Australian Muslims’ Visibility: The Politics of Oppression and Recognition

Abstract

Muslims living in the West have been facing an increasing level of public scrutiny as political instability and conflicts continue to fester in many regions in the world especially involving Muslim-majority societies. The intense public gaze is even more critical and problematic for those Muslim individuals whose religiosity is more visible in the public space. Within this context, Islamophobia discourses ensure that Muslims in the West continue to be hyper-visible and seen as problematic. The perceived hyper-visibility of Muslim individuals and organisations in public space is reflective of a widespread notion that Muslims overall exhibit an excess of visible religiosity which can be both an affront to national identity and potentially a threat to social cohesion. This paper examines the politics of Muslims’ visibility from the perspective of Muslim Community Organisations (MCOs) with a particular focus on examining MCOs’ strategies and actions vis-à-vis the negative hyper-visibility of Muslimness. This paper’s findings suggest that MCOs utilise Muslims’ hyper-visibility as a mechanism to extend their access to public sites of visibility, deploying strategic interventions to contextualise their position within visibility sites defined by notions of Australianness.

1. Introduction

Islamophobia discourses within Western narratives of secularity and liberalism have created a particular politics of problematising Muslim visibility in relation to questions of belonging, identity, and citizenship. The terrorist attacks of 9/11 and subsequent geo-political events in the Middle East and North Africa region created a climate of moral panic and fears towards Muslims, in particular those living in the West (Mansouri and Vergani 2018). The intensifying post-9/11 security agenda caused the relatively invisible religious identity of minorities in the West to be at the forefront of political, media, and public contestations (Mansouri 2015). Subsequently, an imposed, racialised, and homogenised religious identification of minorities as ‘Muslims’ replaced their earlier demographic identification and placed them within a problematic field of social categorisation and politicised visibility (Mansouri 2020b). Consequently, discourses of the ‘enemy within’ and the ‘war on terror’ post-9/11 manifested discursively at the government, media, and public levels casually associating terrorism with Muslimness and intensifying the visibility of Muslims as a problem minority. It is in this context that the politics around Muslims’ visibility were being constructed and sustained within Islamophobic contours.

Historically, Muslims’ visibility is often invoked and identified in reference to individuals’ Islamic or cultural markers such as women wearing a headscarf (hijab), long black dresses (abaya), and/or full face covering (niqab) or men having beards and wearing long trousers and tunics (shalwar kameez) (Colic-Peisker et al. 2019, p. 2744). In more contemporary terms, religiously visible Muslims arguably bear the brunt of personal, societal, and institutional manifestations of Islamophobia (Najib and Hopkins 2020). This is because visible markers of Muslimness not only identify Muslims as ‘others’ in sharp contrast to a secular majority, but also signify, within the public’s imagination, an association with religious extremism and fundamentalism (Hussain and Bagguley 2012). This is why the religious visibility of Muslims often triggers verbal and physical forms of discrimination (Iner et al. 2017; Iner et al. 2019; Bonino 2015) and can lead to polarised debates and ideological contestations around the social incorporation of Muslim migrants. Indeed, in some cases, such contestations have even degenerated into calls for bans of Muslim women’s veil, burqa, burkini (swimsuits), and mosque minarets in many Western countries (Cherti 2010; Amiraux 2016). Anxieties around religiously visible Muslims, nonetheless, are manifestations of the wider public anxieties regarding the very existence of Islam and ‘Muslims in the West’.

Indeed, the surge in populism and nationalism amid growing anxieties of the ‘enemy within’ augment a perceived image of the socially constructed category of ‘Muslims’ as a threat to the West’s secularity, national values, and security (Cherti 2010; Amiraux 2016; Poynting 2015). In response to this increasing problematisation, many Western governments have developed and introduced several surveillance programs and counter terrorism legislation targeting their Muslim communities. For example, the last Australian Government passed 37 instances of counter-terrorism legislation in addition to ‘softer’ counter terrorism programs to ‘fix’ Muslim communities (Cole 2017; Poynting and Mason 2008). Similarly, the Scott Morrison federal government issued and funded social cohesion programs with de-radicalisation agendas heavily targeting Muslim communities. These include for example The National Action Plan1 and subsequent programs2. The aim was to manage the Muslim communities’ perceived problems of belonging, values, and integration to promote moderate interpretations of Islam and also to nurture a particular form of Muslims’ religious leadership (Dunn et al. 2015; Humphrey 2010). As a result, Australian Muslim communities became ‘suspect communities’ and the national security of Australia became connected to the management of these ‘othered’ communities (Vergani et al. 2022; Cole 2017). Unsurprisingly, this political atmosphere was echoed by the Australian media’s reporting whereby Islam and Muslims became exceedingly hyper-visible in not so positive terms. This negative media gaze does not reflect the fact that Australian Muslims remain a relatively small community (3.2% of the national population according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics (2021)). A study by OnePath (2017) of the five major newspaper of News Corp Australia3 found that in 2017 alone, around 3000 article were published, 152 of which are cover page articles associating Islam and Muslims with terrorism, violence, and radicalism. By projecting Islam and Muslims as a ‘threat’ almost ‘eight articles a day’ (OnePath 2017), the media amplify the number of Muslims beyond its reality and augment anxieties of the ‘terrorist Muslim’ at every corner. In this atmosphere, ‘Muslims’ are racialised, essentialised, and problematised as a social category and their behaviours are scrutinised, controlled, disciplined, and evaluated in juxtaposition to democratic and liberal ideals (Poynting 2015). The accumulation of political surveillance, extensive media coverage, and augmented public anxieties feeds Islamophobia and adds to the hyper-visibility of Muslims in Australia.

