Down Under the Veil
Australia's Muslim Women Face a Rising Tide of Xenophobia
A Muslim mother and her children enjoy
the sparkling water at one of Australia's
famous beaches. Photo by Sheila Smart
Sydney, AUSTRALIA--A young woman leaves squeaky footprints in the sand as she carries her fiberglass short-board towards the surf in a yellow string bikini. It is late afternoon and her elongated shadow drifts past the blue hijab of another woman lying on the beach with her children.
Between the flags a group of young Muslim women are training to become surf lifesavers as part of a $600,000 federal grant program designed to more accurately represent Australia’s diverse multicultural mix. Many of the young lifesavers wear a red and yellow burqini, a full-length swimming costume that allows them to preserve their religious beliefs while tackling the rips and currents of Australia’s famous coastline.
Cronulla Beach, in Southern Sydney, wasn’t so tranquil a year ago when thousands of protesters flooded the sand in violent race riots resulting in an unprecedented beach lock-down. The protest, organized through text messages and word of mouth, was a community response to reported threats and violence by Lebanese gangs on the beach. The initially tame crowd rapidly grew to 5000, many under the influence of drugs and alcohol, and spiraled into a number of vicious assaults against people of Middle Eastern appearance and the police trying to protect them.
“We grew here, you flew here” scrawled in black marker on the youthful chests of Anglo-Australian teenage boys, epitomized the message of a growing campaign to reclaim the beaches away from non-white immigrants, specifically the growing Muslim population in Australia.
Muslims currently make up 1.5% of Australia’s population, and have been arriving in steady numbers throughout the country’s history, from the Afghans brought in as camel handlers in the mid-19th Century to migrants fleeing the Lebanese civil war in the 70’s and 80’s. But a fierce history of nationalism, and a current political focus on “border protection” has fuelled serious antagonism towards Australia’s migrant population, and attempts to defend the iconic but long outdated image of the bronzed and blonde Aussie beach culture have created new levels of jingoism and xenophobia among the country’s youngest citizens.
Last year, signs reading “Go Home” and “100% Aussie Pride” lay marked in the sand at Cronulla, a reminder of what was classified by the New South Wales Police as “racially motivated violence.” Retaliation and turmoil continued as average Australians armed with baseball bats, fire arms, and metal bars inflicted property damage and assaults along some 250km of coastline from Wollongong to Newcastle.
Muslim women emerged from the riots a particularly distinct target. The incessant anti-Muslim rhetoric espoused by politicians and the media found a guise in the protection of Muslim women. Politicians suddenly became feminists- throwing around images of “our women” and “their women” in a campaign to liberate Muslim women from the misogynist oppression of their religion.
Starkly absent from this debate were the actual voices of Muslim women, who were meanwhile being spat on, physically attacked, and having their headscarves ripped off on the street. While the hijab debate has become symbolic of the larger issue of xenophobia in Australian society, many Muslim women feel the national discussion has largely denied them the opportunity to represent themselves.
“This scarf is my identity and I am peaceful with it”, says Mahboba Rawi, 38, as she sits on her couch in bare feet with a pot of tea. In her humble home, a townhouse in the Sydney suburb of Ryde, Rawi sits cross-legged and talks, uninterrupted, to the sound of her husband washing dishes in the kitchen.
Born in Kabul, Rawi fled Afghanistan at 14 to escape persecution by the Soviet government after she led student protests against the Russian invasion at her school in Shahr-e-now. With no passport and little money, Rawi walked over the mountains from Kabul to Peshawar, Pakistan, and then traveled on to India before marrying and coming to Australia on her own in 1984, at age 16.
Once in Sydney, Rawi established Mahboba’s Promise, a charity that provides food, shelter and education to widows and orphans in Afghanistan. She beams like a proud mother as she talks about the women and children, lives destroyed by war, who now have access to her orphanages, schools, hospitals, food and water. But despite her humanitarian focus on her former home, she has always returned to Australia.
“I loved this country,” Rawi says of Australia, “from the moment I walked onto the soil.”
Since arriving two decades ago, she has organized English programs and swim lessons for Muslim women in Sydney’s western suburbs. She feels she has an obligation to rectify the image of Muslim women in the media and public sphere.
“Talking is not enough,” she says abruptly. “It’s a hard job to make people understand you…what I do is a tiny bit of help to show that we are normal like everybody else.”
Ironically, Rawi believes that it is public opinion, not cultural traditions, that are oppressing Muslim women in Australia. She blames vocal criticisms of the hijabon talk radio programs and in newspaper editorials for the disappearance of Muslim women from Sydney’s parks, beaches, and public spaces, and claims that this fear to leave the house because of harassment or violence is limiting Muslim women’s ability to practice their own faith and rendering them "prisoners in their own homes."
After 20 years of living in Australia she observes, “It is so horrifying to see that level of hate created in the Australian community that didn’t exist before.”
Australia has an unsettling history of racism masquerading as nationalism. From its founding as a country in 1901 to as late as the mid-70s, the Australian government employed a White Australia Policy. Later, as the country began to accept migrants from Italy and later Asia, it became increasingly pluralistic. Yet public debate never turned away for long from the fear of being “flooded and invaded by Asians” as espoused by right-wing populist Pauline Hanson and her One Nation Party during the 1990s.
