Tony Abbott an “Abo lover”: Sydney Uni English Professor

[Deleted]

Curriculum Reviewer Barry Spurr Mocks 'Abos, Mussies, Women, Chinky-Poos'

By Chris Graham and Wendy Bacon

16 October 2014
New Matilda

Meet the man who Education Minister Christopher Pyne appointed to review what our nation's kids will be taught in English classes. Chris Graham and Wendy Bacon report.

A University of Sydney Professor – employed by the federal government as a specialist consultant to review the national English curriculum – has described the Prime Minister as an “Abo lover” while at the same time advising the government to focus less on teaching Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander literature in our nation’s schools, and place greater emphasis on western Judeo-Christian culture.

In email correspondence that spans more than two years, Barry Spurr, the nation’s leading Professor of Poetry, describes Aboriginal people as ‘human rubbish tips’ and “Abos”, and rails against the prevalence of Aboriginal culture in school curriculums, and within politics. But the exchanges are not just limited to First Nations people.

Professor Spurr also takes aim at “bogans” “fatsoes”, “Mussies” and “Chinky-Poos”, and laments the reality that Australia is less white than it was in the 1950s.

He calls Nelson Mandela a “darkie” and Desmond Tutu a “witch doctor”; describes his University of Sydney chancellor Belinda Hutchinson as “an appalling minx”; likens Methodists to “serpents”; refers to women as “whores”; and in response to a comment about a female victim of a serious sexual assault being a “worthless slut”, he suggests that she needs more than just ‘penis’ put in her mouth, before it’s “stitched up”.

In one email, Professor Spurr tells university colleagues and friends that 95 per cent of the students at Australian universities – including, presumably his own – should not be studying at tertiary institutions, and remarks that a colleague who publicly advanced that argument will be “derided as elitist, fascist, misogynist – the usual litany”.

“[But] he’s completely right. One day the Western world will wake up, when the Mussies and the chinky-poos have taken over,” he adds.

Even the “modern Brit” comes in for a serve, described by Professor Spurr as “the scum of the earth”.

Between September 2012 and late 2014, the emails were sent to around a dozen people, including very senior academics and officials within the University of Sydney.

Professor Spurr has this morning defended his email exchanges, telling New Matilda they were clearly intended to mock the “very extreme language” used.

“The comments that you refer to are largely to one recipient with whom I have had a whimsical linguistic game for many years of trying to outdo one another in extreme statements.

“These statements are not reflections of my views or his.

“What I say about the place of the study of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander language and literature in the curriculum is my considered professional view and not in any way influenced by these email exchanges which are linguistic play, and the numerous students of different races and of colour with whom I have worked for many years will testify that I have treated them with the same equity and dignity that I treat all my students.

“I find it astonishing that you would think that I would seriously hold those views and not realise, as a journalist, that these are emails of mock-shockng (sic) repartee, mocking, in fact, that very kind of extreme language.”

A source within the University of Sydney, connected to the School of Letters, Art and Media (SLAM) - which includes the English Department - has confirmed that the emails were sent from Professor Spurr’s official university email address.

Ironically, SLAM has been the subject of an ongoing attack in The Australian newspaper this week, with Media Editor Sharri Markson alleging the journalism department at the University of Sydney has been “brain-washing” students with biased, left-wing course material which attacks conservatism and rubbishes her employer, News Corporation.

Professor Spurr was chosen by the Abbott Government to serve on the National Curriculum Review, headed by Professor Ken Wiltshire and Dr Kevin Donnelly. The final report was handed to the Abbott Government late last week.

The review is proposing to alter the national school curriculum introduced in 2011 by the Labor government.

Professor Spurr’s contribution to the review was in the area of English studies. He argues that contribution of First Nations writers to Australia’s literary tradition has been “minimal” and that the focus of the curriculum should be on western civilisation and Judeo-Christian heritage.



A screen capture from the University of Sydney website, announcing Professor Spurr's
appointment to the review in May this year.

“The impact on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples on literature in English in Australia has been minimal and is vastly outweighed by the impact of global literature in English and especially that from Britain, on our literary culture,” Professor Spurr writes.

His comments are given additional weight in the final report, which notes that the “emphasis” on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander literature was “criticised for undervaluing Australian literature and the place of Western literature, particularly poetry”.

Those views have been strongly backed by Minister for Education, Christopher Pyne, who described the review as having an “absence of ideology”. On ABC Lateline earlier this week he defended the recommendations to focus the curriculum away from Aboriginal culture towards “our Judeo-Christian heritage”.

“Before 1788, our history was Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander culture and history almost exclusively. Since that time, obviously since colonisation, Western civilisation, our Judeo-Christian heritage has been the basis of our development as a nation,” Pyne said.

“So therefore, learning about where we've come from is not ideological, it's simply learning about where we've come from…. But knowing about our Western heritage is not repudiating our Indigenous heritage and it's not Christianity, it's just history.”

That mirrors Professor Spurr’s public statements in the review, but it’s a world away from what Professor Spurr says privately about Aboriginal people and culture.

While publicly, he argues the Aboriginal contribution to Australian literature is “minimal”, privately, he says the ‘Abo’ contribution is non-existent.