Emerging within this international atmosphere is a growing academic interest in examining Muslims’ responses vis-à-vis the emerging politics of Muslims’ problematised visibility (Shams 2018; Robé 2019; Buchanan and Settles 2019; Colic-Peisker et al. 2019). The Australian literature on Muslims’ responses to their hyper-visibility, nonetheless, is scant and particularly lacking in relation to examining collective forms of Muslimness. This paper partially fills this gap in research through its analyses of the ways in which several Australian Muslim community organisations (MCOs) (N = 25) navigate the dynamics of power relations embedded within Muslims’ social field of visibility within a post-Christchurch context. Indeed, Muslims’ massacre in Christchurch by an Australian alt-right terrorist seems to have shifted the Australian public and political discourse (Herrera and Sabaratnam 2019) engendering a new light onto Muslims’ activism. Specifically, this paper examines MCOs’ strategies to mobilise around the challenges of operating publicly within a securitised and problematised field of visibility sustained for two decades following 9/11. It also engages with the ways by which MCOs perceive, manage, and utilise the politicised field of Muslims’ visibility in order to respond to Islamophobia. In doing so, the paper argues that while Muslims’ visibility within an Islamophobic context may constrains MCOs’ capacity for civic-political engagements, it also highlights opportunities for cross-cultural engagement and anti-Islamophobia advocacy. It concludes that MCOs utilise the hypervisibility of Muslimness to amplify counter-Islamophobia narratives in order to seek recognition and acceptance as multicultural citizens. In other words, they strategically access visibility sites in conscious modes of engagements, informed by their awareness of Islamophobia narratives, to counter such narratives.

2. The Politics of Muslim Visibility

The academic inquiry into the politics of Muslim’ visibility focuses on the nexus between political representation and cultural recognition within a problematised Islamophobic context that dominates Western émigré societies (Mansouri 2021). It has also tended to focus on the praxis of Australian Muslims’ experience and responses to demonisation, racism, and exclusion. Overall, academic literature on the politics of Muslims’ visibility falls within two strands of academic inquiries. First, there is body of literature that focuses on the structures and underlying factors that construct and assign negative meanings to Muslims’ visibility in the public’s imagination. This strand of research examines the body politics that construct, govern and sustain Muslims’ visibility within problematic meanings—as suspect communities. Second, there is a limited but growing body of academic inquiries that focus on Muslims’ management of their visibility within an Islamophobic context. This second strand of academic inquiry on the politics of Muslims’ visibility explores the underlying resistance politics adopted by Muslims to mobilise, engage, and disrupt the imposed notion of problematised visibility assigned to Muslimness. It is within this latter tradition that this paper is situated as it aims to examine Muslim community organisations’ management of their publicly perceived visibility. The following two sections engage critically with key conceptual literature on the politics of Muslim visibility.

2.1. A Hyper-Visible Suspect Community: Secularity, Surveillance, and Academic Inquiry

Muslims’ field of visibility is constructed as a social category with negative meanings and is sustained by Islamophobia discourses (Mansouri 2020a). Islamophobias’ dominant and negatively framed narratives construct within the public’s imagination a particular way of seeing and perceiving Muslims (Lyons 2012). This socially constructed narrative draws from a long history of orientalist imagery of Muslim men as bearded, violent, and barbaric whilst Muslim women are typically depicted as passively covered head-to-toe, oppressed and inherently inferior. While based on orientalists’ notions of civilizational superiority, contemporary Islamophobia discourses redefine the supposed inferiority of the Muslim subject to suit the contemporary context of the secular, multicultural West.

Indeed, within many multicultural societies, Islamophobia discourses construct an image of Muslims as an essentialised and homogeneous group of people inclined to hold anti-modern worldviews and anti-liberal values inspired by their religion, Islam. Therefore, their religious visibility, identified through enmeshed Islamic, racial, and cultural markers, becomes associated with terrorism, lack of support for gender equality, and weak manifestations of national belonging and social integration. For example, cultural and religious dress elements or personal grooming—such as women wearing a headscarf (hijab) or face covering (niqab) or men having beards and wearing long trousers and tunic (shalwar Kameez) (Colic-Peisker et al. 2019, p. 2744)—are perceived, not only as identification of Muslimness, but also as a markers of anti-social orientations. As a result, the so-called ‘Muslim question’, or more precisely how to manage the ‘problematic Muslims’, became the core policy focus of many multicultural nations’ anti-terror legislation, elections campaigns, media programs, and social and community interventions and programs. Underpinning all of this, is the assumption that Islam and Muslims in the West are fundamentally incompatible with Western values of secularity and democracy based on the assumption that Muslims are incapable of developing and exhibiting national belonging and effective civic-political citizenship (Mansouri 2020a). This assumption is intensified within hard-core secular nations which imply a strict separation between the secular and the sacred, as is the case with laïcité in France. Even in soft-core secular multicultural nations, such as Australia and Canada, religion is still perceived and approached mostly as being a dimension of the private sphere and is therefore understood as being separate from other forms of citizenship acts (Asad 2003). Visible markers of Muslims’ religiosity, therefore, stand out as ‘odd’ and threatening because they fall outside the secular norms of private religious practice and are therefore linked to forms of ideological extremism. In the public imagination, Muslims’ religious visibilities are problematised and often portrayed as being somehow un-Australian.

The highly securitised discourses around the visibility of Muslims within multicultural communities project Muslims as hyper-visible beyond their actual numbers. However, not all Muslims are equally hyper-visible. Nadia Jeldtoft (2013) borrows Certeau (1984) strategic and tactic concepts in everyday life practices to argue that public and academic actors strategically render particular forms of Islam and Muslimness (such as public, political, and institutional aspects) as visible, leading to their hyper-visibility. Left out as invisible, therefore, are inactive, apolitical, and/or less religiously visible forms of Muslimness (Schmidt 2011).

