Australians’ divergent opinions about Islam and Muslims

Abstract

Using data from a random stratified sample of people over 18 years of age residing in Australia, this article examines participants’ opinions of the Islamic faith independently of their opinions of Muslim people. Earlier studies have not made the nuanced distinction between opinions about Islam as a religion and opinions about Muslims as people. Theoretical approaches suggest that there is a difference in the opinions non-Muslims have of Muslims and their religion. The non-Muslim Australians we surveyed have very different opinions about the religion of Islam than they do about Muslims, with significantly higher levels of favourablity towards Muslims than towards their religion. Our findings in this latter respect are somewhat at odds with the body of international literature, which suggests it is Muslims, with their cultures, lifestyles and values, that non-Muslims perceive to be problematic. We explain the implications of our findings for government and researchers.

Keywords

Australia Islam Islamophobia Muslimophobia Muslims opinions

Australia is a country with a long history of racism and Islamophobia (Aslan, 2009; Dunn, 2003; Saeed, 2003). This article examines the opinions of a random stratified sample of people over 18 years of age residing in Australia about the religion of Islam independently of their opinions of Muslim people. We do so because one of the authors hypothesised that it was entirely feasible that Australians could simultaneously hold one opinion about Islam as a religion and an entirely different opinion about Muslim people themselves. We sought to examine if this was the case. This study is, as far as we are aware, the first to de-couple examining opinions of Islam from examining opinions of Muslim people. We find that the Australian population does hold significantly different views about Islam as a religion (20.07% hold favourable views and 27.26% hold unfavourable views) than they do of Muslim people (37.26% hold favourable views and 11.85% hold unfavourable views). We also find that close to half the population hold neutral views of Islam as a religion (46.40%) and Muslim people (45.30%).

We set this article in the context of the history and presence of Islam and Muslims in Australia in order to understand the complexities and possible influences on non-Muslim Australians’ opinions of Muslims and their faith. In addition, we examine the available international research into attitudes towards Muslims, that is, the body of work addressing what is called Muslimophobia but we de-couple that from research about Islamophobia because, as our findings indicate, there are differences in non-Muslims’ opinions of Muslims and their opinions regarding the religion of Islam. Our findings are somewhat at odds with the more recent body of research into Muslimophobia, which suggests that it is the people and their cultural practices and behaviours that cause tensions and conflicts with non-Muslims, rather than the religion itself (Erdenir, 2010; Triandafyllidou, 2015). We found that the participants in our study have significantly more positive opinions of Muslims than they have towards the religion of Islam.

The results of our study raise very important questions for researchers and policy makers alike. The international body of research into Islam and Muslims burgeoned after the terrorist attacks in the United States of America on 11 September 2001. It is now a very crowded field. In researching the field of Islam and Muslims in Australian society, what this study shows is that scholars (at least those whose research is based in Australia) may need to consider more precisely whether their research designs need to de-couple Islam as a religion from its diverse followers. With regard to this latter issue, recognising that in Australia Muslims are from 183 different countries (Hassan, 2015) is a critical issue for researchers. For policy makers the findings of this study have particular relevance; this is because they too need to question whether their policy focus speaks to Islam as a religion, Muslim people in all their diversity, or both. They also need to consider how they can shift those who are ‘undecided’ or ‘neutral’ in their opinions. Here, there will be highly nuanced considerations. Additionally, policy makers and Muslim groups should not disregard those who hold negative or extremely negative views of Islam and, to a lesser extent, Muslims because they may present significant opportunities to build connections and improve knowledge and potentially contribute to social cohesion.

Literature review

In order to understand the contemporary context of our study and its findings it is necessary to understand some of the rich and complex history of Islam and Muslims in Australia. The Australian Federation of Islamic Councils (2011: 6–7) argues that when considering the Muslim experiences in Australia, our ‘history with indigenous peoples, colonisation, generations of migration and migration structures as well as Australia’s unique geographical location as a neighbour to South East Asian countries’ are all relevant considerations. All major world religions are represented in contemporary Australia, where its Constitution mandates religious freedom (Jupp, 2009: 1). Religious affiliation has been captured by Australia’s national census of population and housing since it was first conducted in 1911 (Wright, 2010). Earlier coordinated state and colony censuses had similarly captured religious affiliations, providing a springboard for their surprisingly relatively uncontroversial collection at a national level after federation in 1901 (Wright, 2010). At the time of Australia’s first national census of population and housing, and with a population of 4.4 million people, more than 300 different religious affiliations were recorded (more than 200 Christian and more than 90 non-Christian affiliations, including Islam) (Commonwealth of Australia, 1911). At the time there were 3,908 Muslims (or more precisely ‘Mohammedians’) recorded (Commonwealth of Australia, 1911: 769).

