US AND THEM: Keynote address to the Affinity Interfaith Dinner.

October 1, 2006   Bosphorus Reception Lounge, 7 Station St., Auburn, Sydney

The first thing I would like to say this evening is how brave the Conference organizers have been in holding this event on Grand Final night. They must have had some divine help in knowing that it was only the Melbourne Storm and the Brisbane Broncos who would be claiming our attention tonight. Imagine the problems if the Canterbury-Bankstown Bulldogs were playing as we speak. My audience might be reduced to zero!

More seriously, it is great to be here. As a Catholic Australian with an anglo-Irish background but with a whole lot of close Arab and Muslim Australian friends, it is an honour to be asked to speak during Ramadan, the season of forgiveness. So many of these friends of mine look forward to Ramadan with genuine pleasure. My local Egyptian Australian shopkeeper said the other day how much he looked forward to the fasting and the sense of community that comes with the evening meal. He told me of his memories from his old country of how Ramadan was like a national celebration of joy. He re-celebrated it in Sydney with his own friends.

How precious are those migrant experiences! My stepfather, Karol Jaworski, my mother Rosemary and I used to live in Wilmot Avenue, Toongabbie. He was a Polish fighter pilot with the British RAF against Germany in the Second World War and, of course, started life in Australia in the tins sheds of Villawood under the midday sun. On school holidays we would go out looking for a place to picnic. His favourite place was the pine forests. They reminded him of the black forests of his native Poland. But when we’d get there, the pinus radiata never satisfied him. They didn’t look the same, in their straight rows of equidistant trees, they didn’t smell the same and the groundcover of pine needles was different, too. I remember how sad he became. He missed his homeland.

That feeling of being torn between two cultures is central to the Australian imagination. Only black Australians feel entirely at home, knowing their history here is 40 to 80,000 years old. Much English and Irish migrant writing of the nineteenth century in Australia is about missing “home” and you can see in the painting, the architecture and churches of early Australia the desire to re-build “the old country” in this foreign land. Suburbs like Paddington and Glebe in the inner city, with the rows and rows of terraced workers homes, are a tribute to ignoring the sunny open spaces of Sydney and trying to remember “home”.  The novelist who most captures this sense of living in a foreign land is undoubtedly the great David Malouf. He shows how the Aboriginal reality sits at the edge of the consciousness of all Australians, no matter how much the new migrants cling to the coastlines of this vast continent.

So we are all, except for the first people of this land, migrants together. Some have been here 10 years, some 30, some 50, some 100 or 150 and some 200. But we are all “new Australians”. In my own case, the Mannings were from Tipperary in Ireland 150 years ago. For most of our time we felt at odds with the dominant culture: the Protestant English. We called them WASPs. White, Anglo-Saxon Protestant. We, on the other hand, were white anglo-celtic Catholic. We were kept out of the best jobs, the best schools, the best clubs and the best suburbs. We hated them and they hated us. We never married them and they never married us. We thought they were genuinely weird and they thought the same about us. We thought we had a long history of grievance against them (going back centuries) and they thought much the same about us.

I can remember all these feelings from the 1950s. There was “us” and there was “them”. The task before “us” was to break through and capture the best jobs, get into the best clubs and occupy the best suburbs – or create our own. And, by the way, to outbreed “them” as well by having more babies!

Today, there is no “us” and “them” in the way I describe. Catholic birthrates saw the number of Catholics overtake their closest rivals, the Anglicans, many years ago, becoming Australia’s biggest religious denomination. But more importantly, sheer talent saw anglo-celtic Catholic Australians gain the top jobs in law, medicine and business, set up their own top schools, break down the discrimination that kept them out of clubs and buy homes in any suburb they liked.

And even more importantly, Catholics got to know Protestants. They got to know each other, to stop fearing each other, to exorcise the devils and to see the 95 percent of things – particularly the Bible – that they had in common. The differences seemed near irrelevant. No-one today would blink an eyelid if a Catholic boy married a Presbyterian girl. Indeed, the latest surveys show that Catholics are taking on board many of the beliefs of their fellow Christians across the board. “Us” and “them” virtually disappeared.

