Australian Muslim leaders and normalisation discourses

Abstract

Social integration is a contested concept that has been defined in various ways by different stakeholders. Drawing on research with Australian Muslim leaders, we argue that social integration can be usefully conceptualised as both a process of normalisation and the end product of this process. In this paper, we first discuss the identity aspect of social integration and then outline the discursive strategies the Muslim leaders utilise in their attempts to achieve the goal of being viewed as normal Australians. We illustrate how the leaders exercise agency in challenging dominant negative discourses, which assign to them a stigmatised position in Australia. The empirical evidence comes from 30 interviews conducted in Melbourne and Sydney in 2010 and 2011 with prominent Australian Muslim leaders.

Keywords

Normalisation social integration Muslim leaders Australia discourse

Introduction

Social integration refers to the incorporation of groups into a broader society. It has socioeconomic, political, cultural, and identity aspects, and is often concerned about the inclusion of migrants and/or minorities into a society's social fabric. Our concern here is to explore what social integration would look like from the perspective of a particular marginalised group. In so doing, we aim to provide a clear and nuanced understanding of social integration in the context of migrants, an understanding that has emerged from our research with Australian Muslim leaders.

Muslims comprise just 2.2% of the Australian population (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2012). Nonetheless, they have been subjected to a great deal of negative public attention, particularly after the September 11 terrorist attacks but continuing today. The attitudes of the broader population towards Muslims are largely negative. A decade-long national survey (n = 12,512), conducted by the University of Western Sydney, revealed that almost half the Australian population holds anti-Muslim sentiments (Dunn et al., 2008) and annual national surveys conducted in 2010–2012 on attitudes towards three faith groups found that attitudes towards Muslims were consistently much more negative than attitudes towards Christians and Buddhists, the other two faith groups studied (Markus, 2012). A bipartisan parliamentary inquiry into migration and multiculturalism received 513 submissions out of which 212 raised concerns over the cultural compatibility of Muslims with Australia (The Parliament of the Commonwealth of Australia, 2013). These examples reveal the difficulties Muslims face to find their place in Australian society.

This tense climate has led to the emergence of Muslim leaders who attempt to challenge the dominant narratives and promote a positive image of Islam. In the following, we explain their strategies in detail; however, to be able to theorise their discursive strategies, we need to take a closer look at the role that group identity plays in the process of social integration.

Collective identity and social cohesion

To explain the role of identity in the process of social integration, we take one step back and ask: does social cohesion presuppose collective (national) identity? We will show that the answer that is given to this question would foreshadow the relationship between identity and social integration. This question has received conflicting responses. Through a critique of Durkheim’s theory of social solidarity, we argue that in order to cohere, societies need a collective identity.

Durkheim (1984) traced the roots of social solidarity in his book The Division of Labour in Society. He proposed a typology of social solidarity which suggested that societies must have either mechanical or organic solidarity. Mechanical solidarity prevails in pre-industrial societies where collective consciousness is strong. This type of society is often culturally homogenous and society is a ‘community of belief’ (Durkheim, 1984: 173). The sources for collective identity include ‘affinity of blood, attachment to the same soil, the cult of their ancestors, a commonality of habits’ (Durkheim, 1984: 219). This societal type leaves little space for the growth of distinct individual identities: ‘individuality is zero’ (1984: 84). The voluminous repressive or penal law reflects the strong collective sentiments, and punishment reflects ‘public anger’ (Durkheim, 1984: 58).

Organic solidarity, in contrast, refers to a societal type wherein the division of labour, specialisation and occupational differentiations have advanced. The organic or contractual solidarity embeds the individual within various networks of relations with society. These dense networks create functional interdependence between society’s members and institutions. The growth of the division of labour dilutes the collective consciousness and ‘the average intensity of the common consciousness is itself weakening’ (Durkheim, 1984: 120). At the same time, ‘individual personality grows stronger’ (Durkheim, 1984: 174). The weakening of collective consciousness concurs with the diminishing of the size and substance of penal/repressive laws and leads to the enlargement of restitutory laws and professional ethics.

These two types of solidarity cannot exist at the same time: ‘the history of these two types indeed shows that the one has only made progress in the proportion to which the other has regressed’ (Durkheim, 1984: 133). This is to say that the progress of the division of labour and associated specialisation would necessarily entail the dilution, and eventually disappearance, of collective identity.

Durkheim’s analysis, however, runs counter to the reality of Western societies (Billing, 1995). There has been no weakening of collective identities proportionate to the enhancement of division of labour over the past two centuries. In fact, there are compelling arguments that collective identity is indispensable to the functioning of modern democratic nation-states.