In an email written in April 19 this year, sent to two friends outside the University of Sydney, Professor Spurr reveals that Education Minister Christopher Pyne – the man who appointed him to the review – wants him to compare Australian school curriculums with curriculums from other countries.

“The Californian high school English curriculum has arrived (as Pyne wants me to compare ours with other countries). Another 300 pages of reading!

“And whereas the local curriculum has the phrase ‘Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander’ on virtually every one of its 300 pages, the Californian curriculum does not ONCE mention native Americans and has only a very slight representation of African-American literature (which, unlike Abo literature, actually exists and has some distinguished productions).”

In response to that specific discrepancy, Professor Spurr explained this morning: “My considered view is that it is very small, perhaps not zero precisely, so I used the term 'slight' to be as positive as I could be.”

Professor Spurr’s commentary on Aboriginal people and culture – and people of colour generally – are littered throughout the years of correspondence.

In April 2014, he rails against a ceremony at Uluru for the visiting royals, Prince William and Princess Catherine, at which entertainment is provided by “well known Aboriginal singer, Wingabanga Gumberumbul”, presumably a reference to Gurrumul Yunupingu. Professor Spurr calls the Prime Minister “gutless and hypocritical”, and blames his chief-of-staff Peta Credlin for the appearance of an ‘Abo’ singer.

“We have thousands of brilliant young Australians musicians, including the wonderful Nicole Car (who would wear her bra under her dress) currently on the brink of an international operatic career. Why aren’t they asked to perform? Abbott’s to blame for this. This is his day with them, his reception. He should have put his foot down and said, ‘No more Abos’. But he’s as gutless and hypocritical of the rest of them. No doubt Peta Whatsername said ‘Do it Tony. It makes you look like a sensitive guy’.”

In January this year, he writes that “Abo Lover Abbott and [Australian of the Year] Adam Goodes” are Siamese Twins and will have to be surgically separated.


A screen capture of one of the Professor Spurr emails, which describes Tony Abbott as an 'Abo lover'.

In October 2013, he sends a long email about an Aboriginal family who lives down the road from him in inner western Sydney. He describes them as a ‘human rubbish tip’ and mocks Vice-Chancellor of Sydney University, Michael Spence for his support of Aboriginal people and culture under an email headed ‘Ancient Wisdom’.

“These are the people whose ‘ancient wisdom’, our V-C says, we should respect, and to whom we apologise on every possible occasion and whose rich culture we bow down before, confessing our wickedness in our mistreatment of them.

“All very well when you’re living in a multi-million dollar mansion in Woolahra (sic), to spout these feel-good emotions from a safe distance. I wonder how he’d like these manifestations of ancient wisdom living next door. The immediate neighbours tell me it has been hell on earth and, of course, their property values have plummeted. They’re living next door to a rubbish tip: human and material.”

Several of his emails direct friends and colleagues to Youtube videos which celebrate the British Monarchy and deride people of colour.

In one email from February 2013, headed “Look at 11.20 – no fatties, darkies or chinky-poos”, Professor Spurr urges recipients to celebrate an Australian school or church which appears to be made up entirely of white children.



In another email a year later, he links to a video which compares London in 1927 with London in 2013. Professor Spurr writes: “A delight until things turn sour around 4:00 with the emergence of the darkies.”

He also manages to line up Aboriginal people, Asians, Muslims, women and anyone obese in a single email sent a few days earlier, commenting: “No Abos, Chinky-poos, Mussies, graffiti, piercings, jeans, tattoos. BCP (Book of Common Prayer) in all Anglican chruches (sic); Latin Mass in all Roman ones. Not a woman to be seen in a sanctuary (church) anywhere. And no obese fatsoes. All the kiddies slim and bright eyed. Now utterly gone with the wind,” he writes.

In his correspondence to New Matilda, Professor Spurr alleges that New Matilda’s access to his emails was illegal.

“My lawyer informs me that accessing my email is 'a criminal offence' and the university's security service is currently looking into the matter,” he writes.

New Matilda rejects any suggestion it has been involved in any criminal offence.

This afternoon, a spokesperson for Education Minister Christopher Pyne denied the government had anything to do with the appointment of Professor Spurr.

"Professor Spurr was one of 15 subject experts commissioned by the independent review to provide input on the Australian curriculum. He was appointed on the basis of his expertise and credentials as a leading Australian academic in the field of English.

"The appointment was not made by the Government. The Minister and his office had no input into the selection of any subject expert.

"Professor Spurr’s alleged private emails are a matter for him.

"The Minister utterly rejects and finds repugnant the denigration of any minority on the basis of their sex, race, sexual orientation or beliefs."

A spokesperson for the Prime Minister referred New Matilda to Mr Pyne's office.

- Additional reporting: Amy McQuire and Max Chalmers.

newmatilda.com/2014/10/16/curriculum-reviewer-barry-spurr-mocks-abos-mussies-women-chinky-poos

[Deleted]

Well y'know Matt, it's all irony. Apparently it's fine to use irony if you're a leftie on this forum ... but I don't know how the lefturds in general will take to the good professor's ironic examples. Personally though, I can see where he's coming from, lol.

[geopol]

Who said the humanities' departments of our universities were run by raging lefties, irony or not. Professors are not politicians, but probably feel very secure in their ivory towers of right, or left wing smugness until some pesky journalist looks at thoughtless emails.......( That's my bogan bullshit for today!)

