6 When the other otherizes

I crossed the intersection of the main road and noticed the small group gathered
on a grassy slope under a tree. A few placards and banners were scattered on
the ground; some signs were propped up against the foot of the tree: No More
Refugees. Deport Asylum Seekers. Say No to Sharia law. One man, Anglo-looking
and in his early 40s I guessed, wore a t-shirt with the words Ban Islam printed on
the front. Bulky and built, ‘Dave’ towered over the others. He later told me that
he had been in the Australian Defence Force and served in Afghanistan. He was
chatting with another Anglo man, Rob. With the exception of Mister Ban Islam,
Rob, and another 2 Anglo-looking women among the group, the rest of the group
was, to my naïve surprise, not Anglo.
Adrian, the protest’s organizer whom I tracked down on the Internet and who
had invited me along, was standing curbside, waving a Say No to Rapefugees
placard at passing cars. I approached him and introduced myself. He smiled and
warmly welcomed me. Then he invited me to meet the others. Mark, ‘a migrant
from Malaysia’. Rita, ‘who herself came here as a refugee from Eastern Europe
back in the sixties’. Susannah, ‘from China’. Adrian fixed his eyes on me and
cheerfully declared, ‘See! How can they call us racists?’
For about an hour I mingled and I observed, as the protestors stood at the curb,
waving their signs at passing traffic. The protest didn’t grow in numbers, despite
Adrian’s insistence that they were ‘representing the silenced majority’. Several
cars honked at them. One person yelled out ‘racists!’ prompting Adrian to give
me a knowing look as he shook his head and laughed. The ex-army man, Dave,
boasted to me that he was there, wearing his Ban Islam t-shirt, in the name of
freedom of speech and despite the risks. What were the risks? I asked him. The
protestors ‘expected’ large numbers of Muslim counter-protestors to come along
and threaten them. In fact, nobody did.
Susannah, Rita and Mark regaled me with stories about ‘Islam taking over’,
‘illegal asylum seekers bringing in sharia law and incompatible values’, and
‘Muslims refusing to assimilate’. They gave me their contact details and agreed to
meet me individually for an interview. Adrian was pleased for me. I left them with
their chants and t-shirts, the image of Susannah from China holding up a Deport
Asylum Seekers sign imprinted in my mind.
160 When the other otherizes
My purpose in detailing the above is to set the stage for a discussion of how
Islamophobia is implicated not just in the dominant group’s modes of belonging,
but also in the various modes of belonging of racialized minorities. I want to be
clear by reiterating the argument I have made throughout this book, which is that
Islamophobia can only be understood in terms of its symbiotic relationship with
racial Australianization, and the historical and contemporary logics of our racial
state. Thus, even when Islamophobia is deployed, expressed and co-opted by racial-
ized minorities, it is important to remember that as internalized oppression it must
be understood as a condition and symptom (not cause) of the wider racial structure.
I want to therefore bring into focus the relationship between internalized racism and
racialized minorities’ various problematizations of Muslims. I want to clarify that
I have excluded from this discussion people whom I interviewed who, as devout
Christians, Sikhs, and Coptics, had strong theological objections to Islam. Despite
their dogmatic theological opposition to Islamic doctrines and teachings, these par-
ticipants never problematized the Muslim presence in Australia, and indeed defended
the rights of Muslims to practise their (misguided) faith. My focus is on participants
from non-white backgrounds, both first and second generation. Further, only one of
the participants I discuss in this chapter, Dilan, is a ‘political Islamophobe’.

‘You are wog, we are wog, we all wog except Aborigine’

I would not be exaggerating to say that every non-Anglo participant I interviewed
revealed, in their own ways, that they had experienced some form of racism. I want
to start my analysis by focusing first on the first generation migrant participants I
interviewed. The way in which they spoke about direct racial encounters gives us
an insight into the various modes with which they inhabit the nation, and how they
situate themselves when speaking about Australia, multiculturalism and Muslims.
As the following examples illustrate, there was a clear propensity to downplay
or ‘rationalize’ racism.
Antonio, who immigrated to Australia from Italy in 1956, told me,

I have husband, children, nine grandchildren, my own house, I my own per-

son I do what I want. I go shopping. People call us wog I don’t care.

For Sicily, who immigrated to Australia from Italy in 1957, the ‘first time’ she
was called a wog was hard, ‘but not now’. She said,

The first time I come one of the drunk man said these people are wog and
I said you born in Australia and he said yes and he said you not Australian
because you born in Italy and I say you not Australian because you not
Aborigine. You are wog, we are wog, we all wog except Aborigine.

Skye, in her 40s, was born in China. She migrated to Australia 8 years ago and works
in a Chinese church in Western Sydney. She explained that racism ‘is really normal
situation so I don’t think there’s any racism … All other countries the same. Their
 When the other otherizes 161
reactions are quite normal … First thing is that human beings, this racism is normal.
I make this point first. In China we have south and north and some people complain
each other so not just here in Australia. Even when I have the driving test because my
English not good they might be a bit loud at me but I can accept it’.
Skye spoke about ‘abuse on the street’:

Quite normal in the street they say go away, or they don’t like you, but I’m
okay with that.

Susannah was born in China in 1940 and migrated to Australia in 1973. I asked
her whether she had experienced racism and she said,

Yes. But it’s ok, I understand. That is part of human nature. They fight against
each other in the same village, I’m ok, I accept it. Mostly the people who are
against other people are usually not educated. That’s all.

Ratri is from Indonesia but spent most of her life in the United Kingdom. She
immigrated to Australia in the eighties. She told me about being on a bus when

an old man grumbling about me being a migrant and things like that, and
there was a young man sitting next to me, an Australian white. I was quiet,
like this, ‘Oh, leave it!’ And this young man tried to argue … defend me, and
argue with that old man. I said, ‘Let’s leave it!’ What for? Because that old
man might think he was pushed, or the migrants are richer, or … we don’t
know what happened with him.

