Harmony and religious freedom in anxious times
Dr Tim Soutphommasane, Race Discrimination Commissioner
Speech to Australian Catholic Bishop’s Conference – National Conference on the Pastoral Care of Migrants and Refugees
Oct 2, 2014
Race and religion
I turn now to the relationship between race and religion. It is troubling to find that in our public debate some have been justifying anti-Muslim bigotry by resorting to a distinction between race and religion.
Some say that they are perfectly entitled to direct scorn at Islam – or for that matter, any religion. Some say that this involves something fundamentally different to racial prejudice or discrimination: Islam, they will say, is a religion and not a race or ethnicity. The same logic, they say, applies to any other religion. We would not, for example, class bigotry against Christianity as racism. Therefore, it makes little sense to suggest that anti-Muslim sentiment is tantamount to racism.
I want to question this view. In the first place, there is little to commend about militant hostility towards faith. A civilised society must not celebrate barbarian values. We should all be capable of respecting others’ beliefs, even if we may disagree. This isn’t to say that certain beliefs or practices must be immune from scrutiny. Where beliefs and practices breach our civic compact, they should rightly be repudiated and criticised. But this is a different thing altogether to vilification or inflamed animosity.
Second, the dividing line between race and religion may not always be clear. To be sure, one can make a distinction. We may regard race in terms of colour or ethnic background – as immutable qualities of the person, which none of us can change. We may understand religion as being about spiritual matters of belief and doctrine.
Yet not everyone will understand religious differences to involve just religious differences. That is to say, religious differences can often be understood as concerning matters of culture. Perhaps more often they can be racialised.
It is no accident, for example, that when Dr Jonas and the Australian Human Rights Commission conducted its national consultation, in the aftermath of the events of September 11, the focus was on Muslim-Australians and Arab-Australians. What may appear to concern only Muslims and Islam can spillover into other groups. Religious hostility can reveal itself in racial profiling.
Sociologists have written extensively about the overlap of race and culture, of culture and religion.[12] Racism today can involve a belief that a particular culture is incompatible with a mainstream way of life or national identity. The relationship with race is this: what counts as a culture frequently coincides with race.
In the case of anti-Muslim sentiment, what we frequently see is an expression of racialised cultural hostility. Often we are talking about negative stereotypes that are directed particularly at people who come from the Middle East. The stereotype may be one about the incompatibility of Muslim identity and practices with an Australian way of life.
In terms of the stereotype, consider one recent episode of SBS’s Living with the Enemy program, a documentary series which asks people to live with others whose lifestyles and beliefs directly contradict their own. One recent episode involved a Muslim couple, Ahmed and Lydia, spending time with Ben, an Anglo-Australian who believes Islam is a dangerous religion. For much of the episode Ben was confounded by the experience of discovering he had more in common with Ahmed and Lydia than expected. Yet his views remain unchanged. Ben remained unchanged in his view that there was no such thing as a moderate Muslim. Ahmed and Lydia may have been Muslims but there was no way, in Ben’s view, that they could be representative of Islam.[13]
Consider as well some of the recent commentary about the suburb of Lakemba, which is home to some of Sydney’s Muslim communities. One newspaper in August featured a two-page spread about the suburb titled, “Inside Sydney’s Muslim Land”. It was declared at the top of the article that the correspondent had spent 24 hours in a place “where a pervasive monoculture has erased the traditional Aussie way of life”.[14] In the piece itself, the correspondent would observe that the suburb had an ethnic mix “similar to what you’d find in any Arabic city”.[15] In the space of a few sentences, then, we see the conflation of Muslim and Arab – of religion quickly expanding into something more cultural, ethnic, and arguably racial.
Here, I think, is where we should recognise that anti-Muslim sentiment can indeed involve racialised cultural hostility. Anyone who may look like a Muslim will be presumed to be a bearer of a certain culture that is incompatible with Australian culture. But what determines whether someone looks like they are Muslim will necessarily draw upon race and ethnicity. Not everyone will be necessarily aware of, say, the difference between a Lebanese-Australian Muslim or an Egyptian-Australian Coptic. To those who may rehearse negative stereotypes about Muslims, such distinctions may not be obvious.
https://www.humanrights.gov.au/news/speeches/harmony-and-religious-freedom-anxious-times