Anderson (2006) conceptualised modern nation-states as imagined communities. His historical investigations showed that the emergence of modern European nation-states largely originated in the demotion of sacred Latin and the spread of vernacular languages through print capitalism. The growing linguistic consciousness (along with the territorialisation of religions and monarchies) developed a sense of nationhood and laid the foundation for modern European nations. This sense of nationhood continues to exist in the twenty-first century. Therefore, the shift from mechanical to organic solidarity, using Durkheim’s terminology, did not weaken collective consciousness, but replaced one type of collective consciousness with another (Simon, 2004).

Taylor (2006: 501) provides an account of collective identity that adds another dimension to Anderson’s argument. He argued that national identity consists in a democratic society without which the system would not function. Democracy, according to him, demands collective identity more than an empire. Unlike empires, democracy functions through collective agency and popular sovereignty, therefore, ‘a sovereign people, in order to have the unity needed for collective agency, had to have an antecedent unity of culture, history, or (more often in Europe) language’ (Anderson, 2006: 504). This is reflected in the history of pre-modern empires that had ‘a very good record of “multi-cultural” tolerance and co-existence’ while the twentieth century is ‘the age of ethnic cleansing’ (Anderson, 2006: 507).

Durkheim conceptualised organic/contractual solidarity based around the functional interdependence of society’s parts. Contractual relationships in this societal type play a far greater role than they do with mechanical solidarity. A critique of this view is that societies at times face crises (e.g. war, economic recession and the like) that disrupt the normal functioning of society. What keeps societies together in such situations? It does not seem that modern societies quickly collapse at such times. This critique was raised by Berger (1998: 355) who suggested that civic connections are too thin to be functioning in the events of crisis: ‘whenever members of a society are called upon to make sacrifices for the common good, the presence of a “collective conscience” is essential’ (Berger, 1998: 354).

It is worthwhile to note that collective identity does not necessarily originate in a shared homogenous culture. Kymlicka (1996: 131) aptly distinguished between ‘values’ and ‘identity’ claiming that the latter is the source of social cohesion. He referred to the American society as an empirical case and argued that ‘what holds Americans together, despite their disagreements over the nature of the good life, is the fact that they share an identity as Americans’. By contrast, he contended, ‘what keeps Swedes and Norwegians apart, despite their shared principles of justice, is the lack of a shared identity’. Therefore, a multicultural society could sustain its cohesion if there exists a shared national identity. This point has also been made by other scholars from different perspectives (see for instance, Putnam (2007) and Homsey and Hogg (2000)).

The earlier discussion foreshadows how the social integration of minorities ought to be conceptualised. To integrate into mainstream society, a minority group has to fold its story into the society’s broader story. So long as a minority’s identity is constructed as being separate or incompatible with the broader identity, the process of integration will not progress well. This is the case with Muslim minorities in the West, including Australian Muslims.

The Muslim ‘other’ has played a historical role in the construction of Western identity, as explained by Said (1978) in Orientalism. Inherent in Orientalist discourses, and their new incarnations in theories such as the ‘Clash of Civilisations’ (Huntington, 1993), is the ideological construction of Muslims as opposed to the West and the idea that the differences between the two cannot easily be overcome. They reinforce the idea that Muslims in the West are perpetual outsiders. The above discussion suggests that Muslim minorities will not be able to integrate unless the sharp polarity between Islam and Western identity is lessened.

There are a number of political, cultural and security issues that are often raised in Western public debates regarding the integration capacities of Muslim minorities. These issues range from the wearing of the hijab and burqa (and more generally Muslim attitudes towards women) and the building of religious, educational, legal, and financial institutions by Muslims to issues of terrorism and radical interpretations of Islam (e.g. Mansouri and Marotta, 2012; Parekh, 2005). These are the key issues that integrationist Muslim leaders throughout the West, including Australia, have to deal with, debate, and respond to. They strive to provide alternative discourses in order to reduce conflicts over the above issues, thereby helping facilitate the integration process. We suggest that the concept of ‘normalisation’ can enable us to explain the situation of Australian Muslim leaders and the strategies they utilise to improve their lot.

Normalisation

The concept of ‘normality’ has been used in various ways and has been transformed in the last two centuries (Hacking, 1990). Goffman (1963) used the concept of ‘normal’ and the ‘stigmatised’ in opposition to each other. Normal people, he suggested, are ‘those who do not depart negatively from the particular expectation at issue’ (Goffman, 1963: 15). In contrast, stigma is ‘an undesired differentness from what we had anticipated’ (Goffman, 1963: 15). In line with Goffman’s definitions, we define a social group as being normal when public opinion does not view it in a negative light.

