Veiled Threats: Recurrent Cultural Anxieties in Australia

At the end of the nineteenth century, white Australians found themselves in a turbulent and rapidly changing world. As British settlers in a vast, often-perplexing and under-populated continent, they were increasingly aware that they lived in a crowded and predominantly Asian neighbourhood. Their supposedly empty spaces seemed to invite the unwanted attention of hostile outsiders, fertile soil for speculation about vulnerable borders, invasion and violation. It was commonplace of the period for white females to be considered at once particularly vulnerable and also innocent symbols of the new nation. They needed to be protected against Asian males allegedly bent on conquest and violation. It does not follow that these “invasion narratives”, however persistent, meant that the entire population was disabled by fear and dread, but there is convincing evidence of a deeply embedded cultural anxiety about the destructive possibilities and hostile intentions of Asian outsiders. In this article, the authors examine recent representations of Muslims as hostile outsiders in Australia, focusing in particular on the veil as a marker of female oppression under Islam and a sign of the threat attributed to the Islamic community in Australia. While it would be misleading to propose a simple line of progression from late nineteenth century apprehensions to those a century or more later, there are nonetheless intriguing parallels and recurrent expressions of survivalist anxiety across the period examined in this article.

Authors: Anne Aly; David Walker

Introduction

In 1995, The Australian Magazine featured an article titled “Behind the Holy Veil” by an Australian journalist and author Geraldine Brooks.1 The article typifies the strain of media coverage on Muslims and Islam in the decade preceding the 11 September 2001 attacks on the United States. Brooks attributes the return of the Islamic dress code for women, the hijab or veil, to the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in Iran. A similar article entitled “The Iron Veil” by Jan Goodwin appeared in a popular women’s magazine:

Imagine you are totally segregated from mainstream society, you can’t choose whom you’ll marry, how to dress or where to live. Educational opportunities are limited and few jobs-or any other activities are open to you.2

The historically inherited stereotype of the Muslim woman as oppressed, shrouded in black and walking 10 steps behind her husband, “like death out for a walk”,3 has become a metaphor for the threat of Islamic fundamentalism within and beyond Australia’s borders. The Muslim woman is routinely represented as subordinate and passive, an enigma shrouded in the black veil of religious oppression. In contrast to their Western counterparts, Muslim women are portrayed as inferior or backward. To many Western women, the veil stands as the single, most powerful symbol of the gender based oppression that women in non-Western countries suffer.

Comparisons between the role and status of women in Australia and those from the threatening societies are not new. The status of women is a prominent theme in the “invasion narratives” of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It was assumed that if Australia was overtaken by Asia, Australian women would experience a dramatic decline in status and suffer cruel oppression.4 Contrasts between European and Asian women suggested that European women fared much better. It followed that the “Asianisation” of Australia would have dire consequences for the role and status of Australian women.

The focus on the role of women in Islam and the representation of Muslim women as oppressed and forced to wear a veil drew much the same response. Indeed, the veil has come to represent Islam itself and the “veiled threat” has become code for the wider threat of an Islamic presence in Australia drawing explicitly on fears that Australian cultural values might collapse.

A History of Fear

Australia’s history is marked by expressions of anxiety about invasion and the destruction of Australian culture. This cultural anxiety is grounded in the tension between Australia’s history as a European settler society and its geo-political position on the south-eastern fringe of Asia. Small in population and remote from Europe, the new nation sought security through its association with distant but culturally similar allies, first Britain and then the United States.5 From the 1880s, “peril” has been a recurrent theme in Australia’s history. Intermittently this “peril” was “yellow”, “brown”, or, as in the Vietnam war, “skin-yellow” but politically “red”.6

In the 1850s a series of events, including the opening of Japan and the Sepoy Rebellion in India, brought Asian nations and aspirations onto the world stage. This, combined with the arrival in Australia of large numbers of Chinese workers during the gold rush period, prompted an awareness of the migratory nature of Asia and a keener realisation of Australia’s proximity to its Pacific neighbours. From the late nineteenth century, the “invasion narrative” captured many of the persistent anxieties about Asian otherness.7 Invasion writing was a genre popularised in Britain where the enemy was invariably European. In Australian writing that external enemy was Asian, but internal social trends also aroused concern. There were regular critiques of urbanisation along with the trend towards smaller families leading to a worrying decline in the birth rate.8 Titles published from the 1880s include White or Yellow, The Yellow Wave: A Romance of the Asiatic Invasion of Australia, The Yellow Danger and The Yellow Peril in Action.9

