km from their home, visit their families and for the night-time curfew in Melbourne to end. Importantly, a slim majority of 51% of Melburnians now say they should be free to travel more than 5km from their home – up from 45% a week ago. -
Praying Where They Don't Belong
This is a preprint of an article whose final and definitive form has been published in the Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs, vol. 30, no. 2, June 2010, pp 265–278 © 2010 Taylor & Francis; Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs is available online at: www.tandfonline.com with the open URL http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13602004.2010.494076 Praying Where They Don’t Belong: Female Muslim Converts and Mosques in Melbourne, Australia Abstract This paper looks at a sample of women converts to Islam residing in Melbourne, Australia, and their passive boycott of mosques resulting from gender discrimination and ethnic prejudice. Although religious conversion requires structure and support through the performance of religious rituals, including at the community level, Muslim women converts are hindered in their ability to freely access and enjoy mosques. This is despite historical freedom for women to access the Prophet's mosque, and is the result of Islam in Australia being largely characterised by immigrant cultures that assert sex-segregation in the mosque as a way of possessing and ethnicising space. Introduction The mosque plays a central role in the community life of Muslims, and for converts to Islam, observing the rituals of mosque attendance helps facilitate the adoption and confirmation of new Islamic identities; participating in Muslim community rituals helps converts learn to feel, think and act as Muslims.1 Mosques in Australia, having been mostly established by immigrant communities, reflect cultural interpretations of idealised Islamic space. Inadvertently or otherwise, these ethnicised mosques are often exclusionary toward women as well as members of different ethnic groups. -
Australia Muslim Advocacy Network
1. The Australian Muslim Advocacy Network (AMAN) welcomes the opportunity to input to the UN Special Rapporteur on the Freedom of Religion or Belief as he prepares this report on the Impact of Islamophobia/anti-Muslim hatred and discrimination on the right to freedom of thought, conscience religion or belief. 2. We also welcome the opportunity to participate in your Asia-Pacific Consultation and hear from the experiences of a variety of other Muslims organisations. 3. AMAN is a national body that works through law, policy, research and media, to secure the physical and psychological welfare of Australian Muslims. 4. Our objective to create conditions for the safe exercise of our faith and preservation of faith- based identity, both of which are under persistent pressure from vilification, discrimination and disinformation. 5. We are engaged in policy development across hate crime & vilification laws, online safety, disinformation and democracy. Through using a combination of media, law, research, and direct engagement with decision making parties such as government and digital platforms, we are in a constant process of generating and testing constructive proposals. We also test existing civil and criminal laws to push back against the mainstreaming of hate, and examine whether those laws are fit for purpose. Most recently, we are finalising significant research into how anti-Muslim dehumanising discourse operates on Facebook and Twitter, and the assessment framework that could be used to competently and consistently assess hate actors. A. Definitions What is your working definition of anti-Muslim hatred and/or Islamophobia? What are the advantages and potential pitfalls of such definitions? 6. -
Islamic Education in Myanmar: a Case Study
10: Islamic education in Myanmar: a case study Mohammed Mohiyuddin Mohammed Sulaiman Introduction `Islam', which literally means `peace' in Arabic, has been transformed into a faith interpreted loosely by one group and understood conservatively by another, making it seem as if Islam itself is not well comprehended by its followers. Today, it is the faith of 1.2 billion people across the world; Asia is a home for 60 per cent of these adherents, with Muslims forming an absolute majority in 11 countries (Selth 2003:5). Since the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, international scholars have become increasingly interested in Islam and in Muslims in South-East Asia, where more than 230 million Muslims live (Mutalib 2005:50). These South-East Asian Muslims originally received Islam from Arab traders. History reveals the Arabs as sea-loving people who voyaged around the Indian Ocean (IIAS 2005), including to