The presence of Muslims in Australia pre-dates both European colonisation and the arrival of Christianity and has been well documented by researchers (Bartsch, 2015; Ganter, 2008; Hassan, 1991; Kabir, 2006; Saeed, 2003; Stephenson, 2013). As Ganter (2008: 482) points out, the presence of Muslims had a ‘profound impact’ on indigenous Australians, who ‘creatively adapted aspects of Islam’ and whose traditional stories reflect contact with trepang fisherman from Macassar (which is now part of Indonesia). Also well documented by researchers are the significant contributions of Muslims in the early days of Australia’s European colonisation. Camel drivers, including from the then Kingdom of Afghanistan and British India (who collectively became known as ‘Afghan’ Cameleers) first arrived in the 19th century, and made substantial contributions to Australia’s exploration, settlement and the establishment of vital services, including communications and transport links (Bartsch, 2015; Ganter, 2008; Hassan 1991; Saeed, 2003; Scriver, 2004). The majority of the ‘Afghan’ Cameleers were Muslim men – contract workers who left their families behind and, while many never intended to settle permanently in Australia, some did (Deen, 2009: 440). So crucial were the ‘Afghan’ Cameleers and their so-called ships of the desert to Australia’s exploration and development, that they became ‘an institution’ in the Australian outback (Scriver, 2004: 24). Crucial too were the predominantly Muslim Malay pearl-shellers to Australia’s economy, so much so that the industry was exempt from the restrictions on Asian immigration that would have applied otherwise (Aslan, 2009: 32). In an amnesiac Australia, Muslims are far from the new arrivals contemporary political and public discourse suggests.

Despite their long and deep-seated connection with and contribution to Australia, Muslims have struggled against discrimination and alienation from a largely Anglo-Australian society, and continue to do so (Australian Federation of Islamic Councils, 2011; Iner et al., 2017; Islamophobia Register Australia, n.d.). Ganter (2008: 481) argues that in contemporary Australia: ‘Muslims have become the most widely debated and feared segment of the Australian community’. This too comes with a long and deep history reaching back to the backlash from bullock teamsters against the commercial successes of their chief competitors, the ‘Afghan’ Cameleers (Ganter, 2008: 487). The coordinated harassment of ‘Afghan’ Cameleers was set against the backdrop of the improved communications and transportation networks that heralded the inevitable demise of Australia’s reliance on camels (Australian Government, 2009; Ganter, 2008). It also occurred at a time of increasing political and societal resistance from white shop owners to the commercial successes of ‘Asiatic aliens’, many of whom were Muslims (Ganter, 2008: 487). The introduction of the White Australia Policy in 1901, relaxed in the 1960s but not officially abandoned until the early 1970s, was the third part of the triumvirate that politically and socially legitimised anti-Muslim sentiment over time (Ganter, 2008; Poynting and Mason, 2007; Roose, 2013).

While the ‘Afghan’ Cameleers were perceived as an economic and racial threat to the so-called ‘Anglo-Australian way of life’, as well as a threat to white women, and while Muslims in Australia never escaped prejudice or discrimination, post-9/11 Islam and Muslims came to be perceived as a threat to Australia’s national security (Dunn et al., 2007; Kabir, 2005, 2007; Manne, 2006; Saeed, 2003). In post-9/11 Australia, driven by domestic and international events and ignited by sections of both the political elite and the news media, Islamophobia has burgeoned (Dunn et al., 2007; Dunn and Kamp, 2016; Iner et al., 2017; Kabir, 2007; Manne, 2006; Poynting and Mason, 2007; Saeed, 2003). Its manifestations include the fuelling of incivilities and conflict, vitriol and violence directed at Muslims and linking a stereotypical concept of Islam with terrorism (Dunn et al., 2007; Iner et al., 2017; Saeed, 2003; Strawson, 2008). As Strawson (2008) so persuasively sets out, in the contemporary national security context distinguishing Islam from terrorism requires a deep understanding of Islam, its history and its complexities. Yet studies have shown that Australians are largely ignorant about Islam, its adherents and their significant historical and contemporary contributions to Australian society (Dunn, 2004, 2005; O’Donnell et al., 2017; Saeed, 2003). While influenced by contemporary geopolitical events and political discourse, it is mainly ignorance that underpins Australians’ apprehension about Islam and Muslims (Dunn, 2005: 8; Dunn et al., 2007: 571). Muslims are precariously positioned in contemporary Australia (Colic-Peisker et al., 2016: 384), and are under pressure to ‘continually prove their credentials as citizens’ (Schottmann, 2013: 420).