From this definition, it follows that normalisation is a process through which stigmatised individuals or groups achieve normal status in society. Goffman (1963) described various strategies and methods which the stigmatised use to achieve normality. He called these techniques ‘stigma management’. Depending on whether the stigma is visible (e.g. race, gender, age, disability) or invisible (e.g. religious affiliation and sexual orientation), he suggested, the stigmatised draw on different strategies. For example, the stigmatised may conceal the stigma, or fabricate a false identity. Another strategy that the stigmatised may employ is normalisation. Clair et al. (2005), in their study of stigma management in workplaces, demonstrated that stigmatised people may adopt normalising strategies ‘to make their difference seem commonplace or ordinary’ (Clair, 2005: 83). In so doing, they suggested, the stigma ‘is subtly acknowledged, but its significance and stigma are minimized’. This attempt is made by them to ‘establish, maintain, or pretend to be living as “normal” an existence as possible’ (Clair, 2005: 83). By the same token, we see normalisation as a strategy for stigma management in this paper.

We will show that the Muslim leaders in this study view normalisation as an essential path towards integration. The counter-Orientalist discourses they promote about various social and political issues can be interpreted utilising the concept of normalisation. To them, the end point of social integration is to become culturally invisible. They seek to arrive at a point where Islamic practises and symbols are perceived as normal in Australia.

Research method

The idea that social integration can be viewed as a process of normalisation emerged from our study of 30 Muslim leaders in Melbourne and Sydney, Australia. In response to public discourses about Muslims and Islam, Australian Muslim leaders have strived to put forward an alternate vision of Islam in the Australian public sphere, particularly in the post-9/11 era. A group of young, educated and Australian born or raised Muslims have emerged who make appearances on TV panels and shows, write in national newspapers, and participate in public conversations. They do not claim to be religious scholars but they comment on what Islam is and, particularly, on what Islam is not (misogynist, violent and so forth). These are the leaders whose discourses we analyse in this paper.

The research explored social integration from the perspective of these leaders through in-depth interviews held in 2010 and 2011. The interviews took between 40 minutes and 2 h and were recorded, transcribed and analysed thematically. The leaders are prominent and well known in Australian Muslim communities (see the Appendix for a list of participants). Many of them are also well known to the Australian public as they are often consulted by the media to comment on various social and political issues. Sydney and Melbourne were selected because they have the largest concentration of Australian Muslims. Eighteen men and 12 women were interviewed. People of Lebanese (n = 6) and Turkish (n = 5) backgrounds had the largest representation in the sample, which broadly corresponds to the ethnic composition of Australian Muslim communities. The participants had the option of being named or being anonymous in the reporting of the research. Those who elected to be anonymous have been given pseudonyms, which are indicated in the text by being italicised.

The leaders could be characterised as moderate Muslims meaning that they felt themselves to be both Australian and Muslim, much like the moderate Muslims in Modood and Ahmad’s (2007) study of British Muslims. In Modood and Ahmad’s (2007) view, ‘moderate Muslim’ is a relational concept indicating a Muslim’s position towards the West. They situated moderates between two groups: fundamentalists and radical reformists. Unlike radical reformists who ‘openly identify as part of a “movement”’ (Modood and Ahmad, 2007: 193), moderate leaders reflect the views of mainstream Muslims and do not aim to change the mainstream Muslim view.

This is a working sociological definition of moderate Muslim. The problem, however, is that some Muslims are reluctant to be identified as ‘moderate’, as raised in Modood and Ahmad’s (2007) study. This resonates with the findings of the present study of Australian Muslim leaders. In this study, we characterise the participants as ‘integrationist’. We have adopted the term integrationist because the participants were in favour of Muslims being integrated into the broader Australian society. The term ‘integrationist Muslim’ also refers directly to our research objective of analysing social integration.

The normalisation strategies adopted by the Muslim leaders

These integrationist Muslim leaders seek normalisation by highlighting the similarities between Australian Muslims and other ethnic and religious groups. What makes them most uncomfortable with the public discourses on Muslims and Islam is the singling out of Muslims as being intrinsically incompatible with Australian values and culture. Instead, they portray an image of Islam which is malleable and adaptable to all cultures including Australian culture. Their goal is for Muslims to be a normal part of Australian society. This idea is nicely illustrated by Nazid Kimmie, a Muslim Australian artist:

The ultimate goal in years to come would be to be invisible. We would be part of the fabric; your traditional religion would just be part of who you are as an Australian citizen – that is the goal. The people you brought up before – [Muslim] academics and the [Muslim] social elite, are aiming for that.

The quote reveals the desire for a seamless acceptance of Muslim Australians into mainstream Australian society. The end goal is a change to Australian public views so that Muslims, and members of other religions, would be accepted as normal Australians.

