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Today is the last day of a tour that has taken you through the United Arab Emirates, Saudi
Arabia, Turkey and now to Beirut in Lebanon. We are delighted that you came. In most of
those countries I know that you have met with academics, clerics, students, members of parliament,
government officials and ministers. You came to speak to them about Islam in Australia
-- about its diversity, and about the community's successes and problems. How was it? How did
you find their knowledge and understanding of Australia, and Islam in Australia?
Firstly, let me say it has been a fantastic trip and a great opportunity, and I have to
thank you for even thinking of inviting me. The range of people I have spoken to has been
unbelievable. You can list them by profession, but that doesn't really capture the breadth
of the people. As far as their knowledge, there is some diversity. I have met people
who barely knew Australia as a country existed in their consciousness, and certainly Muslims
in Australia barely existed for them.
Perhaps that's a failure on our part!
No, I think it's just a function of the evolution of their societies. If you look at a country
like the UAE, there are people coming from all over the world all the time to make money
-- and occasionally the locals will run into an Australian. But they are not thinking about
Australians very much. Muslims in Australia is not a concept they would ever think about.
I think a lot of that continued for most of the tour -- the level of knowledge about Muslims
in Australia was very small. Even in a country like Turkey, where you have
a huge Turkish population in Australia, overwhelmingly most Turks don't have family in Australia
because there are so many of them. So while you would think there would be these strong
familial connections that pervade through society, but it isn't really the case because
of the size of the country. Turkey has a strong relationship with Australia based on the Anzac
experience and others, but it is not necessarily connected to the Muslim communities.
It was great to have that opportunity to talk to them because their experience of Islam
as a community and as a religion is highly contextual. Our context is radically different,
and so anything that I had to say to them -- the stuff that was mundane and "let's get
to the good stuff" -- that stuff immediately interested them because it was so far from
anything they had thought about before, as far as Islam in the world and in western nations.
Beirut was in many ways an exception to what I have just said there, because the connection
between the Lebanese elite here, if I can put it that way, and Australia seems to be
a lot stronger, they seem to have a much better understanding, not so much of the Muslim community
but the Lebanese community. Which of course is a very significant part of the Muslim and
of course the Christian community and the Druse community. They had the connection more
strongly, so the conversation became more sophisticated immediately. It was a great
experience as well.
I found it fascinating how much I learned about the Muslim communities in Australia
while sitting in on seminars that you did in Lebanon. I thought there was great interest
in what you were saying about the communities in Australia, particularly the diversity,
and I think the people you spoke to have walked away from those meetings with a much greater
understanding of Muslims in Australia.
Yes, I did get that sense. It varied from city to city; some were coming off a lower
base than others. In the case of Lebanon, you are dealing with a country that has considerable
diversity. There is no clear majority in Lebanon, and so they understand the dynamics of community
politics. Obviously it is played out on a much more epic scale here.
But I think they get the idea of what contestations in communities and between communities look
like. It is different in Australia. You have multiculturalism, and you have hyper diversity.
And a lot of that diversity is fuelled by migration, not merely by geopolitics and sectarianism.
But nonetheless I felt that there was a logic they were trying to unlock as they talked
to me about the way that Australia works. I was fascinated at the lunch we were at yesterday
with some politicians and clerics, Sunni and Shia, and I had never spent so much time at
a lunch talking about effectively local government regulations. What was intriguing about that
was the stuff that they were interested in. What they were trying to figure out, it seemed
to me, was the relationship that Islam in Australia, or Muslims in Australia, or really
anyone in Australia, has with the state. What is the basis on which that relationship
is constructed. Is it constructed on a sectarian basis, or on a civic basis as a citizen within
a state? There were lots of questions about religious affairs that seemed to be influenced
by their knowledge of France. It was fascinating to see the local context unfold in the questions
they were asking about Austrlaia. That was a really important lesson for me -- I always
knew that on an intellectual level but to see it emerge -- that any question you get
asked from anywhere in the world has imported into it a whole lot of assumptions from that
local context. And our relationship as Muslims or as Australians or as both must take that
into account.
As I said, it was a great experience for us, and I am sure that you have broadened the
understanding and the knowledge about Australia and Islam in Australia and we thank you for
coming. I know that we are hoping to get you back to the region in January to visit Egypt,
Jordan and the Palestinian Territories.
Thank you -- and the impact on me in turn has been enormous. I have learned a lot.