The tendency among the participants to either downplay racism, make excuses for
it, or frame it as part of ‘human nature’, makes much more sense in the context of
their own formulations of ‘multiculturalism’, the position they believe they inhabit
in the nation, and how this intersects with their internalized racism. Returning to
Ghassan Hage’s analysis of Australia as a nation-space where individuals enjoy
‘differential modalities of national belonging’ (Hage 1998: 51), one might argue
that the participants’ ruminations on their experiences of racism seem to capture
a passive mode of belonging, described by Hage as the feeling that one belongs
to the nation, in contrast to a mode of governmental belonging, the belief that one
has a right over the nation (Hage 1998: 46). Thus, even before we consider the
participants’ feelings about Muslims, it is important to understand how my par-
ticipants ‘feel they belong’, how they imagine they inhabit the nation, what multi-
culturalism means to them, and how they position themselves vis-à-vis whiteness.
Starting first then with their understanding of the lived reality of multiculture,
Antonio defined it simply as ‘mixed people’, ‘mutual respect’, ‘no one different
to others, I’m just a person’. According to Ratri, multiculturalism

is working, but it takes time. It’s always in process, and whenever we have
something new – migrants are always new, it’s difficult to change our attitude
162 When the other otherizes
or to be tolerant, and we have to learn … Australia is a country which was
established by the British, politically. It has been going on for 200 years, and
it works. We come here: as a Christian, I obey. I am under the law. So, what-
ever the government says, and the law, then we should follow. We Christians
don’t have a different law when it is what really matters. Right? But if we
insist that, ‘Look, I’m not under your law, I’m just under God’s law’, then it’s
difficult to live here … If we come here, we have to adjust to the law here,
and don’t take advantage of the law for the sake of other people.

For Skye, the Anglo white majority should dominate

because we have the main and the subordinate. It should be, because Australia
is more than 200 years, the English people came here and settled … We have
to adopt the language because English is the language we use here – survival
English! (laughs) Because that is the language of this country so we have to
learn about the history of this country, the geography, the people, the customs
of the country.

Susannah narrated,

Some Chinese we are very equal people and we been here for years and might
not have received every fair treatment but we went along because we chose
to have this country as our country and we want to abide, we can’t bring the
communism ideology here because this is a Christian, democratic country. So
that is why I think multiculturalism, if we allow them to have their own rules
and their own assets it is wrong. If we are obeying and not having another
set of laws for them, for any type of people, that is right because we have our
state and federal laws and we should abide by the law.

Dilan is involved in an anti-Islam, anti-multiculturalism organization. A migrant

from the Indian subcontinent, he told me,

Multiculturalism had been regarded as a failure in France, in England, in

Germany, in many parts of Europe, in Holland … they went the path of mul-
ticulturalism possibly 25 years ago with all good intentions, not possibly
understanding what’s going to be the full result of this. And so Australia
is sort of treading that path now, and I’m saying, ‘Hold on’. What’s been a
failure in the West, in Europe, why embrace something which is a failure? …
Multiculture is the greatest negativeness. So we change it from multiculture
to multiethnic. And that means my country of birth is … But now I have come
into Australia and I’m coming into conscious knowledge that when I come
to Australia I’m going to trade in my background for Australian lifestyle,
because I chose to come here. So yes, I’ll continue to have my food and par-
ties and whatever we do, but there are some things which are not going to
work alongside … Australian culture … and … the government needs to help
 When the other otherizes 163
people who come, rather than promote them to continue to isolate themselves
and live in little pockets … we must keep Australia Australian.

In her analysis of the ‘matrix of intersecting forms of oppression’ in internalized

oppression, Pyke (2010: 553) argues that such oppression ‘cannot be reduced to
one form or assumed to affect similarly located individuals or groups in precisely
the same way’. The examples here suggest just that, namely, the multidimen-
sional and intersectional nature of internalized racial oppression. What unites the
participants is that they have all, to various degrees, embraced white hegemony
and acknowledged what Stratton (2009: 16) elucidates as the ‘core and periphery
structure’ to Australian multiculturalism – core being Anglo-Celtic culture and
periphery being those described in terms of ethnic and racial difference. They
belong, but in the multicultural periphery. As I analyzed in Chapter 4, they imag-
ine themselves to belong in, but not of. For some, like Skye and Dilan, there is
an explicitly embraced ‘dominant’ and ‘subordinate’ culture, although the vigour
with which Skye expressed this can probably be explained by her only recently
migrating to Australia. As for Dilan, his views need to be located within his strong
alliance with political Islamophobia, more of which I will comment on further.
To be in Australia is to make a ‘trade’: one’s background (excepting food and
parties) for the vaguely stated ‘Australian lifestyle’. To Ratri, multiculturalism
‘is working’ and Australia is defined politically as a country ‘established by the
British’. What we have here in Ratri, Skye and Dilan is the frank acknowledgement
of what multicultural discourses often deliberately obscure and obfuscate in their
valourization of ‘diversity’: multiculturalism’s ultimate deference to whiteness.
Internalized oppression reveals itself, as Pyke (2010: 557) argues, ‘at the moment
that the oppressed accept the identities imposed upon them by oppressors’.
When I visited Skye at the Catholic church she attended in Blacktown, she
gave me a parting gift, a booklet about their Chinese services and … .On the
cover were the quintessential images of ‘Sydney’: The harbour bridge…There
was also a family: white. The booklet articulated more than anything she said in
the interview. To Skye, and her Chinese Australian peers at her church, Australia
was imagined, at its true essence, as white. But this was not the only ‘indoctrina-
tion’ or ‘mental colonization’ (hooks 2003 in Pyke 2010: 556) the participants
revealed about their modes of belonging to Australia. The notion that one ought to
dilute one’s identity, adopt ‘invisibility as a tactic’ (Stratton 2000: 101) in order
to become ‘invisible to the host population’ (Stratton 2009: 16) seemed to explain
some of my participants’ downplaying of racism. Why this links to a state of
internalized oppression is because it represents an exchange, what Schwalbe et al.
(2000: 425) describe as ‘trading power for patronage’. Such a trade results in
accepting practices that oppress, exclude or disempower a person as a trade for
approval and protection. The swiftness with which the participants were quick to
explain racism as ‘normal’, as ‘human nature’, as well as the way in which they
often laughed racism off and quickly reassured me, ‘I can accept it’, or ‘I’m okay
with that’, or ‘it’s okay, I understand’, provides deeper insight into how ideologi-
cal hegemony intersects with the desire for patronage. In Australia’s post-racial
164 When the other otherizes
landscape, racism is ‘a characteristic of all human beings … caricaturized as a
­disposition, an attitude, a pathology’ (Lentin 2008: 493). How race is imbricated
in the multicultural organization of ‘core’ and ‘periphery’, how it structures differ-
ential modes of belonging, is not in the participants’ accounts of racism. Racism
is, as debates around race almost always are in Australia, reduced to the interper-
sonal, and played out in public (Lentin 2016). And the ability to cope, to not kick
up a fuss, plays into the further ‘common sense idea’ that because racism is part
of ‘human nature’, defined in terms of personal encounters between individuals,
it is up to the racialized to challenge racism by demonstrating personal resilience.
And yet, I think it is important to acknowledge that there were also moments
which lent themselves to more nuanced and complex modalities of states of ‘pas-
sive belonging’. Moments when the downplaying of racism revealed something
more than mere internalized racism. What I also read into some of my participants’
accounts is a state of flux in their modes of belonging, fluid boundaries, moments
of pushing back, small claims and movements towards governmental belonging.
Take, for example, Ratri’s experience on the bus. To attribute this to internalized
racism is to deny Ratri any power or agency and to gloss over the potential genera-
tion dynamic here too. It is a ‘young man’ who tries to defend Ratri against the
grumblings of an old man. Could Ratri, in her moment of choosing not to fight
back, in fact be asserting her own power? The power to decide if she will dignify
the tirade with a response; the power to ‘save’ the old man from being rebuked by
a younger man; the power to demonstrate she is not affected by the abuse? Even
if there is an element of not wanting to rock the boat, of feeling contained and
managed in the white national space, I wish to suggest that feelings of marginaliza-
tion and being tolerated do not necessarily fill up the moment. There are crevices
in which the ‘passively belonging’ minority carves out some agency and power
too. Even the act of attributing racism to ‘the uneducated’, as Susannah does, can
function as an act of self-valorization of her identity and self-image. There are
even moments of claiming governmental belonging such as Sicily’s rather poign-
ant declaration to a white racist that, ‘You are wog, we are wog, we all wog except
Aborigine’. Here Sicily is reminding an Anglo-Australian of the precariousness and
conditionality of his belonging to the nation. She is claiming a stake in the nation
on equal terms, defining them both as minorities vis-à-vis those who are vested
with the real sovereignty and right to governmental belonging, namely, indigenous
Australians. The fluidity of her modes of belonging is revealed when we consider
this moment alongside other times throughout her narrative – moments where she
demonstrated a desire for approval by the majority. For example, at one point she
excitedly recounted to me that white Australians eventually changed (towards
Italians) ‘because they see the European people are very good. And once was in
newspaper, English Australian newspaper, something like that, the Italian people
was very, very good!’ Sicily was clearly proud of this ‘acceptance’ by the majority.
Ultimately, my ‘everyday’ participants’ understandings of how the multicul-
tural periphery should ‘belong’ was at the heart of their concerns about Australian
Muslims. In effect, having generally accepted the demarcation between in and
of states of belonging from the point of view of people who had internalized
 When the other otherizes 165
(but sometimes resisted) an ‘in’ state of belonging, the participants’ issues with
Muslims were fundamentally about their expectations as to what is appropriate for
those who belong in Australia, not of.
Religious clothing was raised by some of my participants and revealed the
policing of those whom they perceived as transgressing their ‘in’ state of belong-
ing. Consider, for example, Ratri and Skye’s reaction to some Muslim men who
eschew ‘jeans and shorts’ for the ‘long dress’. Ratri reflected,