South-East Asia. The arrival of Arabs has had different degrees of impact on different communities in the region. We find, however, that not much research has been done by today's Arabs on the Arab±South-East Asian connection, as they consider South-East Asia a part of the wider `East', which includes Iran, Central Asia and the Indian subcontinent. Indeed, the term `South-East Asia' is hardly used in modern Arab literature. For them, anything east of the Middle East and non-Arabic speaking world is considered to be `Asia' (Abaza 2002). According to Myanmar and non-Myanmar sources, Islam reached the shores of Myanmar's Arakan (Rakhine State) as early as 712 AD, via oceangoing merchants, and in the form of Sufism. -
The Status of Theology and Theologian in Islam Islam in Theologian and Theology of Status The
theologians. Keywords: theology (Kalam), Islamic sciences, philosophy, doctrinal arena. holy infallible Imams to undertake the defense of religious beliefs in of the high position of theologians who, in addition, were urged by nobility of Kalam as genuine Islamic science a mention is to be made of knowledge with other religious sciences. Due to the importance and sciences, shedding light on the relation of this doctrinal-religious field role of Kalam in preparing the ground for the rise of other religious doubts. It is in this way that some knowledge is reached on the crucial grounded arguments in answering questions and removing doctrinal distinctive role the defense of holy status of religion through well- role of this religious science and those engaged in it, showing as its the field of Islamic thought and explain the constructive and decisive This article is intended to introduce Islamic theology (Kalam) in Abstract Faculty member of Research Center of Islamic Studies Abdollah Ebrahimzadeh Amoli The Status of Theology and Theologian in Islam 3 Vol 2, Summer 2010, Serial. No. 4 existentiation, manifestation, receptivity, reception. mystery of predestination, mystery of the mystery of predestination, Keywords: determinism, free will, intermediate position, will, the positions taken by Mu tazilites, Asha rites and philosophers. ‛ ‛ some others he puts the position of mystics in opposition to the Arabi explicitly rejects both determinism and “utterly free will” and in position” has the same meaning. In some of his statements Ibn Al- proximate and remote agents. To Ibn Al-Arabi the “intermediate also not the same as vertical agency and attribution of events to receptive, not based on mere separation of agent and receiver. -
Three Education Ministers with Public Primary School Backgrounds
AUSTRALIAN COUNCIL FOR THE DEFENCE OF GOVERNMENT SCHOOLS PRESS RELEASE 582# THREE EDUCATION MINISTERS WITH PUBLIC PRIMARY SCHOOL BACKGROUNDS : Rewards for the Public School Vote in the Victorian Election? Although the private, religious school lobby attempted to influence the outcome of the recent Victorian election, it was the disaffected public school voters, particularly in the neglected developing suburbs and inner city that decided the outcome. Education was a key election issue, with Labor making significant commitments to increase support and funding for public TAFEs, schools and preschools. However, it should be noted that Labor also attempted to ‘buy’the religious vote with a promise of $120 m for expanded facilities. James Merlino, like the Labor Party is Janus faced – facing both ways. Yet when the Catholic Education Office instructed Catholic parents to put the Greens last in the inner city electorates, they did the Greens a great service. Two members from those electorates are now sitting in the Victorian Parliament. And the victorious Labor Party has had the sense to replace the ex-Catholic school principal and administrator, Liberal Education Minister Dixon, with someone who has at least a primary school public education- James Merlino. Deputy Premier Merlino is joined by two other Ministers who have public school experiences. They are: Steve Herbert as Minister for Skills and Training and Jenny Mikakos as Minister for Children and Families, Youth Affairs 1 DOGS note the following CVs for the three Labor Ministers involved with education: 1. JAMES MERLINO: James Merlino was born 19 August 1972. He notes that he attended St Edmonds Public School 1978-1984 , Mt Lilydale College 1985-1990 and received a BA (Hons) 1996 (The University of Melbourne). -
Digital Islam in Indonesia: the Shift of Ritual and Religiosity During Covid-19