[pim]

Reading the man's emails makes you feel like you're reading the kind of posts that you'd get when NTB was in its heyday as Racist Central. And that includes your posts, Matt! Give me a real sense of déjà vu, they do!

You were obviously stung to the quick by my post about irony, Stellar! Don't feel too bad, though! In a sense you were right because irony is a dangerous game to play - particularly in the cyber universe of emails and discussion boards. If you put something out there in an email, or on the social media, it's there forever and can be dredged up, stripped of its context and made to look extremely damning for you. Not you personally, Stellar, but for the individual concerned.

Take Peter Slipper. What did they finally get him on that destroyed him? A set of stupid smutty text messages about female pudenda that were probably more appropriate to the pages of Portnoy's Complaint. In the end it didn't matter that they had been for private consumption. It didn't matter that if you ask women can they swear with hand on heart that they've never laughed in female company at a risqé and indeed smutty joke about male anatomy you'd get a response a bit like the Captain in HMS Pinafore:

Chorus: What, never?
Captain: No, never!
Chorus: What, never?
Captain: Well ... hardly ever!


Irony is for clever people and frequently you can get at a person who indulges in irony simply by taking him literally. Kevin Rudd never understood it and he suffered as a result. I think I recall a time in his latter days as PM when the debate was about the tone of the media and he told a group of journo's that he had his thought police out and they were watching and noting what the scribblers were writing. That night he faced Kerry O'Brien who took him to task over those comments and his response was one of incredulity: "Kerry, it was a joke!" and he never quite got it that the "joke", if you could call it that, was on him.

If this guy commits comments that wallow in homophobia, racism and misogyny to an email and puts it out there he's going to be sprung and his defence that it was all a bit of a joke, nothing to see here I was just indulging in a bit of lavatory humour, is going to appear very very lame.

Let's take your word for it that he was indulging in some heavy irony. As a scholar whose speciality is English and in particular the classics, he'd be more familiar with Shakespeare than you or I would be. The "Friends Romans Countrymen" speech in "Julius Caesar" comes to mind as the classic example of irony in literature. Mind you I don't really know what's "Judeo" or "Christian" about Shakespeare and I would have thought that part of the genius of Shakespeare is the way it transccends anything culture-specific and goes to what it is to be human. As for a lack of indigenous contributions to the Australian literary tradition, Kath Walker says g'day. She used to visit primary schools in Canberra and read her poems to the kids. But back to this English professor and irony. If someone in his position really thought that smutty emails which make a point of homophobia, racism and misogyny were going to remain private and would never come back to bite him then he is not a clever man and he really should give irony a wide berth.

[Deleted]

Oct 17, 2014 9:09:16 GMT 10 pim said:

Reading the man's emails makes you feel like you're reading the kind of posts that you'd get when NTB was in its heyday as Racist Central. And that includes your posts, Matt! Give me a real sense of déjà vu, they do!.

You do realize this man is one of your contemporaries?

[Deleted]

Oct 17, 2014 12:13:26 GMT 10 Gort said:

You, Matty-Boy are one of my "contemptoraries".

Are you tolerant of Islam?

[pim]

Oct 17, 2014 11:55:39 GMT 10 @muslimmatt said:

Oct 17, 2014 9:09:16 GMT 10 pim said:

Reading the man's emails makes you feel like you're reading the kind of posts that you'd get when NTB was in its heyday as Racist Central. And that includes your posts, Matt! Give me a real sense of déjà vu, they do!.

You do realize this man is one of your contemporaries?

I guess Matt believes he's making some sort of point with that one. I won't try to second guess him, I'll just leave it to Matt to clarify his "point" - or not! The board waits with bated breath ...

And so saying we segue seamlessly to Matt's next post ...

Oct 17, 2014 12:53:48 GMT 10 @muslimmatt said:

Oct 17, 2014 12:13:26 GMT 10 Gort said:

You, Matty-Boy are one of my "contemptoraries".

Are you tolerant of Islam?

You mean you have to ask? You've been a member of NTB in all its iterations for a much longer time than I have, Matt. I can't speak for APY whom I've also known as "madmonk" and as "Lucky Phil". That goes back a fair way but I suspect not as long as you go back on the various NTBs that have existed down through the years. In any case if I stack up your history of posting on Islam down through the years against APY's history of posting on Islam, I'd put it to you that APYs record is more one of responding to, exposing and opposing the bile, the bigotry, the sectarian hatred and the xenophobia that have been a feature of your posts on everything to do with Islam.

So bitter, so vicious and so full of sectarian hatred has been your characterisation of Islam down through the years that, naturally, there is widespread amused disbelief at your "Saul-on-the-road-to-Damascus" so-called "conversion". Some of us don't give a stuff and that's fair enough. Others just don't believe it. You'll recall my prediction that 2015 will see you suddenly appear on NTB - after a few months' absence as is your wont (that's spelled with an "o" and not an "a", Matt; "wont" is an old English word for "habit" and as such is related to the German word for "habit" which is "Gewöhnte" and the Dutch "gewoonte", so you have over the years been "wont" to disappear for months at a time and then to reappear with a brand new "persona" which on closer inspection is really the same old bullshit) you will reappear and announce to a bored and uninterested universe that you have come out as gay, that you've met the love of your life, that you've junked Islam and that henceforth you will devote your life to the promotion of the gay lifestyle with gay marriage as your cause célèbre.