Why they have that, I don’t know … Because they have stigma, to be hon-
est. Why don’t they try to eliminate the stigma? What’s wrong with wearing
trousers? If there is nothing wrong with wearing trousers, why should you
wear something which will provoke people? … they are Muslim, that they are
extremist … you know, the common stigma.

Ratri felt the same way about Muslim women who wear the hijab in a corporate
employment context. She considered it stood out in a secular society and that ‘it’s
better’ for people to ‘blend in’ because

again, I think that’s a bit exposing, or a bit pushing. I mean, what’s wrong
with wearing that? You are not asked to be nude. You are not asked to show
off your body … That’s what I mean by a superficial thing. Don’t make it so
important that people insist on that … in employment context. Like being a
police, or a traffic warden, or whatever … It’s silly to me ... It’s not practical
… It’s a bit … well, don’t blame others … if they … like that. Shame that a
lawyer wearing hijab … the client would have thought immediately that the
lawyer cannot be neutral. She would be biased. That’s what I think, person-
ally … Because you expose yourself, thinking, ‘This is what I believe’.

Ratri’s response reminded me of Paul’s ‘advice’ to Muslims detailed in Chapter 4,

whereby he counsels Muslims to modify their clothing in order to avoid ‘a reac-
tion’. I analyzed this as a step-by-step neutralization process by which Muslims can
transform themselves from ‘stranger’ to ‘neighbour’. Ratri here expresses some-
thing very similar, but from the position of one who has internalized this social
order and, having been herself transmuted from stranger to neighbour, is now pro-
jecting this expectation onto other ‘strangers-to-be-transformed-into-neighbours’.
Skye was similarly critical of women who wear the hijab and niqab. She found it

a bit over! I find it a little bit over because they can do it at home but a bit not
respecting the culture here. They don’t really care about outside Australian
culture and that’s not good. They should consider the Australian environment
and respect the culture … they would like to live here and get what they want
but they also want to do just what they want.

For Skye, the non-Anglo constitution of self must always reference the white point
of view. Her expectation of complete deference to the ‘dominant’ culture means
166 When the other otherizes
that to wear religious dress constitutes a kind of excessive and over-indulgent
sense of belonging to the nation. ‘They also want to do just what they want’ is the
indictment on those who wear religious or cultural dress. The point is that because
you are not part of the dominant culture, you cannot go around doing just what
you want. Even your dress must be modified in order to package oneself as laud-
able to the majority. Again, I think it is important to note that Skye has not been
in Australia for as long as Ratri and so her inclination to ‘blend in’ seems more
understandable. Yet there was no shrill tone in Skye or Ratri’s accounts to me. In
fact, it was the matter-of-fact, sagely inflection to their tone that made their com-
ments all the more sobering to encounter. Muslims were not belonging in a way
that was befitting of a minority community and this was something deeply felt.
On a number of occasions, the participants expressed a distaste for Muslims
‘showing off’. For example, Antonio described Muslims as ‘arrogant’ because

Like when I pray I no tell people what sort religion I am or nothing but them
they show off, it’s to show off. With their prayer, they do this, they do that
(motions movements in prayer). Somebody told me, my daughter in law, in
park they see lots of this they pray in the park. I no go park but she see these
people they go there in the morning and pray for one hour.