Now I should stop here to say that I am not pretending there are no differences between Catholics and Protestant Christians, any more than there are no important differences between Sunnis and Shia Muslims or Orthodox and mainstream Jews or the various wings of Hinduism and Buddhism. Differences matter.

But what happened in my time between Catholic and other Christians was that the false differences were eliminated through discussions, meetings, closeness, negotiation and friendship. The myths about each other – the conceptions that make for dehumanising your enemy – were gradually broken down. In this process, the literal differences were left as bedrock beliefs and these were found to be far smaller than the things that united us.

That’s the 1950s and maybe into the 1960s. Twenty years later there was a new “us and them” scenario. Vietnamese “new Australians” were the new “other”, the new “them”. And now fifty years later the “us and them” is anglo Christians versus Middle Eastern Muslims.

I have just written a book about this new “us and them”. I believe the roots of this
myth-making about how different Arab and Muslim Australians are to the rest of “us” goes back to conceptions of the Orient which took hold when the first Muslim armies and missionaries swept across Asia and Africa in the first century after the Prophet Mohammed (peace be upon him) and then again after the Reformation, the Western divorce between church and state and the industrial revolution.

When Napoleon invaded Egypt in 1798 he began 200 or more years of Western colonialism and imperialism based on the belief that the Ottoman Empire and the Middle East might once have experienced high culture but that civilization was long past                                                                                                                            
and now Muslim areas needed to accept the West as being superior, more rational, more peacable and more democratic. This Western belief vis a vis the East continued despite the incredible history of European violence that characterised the seventeenth and twentieth centuries and, of course, the wars of conquest and empire in South America, Asia, Africa and the Middle East itself.

This is the “orientalist” myth that is part of every anglo Australian’s “cultural baggage”. “They” are tricky, irrational, violent and autocratic, not like “us”.

Enter the Iranian revolution in 1979 of Ayatollah Khomeini and the American media went berserk portraying him as the latest example of the oriental devil. The Australian media, connected umbilically by syndicated contracts to the US media, picked up the theme. The hysteria about Iran developed further in the 1980s and then picked up with the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s. Its at about this time that a new wave of immigrants came to Australia from Lebanon seeking refuge from the violence and hatreds of the civil war. For the first time, Australia, and especially Sydney, had a large influx of Muslim migrants. 

Then came Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in 1991 and the first Gulf War. Violence against Muslim women and attacks on mosques in Brisbane and Sydney began. Muslims were being positioned in the media as exactly the kind of “other” or “them” that Catholics like myself had been in the past. In my view, based on my own academic research, the media in Sydney have now settled in to the sort of stereotypes that express a dominant culture. And in those stereotypes the differences between “us” and “them” are over-emphasized and the things that are common under-estimated.

It’s easy to believe that the perceived differences somehow relate to September 11, Bali, London and Madrid. In other words, to terrorism. The truth is: they long pre-date those events. So what the post 9/11 critics have to contend with is this: what have these latest events got to do with the ordinary Muslim Australian living as an Indonesian Australian in Kingsford, a Pakistani Australian in Winston Hills, a Somali Australian  living in Harbord or a Lebanese Australian living in Bankstown? Are they all blackened by the actions of 50 criminals across the other side of the world? Is it somehow inherent in being Muslim that violence of this kind will be tolerated, encouraged or allowed?

The overwhelming answer, of course, is “no”. There is no connection.

But you would never guess this from our media, from our politicians or from some of our so-called community leaders.

