Framing Interfaith Dialogue in Australia's Multicultural Setting: Mounting an Interfaith and Intercultural Network in Melbourne's Northern Region

Abstract

By examining the experience of an innovative and ambitious initiative in the evolution of the interfaith movement in Australia, this article analyses three contested themes: first, how to connect religion more closely with culture, thereby placing interfaith relations within the context of intercultural awareness; second, how to develop a regional initiative which, informed by Australia's urban history and sociology, would complement and dovetail with preexisting interfaith and intercultural activities; and third, how to translate the general principles of dialogue into the operational environments of local communities. By analysing the insertion of dialogue into the modalities of ‘everyday’ life, this article illuminates how a multidimensional approach to interfaith dialogue can resonate with the cultural–political specificities of a major metropolitan concentration.

Acknowledgments

This article was made possible by an Australian Research Council Linkage Project grant, ‘Developing the Framework for Locally Based Interfaith and Intercultural Dialogue’. I would like to thank the project's chief investigator, Joseph A. Camilleri, director, Centre for Dialogue, for all his assistance as well as Janelle Cairns, Stephanie Matti, Charlotte Setijadi-Dunn and Larry Marshall for their input during various stages of the article. The author is also indebted to RSS’s editor Philip Walters and the peer-reviewers for their commentary, which has helped improve the original manuscript. The views conveyed in this article are exclusively those of the author.

Notes

1. A reversal of Friedrich Nietzsche's controversial declaration that ‘God is dead’ (Nietzsche, 2003, p. 41). The report (Cahill et al., 2004), co-authored by Desmond Cahill, Gary Bouma, Hass Dellal and Michael Leahy, was released on 21 December 2004 at Melbourne's Immigration Museum in partnership with the Australian government's Living in Harmony Initiative at the Department of Immigration and Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs and in association with RMIT University, Monash University and the World Conference of Religions for Peace.

2. I am using ‘local’ to mean the municipal local government context and ‘regional’ to mean the geographical provincial context.

3. ‘Hyphenated’ Australia refers to the discursive construction of interculturality and its relationship to the dominant culture at the fusion of multicultural and national identities. As Loza (2002) explains, it is an attempt to move beyond modern conceptions of identity in opposition to postmodern conceptions by theorising a third space called the hyphens. Globalisation, diversification and the acceleration of global movement of people have meant that intercultural identities constitute the fastest growing sector of the Australian population. For those informed by, at least, two cultures, notions of multiculturalism, ethnicity and ‘Australian-ness’ remain contested relational structures and processes. As a conceptual tool, hyphenisation of Australian identity visualises interculturality by construing an amorphous spatial terrain where identities intersect/interact, characterised by contestation, ambiguity, and ambivalence. The transitory nature of liminality, however, promises new emerging and creative forms of identity instigated by interculturality.

4. Intercultural tensions between the Lebanese and Anglo-Saxon communities of Sydney reached a climax in 2005 with the racially charged riots in Cronulla and surrounding suburbs in Sydney's beach area. On 11 December 2005 approximately 5000 people gathered in an ad-hoc protest to ‘reclaim the beach’ after reported incidents of assaults and intimidating behaviour by groups of non-locals, most of whom were identified in earlier media reports as Middle Eastern, particularly Lebanese-Australian, youths from the suburbs of Western Sydney. The crowd had assembled following a widely reported series of earlier confrontations and an assault on three volunteer lifeguards which had taken place the previous weekend (ABC, 2006).

5. According to a survey commissioned by the Centre for Dialogue in 2011 there were 38 interfaith networks, councils and initiatives in Victoria with an additional 12 faith communities which maintained an interfaith profile and portfolio (Bobko, 2011, p. 30).

