Few issues have captured media headlines over the past two decades like Islam and Muslims, and much of what the Australian public knows about Islam and its followers is gleaned from the mass media. Islam and the Australian News Media tackles head-on the Australian news media's treatment of Islam and Muslims. This incisive collection brings together the research and insights of academics, editors and journalists on the representation of Islam and its impact on social relations, the newsworthiness of Muslim issues and the complexities of covering Islam. Importantly, Islam and the Australian News Media also explores how Muslim communities in Australia are responding to their image in the Australian news media. This book is a must-read for all those interested in the relationship between media and society.

Why did a nice middle class Australian Muslim boy want to become a soldier for Islam? Irfan Yusuf tells his story of growing up Muslim in the suburbs.

In Muslim Integration: Pluralism and Multiculturalism in New Zealand and Australia, contributors from a range of backgrounds investigate the state of Muslim integration in New Zealand and Australia. The growing presence of a Muslim minority has invited these two Pacific settler states to closely consider the question of Muslim integration into Western society. This collection discusses the future of religio-cultural pluralism, multicultural policies, and the growing demands for greater emphasis on assimilation. Contributors examine issues such as parallel societies, Islamophobia, radicalization, tolerance, adaptation and mutual adjustment, legal pluralism, the role of mosque architecture, and media depictions of Muslims are examined. Recommended for scholars of anthropology, religious studies, sociology, and political science.

With Islamophobia on the rise in the US since 9/11, Muslims remain the most misunderstood people in American society. Taking as its point of departure the question of the compatibility of Islam and democracy, this book examines Muslims’ sense of belonging in American society. Based on extensive interview data across seven states in the US, the author explores the question of what it means to be American or un-American amongst Muslims, offering insights into common views of community, culture, and wider society. Through a combination of interviewees’ responses and discourse analysis of print media, Muslim Americans also raises the question of whether media coverage of the issue might itself be considered ‘un-American’. An empirically grounded study of race and faith-based relations, this book undertakes a rigorous questioning of what it means to be American in the contemporary US. As such, it will appeal to scholars of sociology and political science with interests in race, ethnicity, religion and national identity.

This book fills a gap in our knowledge about the activities of Western supporters and members of Islamic State by examining the experience of their Australian cohort. More than 200 Australian men, women and children travelled to Syria and Iraq to fight with Islamist groups and to help establish an Islamic State by force. Dozens more assisted Islamic State by supporting those overseas or by planning or carrying out terrorist attacks in Australia. For all that, little is publicly known about the impact of the Syrian conflict on Australia’s radical Islamists. This book provides a well-researched examination of how and why so many Australians travelled to fight for or otherwise supported Islamic State. From the failed attempt to bring down an Etihad passenger plane en route from Sydney to Abu Dhabi, to showing their children holding the heads of Syrian soldiers, Australians were prominent in carrying out Islamic State’s directions. Using a range of Australian and foreign court records, social and mainstream media content, this book provides the first detailed look at who these people were, what tasks they carried out, how they came to adopt this radical view of Islam and what long-term legal and security implications are likely to result from their actions. This book will be of interest to students of terrorism, political Islam and security studies.

While the themes of radicalization and Islamophobia have been broadly addressed by academia, to date there has been little investigation of the crosspollination between the two. Is Islamophobia a significant catalyst or influence on radicalization and recruitment? How do radicalization and Islamophobia interact, operate, feed one another, and ultimately pull societies toward polar extremes in domestic and foreign policy? The wide-ranging and global contributions collected here explore these questions through perspectives grounded in sociology, political theory, psychology, and religion. The volume provides an urgently needed and timely examination of the root causes of both radicalization and Islamophobia; the cultural construction and consumption of radical and Islamophobic discourses; the local and global contexts that fertilize these extreme stances; and, finally, the everyday Muslim in the shadow of these opposing but equally vociferous forces.

This book offers an East-West comparative analysis of mediatised terrorism. This is the first country-specific analysis of the mediatisation of terrorism, with Pakistan and Australia representing the two worlds, respectively. Caught up in the ‘9/11 effect’, Australia is known for its anti-terror ‘hyper-legislation’, despite the implausible nature of the threat. In contrast, Pakistan is plagued by terrorism, yet the military establishment favours a duplicitous policy of fighting militant groups selectively. To understand how the two diverse cultural sites, with their very different experiences of terrorism, make sense of this unpredictable threat, the book uses Beck’s World Risk Society theory as a conceptual framework to examine the production and construction of news narratives around the risk of terrorism in both countries through textual analysis of local news stories and in-depth interviews with Australian and Pakistani journalists. Narratives about ‘global terrorism’ are mostly ‘Western’, with fear of its impact on ‘Western’ democracy and civilisation. This book aims to fill the gap and present a nuanced understanding of global terrorism by examining the characteristics of the phenomenon in a Western as well as an Eastern location and the ways in which the risk of terrorism is being played out in the two worlds. This book will be of much interest to students of critical terrorism studies, media studies, Asia-Pacific politics, and International Relations.