Dr Ali White

Muslim University Students in Australia – an Inside View

Of all Australian Universities, UWS probably has the largest number of students who
are both Muslim in religion and Australian in citizenship.1 And, two of the areas where
UWS has campuses – the Canterbury-Bankstown and Parramatta regions – are
among the largest Arabic-speaking populations in Sydney (NSW Premier’s
Department, 2003: 10-11). 2 This contribution hopes to give a view from the inside on
some of the needs and outlooks of these students, while also looking more generally
at the needs and views of Muslim students at Australian universities. I will begin with
a discussing certain erroneous assumptions underlying much of this discourse, then
move to examination of stereotyping of Muslim youth in Australia in theory and
reality. This lays the basis for establishing the social basis of the stigmatisation of
these Muslim youth and to the consideration of some elements in a practical
framework for worthwhile engagement by Australian universities with Muslim
students.

‘Muslim Australians’ and ‘Muslim special needs’

Before commencing, it is important to nip in the bud a couple of assumptions. At one,

highly practical, level, it makes good sense to speak of ‘Muslim Australians’ and
‘Muslim special needs’; we are in Australia, after all, and Muslim students do have
some unique needs. But we should neither exaggerate nor essentialise these two
facts, into abstract meta-theories disconnected from reality.

Muslim youth brought up in Australia are obviously ‘Muslim Australians’, in the sense
that they are both Australian (whatever that means culturally) and Muslim. But that is
all it means. A ‘Muslim Australian’ is not qualitatively different in his or her religious
beliefs or practices from a Muslim anywhere else. (And, if they are, they have ceased
being Muslims, and become something else.) Muslim students do generally adhere
to the Islamic dietary code and pray five times daily. These facts generate specific
needs, when large numbers of Muslim students present at an educational institution.
But these requirements are easily accommodated by institutions and do not require
grand philosophising. Nor do the Muslim dress code, or the Islamic practice of not
physically touching persons of the opposite gender, require symposia to be
convened. All these ‘differences’ call for is simple respect.

Australia has over 200 different ethnic and cultural communities and we have all
learned fairly easily to live together and accommodate each other’s peculiarities.
Essentialising Muslims as the exotic ‘Other’, is to fall into the old ‘Orientalist’ trap,
which constructs non-Anglo realities as essentially inscrutable and thus
unfathomable. This essentialising is not politically constrained: it can have either a
right-wing (racist) or left-wing (patronising, ‘politically correct’) face.4 In either
manifestation, it is both ugly and terribly limiting. As Lila Abu-Lughod (2002: 790)
puts it, we need to ‘break with the language of alien cultures’. Muslims are not
qualitatively different from other human beings and deserve to be understood in all
their living human complexity, instead of essentialised — that is, instead of being
marked as utterly different and put in metaphoric glass cases.

Look at it this way: youths of Anglo-Celtic background are never subject to

speculation on their religious or cultural practices, when society attempts to
understand their behaviour. We take it for granted that they are all discrete
personages, with individual personalities, likes, dislikes, education levels and
abilities. Similarly, youths of Muslim background cannot be understood by
essentialising of either the right- or left-wing varieties.

Unfortunately, Australia’s largest single cohort of Muslim students at the University of

Western Sydney (Lebanese Muslim Australian youth) has experienced relentless
essentialising of the right-wing type in recent years. Muslim students at UWS
therefore do not inhabit a vacuum, but are affected by this racist essentialising. It is
therefore worthwhile considering some of the effects this stereotyping has on
Lebanese Muslim Australian youth in Sydney.

Discrimination and accepting difference

Media treatment of Lebanese Muslim Australian youth in Sydney over recent years
has clearly been marred by ethnic and religious (Muslim) stereotyping, which links
these elements inextricably to criminal and socially deviant behaviour. Worse,
Sydney’s Lebanese Muslim community has been held collectively responsible by the
media, acting often in conjunction with the State Government and the police, and
ordered to ‘resolve’ these problems. One media report even stated: there is a
Lebanese ‘way of crime’ (Parnell, 19 January 2004).

Nathalie Wan (2003: 279-80) remarks that humans generally perceive differences
between each other. It is only ‘when particular human differences are evaluated
negatively and viewed with negative moral meaning, [that] the basis for stigma is
created’. Erving Goffman (1963) argues that all human differences are potentially the
basis for the stigmatisation of individuals or groups by society as a whole.
Demonstrating the theoretical framework for investigating the phenomenon of social
stigma, he asserts:

Society establishes the means of categorizing persons and the

complement of attributes felt to be ordinary and natural for members of
each of these categories. Social settings establish the categories of
persons likely to be encountered there (Goffman, 1963: 2).