But I predict that you'll go further than that. You'll trumpet this so-called "flirtation" with Islam as some sort of "deep cover" experience that has revealed to you the deep abiding evil that is Islam (you'll say that, not me!) and you'll come back more Muslim-bashing and Islam-hating than ever.

Oh what a tangled web you weave, Matt, when first you practise to deceive ...

[Deleted]

When I said the Shahada I was fully forgiven.

[geopol]

The god professor has been suspended and what's more has been barred from the Sydney University campus. Prepare for a hot pudding of hysteria steaming in all sorts of directions stirred by many cooks.

[jody]

Lovely to see my cousins name in the OP

[Deleted]

Oct 17, 2014 22:59:03 GMT 10 jody said:

Lovely to see my cousins name in the OP

Are you related to the professor?

[pim]

I kinda doubt that if Jody were related to Spurr she'd trumpet on social media that she's a relative of a disgraced academic who's been suspended by one of Australia's top sandstone universities for writing smutty emails that wallow in homophobia, racism and misogyny.

[Deleted]

Coincidence that he bears a passing resemblance to Brandis?
Peas in a pod...

Good riddance...to both, if we are lucky come next election...

[jody]

One of the writers is my first cousin.

[Yassir Rebob]

Oct 17, 2014 14:54:50 GMT 10 @muslimmatt said:

When I said the Shahada I was fully forgiven.

HA HA HA  HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA
HO HO HO HO HO HO HO HO HO HO HO

Stop it Matty-Boy, Stop it.
That's too funny.


Oh, and the Proff, sounds just like your type of Bloke.

[geopol]

Dr Riddle said Professor Spurr was "out of touch" with Australian English classes, but believed the email revelations could put more positive attention on Indigenous literature.


Audio: Listen to Alison Caldwell's report (AM)



"I think this is a good opportunity to talk about some the great Indigenous literature that we actually do have in this country," he said.

Macquarie University Professor Catharine Lumby, who once managed the now suspended professor, said she was not surprised to hear about the controversial emails.

In 2004, Professor Lumby was the head of the school which included the English department where Professor Spurr worked at Sydney University.

"It's not credible to me that Professor Spurr was playing a whimsical linguistic game, and in fact I want to say this: I find it very strange that a professor of poetry appears to have such scant understanding of how words live in the world, and of the power they have to affect us deeply," she told the ABC's AM program.

"I think it's shocking that he would be putting these kind of comments in emails, knowing that he may have students or colleagues who are women, like myself, people of colour, Indigenous people, because it just absolutely erodes any confidence we can have.

More evidence of the value of our beloved ABC!

[Deleted]

You were obviously stung to the quick by my post about irony, Stellar! Don't feel too bad, though! In a sense you were right because irony is a dangerous game to play - particularly in the cyber universe of emails and discussion boards. If you put something out there in an email, or on the social media, it's there forever and can be dredged up, stripped of its context and made to look extremely damning for you. Not you personally, Stellar, but for the individual concerned.

Not so much stung to the quick, Pim - more like slightly miffed that there are double standards around here. I don't believe the "jigaboos" comment was an example of irony although I can understand why you'd like to believe it is.

[Deleted]

Oct 18, 2014 21:41:01 GMT 10 Stellar said:

Oct 17, 2014 13:34:51 GMT 10 pim said:

You were obviously stung to the quick by my post about irony, Stellar! Don't feel too bad, though! In a sense you were right because irony is a dangerous game to play - particularly in the cyber universe of emails and discussion boards. If you put something out there in an email, or on the social media, it's there forever and can be dredged up, stripped of its context and made to look extremely damning for you. Not you personally, Stellar, but for the individual concerned.

Not so much stung to the quick, Pim - more like slightly miffed that there are double standards around here. I don't believe the "jigaboos" comment was an example of irony although I can understand why you'd like to believe it is.

It is called double standards.

Pim will make excuses for those on his side of the political fence, but will condemn everyone else.

[pim]

Oct 18, 2014 23:36:17 GMT 10 @muslimmatt said:

Pim will make excuses for those on his side of the political fence, but will condemn everyone else.

Liar! I distinctly recall how, during one of your "socialist" fantasies, you condemned me for being critical of Rudd Labor. You really do live in a fantasy universe. You adopt a "side", and while you indulge your fantasy-of-the-month, you embrace it uncritically, proclaim it as the Ultimate Truth and attack any sort of reasoned analysis. Your comment about me is really a description of yourself!

In any case I question the sincerity of your alleged "conversion to Islam. Next year when you're a gay marriage advocate and living in a gay relationship with the love of your life, you'll come back more Muslim-hating and Muslim-baiting than ever, and you'll describe your flirtation with Islam as a deep cover experience where you pretended to be Muslim and lived out a Muslim fantasy the better to hate Muslims.

[Deleted]

 Errrr....a pick on Matt forum...and him being Muslim and all..

[pim]

Hey Spinner, how's the war on Muslim women going? Ripped off any veils lately? Abused any Muslim women in the street? How about that trick one hears lately of throwing the contents of a take away cuppa coffee through their car window? Done any of that? Do you draw the line at kicking the prams they're pushing their babies in, or are they fair game too? Matt's speciality used to be the Hate Stare. He'd go out into some shopping mall or public place in whatever western suburbs sinkhole he infests and give Muslim women the Hate Stare. Then he'd come onto NTB and brag about it.

