Asia Institute - Theses
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ItemActive citizenship of Muslims in Australia and Germany: civic and political participation of a socially marginalised group( 2015)Modern citizenship in the West is commonly regarded not only as a legal status but also as a social process of citizens’ engagement in civil society and the political arena. This study examines Muslims’ active citizenship in Australia and Germany against the backdrop of the social marginalisation and scrutiny they experience in both countries. The basic understanding of active citizenship draws on an eclectic theoretical framework, emphasising the performative nature of citizenship, enacted through various forms of civic and political participation. Based on 30 in-depth interviews with active citizens of (self-declared) Muslim background, this research pursues a comparative approach to examine Muslims’ participation in Australia and Germany. It provides fresh insights into Muslims’ trajectories of civic activism, their goals, motives and empowering factors, and personal implications of their participation. The findings underscore the enormous complexities and dynamics of Muslims’ participation in civil society and the political arena, dispelling widespread misconceptions of Muslims’ active engagement as socially isolated – and isolating – activism. Muslim community organisations often play a key role for Muslims in Australia and Germany both as a location of civic participation and as a gateway for other, often more mainstream-oriented manifestations of activism. The study also discovered that the majority of interviewed Muslim citizens (including those active within a community context) pursue a predominately republican agenda, seeking to contribute to the greater good of society at large or to promote social justice. In contrast to commonly raised concerns about Islam as a hampering factor for citizenship, the results of this analysis demonstrate that the Islamic faith is a powerful resource and driving force for many Muslims’ active engagement. Moreover, the study found that personal or collective experiences of exclusion, including the public misconception of Islam, often have empowering effects on Muslims’ civic activism. The cross-national comparison points to many similarities between the ways in which Muslims in Australia and Germany perform their citizenship, but it also reveals differences; these seem, at least partially, attributed to divergent political opportunity structures in the two national settings. The recognition of Muslim community organisations as ‘normal’ civil society stakeholders, institutional opportunities for Muslims to contribute to the political discourse and social networks between Muslim organisations and mainstream institutions, for example, appear more advanced in Australia. All these structural differences, in addition to the countries’ citizenship regime and access to political right, appear to have implications for Muslims’ activism.
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ItemContesting the future: Muslim men as political actors in the context of Australian multiculturalism( 2012)In the period 2001-2011, Australian Muslims have inhabited an often hostile social climate characterised by extreme levels of scrutiny, public surveillance and pressure. Australian Muslims have been cast in the dominant hegemonic discourse as either ‘at-risk’ of radicalisation or as a potential ‘threat’ to Australian values. Young Muslim men in particularly have been portrayed as potential terrorists, criminals or misogynistic oppressors and as a problem that must be solved. The question of Muslim identity in Australia has clearly become a central pivot around which debate has focussed for both the place of Islam in Australia and the adequacy of the official state policy of multiculturalism. However despite the centrality of young Australian born Muslim men to these questions and an emerging body of literature, they remain poorly understood. In the past decade Australian-born Muslim men have sought to challenge dominant negative representations and simultaneously to shape the development of Islam in the local context. This thesis aims to understand how social influences interact to influence different forms of political action by Australian-born Muslim men in Melbourne and in so doing to reveal insights into the developments in Islam and its interactions with Australian multiculturalism. This occurs through the examination of three ‘exceptional examples’ of Australian-born Muslim men undertaking political action. Muslim hip hop group The Brothahood have toured extensively throughout Australia and Asia whilst Waleed Aly has emerged as one of Australia’s leading public intellectuals, with his vast body of work published across national and international media, legal and literary journals. These young men have become successful political actors displaying highly creative and empowered ‘project identities’ to challenge both racism and hard-line textualist Muslims, shaping the future of Australian Islam and multiculturalism. In contrast, the young men of Australia’s first convicted terrorist organisation the Benbrika Jama’ah displayed a disempowered ‘neo-resistance identity’ seeking to commit an act of destructive violence against the State and were completely unsuccessful as political actors, reinforcing the hegemony of those they were seeking to challenge. This thesis is based on extensive fieldwork and unprecedented access to over 4000 pages of Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) listening surveillance device and telephone intercept transcripts. A Bourdieuian analytical frame is employed to reveal how key social influences interact as either enabling or disabling influences, shaping the development of constructive ‘project identities’ and ‘neo-resistance identities’. Enabling social influences and interactions include Tasawwuf (spiritually focussed) and traditional Islam, high levels of education, professional employment, exposure and familiarity with Western cultures, the multicultural State and an upward social trajectory whilst disabling influences include low levels of education, unemployment, welfare dependence, unskilled work, criminal activity, the coercive State and a downward social trajectory. These findings have important implications for understanding the development of both Islam and multiculturalism in both the Australian and wider Western contexts, revealing the intertwined yet contested nature of both, the benefits to Australia of a critical and robust political Islam and the centrality of hope and recognition to shaping constructive political engagement by Australian born-Muslims.