Irwin Katz (1981: iii) notes that the stigmatised can include a multitude of different
societal groups — each of which comprises individuals ‘with ‘attributes that do not
accord with prevailing standards of the normal and good. They are often denigrated
and avoided’ either overtly or covertly’ (Katz, 1981: iii). Goffman (1963: 48) argues
that the ‘visibility’ of a given stigma is ‘crucial’ in deciding whether an individual (or
group) is stigmatised or not. Wan (2003: 281) suggests:

Attributes such as skin colour and particular physical impairment

provide visible evidence of stigma, so [that] their bearer can be
immediately discredited. The more prominent the stigma, the more
likely it will effect the individual’s social interactions.

Given that social settings contain implicit ‘categories of persons likely to be

encountered there’ (Goffman (1963: 2), Goffman asserts: ‘We lean on these
anticipations that we have, transforming them into normative expectations, into
righteously presented demands’ (Goffman, 1963: 2).

This process is largely unconscious. We only become aware of our assumptions

when confronted with individuals or groups who do not meet them. In practice these
assumptions become demands. Goffman (1963: 3) describes stigma as ‘an attribute
that is deeply discrediting’ within a particular social interaction. Focussing on societal
attitudes towards people with attributes that fall short of public expectations, he
argues that a stigmatised person is ‘reduced in our minds from a whole and usual
person to a tainted, discounted one’ (Goffman, 1963: 3):

By definition, of course, we believe the person with a stigma is not

quite human. On this assumption we exercise varieties of
discrimination, through which we effectively, if often unthinkingly,
reduce his life chances. We construct a stigma-theory, an ideology to
explain his inferiority and account for the danger he represents,
sometimes rationalizing an animosity based on other differences, such
as those of social class. We use specific stigma terms such as cripple,
bastard, moron in our daily discourse as a source of metaphor and
imagery, typically without giving thought to the original meaning
(Goffman, 1963: 5).

Goffman (1963: 7) adds that a ‘stigmatised individual tends to hold the same beliefs
about identity that we do. The rub here, of course, is that such an individual
understands that others (so-called ‘normals’) do not accept him as an equal, causing
him ‘to be intimately alive’ to his failure to live up to his failure to meet the norm. The
stigmatised individual can then become dominated by shame, ‘arising from the
individual’s perception of one of his own attributes as being a defiling thing to
possess’ (Goffman 1963: 7).

A climate of hostility and divisiveness, intolerance — dichotomies of ‘us’ and ‘them’

—can then emerge. In the case of young Muslim Lebanese-Australians in NSW, the
atmosphere has been set since 3 March 1998, when the then NSW Premier Bob
Carr denounced so-called ‘Lebanese gangs’ in Sydney’s South-West on the front
page of the Sydney Morning Herald. Crimes by persons of Lebanese ancestry —
especially if they happen to come from Muslim families — have been showcased by
the NSW media ever since. The NSW State Government, the Commonwealth
Government and a few senior NSW Police spokespersons have been keen to feed
this media frenzy for their own purposes. These powerful entities have collaborated
to craft and perpetuate the stereotype of Lebanese so-called ‘Middle Eastern youth
gangs’.

As Paul Tabar (2002) explains, these powerful entities (he calls them ‘identity
definers’) do so because it empowers them:

to criminalize particular cultures by assigning to these cultures the

mysterious power to generate criminal elements in society despite
structural problems of unemployment, economic globalisation and
institutional racism that are all encountered by migrant communities
and migrant youths.

The September 11 terrorist attacks in 2001 and the 2002 Bali bombing frame the
international political environment for this stigmatising atmosphere. These
international atrocities only exacerbate the demonisation of young Lebanese-
Australians in NSW, as the ‘identity definers’ utilise them, to buttress their supposed
‘case’ against these young people.

From stigma to social disaster?

Yet, if we stop and ponder for a moment, we can observe that it is not unusual in
modern society for young people of any faith community or ethnic origin to face
problems ‘fitting-in’. Like all youth in Australia, young Muslim Lebanese-Australians
must contend with many challenges impacting on their identity — including stress
and low self-esteem, stereotyping and stigmatisation. A kind of internal war is
frequently played out, within the bodies of these stigmatised young people, between
their own perceptions of themselves and those that society has formed about them.
Rejected as equals by society, they can feel that society assesses the very attributes
that make them what they are (their Muslim and Lebanese-Australian identities) as
sources of shame. It is little wonder, then, that many of these youth conclude that
‘normals’ typically think negatively about them.

