The Geography of Islamophobia in Sydney: mapping the spatial imaginaries of young Muslims

ABSTRACT

A rise in anti-Muslim sentiment in the ‘West’ has invoked wide debate on the impacts of Islamophobia on Australian Muslim citizens. Noble and Poynting (‘White Lines: The Intercultural Politics of Everyday Movement in Social Spaces’, Journal of Intercultural Studies 31 (2010): 489–505) speculated that racism impacts young Muslims’ sense of belonging in and across public spheres. Despite Australian Muslim testimonials of racial experiences occurring in the public space, the impact of racism on how ethnic and/or religious minorities, such as Muslims, translate this sentiment into mental maps of exclusion has not hitherto been empirically examined. This paper reports on the findings of an online survey conducted in July 2014 with young Australian Muslims living in Sydney. Young Muslims suggest that there is a geographical distribution of Islamophobic spaces across Sydney, focused in the regions of Sutherland, Sydney’s North Side/Eastern Suburbs, and the Upper North Shore. In comparing young Muslims’ ‘mental maps’ of Islamophobia and existing evidence of Sydney’s ‘geographies of racial attitudes’ illustrated by Forrest and Dunn in 2007 (‘Constructing Racism in Sydney, Australia’s Largest EthniCity’, Urban Studies 44 (2007): 699–721), the need for culturally specific, empirical examinations of (in)tolerance across Australian cities is emphasised.

KEYWORDS:

• Islamophobia
• young Muslims
• spatial imaginaries
• Sydney

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. ISIL—the ‘Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant’, also known as the ‘Islamic State in Iraq al-Shā m’ (ISIS) has occupied territory in Iraq and Syria since late June 2014. For an overview of the demonisation of ISIL in Australian political discourse see Lentini (2015).

2. Reclaim Australia is a loosely structured right-wing movement formed through street rallies in 2015, predominantly against ‘Islamism’, halal certification and mosque development across Australia.

3. Islamophobia Register Australia is a community-initiated service that offers an online portal to report anti-Muslim abuse.

4. Although Dunn, Klocker, and Salabay (2007) make a distinction between coloured (old) and cultural (new) racism, they argue that both types of racist attitudes are operationalised into racist acts in an essentially similar way.

5. These Facebook groups included: ‘Y factor radio show’, ‘Sydney Muslim Youth’, ‘Muslim Trading Post Aus’ and ‘Muslim Student Association’ pages for the following universities: Western Sydney University (WSU), University of Technology Sydney, University of New South Wales and University of Sydney.

6. Where multiple ethnicities were indicated, these results were combined in each category.

7. ‘SD’ is used in the remainder of this paper when referring to the Semantic Differential scale questions in the Survey.

8. SA4 regions are the largest sub-State regions in the main structure of the Australian Statistical Geography Standard (ASGS)—the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ geographical framework. See Figure 2 for the spatial distribution of SA4 regions.

9. The allocations of ‘positive, neutral or negative’ categories are not deterministic, and are provided to encourage comparative discussion.