Quote:I am feeling nothing less than rage, alienation and despair at the moment. Muslims have been on trial for 17 years now. Seventeen years in the dock, in community detention, on parole, out on bail. Seventeen years of punishment and accountability, of collective culpability that turns inwards into confusion, anger, helplessness, shame. Seventeen years ago I was a university student in Melbourne when I was pronounced guilty for the crimes that took place in another country. Seventeen years on and my children now inherit my sentence.
I am expected to "combat radicalism", take "special responsibility’" for national security, predict random acts of violence by random people whose only connection to me is that they identify as Muslim. On any given day, I have a long to-do list. According to the Prime Minister of this country, on Friday it looked like this: drop kids to school, write book chapter, edit film script, defrost chicken for dinner, help my grandmother with grocery shopping, combat terrorism.
Enough is enough.
From the beginning we have been told we, Australian Muslims, must "take the lead", "assume primary responsibility", ensure "social cohesion". We must avoid others stigmatising us by proving we are not terrorist, not radical, not threat. We are permitted to speak, but only as a disclaimer. We must condemn terrorism. Denounce it, loudly and clearly. You have a voice, they tell us. But there are strict rules on what we can say.
We must provide reassurances that we are loyal, not stealth jihadists, not shariah-takeover. Prove you are integrated; moderate, not extreme. If you do not want to be rejected, you must be extraordinary. An over-achiever, iconic, a role model of our neo-liberal capitalist economy. We must enjoy freedom of religion but not be too Muslim-looking, too Muslim-acting, even too Muslim-thinking. We must accept government money and use it among Muslim youth in a mass social engineering project of producing a generation of apolitical consumers. We must dream big, be ambitious, buy into the neo-liberal capitalist dream, but remember our place.
There are some Muslims today, most of them self-appointed "leaders", who are rushing again to condemn and reassure. No doubt they issue their press releases and statements in good faith, with a hope that the reassurance they offer will ameliorate any backlash against Muslims by reaffirming Muslims as a community not to be feared. The overall posture of these condemnations is about soothing the anxieties of a wider community whose position as judge and jury is acknowledged, and whose power to afford safety and indeed human worth to Muslims is clearly conceded.
Other Muslims, including some peak bodies, have expressed how fed up they are with these condemnations and assumptions of collective responsibility and guilt. This has been a welcome change. I, an Australian Muslim, refuse to condemn the violence that took place on Bourke Street. To ask me to condemn is to strip me of my basic humanity. It asks me to disprove an assumption that I inherently support such actions; it denies me the right to mourn the loss of life. The act of condemnation immediately binds me to a person – to their life, their history, their motivations, hopes, dreams, fears and troubles – who was one among the 24 million other strangers to me in this country.
Asking Muslims to assume some kind of pastoral responsibility over a mythical homogenous "community" not only relies on a racist framing of every Muslim as a potential terrorist, but it locates the "problem" in Islam and "culture", not politics. The script we are given for talking about the war on terror is censored and redacted.
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Brilliant summary of muslim sentiment re Bourke St (Read 11526 times)
