Pressured to ‘confess’ beliefs
MELBOURNEBASED academic Dr Yassir Morsi says he has been under continual pressure in Australia to ‘‘confess’’ his Muslim beliefs and reveal if he is a ‘‘moderate’’.
Dr Morsi is a lecturer in the politics and philosophy department at La Trobe University and is the 2017 Visiting Scholar of the Centre for Global Migrations at the University of Otago.
He gave a free public lecture yesterday, hosted by the centre, to about 50 people at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery, on Muslims ‘‘belonging’’ and ‘‘becoming’’.
Dr Morsi was born in the United Kingdom, of Egyptian parents, and spent half his life there before migrating to Australia.
His father had sought to shift to Australia ‘‘to escape the racism’’.
‘‘I’m not sure he did his research,’’ Dr Morsi said.
Much of his academic work and his life in Australia consisted of ‘‘asking tough questions and having no answers’’, he said with a smile.
In Australia he had come under several pressures, including to ‘‘confess’’ his religious beliefs, and many Muslims felt they had to ‘‘wear a moderate mask’’ to survive, Dr Morsi said.
The author of a recent book, Radical Skin, Moderate Masks, Dr Morsi said he felt ‘‘a sense of incompleteness’’, was uncomfortable with the media often seeking brief ‘‘sound bites’’ on complex topics and would like to shift the dialogue about ‘‘Muslims’’ on to more productive ground.
He found much of the discussion about Muslims in Australia to be confronting and heavily focused on a ‘‘binary’’ approach in which Muslims were asked whether they were ‘‘moderate’’ or ‘‘radical’’.
Some of the assumptions of a ‘‘White Australia’’ orthodoxy lay behind a constant questioning of the beliefs and values of Muslims.
In a moving and sometimes witty talk, Dr Morsi said that he had been approached by a group that was organising a proposed livein reality television programme involving Muslims of various kinds, which would be in effect an ‘‘Islamic Big Brother’’. Dr Morsi will also give a talk at the University of Otago’s 52nd annual foreign policy school, which starts tonight.
This theme of this year’s school is ‘‘Open and Closed Borders: the Geopolitics of Migration’’.