While Islam is the world’s second largest and its fastest growing religion (Pew Research Center, 2015), Muslims are a minority in Australia and represent just 2.6% of its population of 23.4 million people (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2017). After Christianity, Islam is now Australia’s second largest religion (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2017). Reflecting distinct waves of immigration, Australian Muslims are also ethnically and culturally diverse (Dunn, 2005; Dunn et al., 2007; Ho, 2007; Kabir, 2005; Poynting and Mason, 2007). In discussing the diversity of Muslims in Australia, the Australian Federation of Islamic Councils (Australian Federation of Islamic Councils, 2011: 2) explains:

despite being a minority there are ethnic representations from migrant and non-migrant backgrounds that belong to the Muslim faith including Anglo-Celtic Australians and Indigenous Australians. This high ethnic diversity of Muslims in Australia who have come or have heritage from every corner of the world, including Africa, Asia, the subcontinent, Europe, America and South America etc., express ethnic identities along religious identities that makes them practice Islam in a unique fashion whilst maintaining faith commonalities.

The key point that should not be overlooked is that Muslim communities in Australia are not one thing. Rather, they reflect different ethnic, cultural, social and economic backgrounds. The tie that binds is the Islamic faith and there is no one way to practise it. It is both relevant and timely to examine Australians’ opinions about both Islam as a religion and about Muslims as people. As Jupp (2009: 2) argues, while ‘contemporary Australia has not been a rigidly divided society along religious lines’ neither has it been an ‘open marketplace’. There exists an ‘explosive rage’ against Muslims and people of Middle Eastern appearance in Australia (Manne, 2006: 41) and Islamophobia is increasingly politically acceptable (Manne, 2006: 39). The return of Pauline Hanson to the Australian parliament, with her anti-Islam agenda – including a call for surveillance cameras in all mosques and Islamic schools, a ban on halal certification as well as a call for a Royal Commission into Islam to determine if it really is a religion – means the political rhetoric around Islam and Muslims in Australia has been dialled up (Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Political Party, 2015; see also Agius, 2016). The report produced from data gathered by the Islamophobia Register Australia is sobering (Iner et al., 2017; Islamophobia Register Australia, nd). It concludes, inter alia, that in Australia Islamophobia has become normalised.

While much of the scholarship has focused on Islamophobia as a way of explaining non-Muslims’ negative opinions of Muslims, another much smaller and relatively more recent body of literature suggests that the term ‘Islamophobia’ is too vague a concept and should be replaced by the term Muslimophobia. Historically there has been some disagreement among scholars as to whether Islamophobia and Muslimophobia are the same thing, whether they are different or whether there is ‘fluidity’ (Erdenir, 2010: 29) between the two concepts. Erdenir (2010: 28) clearly differentiates the two terms, explaining that Islamophobia centres on ‘religious discrimination’ while Muslimophobia is ‘distinct from Islamophobia in the sense that the former targets Muslims as citizens or residents of European countries rather than Islam as a religion’. Erdenir (2010: 29) elaborates on the concept, stating that in ‘mainstream politics and media it is not Islam but the Muslims who are in the spotlight’. Additionally, Erdenir (2010: 29) reminds us that ‘anti-Muslim sentiments are rarely expressed through a purely religious dimension and Islam is hardly ever the only force at work’. The perceived problematic nature of Muslims’ ‘culture, lifestyle, and values’ (Erdenir, 2010: 37) is proposed as the cause of Muslimophobia. However, Erdenir (2010: 36) warns of the complex nature of Muslimophobia as it brings together two forces that involve ‘prejudice and discrimination against an outside group defined in a combination of religious and ethnic terms’. In this respect Erdenir (2010: 29) describes Muslimophobia as a form of ‘“new racism” which targets the cultures, lifestyles and physical appearances of Muslims’. The term ‘Muslimophobia’ enables scholars to focus on the:

real, material, and contingent causes of the reaction against Muslims; it explores to what extent the prejudice emanates from socioeconomic issues, power relations, political issues, international conflicts, et cetera. Yet it does not leave out the historical legacies that keep on shaping prejudices against Muslims and Islam in the contemporary setting. (Erdenir, 2010: 30)

Building on this, Erdenir (2010) suggests that the racial discrimination that characterises Muslimophobia is stronger that the religious discrimination that accompanies Islamophobia.