The strategies that will be described are loosely coordinated via bodies such as the Islamic Council of Victoria and other Muslim organisations that employ discursive techniques to change the positioning of Muslims from stigmatised outsiders to regular/normal Australians.¹ The integrationist Muslim leaders utilised four discursive normalisation strategies. First, they rejected Muslim exceptionalism, arguing that Muslim ‘problems’ such as the oppression of women, religious fundamentalism, and other issues that are mentioned in stigmatising discourses are ‘normal problems’ that all communities face. Second, they highlighted the ways in which Islamic values are congruent with Australian values. Third, they situated negative practises associated with Muslims, such as patriarchy and polygamy, as cultural practises from particular parts of the world rather than as Islamic religious practises. Finally, they argued that Muslim radicals, like other religious radicals, are a tiny proportion of Muslims and, further, they are a fringe minority that do not reflect the views of most Muslims just as Christian fundamentalists do not reflect the views of mainstream Christians. These discursive strategies are purposive and support the Muslim leaders’ normalisation project. We discuss each in turn.

The rejection of Muslim exceptionalism

Australian Muslims, similar to many other Muslim minorities in the West, have been criticised for being oppressive to women, fundamentalist, violent, and unwilling to integrate. In responding to these allegations, integrationist Muslim leaders compare Australian Muslim communities with other ethnic and religious groups living in Australia. Through these comparisons, they highlight the similarities between the realities of Muslim life and other groups. In so doing, they acknowledge that there are some ‘problems’ within Muslim communities but, at the same time, normalise them by pointing out that other communities faced, and continue to face, similar problems. Muslim leaders do think that there is a need to address these problems and suggest that takes time and patience. However, they strongly oppose public discourses that use stigmatising social issues to single out and de-normalise Muslims. We illustrate how they do this by offering some examples.

Australian Muslims build educational, financial, legal and cultural institutions alongside public institutions. These institutions have been taken by some commentators as evidence of Muslim migrants’ resistance to integration (e.g. Bendle, 2011; Karvelas, 2011; Murray, 2009). Mehmet Saral, President of the Affinity Multicultural Foundation, responded to these assertions by highlighting the similarities between Muslims and other religious groups that have become part of the Australian mainstream:

When the Irish came to this country the first time, they built their churches and they built their own schools, because the majority at that time [belonged to the] Anglican Church – the Church of England. So the Irish didn’t fit in and they were the Other. They built their churches and they built their schools. When Italians and Maltese came in, they did not need to build schools and churches because they were Catholic and the Irish had already built the Catholic churches, and in the future, as other Catholics came, they didn’t have to do that because it was already done. When the Greek Orthodox came, they also built their own churches and their own schools because there was not any Greek orthodox church here. When the Egyptian Coptics came, again they were a Christian group. They built their own schools and their own churches, and in a similar fashion when the Vietnamese came, they built the Buddhist temples; the Indians came and they built Indian temples and their own schools in a similar fashion.

The quote demonstrates the way integrationist leaders normalise the practise of institution building. Saral referred to different Christian denominations that came and built their own institutions. Christianity is the dominant religion in Australia. By making reference to Christianity and highlighting similarities between earlier Christian migrants and contemporary Muslim migrants, Saral calls into question the intense negative public focus on Muslim institution building. The building of mosques thus becomes a normal activity that people of all religious backgrounds undertake when they join a new society.

Omeima Sukkarieh, Manager of the Auburn Community Development Network in Sydney, and Kuranda Seyit, Founder of the Forum on Australia’s Islamic Relations (FAIR), both also questioned the discourses that construct Muslims as being culturally incompatible with Australia. They claimed that Muslim practises which are often negatively focused on are commonplace in other communities but do not receive the same attention and media coverage:

Omeima Sukkarieh: What is the difference? If somebody did the research, a similar kind of research on the Jewish community, you would find that they’ve got their own institutions—their own educational institutions, religious institutions, right? There has never been a question of [their] integration. The same with Hindus, what about the Hindu temples and the Hindu practices? These all happen in other communities, right? So the question for me is if you did research in other communities and did a comparative analysis, would they be that much different? My guess would be, no!

Kuranda Seyit: There are problems within the Muslim community. There are patriarchal and chauvinistic attitudes amongst Muslim men. That’s right across every religion: Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, and Sikhs. These patriarchal views, or sometimes misogynistic views or chauvinistic views, are prevalent in every society.

These quotes show the ways by which the leaders reinterpret practises that appear to situate Muslims as outside the mainstream, including the negative ones, as being solidly mainstream. They acknowledged the existence of ‘problems’ within Muslim communities but normalised them by showing that Muslim problems are the same as those of other groups. The same was true regarding Muslim fundamentalism. Salih Yucel claimed that some Muslims’ opposition to homosexuality and secularism is shared by Christian fundamentalists, but they do not get the same amount of public attention as Muslims. Christian fundamentalism is depicted as a problem, but an ‘Australian’ problem. In contrast, Islamic fundamentalism is perceived as an entirely ‘foreign’ problem imported into Australia. The integrationist leaders repeatedly argued that Muslim problems are no different from other religious communities’ problems, with the goal of normalising those problems.