Representations of Asia as a threat to Australia persisted well into the twentieth century. By the early 1900s, Australia had established its vision of an exclusively Anglo-Celtic future expressed in the passing of the Immigration Restriction Act 1901, better known as the White Australia Policy. Concern that Australia’s sparsely populated continents might not withstand immigrating hordes from overpopulated Asian neighbours gave way to fears about maintaining racial purity and cultural homogeneity in Australia.10 According to Jones, racial purity was considered central to Australianness at the time of Federation. Fears about miscegenation underpinned calls to maintain “Australia for the White Man”.11 The White Australia Policy aimed at constructing Australia as a homogenous white settler nation. The white races were commonly considered superior to what then-Prime Minister Barton referred to as the “coloured races”, whom he claimed were “intrinsically inferior to the whites”.12 Ang contends that in Australia, anxiety and suspicions of the “other” are rooted in an idea of a national culture that was formed by the ideological assumptions of the White Australia Policy. These anxieties, suggests Ang, are expressed not so much as a desire to return to White Australia traditions, but rather as a desire to maintain the boundaries that define Australia as a separate nation-state, or “fortress Australia”.13 Modifications to the Immigration Restriction Act in the 1950s allowed for small numbers of non-European immigrants under the distinguished and highly qualified immigration category, but it was not until 1973, after Britain joined the Common Market and rescinded favoured migration relationships with Australia, that the newly elected Labour government, led by Gough Whitlam, finally discarded racial criteria for migration to Australia.

Some one hundred years after the emergence of the “invasion narrative”, the concept of an Asian invasion resurfaced. In 1996 Pauline Hanson emerged as the outspoken leader of One Nation, a political party that saw Asian immigration as a threat to Australia’s cultural traditions. In her maiden speech, Hanson maintained that Australia was “in danger of being swamped by Asians”14 invoking familiar concepts of the “Asian invasion” and cultural anxieties about the loss of a distinct national identity. Hanson echoed the words of Arthur Calwell, Australia’s first and often controversial Minister for Immigration who declared that Australia could never survive as a multi-racial society.15 Hanson was also quoted in the Bulletin in 1996: “My fear is that if we keep going the way that we’re goinghellipthe yellow race will rule the world, because they have different culture. A different way of life”.16

The threat of an increasing Chinese presence in Australia had long been associated with attempts to define and defend the role of the male in increasingly urban societies where women were pressing for a larger stake in public affairs. Australia was almost a case study of modernity, a wealthy society in which women’s education and the female franchise were at the forefront of progressive politics. In positing a threat from Asia, invasion writers maintained that white women would be the first to suffer enslavement and violation. In the “invasion narrative”, securing the nation was the highest priority, not progressive reform. In this schema, women needed men prepared to protect them more than they needed the vote or new rights and freedoms. As one exponent of the “invasion narrative” expressed it, the bushman of the rough interior was “the backbone of resistance that the White Man will make to any Flow of Asia along the Pacific littoral”.17 If the “new woman” was to survive, the bushman would prove to be her saviour. The status of Australian women was regularly held up as a progressive accomplishment rather than a work in progress. It presented a stark contrast to an orient typically characterised by tales of harems and female slavery.18

In 1888, William Lane, a labour movement activist, wrote and serialised Australia’s first invasion novel, White or Yellow: A Story of the Race War of AD 1908. In Lane’s story, the leader of the Chinese in Queensland, Sir Wong Hung Foo, rapes and murders Cissie Saxby, invoking an anti-Chinese uprising. Just over a century later, Lane’s personification of the threat to Australian women resurfaced when a group of young Australian men identified as being of Lebanese origin raped two Anglo-Australian teenage girls. The popular media called the rapes an “act of war” against Anglo-Australia. Comments such as those by Age editor Pamela Bone are a typical reflection of the way the popular media interpreted the events: “Racially motivated rape, the intention of which is to defile the women of the enemy, is as old as warfare, but it is devastating to think that this could be happening in Australia today”.19 The rhetoric of war in reports of the so-called “Lebanese gang rapes” parallels the historical framing of the Asian male as “an invasive figure bent on the violation of white women”.20 Media engagement with the Lebanese rape case frequently contextualised it as an act of aggression whereby the rapists targeted vulnerable females in an attempt to disempower and humiliate masculine Australia. Indeed, it was as if the rapists had raped Australia herself. Their actions were seen to be representative of the barbaric and misogynist Muslim culture, while young Australian girls represented Australia’s vulnerability to the insidious threat of Muslim culture. The Lebanese rape case reinforced the historically inherited stereotype of the ugly Muslim male, an image which has persisted for at least a decade and which typically portrayed Muslims as violent and sexist.21

