Split Allegiances: Cultural Muslims and the Tension Between Religious and National Identity in Multicultural Societies

By Liza Hopkins and Cameron McAuliffe

Volume 10, Issue 1, pages 38-58, April 2010

Abstract

Second generation Australians from a Muslim background have appeared on the political radar recently as a group at risk of disengagement due to their potentially split allegiances. For these young Australians, the traditional tension over diasporic allegiances between the homeland and the country in which they live is further complicated by religious identity. This paper offers two case studies of the second generation of two mainly Islamic, but otherwise very different, ethnonational communities in Australia, Turkish and Iranian. It examines the responses of these groups to the rising essentialisation and ethnicisation of Islam, at the expense of ethnic and sociocultural difference. In particular, the paper focuses on the way secular practice and religious identity converge into ‘cultural Islam’. We use the term cultural Islam as a way of describing those, particularly of the second and third generations in Australia, who proudly claim their Islamic heritage while choosing not to participate actively in religious life.

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Continuity and Change in the Minority Policies of Greece and Turkey

By Georgios Niarchos

Volume 6, Issue 1, pages 30-48, March 2006

Abstract

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Institutions, Identity and Unity: The Anomaly of Australian Nationalism

Joseph M. Parent

Volume 7, Issue 2, pages 2-28, March 2008

Abstract

Why has Australia not produced a viable separatist movement? This non-event is all the more striking compared to the separatism experienced by the United Kingdom, United States, and Canada, among others. Individually or combined, the major paradigms cannot explain separatism or its absence. This paper advances an elite persuasion argument and contends that success of separatist movements depends on the conditions in which elites appeal for autonomy. Specifically, five conditions are necessary for a viable separatist movement: 1) cultural differences, 2) economic incentives, 3) security, 4) concentrated minority settlement patterns, and 5) favourable domestic institutions. The analysis focuses on a comparison between Australia and Canada, but has implications for other separatist and potentially separatist areas.

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Ethnicity of Fear? Islamic Migration and the Ethnicization of Islam in Europe

Bassam Tibi

Volume 10, Issue 1, pages 126-157, April 2010

Abstract

This feature article acknowledges the fact that neither Islam, understood as the umma community, nor the modern civic European nations, are ethnic identities. Why then are both related to the notion of ‘ethnicity’ in the present article? Why does the analysis of the Muslim diaspora in Europe prompt an alert of an ‘ethnicity of fear’? In order to answer these questions the analysis departs from the supposition of an ongoing ethnicization process that results in an ethnic conflict. The question and the supposition furnish the subject matter of the present study.

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Boundaries in Shaping the Rohingya Identity and the Shifting Context of Borderland Politics

Kazi Fahmida Farzana

Volume 15, Issue 2, pages 292-314, October 2015

Abstract

In recent years, new waves of ethnic violence in the Arakan (Rakhine) state of Burma (Myanmar) have resulted in increased internal displacement and the continued exodus of the Rohingya people to neighbouring countries. At the heart of this problem is the fact that Burma (which the Rohingyas claim as their ancestral land) and Bangladesh (where many Rohingyas are unwelcome and/or undocumented refugees) continue to deny the Rohingyas their political identity, each insisting that the displaced Rohingyas are the responsibility of the other. This study examines the history of the region to explore how political identities are shaped (generally) and how Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh, living along the borders, identify themselves in the midst of political sovereignty claims and a social space that exists across artificially drawn borders (specifically). This article argues that the true political identity of the displaced Rohingya refugees can be located in their social memory and their life-politics in the borderlands. In this social memory, the Rohingyas’ beliefs in ethnicity, identity, and belongingness play an important role in shaping their current identity. Their production of cultural artefacts while in exile suggests a non-conventional resistance, and the close proximity of the refugees to their homeland creates a completely different psychology of attachment and alienation, which needs further attention in refugee studies. Such an understanding of life-politics along the border may challenge our current understanding of borderland conflicts within the framework of state-imposed boundaries. The boundaries of identity may go beyond traditional notions of national borders and the identity of the state.

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