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Oishee Alam
‘Islam is a Blackfella Religion, Whatchya
Trying to Prove?’: race in the lives of white
Muslim converts in Australia
LATE LAST YEAR, my husband Will had two beer bottles thrown at him while he waited for a bus in Maroubra. Along with the bottles was hurled the racial slur, ‘Arab dog’. During Ramadan, a carload of young men screamed ‘Fucking wog!’ while they sped past Glebe Point Road in Sydney’s inner city; the following night, an almost identical incident occurred, but this time the men also ululated loudly out of their windows, in a mockery of a wedding tradition practised widely in Arab, Berber, and some African communities. Another time, a man spat on him from inside his car and yelled at Will to ‘go back to where you came from!’ When Will recounted the story to me later, he jokingly added, ‘But I don’t want to go back to Fremantle!’
Will is a white man with blonde hair and blue eyes, who traces his ancestry back to the ‘Celts, the Huns, and the Vikings’. He is also a Muslim, and when he dons his turban and thawb ,^1 he is a very visible one_._ When other people hear of his experiences, their shocked reactions are often accompanied by one of perplexed bemusement: ‘But
- you’re as white as they get! Even with all the sunnah^2 gear on, you still look so white. How can they think that you’re Arab?’ My husband is one of a number of people who must negotiate the labels of ‘white’ and ‘Muslim’ simultaneously in a country where the religious associations of whiteness are most strongly linked to Christianity and where Islam is seen as a ‘brown man’s’ religion. The assumptions that he deals with on a daily basis are held by both Muslims and non-Muslims who believe Islam to be intricately entwined with cultural identities and histories far removed from their understanding of whiteness and Western cultures.
Far from being unique, Will’s stories reflect the experiences of many white converts to Islam. In this article I argue that the expectations placed upon white Muslim converts exist because Islam is a highly racialised religion in Australia, and the racialisation of Islam on a discursive level in the public sphere is enacted by individuals in their everyday interactions with Muslims. The article explores 12 white converts’ experiences of race post-conversion, drawing on theories of whiteness and racialisation to argue that the act of conversion is one that racialises white Muslims, removing the privilege of racial invisibility that was once afforded them by virtue of their whiteness.
Writings About Converts to Islam
Academic material on conversion to Islam has traditionally taken one of two approaches. The first of these is a historical angle that focuses on the ‘Islamisation’ of geographical
‘Islam is a Blackfella Religion, Whatchya Trying to Prove?’
Young Anglo-Australian Muslim man in headgear. Photo by Jakob Hänsel-Harrison, http://www.flickr.com/photos/rankshifted/6646305557/.
regions as its people came into contact with Muslim empires.^3 The second approach attempts to determine the motivation and reasons informing a person’s decision to convert. Studies of this nature have spanned a number of countries, including but not limited to Britain.^4
In recent years, however, a number of texts have shifted the focus of their study away from the ‘why’ of conversion to the ‘how’, choosing to concentrate on how converts experience and make meaning from their lives following their conversion. More often than not, the participants in these studies are ‘native’ converts in Western nations.^5 While there is still much to explore within the field, the existing academic literature has already attended to a diverse range of aspects of converts’ lives. One such area is the relationship between the ethnic, national, and religious identities of converts. Jensen’s work^6 with Danish converts highlights the tensions between a Danish national identity and Muslim religious identity, and how converts negotiate that conflict. In Danish society, she posits, Muslims are conceptualised as the ‘ultimate other’,^7 which has a dramatic impact on the way that converts construct their identity. The conflicting dynamics between converts’ national and religious identities manifest themselves through the way that they perceive self and other in contemporary Danish society, their relationships with their non-Muslim family, and their engagement with immigrant Muslim communities. Jensen suggests that the converts’ uneasiness with their identity and place within Danish society ‘expresses
‘Islam is a Blackfella Religion, Whatchya Trying to Prove?’