Lane’s juxtaposition of the races in White or Yellow exemplified a common view that war between the races was inevitable wherever racial mixing occurred. Racial homogeneity was the only safe course. Subsequent titles such as Dawe’s Yellow and White published in 1896 and Chidell’s Australia – White or Yellow? published 30 years later, continued to draw on the notion of a global struggle for racial dominance.22 These were presented as studies of what Samuel Huntington recently popularised as the “clash of civilisations”. According to Huntington, the main source of international conflict after the Cold War would be cultural, not political. The resurgence of religion throughout the world, he claimed, underlines the philosophical assumptions, values, ideologies and customs that separate different civilisations.23 Huntington’s theory has been largely dismissed by political analysts. Chomsky, for example, saw the clash of civilisations as having popular appeal, but little rational, scholarly basis24 and Corey Robin asserts that when viewed as a “clash of civilisations”, terrorism is transported from politics into the realm of cultural conflict.25 Despite this, the notion of world conflict being fought along the fault lines of culture and religion has gained some currency since the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centre in September 2001 and the advent of the so called “war on terror”. The September 11 attacks were portrayed by the popular Western media and in the political arena as symptomatic of Islamic fundamentalism’s deep-seated anxiety about modernity. The perpetrators of September 11 targeted the United States for its values of liberty, democracy and freedom- values particularised in the political rhetoric and media discourse as exclusively and characteristically Western. The “war on terror” juxtaposes the free, liberal and civilised West with the backward, oppressive and uncivilised Islam in much the same way as the “invasion narratives” particularised Asia as the “yellow peril”.26

As early as 1912, Australians were being cautioned about the threat of an Islamic presence. In an address to a Melbourne audience entitled “The Moslem Menace”, the Reverend George Brown, a prominent missionary, urged listeners to heed his warnings about Australia falling under Islamic control. For the “Moslem Menace” to which he referred to be fully understood, Brown maintained that Melbourne should experience Islamic domination for twenty four hours in order to “realise the danger of wife or sisters going in the streets unattended or unguarded”. Brown’s address inferred that an Islamic presence in Australia was incompatible with the values of a dynamic and progressive Western civilisation.27 The target of his attack was unusual for the time. With Asian invasion as the dominant threat, the “Moslem menace” was hard to present as a convincing risk to Australia.

Madge Peterson’s The Lure of the Little Drum, first published in August 1913, echoed the concerns voiced by Reverend Brown. The novel won the coveted title of Best Novel for 1913 in a competition run by the British publishing house, Andrew Melrose Ltd. Joseph Conrad was among the judges. By the end of the year, The Lure of the Little Drum had reached its fourth impression. The story is set against the splendid backdrop of the Raj. Esther, a woman of unimpeachable loveliness from a background that was not all it should have been, marries Gerald, a determinedly cheerful, tiger-hunting fellow. Lurking in the background is Ishaq Khan, a prince (certainly) but also a Muslim agitator. Esther tires of Gerald, falls into Khan’s encircling arms, and is soon installed in his harem. His purpose is not amorous, but political vengeance. The Old India Hand of the novel knows that Khan is motivated by “the passion of his hate”. Esther’s humiliating enslavement satisfies his “lust of cruelty”. Worse still, Khan seeks “the joy of degrading what we white men hold so dear, our women”.28 White women were represented as a target in the war between the races, a terrible truth known only to the keenest students of the oriental mind. It was exactly the point that the Reverend Brown had tried to impress upon his Melbourne audience.

Muslims in the Australian Media

The Australian media’s interest in the Middle East was awakened by a series of global events in the 1950s and 60s, among them the Suez Canal Crisis in 1957 and the Six Day War in 1967.29 Typically, during this period, the Arab world was represented as a fabled, exotic land in the tenor of Orientalism.30 It was not until the 1970s and 80s that Australia’s detached interest in the Middle East developed into a concern over the emergence of Arab terrorism. The terrorist attack at the 1972 Munich Olympics captured the attention of the global media and saw the beginnings of a pre-occupation with the phenomenon of Islamic resurgence in the Australian popular media. By the late 1970s the image of the Arab terrorist emerged as the dominant representation of the Middle East in Australia.31 The Iranian revolution in 1979 quickly shifted the focus to Islamic fundamentalism. Representations of Khomeini as a fanatical despot became synonymous with Islamic fundamentalism as the international press focussed on the orchestration of a terrorist campaign against the United States as the “Great Satan”. Progressively throughout the 1980s the images inspired by Iran became interchangeable with Islam. The media repeatedly invoked images of fanatical Muslims poised not only to cleanse their own societies but ultimately to Islamise the world, instil religious law and annihilate Western liberal democracy. Reports of Islamic insurgency in both the Middle East and Asia inspired what Brasted terms the “domino effect”, whereby it was assumed that Muslim countries would eventually yield to fundamentalist insurgents. The Islamic threat to Australia was a recurring theme in the popular media but did not emerge as a serious threat until the 1990s.32