Another strategy used by integrationist leaders to normalise the problems that situate them as outsiders is to emphasise the role of time. They claim that because Muslims are relative newcomers, the problems they experience are really just problems associated with settlement after migration. These have been experienced by other migrant groups and, the leaders assert, over time Muslims will integrate into the mainstream just as other migrant communities did. Through highlighting the time element, they indirectly tackle the notion of intrinsic antagonism between Islamic teachings and Western culture. For instance, Muslims have been criticised in the media for settling in certain suburbs, particularly in West Sydney. This residential pattern is taken as an evidence of resistance to integration (Fife-Yeomans, 2013). In response to such criticisms, Nazid Kimmie compared Muslims with other ethnic groups:

Being an Australian who has observed this for 20 or 30 years, [I’ve seen that] each group or culture that comes to Australia goes through the same cycle, the very same cycle. First and second-generation, they are in ghettoes. They are isolated. This is how they find strength, and this is how they preserve their culture. But of course, now we have these headlines – that Muslims, you know, keep to themselves and [stay] in ghettoes etc. … I think it happens in every social group that comes to this country. It happened with Greeks and Italians; it happened with Vietnamese … the same we have with the Muslim community.

This reasoning reinterprets the alleged lack of integration of Muslims in the context of settlement issues and not Islamic culture. In this way, the familiar notion of generational integration is emphasised and the Muslim situation is normalised.

Australian values and Islamic values

In the past two decades, there have been heated discussions about Islamic values and whether they are compatible with Australian values. The rhetoric that there is a set of specifically Australian values gained momentum in the 1990s and early 2000s. The adoption of ‘Australian values’ and the ‘Australian way of life’ became the criterion for judging migrants’ integration or lack thereof. Islam and Muslims, in particular, were singled out implicitly or explicitly as being incompatible with Australian values. Costello (2006), then Deputy Leader of the Australian Liberal Party, said:

Before entering a mosque visitors are asked to take off their shoes. This is a sign of respect. If you have a strong objection to walking in your socks don't enter the mosque. Before becoming an Australian you will be asked to subscribe to certain values. If you have strong objections to those values don't come to Australia.

This view, portraying Islam as incompatible with the West, has been the dominant explanation for Islam–West conflicts in the international media over the last two decades. In the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, 60 prominent American scholars (including well known scholars such as Samuel Huntington, Michael Walzer, Theda Scocpol, Robert Putnam and Francis Fukuyama) issued a statement defending the War on Terror. In their statement, they framed terrorist activities as attacks on American values (Institute for American Values, 2002). In Australia, the terrorist acts of some Muslim radicals were also framed by the Australian government as attacking Australian values (Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, 2004). Not only terrorism, but the wearing of the hijab or burqa, and other visible Islamic symbols have been viewed as un-Australian. Randa Abel-Fattah, a prominent Australian Muslim writer and public commentator, alluded to these views as ‘an unfortunate tendency to construct Muslim and Australian as somehow mutually exclusive’.

In such a polarised climate, integrationist Muslim leaders aim to undermine these dichotomous constructions. Most interviewees asserted that there is no remarkable or problematic incongruence between Islamic and Western values. Kamal said that he sees no ‘intrinsic tension’ between Islam and the West. With regard to this debate, the main discursive strategy of the integrationist leaders was to offer a very broad description of both Australian values and Islamic values so that they could highlight how similar the two are. Kuranda Seyit, Founder of the Forum on Australia’s Islamic Relations (FAIR), described the relationship between Islamic and Australian values as follows:

We talk a lot about Australian values, about mateship, about friendship, about fair go, about giving our helping hand to someone who is in trouble, about being sociable and hospitable and being friendly to the visitors … these values are all standard and I think everybody loves that – they love sport, they love the outdoors. Every single thing that I just mentioned as Australian values are really fundamental to being a Muslim. The love of helping one another when you are down, those of hospitality, these things are Muslim values – the responsibility of doing good works in the community – so when people say to me, or in the media on talk-back radio, when they say we don’t want these Muslims in our society, I get on the radio and say, ‘Why’?

Ambiguity around what Australian values actually include helps the leaders to interpret them broadly. For instance, referring to the Australian government’s Charter of Human Rights, Tasneem Chopra argued that the Charter makes it clear that there is no ‘competition’ between Islamic values and Australian values because its stated values of: ‘equality, justice and fairness resonate with Islamic values’. Similarly, Nayeefa Chowdhury, an Australian Muslim activist, saw no discrepancy between Islamic values and those indicated in the Australian Values Statement: freedom of religion; equality of men and women; equal opportunity for all citizens regardless of race, ethnicity and religion; support for democracy, and the rule of law: ‘So in general, if you abide by the law, you are committed to the fundamental Australian values’. She concluded that Australian values do not clash with Islamic principles because ‘in Islamic principles you have to follow the rule of the land’.