includes well-rehearsed stereotypes of Islam’ and create a ‘culture’ rather than ‘colour’ racism. They draw on three data sets including surveys and print media to conclude that Muslims are seen by many Australians to be culturally inferior, barbaric, misogynistic, fanatical, intolerant, and ultimately alien. The authors contend that this perception is ultimately a racialised one that sets ‘Muslim’ up as a homogenous and reified identity that is incompatible with Australia as a white/Christian culture.^17 Importantly, they suggest that the contemporary racialisation of Muslims is primarily derived from ‘observable elements of culture’^18 that are either based on clothing or phenotypical attributes such as skin colour, having a beard, or wearing a kufi^19 or hijab.^20
To explore the repercussions of the racialisation of Islam on a micro-level, I chose to conduct interviews with a sample group made up solely of white converts to Islam. My reason for focusing specifically on white converts stems from the theory of whiteness studies that argues that whiteness is not racialised, and is instead constructed and lived by white people as a racially or culturally neutral identity.^21 The cultural practices associated with whiteness are viewed as normative and ‘commonsense’, thus ‘colonis[ing] the definition of the normal and also the definition of other norms’.^22 Unlike non- white Muslims who will have always experienced life as racialised individuals and unlike white ‘born Muslims’ who do not have a point of comparison about life as a white non-Muslim, white Muslim converts provide the ideal candidate through which to explore the notion of racialisation through conversion to Islam, as they can draw from their pre- and post- conversion experiences.
It is important to note that in the Australian context, whiteness is intricately tied up with the Australian national identity. Moreton-Robinson posits^23 that the formation of Australia as a nation state was built on the dispossession of land from Indigenous people, and that through this denial of Indigenous sovereignty the Australian nation is constructed as a white possession. As evidence of the linkage between whiteness, possession, and the nation, she points to the ‘relationship between whiteness, property, and the law which manifested itself in the latter part of the nineteenth century in the form of comprehensive discriminatory legislation tied to national citizenship’.^24 Australia continued to be constructed and enforced as a white man’s land through the White Australia Policy,^25 which intentionally restricted the immigration of non-white persons up until 1973.
Despite a new multiculturalist outlook after the decline of the White Australia Policy, Australia remains a white-normative and white-dominant nation, in which a vision of the national community ‘is constructed in terms of whiteness, at the same time as claiming to be non-racial’.^26 These days, whiteness is not racially marked but instead operates primarily as the normative understanding of what an Australian is; and so continues to assert dominance in a more subtle but equally exclusive way. Integral to this cultural space are the religious and political ideals of Christianity and secularism. Former Prime Minister John Howard’s contribution to the discursive association of whiteness and Christianity throughout his administration has been well documented,^27
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Indonesian man and Anglo-Australian man talking whilst waiting at the Westall mosque, 2010. http://www.flickr.com/photos/westallmosque/5084589075/.
with reference often made to an interview with the Australian Jewish News in 2006 in which he stated that Australian culture is ‘plainly’... ‘influenced by the Judaic-Christian ethic’.^28
In her article ‘“Common Values”: Whiteness, Christianity, Asylum Seekers and the Howard Government’, Randell-Moon convincingly argues^29 that the Howard Government’s use of Christianity in its political discourse ‘is reflective of an investment in, and protection of, a white teleology of Australian nationalism’. The article asserts that in contrast to the nation building tactics of the era of the White Australia Policy, the Howard Government did not seek to develop the national identity around a whiteness that was explicitly racially marked, but rather did so through references to ‘common values’ that are ultimately tied up in Christianity and, implicitly, whiteness. Randell-Moon contends that this leads to the construction of an ‘Anglocentric national identity where whiteness may not always be located on the body but can be an imagined investment in a system of values that associates Australianness with whiteness through Christianity’.^30 This concept problematises the notion of white Muslim converts, who remain racially marked as white on a phenotypical level, but disrupt the normative discursive association of whiteness and Christianity.
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Figure 1 – Participants’ profiles.