2.2. Responses to Muslims’ Visibility

Muslims’ individual and organisational responses to the hyper-visibility of Muslimness in the West aim to normalise Muslims’ representations in public discourses as citizens within secular nations (Jonker and Amiraux 2006). Often academic inquiries approach Muslims’ visibility in reference to particular Islamic identifiers such as men’s beards, women’s hijab, and Islamic physical structures such as mosques and minarets. Indeed, veiled Muslim women’s distinctive appearance amid Islamophobic discourses, denoting their religious attire as an anti-modern and a threat to secularity or a symbol of cultural oppression and Islamist extremism, place Muslim women at the heart of many debates pertaining to Muslims’ visibility (Ali and Sonn 2017). Many academic studies do in fact examine Muslims’ visibility by investigating how Muslim women navigate their distinctive visibility. For example, Christiansen (2011) examines the sartorial strategies of Danish Muslim women who use Islamic fashion as political statements in their public appearances in the media. Similarly, Ahmad and Thorpe (2020) examine the ways in which Muslim sportswomen use political hashtags and the politics of everyday visibility on social media to challenge dominant portrayals of Muslim women as being in need of ‘saving’. Some studies, including that of Hopkins and Greenwood (2013), take a psychological approach in their analysis of accounts of British visibly Muslim women (wearing hijab) to explore the impact of their Islamic visibility on their identity performance. Their study characterises Muslim women’s decision to be identifiable as Muslims as ‘consequential’ for their awareness of their identity as representatives of Muslims, which in turn, motivates their performance (e.g., everyday behaviours) within the ideals of an Islamic identity. This is comparable to studies that found that Muslims capitalise on their religiosity and Islamic commitment to establish a connection in the public between their positive civic engagements and their religiosity (Ali and Sonn 2017). From using fashion as a political statement (Christiansen 2011) to surfing the shores of social media (Ahmad and Thorpe 2020), Muslim women use their veil as a symbol of resistance (McGinty 2012) and project themselves through their religious visibility as representatives of their religion. In doing so, they seek to connect their religious and social activism to their Islamic religiosity.

Similar to Muslim women’s head and face covering, Muslims’ organisational and structural visibility within regional and urban spaces have received much public scrutiny and were often rejected and opposed by anti-Islam groups in Australia and abroad (Kuppinger 2014; Hussein 2015). The ways in which Muslims manage their spatial visibility take different forms within different contexts. For example, despite being a manifestation of the problematic position of Islam and Muslims in the Europe, Kuppinger (2014) believes that controversies around mosque building in Germany increase Muslims’ visibility and their civic participation, and this increases public recognition of their existence in the community. Kuppinger (2014, p. 739) argues that ‘Muslims’ spatial presence’ through mosques and minarets ‘is an expression of political presence, and a quest for participation, visibility and citizenship’. From a similar perspective, Monnot (2016) ethnographic analysis examines Muslim strategic invisibility. Monnot (2016, p. 51) argues that Muslims’ stigmatisation, coupled with the Swiss localised direct democracy system, gives citizens the power to determine or oppose the locale for building a mosque and forces Islamic cultural associations and centres to become invisible. By choosing their premises in remote locations, for example at the cities’ margins and in underground garages, these Islamic centres strategically remain discrete and thus paradoxically gain their neighbours’ acceptance and respect, mitigating the risk of losing their cultural and religious premises (Monnot 2016). Nevertheless, the strategies of Switzerland Muslims are to remain visible as a federative political body in order to represent Muslims’ voices and needs at the political and media levels (Monnot 2016).

Australian studies have tended to explore the politics of Muslims’ visibility through social integration (Sohrabi and Farquharson 2016) and civic-political participation (Roose 2016). In these studies, Muslims’ identity politics plays a vital role in Muslims’ own management of their representation. Through deploying a counter-narrative to identity politics, Muslims seek to be recognised as full multicultural citizens who are worthy of inclusion and respect. For example, Muslim organisations strategically attempt to replace the visibility of Imams and founders who were problematised for appearing as alien to a secular and English-speaking West, with second-generation, skilled, English-speaking and confident Australian-born Muslims (Peucker et al. 2014; Sohrabi and Farquharson 2016; Sohrabi and Farquharson 2015). Indeed, limiting the visibility of Imams and enhancing the visibility of professional and skilled young and female Muslim leaders has been highlighted as a necessity to counter Islamophobia (Faris and Parry 2011).

At an individual level, active Muslim actors with and without an association to a Muslim entity, like the majority of Muslims in Australia (Woodlock 2011), attempt to blur the sharp polarity between Islam and the West in order to refute the problematisation of Islam (Amath 2013; Mukaty 2013; Peucker and Akbarzadeh 2014a; Peucker and Akbarzadeh 2014b; Sohrabi and Farquharson 2016). Through their on-going everyday engagements deploying various forms of citizenship engagements, Muslims strive for recognition through ‘normality’ as a group of people who are ‘just like us’, in synergy with Australian values.

The emerging assertive Australian Muslim identity is characterised as resilient, open and relational and in favour of pluralism and universal values (Mansouri et al. 2017; Amath 2013; Peucker et al. 2014; Peucker 2019; Peucker 2016). Roose (2016, p. 134) refers to this as the development of an Australian Islam by Australian-born Muslims who ‘are weaving Islam into the fabric of Australian social, cultural and economic life’. These Australian Muslims cite their religiosity as the core motivation for advancing their civic and political engagements (Amath 2015b; Johns et al. 2015; Mansouri et al. 2017; Vergani et al. 2017; Peucker 2018). Nonetheless, they feature, as their guide, a nascent and relaxed Australian Islam that is free from ‘rigid religious dogma’ and adapted to Western culture (Amath 2015b, p. 186). In doing so, it is argued that the cross-cultural experience of emerging young Muslim leaders and actors establishes a distinctive understanding of Islam through cosmopolitan ideas such as equality, peace, and morality (Amath 2015a; Faris and Parry 2011).