A dangerous vicious circle exists: marginalised and stigmatised by powerful sectors

of Australian society, some young Lebanese-Australians feel pushed to deny their
‘Australianness’. Ironically, this opens them up to the assertion that they refuse to
participate in this society. This accusation is then used as a pretext to further
marginalise these young people. Here is a recipe for social disaster.

Muslim ‘special needs’

The purpose in raising these issues is not to evoke pessimism; it is simply to point
out that a certain living context exists for this conference’s discussion of the ‘specific
needs of Muslim students’ — such as praying space and halal food, and acceptance
of the Muslim dress code and the Islamic practice of not physically touching persons
of the opposite gender. Despite the pervasive anti-Muslim media discourse, by the
way, you might be surprised to learn that the Holy Qur’an instructs Muslims: [2.256]
‘There is no compulsion in religion’. So, despite what the right-wing essentialists
assert, requests by Muslim students for prayer space and other so-called ‘specific
needs’ mentioned earlier are not part of a sinister jihadi plot to impose creeping
Shari’ah Law.

Such requests are merely a statement of needs, and granting such requests is
merely meeting the needs of UWS’s most sizeable group of students. Non-Muslim
students demand bars on campus and get them. Students of all backgrounds want
subsidised sporting facilities on campus and get them. No-one has ever suspected a
fiendish plot behind lobbying for such ‘specific needs’. No Muslim student at UWS
has ever demanded that non-Muslims be forced to pray or to eat only halal food!
There is nothing extraordinary or even exotic in catering for the needs of a group (in
UWS’s case the largest single identifiable group) in one’s student body.

UWS promotes itself very much as the university for Western Suburbs students and
sees its chief market for students to be the Western Suburbs.3 The pronounced
‘Muslim’ character of much of the Western Suburbs means that UWS must address
the requirements of students from the Western Suburbs, just as it must ensure that
international students have assistance with accommodation and settlement
problems. In both cases, this is only showing due respect and acceptance, not to
mention displaying sound business acumen.

To pose the assessment of Muslim needs on university campuses as a matter of

‘Fair Adjustment’, as the Call for papers of this Conference puts it, is therefore
bewildering if not, perhaps, faintly insulting. To add to this ‘Why, and to what extent,
secular universities should accommodate the specific needs of Muslim students?’
simply beggars belief. Muslim students are present in growing numbers at virtually all
Australian universities. At the university convening the present Conference, the
University of Western Sydney, literally hundreds of Muslim students are enrolled. It
has already been shown that meeting the needs of these students is simply common
sense, not to mention common decency.
Nor should addressing the specific needs of Muslim students be (mis)understood via
the left-wing essentialist model of ‘disadvantaged groups’ — such as disabled
students, or persons of unconventional sexuality. Muslim students are thoroughly fed
up with being treated as ‘disadvantaged’, merely due to their religious convictions.
Once again, Muslims are human beings, to be understood in all their living human
complexity, not essentialised.

The Conference aims of ‘combating discrimination and prejudice’, and of developing

‘inclusive practices and strategies’ begin at home. That is, our universities and other
Australian institutions need to face up to the systemic racial realities that have always
dogged this country’s history. Otherwise, we shall never as a nation come to terms
with Sydney’s so-called ‘Lebanese Muslim problem’.

No ethnic groups are born blameless. In my experience, young Muslim Lebanese-

Australians are generally the first to admit this about themselves. Thuggish behaviour
by a tiny handful of Lebanese-Australian youth in Cronulla was the justification used
by open racists to declare war on all Muslim Lebanese-Australians. Yet, unless the
rest of Australia is able to raise itself to the point where it rejects the essentialisation
of the ethnic and cultural ‘other’ in its midst, we only have ourselves to blame for the
consequences of the continued alienation of Muslim Lebanese-Australian youth. The
stigmatisation of these youth is a recipe for social disaster. The solution is in our
hands.

Goffman (1963: 2) showed beyond any doubt that it is society which establishes how
persons are categorised. One of the big challenges facing Australian universities in
the first quarter of the twenty-first century is whether they are capable — or willing —
to play a positive role in helping reverse the current dangerous stigmatisation of
Muslim Australian youth. If they want to, Australian universities, especially those with
high Muslim student enrolments, have the potential to do much good in this regard.
Some Australian academics (most notably, Scott Poynting, Greg Noble, Paul Tabar
and Jock Collins) have already done some pioneering work that contributes towards
this worthy goal. The work of these scholars is effective because it seeks to
fearlessly address the real issues, avoiding narrow stereotypes of the right or left.

