The cover of Abdullah Saeed’s recent book Islam in Australia carries the photo of a very determined young woman running with a football tucked under her arm. Nothing new there: we’ve got beyond thinking only males can play rugby. What is surprising about the scene, though, are the veils she and her pursuers are wearing. She’s challenging a stereotype. The photo reminds us that even a book entitled Islam in Australia is not so much about a system of religious thought and practice but about people, about Muslims. When we ask ourselves where we stand, we must first insist on speaking about Muslims and Christians—as people, as believers—rather than about Islam and Christianity, which after all are abstractions.
Much of the fear regarding Islam so evident in the West—and expertly exploited for political advantage in the US and Australia—comes from the sense that we are confronted with a faceless and monolithic system that is of its nature inimical to us. We have not yet outgrown visions of the world much like the multi-coloured maps of our school days in which the Commonwealth was illustrated in pink. That one colour disguised an extraordinary diversity. A very few of the people who lived in those pink countries were pink-skinned; the others were of every shade of skin colour imaginable. Some lived
under dictatorships, some in republics, others under monarchies. Most lived in grinding poverty, some in middle-class comfort, a few in opulence. We were bound together by cricket, royal visits and tea.
Many of today’s politicians and commentators—Christians, Muslims and others—offer us a view of the world in the primary colours of kindergarten blocks. They are great big blocks, easy to grasp and hard to lose. They seem to make everything understandable, yet they actually obscure the complex truth of the matter, offering only a view of the world suitable for ages 3–7.
No-one could realistically deny that some Muslims are threatening the world’s peace in the name of what they consider to be Islam. However, even as we acknowledge this, questions remain. How widespread is this violent movement, for example? The authoritative historian of Islam, Bernard Lewis, is surely stating the obvious when he points out that most Muslims are not fundamentalists and most fundamentalists are not terrorists. We need to ask whether those people who are trying to terrorise us are doing so because they are Muslims or for motives that have more