3. Framing Notions of Visibility

Visibility is not merely an epistemological construct around seeing and being seen but is rather a social process that occurs within the domains of constructed perception reflecting asymmetrical power relations (Brighenti 2007). MCOs operate within a field of visibility that is not power-free but rather in a field where all of their actions are categorised and judged (Mansouri 2020a). Muslims’ supposedly problematic visibility then emerges within a particularly charged socio-political context of Islamophobia which shapes and controls who and what should and should be and should not be seen, and more importantly, how much and in what ways Muslims are to be seen. It is a political space where asymmetrical power relations construct the quality and quantity of the public ways of seeing Muslims. For almost twenty years, Islamophobia’s linguistic and performative discourses tended to assign negative meanings to Islam and Muslims within the public domain. The amplified, repetitive, and consistent mediated images of Muslims appear alongside political narratives that associate Islam and Muslims with (in)security, undesired refugees, global terrorism networks and an inherent cultural incompatibility with the West. In doing so, the visible and discursive domains of power merge to form a particular domain of perception, a particular way of seeing Muslims crafted within Islamophobic discourses. The socio-religious capital of MCOs as operating by or for Muslims means that they are unavoidably perceived as visible Muslim entities in a socio-politically charged space. Their civic and political engagements do not merely represent Islam but are also perceived and appropriated through Islamophobic narratives that problematise the very existence of Muslims in the West.

Muslims’ visibility is a broad concept encompassing a wide-ranging understanding of the multiple and complex ways in which the public identify Muslimness. One identification of Muslimness is via individuals’ religious and cultural features (Colic-Peisker et al. (2019). Another form of identification is through the social category of Australian Muslims as a racialised and homogenised group (Poynting 2015; Mansouri 2020b). In this paper, Muslims’ visibility is approached as the visibility of the socially and discursively constructed category of Muslims, particularly, members or representatives of Muslim community organisations. It is their association to a particular MCO that renders Muslim individuals even more visibly Muslim. In this context, active Muslim women, for example, may not wear the hijab or abaya and Muslim men may not be bearded, but they will still be perceived as visibly Muslim for their mere association with Muslim organisations. This is akin to the notion that a perceived excess of religious visibility is in itself both an affront to national identity and potentially a threat to social cohesion (Mansouri et al. 2017).

Furthermore, Muslims’ visibility depends on sites and subjects which determine who is to be more visible, in which specific sites and in what ways (Brighenti 2007, p. 331). Access to sites of visibility ‘is a precondition for having a voice in the production of representations’ (Brighenti 2007, p. 333). Although some sites guarantee more visibility than other sites, subjects’ representation depends on the style and mode in which they access these sites. For example, Islam and Muslims appear in highly visible sites such as the media and political discourse; however, they do so in ways and modes that are negative and mostly out of their own control. Moreover, Muslim subjects appearing in these highly visible sites tend to be monolithic, essentialised examples of extremist Muslims deployed to serve an economic or political goal (Mansouri and Vergani 2018). Therefore, the resulting social effect of Muslims’ visibility is often negative representation. Furthermore, the politics of recognition which governs the relationship between minorities and the mainstream (Taylor et al. 1994) is in itself a form of managing social visibility (Brighenti 2007). Indeed, invisibility or low visibility results in minorities’ social exclusion while hyper-/supra-visibility results in their misrecognition, which both distort minorities’ representation and recognition as equal citizens (Brighenti 2007, p. 330). Minorities will only be recognised as equal citizens when they enjoy fair and positive visibility within their local social milieus. Islamophobia discourses orchestrating moral and security panics not only push Muslims’ visibility beyond the threshold of fair visibility into hyper-visibility or even misrecognition, but also control the modes of Muslims’ visibility and push it towards negative representations.

This paper, therefore, frames MCOs’ visibility within a conceptual understating of Muslims’ hypervisibility as emerging from within the dynamics of inequitable power relations that shape and sustain the politics of recognition and representation (Young 2002; Benhabib 2002). This paper, therefore, approaches visibility as a form of political control that manages processes of public identification, representations, and recognition of particular minoritised groups. This in many ways represents a retreat from a pro-diversity multicultural agenda towards a more muscular form of controlling ethno-cultural minorities (Joppke 2004; Kymlicka 2007). In Discipline and Punish, Foucault (1991) argues that visibility is a mechanism put to use by those in power to control those classified as subjects. By making Muslims hyper-visible within increasingly contested narratives, Muslims’ visibility becomes the controlling mechanism that justifies surveillance and scrutiny practices to evaluate, examine, and govern Muslims in relation to pre-existing notions of citizenship and national identity. In this sense, Muslims’ hyper-visibility becomes a trigger for Islamophobia narratives and related forms of cultural oppression and political control. Nonetheless, and paradoxically, minorities’ visibility is also a precondition for their recognition (Brighenti 2007). Muslims’ struggles to control the modes and styles of accessing public visibility sites imply their agentic resistance to the current ways of seeing Muslims. Visibility, therefore, can be at once empowering and disempowering, it is the result of asymmetrical power and the condition for a politics of resistance (Gordon 2002). This paper, therefore, approaches MCOs’ agentic strategies around Muslims’ visibility from the assumption that visibility is both the conduit of societal control and the condition for political resistance and cultural recognition (Young 2002; Benhabib 2002).

4. Methodology

This paper is based on 25 interviews conducted with Muslim individuals who are founders, CEOs, or in a position of organisational leadership within MCOs. The sample of MCOs included in this research exhibits some degree of variation in structure, size, and focus, though all are founded and run by Muslims. The majority of these MCOs provide religious, settlement, and support services to sections within the Muslim communities they represent and serve. These communities exhibit a high level of heterogeneity along the key variables of Islamic sect, gender, age, socioeconomics, and local settings. For example, some MCOs serve Ahmadiyya or Sunni Muslims, others serve converts, Muslim students at universities, Muslim women, Muslim youth, Muslim individuals in the work force, or they represent and support Muslims in a particular geographical locality in the east, west, or north of Victoria. In addition, some MCOs provide online services to Muslims in the form of Islamophobia registry websites and political education. Few MCOs in this study do not provide services exclusively to Australian Muslims per se but invest in issues related to Islam and Muslims more broadly, such as educating non-Muslims about Islam in order to improve public perception of the religion and its adherents.