Another important piece of work in the area of Muslimophobia was undertaken by Triandafyllidou (2015). In building on Erdenir’s account of the difference between Islamophobia and Muslimophobia, she (2015: 8) provides a concise summary of how social scientists define the two terms explaining that:

Islamophobia is the irrational fear of and prejudice against Islam as a faith and a culture without any discrimination between different Islamic religious currents. Muslimophobia is the irrational fear of and prejudice against Muslims as individuals, assuming that all people who are nominally Muslims experience their identity and faith in the same fanatical way that involves, among other things, the fusion of religious and political power, the subjugation of women to men, and certain other customs that are incompatible with dominant Western values such as forced and under-age marriages, homophobia and anti-semitism.

However Triandafyllidou (2015: 8–9) warns that these definitions fail to take account of the post-9/11 context in which ‘some of the issues seen as emblematic of Muslim incompatibility with European secular and liberal democracies, notably homophobia or anti-semitism, are persisting issues of tension among Christian and secular majorities in these countries’.

A number of other scholars have explored the concept of Muslimophobia (Erdenir, 2010; Richardson, 2009; Triandafyllidou, 2015) but few apart from Cheng (2015) have explored how it works in practice. Cheng (2015) examines how Muslimophobia and Islamophobia operated in an analysis of Swiss parliamentary debates about a referendum to ban the construction of minarets in Switzerland. Cheng demonstrates that Islamophobia and Muslimophobia are different from each other but mostly occur in tandem. Her analysis and associated findings highlight that:

Muslimophobia can be but is not always a form of racism due to the ‘manipulation of culture’ in which proponents of the ban can de-essentialise, as well as essentialise, cultural traits to argue that Muslims can become integrated if they fulfill certain conditions. (Cheng, 2015: 562)

In explaining the key difference between the two terms, Cheng reminds us that it is not possible to be racist towards a religion but that in treating Muslimophobia as a separate idea from Islamophobia different discourses operate. She explains how these discourses work: for example, they centre on the incompatibility of Muslims with Western culture and the inferiority of their cultures. Cheng (2015: 567) summarises the connections between Muslimophobia and racism, saying that: ‘Muslimophobia overlaps with both the racism that links biology with cultural characteristics, and the racism in which cultural and behavioural traits or dress or lifestyle habits become essentialised and racialized.’

Most of the scholarship about Muslimophobia has approached the issue through a theoretical, rather than an empirical, lens. While we have identified a few empirical studies undertaken by academics that have examined the opinions of non-Muslims regarding Muslims and their faith, these studies have not separated the religion and the people. In a review of 104 British non-academic surveys and polls undertaken between 1988 and 2006, Field (2007) highlights that they focused on non-Muslims’ opinions of Muslims or non-Muslims’ opinions of Islam, but there was a failure in the polls he summarised to separate the religion and the people when asking about opinions of Muslims and Islam. Field (2007: 449–50) cautions that the majority of the polls he reviewed were not undertaken in the course of academic research; rather, they were commissioned by news media or other non-academic groups and, as such, their lack of academic rigour was ‘often exemplified in what many might regard as relatively unsophisticated question formulation’. A number of key themes emerged from Field’s review, including that the surveys tended to focus on issues associated with current events. For example, when terrorism events occurred at the time polls were administered, they tended to shift towards examining Britons’ perceptions of safety, the threat of terrorism and questions about the place of Muslims in British society. Field (2007: 450) contends this meant that the polls he examined were delivered in a climate that was not ‘normal’, given the events that had occurred around the times they were administered, and that those polls ‘probably capture Britons at their most Islamophobic moments’. Additionally, he identifies that questions in many of the polls were frequently not replicated between polls, which therefore made it difficult to track findings longitudinally. It is not our intention here to replicate Field’s work but rather to highlight that none of the surveys he accessed concurrently examined the differences in opinions of Islam and opinions of Muslims, which is, as we stated at the beginning of this article, the unique marker of our study.