[Deleted]

Of course one can expect that sort of spiteful low wit mentality from those that hail Islamophobia as justification for their supporting Islamic extremist....are you and Yassir one and the same...that sort of commentary is his style..??

Hey Pimullah beheaded any infidels today.??..raped any Christan girls or boys probably more your liking..??...hows the Caliphate in the Adelaide Hills going..??...telling your neighbours where they can live so you live in peace...??....wearing your Niqab in the kiddies playground..??

Being nasty is easy shit in it...thinking about the actual problem is harder.



Clive S. Kessler

The Islamic State and ‘Religion of Peace’

As a faith, and a civilization built upon that faith, Islam over the centuries has displayed many faces, some peaceful and others not. Against the threat of violent Islam in our time, bland and disingenuous assertions of Islam’s essentially peaceful character are inadequate

Some hours after the arrest on 18 September of fifteen IS sympathizers alleged to be planning violence in Australia, the Attorney-General Senator George Brandis QC, in an interview with Raf Epstein on ABC Radio Melbourne, declared — correctly — that people of the kind arrested constitute only a “tiny minority” within a large and largely law-abiding community. He went on to reject the suggestion that violence, or support for it, is any way “intrinsic” to Islam. Then he went further. “The suggestion that mainstream Islam is anything other than a religion of peace is arrant nonsense,” he insisted.

How convincing is this claim? Can we, in the face of threatened Islamist violence, find reassurance in that assertion?

The truth is that, both as faith and a civilization built upon that faith, Islam over the centuries has displayed many faces, some peaceful and others not. Against the threat of violent Islam in our time, bland and disingenuous assertions of Islam’s essentially peaceful character are inadequate.

The dramatic emergence of the so-called Islamic State in northern Syria and western Iraq (ISIS) and, with it, the foundation, even restoration after a ninety-year hiatus, of a universal Islamic caliphate, brings modern-age militant Islam to a new level. Radical fundamentalist Islam is no longer seeking simply to infiltrate a state, or intimidate a state through terror, or to suborn and then capture and control an existing state. In the bleak borderlands of Syria and Iraq, violent Islamists are now creating a state of their own. And not just any state.

Their task, they claim, is not one of modern institutional innovation but of divinely ordained historical restoration: the restoration of Islam’s worldly sovereignty and universality. They see themselves as erecting the basic framework of a regime and overarching political structure that, they intend, will eventually encompass not only all the world’s Muslims but the entire world. Initially that will be a world of non-Muslims under Muslim governance, but ultimately a world entirely Muslim by faith and in identity and destiny.

This development poses a threat that requires an adequate and effective response.

One thing is clear — or ought to be clear, but in fact is not. No effective response can be grounded upon a misrecognition or misunderstanding of this dramatic threat and its deep, underlying sources.

One common, and all too easy, response is that offered by many Islamic leaders, both religious and political, international as well as local. One typical and widely influential such voice is that of the former Malaysian Prime Minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad. “There is no place for violence in Islam. Islam is a religion of peace and some people have wrongly interpreted the religion,” he said in August, when commenting on reports and images of ISIS atrocities and executions.

Islam, “a religion of peace”? Is this a defensible claim? Is it an adequate basis upon which to oppose the ISIS militants and to dissuade disaffected young Muslims, in Australia and elsewhere, from rallying to its call and banner? If Islam is a “religion of peace”, then what kind of peace does it imagine, aspire to and offer—to its adherents, to non-Muslims and to the world at large?

All religious traditions imagine themselves as ultimately universal — mainstream Christianity as much as radical, and also mainstream, Islam. But there is a difference. The Christian imagination was founded upon the brutal political punishment and execution of a man (one of Divine and salvational character) at the hands of a powerful state. The Christian imagination, like the core Jewish imagination from which it grew, was initially “minoritarian”—formed upon a sense of its own “outsider” character and minority status—and, born of this religiously defining act of state violence, deeply “state-distrusting”. That only changed, in the Christian case, with the conversion of Constantine, when suddenly a state-distrusting faith not only acquired a state but became one: surprisingly and paradoxically, by acquiring control of the very Roman state and empire that—in the new faith’s focal experience and formative moment—had crucified its founder Jesus and, thereafter, persecuted so many of his followers.

The case of Islam is different. Its entire founding social imagination, in the Prophet Muhammad’s earlier oppositional experiences in Mecca and then as the leader of a cohesive, religiously defined human community in Madinah, is inherently and intensely political. And that faith not only imagined and formed itself in political terms on this Madinah foundation. Its early history, in the century after the death of its founder, was as a success story, in which it brought the non-Muslim world that it encountered under its management and reorganised its governance to accord with Islamic ideas and requirements. Islam’s early history was a story of political triumph and ascendancy wherever it reached and took hold.

Like human personalities, religions too bear the stamp of their formative moments and the imprint of their defining experiences. And that formative experience provided the historical foundations of the terms in which the standard Islamic religious and social imagination has continued to operate ever since.

The mainstream or majority religious imagination in Islam has always been intensely political. More than simply political, it has been politically “majoritarian”. It assumes a world where Muslims “have the upper hand” because they are the majority, one that is capable of having and imposing its way.