The term MCOs is, therefore, used in this paper to refer to all these divergent forms of organised Muslimness. These MCOs or their representatives are not characterised in this paper as representing or speaking on behalf of all Australian Muslims. Indeed, many Muslim individuals do not belong to or participate in any organised forms of Muslimness (Akbarzadeh and Roose 2011). Furthermore, these MCOs cannot possibly reflect the diverse forms of religiosity, ethnicities, cultures, and languages of the Australian Muslim communities originating from 183 countries (Mansouri et al. 2017; Rane 2020). Muslim migrants from central, west, and south Asian nations such as Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, and Indonesia compose the majority of Australian Muslims replacing the previous high numbers of Arab migrants from Turkey and Lebanon (Mansouri 2020a). Although most Australian Muslims identify themselves as Sunni (63.6%), around (34.0%) identify as ‘just Muslim’ followed by Hanafi (18.0%), Ahl Sunnah wal Jamaa (12.6%), Shafi’i (6.7%), Sufi (6.5%), progressive (5.2%), Shiite (4.1%), and Salafi (2.8%) (Rane 2020, p. 7).

Indeed, the heterogeneity within Australian Muslims’ ethnicities, backgrounds, and religiosities cannot possibly be reduced to or represented by these organisations and their spokespersons. Nonetheless, the public and the Australian Government address MCOs as representatives of Australian Muslims due to and the fact that their community work focuses on Islam and Muslim Australians. Therefore, MCOs’ Islamic cultural capital and public position place them within a field of visibility associated with the notion of Muslimness.

5. Analysis and Discussion

The discussion of the key findings below is structured around several inter-related themes pertaining to the hypervisibility of Muslims in contemporary Australia. These themes range from public perceptions around the politics of Muslims’ visibility, MCOs’ engagement strategies, the appropriation of public spaces and the important work around cross-cultural networking.

5.1. MCOs Awareness of the Politics of Muslims’ Visibility

An overarching finding emerging from interviews with MCO representatives is their consciousness of Muslims’ hypervisibility and the negative connotations assigned to Muslimness. The impact of this awareness at an organisational level varies among MCOs. For example, while some MCOs will deliberately attach the Muslim or Islamic label to their organisation and programs’ titles in order to assert their religious credentials and identities, others would deliberately omit any religious identifier for their organisations to ensure other organisations and individuals were not disinclined to withdraw from engaging with them:

We don’t say that we are an Islamic organisation trying to build a relationship between diverse communities. We just say we’re a not-for-profit organisation trying to promote cross cultural understanding … So, we don’t put our identity into our pitch because we don’t want to deter people from interacting with us. Because if we do put Islam in our title, or Islam in our pitch then a segment of society would not want to engage with us, whereas we would like to engage with everyone. We want people to at least come up to us and feel like they can approach us. They may disagree with us but at least we want to be approachable.

MCO representatives’ awareness of the stereotypical and negative connotations assigned to Muslim men’s masculinity appeared in the data in the form of an internalisation of this narrative. For example, the representative of an online organisation believes that Muslims are ‘obsessed’ with ‘the superficial aspects’ of the faith such as growing one’s ‘beard’ and neglect more important things such as ‘saying please and thank you and offering to pay the bills and bringing good to people at work, and just be nice and smiling, serving in any shape’. This representative said:

We [Muslims] are focused on the media and the politicians. You walk around all day and you see these uncles who are just grumpy and frowning and scold people. It’s like you wonder why people hate you.

Similarly, the founder of a civic MCO believes that often ‘the only Muslims that people recognise are the visible Muslims’ who ‘wear robes’, have ‘big beards’ and ‘drop Arabic words without realising it’. This MCO leader adds that this skews the public’s perception of what Muslims should look like, ignores the many Muslims who do not dress or groom accordingly, and alienates Muslims from the wider Australian community as ‘not integrating’. The founder blames the media for promulgating this conservative image of Muslims and gives the example of how she was prone to believing that Australian Muslims were ‘conservative’ and ‘mediocre at best’ with mainly traditional-to-extremist views prior to her civic engagement when she discovered ‘heaps’ of ‘awesome Muslim leaders’.

MCO representatives believe that both Muslims’ self-representation as well as the media representation of them are pivotal to their public visibility. By reclaiming control over the modes and styles of Muslims’ representation, MCOs see the potential to start countering the entrenched Islamophobic discourse. The quote below by an online MCO representative reflects a consensus among many MCOs with regards to Muslims’ visibility. In response to a question on what Muslims should do in response to Islamophobia, this representative said:

Internally we need to be aware that there are people watching us. But externally, we really need to find way to let people know that it’s not okay that News Corp has every second day a front-page story attacking the Muslim community.

MCOs are aware of the contested meanings assigned to Muslims’ visibility in public spaces, especially of highly visible religious markers such as women’s hijabs and men’s beards. They are also aware of the public scrutiny Muslims receive as hyper-visible subjects. This awareness, nonetheless, does not cause them to isolate and withdraw. On the contrary, this awareness cultivates and necessitates their strategies vis-à-vis this visibility through carefully managed modes of resistance and advocacy. The following sub-sections explicate further the ways in which MCOs use and manage Muslims’ visibility in response to Islamophobia.

5.2. Engagement with Issues That Transcend MCOs Ethno-Religious Communities

MCOs’ tend to strategically engage with issues and settings that are related to or are an extension of mainstream and national character discourses as opposed to being a strictly ethno-religious. By engaging in issues of national interest, beyond the exclusive realms of Islam and Muslims, MCOs strategically aim to normalise the existence of their members as religious multicultural citizens who are actively engaged to advance the welfare of the broader Australian community. For example, Ahmadiyya Muslim Association strategically decided to move their participation in Clean Up Australian Day from the invisible spaces of their mosques and centres into visible public spaces. Furthermore, Ahmadiyya decided to partner with non-Islamic organisations to maximise the volume and quality of their visibility in the local media thus being represented as socially integrated and as exhibiting all the hallmarks of normal, active citizens. To this extent, the Ahmadiyya representative states:

We try to engage or collaborate with different organisations. For example, Clean Up Australia Day. In the past we only used to clean up within the vicinity of our mosques, or in the street. But now we partner with other organisations as well. So, word goes out that Muslims are cleaning the streets and they are doing it in partnership with so-and-so. So, we are not isolated. We are doing it with others as well. So that’s a better opportunity then for the media to come than having the media to come and cover our story. It’s not just us. It becomes the whole community as well.