One academic study which examined non-Muslims’ attitudes towards Muslims was undertaken by Brockett et al. (2009), who looked at the attitudes of non-Muslim school children in north England had towards Muslims. However, the Attitude Towards Muslim Proximity Index used in the study tested Islamophobic attitudes among some school children, rather than focusing on Muslimophobic attitudes. Brockett et al. (2009: 241) also point out that studies that have measured attitudes towards Muslims on the part of non-Muslims have tried to ‘operationalise an underlying attitude of prejudice, fear or loathing linked to concepts such as racism and Islamophobia’. In their study undertaken across three geographical areas in northern England (Blackburn, Kirklees and York) they found there was a higher proportion of Muslim students in Blackburn and Kirklees than in York. They noted that:

pupils in Blackburn and Kirklees were twice as likely to know Muslims or to have Muslim friends compared to pupils in York . . . clearly reflecting the considerably higher proportion of Muslims among the Blackburn and Kirklees communities compared with the community in York. (Brockett et al., 2009: 245)

However, this did not translate to majority positive opinions, as Brockett and colleagues (2009: 245) found that students in the two areas with higher numbers of Muslim students reported more affiliation with the views of the British National Party – a far right political party in the United Kingdom – than the students in York, which had far fewer Muslim students. Those non-Muslim students in Blackburn and Kirklees also agreed that ‘Muslims should adopt Western culture when living in the UK’ (Brockett et al., 2009: 245).

It is clear from the literature about Islamophobia and Muslimophobia that there is a pressing need in researching the opinions of non-Muslims with regard to Muslims to separate the people from the religion, and to gather and analyse empirical data to determine whether opinions about the religion are different from opinions about the people. That is what we turn our attention to next.

Methods and data

The data for this descriptive study are drawn from a cost-shared National Social Survey (NSS) conducted in Australia by the Population Research Laboratory of CQUniversity between 17 July and 23 August 2017. This random stratified sample of people over 18 years of age (n = 1265) resident in Australia consisted of a series of core demographic and health questions and questions submitted by researchers. The NSS was administered via a 20-station Computer-Assisted Telephone Interviewing system. The data were tabulated and cleaned by the Population Research Laboratory using SPSS. Weighted and non-weighted data were supplied, and this study utilises non-weighted data. The core demographic questions included asking the survey participants (among other things) to identify their religion. As this study is focused on the opinions of non-Muslims, the responses from the 15 Muslims who participated in the survey were removed from the dataset, reducing its sample size at this point from 1265 to 1250.

There are two specific questions in the 2017 NSS that are relevant to this study. The first asked participants to describe their opinion of Islam as a religion and the second asked participants to describe their opinion of Muslim people. A five-point Likert scale was used and the response options for both questions were: very favourable, somewhat favourable, neither favourable nor unfavourable, somewhat unfavourable, very unfavourable and don’t know / unsure. To enable comparisons, participants who did not answer both questions were removed, reducing the sample size to 1181.

Analysis was done in two steps. We first used frequency distributions and cross-tabulations to look for observable differences in the responses. This is a suitable technique for examining single and multiple variables (Creswell, 2009; Neuman, 2011).

Table 1 shows participant responses to the two questions.

Table 1.

Opinions of Islam as a religion compared with opinions of Muslim people – observable differences (n = 1181).

Opinion of Islam	Count	%	Opinion of Muslims	Count	%
Very favourable	49	4.15%	Very favourable	143	12.11%
Somewhat favourable	188	15.92%	Somewhat favourable	297	25.15%
Favourable overall	237	20.07%	Favourable overall	440	37.26%
Neither favourable nor unfavourable	548	46.40%	Neither favourable nor unfavourable	535	45.30%
Somewhat unfavourable	170	14.39%	Somewhat unfavourable	86	7.28%
Very unfavourable	152	12.87%	Very unfavourable	54	4.57%
Unfavourable overall	322	27.26%	Unfavourable overall	140	11.85%
Don’t know / unsure	74	6.27%	Don’t know / unsure	66	5.59%

Table 1 highlights that there are clearly observable differences in how the Australian population view Islam as a religion and how the Australian population view Muslim people. It also highlights that just under half of the study participants who responded to both relevant questions indicated they hold neutral (neither favourable nor unfavourable) views about both Islam as a religion (46.40%) and about Muslim people (45.30%). A small percentage of participants were unsure of their responses (6.27% and 5.59% respectively).