6. As compound Greek words, etymologically ‘dialectic’ and ‘dialogue’ share the common prefix ‘dia-’ which, depending on its root word, means ‘through’, ‘across’, ‘over’, ‘by’ or ‘to’. Thus by conferring ‘dia’ to the noun logos (meaning ‘word’, ‘reason’, and in its Christian New Testament incarnation ‘word’ as ‘truth’) we get ‘dia-logos’ (dialogue). Dialectic, however, derives from the verb ‘dia-lego’ (to choose) and ‘dia-legomai’ (to be chosen), in which Plato (2008 (380 BC)) accentuated its ‘diairetiki’ (divisive) quality, thus instilling the dialectic approach with its critiquing, questioning and contrarian features.

7. Dialogue's divergence from the dialectic discourse was significantly informed by Mikhail Bakhtin's (1981) elucidation of the ‘monologic’ in literature. By extending Bakhtin's theory to language we realise its relational properties by engaging in a process of re-description. Furthermore – and here lies the distinction from a dialectic approach – Bakhtin stressed that certain uses of language maximise the dialogic nature of words, while others restrict their ‘polyvocality’. Intertextuality provides the use of language with its dialogical dimension as a dynamic and interactive alternative to the dialectic monologicality (Kristeva, 1980).

8. These were: the Australian Multicultural Foundation; the Buddhist Council of Victoria; the Ethnic Communities Council of Victoria; the Islamic Council of Victoria; the Jewish Community Council of Victoria; the Spectrum Migrant Resource Centre; the Uniting Church in Australia; and the Victorian Council of Churches.

9. In the Australian context religious, and cultural, differences tend to correlate with language (other than English) spoken at home (LOESH). Irrespective of its intergenerational linguistic retention, LOESH as modes of socialisation and representation form part of the cultural system created, shared and contested by members of a particular Non-English Speaking Background (NESB) ethno-religious group. The elaborate network of kinship by LOESH groups reveals the intimate relationship between language and cultural formation, of which religion is an integral component, providing a lens through which groups are able to differentiate, reciprocate and express their individual and collective identity (ACARA, 2011, p. 15).

10. Often framed in government literature and language as ‘diversity and social cohesion’.

11. Popularity was operationalised by asking people what they thought as being most effective rather than what they preferred. The folkloric, festive, ‘food and feast’ image of multiculturalism has been critiqued by Sneja Gunew (1993, 1999), Ghassan Hage (1998) and Regina W. Lee (2005) as a ‘soft’ and ‘acceptable’ form of popular culture. Gunew (1993, p. 41), in particular, argues that food, as a commonality and a commodity, ‘has long been the acceptable face of multiculturalism’, with migrant communities providing ‘cultural enrichment’ through the ‘soft’ options of food, music and dance, which are manifestations of popular culture, thereby offering ‘one of the seemingly benign representational systems’ of multicultural difference. As Gunew continues to note (1999, p. 151), ‘the insistence on invoking food whenever multiculturalism is represented in a positive way is not quite so benign as it may first appear’ as it offers a tacit rationale to the dominant culture that it need not engage with minority cultures in any dialogic sense. In this context multiculturalism is commodified in an ‘acceptable’ and ‘soft’ form by presenting to the dominant culture an orientalist image of the ethnic as an exotic ‘other’.

12. Despite the Catholic Church's ‘teaching and official commitment to interfaith dialogue and activities’ these ‘have yet to be fully integrated at the grass-roots level of the church’ (Hall, 2010, p. 55). Eastern Christianity has been somewhat sceptical and reluctant to engage in interfaith dialogue, which it views as a post-9/11 Western Christian initiative. Orthodox Christians and Muslims have coexisted and conflicted for centuries in the Middle East, Balkans, Eastern Mediterranean and Eurasia, however, and their relations as developed in these regions have been transplanted to their corresponding diasporic communities in Australia including the northern region of Melbourne.

13. See for example information for 2010 from the Scottish Inter Faith Council (www.scottishinterfaithcouncil.org) and Faithnet Southwest (www.faithnetsouthwest.org.uk/joomla/index.php).