Name Place of Birth Age Years sinceconversion
Philip Sofia, Bulgaria 24 2 “Jessica” Sydney 24 1. Alinta Sydney 26 5 “Abdul Rahman” Sydney 37 15 “Natalie” Brisbane 39 20 “Michelle” Sydney 27 9 Sean Great Britain 39 9 “Rania” Sydney 19 4 “Tara” Melbourne 32 13 Shawn United States 25 2 “George” Sydney 27 4 “Dana” United States 42 6
they’re talking about; Muslims’. Rather than occurring in a social and political vacuum, the form that racialisation takes is heavily mediated by prevailing social anxieties of the time. The authors of Bin Laden in the Suburbs (2004) argue that the modern Australian folk devil is the ‘Arab/Muslim Other’, as evidenced by the negative representation of Muslims and Arabs by the Australian media. Poynting, Noble, Tabar and Collins contend that moral panics have been instigated about people of Middle Eastern ancestry since before the September 11 attacks and continue on today, and that the panic often results in a conflation of Arab or Middle Eastern with Muslim. They suggest that the media’s ‘highly racialised framing of current events’ has the effect of also racialising ‘a range of cultural practices whose only offence is their perceived difference’.^33
The interviews suggest that in interpersonal interactions between Muslims and non-Muslims, the use of racialised comments other than references to Arabs are just as common an occurrence. Sometimes the abuse took the form of a general assertion that they were outsiders and not welcome in Australia: George, Natalie, Alinta, Abdul Rahman, and Rania all alluded to incidents where they were told to ‘go back to where they came from’. At other times, the classification was more specific, and indicated an understanding of Islam as anything but white. Tara recounts one such experience of this:
I wear hijab but I have Anglo features, but I still get not just Islamophobic slurs but clearly racist slurs. I was driving not long ago in the car, and this guy on the street yelled out ‘You effing black slut’. To me!... Like dude, obviously I’m white!
The vilification documented above indicate that for some people, whiteness
‘Islam is a Blackfella Religion, Whatchya Trying to Prove?’
has less to do with phenotypical attributes and more to do with observable cultural or religious practices that contradict the naturalised customs of whiteness. Participants also alluded to the idea that their lived experiences of whiteness, both prior to and after becoming Muslim, had an effect on how they responded to discrimination and abuse, even when it wasn’t racial in nature. Tara identifies her reaction to the racism that she does encounter and perceive as mediated by her racial identity as a white woman: ‘You know, you expect that when you go into a shop you’ll be treated well, and so when they don’t, you’re like what the eff is this!’ Tara’s realisation of the privilege her whiteness afforded her came after she started wearing a headscarf, and began to notice how she was treated differently. In Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack , Peggy McIntosh refers to white privilege as an ‘invisible package of unearned assets which I can count on cashing in each day, but about which I was ‘meant’ to remain oblivious’.^34 She lists a number of these ‘assets’, which include assumptions that she has about the way that she can expect to be treated by other people, one of which includes being able to shop alone without being harassed or followed by security, as well as being able to partake in certain activities without her race being viewed as a component of it. In Tara’s case, her ‘assets’ included not being stared at, being treated well in stores, ‘sailing through airport security’, and not being asked about ‘politics on the other side of the world, in a country you’ve never visited’. As an ‘anonymous white woman’, she states, these were things she never had to worry about; by donning the hijab , however, Tara was made acutely aware of her privilege.
Alinta’s response to experiences of racism echoes the same sentiment. She too refers to a myriad of situations where she felt that she was being treated very differently to how she was accustomed to being treated before she became ‘visibly Muslim’ by people on the street, in shops, and on public transport to take a few examples. Although she felt that she was treated differently whenever she wore a headscarf, Alinta opined that the type of treatment was often influenced by whether she was wearing an abaya^35 or ‘more Western clothes’. When she wears an abaya , she states, people are more likely to treat her as though she is uneducated or tell her to go back to where she came from, a sentiment that Alinta finds laughable: ‘I put on the hijab and look in the mirror, I still see me, I still look so white to me. With my blue eyes, and even though you can’t see my hair, my skin was white... I look so Aussie!’
At Worst I’m Seen as a Traitor, at Best I’m Seen as Different.