MCOs’ engagement in issues beyond their ethno-religious communities is aimed at disrupting the perceptions of Muslims as isolated communities with values and interests that clashes with broader society. Moreover, it assigns new meanings to Muslims’ visibility that align with Australia’s values and interests. Along these lines, the representative of a participating MCO says:

We want them [the wider Australian community] to be able to see it all the time. Muslims. Muslims doing something on the environment. Muslim seminar on organ donation, to normalise our existence. People walking into our shared co-working space with environmental groups and stuff and seeing a Muslim organisation there.

Though it is beyond the scope of this paper to engage in a discussion on how MCOs understand Australia’s values and interests, it is nevertheless worth noting how MCOs representatives associate the notion of ‘normal citizens’ to engagements in civic-political activities. In addition to the environment and organ donations issues highlighted above, other MCO representatives list other national issues, such as political processes of democracy, social justice for the First Nation, LGBTQI+, and gender equality. MCOs’ engagement as Muslims in these civic-political spaces of national interest aim to amplify the compatibility between Muslims’ religious values and their Australian identity. This alignment privileges and makes visible the positive and ethical values of their Islamic identities which drive their desire to engage in these matters of broader national importance.

5.3. Initiating and Participating in Cross-Cultural Engagements

The Australian Government, like its counterparts in Europe, has adopted a social cohesion agenda with a special focus on Muslim communities as a means of preventing radicalisation and violent extremism (Mansouri and Vergani 2018; Vergani et al. 2022). The underlying assumption here is that Muslims’ civic-political participation in wider society is necessary to prevent radicalisation since isolated and disengaged Muslims are prone to becoming radicalised terrorists (Vergani et al. 2022). In order to counter some of these assumptions, MCOs have been actively engaging with the wider community in cross-cultural communication and interfaith dialogues. There is no shortage of academic studies examining individual and organised Muslims civic-political, cross-cultural, and interfaith engagements (Peucker 2016; Peucker 2021; Roose and Harris 2015; Vergani et al. 2017; Peucker 2017; Amath 2015a; Peucker et al. 2014). The focus here, however, is on the ways in which MCOs perceive their cross-cultural engagements as a strategic act of positive visibility.

Analysis of interview data reported in this paper reveals that overall, the majority of interviewed MCOs initiate or participate in some sort of cross-cultural initiatives that vary in nature, scale, and settings. Some of these activities are nominal interactions at everyday spaces such as schools, workplace, and the like. Others are planned interactions at individual levels such as activities like ‘Cuppa with a Muslim’ and ‘Speed Date a Muslim’. Other cross-cultural activities happen at institutional levels such as diversity training for government or corporate organisations, interfaith dialogues with religious organisations, university Muslim student associations, and other similar platforms. Study findings reveal that MCOs perceive any interaction with non-Muslims as a form of cross-cultural engagement—an opportunity to showcase the true nature of their Muslimness. One representative stated that:

We have to show ‘us’ more to the wider community and to be working with them naturally … and to have more of the friends. This is just individual neighbours like we can go out, have ten or twenty friends which I did. In fifteen years, I worked in the city in different companies.

MCOs consider cross-cultural activities as opportunities to educate non-Muslims about Islam and to humanise and normalise Muslims’ existence and everyday experiences. More importantly, MCOs perceive these engagements as critical platforms to regain control of their public images and to improve their social positionings by amplifying their positive visibility. For example, the World Assembly of Muslim Youth (WAMY) installed stalls in multiple Melbourne CBD locations for the two weeks of the Asian Cup in 2015. Young Muslim boys and girls handed souvenirs, gifts, water bottles, and pamphlets to debunk misconceptions about Islam. Interestingly, two weeks prior to the event, WAMY engaged these young volunteers in an in-house public relations training course to prepare them so that they could provide a better representation of Islam and Muslims to the public. Speaking about this event, the WAMY representative argued that:

Now they are stuck [sic] in their mind that Muslims are there, and they are representing their community. These young boys and girls distributing good things with a smile, free souvenirs. That is good to have. It’s different to only have the big brothers with the big beard; that style only. We have to be as we are, normally … This will make it more appealing for them to mingle with us.

WAMY’s conscious and strategic decision to recruit and train young Muslims from both genders aims to disrupt the dominant representation of Muslims as uneducated, violent and bearded men with no presence of women. Comparable examples from the data show that MCOs utilise sites of cross-cultural engagements to disrupt and transform Islamophobic perceptions of Muslims’ visibility towards new, more empowering meanings paradoxically emerging from within Islamophobia’s dominant narratives of Muslims as inherently disengaged and problematic.

5.4. Turning Private Spaces into Public Spaces and Vice Versa

MCOs attempt to blur the sharp dichotomy between public sites of visibility assigned to citizens and private sites of invisibility assigned to Muslims. On the one hand, MCOs deliberately turn their private spaces such as mosques and Islamic cultural centres into public spaces open to receive all and not only Muslims. An illustrative example is the annual National Mosque Open Day when several mosques across the nation simultaneously open their doors to the public. Since 2017, Victoria’s National Open Mosque Day has been orchestrated by the Islamic Council of Victoria and supported by the Victorian Multicultural Commission, the Victorian Office of Multicultural Affairs and Social Cohesion, and Australian Federation of Islamic Councils. This annual collective mobilisation of participating mosques offers Victorians a first-hand opportunity to interact and have conversations with Muslims inside their houses of worship.