I am reading at the moment Patrick Seale’s famous biography of the former Syrian leader Hafiz al-Asad. When Asad came to power he had to face the question of the role of Islam in the formation of his Ba’athist state in the early 1970s. Unlike the Turkish state, he wanted it to have a left-wing orientation but, like Kemal Ataturk, he wanted a secular state that allowed for all religions. But Islam clearly had a special place as most Arabs were Muslim and Damascus had long been a holy capital with the Ummayad Mosque and the Tomb of Saladin and so on. In agreeing to always install a Muslim president of his new state, Asad spoke to Syrians of his view of Islam. Islam, he said, should be
      “far removed from the detestable face of fanaticism…Islam is a religion of love,
        of progress and social justice, of equality for all, a religion which protects both
        the small and the great, the weak and the strong, a religion in tune with the spirit
        of the age.” (Seale, “Asad”, p. 173)
It reminded me greatly of another passage. It was the gospel according to Saint Matthew.
He quotes Jesus Christ as saying:
       “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven;
       “Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted;
       “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth;
       “Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled;
       “Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy;
       “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God;
       “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God.”
       (Matthew, 5:3-9)
The similarities between the two statements could not be more obvious.

Or let me take another angle at addressing the alleged differences between “us” and “them”.

I was reading in a letter the other day of the attitude of Catholic Cardinal Julius of Indonesia when faced with the recent speech by Pope Benedict quoting an earlier medieval statement. Living in the world’s largest Muslim nation, Indonesia, this Catholic nun wrote in a letter that
       “the person who spoke strongest of the hurtfulness of (the Pope’s) statement
         was our Cardinal when he told our parish council how hurt he was at these      
   injurious words. The plenary session of the Indonesian Conference for Religion
         and Peace had scheduled the installation of its president, Hasyim Muzadi, the leader
         of the largest Muslim organization in the world, for the Monday following the
         the Pope’s statement.When Cardinal Julius spoke he interrupted his remarks to have
         the (Indonesian) Bishops’ Conference Statement of Apology read. After the
         Cardinal’s speech, Hasyim Muzadi embraced the Cardinal and they mutually asked
         forgiveness. The Cardinal knelt to do so.”
This kind of meaningful gesture seems to me eminently more likely to build bridges between communities that share an Abrahamic tradition than strident statements highlighting our alleged differences.

Trying to debate which community treats its women better, which salutes the flag more often, which is less violent, which can speak English more – and this in a city where a third of its citizens speak a language other than English at home! – and which loves Australia more seems to me pointless tests designed to promote fear and division.

I could go through each of these alleged differences – about women, about violence and about patriotism and loyalty – but I won’t. Its not appropriate to get too contentious on this happy evening tonight.

But I will take up one criticism, or alleged difference, aimed at the Muslim community by the Treasurer, Peter Costello, the other day. He said that, like the Christian West, Muslims should separate matters of state from matters of religion.

Now that question has a long history in the Christian West and even in Australia. Stem cell research, abortion, divorce laws, State aid to Catholic schools – all have seen Christian religious leaders in Australia heavily involved in politics. On the other side, Muslim leaders have been debating the question of church, or mosque, and state for at least 200 years and beyond. Al-Afghani and Mohammed Abduh are two. In the twentieth century, Turkey and Indonesia went one way, Iran and Saudi Arabia went another.

But just to emphasize, once again, the similarities rather than the differences, let me point out that when Australian forces are farewelled as they go to Iraq or Afghanistan, they have Christian leaders blessing their efforts. When John Howard speaks of “our” religion of Christianity being closest to the Judaic tradition, he’s talking of Christianity as Australia’s primary religion. And when Peter Costello himself talks of keeping church and state separate and that being the Western way, he’s doing so at a fundamentalist Christian convention – just like he did last election when he danced at the Hillsong Church in the only electorate in Australia where a Muslim Labor candidate was standing for office (the nearby seat of Greenway)!

The point I am making is that the alleged separation of church and state in Christian countries like Australia – or Britain where Anglicanism is the Established Church or the US where George Bush is heavily influenced by extremist Christians – is more a hazy one than a clear separation. Very much the same could be said for our nearest neighbour, Indonesia.

So maybe next time, Peter Costello might consider his words a bit more, and read a bit of contemporary history, before plunging in to moralistic clichés.

It is so easy to see figments of your imagination when irrational fears are lurking in your head. And the spectres grow into demons. And the demons become sub-human.

The truth is there is, of course, no “us” and “them”. There is only “us” migrant Australians living in the land of the Aboriginal people. We are one but we are many. And what a mighty strength that is.

Thank you.

Ends.