That’s the Fix I’m in.^36
Five of the participants referred to incidents in which they were made aware that their conversion to Islam was viewed by some white non-Muslims as an act of treason. Michelle recalls an altercation with a co-worker at a new job who said that Michelle was a traitor because the second she became Muslim she became an Arab, and was no longer an Australian. George’s interview reveals that while his parents ‘intellectually supported’ his conversion, his extended family viewed it as a betrayal. Rather than
‘Islam is a Blackfella Religion, Whatchya Trying to Prove?’
men’s, at 55.6% of women expressing concern compared to 48.9% of men.^40 Dunn contends^41 that the data ‘suggests that the stereotype of Islamic misogyny is an important component of the racialisation of Islam in Australia’ as it implies that the respondents who expressed concern were worried about the treatment that a female family member would suffer at the hands of her husband. Ho takes^42 a similar position to Dunn, and argues that the construction of Islam as a misogynistic ‘other’ is crucial to contemporary Australian nationalism. Ho criticises^43 the ‘colonial feminist’ attitudes implicit in the victim narratives perpetuated about Muslim women in nationalist discourses that seek to ‘save brown women from brown men’,^44 and use women’s rights as a justification for conceptualising Islam as culturally inferior. The attitude of women who view white female converts as simultaneously gender and race traitors operates on this same premise, and demonstrates that racialisation is experienced in gendered ways.^45
Rania, George, and Tara all suggest that the conceptualisation of conversion to Islam as an act of race and gender treason is also closely linked to the condescending notion that white people should know better. As Rania states: It’s so easy for them to dismiss another culture and dismiss the religion along with it, but when someone of your own race comes into that religion, it kind of throws things off balance for them... there is the expectation that we should know better and we’re not like them and when you extrapolate that it becomes even worse, oh well you’re traitors. George opines that the horror and anger directed towards white people converts to Islam does not only signify a superior attitude towards Muslims, but also to non-white people more generally. For white people to become Muslim is a ‘step down’ for them – that white people ‘should know better’ featured in many of the participants’ narratives.
I’m Sure You’re Lebanese, You’re So Like Us!^46
When Michelle describes her experiences as a white convert, she suggests that Muslims are just as likely to view her as Arab or non-white as non-Muslims are. ‘Friends of mine, that are Muslim and Arab as well, they’re like, “Oh but, you are like us! I’m sure that you are Lebanese, you are one of us, you can’t tell the difference.”’ She shares a number of stories to illustrate her point, including one about the brother of a man she was getting to know for marriage: His little brother’s quite young and he always says to me, ‘Oh but you’re Lebanese now.. .’ He’ll make comments about Australians in front of me, he’ll say, “Oh those Australians do blah blah”... He doesn’t see me as being Australian, because I don’t do what they do. Abdul Rahman recounts similar experiences with Muslims who struggled to make sense of a white Muslim. He states that when he first began his work placement, both students and staff thought that he was Jewish because of his beard and kufi , which they mistook for a Jewish kippah. He attributes the confusion that ensued when they found out that he was Muslim to growing up in non-religious households where Islam was purely a cultural identifier, and so Islam was always linked to particular ethnocultural
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groups.
... they can’t conceive that you are Muslim, because if they have identified your ethnicity correctly, then you can’t be Muslim. If they have identified you as a Muslim then you can’t be white, you have to be Turkish or Bosnian or Lebanese... anything but a Caucasian person. Similar experiences were also shared by Shawn and George, illustrating a trend within the Muslim community to automatically associate Muslims with particular ethnocultural backgrounds, in which whiteness cannot play a role. For some Muslims, it can be easier to understand white converts by racialising them, because they themselves see Islam as a racialised religion. Sometimes the act of racialisation is encouraged through following particular customs. In her article ‘Praying Where They Don’t Belong: Female Muslim converts and access to mosques in Melbourne, Australia’ , Rachel Woodlock argues that Australian Muslims from ethnic backgrounds not typically associated with Islam, such as Celtic and Anglo-Saxon, are encouraged to choose between being Australian and being Muslim, and may feel pressured to ‘adopt Arabic names; wear Middle Eastern or Asian clothing; and follow non-Australian prescriptions for gender relations’ to prove their legitimacy as Muslims.^47
At other times, it reflects a particular understanding of power and privilege and how much of each is retained or given up by the white convert. Sean’s upbringing had taught him that using the word ‘Paki’ to describe his Pakistani friends would have had him ‘clobbered’ given the racist connotations of the term in Great Britain. He recalls that after converting to Islam, a British Pakistani woman told him that it was no longer inappropriate for him to use the word ‘Paki’, stating that ‘Well you’re a Muslim now, you’re an honorary Paki’. Sean remarks that at the time her attitude surprised him, but he took it in his stride. While a white person using the term ‘Paki’ would have been considered racist and offensive, Sean’s white privilege was eroded by his conversion to Islam, which for this woman was also a default conversion to ‘Paki-dom’ - if not literally, in the sense that he was now equally as marginalised as she was.