These discourses promote the idea that Islam and Western culture are compatible and beyond that are actually similar, thus attempting to undermine the idea of an essential incompatibility between Islam and the West. This reframing of essentialist discourses that situate Muslims outside of Australian society is part of the normalisation project of the Muslim leaders.

Australian Islam

Moderate Muslim leaders emphatically make a distinction between Muslim cultures and the religion of Islam. This discursive strategy enables them to divert criticisms of Islam to instead being criticisms of the practises of some Muslims. They note that there are significant variations in Islamic practises across Muslim cultures. This variation was well studied by American Anthropologist Geertz (1968) in Islam Observed. Geertz illustrated that Islam has been interpreted differently in Morocco in comparison with Indonesia, showing how social and historical factors impacted on its interpretations and associated practises.

In the West, intellectuals such as Tariq Ramadan, a prominent European Muslim figure, have campaigned for the reinterpretation of Islam in Western contexts:

We must distinguish between on the one hand the elements of Muslim identity that are based on religious principles and that give it a necessarily open quality that allows the believer to live in any environment, and on the other hand cultures that are specific ways of living out these principles, adapted for a variety of societies, none having more legitimacy than any other provided that it respects the religious injunction. (Ramadan, 2003: 78)

The process of ‘stripping down’, Ramadan (2003: 78) argued, allows for the emergence of an Islam specific to the cultural environment of Europe, namely European Islam. This point was echoed by several participants. Rachel Woodlock, a Muslim public commentator, suggested that there are beliefs and rites shared by Muslims around the world including the oneness of God, prohibition of alcohol, prayer five times a day, and fasting during Ramadan. Nevertheless, she claimed, there are: ‘a wide range of areas’ where Islam has adapted to local culture and these ‘cultural expressions’ of Islam are easily identifiable in Muslim countries. She stated that when Muslims began settling in the West, they underwent the same process, namely, developing a Western ‘flavour’ of Islam. She held that Muslims who settled in Australia have had to think through the distinction between Islam and their ethnic culture. The intermingling of Muslims of various ethnic origins has made them more aware of their distinct ways of practising Islam. She maintained that most Australian Muslim students attend public schools where they meet Muslim students from other Muslim ethnic groups. They notice differences and bring them home. These challenges, she claimed, have been ‘highly creative’ in developing a ‘unique experience of Islam’ in Australia.

The leaders insisted that Islam can adapt to any culture including Australian culture. Berhan Ahmed, an African Australian community leader, said he has a ‘strong belief that Islam survives in any culture and in any situation’. Some of the participants compared Islam to water, and culture to a container. For instance, Chowhury said: ‘Islam is like water; you pour water into a container, and it gets the shape of that container’. Maha Abdo said that most of her activities aim to educate people about this distinction because she believed that the conflation of religion and culture was problematic for both Muslims and non-Muslims. She brought up the example of forced marriage, saying this is practised by some Muslims, but it cannot be justified on the basis of Islamic teachings. Educating people about this misattribution would benefit both Muslims and non-Muslims.

Ahmed highlighted the difference between religion and culture by explaining polygamy. He asserted that Islam did not introduce polygamy into Muslim lives. Rather, when Islam entered those lands where polygamy was practised, it became part of Islam. He claimed that the same happened when other religions entered Eritrea: ‘We have got Christians, we have got Jews, and we have got Islam. All of them have monogamy and polygamy. It is not because they are Muslims, No! No! Christians also have these sorts of practices, the Jews have it too’. Bilal Cleland also alluded to the different treatment of men and women in some Muslim communities: ‘It is tribalism; it is not actually Islam. If you look at the prophet – peace be upon him – he was combating the narrow attitudes of men’.

Omer Atila, Executive Advisor at the Australian Intercultural Society, imputed patriarchal practises to Muslims’ local culture. He said that in eastern Turkey, ‘men walk two meters in front of women’, but this ‘has nothing to do with Islam’. By the same token, Sherene Hassan, Secretary and board member of the Islamic Council of Victoria (ICV), stated that interpretations of Islam tended to be ‘adulterated’ by cultural and patriarchal teachings. She questioned the limited access of Muslim women to mosques in some Muslim cultures and claimed that is not defensible by Islamic teachings. In her view, these practises lose validity against ‘pure’ Islamic teachings. In a similar fashion, Tasneem Chopra, Chairperson of the Australian Muslim Women’s Centre for Human Rights, suggested that the confusion between culture and religion has led to Islam being blamed for practises that are not essentially Islamic:

I mean a lot of Muslims’ practices are going to be coloured by culture and when you have that happening, being often, the distortion of Islam becomes great because people look at what is happening in the culture entity and associate that with Islam, and as you know we have 70 different [Islamic] cultures roughly in Victoria alone. So clearly the image and picture of Islam is going to be very distorted and people think that all Muslims are Arab, or all Muslims are Afghani, or all Muslims are Pakistani. Clearly those cultures impact the way that Islam is viewed … . We know that Taliban and what they do and practice is actually sanctioned because of the culture not because of what Islam says. It is often clothed in the name of religion.