While just 4.15% of respondents have a very favourable opinion of Islam, close to three times that number (12.11%) simultaneously hold very favourable views of Muslim people themselves. Looking at favourable (very favourable and somewhat favourable) opinions overall, Table 1 highlights that while approximately 20% of the Australian population hold favourable opinions of Islam as a religion, favourable opinions of Muslim people is nearly double that at close to 40%. The corollary is that while close to a third (27.26%) of the Australian population hold unfavourable views of Islam as a religion, a far smaller proportion (11.85%) simultaneously hold unfavourable views of Muslim people themselves.

We then used McNemar tests to identify if the key observable differences were statistically significant. McNemar tests assess the consistency of responses across two variables, and generate an odds ratio estimate of effect size (Agresti, 2012). Table 2 shows the results of the McNemar tests which indicate significant differences in the proportion of those who chose unfavourable and favourable for their view of Islam and Muslims.¹

Table 2.

Opinions of Islam as a religion compared with opinions of Muslim people (n = 1181).

Opinion	% Islam	% Muslims	Difference
Don’t know/unsure	6.27	5.59	0.68^ns
Unfavourable	27.26	11.85	15.41*
Neither favourable nor unfavourable	46.40	45.30	1.10^ns
Favourable	20.07	37.26	−17.19*

Note: *Significantly different at p<.0001 ^nsNot significantly different.

This confirms that overall, non-Muslim Australians view the people who follow the religion of Islam more favourably than the religion itself. There are no significant differences in the proportion who chose neither favourable nor unfavourable, or in the proportion who could not choose a response. However, respondents were significantly more likely to be unfavourable towards Islam (27.27%) than towards Muslims (11.85%), with an odds ratio estimated through McNemar’s test of 11.71, meaning that the odds of being unfavourable to Islam was around 12 times the odds of being unfavourable towards Muslims. In contrast, the percentage favourable towards Muslims (37.26%) was significantly greater than towards Islam (20.07%). The odds of being favourable towards Muslims was around seven times greater than the odds of being favourable towards Islam.

What is puzzling is that our findings run somewhat counter to the findings of the literature about Islamophobia and Muslimophobia, but we will unpack that in the following section where we discuss our findings.

Discussion

The focus of this study has been to identify and describe if and to what extent the Australian population holds different opinions of Islam as a religion as distinct from their opinions about Muslim people. It is, we believe, the first study to do so. While our survey took place in Australia, which has a fractured history of contact between Muslims and non-Muslims, particularly post 9/11, our study breaks new ground internationally. It provides something of a challenge to the more recent Muslimophobia research. Muslimophobia suggests that it is Muslims who are perceived negatively by some non-Muslims more so than their religion. This study has looked at an ordinary aspect of the everyday life of Australian Muslims by exploring opinions held towards them by non-Muslim Australians. When Muslims in Australia experience the direct outcome of negative opinions some non-Muslims hold towards them, whether that be via acts of verbal abuse or physical violence, that is their lived experience and that lived experience may be improved by a focus on initiatives that work to address the issues raised in this paper. Our findings suggest that in Australia it is the religion of Islam that is perceived more negatively than the people and their culture.

This study reveals there are significant differences in how the Australian population views Muslims and the religion of Islam. While favourable opinions of both are in the low range (37.26% and 20.07% respectively), it is instructive that simultaneously unfavourable views of Muslims are significantly lower at 11.85%. It is interesting to speculate about why almost half the study’s participants hold neutral opinions (neither favourable nor unfavourable). A number of questions arise as a result of the high proportion of those surveyed who reported holding neutral views. These include whether they made a conscious decision not to share their views and what factors may have contributed to that decision, particularly given the current political and social climates in Australia; whether with more education about the Islamic faith and about the diversity of Muslim people, their views could shift to the favourable range; and what other approaches might change the minds of those who hold somewhat unfavourable or very unfavourable opinions of Islam and Muslims. It would also be instructive to identify the factors that might influence those who hold unfavourable views of Islam and, to a lesser extent, of Muslims in order to develop policy and practice to counter those factors. These are important questions for policy makers to consider. It means that different policy options could be developed and used for different purposes – on the one hand to educate people about and normalise the religion of Islam, and on the other hand to foster a positive view of multiculturalism. In a submission to the Australian Parliament’s Joint Standing Committee on Migration, the Australian Federation of Islamic Councils (2011: 3) argued that ‘greater understanding of cultural and faith norms needs to be absorbed by the wider community’ (emphasis added). This study underscores the salience of this point. Moreover, the findings of this study helps further guide policy makers working though programs encompassing a focus on social cohesion. This is because we have shown it is entirely feasible for people to hold an unfavourable view of Islam as a religion while simultaneously holding favourable views of Muslim people themselves. This is a highly nuanced but important point.

