There is every reason to be extremely worried
about a survey in Australia last week indicating that nearly half the
population believes that Muslims and people from the Middle East do not
belong in the country.
Many may not find a growing Islamophobia in Australia all that strange.
After all, Australia is one of the few countries that has backed President
George Bush’s policies on Iraq; it was where mosques were attacked in
the aftermath of Sept. 11, and the government has pursued a persistently
hard-line policy against asylum seekers, invariably Muslims. Nor can
anyone forget the notorious Pauline Hanson, founder of the far-right One
Nation party, whose extreme views on asylum seekers and indigenous
Australians briefly tapped into a vein of national prejudice. Although her
party’s popularity soon subsided after winning almost a quarter of the
vote in Queensland in 1998, only this week she announced a return to
political life a year after saying that she was giving it up. It has to be
seen as another sign of the Australian pendulum swinging toward
intolerance. She would not have decided to run for the New South Wales
state parliament if she did not think that she had some chance of success.
Yet Muslims, specifically Afghans, are not new to Australia. The
railway from Sydney and Adelaide to Alice Springs in the heart of
Australia is known by all Australians as “The Ghan”, an affectionate
reference to the Afghans and their camel trains who kept the town
connected to the outside world until the coming of the railway in 1929.
Many descendants of those early Afghan operators still live in Alice
Springs, worship at the local mosque, and are as authentically Australian
as anyone whose family has lived in Australia for 100 years.
So why the change? Why have Muslims come to be regarded with such
suspicion in Australia? The academics who carried out the survey blame
media misrepresentation of Muslims and Western antipathy toward Islam.
But why the misrepresentation in the first place? Why the antipathy? In
fact, the general rule is that the media in the West panders to public
opinion rather than leads it. It finds out what people think and then
screams it back at them.
Before jumping to the conclusion that Australians are incorrigible
bigots and Islamophobes, ask instead why they may have become so. Muslims
have to accept some responsibility for this. Australia, along with the
rest of the non-Muslim world, is not getting a true picture of Islam. It
is getting an image corrupted and twisted by the hate and barbarism of
fanatics. The Bali bombing in which 88 Australians died cannot but have
damaged Australians’ attitudes toward Islam. If ever there was proof of
the harm done to Islam by extremism, here it is. The high-profile gang
rape case, too, which shocked Australia last year after revelations that
the 14 youths of Lebanese extraction involved had boasted that they were
Muslims targeting “Aussie pigs” did almost as much as much damage. Of
course, we know that this is not Islam, but many Australians do not.
Something has to be done to change the Australians’ image of Islam.
There is no point expecting them to do it. The responsibility belongs to
Muslims alone. A true image of Islam has to be presented. That is the
challenge. Condemnation is certainly not the answer. That will only make
things worse.