In the decade preceding the September 11 terrorist attacks on the United States, the threat of Islam to Australia gained momentum. Australia’s involvement in the 1991 Gulf War, largely in a supportive capacity, ignited a debate on the presence of Muslims in Australia in the popular media. Calls for Australian Muslims to be repatriated to their countries of origin came through on talk back radio. John Laws, a prominent radio announcer on Sydney’s Radio 2UE declared that Muslims opposed to the war should “Go homehellip. It’s all simplehellip. If you wish to condemn Australia’s involvement in the Middle East on personal grounds, then go home”.33 Between late 1990 and early 1991 nationalist sentiments were increasingly expressed in newspaper articles and letters to the editor.34

The Islamic threat to Australia soon found expression in the representation of Muslim women. While images of Muslim violence persisted, the Australian media began to replace it with the image of the Islamic veil or hijab as the sole, most compelling, image of Islam. The dominant theme in popular print media articles focussed largely on the role of women in Islam, the Islamic approach to human rights, Sharia punishments and the connection between Islam and practices such as female genital mutilation and honour killings. Increasingly, the image of Islam was that it was incompatible with the ideals of Western liberal democracy and the “veiled threat” became the standard reference in many news items about Muslims.35

Muslim Women in Western Feminist Discourses

The Western feminist discourse largely portrays Muslim women as unable to speak for themselves because of the repressive regimes under which they live.36 Thus the Western woman is bound to speak on behalf of her Muslim sister. The notion of the muted Muslim woman extends to Muslim women in Australia whose true voices are perceived to be subdued by the oppressive, masculinised culture of Islam. This has effectively reduced Muslim female identity to an article of clothing. The imagery is powerful: the veil is the shroud through which the muffled voices of Muslim women struggle to be heard. The emancipated Western woman seeks to symbolically, but also literally, “unveil” Muslim women as if somehow the act of “unveiling” will free them from their oppressive shackles. The diversity of the veil (headscarf or hijab, chador, burqa) as well as the diversity of Muslim women is ignored. Muslim women are homogenised37 and objectified, losing their individual identities in the process. As Waleed Aly has observed, “The Muslim woman, in her varying degrees of cover has become merely a symbol; a battleground for a much broader polemic. She is not a person with interests, aspirations, struggles and feelings”.38 Ironically, by focusing attention on superficial symbols such as the veil, Western feminist discourse serves to distract attention from the feminist objective of achieving fundamental social rights for women.39

The last decade has seen a proliferation of books and articles in the popular media about Muslim women. Almost all draw on the semiotics of the veil and include titles such as My Forbidden Face, Without Mercy: Woman’s Struggle Against Modern Slavery, Voices Behind the Veil and Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women.40 Articles in the print media in particular draw explicitly on the imagery of the veil with headlines such as “Nile warns of veiled threat”, “Veiled threat”, “Life behind veil of Islam”, “The hijab jihad”, “Veiled threat an insult to all”, “Unveiling feminism in the Koran”, “Hiding behind a veil of outrage”, and “Shrouded in strife”. Without exception, all feature an all-too-familiar graphic of a Muslim woman, eyes peering imploringly from behind a black veil. The veiled Muslim woman is a central figure in Orientalist discourse, conjuring up a range of responses from oppression and misogyny to cultural threat and terrorism.

In Nine Parts of Desire, Geraldine Brooks recounts her experiences in Saudi Arabia where, as a female, it was easier for her “to get behind the veil than a male journalist”.41 The title of the book, it is claimed, is based on a quote from the Shiite religious leader Ali who is reported to have said that God created sexual desire in 10 parts of which women were endowed with nine and men with one. The title itself immediately associated Muslim women with Western stereotypes of exotic orientalism. In contrast to progressive Western societies, women in Islam are seen to be much more sexual than men and hence need to be controlled through practices such as female genital mutilation and veiling. The following comments are among the typical reactions to Brooks’ book by Western women: it “gives you some idea of the fear of women inherent in this culture” and “the reason behind the veiling and all of the radical and horrible restrictionshellip on Muslim women ishellipwomen are evil, men must take whatever measures are necessary to protect themselves from US”.42 It comes as no surprise that Brooks, in at least one interview, is referred to as “an expert on the role of women in Islam”.43 Yet in this same interview she makes a colossal error in attributing the spread of female genital mutilation to the introduction of Islam in Egypt and its subsequent spread to South East Asia. It is widely known among Muslim women who have been campaigning against this practice44 that it predates both Islam and Christianity and that its affiliation with Islam is most often attributed to a much contested Hadith of questionable authenticity known as Hadith Um Attiyat. The fact that Brooks is heralded among Western women as an expert on Muslim women demonstrates the hegemony of the Western feminist discourse. The voices of Muslim women are muted, not by the veil, but all too often by Western feminists themselves. In closing her book, Brooks appeals to feminists and human rights advocates to do what they can to save Muslim women. In response to Brooks’ appeal, one Muslim woman wrote: “Ms. Brooks need not bother to strive for Muslim women’s rights to bare their bodies if they chose to spiritually rejoice in covering them”.45