ISSUE: 2021 No. 107 ISSN 2335-6677 RESEARCHERS AT ISEAS – YUSOF ISHAK INSTITUTE ANALYSE CURRENT EVENTS Singapore | 12 August 2021 Digital Islam in Indonesia: The Shift of Ritual and Religiosity during Covid-19 Wahyudi Akmaliah and Ahmad Najib Burhani* Covid-19 has forced various Muslim groups to adopt digital platforms in their religious activities. Controversy, however, abounds regarding the online version of the Friday Prayer. In Islamic law, this ritual is wajib (mandatory) for male Muslims. In this picture, Muslims observe Covid-19 coronavirus social distancing measures during Friday prayers at Agung mosque in Bandung on 2 July 2021. Photo: Timur Matahari, AFP. * Wahyudi Akmaliah is a PhD Student at the Malay Studies Department, National University of Singapore (NUS). Ahmad Najib Burhani is Visiting Senior Fellow at ISEAS – Yusof Ishak Institute and Research Professor at the Indonesian Institute of Sciences (LIPI), Jakarta. The authors wish to thank Lee Sue-Ann and Norshahril Saat for their comments and suggestions on this article. 1 ISSUE: 2021 No. 107 ISSN 2335-6677 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY • Before the Covid-19 pandemic, the use of digital platforms in religious rituals was already becoming an increasingly common practice among Indonesian preachers to reach out to young audiences. During the pandemic, some Muslim organisations and individual preachers have speeded up the use of such platforms as a way to communicate with people and to continue with religious practices among the umma. • Among religious rituals that have shifted online are the virtual tahlil (praying and remembering dead person), silaturahim (visiting each other) during Eid al-Fitr, haul (commemorating the death of someone), and tarawih (night prayer during Ramadan). -
Law and Liberty in the War on Terror
LAW AND LIBERTY IN THE WAR ON TERROR EDITORS Andrew Lynch Edwina MacDonald George Williams FOREWORD The Hon Sir Gerard Brennan AC KBE THE FEDERATION PRESS 2007 Published in Sydney by: The Federation Press PO Box 45, Annandale, NSW, 2038 71 John St, Leichhardt, NSW, 2040 Ph (02) 9552 2200 Fax (02) 9552 1681 E-mail: [email protected] Website: www.federationpress.com.au National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry Law and Liberty in the war on terror Editors: Andrew Lynch; George Williams; Edwina MacDonald. Includes index. Bibliography ISBN 978 186287 674 3 (pbk) Judicial power – Australia. Criminal Law – Australia. War on Terrorism, 2001- Terrorism – Prevention. Terrorism. International offences. 347.012 © The Federation Press This publication is copyright. Other than for the purposes of and subject to the conditions prescribed under the Copyright Act, no part of it may in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, microcopying, photocopying, recording or otherwise) be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted without prior written permission. Enquiries should be addressed to the publishers. Typeset by The Federation Press, Leichhardt, NSW. Printed by Ligare Pty Ltd, Riverwood, NSW. Contents Foreword – Sir Gerard Brennan v Preface xii Contributors xiii Part I Law’s Role in the Response to Terrorism 1 Law as a Preventative Weapon Against Terrorism 3 Philip Ruddock 2 Legality and Emergency – The Judiciary in a Time of Terror 9 David Dyzenhaus and Rayner Thwaites 3 The Curious Element of Motive -
Women, Business and the Law 2020 World Bank Group
WOMEN, BUSINESS AND THE LAW 2020 AND THE LAW BUSINESS WOMEN, WOMEN, BUSINESS AND THE LAW 2020 WORLD BANK GROUP WORLD WOMEN, BUSINESS AND THE LAW 2020 © 2020 International Bank for Reconstruction and Development / The World Bank 1818 H Street NW, Washington, DC 20433 Telephone: 202-473-1000; Internet: www.worldbank.org Some rights reserved 1 2 3 4 23 22 21 20 This work is a product of the staff of The World Bank with external contributions. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this work do not necessarily reflect the views of The World Bank, its Board of Executive Directors, or the govern- ments they represent. The World Bank does not guarantee the accuracy of the data included in this work. The boundaries, colors, denominations, and other information shown on any map in this work do not imply any judgment on the part of The World Bank concerning the legal status of any territory or the endorsement or acceptance of such boundaries. Nothing herein shall constitute or be considered to be a limitation upon or waiver of the privileges and immunities of The World Bank, all of which are specifically reserved. Rights and Permissions This work is available under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 IGO license (CC BY 3.0 IGO) http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/3.0/igo. Under the Creative Commons Attribution license, you are free to copy, distribute, transmit, and adapt this work, including for commercial purposes, under the following conditions: Attribution—Please cite the work as follows: World Bank. 2020. Women, Business and the Law 2020.