Created in academia’s Left bubble, a Deakin University study of Muslims in the West makes 18 references to “Islamophobia”. Phobias are unreal fears; fear of Muslim terror is perfectly rational, given thirty Islamic attacks killed 157 people in the last week of June alone.
Just about every Australian university now has its Islamic studies centre, relentlessly spreading the word that Muslims are the nicest people around.[1] If a minority of them aren’t so nice (suicide blasts, beheadings) it’s of course the West’s fault for being mean to Muslims historically or in failing to throw enough welfare at Muslim arrivals. Griffith University even sports a centre educating journalists on how to do Islam-friendly reporting of gory Allahu-Akbar events.[2] Sydney University’s law school has a course, “Muslim Minorities and the Law”, using a textbook authored by the lecturers and calling for elements of sharia law to be recognised in the mainstream legal system—including polygamy and a lower age of consent.
Victoria’s Deakin University is another case in point. On June 22 it put out a 140-page study, Islamic Religiosity and Challenge of Political Engagement and National Belonging in Multicultural Western Cities. As heading of the press release explained, “Muslim faith not at odds with Western beliefs, Deakin study shows”. [3] It elaborated:
Public debate that paints a negative picture of Muslims and Islamic religiosity is at odds with the peace-driven lens through which much of [my emphasis] the Muslim communities view their faith … The findings challenge the dominant public commentary that portrays Islamic beliefs as a potential security problem at odds with Western norms of democracy, secularism, liberty and individual rights.
Those hundreds of bollards now protecting Melbourne and Sydney pedestrian-ways must be to thwart homicidal Buddhists.
The study found that Islamism wasn’t at odds with “Western norms of democracy, secularism, liberty and individual rights”. The study leader, Professor Fethi Mansouri, who also holds the UNESCO Chair on Cultural Diversity and Social Justice, wants his study to promote “solidarity and understanding not fear and loathing”.
His team set out to discover if Muslims’ warmth towards their host community was enhanced by their public practice of Muslim faith rituals. The surveys covered “a broad cross-section of practising Muslims in the West”, namely in Melbourne, Detroit, Lyon, Grenoble and, to a minor extent, Paris.
“Muslims in the West” is a bit of a stretch. The study involved only 384 Muslims in a three-country survey and interviews, including 237 who took a questionnaire online or face-to-face. When the US Pew Research Group surveyed global Muslim opinion between 2008 and 2012, it did 38,000 face-to-face interviews in eighty languages.
Mansouri says Muslims in the West want to be “good citizens and be just, open and caring people”, demonstrating a need to “reshape public discourse and policy attitudes towards Muslim communities”. His study “enables a better understanding between the West and Islam that could alleviate tensions and prevent outbreaks of violence by Muslim youth who feel disenfranchised by a dominant majority culture”. But why don’t alienated Hindu and Aboriginal youth also go on murderous rampages?
Other jarring notes in the Mansouri symphony include:
# Those coming to Australia from a Muslim-majority nation “often produced one of three responses: assimilation, incorporation or extremism”. Mansouri doesn’t define what he means by “extremism”—conceivably just intense religiosity—but the term is now the official euphemism for violent Islamism.
# “Official discourses predominantly emphasise dominant images of radicalisation among youth that places all young Muslims under scrutiny. This has the effect of producing anger and outrage, which are expressed in different ways in the cities that were the focus of this project.”
# 8 to 10 per cent of the Muslim respondents in Melbourne, Detroit and three French cities said they followed sharia exclusively rather than national legal codes. Some respondents conceded that their sharia observances involved practices “often thought to be incompatible with domestic laws”. But really, some Melbourne Muslims said, such sharia codes were essential in “promoting ethical behaviour as well as virtuous and participatory citizenship”.
The study was silent on which aspects of sharia don’t fit Western laws. At the mildest end, I could nominate female subservience and polygamy. The least Western aspects of sharia and its prescribed punishments might include honour killings, hand-loppings and stonings of rape victims.[4]
The Deakin study raises questions about its methodology. First, for the five cities, the team mustered under 100 questionnaire replies each in Melbourne and France, and forty-eight in Detroit. These included online responses, which are generally considered lower-grade material.
Second, the team did four focus groups in Melbourne of half a dozen clients each. These people were selected for Deakin by Muslim organisations.[5] In Grenoble they did one focus group of six clients and in Detroit, none.
Third, in the five cities, the team did a total of 115 interviews, or about thirty to fifty per country. The authors can at best only describe the interviews as “semi-structured” and claim they provide “rich qualitative data” (no detail on interview questions was appendixed). As icing on the cake, the team noted “ethnographic” inputs, namely “participant observation, visual methodologies” and “photo-elicitation techniques”, whatever that means.