Skye complained that Muslims wear their religious dress because ‘in fact they
want to stand out’. It was interesting to see how public displays of religiosity in
Muslims was experienced as ‘showing off’. Antonio is a devout Catholic and
wore a large cross necklace around his neck. Skye is a devout Christian and also
wore a cross necklace that was clearly visible. There seems more to their disdain
than the internalization of the secular ideologies and publicly sanctioned religious
norms of the dominant group, what Pyke and Dang (2003) describes as a process,
relying on Gramsci’s (1971) concept of ideological hegemony, where ‘the subju-
gated inculcate, seemingly by cultural osmosis, negative stereotypes and ideolo-
gies disseminated as taken-for-granted knowledge’ (Pyke and Dang 2003: 556).
Something else was going on that seemed to tie in with the internalization of this
ideological hegemony. I think it is illuminated best if we consider two further
narratives. The first is by Susannah, who immigrated to Australia from China,
whom I have already referred to. And the second is by Steve, who immigrated to
Australia from Malta as a teenager in 1964.
Susannah told me that she did not feel Muslims ‘adapted’ to Australia because

they have to establish all their rights so much … I just find that actually
there’s a lot of injustice when we talk about the equality of multiculturalism
but when one culture seems to have precedence over others maybe because
they know how to voice out or maybe they have finance from the countries
that are backing them up, I do not know. Like for example, some Chinese we
are very equal people and we been here for years and might not have received
every fair treatment but we went along because we chose to have this country
as our country and we want to abide, we can’t bring the communism ideology
 When the other otherizes 167
here because this is a Christian, democratic country. So that is why I think
multiculturalism, if we allow them to have their own rules and their own
assets, it is wrong …

Steve recounted some of his experiences to me during the period of the white
Australia policy:

Generally we also felt very inferior, that we should be seen not heard ...
Amongst the Maltese community leaders at the time they were quite involved
in lobbying to start making some changes. At the time assimilation white
policy was unbelievably strong. For example you wouldn’t dare, if I had the
Maltese paper, read it on public transport. They would stare or make some
kind of a gesture … In a sense I became more inferior … I was definitely
against the concept of assimilation.

Steve came of age during a gradual (policy and rhetorical) transition from assimi-
lation to multiculturalism and so his understanding of multiculturalism, how he
values it, and the place of minorities within it, must be understood in that context:

Going from a policy of assimilation to multiculturalism … I knew the war has

just begun for us … There was a lot of resistance against it.

Steve then expressed his concerns about Muslims within the contemporary mul-
ticultural context:

Here we’re communities of different faiths and cultures … so for us what

we cannot accept, is they came here and rather than integrate to a medium
where I get along with you and you get along with me, no, as if they wanted
to create their own state of this is the way we are … so eventually what we
struggled for to make Australia more integrated will fall into pieces and as
a result we’ll also suffer because the Australian might go multiculturalism
hasn’t worked because they’re shaking the foundation of our society here …
we have fought to change the white policy into integration, multiculturalism
… Muslims don’t want part of the cake. You want all of the cake. Not just a
few items considering we are in Australia and there are other communities
and faiths we need to consider … We go back full circle. When we came
here we were a minority. We felt at times disadvantaged, discriminated,
socially, economically, it seems like all these advancements we overcome it
will be repeated.

There is a lot going on in these narratives. The pain and struggle to navigate
through the demands of white Australia. The sense of giving something up as a
trade for being in Australia. Pride at having been part of the movement against
the white Australia Policy. And an overwhelming sense of the conditional and
unstable state of belonging enjoyed by those in the multicultural periphery. I want
168 When the other otherizes
to suggest that in the space inhabited by all these passively belonging multicul-
tural peripheral minorities there is a sense of struggle, competition and conflict
over resources, over recognition as the ‘model minority’, over ensuring a balance
between and among minorities, and a disciplining of any ‘group’ who threatens to
destabilize the multicultural status quo. This is where the visceral force of ‘stand-
ing out’ or seemingly ‘showing off’ reveals itself. Like siblings competing for
the good favour and attention of a domineering parent who brooks no rebellion,
resentment emerges when one sibling seeks to disturb the familial status quo,
transgress their proper place or seek additional privileges. There is a sense that all
will suffer. Steve clearly recognizes that his position in the multicultural space is
conditional on the goodwill of the dominant group. In demanding more rights than
is due to them as one of many minorities, Muslims are jeopardizing the privileges
Steve and non-Muslim communities have derived in their trade of ‘power for
patronage’, risking a withdrawal by the majority of these privileges if the mul-
ticultural boat is rocked. Those privileges are not, it should be stressed, equality
and unconditional acceptance into the nation-space. It is the privilege of not living
under an official policy of assimilation. The privilege of living in a multicultural
society where the multicultural cake is shared, but the pieces are apportioned and
cut by the white majority. Thus, the main problem Steve appears to have with
Muslims was that they threatened this tactical strategy of survival as a minority
within the larger racial schema. There is a risk of disturbing the delicate balance
that pits one sibling over the other in the larger struggle of gaining the approval
of the domineering parent. Muslims’ religiosity is therefore interpreted through
this prism, as a performative gesture of ‘showiness’ and ‘arrogance’ when what
is called for is gratitude, humility and being strategic in your passive belong-
ing. When Muslims seek ‘their rights’, or imagine themselves as belonging of
Australia, not merely in, or dare to assert a right to governmental belonging, they
become the multicultural killjoy. The reason this self-policing is a condition of
the wider racial structure is because of the way in which the success and failure of
multiculturalism has become the responsibility of the nation’s multicultural oth-
ers. If multiculturalism has ‘failed’, if there is dissent among its diverse cultural
ranks, then this is blamed on minorities. Steve understands this well.
In one of the most poignant moments during my interview with Steve, he
revealed the fluctuating, ambivalent and contradictory nature of his positionality
in relation to Muslims:

The distortion of the media kept on hammering so that eventually there’s

only one side of the story. So prior to September 11, I was already sick of
the Western media not giving the versions of other communities, countries
etc. There were some incidents too where there were groups and these groups
existed with other NESB communities. They used to congregate in particular
areas at night, mostly young people. And it gets magnified. And that resent-
ment from us, the non-Muslim communities, became verified – that some-
thing is wrong with the Muslim society as such and religion. I remember
discussing this with my brother because he lives in Hurstville and he hears a
 When the other otherizes 169
lot of these incidents and he’s very – you could say he doesn’t like too many
Muslims around him and he fears for his safety. And once I remember telling
him that from my experience going into Muslim homes – because I had that
exposure – definitely the parents were loving and caring; they were not hate-
ful. The girls, the daughters, were definitely non violent. The only percentage
of the Muslims were the males being that sort of 18–24 to give you an exam-
ple which were sort of rebelling or voicing their … disagreeing. Another
aspect that really I hear it a lot is that … it’s a very small percentage but they
were the most vocal and it didn’t reflect on Islam if there was gang rapes or
drugs or other crimes. I remember saying, they’re young, full of energy, and
doing same things other Anglos are doing, drugs, tax evasion, bludgers and
so on. When you think of it they’re no different, except our expectation is that
they should be like us, seen not heard and be good. Fair enough to be good
and obey the laws but that wasn’t really happening there were always these
outbreaks magnified by the media. And the whole community kept reinforc-
ing the bad image of the Muslims and the Muslim faith.

