The Predicament of Australian Muslim Women before and after 9/11

Abstract

Several scholars in Britain and Australia have addressed the general theme of Islamophobia or discrimination against Muslims. This article proceeds particularly with documentation on some Muslim women's experience in Australia. These women are treated as the "Other" by some Westerners because they believe their own culture to be superior. This notion of Westerners' cultural superiority has been noted by Edward Said in Orientalism. Said has argued that through a discursive conception of the Orient, the West was able to construct an image of its own identity — that is, that the West is the negative of "Oriental" (in this instance it is the Arab and the Islamic cultures), comprising what the Other is not. In this sense, Orientalism involves a binary opposition that finds the West as central to modern, enlightened thought, and the Orient as the mysterious and often dangerous Other. Like any opposition, this binary one relies on a series of cultural constructions that in this case can be understood as "biological essentialism, as well as racial, religious and cultural prejudices." In this paper I will discuss the placement of some Australian Muslim women within the framework of Said's Orientalism. Through several case studies I will observe if other factors are operative against Muslim women such as the Westerners' lack of understanding of the diversity of Islam. This paper is based on primary and secondary sources, including oral testimonies.