Islamophobia – The Experience in Worlds Old and New: Lessons from Europe and Australia Organized jointly by the Australian Intercultural Society, the Australian Catholic University, and Monash University together with the Gülen confer- ence a few days earlier, this conference was devoted to a particularly impor- Conference, Symposium, and Panel Reports 155 ajiss 26-3-final-obay.qxp 6/9/2010 4:11 PM Page 155 PDF created with pdfFactory Pro trial version www.pdffactory.com http://www.pdffactory.com http://www.pdffactory.com tant and pressing topic: the anti-Islam discourse slowly becoming a standard feature of western political competition and media coverage. As the topic is similarly a rather polarizing one, an event of high scholarly quality could not be taken for granted. However, this is just what organizers, speakers, and audience managed to achieve during this event, held during 18-19 July 2009 at Monash University in Melbourne. The phenomena subsumed under the term Islamophobia, their expressions, preconditions, and multiple roots and facets were discussed through different approaches in theoretical, descrip- tive, and analytical terms. Raelene Frances (Dean of Arts, Monash) showed how Irish Catholics were formerly subject to many of the same stereotypes now connected with Muslims in Australia. Douglas Pratt drew attention to the fact that contempo- rary conceptions of Islam are often dominated by misrepresentation and dis- torted images arising both from misunderstanding and ignorance. Author Hanifa Deen pointed to the recent nature of the problem by revisiting the pro- gression from largely indifference toward Muslims to Islamophobia in Australian society within a few decades. A highly thought-provoking presen- tation was given by Dan Madigan, who highlighted the problematic nature of the term Islamophobia itself and even convincingly discouraged its use. Apart from its basis in psychological terminology, which seems to imply that the holder of anti-Muslim prejudices is the mere victim of an affliction (just as the one suffering from claustrophobia, for example), the term also seems to obscure the fact that hatred often plays a greater role in the issue than fear. Tellingly, it became evident during the conference that a number of other scholars felt uneasy with using the term and opted for such expressions as anti-Muslim prejudice or anti-Islam discourse instead. The historical roots of this very discourse, which go back almost a millennium to the time of the First Crusade, were then discussed by Jonathan Lyons. Gary Bouma analyzed the relationship between the growing religious diversity in western societies and religious resurgence, which has led to a growing commitment to put faith into practice and a form of competition between religions that, at times, spills over into outright conflict with the respective parties employing dehumaniz- ing discourse regarding their opponents. Likewise, the second day provided very valuable perspectives on the problem. Greg Barton set out to formulate a conceptual framework for studying the phenomenon by taking into account its many different elements that often are actually hardly connected to religious issues at all, as well as including a justified fear of violent expressions of Islam that have become more visible in the last decades. Stephen Fontana provided rare insights into 156 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 26:3 ajiss 26-3-final-obay.qxp 6/9/2010 4:11 PM Page 156 PDF created with pdfFactory Pro trial version www.pdffactory.com http://www.pdffactory.com http://www.pdffactory.com the strategies of the local police to overcome both the fear of Islam as well as the isolation of local Muslim communities, whereas David Tittensor took up an important feature of contemporary pseudo-scholarly discourse on Islam, namely, the frequent reference to the Islamic legal concept of taqiyah (religiously sanctioned deception) used to discredit liberal Islamic move- ments as mere dissemblers. Also very enlightening was also Benjamin Mac- Queen’s presentation on how fear of so-called Islaist parties was usually pri- marily connected in the West with a fear of the establishment of Islamic law, when the evidence of recent years shows that its imposition was indeed hardly a top priority whenever Islamic parties gained access to a measure of political power. Moreover, the whole concept seems to have been turned upside down by the cases of Iraq and Afghanistan, where the imposition of religiously-based civil law took place under the sponsorship and supervision of the West. Eventually, Irfan Ahmad rightfully stressed, anti-Islamic dis- course in the West as well as in places such as India is closely related to the desire of majority populations to protect an idealized status quo in an imag- ined home, which is constantly threatened by the tireless forces of (for example, demographic) change. It says much about the local interest in confronting the problem of Islam- ophobia that the list of presenters featured figures such as Monash’s Dean of Arts and representatives of both Victoria state’s police and of its Human Rights Commission. Unfortunately, turnout on the second conference day was sadly very low, which seems to point in the opposite direction. How- ever, the conference was doubtlessly of great contemporary relevance and yielded many thought-provoking results, inviting a more thorough future engagement with the topic despite the fact that international developments will most probably dictate such engagement anyway. The presentations and discussions were mostly truly objective and far from mere apologetics. For one thing, the conference also showed that even aspects of common histori- cal knowledge have to be stressed over again in order not to vanish from pub- lic consciousness in the present circumstances. Indeed the view of religious conflict as major cause for violence in human history has gained such public currency that people already have to be specifically reminded that neither the two world wars nor the major atrocities of the last decades, such as the geno- cide of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and the bloody wars in the Democra- tic Republic of Congo and Rwanda had any connection with religion. Philipp Bruckmayr Ph.D. Candidate, Arabic and Islamic Studies The Institute of Oriental Studies, University of Vienna, Austria Conference, Symposium, and Panel Reports 157 ajiss 26-3-final-obay.qxp 6/9/2010 4:11 PM Page 157 PDF created with pdfFactory Pro trial version www.pdffactory.com http://www.pdffactory.com http://www.pdffactory.com