Rachel Woodlock

Being an Aussie Mossie: Muslim and Australian identity among Australian-born Muslims

The topic of Muslim integration in Western societies such as Australia has generated much interest and comment. Despite factors that might promote Muslim inclusion in Australia, there has been an unofficial policy swing back to promoting monoculturalism, which threatens to establish a two-tier Australian national identity. This article criticizes the notion of an inherent conflict between Australian and Muslim identities and examines how a group of 200 Australian-born practising Muslims living predominantly in New South Wales and Victoria value their Muslim and Australian identities. It finds they strongly value being Muslim, while also valuing a concept of Australian identity that is affirming and inclusive and consists of achievable attributes, despite also struggling with perceptions of discrimination and prejudice.

Praying Where They Don't Belong: Female Muslim Converts and Access to Mosques in Melbourne, Australia

This paper analyses the data from a sample of women converts to Islam residing in Melbourne, Australia, and the difficulty they face in accessing mosques. Although conversion requires structure and support through the performance of religious rituals, Muslim women converts are hindered in their ability to freely access and enjoy mosques. This is despite historical freedom for women to access the Prophets mosque. It appears that the trend to exclude women from mosques has been imported into the Australian context due to the strong ethnic identification of mosques with immigrant communities that are used to greater degrees of sex segregation than is generally practiced in Australia. The paper briefly reviews the role of the mosque in Muslim community life and its importance for new converts in facilitating their transition as a source of support after conversion. After examining the pattern of attendance at the various mosques in the greater metropolitan area, the paper reviews the historical debate over womens presence in the mosques; analyses the challenges of gender discrimination posed by culture, ethnicity and exclusion; and relates it to the hardship for new women converts to Islam in Australia, prompting some of them to a passive boycott.

The masjid is for men: competing voices in the debate about Australian Muslim women's access to mosques

Muslims in Australia, as in other English-speaking and European nations, live as a religious minority where community infrastructure is still being built, thus intensifying the role of the local mosque as the centre of Muslim religious and community life. Despite evidence that the spatial sunna of the Prophet gave women full access to the masjid, many Australian mosques practise segregation and varying levels of exclusion, which disenfranchises the female half of the community. Segregation and exclusion are defended through use of the fear of sexual fitna trope that arose from patriarchal interpretations of, and interpolations into, Islamic source texts. Nevertheless, fundamentalist and contextualist voices have defended the right of women to fully access mosques. Contextualists in particular base this on the need to provide fresh fiqh interpretations appropriate to the exigencies of modern life, pointing out that many other traditional rulings from the fiqh of mosques have been abandoned or modified in the Australian context.

Introduction: Understanding Islamophobia

This book deals with a controversial phenomenon that has become known as ‘Islamophobia’. Antipathy towards Islam, long-standing from many quarters (Bravo Lopez 2014, 2011; Gottschalk and Greenberg 2013; Curtis 2013; Kumar 2012; Mastnak 2010; Tolan 2002; Daniel 1960), not only seems to be increasing but evolving into a phantasmagorical spectre (Werbner 2013), particularly since the 11 September 2001 attacks, which not only took thousands of innocent lives, but destroyed the few existing barriers preventing hate-speech against Muslims from proliferating (Sheehi 2011). Perceptions of Islam, and concerns about Islamic ideology and Islamist activities, constitute topics of on-going contemporary concern globally for Muslims and non-Muslims alike. With the emergence in parts of the Muslim-majority world of DAISH (ISIS/ISIL) claiming to resurrect an Islamic caliphate, and its undisputed horrific atrocities and extermination of various Muslims and non-Muslims as targeted enemies, the peaceable interpretations of Islam followed by many millions across the globe are in danger of being so overshadowed that Muslims everywhere are perceived as harbingers of hate toward any not like them. Furthermore, in what Pratt (2015) describes as ‘reactive co-radicalisation’, extreme anti-Islam and anti-Muslim hatred also manifests in acts of violence and murder such as the 2011 Norwegian massacre committed by Anders Behring Breivik.