Philip too notes that some types of language and forms of behaviour, such as jokes about different cultural groups, are seen as acceptable because ‘some Muslims will be pulling me more into the brown people category, which I don’t mind’; however ‘there is a risk that one person will definitely not feel that way’. Philip uses the example of racially offensive terminology to illustrate his point: ‘I know quite a few Muslims that use the N word^48 – not in like a derogatory way but in a kind of hip hop reference, maybe they’re Pakistani, or Arab; but if I say it, even though I’m Muslim, some people will just look and see white person saying that word.’
For Philip, the appropriateness of using ‘the N word’ depends on the amount of privilege that one holds in society, because while for a privileged white person to use the word simply reinforces its historical usage to control and subjugate people of colour, someone from a group who has had the word used against them before, either historically or currently, may ‘reclaim’ it to ‘clear a space for linguistic empowerment and communal
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contemporary Muslim discourse about the West, referring to different historical periods and geopolitical locations to analyse the multiple messages inherent in four types of discourses: the political, cultural, spiritual, and socio-economical. The assumptions particularly relevant to this study include the idea of the Orient and the Occident as mutually exclusive opposites that are reified and essentialised, with the West representing ‘a disintegrating society in which egoism and human solitude prevail... the land of loss of soul, where secularity dominates and people drift without deeper norms and higher values’.^54
Current Muslim discourse thus constructs white Westerners as inherently irreligious and immoral. Michelle feels that the main reason people find it hard to accept her as a true Muslim is because they associate her whiteness and ‘Aussie-ness’ with haram activities, such as drinking alcohol. She opines that the hypocrisy and judgemental essentialism implicit within such attitudes are not uncommon amongst the Muslim community, and that they form a hard perception to break. Referring to a recent incident where someone asked her if she was ‘really’ a Muslim, she states: ‘I just felt like, who are you to ask me if I’m really Muslim? Are you really Muslim? How much do you practise your din [religion]?’ Philip recounts that ‘I’ve had Muslims tell me that Muslims have been able to Islamise other cultures, but this modern, Western, whiteish culture is something different and it can never be assimilated’. He skeptically adds, ‘Obviously I point out to them that the Muslim world has its bellydancers and honour killings so I don’t know how Islamised they are’.
Shawn remarks that he has encountered the same attitude, particularly when looking for a wife: She took me to her family and basically they said, “You’re not Muslim cos you’re white”. And I was like well hold on, I’ve been learning about Islam for like three or four years, a couple of years even before I converted... I’ve got tattoos, I’m a smoker, but you see me praying five times a day, I pray at work, I go to the mosque as often as I can, I go to lectures as often as I can, trying to learn. The experiences of Michelle, Phil, and Shawn highlight that the belief that being white and being Muslim is a paradox is not simply restricted to the non-Muslim community, and that Muslims also partake in racialising projects. Their stories support Omi and Winant’s theory of racial formation, as Omi and Winant contend^55 that it is not only dominant groups that engage in racial projects, but marginalised groups in society can also adopt racialised modes of thinking about themselves and about others in order to band together against discrimination and subordination.
Implicit within the belief that white converts are pseudo-Muslims is the inverse assumption that certain cultural practices are better suited to Islam. Rania states that while she has only ever had one person explicitly say that she cannot be a proper Muslim because she is white, she feels that she is more readily accepted by the Muslim community if she adopts customs that are traditionally associated with a more Islamised cultural group:
‘Islam is a Blackfella Religion, Whatchya Trying to Prove?’