Western feminists rarely acknowledge that for some Muslim women donning the veil is a matter of choice that is closely tied to their Islamic identity. In an article published in the Canberra Times in March 2006, the proliferation of veiled women in Cairo is somehow linked to the number of violent crimes against women and even to a ban on abortion in the US state of South Dakota.46 Pamela Bone produced a series of articles on Muslim women for the Age which also warrant examination. Two articles published over a decade apart are titled “Life Behind the Veil of Islam” and “For Women, the Hijab and the Burqa Reflect Their Subjugation”. The first title treats Islam and the veil as if the two were synonymous. The latter equates the veil with oppression. Bone’s obsession with the veil as a symbol of the role of women in Islam is apparent when she writes: “Islam puts great emphasis on submission and obedience”.47 Bone neglects to mention that submission in Islam is to God and that both men and women must submit to His will. Engaging in the debate on the wearing of the veil in public schools, Bone, echoing Brooks, states: “The underlying rationale for the hijab is that women should cover their crowning glory so as not to provoke feelings of ‘lust’ in men; whereas in this society we have (supposedly) progressed to the view that it is men’s responsibility to control their sexual urges whatever women are wearing”.48 The implication here is that veiled Muslim women represent a backward ideology that threatens the progress that Western women have made in achieving equal rights. Bone’s message mirrors the rationale of the Asian invasion narrative of some 150 years ago: the progressive West is pitted against the regressive and oppressive East. It is perhaps ironic that the argument of the progressive West has not progressed since it first appeared in the 1800s.

While the narrative of the Asian invasion that emerged in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Australia was predominantly a male genre, the vast majority of recent books that explore the role of women in Islam are largely feminist in inspiration. In Hales’ novel, The Little Blue Pigeon, published in 1903, the oppressive treatment of women by the Japanese is a central theme rendered through a love story between a Japanese woman and an Englishman. The female subject discovers the meaning of respect in the only way deemed possible for her: through a relationship with an English gentleman.49 In a similar fashion, the array of paperbacks that explored the subject of female genital mutilation in the late 1990s emphasise the heroic flights of the subject from oppression to freedom. Books such as Aman, Desert Flower and Do They Hear You When You Cry? follow a similar story line: “excision and infibulation, arranged marriage (usually of a pubescent girl with a much older man), flight to safety and rescue (including resettlement in a foreign country, usually the USA)”.50 Rather than highlighting the devastating health effects of female genital mutilation: infection; problems with childbirth and fertility, these stories highlight the escape from oppression to the freedom and justice of the West.

Underlying the “invasion narrative” was an implication that an Australia demasculinised through the pursuit of feminist objectives was an Australia vulnerable to the threat of invasion from the Asian hoards. Masculinist commentary on the role of women in Australian society was considerably influenced by comparisons, often heroic in their generality, between Western and Eastern practices on the treatment of women. The barbarous practices of the East were invoked to limit female claims to greater equality, but the “invasion narrative” establishes that women were often reminded of how much better off they were than their Eastern sisters.

Similarly feminist commentary on the role of Muslim women in Islamic societies is influenced by comparisons between secular and Islamic ideologies. The practice of veiling is invoked as proof of the gender oppression of women in Islam. Underlying much of the Western feminism discourse on Islam is a conviction that Islamic society is not as progressive as Western society and that the status accorded to women is the singular, most significant measure of progress. There are some striking continuities between the masculinised “invasion narrative” of the late nineteenth century and feminist discourse on the veil a century or so later. Where the “invasion narrative” places a “fully realized masculinity” as “defiantly anti-Asian”,51 the feminist discourse on the veil places a fully realized feminist objective as anti-veil. Where the “invasion narrative” sought to maintain a spirit of “defiant masculinity”,52 the discourse on the veil seeks to maintain a condition of defiant feminism.

The “Veiled Threat”

By the late 1990s, the discourse on the veil in the Australian popular media directly situated the Muslim woman in two ways. Firstly, the veil is inextricably linked to the cultural threat posed by Islam. Secondly, since the terrorist attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon in 2001, the “veiled threat” has expanded to include a threat to Australia’s security.53

The image of the Muslim woman embodies the cultural threat to Australia in particular and the West more generally from Islam. The political and public debate surrounding the right of Muslims to wear the various forms of the veil: hijab, chador or burqa often masks a deeper concern with the Islamification of Australia. Here, the veiled Muslim woman is a symbol both of anti-assimilationist defiance and of female servitude, characteristics which are central to the “clash of cultures” in which Muslim Australians, marked as culturally incompatible “other” are thought incapable of “fitting in”. The paradox of the veil symbolism is that the veil represents both oppression and dissention. In both the political arena and the media, the point is often made that the act of veiling spells the rejection of Australian society and the political values of liberal democracies. The underlying assumption is that “elements of Islam have an agenda hostile not only to Australia’s values but also to the basic tenets of Western civilisation”.54 In articles which refer to the veil debate, “Muslims” are clearly demarcated from “Australians”. Narratives about the veil are frequently prefaced by comments such as: “The Middle Eastern community has to understand that if they want to live in this societyhellip”.55