Identity and Islamophobia: An Australian Investigation

Islamophobia operates to downplay or even deny the reality of Muslim diversity. It rejects the ability of Muslims to be both genuinely religious and genuinely peaceable citizens of non-Muslim Western societies. Muslims are seen as being difficult to integrate into Western societies such as Australia society because of their religion. There has been an unofficial policy swing back to promoting monoculturalism, which threatens to establish a two-tier Australian national identity. On the other hand, some religious personalities have called for Muslims to isolate themselves from being influenced by any non-Muslim culture and prioritise their connection to Islam and the worldwide Muslim umma. This chapter, based on questionnaire responses of 537 religious Australian Muslims, challenges the meme that there is an inherent conflict between religious and Western identities. Most respondents value a concept of Australian identity that is affirming and inclusive and consists of achievable attributes rather than exclusive ascribed ones. There is evidence of the identity category ‘Muslim Australian’ on offer for participants to foster, giving them a third choice other than the assimilationist Australian-only or the isolationist Muslim-only. The data demonstrate that the large majority of Muslims surveyed—Australian-born and migrants—experience no internal conflict between the two forms of identity. It finds that religious Muslims are fully capable of valuing multiple forms of identity and harmonising the quotidian requirements of both Islam and their citizenship in secular Western societies. Muslim Australians are claiming the right to establish ‘Muslim Australian’-ness for themselves.

Muslim women of power: gender, politics and culture in Islam

contemporary interpretations of the Shariʿa in various Muslim societies, without really grasping ‘the rules of Quranic textual discourse’ (p. 45). They simply assume a degree of formal codification that is not really there. Thus, the commentators are commenting, in effect, upon the commentaries. For the author, all the evidence – the Qur’an and centuries of tafsīr (commentary) – clearly demonstrates that this category of jihad ‘is a just war that aims at stopping aggression or protecting religious freedom of Muslims’ (p. 198). It should come as no surprise that towards the end of the book Al-Dawoody repeats and affirms the appeals for international peace and ‘a coalition between the West and the Muslim world’ (p. 196) voiced by David Miliband, then British foreign secretary, in 2009. The Islamic law of war is thoroughly convincing in its substance, articulate and sincere. However, it is a hard read at times and will mostly attract academics (both Muslim and nonMuslim) keen to learn more about military jihad and related subject matter. The author reiterates time and again that ‘Islam was born in a culture of intertribal conflicts’ (p. 47) and that this has shaped the theological basis for conflict – and conflict resolution. This book certainly supersedes much of the apocryphal material currently circulating on the topic, and although one would hope such a book would appeal to a wide readership, especially to those who otherwise are often guilty of misrepresenting the idea behind ‘jihad’ in the media, I suspect its intense academic style will limit its circulation.

Muslim wellbeing in Australia: an analysis of personal and national wellbeing among a sample of Muslims living in New South Wales and Victoria

This article examines the subjective personal and national wellbeing of a purpose-selected sample of Muslims (n = 509 for PW and n = 544 for NW) living in New South Wales and Victoria over 2007 and 2008, using the Personal Wellbeing (PWI) and National Wellbeing (NWI) indices from the Australian Unity Wellbeing Index (AUWI) survey. The PWI looks at satisfaction with life across seven proximal domains: health, personal relationships, safety, standard of living, achieving, community connectedness, and future security, whereas the NWI deals with national satisfaction across six distal domains: the economy, the environment, social conditions, governance, business, and national security. Thus, this article asks: What is the state of subjective wellbeing among Muslims in Australia, particularly in comparison to the general population? It confirms that average Muslim personal wellbeing is comparable to that of the general Australian population, and that national wellbeing of Muslims averages lower than the general population, but still within normative ranges. It nevertheless finds there are differences between the general population and Muslims in some of the specific domains used to assess personal and national wellbeing, namely those of safety, future security, and satisfaction with government.