University hierarchies can learn from this, by resolving to avoid all manifestations of
essentialism. This is the precondition for achieving the stated Conference aims of
‘engag[ing] the Australian Muslim community in partnership and dialogue about
educational aspirations, and local involvement’ (UWS: 2007).

In other words, practically speaking, such engagement:

• Must avoid essentialist language and frameworks of all varieties, including

left-liberal politically correct jargon, that relegates the vibrant and complex
reality of Muslim students to a uniform patronising category as an ‘oppressed
group’, that only makes any educated Muslim cringe;

• Must shun the temptation to impose agendas and projects which imply that
Muslim students (if not Islam itself) are misogynist, tyrannical and perhaps
even inherently violent. Practicing Muslims — that is, Muslims committed to
embodying the universal values of the Holy Qur’an — are aware that Islam
advocates precisely the opposite values and will only recoil from projects
implying the opposite. And, as the Turkish woman academic Lila Abu-Lughod
(2002: 790) pithily observes: ‘Missionary work and colonial feminism belong in
the past’. Universities should leave such political games to the politicians and
the media; they are paid to push such barrows, after all!
 • Must not take the form of talking only to hand-picked so-called ‘leaders’
recognised by no-one (as in the Commonwealth Government’s failed
‘Reference Group’ model), but engage in serious dialogue directly with
elected Muslim student representatives, in the campus Muslim Student
Associations.

I am certain that a number of my colleagues here today will find some aspects of
what I have said today to some extent challenging. Welcome to the world of real
dialogue with real Muslims! Muslims are predisposed by their worldview to engage in
genuine dialogue and ask only that universities interact with them frankly, without
branding them as utterly different from other humans, and at all times respect what
they believe to be their Divine set of values.

The author is the Researcher/Muslim Advocacy Worker for the University of Western
Sydney Students’ Association (UWSSA). He has a PhD in Middle East Politics and
has researched the effects of racism on Lebanese Muslim youth in Sydney. Prior to
taking his current position, he taught Islamic and Middle East Studies and Politics at
Australian universities.

Notes

1. The University of Western Australia may well have a higher number of Muslim
students enrolled; nevertheless, the majority of these are international
students.

2. According to the NSW Premier’s Department (2003: 10-11), Canterbury

(18,819 persons), Bankstown (26,719 persons) and Parramatta (14, 420
persons) ‘have the largest Arabic-speaking populations in Sydney (NSW PD,
2003A: 10-11).

3. For instance, a paper by 3 UWS Educationalists (Bollard et al, 1996) states:

The University of Western Sydney aims to fulfil an important role in

preparing future teachers for schools in the outer western suburbs
which invariably serve communities in poverty with ethnically diverse
students who historically suffer from low educational standards.

4. The UWS press release announcing this Conference contains a hint of this,
when Professor Janice Reid speaks about ‘those who experience
disadvantage or ethnic/religious minority status’.

References

Abu-Lughod, Lila (2002) ‘Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving? Anthropological
reflections on Cultural Relativism and its Others’, in American Anthropologist, Vol.
104, No. 3, September, pp. 783-90.
Bollard, Sheila & Harrison, Jason & Munns, Geoff (1996) “Who's on top?” A
Challenge to Canter from the Research of Undergraduate Students, at the following
URL:
http://www.atea.schools.net.au/ATEA/96conf/bollard.html.

Goffman, Erving (1963) Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity,

Engelwood Cliffs, NJ, Prentice-Hall.
Katz, Irwin (1981) Stigma: A Social Psychological Analysis, Mahwah, NJ, Lawrence
Erlbaum Assoc Inc.

NSW Premier’s Department (2003) Al-Ostrali: Arab Australians in NSW, Sydney.

Parnell, Aaron (2004) ‘Middle East Gang Unit Back on Agenda’, Sydney Morning
Herald, 19 January.

Tabar, Paul (2002) Youth Identity: A Site of Contestation, paper delivered at the 2002
NSW Young Labor Conference.

UWS (2007) ‘UWS to Host Muslim Students Conference’, 24 May, at the following
Web site: http://apps.uws.edu.au/media/news/index.phtml?act=view&story_id=1920.

Wan, Nathalie (2003) ‘“Orange in a World of Apples”: the Voices of Abinism’ in

Disability & Society, Vol. 18, No. 3: 277-96.