In February 2006, the Australian Prime Minister, John Howard, aroused controversy when he stated that “most Australians” would find the Islamic dress “confronting”.56 His comments follow those of Liberal backbenchers in 2005, Sophie Panopolous and Bronwyn Bishop, who called for a ban on the wearing of headscarves in public schools. Both Panopolous and Bishop appealed to a deep-seated anxiety about the Islamisation of Australia:

I fear a frightening Islamic class emerging, supported by a perverse interpretation of the Koran where disenchantment breeds disengagement, where powerful and subversive orthodoxies are inculcated into passionate and impressionable young Muslims, where the Islamic mosque becomes the breeding ground for violence and rejection of Australian law and ideals, where extremists hijack the Islamic faith with their own prescriptive and unbending version of the Koran and where extremist views are given currency and validityhellip.Why should one section of the community be stuck in the Dark Ages of compliance cloaked under a veil of some distorted form of religious freedom?57

The rhetoric on the wearing of the veil appealed directly to concerns about the clash of cultures. In reference to her comment on the banning of the veil in public schools, MP Bronwyn Bishop stated: “what I was saying was not about headscarves per se, it’s about a clash of cultures where there are extremist Muslim leaders who are calling for the overthrow of the laws that give me my freedom and my equality as defined by the society in which I live”.58 In this discourse Muslim women become symbols of an imagined cultural divide between Australian Muslims as “other” and Australia’s Anglo-Celtic cultural heritage. The threat of Islam, personified in the veiled Muslim woman, is a threat to the values of liberal democracy where “women and men are equal”.59 In stark contrast to her liberated Australian counterpart, the veiled Muslim woman stands as a “confronting” expression of “sexual apartheid” and a “retrograde curtailment of women’s rights”,60 and hence a demonstration of Islam’s incapacity to exist in the “free West”.

Underlying the imagery of the veil is the Orientalist discourse of Muslims as lustful and motivated by unnatural sexual urges. While images of violence and terrorism persist, Islam is also frequently linked to sexuality. Karim notes that the portrayal of oriental sexuality is a “primary preoccupation of many writers, poets, and painters of the Romantic period”.61 Oriental women are often portrayed as sexual slaves who spend their lives confined in harems in sexual preparedness:

Depictions of Oriental women differed qualitatively from those of European women becausehellipdiscourses on Eastern sexuality generally occur within the context of imperial power. The desires and characteristics that one does not admit having often are projected onto the Other; these features are made out to be exceptions in one’s own society and the norm in that of the latter.62

The Asian invasion narratives also drew heavily on Orientalist discourses of lust and sexuality where the treatment of women as sexual possessions is seen to be an inherent trait of the oriental races. It followed that in an Asianised Australia, Australian women would inevitably suffer the same humiliating fate.63

In an interview on the riots that occurred on Sydney’s Cronulla beach in December 2005 one of the youths involved in the incident expressed the belief that Muslim law condoned the rape of women. He added that Australia was at risk of becoming an Islamic state:

They will probably, like, possibly out-breed us. And once they get the numbers, they can vote their members into parliament. And once their members are in parliament, they can pass laws, like, they’ve already tried to get the Islamic law into Australia a few times.64

More recently, the veil has come to be associated with the threat of terrorism. It is here that the veil takes on a whole new meaning. While images of violence have been central to the stereotype of Muslims in the Australian media, the preoccupation with the veil as a symbol of Muslim women’s oppression shifted to a perception of the veil as possible threat to Australia’s security. Australian Christian Democrat MP Fred Nile in 2002 called for a public ban on the veil, because a woman could easily hide a bomb in her chador.65 This has since been followed intermittently by a media debate which canvasses whether, for reasons of public security, various versions of the veil should be banned in Australia. The debates over the veil are often clearly linked to issues of national security and social cohesion. Reports on the Cronulla beach riots in 2005 again drew on the imagery of the veil. Several articles referred to a “veil of secrecy” descending “on the Arab community” over the riots and those involved.66 The veil represents impenetrable secrecy and an unnerving suspicion that veiled women have something to hide. Whereas the veil was once assumed to be hiding uninhibited sexual desires it is now also assumed by some to be hiding weapons of mass destruction.