The discourse of religion versus culture prepares the ground for the discourse of an ‘Australian Islam’. Sara claimed that an Australian Islam is in the making. She highlighted the role of converts and also second-generation Muslims in the process:

We are at a stage now – while we are still a migrant community – we are now having a lot of second, third, and fourth-generation Muslims and also a lot of converts, so the people whose idea of what it means to be a Muslim have been formed by an Australian identity … I think this Islam that we are seeing in countries like Australia and the States and England, for example, is starting to have that local western flavour and interpretation … it is reformulating now, I think. It is people who were born here –maybe their parents were born here – who are thinking in an Australian way and approach the faith in an Australian way, with all the good and bad that comes with that.

This quote encapsulates the idea of an Australian Islam. It assumes the malleability, adaptability, and compatibility of Islam with almost every culture. Australian Islam develops within the cultural and political environment of Australian society and incorporates this culture in its interpretation of Islam. As well-known Muslim writer Yusuf (2007) put it: ‘Australian Islam needs an Aussie accent’.

Integrationist leaders claimed that Islam should not be equated with what Muslims do. Muslim practises have often been ‘coloured’, ‘adulterated’ and ‘clothed’ with culture. By dissociating Islam from ethnic cultures, practises which do not seem ‘normal’ in the Australian culture are eliminated and the culturally compatible aspects of Islam are emphasised. This process is undoubtedly influenced by the cultural norms of Australian society and leads to the emergence of an Islam that is ‘reformulated’, has an ‘Australian flavour’ and is ‘organic’ to Australia. This by no means implies that integrationist Muslim leaders are succumbing to Western culture or acting hypocritically to appease the Australian majority. The point is that those who have been socialised in the Australian cultural environment understand Islam in a way that is congruent with their everyday experiences and cultural worldview.

The discourse of Australian Islam aims to dismantle the antipathy between Islam and the West/Orientalist ideology, serving the aim of normalisation. The integrationist leaders try to show that Islam, as a religion, does not inhibit Muslims from being Australian. By relativising Islamic interpretations and practises, they promote the idea that Muslim migrants are the same as other migrants who have become part of the mainstream over time.

Muslim radicals as a minority

Australian Muslims are a minority group in Australia. Within the Australian Muslim group, there is a discourse that separates the group into ‘mainstream’ Muslims and radical others. The integrationist leaders view themselves as the representatives of ‘mainstream’ Muslims. They believe that the majority of Australian Muslims, the mainstream, are law-abiding citizens who support democracy, freedom, integration and multiculturalism. They assert that mainstream Muslims reject terrorism and fundamentalism and have reconciled their Islamic identity with their Australian identity. Muslim radicals, they contend, are, however vocal, only a tiny minority of Muslims. Mehmet Saral, for example, said that Muslim extremists comprise 0.01% of Australian Muslims. Similarly Fatima said:

There are certainly positive models of integration, but integration on our terms, you know, but then there are Muslims who have taken to this issue and responded negatively, and you see that in, for instance, these groups like Hizb ut-Tahrir and other very fringe groups. I consider them fringe; I don’t think they are mainstream. I don’t think they resonate with a lot of people.

The discursive model of the normal majority versus radical minority is not limited to Muslims, but is prevalent in political and media discourses in various contexts. In the case of political movements, Hall (1993: 285) argued that the minority/majority model is ‘one of the most persistent “inferential structures” in the significance of political deviance’. The minority/majority paradigm implicitly represents the majority as ‘the reasonable, the rational, the normal, the natural’ (Hall 1993: 285) while the minority is represented as militant, radical and violent. This frame, Hall claimed, has cognitive, evaluative, expressive, explanatory, predictive and consolatory power.

Integrationist leaders view radicals as a minority that have been focused on disproportionately, given their small numbers, in the media. Sara alluded to the overrepresentation of radical Muslims in the media and said:

If you take the [television news] show Today Tonight, for example, … Shows like that are actively going looking for the lone widow, and then suggesting that this is in fact the norm. And that is the problem with media representations … the problem is that it is portrayed in a way that suggested it was somehow representative as opposed to being an aberration.

The normalisation process, then, aims to reverse these images which portray the ‘aberration’ as the ‘norm’. The integrationist leaders position Muslim radicals as fringe, marginal and few in number. By assigning to themselves a ‘majority’ and ‘mainstream’ status, integrationist leaders attempt to normalise a particular Australian-focused Muslim identity and to marginalise those who do not wish to integrate.