Steve’s account lays bare his reflexive awareness of the entanglement between
perceptions of Muslims and media agendas. The media ‘magnifies’ and ‘verifies’
resentment. Furthermore, Steve is not one for polemics. He offers nuanced and
thoughtful meditations on male deviance: ‘they’re young, full of energy’, ‘rebel-
ling or voicing their … disagreeing’. He is not here excusing behaviour, yet he is
not culturally or religiously pathologizing it either. But it is what Steve says next
that, for me, was most poignant and revealed how deeply attuned he was to the
accumulated and enduring assimilationist debris that weighs on the shoulders of
those on the peripheries of multicultural Australia. Steve nonchalantly repeats a
phrase he used earlier to describe expectations on the Maltese community when
he lived in the assimilationist era: ‘seen not heard’. When young Muslims males
are ‘doing same things [as] other Anglos’, when they are ‘no different’, they none-
theless arouse resentment because ‘our expectation is that they should be like us,
seen not heard and be good’. This is sobering stuff. It reveals Steve’s mindfulness
of the racial biopolitics entrenched in the arbitrating of belonging and disciplining
of racialized citizens, and that the racialized body owes more than ‘be[ing] good
and obey[ing] the laws’.
There are clearly textures and layers to the sorting, judging and encounter-
ing of Muslims and, as Steve’s account shows for example, it would be wrong
to flatten all the participants’ narratives under a single reading. Dilan (political
Islamophobe) offers us a glimpse into the ‘extreme’ side of the ‘spectrum’. The
side that operates according to strict binaries and embraces a logic of friend and
enemy. Dilan categorically blamed the ‘failure’ of multiculturalism on Muslims,
insisting to me that

if we don’t wake up and put a stop to multiculturalism and call it multi-

ethnic Australia, and saying people who leave their country make a conscious
choice: ‘I’m going to Australia because Australia is a better place than where
170 When the other otherizes
I am living’. Now, you’ve got to assimilate in the Australian way of life.
Become a part of the country. Culture divides. We need to have not what is
going to divide us as a nation, we need to have what’s going to unite us as
a nation.

For Dilan, anything less than assimilation will cause national disunity and, because
Muslims are not assimilating, they are dividing the nation. This rhetoric mimics
what Lentin and Titley have described as the so-called ‘crisis of multiculturalism’
in Europe, which blames Europe’s cultural others who threaten social cohesion
because, for example, they have ‘come to hold the “whip hand” over the white
majority’ (Lentin 2014: 1271). For Steve, Muslims are emerging as a problem, as
potential multicultural killjoys, because he recognizes all too well that the ‘toler-
ance’ and ‘benevolence’ of the majority for multiculturalism can be withdrawn.
Dilan, on the other hand, has so thoroughly internalized a position of belonging
that is conditional on the management and goodwill of the majority that he feels
the need to put on a show of valorizing the status quo, repeating and reinforcing
the rhetoric that makes social cohesion contingent on integration-as-assimilation.
Dilan clearly offered a cultivated version of the ‘honorary white’, reifying
white Australia, chiming in on the rhetoric of white decline and ‘reverse rac-
ism’ (he calls for schools to teach the history of Western civilization and herit-
age’, as though this did not dominate school curriculums already), and reinforcing
ideologies of white supremacy and Muslim civilizational inferiority. His anti-
Islam agenda was constructed around his image of himself as the brown defender
of white Australia. Consider here how he deploys his brown body to disavow
his racism:

When SBS contacted me, the first interview I did on radio … the guy was
like ‘Here we have another political party similar to Pauline Hanson’s white
Australia party’ … and the guy comes online, and I just crack up laughing,
and I said ‘Mate, you called it a white Australia Party mate … I’m a black
fellow!’ The guy just didn’t know what to say. ‘Mate, this is not about white
Australia party. Mate … one third of party membership, one third of the rank
and file, one third of the support base, is non-white’.

There is something deeply sad and pitiful about Dilan’s performance. By lending
his ‘brownness’ to the project of a hegemonic white Australia, he earns the privi-
lege of proximity to whiteness, and the reward of ‘not being included in the mul-
ticultural celebrations of ethnic difference’ (Stratton 2009: 22). But Dilan must
pay interest on his loan, reaffirming white hegemony and repeating the discourse
of decline that animates so many debates around the ‘crisis’ of multiculturalism.
He said,

There is hardly any racism in Australia, particularly white to black – yes, in

the past there were horrible things done to the indigenous people, no question,
but it seems like the Westerner has now gone from one end to completely the
 When the other otherizes 171
other end, to the point of losing their own rights, and the host country is now
losing their own rights and I’ve said ‘Hold on, the very values that make this
a great democracy, if we lose those values, the Judaeo-Christian foundation
on which it’s built on.

From this concern for the ‘reverse racism’ suffered by the white majority, Dilan
recounted the following story:

Australia was playing India at the cricket match. This was a few years ago.
Two Aussie blokes, 22-year-old fellows, decided to draw up a banner. There
is a Simpsons cartoon character which has a – there’s a shopkeeper at the
Kwik E Mart who’s an Indian. Now, this guy basically wrote a banner saying
while the Indians play cricket, who will watch the Kwik E Mart? Simple joke.
In other words, saying if all the Indians are at the match, who’s going to be at
the Kwik E Mart, you know? Now, some Indians who were in the crew took
offense to that. And they sought those two young fellows and took them to
court. Under the vilification laws, in Victoria. And the Victorian fellows had
to apologize and say they were never to be involved in conduct such as that.
And I’m thinking, hold on, this is stupidity! What you have done is you have
turned those two white people’s hearts completely against everyone black,
because they’re going to think these people are coming to our country and
now they’re telling us what to do. What’s the big deal in someone holding a
banner and having a fun? … So the white person, if I would put it point blank,
is become a weak thing to the – on the other end of the receiving stick, which
is really unfair.

