Religious visibility: perceptions and experiences of residents in two Muslim concentration suburbs in Melbourne, Australia

ABSTRACT

In recent decades, and especially after the 9/11/2001 terrorist attack on US, an antipathy towards and fear of Muslim minorities in Western countries have increased, forming part of the current widespread anti-immigration sentiment. In this context, the ‘religiously visible’ Muslims are the most obvious target of negative perceptions, discrimination and other manifestations of ‘Islamophobia’. This paper uses quantitative and qualitative data on religious visibility collected through a survey and in-depth interviews in two suburbs with residential concentrations of Muslims in Melbourne, Australia. The two localities, ‘Broadburb’ and ‘Greenburb’, have similar proportions of Muslim residents (about 1/3) but the levels of religious visibility differ. The paper discusses perceptions and experiences of being religiously visible in a secular society, and particularly being a ‘visible Muslim’. We also discuss perceptions of Muslim visibility by others – non-visible Muslims and non-Muslims – who share neighbourhoods with the visible Muslim minority.

KEYWORDS:

• Australia
• Muslims
• religious visibility
• neighbourhoods
• inter-ethnic relations
• perceptions

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 SEIFA (Socio-economic indexes for areas) scores are calculated by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) from the Census data. The scores (1-10) combine a number of indicators of socio-economic status (SES) of a particular area, from the lowest (1) to the highest (10).

Additional information

Funding

The study was funded by the State of Victoria Social Cohesion Research Grants Program (Round 1, 2016), administered through a competitive research grant program. The project was conducted in 2016–17, in partnership with the Islamic Council of Victoria (ICV) and two metropolitan local councils. This work was supported by Department of Premier and Cabinet, Victoria, Australia.