Conclusion

There are some signs that a different view of Muslim women in Australia, one which takes into account that they are heterogenous and can exercise freedom in their choice of dress is beginning to penetrate the popular media. A recent article in the popular Australian Women’s Weekly follows the lead of other popular women’s magazines and presents the stories of six Australian Muslim women in their own words. In introducing the article, the author recounts her initial feelings of discomfort upon entering a room of Muslim women who “wore funny clothes and left their shoes at the door”. As she meets the women, these feelings dissipate:

Inside, everyone was smiling, friendly, welcoming. They didn’t come across as downtrodden or oppressed and they didn’t look like thugs or terrorists – whatever terrorists look like. Then it dawned on me that I was falling into the trap of making assumptions about a whole group of people I was labelling with the catch-all of “Muslim”.

Notably, the bulk of the article presents the images and voices of six of the women she met that day in their various garb: unveiled, hijab, chador and burqa.67 This article, and others like it, indicate that there may be a change in media representation of Muslim women that recognises that the historically inherited stereotypes do not represent the reality of many women’s lives.

Notes

1. Geraldine Brooks, “Behind the Holy Veil”, The Australian Magazine, 25-26 February 1995, pp. 12-23.

2. Jan Goodwin, “The Iron Veil”, New Woman Magazine, September 1994, pp. 48-55.

3. Guy de Massapaut cited in Brooks, “Behind the Holy Veil”, op. cit.

4. David Walker, Anxious Nation: Australia and the Rise of Asia 1850-1939, Queensland: University of Queensland Press, 1999, p. 104.

5. See, for example, J. Fitzpatrick, “European Settler Colonialism and National Security Ideologies in Australian History”, in Middling, Meddling, Muddling. Issues in Australian Foreign Policy, eds R. Leaver and D. Cox, St Leonards: Allen and Unwin, 1997.

6. A. Jamrozik, “From Lucky Country to Penal Colony: How Politics of Fear Have Changed Australia”, paper presented at the Refugees and the Lucky Country Forum, Melbourne, 2002.

7. Walker, Anxious Nation, op. cit., pp. 95-112.

8. Ibid., p. 101.

9. Ibid., pp. 101-11.

10. Ibid., pp. 181-94.

11. G.W. Jones, “White Australia, National Identity and Population Change”, in Legacies of White Australia: Race, Culture and Nation, eds, L. Jayasuriya, D. Walker and J. Gothard, Perth: University of Western Australia Press, 2003, pp. 110-29.

12. Cited in Jones, “White Australia”, op. cit., p. 112.

13. Ien Ang, “From White Australia to Fortress Australia: The Anxious Nation in the New Century”, in Legacies of White Australia: Race, Culture and Nation, eds, L. Jayasuriya, D. Walker and J. Gothard, Perth: University of Western Australia Press, 2003, pp. 51-70.

14. See online:<" target="new">http://www.australian-news.com.au/maiden_speech.htm>.

15. See also Calwell’s autobiography, Be Just and Fear Not, Sydney: Rigby Ltd, 1972.

16. The Bulletin, 24 October 1996.

17. David Walker, “Shooting Mabel: Warrior Masculinity and Asian Invasion”, History Australia, Vol. 2, No. 3, 2005, pp. 88.81-88.11.

18. Ibid.

19. Pamela Bone, “Rape, the Debate We Had to Have”, The Age, 24 July 2002.

20. Walker, “Shooting Mabel”, op. cit., p. 88.2.

21. Several scholarly studies offer a discourse analysis of articles in the popular Australian media involving Muslims. See, for example, S. Akbarzadeh and B. Smith, The Representation of Islam and Muslims in the Media, Melbourne: Monash University, 2005; A. Saniotis, “Embodying Ambivalence: Muslim Australians as ‘Other’”, Journal of Australian Studies, Vol. 82, 2004; Howard V. Brasted, “Contested Representations in Historical Perspective: Images of Islam and the Australian Press 1950-2000″, in Muslim Communities in Australia, eds A. Saeed and S. Akbarzadeh, Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2001, pp. 206-28.

22. Walker, “Shooting Mabel”, op. cit.

23. Samuel P. Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations?”, Foreign Affairs, Vol. 72, No. 3, 1993.

24. Noam Chomsky, September 11, New South Wales: Allen & Unwin, 2002.

25. Corey Robin, Fear: The History of a Political Idea, New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.

26. G. Osuri and S. Banerjee, “White Diasporas: Media Representations of September 11 and the Unbearable Whiteness of Being in Australia”, Social Semiotics, Vol. 14, No. 2, 2004, pp. 151-71.

27. “The Moslem Menace: Missionary’s Address”, Argus, 5 November 1912, p. 7.