Dilan reveals here the ‘intrinsic intertwining’ of ‘the fantasy of exception’ in the
concept of ‘honorary whiteness’ (Young 2009: 179). His ‘honorary whiteness’
is based on ‘a state of suspended fantasy, in which privilege is tentative rather
than absolute’. One must suffer racism because to protest it will be construed
as ‘they’re telling us what to do’. Even after all Dilan has given to the white
Australia cause, he acknowledges here the essential structure of the nation-space:
‘they’ represent the dominant majority whose feelings, behaviour and status must
be protected, and ‘us’ who must defer, soothe and protect as subordinate others.
Under these loan terms, no amount of interest paid by Dilan will change the fun-
damentally low investment value of the brown capital he offers the majority – and
even he knows it.
One of the practices that flows from this internalized racism is what Schwalbe
et al. (2000) describe as an adaptive response to racism, namely, defensive and
intra-group othering. This occurs when subordinated groups denigrate ‘other’
members within the subordinated group in order to mark their own co-ethnic peer
group as superior, sometimes in order to seek to appear to share more in common
with the dominant group (Pyke 2010: 557). Hage (2015: 183) similarly notes how
racialized groups become ‘invested in a defensive racism whereby racism is expe-
rienced as the mode of avoiding one’s own racialization.
172 When the other otherizes
In the following narrative, Antonio suggests a violent ‘mentality’ among
Muslims; a supposed culture of older mentors essentially grooming a younger
generation to violence:

We are different, we grow up in another atmosphere ... Because they want

to do justice themselves, they don’t consider the department of justice is the
right to decide what penalty you need, you know? They got their mentality.
I walking, you can smell it, or see it, an old bloke, 60 over, with 6 or 7 chil-
dren sit around him and talk their language. I believe is opportunity to teach
these kids, to defend themselves or to commit like heroes, you know you can
have a place in paradise (laughs). I example be with my kids or nephews to
be like not a teacher but like a friendly guy, play thing, do soccer games on
front yard or park, they no, they sit down and get this conversation and make
them to be heroes, to brain wash them. Well, this their attitude growing in the
background but they continue here.

Antonio is not here simply invoking familiar stereotypes and fantasies about
Muslims and violence. He does so by distinguishing the Italian community – ‘we
are different’.
Defensive or intra-group othering was something I also found in some of the
second-generation participants in my study, but it was deployed in ways that
revealed how deeply mediated such defensive othering was, and how susceptible
the participants were to the symbolic weight of pervasive Islamophobic scripts
because of their own racialized experiences.
In two instances, defensive othering revealed itself through a story of rac-
ism experienced because of a mistaken assumption that the participants were
Muslim. Sundeep (38, Sikh, Australian-born) attends a Sikh temple in a suburb
with a large Sikh population. He told me that many of the congregants walk to
the temple. Women cover their hair and the men wear a turban and ‘quite a few
teenagers throw eggs, and they think we’re terrorists. A lot of people don’t drive
and they walk and they got abused, they make remarks, terrorist, Taliban. They
confused about this place as a mosque’. Sundeep attributed this to, ‘the image
portrayed in the media … Of course every community has one or two bad apples
… They can’t differentiate. Obviously I don’t blame them. Education lacking in
our schools. They see turban and beard and think Muslim. But it does get frus-
trating, especially when we are a peaceful community but other people get mixed
up about who we are’. Sundeep’s brother was incensed at being associated with
Muslims. ‘He thinks they’re trouble-makers and terrorists so it really works him
up when we get confused for being them and he gets mad at Muslims for bring-
ing it onto us all’.
What interests me about this scenario is how Sundeep and his brother deflect
their frustration at being mistaken for Muslims onto Muslims, and not the rac-
ist perpetrators. It is not so much that Sundeep and his brother seek to exoner-
ate the perpetrators entirely, but that they seem to locate their power in this act
of deflection (Sundeep’s brother doing so more zealously). The deflection onto
 When the other otherizes 173
Muslims is easier; a defence mechanism that offers some sense of agency in the
face of racism. This, it appears to me, demonstrates how intra-group othering as
a defence mechanism against wider racism can function as a convenient weapon
for the racialized, and why it is critical to understand it as a condition of wider
racial conditions which provide repeatable scripts and codes for making sense of
everyday encounters.
Mary (39, Australian-born Lebanese Christian) is a teacher in a south-western
Sydney high school. Mary shared with me many instances of racism that she and
her family had experienced. She told me that just the week prior to our interview
her sister had been interviewed for a position as a lawyer. The person conducting
the interview had asked her sister her nationality and, not satisfied with an answer
of ‘Australian’, probed her further until her sister replied, ‘Lebanese background’.
The interviewer had then rolled her eyes and groaned loudly. Mary told me that
there were occasions when parents or new colleagues assumed she was Muslim
and then, on her correcting them, expressed their relief. Mary was honest with
me about how this made her feel and poignantly shared with me the following
reflections:

For a moment, when they thought I was Muslim, I felt indignant and rushed
to correct them. Then, when I realized that me being Christian put them at
ease, I felt slightly ashamed to be honest. Lebanese Muslims have a bad
image so as a Lebanese Christian I find myself not wanting to be confused as
being one. At the same time, I feel bad that I feel that way because I have dear
friends who are Muslims. But then something happens and the media goes
nuts and I feel annoyed because I know that someone along the way is going
to lump me with Muslims.

I asked Mary to dig deeper about why she felt resentful about this. She said,

It’s a combination of things. The media, the Muslim extremists who make the
media’s job easier. A part of me sometimes thinks that my community has
managed to settle in but the Muslims haven’t so why should we be tarred with
the same brush? That’s why I think the problem is extremist Muslims who
ruin it for their own community and us.