For the international scholarly community, our findings present somewhat of a conundrum as they run counter to the more recent literature about Muslimophobia, which we highlighted earlier in this article. The literature suggests that factors that characterise Muslimophobia and the associated negative reaction of non-Muslims towards Muslim people include dress, culture, physical appearances, lifestyle and values (Erdenir, 2010). It is possible that in our survey both Islamophobia and Muslimophobia are factors in the negative responses towards Muslims and towards Islam. However, the lower negative response rate in our survey to the question about opinions of Muslims compared to the higher negative response rate to the question about opinions of Islam, suggests that Islamophobia may have a stronger foothold in Australia than Muslimophobia. We recognise this runs counter to the Muslimophobia literature that suggests that this phobia is tied up with racism towards ethnic groups whose members are Muslims. We did not ask questions about opinions towards specific ethnic groups and therefore we don’t know if racism is a factor in the negative results. Unlike Brockett et al. (2009) we have not looked at how personal contact with Muslims influences opinions of Islam and opinions of Muslims. This is an area for further research in Australia given our findings. Further research into the relationship between Islamophobia and Muslimophobia might include longitudinal studies of non-Muslims that use surveys to explore why there is a difference between their attitudes towards Islam and Muslims. This research could track whether these attitudes change over time and, if so, identify what the drivers are behind those changes. It would be useful to undertake qualitative studies using focus groups with non-Muslims to examine how they perceive Muslims and Islam, and explore in greater detail the differences in their perceptions.

Conclusion

Our study provides a new basis from which researchers can reassess how opinions towards Islam and Muslims can be separately understood. It also provides policy makers with a fresh foundation for focusing on policy supporting social cohesion, for example initiatives that focus on non-Muslims meeting Muslims. Some efforts in Australia have gone towards the aforementioned types of programs with varying levels of success (Wise and Ali, 2008). The results our study provide the potential for policy makers to build on the goodwill that exists among those who responded positively to questions about opinions of Islam and opinions of Muslims, and to move those who were either undecided or did not want to answer these questions. Perhaps the most interesting path for future research lies in further exploration of the large number of people who registered a neutral view, understanding why this is the case is important as we can only speculate as to what the drivers of this may be. As Brockett et al. (2009: 242) indicate, when survey participants respond neutrally to a question it may mean that something else is at work, for example a ‘lack of understanding, rather than a particular attitudinal stance’. Additional research into those who hold particularly unfavourable views towards Islam, and also towards Muslims, may contribute to policy development.

Our study has its obvious limitations. The first is that it takes just one measure to assess opinions. As it is focused on describing the situation, demographic and other factors that may affect Australians’ opinions remain unexplored. These offer new and valuable paths for future research. There are also implications for Australia’s Muslim communities, with the survey results highlighting the need for continuing outreach and building communication and relationships between Muslims and non-Muslims. There is a gap in the research as to the factors that influence opinions towards Muslims and also towards the religion of Islam. This is a potentially rich field of research, with attendant policy implications.

The challenge for those scholars studying Muslimophobia is to undertake empirical research of the type we have carried out, to determine whether negative responses to the presence of adherents of the Islamic faith in Western countries is truly about the people, their culture and lifestyle, or whether it is about the religion they practise.

Footnotes

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The research project from which data was drawn for this paper was funded by the Commonwealth of Australia.

ORCID iD

Jacqui Ewart

Notes

Author biographies

Jacqui Ewart is a Professor of Communication and Journalism at Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia. She is a member of the Griffith Criminology Institute.

Kate O’Donnell is an adjunct researcher in the Griffith Criminology Institute in Brisbane, Australia.

Shannon Walding is a research fellow in the Griffith Criminology Institute in Brisbane, Australia.

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