So the conventional Islamic imagination is also “governmentalist”: Islam is both din and daulah, a faith and faith-based way of life and also a political order. It imagines and assumes a world organised upon Islamic principles, one that operates upon the basis of, and maintains, the Islamic social template.

Conventional Islam has always assumed that it can and must “live in the world” on its own terms; that it is entitled to do so; that, in order to realise itself and thrive, it must do so; and that it may insist upon and even, when possible, impose upon others the terms of its own thriving according to its own ultimately sacred, since divinely ordained, sociopolitical template.

Islam is—meaning that conventional Islam imagines and provides—a set of binding arrangements under which Muslims submit totally to Allah, to the transcendental overlordship of God, and where non-Muslims then submit, or accommodate themselves compliantly, to the worldly overlordship of Muslims, to Muslim rule.

When one sets aside its divine dimension, Islam is in mundane terms a religion not of peace but of domination and submission: the submission of all Muslims to Allah, and of other Muslims to those Muslims who claim to exercise the authority of Allah; and of non-Muslims to Muslims, under arrangements that are said to embody the sovereignty of Allah. That is the basis upon which Islam claims to offer social peace and, in the words of its political apologists, to be a “religion of peace”.

Of course, the champions of this vision would prefer to achieve peaceably—without resistance, by genuine or, if need be, dragooned consent—what in the end can only ever be established against serious, if not always overt, resistance. And the militants know it. Unlike the disingenuous and confused and even well-meaning apologists, they know what the achievement of that objective, a humanly “sacralised” objective of what they see as a divine imperative, entails.

Many self-declared moderates are happy to dream or hope otherwise. But they are reluctant to criticise, and openly oppose, those who take the more strenuous view of what actualising this religion of peace may involve. And, to that extent, they too are prepared to go along with the militants, their ideas and agenda. No matter how reluctantly or uncomfortably, they stand “on side” with the champions of militant Islam.

What then is the peace that this “religion of peace” offers?

Peace, yes, its proponents say to the adherents of other faiths, you can have peace and enjoy all the peace that we are prepared to offer—on our terms. But that is our peace, and those terms are our terms. In other words, there is nothing to be negotiated between us, as the majority, and you, who will live among us on our terms, in accordance with the dispensation that we provide. We can assure you that, provided you utter your consent, there is a place for you in our scheme of things—and we will tell you what that place is. And you may enjoy that peace of ours so long as you accept and agree to live within these terms, under those constraints and disabilities.

All that the members of the non-Muslim minority have to do is to say, freely or under whatever situational duress may prevail, that they accept these terms. It is enough that they say it. They don’t really have to mean it. Sincerity of affirmation is not required. It is sufficient that they say it since, once it has been said, sincerely or not, the members of the majority have them where the presuppositions of the Islamic social order require them to be placed. This was the status of the dhimmi, or “protected minorities” in classical Islamic society, under the classical dispensation and social paradigm of Islam.

If by a “religion of peace” one means a religion and an attendant worldly order of hegemonic quietude and obedience, then Islam is a religion of peace—a peace under which Muslims heed God (as they understand God, or are required by their religious authorities to understand these things) and non-Muslims obey worldly Muslim authority (as they are told and required to do).

When apologists, often well-meaning people, retreat into the stock affirmation that Islam is really “a religion of peace”, they are entering a zone of evasion and delusion. Once they offer this assertion or intended exculpation, there is a question to be answered. If Islam is a religion of peace, then where does this violence, this awful penchant for religiously justified violence, come from?

The answer invariably is that there are people who do not really understand Islam. And it is their fault. Whether out of malice or ignorance, these people offer in the name and with the supposed imprimatur of Islam a message of violence that is foreign to Islam, or what the apologists choose to regard as “properly understood Islam”, one that in their view has no roots within the religion or historical traditions of Islam.

As an explanation this is inadequate. More of that in a moment. But first, when proffered as strategy of “counter-radicalisation” among disaffected young Muslims, it is in its own terms doomed. While this approach may imagine it can handle the “ignorant” part by means of “education” and “correct Islamic messaging”, it has no answer for “malice”, for how to deal with and counter its destructive workings.

The question is not, as the apologists offering this approach always suggest, “Who is behind this misappropriation of Islam?” It is not a matter of finding a puppet-master or evil operator who, by misrepresenting the faith, is constantly manipulating good and decent people within the local Muslim community or worldwide ummah.

One must ask, and be brave enough to ask, a different question: What is it, within formal, doctrinal Islam and then, on that (perhaps selective but still identifiable) basis within the Islamic tradition and in Islamic history from which that powerful tradition is “sedimented”, that underpins and drives—and perhaps, as some see it, validates—this kind of gruesome, barbaric action: by Muslims, acting as committed Muslims, and in the name and in the “defence” or “promotion” of Islam?

The interpretation of Islam that is provided by the militants is not the only possible construction of the Islamic inheritance and agenda. And it may not be the preferred version of the moderates and the liberals and of Islam’s well-meaning apologists. But it is a version, and one that can be constructed on grounds that are indisputably internal to Islam, not some external intrusion or imposition implanted by the ignorant or the ill-intentioned.

