Prof Michael Humphrey

University of Sydney, Australia

Issues of Social Inclusion and Muslims in Australia

Abstract

The current scrutiny of Islam and Muslims in the West is in fact a particular instance of the historical tension between immigration and the national project. Immigration has always represented a challenge to the ideology of the nation-state as culturally standardising and assimilating. While immigration policy is instrumental it is at the same time deeply culturally ambivalent. Afterall immigrants came as workers but also as bearers of other national and religious identities. The so-called ‘problem of Muslim integration’ into secular national societies is a post-multicultural revisionism re-imagining the nation-state as culturally singular in the age of globalization, global cities and transnational citizens. Islam and Muslims have become shared objects of transnational governance, a focus for national and international coordination of security, cultural critique and population management.

This paper explores the way Australian Muslims have experienced the questioning of their integration as the growing conditionality of their citizenship in Australia. It examines the way Islam and Muslims have increasingly been constructed as ‘Other’ in Australia despite their active involvement in negotiating their presence. A critical element in this process is the politicisation of Islam as a source of political extremism and violence. Positioned on the social and cultural margins Islam and Muslims have been made the test case of cultural compatibility and political loyalty. They have come to symbolise not only the crisis of the national project but also the global risks associated with transnational identities and citizenships. It examines the state’s efforts at social engineering to produce a ‘moderate’ Islam is integral to forms of neo-liberal governmentality concerned with responsibilization as a form of risk management.

Bio

Michael Humphrey is Professor and Head of the School of Sociology & Anthropology at UNSW. He has published widely on the themes of multiculturalism, Islam, racism, globalisation, violence, law, human rights and reconciliation. He has undertaken fieldwork in Australia, the Middle East, South Asia, Africa and Latin America. His recent research has focused on atrocity and social trauma and strategies of transitional justice and post-conflict reconstruction and reconciliation. His current research is focused on human rights and healing in post-conflict societies.