Although mosques are always open and accessible to the public, the Open Mosque Day places MCOs’ invisible and private sites in the realm of the visible and public. Their aim is not only to enhance MCOs’ visibility among the public, but most importantly to emphasise their openness and accessibility to ease fears of the invisible and disengaged Muslim. A representative of one of the participating mosques explains:

If we don’t invite these people, these people will think that we are closed, that we have something to hide. But we don’t have anything to hide. We are open to everyone, even to people who are afraid of us as Muslims. They can even pass by and look, even if they don’t need to participate. So, we give them this chance as well.

Turning religious private spaces into public spaces allows MCOs to manage and control aspects of their visibility and representation. MCOs not only get to decide whether to go public or not, but also decide and manage what aspects of Muslimness are represented and how they choose to represent it. For example, a representative of a youth development organisation speaks of how the organisation engages young Muslims in open mosque days so that the face of Islam seen by the public is young, English-speaking, and well educated. This will assist in countering the perception of Muslim as foreign, extremist, and predominantly reduced to the image of excessively religious, bearded men. This finding is comparable to a Sohrabi and Farquharson (2016) study which also found that some MCOs front-stage Muslim women and youth as community spokespersons to replace public discourses of Muslim women as subjugated and to normalise Muslims’ status as citizens, exemplified in young Muslims’ rich Australian cultural capital. MCOs also pay close attention to local Imams’ sermons and speeches striving to ensure they are ‘fluent in English’ and aware of Australian culture (Sohrabi 2013, p. 104). Such strategies are pragmatic solutions designed to provide alternative, positive, and normalised images of Islam and Muslims in order to promote the notion that Muslims are people ‘just like us’, and in doing so mitigate representational risks posed by some traditional Imams (Sohrabi and Farquharson 2016).

However, there are also instances when MCOs turn public sites into private Islamic spaces. This is a deliberate and strategic decision to access public sites of visibility assigned to Australianness in their capacity as Muslims. By doing so, they aim to amplify their religious identity and assert its compatibility with their national identity as Australians. For example, one of the respondents cited as a response to Islamophobia the time when Australian Muslims gathered in a public space in the city of Melbourne to perform Eid prayers in a public space under the public gaze. The silent and visible performance of Muslims praying en masse in a public space is a highly audible and visible statement of Muslims’ rights to exists and experience pride in their religiosity. He indicates that:

Eid prayers. [We] hold it in Flagstaff Gardens, which is in the city ... which is a garden ... it will be open for everyone to have a look. That is a form of interfaith. We’re actually reaching out. We’re showing the non-Muslims here that we are Muslims, we are getting together in a park and celebrating their Eid, and doing their Eid prayers.

Another example is when RMIT university Muslim students and staff closed the street in front of their campus for two months in 2009 to perform their Friday prayers. Their praying in the street was a peaceful act of protesting against RMIT university’s decision to demolish their allocated prayer room without providing a suitable alternative. Through their silent but active performance of resistance in a highly visible public site, Muslim students asserted their right as Muslims and citizens and provided a powerful example of how to counter discrimination. Another example is Salam Fest, an annual cultural festival which started in 2015. Salam Fest strategically celebrates Muslim arts, culture, food, and spiritual traditions for three consecutive days each year in the middle of Melbourne CBD to ensure optimal attendance and visibility by non-Muslims. The founder aims to assert the peacefulness of Islam and the diversity among Muslims by showcasing the serenity of praying in public as well as Muslims heterogeneity through sampling their diverse cuisines, arts, cultures, and customs.

Religiosity is perceived as a private matter in Western secular societies that belongs to and is performed behind closed doors (Asad 2003; Casanova 2009). Muslims’ acts of praying in congregation in public parks and streets disrupts discourses of a secular nation in which separation between the sacred and the civil is the norm. Nonetheless, MCOs believe that Australia’s multicultural character is what protects, celebrates, and gives Muslims the right to practice their religion in private or public spaces (Johns et al. 2015; Cheikh Husain 2020). By taking their religious activities to public spaces of high visibility, MCOs endeavour to be seen and perceived as also being part of the multicultural fabric and therefore being citizens who can assert their right to practice their faith peacefully on sites assigned to Australians. Through this performative act of citizenship privileging the religious dimension of their identities, MCOs employ highly visible public sites to assertively claim the compatibility between their religious beliefs and their civic identities. The performative act of praying in public spaces challenges Islamophobia narratives which misrecognise their religiosity and legitimacy (Lam and Mansouri 2021; Hage 2011). Moreover, public collective praying is a spiritual demonstration of Muslims’ visibility and religiosity that can counter stereotypical and Islamophobic representations of Muslims as the quintessential threat to social cohesion and national security.

5.5. The ‘Discipline and Govern’ Approach to Muslim Visibility

For two decades, Muslims in the West have been problematised in public discourse and treated as a suspect community and the target of countering violent extremism (CVE) legislation (Mansouri and Vergani 2018; Vergani et al. 2022). The politics of Muslims’ visibility proclaim Muslims’ homogeneity as a racialised group in a diametrically oppositional relationship with the broader community. The politicised and racialised collective identity of Muslims implies their shared accountability for actions of those deemed ‘bad’ Muslims. All Muslims bear the brunt of vilification, abuse, and being targeted by political and policy backlashes every time acts of political violence are committed somewhere on the world stage (Briskman 2015; Briskman and Latham 2017; Poynting 2015). For example, in 2019, ex-Prime Minister Scott Morrison publicly criticised Australian Muslim leaders for failing to discipline and manage members of their Muslim communities in the aftermath of an incident in which a Muslim person, known to authorities, stabbed three people in Melbourne (Norman and Borys 2018). The former Prime Minister stated that ‘radical, violent, extremist Islam’ remains the greatest threat to Australia’s security and accused the Muslim leaders of ‘not doing their job’ (Norman and Borys 2018). This political rhetoric of assigning collective guilt is not altogether new nor is it surprising. A discourse analysis study on the House of Representatives’ rhetoric around Australian Muslims shows that Muslims are characterised’ as being different to other Australians, belonging to ‘Muslim communities’ and headed by ‘Muslim leaders’. Consequently, Muslims are often referred to as a collective and should therefore be collectively celebrated or punished (Batainah 2012, p. 236).