So much is revealed in the admission that Mary ‘rushes’ to correct people when
they assume she is Muslim, and the shame that sets in for her afterwards. We can
see here the intensity of race springing into action, a ‘call to order with machinic
force’ (Amin 2012: 5) that Mary cannot help but answer, brought up as she has
been in a climate which has fixed the category of Lebanese with racist aversions,
and dangled before her the seductive prospect of exemption through the distinc-
tion of Lebanese Christian. As Amin (2012: 9) argues, racist biopolitical regimes,
which include ‘habits of public commentary’, and the ‘extensive and deep natu-
ralization of white order through institutional and vernacular practices’ (Amin
2012: 13) ‘regulate the state of alert towards the raced body’ (Amin 2012: 9).
174 When the other otherizes
Mary, in a state of alert towards her own raced body, ‘rushes’ to sort herself into
the right racial category, revealing the heavy weight and burden of racial biopoli-
tics on the racialized.
Mary continued and told me she had ‘no problem with Muslims per se’. The
issue was ‘fundamentalism’. Mary told me that her family

will out and out refuse to go to a grocery shop or a bakery, if it is run by a

particular strand of Islam, the ones that they see as extreme and fundamental,
they absolutely will not go. And they are more than happy to hang out with
their Sunni neighbor who will drink alcohol with them, but absolutely refuse
to go to that particular manoush shop or grocery shop. It’s not an option. It’s
funny in the beginning they were happily going there not realizing the reli-
gion then later down the track something gave it away. They found out and
didn’t like it so they stopped going.

What interests me is how Mary attempts to discern the difference between ‘mod-
erate’ and ‘extreme’: ‘If they dress in a particular way the assumption is that
they are extreme … I feel like they’re just plastering it on their forehead, what
they are’. Mary told me that, despite racism, she has ‘always felt a huge sense of
belonging. I’ve never had an issue with it personally because I think I go out of
my way to mediate situations, to adapt, to do my best. I have never, ever felt that
I don’t belong’. I asked Mary what she meant by ‘adapt’:

When in Rome, do as the Romans do. So I don’t need to plaster up posters

that show my religion or a map of where my family is from plastered on my
t-shirt unless it’s socially acceptable at that time when it’s cultural day at
school but just day to day I don’t need to wave that in everybody’s face.