The militant and fundamentalist versions of Islam are forms or variants that can be “sourced” and derived directly—dare one even say “authentically”?—from Koranic writ, from early formative Islam as recorded in the traditions and practices (hadith and sunnah) of the Prophet in his own lifetime and worldly career, and within historical Islam as it developed on that foundation. The militant version is a reading or construction of direct intellectual lineage and identifiable descent within historical Islam. It has its foundations—genuine, not spurious or fictive or prejudicially confected foundations—in what, from the outset in the Prophet’s own time and career, Islam is and has been in its worldly history and evolution.

Though sourced within mainstream historical Islam, not some dubious or marginal heretical tradition, it may be an extreme reading and, like all such readings of sacred traditions, it may be highly selective in its derivation and character. But, even so, it is a derivation from—and rests upon the reactivation and reanimation of something that, as much as anything else, is part of—that historic tradition.

No amount of selective doctrinaire invoking of an ideologue’s preferred version of “idealised Islam” can undo or alter or erase what, in its worldly career, “actually existing Islam” was and did, what it condoned and how, in consequence, the Islamic faith, in the course of its historical evolution, was shaped by the civilisational vehicle in which it rode through world history. Militant Islam—the Islam which now finds expression in the Islamic State movement and its caliphate—has those doctrinal roots and is built upon that process of historical elaboration, upon those identifiable historical foundations.

It must be recognised for what it is. There is no other way to understand, and still less to counter, the challenge that it represents and poses.

Grappling with this threat is now a key part of all our futures. So all of us—Muslims and non-Muslims alike—are entitled and need to ask a tough question: What is it within Islam as a faith and sacred tradition and then as a historical civilisation upon which the violent militants draw to build their malign outlook, their grim agenda and gruesome political practices? And, if we can identify there the sources of what they do and if those models are accordingly not external to Islam, how can Islam and its defenders possibly and decently disown that informing political inspiration, turn their eyes away or prevaricate about its powerful and empowering provenance?

Until people, including Muslims and notably those who hold positions of public trust and responsibility within the local Muslim community and global ummah, find the courage and basic honesty to begin facing up to this question, the serious analysis will not have begun.

Like its past, the future of Islam too may be either peaceful or violent. The challenge is to ensure that it will be peaceful. And it is Muslims — the broad majority of the Islamic faith community, and nobody else — who alone can and must make that peaceful future. That can only be achieved if mainstream Muslims of good faith, going beyond easy assertions that “Islam is a religion of peace”, publicly recognize and directly repudiate those parts of the Islamic tradition that are anything but peaceful.

How is the “unpeaceful” side of Islam to be rejected? Sacred texts cannot be changed. It is a question of how modern people choose to live with, and understand, their sacred texts. And of how they choose to live with doctrinaire scripturalist authoritarianism. Of their readiness to stand up against narrow scripturalist literalism, the monopoly upon truth that the traditional custodians of that literalism claim, and against the political zealotry that is grounded upon the assertion of that narrow, literalist monopoly.

How can this be done? The process begins not with loud accusatory cries of “Islamophobia!” but with the quiet and honest admission that, yes, there are things in the Islamic tradition that are, or should be, a source of concern to all Muslims of good faith—and if to them then also, and perhaps even more, to their non-Muslim fellow citizens.

It is that narrow, literalist authoritarianism and those worrying features of the Islamic faith tradition that modern Australian Muslims need to distance themselves from and explicitly repudiate. And they will not do so, since they will feel no need or obligation to do so, if our political leaders (such as the Attorney-General in his recently proffered and fashionable bromide) endorse and encourage them in that same intellectually lazy and politically evasive — and historically altogether simplistic — affirmation that “Islam is a religion of peace”.

It simply will not do to ask, disingenuously, “Who, us?! How could it possibly be us? Who is responsible for this deceiving misappropriation and defamation, for this scandal against Islam?” To ask who is “behind all this” and manipulating this situation is not simply inadequate. It is deceptive and dishonest. More, it amounts to wilful self-deception and delusion.

All who wish to “share the world” with others, decently and productively, including with people who have been formed within the faith and civilisation of Islam, have a right to expect that Muslims “of good faith” as fellow citizens will address this question, not dishonourably shirk or “finesse” it. Instead of trying to sweep aside the atrocities committed by Muslim terrorists and militants by not owning up to them, seriously concerned Muslims must instead recognise what it is about Islam that can motivate and condone, or be used to prompt devout adherents towards, such cruelty.

But there are grounds for hope. A young Malay columnist, Zurairi A.R., “The Many Faces of Islam”, writing last month in the Malay Mail Online saw this need and remarked,

“Ultimately, it remains to be seen if the Muslim community can subject itself to such self-scrutiny and self-reflection. Obtaining the answer is perhaps the only way Muslims can avoid more of their devotees following the path stained with blood.”

His is one voice. We need to hear many more.

Clive Kessler is Emeritus Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of New South Wales. He has been studying political Islam, in South-East Asia and globally, since the early 1960s.

So there we have it some one who knows the fundamentals of the Koran and its dark side, and those who think that those wearing the Niqab and Burqa are cloaking themselves in piety are being fooled as to what relies lies under the garb...but hey continue shouting "Islamophobia" and label people red necks and racist while in the future that ideology will turn around and bite them on the bum as the Koran tells Muslims it is OK to behead non believers and take their wives and daughters for pleasure as noble.

