Big Job For An Australian Islam

Note: This article, from the SMH, gives some very welcome facts and figures on a problem facing muslims in New South Wales. Overcoming these problems is difficult while so many local muslims are still held 'mentally and spiritually' by their imams.

These imams are the enemies of proper integration of muslims into Australia. Muslims here need an Australian version of Islam.






A problem of logistics, not race
By Michael Duffy
April 8, 2006

ONE OF the problems with public debate about racism is it tends to get left to extremists on both sides and the media, all of whom are keen to exaggerate it. Calling the Cronulla mob violence a "race riot" is pushing things a bit. It could be argued that compared with Europeans, Lebanese people aren't a different race by any commonly accepted definition: for instance, they were not regarded as aliens under the White Australia Policy. So the rush to see Cronulla in racial terms produced a spate of splendid moralising, but less in the way of understanding.

This week research was released that indicates a more prosaic reason for the gap between some Lebanese and other Australians. It is a paper by sociologists Katharine Betts and Ernest Healy, to be published in the next issue of the academic journal People & Place. It's pretty boring, really: Lebanese Muslims are a lot more likely than other Australians to be unemployed.

The 2001 census reported there were 147,500 people of Lebanese ancestry in Australia, of whom 39 per cent were Muslim. (The latter comprised 22 per cent of all Australian Muslims.) About three-quarters lived in Sydney, concentrated mainly in the south-west but also around Rockdale.

Forty-seven per cent of all Lebanese Muslim men aged 25 to 64 were not in the labour force, compared with 28 per cent of Lebanese Christians and 21 per cent of all men in that age group. For second-generation Lebanese Muslim men aged 25 to 44, the figure was 26 per cent, compared with 16 per cent for all men.

The paper does not look at women, but Betts says that 65 per cent of all women aged 25 to 64 had some sort of paid work, while the figure for Lebanese Muslims was only 18 per cent. (She points out that they're younger, on average, than all women and therefore more likely to be at home with children. But it's still a big difference.)

These figures are disturbing for the individuals involved, and not just for financial reasons. Paid work is an important way to break down barriers, giving immigrants the chance to learn about the rest of the community, and vice versa.

Another way this happens is by mixed marriage, but Lebanese people are less likely to do this than almost any other group. According to another article in People & Place, by sociologists Bob Birrell and Ernest Healy in 2000, 61 per cent of Lebanese grooms, and 74 per cent of brides, married other Lebanese people in the period 1996 to 1998. This was a far higher rate of intermarriage than in any other group for which figures were given. Just as significantly, Lebanese people were almost the only group where there had been a significant increase in intermarriage since the early 1990s.

So it appears that Lebanese Muslims, even into the second generation, are not intermingling as much as other groups, economically or socially. Compared with other immigrants, they are benefitting less from what one observer has called the "multiculturalism of the street".

This raises the question of whether their problems are simply those suffered by all new immigrant groups, or are more fundamental.

Ghassan Hage, associate professor of anthropology at the University of Sydney, believes it is the latter. At an SBS radio forum in Parramatta recently, he spoke about the insecure state of Australian nationalism and identity these days. Then, comparing Muslims with earlier immigrants, he said: "Muslim otherness is a new kind of otherness … It is religious, and seriously religious."

Noting the Muslim belief that God should control everything, Hage said: "There is a surface of tension between this kind of religiosity and secularism, on which traditional multiculturalism was predicated." He added: "Muslim communities are also attracters of the downfallen in a way no other communities have been. I call it Bilalism, because, if you know your history of Islam, you know that Bilal is the slave who followed Muhammad … there's something about the Islamic religion which, as it has been lived so far, articulates itself to slave modalities of being."

Another who spoke at the SBS forum was John Hirst, reader in history at La Trobe University in Melbourne. He made the general point that Australia is a place where "maintaining social peace" is more important than principles or ideas, and that this helps a mixed population live together. He spoke approvingly of how earlier waves of immigrants had had jobs and had gradually spread throughout the suburbs. Now, though, some immigrants seem to be "living permanently in their own enclaves". (Hirst didn't say so, but I see urban consolidation as playing a role in this: thanks to high house prices caused by land rationing, it costs more to move out of an ethnic enclave to the fringe today than at any time since the 1940s.)

It seems to me there's good news mixed with the bad above. Insufficient education and jobs and affordable housing are big problems, but they are not unsolvable, especially in a prosperous and generally stable society. (Efforts are already being made to address some of them.) The people experiencing these problems are not all that many, relative to the size of Sydney, and are not typical of all Lebanese or all Muslims.

Finally, despite continuing concern about a major Middle Eastern crime threat, the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research says most crime rates have dropped dramatically in the past five years. Strangely enough, few people are aware of this.



Comment: The unemployment problem among muslim males is a very serious problem. It is a root cause for other problems, not least being the wider Australian public perception of muslims and Islam.

It is truely time for muslims with education and intelligence to take a lead in Australia. The muslim communities here will have no future better than is shown in this article if they do not face up to the fact that they cannot continue on as they have been doing.

Any person who tells them that they have no problems in Australia is an enemy of the community. The problems they have are centered on themselves; they have to make the efforts needed. Why not start now?