Muslims in Australia: beyond religion and culture

This thesis looks for an answer to the problem of the negative image of the immigrant Muslim community in Australia, resulting from an implied association with fundamentalism. The hypothesis, which denied any rational basis to the negative image, was tested by comparing the responses of immigrant Muslim parents with those of their children between the ages of twelve and twenty five, to questions having fundamentalist significance. The rationale for the methodology used was based on the argument that a deviation by the second generation from parental conservatism was inconsistent with either the importation or the perpetuation of fundamentalism. A total of fifteen substantive questions were used in the survey. Fifty families, consisting of eighty eight parents and eighty six children, participated in the research. The literature review is divisible into two main analytic categories: Islamic ethics, or a Muslim critique of Muslim culture and society, and the sociology of lslam or the study of Muslim culture and society from the western academic perspective. The former category indicates that despite globalisation which promotes increasing involvement among people worldwide, fundamentalist Muslim doctrine denies the Muslim unrestricted freedom of movement to non-Muslim societies, in view of a perceived risk to the continuation of a fundamentalist religious identity. The literature review of the sociology of Islam complements this position by identifying some of the specific changes which have an adverse impact on the continuation of a fundamentalist religious identity in the West. In a secular, modern society there was also seen to be the potential for a conflict of ideas which distanced the second generation from the religious identity of their immigrant parents. Moreover, socio-cultural marginality was seen to provide the impetus for creativity in outlook. Identity formation in the West among the second generation was seen to be weighted in favour of the dominant secular culture of the host society, rather than the religious identity which immigrant parents might hold on to and wish to reproduce among the second generation. The research instrument was a pre-coded interview schedule, constructed through the literature review. An exploration of a wide ranging survey of Muslim culture and society served to identify the appropriate questions, as a necessary qualitative aspect to the subsequent quantitative evaluation of the empirical data. A significant statistical difference was found between the responses of parents and children, in favour of the second generation as a less conservative group. The theoretical approach to this inquiry took into account the social reality of the immigrant Muslim in a non-Muslim society. The Islamic worldview as a positivist theory was used, in addition to non-positivist critical theory from within the sociology of Islam. Both theoretical perspectives were employed in view of the need to make the study meaningful to Muslims, while critically evaluating the personal views of individual respondents. Other positivist sociological theories were avoided in view of the procedural need to restrict the theoretical perspective, as far as possible, to one or the other approach.