From little things big things grow.

[pim]

Oct 19, 2014 15:30:41 GMT 10 @spindriftaholiday said:

Of course one can expect that sort of spiteful low wit mentality from those that hail Islamophobia as justification for their supporting Islamic extremist....are you and Yassir one and the same...that sort of commentary is his style..??

Hey Pimullah beheaded any infidels today.??..raped any Christan girls or boys probably more your liking..??...hows the Caliphate in the Adelaide Hills going..??...telling your neighbours where they can live so you live in peace...??....wearing your Niqab in the kiddies playground..??

Being nasty is easy shit in it...thinking about the actual problem is harder.

No, what's even easier is slipping in a c & p and calling it "thinking about it".

But a couple of points in answer to your diatribe which admittedly is in response to my diatribe which was in response to your snarky and gratuitous little remark about "poor widdle Matt whom everybody's pickin' on" which was in response to some calumnies by Matt which were directed at me (look up "calumny", Matt, and you too Spinner. You both indulge in them) which were in response to ... who cares! Gets complicated when you go into "he said ... and then you said ..." dunnit! But context is important and if Matt goes in for slander then he shouldn't whinge if he cops a serve right back. And neither should you.

So ... back to your calumnies:

Calumny #1: that Pim supports Islamic extremists. That's a lie and you know it. You want to start a thread on whether or not I support Islamic extremism, or indeed extremism in any form? Go ahead. Mind you it might also unleash one of those board wars that usually end up causing the end of the NTB of the day but if that's what you want then on your head be it.

Calumny #2: I won't even try to summarise it! It's that second paragraph bit. I've never tried to start any religion and neither have I called for anything to be banned. I live in perfect peace and harmony with my neighbours thank you very much! As for wearing niqabs - I'm pleased you finally got the word right.

As for the c & p, Spinner if you want a discussion on whether this religion or that religion is a "religion of peace" then go ahead and talk to yourself! Religions can be whatever their adherents want them to be. As someone who was brought up and fed with pretty serious dollops of doctrinaire Catholicism I've seen the effect Christianity has had on some people in my life that makes me envy them their peace and serenity. Clearly they've found within Christianity a path to grace. I'd say Bishop Desmond Tutu is a man touched by grace. On the other hand I wonder about the apartheid oppressors who used that same Bible to justify their oppresssion of people they derided as "kaffirs". I'd argue that Martin Luther King Jr was touched by grace and yet there were others who'd put on white sheets and murder black people in the name of the God that the Rev. King invoked. I've seen the flip side of the coin and have seen people make of their Christianity something spiteful, something bigoted and something vindictive. Same with Buddhism or Hinduism. Mohandas Gandhi found within his Hinduism a path to grace and yet he was assassinated by people who had taken their Hinduism and fashioned out of it a vehicle for their sectarian hatred. I'd always believed that Buddhism was the gentlest of religions, and indeed so it can be. And yet in Sri Lanka we can see the brutal Sinhalese oppression of Tamils and they do it in the name of Buddhism. And that leaves us with Islam. For every Osama bin Laden I can point to a Gus Dur, and to the blind nihilism of the jihadis you can point to Malala Yousafzai ...

[Deleted]

If anyone is indulging in calumny its yourself Pimullah your the one who stared the broad accusations I just returned in kind.

Matt sets himself up to be a target and you guys go at him hammer and tong....if there was some humour attached it would be something to have a chuckle at, well it ain't humorous just spiteful...like who cares if the bloke chooses to be a Rastafarian Mars worshiper, and you have Yassir proclaiming a fair go for Muslim rights to wear what ever yet when the Palestinians Muslims are having the crap blown out of them costing the world billions in rebuilding Gaza ..its oh they deserve it because Hamas didn't build bomb shelters.



I have be saying here on this board and previous boards that Islam has some issues that are steeped in medievalism as Professor Kessler writes with more finess that my avg joe missives.

Your statement below merely shows you have fallen into hysteria where you need to have a bex and good lie down...

Hey rednecks! How's the War on Muslims going? Picked on many Muslim women lately? Must make you feel so ... so ... manly!!
 

Kesslers  long study of Islam and the Koran in the c&p has laid out the problems and issues with it as compared to other religions, (and he isn't the only one he cites a Muslim Malay journalist as another), that do not have the same doctrine of world dominance, and since you do not or cannot see the issues in the Koran that needs addressing by Muslim people themselves that will lead to mobs like ISIS, the Taliban etc and no matter if they destroy those Islamic groups with force and violence  they will continue to emerge with acts of violence from Koran teachings unless the Muslim people have some sort of reformation over the Koran.

Basically there is no point in furthering the discussion as the drongo fundamental left cannot look beyond their noses towards the future that allowing Islamic fundamentalism to rise will lead to greater security issues because of what is written in the Koran itself.

And that's the problem Labor has ...it didn't listen to the people when Gillard took over leadership in a rather brutal spill that has left Labor unable to recover wallowing around like girlies, and it is not listening now when people are calling for them to wake up to themselves over fundamentalist Muslims.

The Abbott government will win the next election and the consequences all the fine noble socialistic services in public health and education will go down the plug hole, inequality and prison will expand making it tough all round for the lower classes.

Dunderheads.