Conclusion

A collective identity underpins social cohesion in societies. Social integration of minorities, therefore, has an identity aspect. Minorities, in order to be accepted by the mainstream society, have to fold their story into the broader collective identity. As far as Muslim minorities in the West are concerned, this is not an easy task to achieve. Tensions and conflicts abound in Islam–West history and they increased following the September 11 attacks. The subsequent tense political climate has left local Muslim minorities in a difficult situation and has curtailed their capacity to be fully accepted by mainstream Western societies. This paper illustrated the efforts of a particular group of Muslim leaders towards overcoming these difficulties. Their discursive strategies serve to normalise the image of Islam and Muslims in the Australian public sphere. They aim to become invisible to the gaze of the public and be therefore viewed as normal Australian citizens.

The findings indicate that social integration can be conceptualised as a process of normalisation. The Muslim leaders have adopted discursive strategies that aim to reduce the stigma associated with Islam in Australia. Their long-term goal is to make being Muslim a normal Australian experience, to be normalised. These strategies are not unlike strategies that other stigmatised groups utilise to minimise their differences (see Clair et al., 2005; Goffman, 1963). Should the goal be achieved, the Australian national identity would broaden to include non-Christian religions, thereby possibly increasing social cohesion (Kymlicka, 1996). For this to happen, the polarity between Muslims and the West will need to be reduced.

The question that remains to be answered is whether these efforts have proved effective and successful. We suggest they have not, yet. The reason has much to do with the limited access the Muslim leaders have to the public media. The public media enforces negative images of Muslims (Dunn et al., 2007), undermining the integrationist discourses put forward by these leaders. The disproportionate attention paid by the news media to radical voices, as raised by interviewees in this study, thwarts the integrationist leaders’ efforts described in this paper. To sell more of their products, the media often publish and broadcast stories that capture a greater audience, and these stories are usually ones that entail elements of fear, crime, war, tension, violence, and the like (Brasted, 2001). It is then not surprising that the media find radical Islamists’ inflammatory rhetoric and actions well suited to their purpose. Caught between the dominant media images and regular provocations by, and public controversies about, radical Islamists, integrationist leaders are hard-pressed to normalise the image of Islam and Muslims in the Western public sphere.

Footnotes

Note

Appendix 1. List of participants

Abdo, Maha: President of Muslim Women’s Association.

Abdel-Fattah, Randa: Writer and public commentator.

Ahmed, Berhan: African-Australian community leader and Chair of the African Think Tank.

Atila, Omer: Executive Advisor at the Australian Intercultural Society.

Abu Ayman: Founder of Ahlu Sunnah wal Jamma’h Association of Australia (ASWJAA).

Badar, Uthman: media representative of Hizb ut-Tahrir Australia.

Cleland, Bilal: A prominent historian of Islam and Muslims in Australia and former Secretary of the Australian Federation of Islamic Council (AFIC) and Secretary of the Islamic Council of Victoria (ICV).

Chopra, Tasneem: President of the Islamic Women’s Welfare Council of Victoria.

Chowdhury, Nayeefa: Founding Director of an Internet-based Islamic information service (Light of Islam.net) and active in Muslim student associations and the Bengali community in Australia.

Cooper, Aziz: Prison Chaplaincy Coordinator at the Islamic Council of Victoria (ICV).

Dellal, Hass: President of Australian Multicultural Foundation since 1989.

Elsyed, Ramzi: Vice president of the Islamic Council of Victoria (ICV).

Hassan, Sherene: Secretary and Board member of the Islamic Council of Victoria (ICV).

Kimmie, Nazid: A prominent Muslim artist, poet and writer.

Mehboub, Amjad: Former president of the Australian Federation of Islamic Councils (AFIC).

Morsi, Yassir: President of Victoria’s Muslim Student Associations.

Patal, Ikebal: President of Australian Federation of Islamic Councils (AFIC).

Raihman, Zubeda: Treasurer of the Muslim Women’s National Network Australia.

Saral, Mehmet: Co-founder and President of the Affinity Intercultural Foundation.

Seyit, Seyfi: Founder of the Forum on Australia’s Islamic Relations (FAIR).

Shkembi, Nur: Arts Officer at the Islamic Council of Victoria (ICV).

Sukkarieh, Khaled: Chairman of the Islamic Council of New South Wales (ICNSW).

Sukkarieh, Omeima: Manager of the Auburn Community Development Network, and a nominee for the Australian of the Year 2011.

Toohey, Monique: A Muslim activist.

Trad, Keysar: President of the Islamic Friendship Association and former Director of the Lebanese Muslim Association (LMA).

Woodlock, Rachel: A Muslim public commentator.

Yucel, Salih: A former Imam and a lecturer at Monash University.

And three anonymous participants:

Kamal: A leader occupying high organisational positions within Muslim organisations.

Sara: A Muslim public commentator.

Fatima: A Muslim activist and public commentator.

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