Recent events such as the September 11 attacks, the Bali Bombings, and the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Lebanon have meant that Australia’s Muslim population has been the most recent target of harassment and racism. In 2003 the New South Wales Anti-Discrimination Board argued that these debates had led to a “damaging environment of anti-Arabic and anti-Muslim sentiment” and the Australian Arabic Council recorded a twenty fold increase in complaints.
As Pauline Hanson announced her intentions to re-enter politics in 2006, she called for Muslims and Africans to be banned from entering Australia to quarantine the country from Islamic fundamentalism and HIV/AIDS and other diseases. Prime Minister John Howard’s government has recently removed the word ‘multiculturalism’ from the public lexicon, and the town of Tamworth, 420 km north of Sydney and the 2006 winner of Best Western’s “Friendly Town” Award, rejected a proposal to resettle Sudanese refugees due to residents’ voicing concerns that refugees would bring disease and crime to the community and take jobs from locals.
This increasingly hostile climate has touched Rawi’s life as well. When 88 Australian citizens were killed during the Bali Bombings in 2002, teenagers burnt down Rawi’s front fence. During the 2006 Israel-Lebanon conflict, her 10-year-old son was called a terrorist at school. This year a man at a train station followed Rawi, swore at her and told her to go back to her own country.
She says she wanted to cry, “I went back to my country, but 75% of the buildings were demolished, all there is was this horrible war, there is no house for me. I don’t have a home to go to. This is my home!”
Such experiences are not isolated to Sydney. On September 29, 2006 a suburban mosque in Perth, Western Australia, was the subject of a drive-by shooting. The mosque’s Sheikh Muhammad Agherdien claims it was only the latest in a series of attacks including robberies and vandalism. Shots were fired into a second floor window upon a congregation of nearly 400 people during evening prayer in the month of Ramadan. "Kids were screaming, mothers were running. People wanted to protect their children.'' reported Ahdielah Edries, 38, President of the Islamic Council of Western Australia, after a bullet missed her left ear by 5 centimeters.
Though everyone in Australia’s Muslim community is affected by events like these, women and their choices have become subject to increasing scrutiny, with the hijab typically being the rallying symbol.
For Rawi, the initiation with the hijab was not an easy one. She began wearing the scarf in Australia when her first son died in a tragic accident at the Kiama Blowhole, a beach landmark on the South Coast of NSW. She says the scarf brought her closer to God.
She insists that she doesn’t follow orders from her husband, father or her brother, and claims, “So many Muslim women love to wear a scarf, and people don’t realize this. You look colorful, it’s our fashion, it’s our identity, it’s our culture, it’s our religion.”
Mahboba Rawi, 38, has lived in Australia
for25 years. Rawi began wearing the
hijab after the accidental death of her son
and says the scarf has brought her closer
to God. Photo by Lisa D'Ambra
Rawi respects the way that girls on the beach in bikinis look proud and comfortable in their skin, and says defiantly, “I love all these girls, but I love myself too. Why should somebody interfere with me? How I dress is my right.”
Unfortunately, the consequences of wearing a hijab in Australia are not always so simple. Author of Does My Head Look Big in This? Randa Abdel Fattah claims that she stopped wearing the hijab because she experienced difficulty finding a job.
Following the Cronulla riots, the hijab debate became coupled with conversations in Australia about values and integration. In October 2006 the then Government Opposition Leader Kim Beazley called for a clause in Australia’s visa application forms providing that applicants must adopt ‘Australian values’. The suggestion was criticized as shifting the focus away from problems within Australian culture and presenting outsiders as something to be feared or controlled.
Taghred Chandab, 29, journalist and award-winning author of The Glory Garage, a book about her experiences growing up Lebanese Muslim in Australia, found the suggestion bizarre and bemusing, and wonders if many Australian-born Aussies would pass the test.
“Apart from cricket, wearing singlets and wearing thongs, which are all stereotypes in themselves, one cannot attribute any one thing to being Australian,” she claims. “Being Australian encompasses many different values, which I believe are generally common sense and apply in every country.”
Chandab, mother of two young children, rejects the idea of assimilating in the sense that it entails surrendering your culture completely for the guise of another. She sees the hijabas a “spiritual decision between myself and God,” and doesn’t believe that being Muslim and being Australian are mutually exclusive: “Living in Australia has allowed me to practice my religion, fulfill my dreams as a writer, and have a family.”
Since Sydney’s famous beaches were flooded with the rising tide of xenophobia last year, Muslim women like Rawi and Chandab have stood up to reclaim the discourse surrounding their lives. Chandab remains outspoken on the topic: “Muslim women are not the prisoners that people in the west would like to have you believe – I am a journalist, author, mother, wife and daughter: everything I have ever wanted.”
Mahboba looks forward to a future where the community is not divided but inclusive, and where people can experience the generosity and kindness of Muslim culture. “I looked for peace and couldn’t find it for a decade. After so much difficulty this country gives me peace, freedom and all this happiness. I love that I can wear a scarf and lie on the beach. Just looking at the water in the fresh air makes me happy.”
© 2007 The Common Language Project