Against this background, MCOs have rejected public claims of collective accountability towards actions of Muslims, highlighting their inability to control the behaviours of all members of the Australian Muslim community let alone actions of Muslims globally. In the aftermath of former Prime Minster Scott Morrison’s accusations, some Muslim community leaders boycotted a follow-up meeting with him, stating that Morrison’s comments imply ‘that the community is collectively culpable for the criminal actions of individuals’ (Norman and Borys 2018). Nonetheless, MCOs’ public presence as organised collective entities attribute some level of representation of and responsibility for the Muslim community as whole in relation to individual actions. This is at least how they are perceived in public discourse emanating from government, media, and more generally the Australian public.

Despite rejecting claims of accountability, this study’s analysis reveals that many MCOs internalise the imposed collective guilt and the imposed position of representation and responsibility for the actions of individual Muslims. They in turn attempt to control, discipline, and govern Muslim individuals’ behaviours and engagements in the public space to enhance the quality of Muslims’ visibility. Underpinning these kinds of actions is the assumption that Muslims should be seen as ‘good’ Muslims and accepted as Australian citizens. The question, however, is what do ‘good’ Muslims look like? And who decides on their key attributes?

Data analysis reveals that MCOs’ representatives speak about ‘good’ Muslims either in relation to spiritual characteristics or forms of economic and transcultural capitals. On the one hand, a ‘good’ Muslim is one who shows a strong commitment to Islam’s social values of justice, empathy, and mercy. On the other hand, a ‘good’ Muslim is an empowered individual who accumulates economic, linguistic, political, and cultural capital. These two quotes provide some further insight.

We [Muslims] have lost our way. We’ve [Muslims] become [a] little bit too punitive and maybe we need to—through the application of Islam—we need to revive the concepts [of] mercy and compassion.

A lot of refugees, but also a lot of immigrants; economic immigrants who have come here; not necessarily the most educated, and not necessarily the most politically aware about Australia. A lot of immigrants tend to still have their heart and mind in their homelands, and that connection. I think a lot of Australian Muslims (but I think it is changing now) have not fully accepted that they are a full part of Australia.

MCOs see their mission is, to an extent, to empower Muslim individuals to acquire these different forms of capital (Arias Cubas et al. 2022). To make them feel and act as Australians. This in turn means that Muslims are perceived and seen as full Australian citizens not merely as migrants—or worse still, as outsiders.

These actions by MCOs aim to prevent a situation where Muslims’ hyper-visibility is connected to a perception of them as suspects and deviants and thus justifying external disciplinary and control mechanisms such as political surveillance and social scrutiny as well as internal disciplining strategies from within the Muslim community itself. Muslims’ hyper-visibility in this context intensifies MCOs’ sense of impact as they conjure up internal creative strategies and measures aimed at minimising possible harm to their collective identity. Foucault’s (1977) analyses of Bentham’s panopticon are helpful here to understand the impact of Muslims’ hypervisibility in shaping MCOs’ internal disciplining mechanisms. Such internal actions by MCOs allow them to manage their own public representation as well as those actions performed by members of their communities.

6. Conclusions

Visibility is a powerful mechanism for both engendering cultural oppression as well as enacting agency and empowerment (Young 2001). Islamophobia produces and sustains Australian Muslims’ hypervisibility as problematic subjects within political, social, and mediatised sites of visibility. The politics of Muslims visibility deny Muslims access to public sites otherwise reserved for Australian citizens and therefore misrecognises and rejects Muslims claims and rights to equal citizenship. To counter such exclusionary practices, MCOs’ attempt to control and manage Muslims’ visible identification, representation, and engagements to ensure acceptance and recognition as full citizens within their multicultural polity (Mansouri 2015).

This paper’s findings suggest that MCOs use Muslims’ hypervisibility as a platform to outwardly project and amplify their religious identity within secular, national visible sites of recognition. To this end, MCOs consciously and purposefully engage in civic-political and cross-cultural engagements within sites of visibility pertaining to citizenship and recognition (Benhabib 2002). In doing so, they attempt to situate Muslims within new visibility sites to enhance their public recognition as multicultural and active citizens (Isin 2017; Mansouri and Kirpitchenko 2016). In their attempts to project a normalised, accepted perception of Islam and Muslims, MCOs carefully perform grassroots initiatives often within these public sites to turn the very visibility of Muslims from a hyper-securitised construct to an inclusive platform for countering Islamophobia narratives. Such acts manifest in MCOs’ investment in up-skilling Muslims’ capacity for civic-political activism within and beyond their ethno-religious communities.

The public visibility of Islam and Muslims in the West, including in Australia, continues to exacerbate political and ideological contestation around issues of belonging, identity and citizenship. This paper focuses on public discourses circulating around the hyper-visibility of Muslims and the role of MCOs in providing counter-narratives and performative acts for bridging cross-cultural divides. The paper argues that MCOs’ work in this space not only allows a re-conceptualisation of public visibility in relation to minoritised ethno-religious groups, but more critically transforms this very public visibility into a form of cross-cultural capital capable of engendering agency and recognition for minoritised groups. Public gaze vis-à-vis Islam and the hyper-visibility of Muslim citizens in the public sphere as this paper has shown, become the catalyst for a radically disruptive and transformative form of social activism, individual empowerment and cultural recognition for Muslim citizens as well as for Muslim community organizations. In doing so, MCOs actions become intrinsically related to the very ongoing political process of becoming active citizens that Muslim migrants in the West continue to pursue (Göle 2011; Mansouri and Mikola 2014).