CCN0110

December 14, 2006

AUSTRALIA had an officially identified "disloyal minority" for at least the first 50 years of its settled existence. In 1804, an armed mob of several hundred Irish convicts was bloodily suppressed at the Battle of Vinegar Hill. Until the 1830s, priests were not allowed freely to say mass in the new colony lest this inflame seditious tendencies.

This is far from the first time some Australians have been concerned about the readiness of ethnic and cultural groups to assimilate, or minority groups have felt persecuted by their fellow Australians. Muslim integration is a serious issue posing formidable challenges, but it should be kept in perspective.

During World War I, for instance, Anglo-Australians often regarded Irish Australians' broad sympathy for the Easter Uprising as evidence of subversive tendencies, even though Catholics had volunteered to serve in the Australian army at much the same rate as Protestants, and Irishmen had served in the British army at more or less the same rate as Englishmen.

In my childhood, Catholic schoolchildren walking past public schools after 3pm were likely enough to have stones thrown at them. If anything like this regularly happened today, it would trigger an agonised national debate, with all involved referred for counselling if not reported to the anti-discrimination board.

Fears that Australian values are being eroded by alien newcomers betray a surprising lack of confidence in the gravitational pull of the core culture. It's important to remember that in these times, unlike the convict era, every newcomer has, in effect, voted for Australia. For us, being Australian is an accident of birth or parentage. For them, being Australian is an act of conscious choice. That's why the placards displayed at Cronulla last Christmas, "We grew here, you flew here", suggesting that only the native born could be fair-dinkum Aussies, were so wrong-headed.

Every generation is inclined to lament the pace of change and to fear that things aren't what they used to be. Still, the fact that would-be migrants the world over prefer English-speaking countries is the best possible testament to the Anglosphere and its near-universal appeal. Certainly, treating migrants and migrant cultures as interlopers is going to make the challenge of integration harder.

Like the Prime Minister, I would find the burka confronting. Even so, I wonder who faces the greater cultural shock: Australians who notice a few women wearing headscarves, or migrants from Muslim countries adjusting to almost complete sexual freedom, gender equality, cultural diversity and commercial laissez faire? It's hardly surprising that some respond by associating with their fellow Muslims and defining themselves by their differences from other Australians.

There is no doubt that some Muslims find aspects of the Australian way of life objectionable. A minority systematise that by denying legitimacy to any non-Muslim state. Still, treating all Muslims as suspect because some Muslims resist integrating would make a difficult situation far worse.

In the age of terror, it would help if Muslim leaders were less ambivalent about the practice of suicide murder. Perhaps some of this reticence is an Islamic version of the then pope's "prudent" reluctance categorically to condemn Nazism. In any event, it seems clear that bombing mosques and police recruitment centres in Iraq is no more sanctioned by Islam than bombing police stations and pubs in Ireland was sanctioned by Christianity.

The Anglosphere has not maintained its economic, technological and military preponderance by pretending that there's nothing to learn from other cultures. English-speaking countries have not become beacons of hope and freedom by building walls against the world. We are always open to new ideas and better ways of doing things. We never assume that others have nothing to teach. To the extent that our political and ethical values are not potentially universal, we think that they're not values at all, just prejudices. This is the real explanation for the strength and resilience of our culture.

It's now glaringly obvious that the war on terror will not be won by armies and security services, important though these are. The war on terror will only be won when people no longer feel that terror is justified. That's why this debate about being Muslim and being Australian is part of Australia's potential contribution to a safer world, along with our military forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.

As hundreds of thousands of Australian Muslims have demonstrated - starting with a handful of early settlers and extending to people such as footballer Hazem El Masri and businessman John Ilhan - there is no incompatibility between commitment to Islam and constructive contribution to Australia. For these people, as for their Catholic and Protestant fellow Australians, building a life and a nation turned out to be more important than stressing points of religious difference.

The last way to reach yet-to-be-convinced Muslims is telling them, in effect, to like us or leave.

The post-September 11 debate about Islam and the West has inevitably been marked by knee-jerk reactions and stereotypes of all kinds. Intolerance thrives in the shadows. Media portrayals of xenophobia and extremism are inevitably inflammatory in the short run, but in the long term force people to confront their own prejudices. Once a topic, individual or group are the subject of media interest, they have to explain themselves. Views that don't have to be justified are unlikely to be changed. Even an argument is a form of engagement.

The reporting of Taj Din al-Hilali's notorious sermon on women should lead to him rethinking his views, not just apologising for them, because any view worth holding, almost by definition, has to be capable of public explanation and justification.

In the short term, media coverage of Islamic leaders may well present Islam as exotic or even scary, but some of them are scary and ought to be exposed. In the long term, it's likely to produce a dialogue between Muslim and non-Muslim Australians that everyone can learn from.

Now that the attitude of Muslims towards the West in general and Australia in particular has been called into question, this issue has to be resolved. Only Muslims can determine whether Islam, properly understood, is compatible with political freedom and cultural pluralism. This is the debate that Islam has to have, and it is as likely to lead to happy conclusions here as anywhere else.

The war on terror does not pit al-Qa'ida against the West so much as a small minority of Muslims against their co-religionists. Australia's greatest contribution to winning the war on terror would be demonstrating how sincere Muslims can also be citizens of a pluralist democracy.

Tony Abbott is the federal Health Minister. This is extracted from a speech to a conference on The Journalist and Islam, organised by Macquarie University's Centre for Middle East and North African Studies at NSW Parliament House last week.

Source: http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,20922773-601,00.html

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