Overall I just found the more Australian I acted, the more Anglo I acted, the more of a divider it became between me and them... The more cultural I was, more socially acceptable I became. Rania articulates that she feels that Islam is a ‘highly racialised’ religion in Australia, and that the more racialised she became the more Muslims accepted her as one of them. Although she recognises that some of the cultural practices that she feels pressured to conform to are not strictly required by Islam, she is happy to embrace them in order to ‘meld into the culture and community’.
Similarly, Natalie chose to embrace some of the customs of her husband’s Sri Lankan culture, such as learning to speak Sinhala, adopting everyday etiquette and customs, eating and cooking Sri Lankan food, and wearing Sri Lankan dress. She notes that in the beginning there was some confusion from the Sri Lankans that she met through her husband. ‘Initially they weren’t quite sure what to expect because the idea of a white person is someone who doesn’t practise any religion, not very clean, so I had to help them also understand about me, rather than looking at me and saying “Oh you’re from white society, therefore you must be the same as everyone else”’.
While Rania and Natalie both readily embrace aspects of Islamised cultures, Philip rejects the idea that white converts should adopt different cultural identities. He states that part of his desire to develop and assert his white identity stemmed from a resistance to assimilating into another culture, the two options he saw available to him after conversion: ‘if you convert and you become Muslim, you’re either going to have some sort of understanding of what your racial or cultural identity is, or you’re going to become one of those people who adopt one of the Muslim cultures. And I really viewed the second one as very negative’. Philip sought to demonstrate that converts could retain their cultural identity whilst still being a practising Muslim, to counter the idea that white cultures are not as religiously acceptable as non-white cultures, indicating that if anything, he had ‘a thousand and one problems with Muslim cultures’ that pushed particular points of view and codes of behaviour under the guise of Islam when they had no or little religious support for it.
Abdul Rahman promotes the notion of embracing an Australian Muslim identity. His experiences with Muslims reinforced the need for an indigenous Islam by developing ‘a stronger Australian identity so that we can get rid of these ethnic mosques’ and the divisions that they create within the Muslim community. For Sean, this ‘Australian’ Islam was witnessed in Perth where the small numbers of Muslims meant that there was a stronger sense of Muslim brotherhood and sisterhood unlike Sydney’s ethnically determined initiatives and institutions. Abdul Rahman, Philip, and Sean all reject adopting an Islamised culture, choosing instead to embrace an Australian identity as they visualise Australianness as a culturally neutral terrain where Muslims can practise a purer Islam, untainted by ethnocultural baggage.
‘Islam is a Blackfella Religion, Whatchya Trying to Prove?’
This phenomenon illustrates Antheas and Yuval-Davis’s argument^57 that racialisation in contemporary times has moved away from using biological rationale and phenotypical descriptors to understand race, and that these days races can be and are constructed out of groups that could never otherwise satisfy the criteria of a race in the traditional sense. The ramifications of this are wide-ranging. On a broader level, it highlights the socially constructed nature of race, and illustrates that although society has by and large abandoned older notions of race and people are less likely to support older forms of racism, as a result, race remains a meaningful category that informs the way that people view and interact with the world around them and the people that live in it. Rather than living in the ‘post-racial’ world that some political commentators^58 alluded to after Barack Obama’s election, race and racialisation continue to play a large role in Australian society. Participant’s experiences thus suggest that Australian laws and policies should broaden their understandings of race to account for new, culturally defined forms of racism. Exposing the way that Islam is racialised is also significant on a discursive level for Australia as a society, as it forces debates about Islam to occur on ideological terms, rather than through fear-mongering and the marginalisation of communities. It allows Muslims in Australia the opportunity to take part in national discussions as equals rather than the cultural inferiors that racialising discourses currently construct them as. Finally on an individual level, an understanding of the racialisation of their religion can give white converts a framework to understand their often fraught position, suspended between two communities.
‘Muslims for Peace’ at anti-war rally protesting Australia’s impending involvement in Iraq war, October 2002. Photo by Rachel Woodlock.