28. Madge Peterson, The Lure of the Little Drum, London: Andrew Melrose Ltd, 1913, chapter xx.

29. Brasted, “Contested Representations”, op. cit.

30. Ibid.

31. Ibid.

32. Ibid.

33. Howard V. Brasted, “The Politics of Stereotyping: Western Images of Islam”, Manushi, Vol. 98, 1997, p. 8.

34. Saniotis, “Embodying Ambivalence”, op. cit.

35. Brasted, “Contested Representations”, op. cit., p. 220.

36. See, for example, the various works cited in this article by authors Bone; Brooks; and Goodwin.

37. J. El Matrah, “Stolen Voices of Muslim Women”, The Age, 22 April 2005, p. 21.

38. Waleed Aly, “Canberra’s Demons”, The Age, 4 March 2006, p. 7.

39. G. Martin-Munoz, “Islam’s Women Under Western Eyes”, 2006, available online at:<(accessed" target="new">http://www.opendemocracy.net/xml/xhtml/articles/498.html> (accessed 7 March 2006).

40. See, Latifa, My Forbidden Face, Without Mercy: Woman’s Struggle Against Modern Slavery, New York: Hyperion, 2001; Ergun Memet Caner, Voices Behind the Veil, Michigan: Kregal Publications, 2003; and Geraldine Brooks, Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women, New York: Anchor, 1995.

41. The Sheila Variations, 2006, available online at:<(accessed" target="new">http://www.sheilaomalley.com/archives/005798.html> (accessed 7 March 2006).

42. Ibid.

43. L. McClure, “What Would Mohammed Do?”, 2006, available online at:<(accessed" target="new">http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/2002/12/04/islamic_women/print.html> (accessed 7 March 2006).

44. Anne Aly, one of the authors, is a Muslim woman who has been involved in campaigns to raise awareness of the health and community impacts of female genital mutilation in Western Australia.

45. “Nine Parts Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women by Geraldine Brooks. A Muslim Response”, 2006, available online at:<(accessed" target="new">http://www.themodernreligion.com/comparative/jew/brooks2.htm> (accessed 7 March 2006).

46. “From Afghanistan to the United States, the Patriarchy is Striking Back”, Canberra Times, 9 March 2006, p. 17.

47. Pamela Bone, “For Women, the Hijab and the Burqa Reflect their Subjugation”, The Age, 1 September 2005, p. 15.

48. Pamela Bone, “Life Behind a Weil of Islam”, The Age, 3 March 1992, p. 11.

49. Walker, “Shooting Mabel”, op. cit.

50. L. Manderson, “Local Rites and Body Politics: Tensions Between Cultural Diversity and Human Rights”, International Feminist Journal of Politics, Vol. 6, No. 2, 2004, pp. 285-307. See: Virginia Lee Barnes and Janice Boddy, Aman, New York: Pantheon, 1995; Waris Dirie and Cathleen Miller, Desert Flower, New York: Harper, 1998; Fauziya Kassindja, Do They Hear You When You Cry?, New York: Dell, 1998.

51. Walker, “Shooting Mabel”, op. cit.

52. Ibid.

53. See, for example, “Nile Warns of Veil Threat”, Daily Telegraph, 22 November 2002; Rosemary Neill, “Liberator or Oppressor – Paradox of the Veil”, The Australian, 29 November 2002; “Veiled Threats”, Sydney Morning Herald, 4 September 2004.

54. Michael Baume, “Accentuate Ties that Bind”, Australian Financial Review, 6 March 2006.

55. Rhett Watson, “Silent Shame – Arab Community Accused of Hiding Thugs – The Cronulla Riots”, Daily Telegraph, 10 March 2006.

56. “Muslim Garb ‘Confronting’: PM”, The Age, 27 February 2006.

57. Comments made by Sophie Panopoulos MP in Parliament on 5 September 2005. Available online at:<(accessed" target="new">http://www.aph.gov.au.hansard> (accessed 17 June 2006).

58. Cited in Waleed Aly, “Canberra’s Demons”, op. cit.

59. Pamela Bone, “Rape, the Debate We Had to Have”, op. cit.

60. Comments of Sophie Panopoulous, Victorian Liberal MP in Parliament on 5 September 2005. Available online at:<(accessed" target="new">http://www.aph.gov.au.hansard> (accessed 17 June 2006).

61. Karim H. Karim, “The Historical Resilience of Primary Stereotypes: Core Images of the Muslim Other”, in The Language and Politics of Exclusion: Others in Discourse, eds Stephen Riggins and Stephen Harold, London: Sage, 1997, pp. 153-83.

62. Ibid.

63. Walker, “Shooting Mabel”, op. cit.

64. “Four Corners Program Transcript”, 2006, available online at:<(accessed" target="new">http://www.abc.net.au/4corners/content/2006/sl1590953.htm> (accessed 14 March 2006).

65. “Nile Warns of Veil Threat”, Daily Telegraph, 22 November 2002.

66. Rheet Watson, “Silent Shame”, op. cit.

67. Alison Leigh, “Muslim Women Speak Out”, The Australian Women’s Weekly, February 2006, pp. 84-9.

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