Certain forms of the hijab signaled ‘extremism’ to Mary and her family. If a
female wore her hijab with ‘western style dress’ she could be seen as ‘moderate’.
If she ‘shook hands and made small compromises like that’. Mary told me about
her Muslim friend, ‘who wears hijab and is a doctor. She makes compromises all
the time, like having to treat the opposite sex. You have to work out if something
matters in the bigger scheme of things’.
Again, there is something sobering about these narratives of belonging based
on ‘adapting’. Not once did any of my Anglo participants even hint at a mode
of belonging that was conditional; a mode of belonging that was earned through
some kind of process of adaptation or dilution of identity.
It is important to point out that manifestations of intra-group othering were
deployed far less self-consciously than they were among some of my first-gen-
eration participants. For some of my first-generation participants, there was an
almost ritualistic impulse to prove their worth as the ‘model minority’ and change
to fit in. For those born in Australia, the distinction they drew between themselves
and Muslims was not necessarily done in order to seek approval of the major-
ity. Nor did it seem attributable to a fear of the consequences of one ‘minority’
 When the other otherizes 175
group disturbing the multicultural peripheral status quo. Some of my participants
– people who had a strong sense of belonging and who had intimate friendships
and associations with Muslims – were testing and working through what Ibrahim
Kalin call ‘the limits of Muslimness’ (2011) in a liberal secular multicultural state.
Nicholas (32, Australian-born of Greek parents, Network Administrator) had a
strong sense of his Greek heritage and was raised ‘to be proud of my background’.
Nicholas had attended a selective school in the Hills district in Sydney and told
me he had ‘a good Muslim mate who I met at Tafe. You wouldn’t know he’s
Muslim though, like he drinks, but he doesn’t eat pig. I think he sometimes fasts
but he’s pretty easy-going in his religion and that’s the way it should be’. Nicholas
continued, ‘I can see that they’re the latest, like, bad ethnic group, in society and
the media is a bit much sometimes. But I do feel that Muslims are generally more
fundamentalist in their religion and that just makes me feel uncomfortable, like
they’re trying to push it on other people. Us Greeks we don’t do that. We live and
let live’.
For Nicholas, whose family was ‘religious but not extreme’, Muslims had
‘failed to fit in like the Italians and Greeks’ because they ‘put religion before
anything and in Australia that doesn’t help’. Nicholas did not believe in ‘assimila-
tion, like losing your heritage or trying to be a white guy just to be accepted. I’ve
been accepted for who I am because I don’t hide it but at the same time I don’t
make being Greek a big deal in my daily life. Whereas with most Muslims you
get the feeling that everything comes back to their religion and look that’s just not
going to work’. Nicholas laughed about ‘Australians always having to beat up on
the new group and it’s just the Muslims’ turn’, but he also strongly believed that
Muslims would only overcome their outsider status if they ‘were less Muslim and
more Australian. Just relax it down is what I mean, like us Italians and Greeks
have learned to do. I think that would really help with a lot of the problems their
community faces’. I asked Nicholas what he meant by ‘less Muslim’. He strug-
gled to articulate an exact answer and settled on, ‘their clothes sometimes, like the
full covering and even the head scarf can just stand out. Not drinking. I mean, in
Australia if you don’t drink you’re setting yourself up to be on the outside. I work
in the corporate world and drinks with your colleagues or clients is a big thing’.
Nicholas understands media constructions of Muslims and also puts their out-
sider status into a wider context of ‘Australians always having to beat up on the
new group’. There is an awareness here of a kind of racialization conveyer belt in
the very nature of Australian society. Nicholas is attempting to offer some kind
of solution to this, but reverts to placing the onus for avoiding racialization onto
Muslims by expecting them to dilute their religiosity in matters he deems to be
extreme; that test what he considers to be the social and cultural limits to how one
elaborates their cultural and religious identity in a multicultural society.
Lucinda (42, Australian-born of Chinese parents, historian) and Shay (34,
Australian born of Indian parents, arts curator), were both deeply committed to
the principles of ‘diversity and live and let live’. Lucinda had ‘friends from all
backgrounds’ and Shay had grown up ‘probably, I would say, with more non-
Anglos than Anglos in my life’. Both had stories of racist abuse and ‘subtle stuff
176 When the other otherizes
in applying for jobs or at work’. Both were deeply cynical about media representa-
tions of Islam and believed that ‘terrorism is an individual crime and shouldn’t be
blamed on an entire religious group’. For them, the issue came down to ‘moderates
and extremists’. Shay said, ‘anybody who takes religion or culture to the extreme
and threatens the rights of others, that’s what I object to’. Lucinda articulated
a similar sentiment through a conversation around assimilation: ‘My grandma
didn’t speak a word of English and lived in a bubble with her Chinese friends and
family. If you were to ask was she assimilated? I would say no. But she never
exhibited any anti-social behavior and she never deprived other people of their
rights, or hurt anybody. So there’s a difference between assimilation, which I
oppose, and anti-social behavior, and to me extremism is anti-social.’
Violence as anti-social behavior was ‘obvious’ (‘whether it’s done because of
some religious motive or not’). What Lucinda wrestled with, as ‘somebody who
grew up with a strong Chinese culture’, was certain cultural sensibilities and pat-
terns of behaviour. Lucinda reverted to a liberal script on tolerance and liberty to
try to explain what she meant: ‘I think some things shouldn’t be tolerated where
they cause harm, like genital mutilation or depriving women of their choices and
rights. People’s dignity should be respected. But there are other things too. Like
you hear about these Muslim conferences where women and men have to sit sepa-
rately. I don’t think that’s right. It promotes inequality. I see that as extreme, as
taking things too far’.
Shay struggled with the ‘claims by some Muslims to have their own laws “for
things like divorce and marriage”’. She felt this was ‘going too far. Can you imag-
ine if in one family you have five sets of menu? It doesn’t work. We should all be
equal under the same law. And there are lots of Muslims I know who are moderate
who would say the same thing’. Shay also found the face veil ‘extreme’. Neither
Lucinda nor Shay were zealous in making these reflections. Lucinda admitted that
she ‘didn’t have the answers’, and Shay reflected, ‘I know, from my own fam-
ily, that it’s hard to make compromises. It’s difficult to work out what should be
accepted and what takes things too far’.
Wise (2013) has noted that those of us engaged in analyzing multicultural-
ism and racism can forget that outside academia, regular people usually only
have at their disposal cultural idioms and terms of reference that circulate in
public commentaries and debates, media headlines, dominant myths and stories,
and folk summaries and scripts to make sense of the complexity of everyday
multiculture. Lucinda and Shay are engaged in a genuine struggle of trying to
understand how to, as Nigel Thrift puts it, ‘manag[e] the sharing of lifeworlds’
(Thrift 2008: 144). Perhaps because of their own experiences of racism, and
their more defiant sense of conditional belonging than their parents’ generation,
the second-generation participants were more reflexive about multiculturalism’s
expectations and pronouncements on ‘the limits of tolerance in liberal society’
(Povinelli 2002: 12). Their accounts reveal how normative claims accepted at
face value – such as extremism, moderate, anti-social, adapt, compromise – lay
bare the inherent contradictions and complexities of teasing out these ideals
in practice.
 When the other otherizes 177
The demarcation between ‘moderate’ and ‘extreme’ Muslims is arguably the
major fault line in the assessment of the ‘limits of Muslimness’ (Kalin 2011) in
a liberal secular multicultural state, that is, to borrow from Elizabeth Povinelli,
‘what constitutes the socially and culturally repugnant and the limits of recogni-
tion’ (Povinelli 2002: 3). It is important to situate the participants’ attempts to
judge the limits of Muslimness within the contemporary preoccupation with ‘the
Muslim question’ and to understand their enrollment of liberal scripts as a condi-
tion of the wider racial order. In The Cunning of Recognition, Povinelli (2002: 13)
interrogates the capacity (or lack thereof) of the liberal multicultural imaginary to
recognize ‘moments of fundamental and uncanny alterity’. Applying Povinelli’s
analysis to the problem of cultural and religious difference, when does ‘a practice
or belief switch from being an instance of cultural difference to being repug-
nant culture’ (Povinelli 2002: 4)? The exercise of ascribing certain behaviour as
‘extreme’ and ‘moderate’ requires a calculation of what a ‘real Muslim’ can get
away with in their practice to take them from ‘extreme’ to ‘moderate’. Indeed, the
notion that the ‘moderate’ Muslim is the ‘real Muslim’ has entered our common
vernacular, repeated endlessly in public commentary, media and political narra-
tives, and even Muslim leaders in the context of the War on Terror. Demarcating
the moderate from the extreme is ingrained in vernacular practice and presumes
a kind of manifesto that explicates ‘moderate practices’ and ‘extreme practices’,
foreclosing the complexities inherent in individuals’ working through their own
religious practice. What seems clear is that non-liberal ways of being, non-liberal
life worlds and epistemologies are considered extreme and therefore present the
limits of Muslimness. And because what constitutes ‘extremism’ is subjectively
determined, we can see how the limits of Muslimness are interpreted and wrestled
with in different ways by the participants.
The effect of the participants evaluating what practices can be ‘compromised’
in order to adapt, fit in, avoid an outsider status, and so on, is that religious dilu-
tion delivers diluted recognition; it results in recognizing the diluted Muslim as
the ‘real’ Muslim multicultural subject. ‘Real’ because multiculturalism, under-
stood in this way, often only recognizes Muslims who have ‘divested themselves
of what many of them regard as … essential to themselves’ (Asad 2003: 168).
That my participants invoke this expectation is telling, given that they have all
personally experienced complex negotiations of their own identities and cultural
backgrounds to ‘fit in’.
What comes through strongly is that for all the non-Anglo participants, it is
taken for granted that their ways of being, in the multicultural periphery, must
be evaluated and, if need be, compromised. Not once did any of the participants
question the limits of tolerance of Anglo ‘culture’ or ‘customs’. The reason why
should be obvious. Whiteness is universal, floating above ways of being, rather
than being one among many life worlds. This, then, is how internalized racism
hums quietly in the background, offering pre-formulated scripts and ways of talk-
ing and meaning-making that people can easily ‘absorb and grab onto’ (Wise
2013: 40). It operates in the shadows of even the more confident and assertive
of the participants. Whether first-generation or second-generation, this is the
178 When the other otherizes
subjectivity that often weighs down their encounters with Muslim life worlds and
ways of being. For the first generation, much of the evaluation is often steeped in
a sense of wanting to preserve a model minority status and not rock the boat. For
the second-generation participants, there was often a more reflexive and fraught
questioning of their feelings and views, and the way they thought through the
limits of liberal tolerance. In both cases, however, the Muslim becomes the site of
convergence for debates around the practice and limits of multiculturalism.

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