Swarthy bearded men or women in headscarves are a rare sight on Australian television screens — until tragedies such as the shooting of Curtis Cheng last Friday.
Usually, Sydney doctor Jamal Rifi is among the first to speak out. “It is alien,” he says of Cheng’s murder. “Totally against the teachings of Islam.”
Rifi has delivered that message all week across television and radio, and in an op-ed in Sydney’s Daily Telegraph calling on Muslim parents to take ownership of the problem.
But inside Australia’s diverse Muslim communities, how to respond to violence committed in the name of Islam is the source of deep disagreement, usually private, but this week spilling out into what some called “personal attacks and character assassination”.
Veteran Muslim educator Silma Ihram is another familiar face on television after counter-terrorism raids, or after a young Australian slips into Iraq or Syria.
She is weary of continually having to assert that Australians Muslims condemn groups such as Isis. “It’s like you’re a parent. You’re constantly reassuring that the Muslim community is not with them. I’ve said it earlier this year, and the year before that, and the year before that,” she says.
“I understand the detractors in the community, those who get frustrated and say, when is this going to end?”
Community advocates such as Lydia Shelly, a lawyer, speak of “the bind” they face when dealing with media.
“When you see tragedies and violence committed in the name of your religion, you have a personal obligation to respond. Your religion doesn’t allow you to do these types of thing, and you have to clarify that,” she says.
“But at the same time, we don’t necessarily want our internal politics out there for public consumption. And we don’t want to see any further police responses or ineffective policies that target our community.”
One grievance is that the media, distant from many Muslim communities, sometimes does not understand where influence or expertise lies.
Comedian Nazeem Hussein drew laughs when he revealed how a journalist had called him in the hours after Friday’s incident, asking “off the record” if he knew the gunman.
More seriously, Yassir Morsi, a critical race theorist from the University of South Australia, asks: “What has a local imam, a doctor, a principal, got to do with talking about the excesses of war that have come out of Syria?
“All of a sudden they are expected to be experts on psychology, sociology, politics, youth culture, international relations, just because they’re Muslim.
“Get Muslims on,” he says, “But those who have some kind of expertise, or who speak from relevant experience. Asking them to give an insight into a collective condition is problematic. It reaffirms the issue lays solely within the community.”
Writer and researcher Randa Abdel-Fattah agrees: “There’s a political naivety in the way we respond to this. People genuinely feel that if you tell the wider public there’s a problem and we’re part of the solution, that will reassure them that we’re not a problem community.”
Condemning Isis is the “easiest thing to do”, Morsi says. Harder is to challenge damaging narratives around Islam in Australia, which alienate some young Muslims, and play into extremist propaganda that they will never find a home or voice here.
“The idea that radicalisation results from bad mosques, bad people, bad religion, is how Islamophobia operates,” Morsi says.
“It forecloses political and historical complexities that create today’s violence. Islamophobia skews the fight against radicalisation: we end up chasing this immoral figure more than addressing the conditions that created it,” he says.
For Rifi, discussions such as this are overly theoretical – important, but secondary in matters of life and death.
“We need to get our priorities right. Islamophobia does exist, but Islamophobes are not killing our young boys and girls. They’re probably making them angry, but they’re not killing them,” he says.
“What’s killing them is the preachers of hate that are brainwashing our kids and infecting their thoughts with this idea that it is permissible by God to kill innocents.
“This ideology of hate, that should be the priority of our community to combat.”
Frustration with Rifi’s public stand boiled over on social media this week. Memes and messages circulated that criticised, sometimes harshly, the 2015 Australian Father of the Year.
Facebook and Twitter have been as disruptive to the social hierarchies of Muslim communities as any other. A younger generation, raised in the glare of a global “war on terror”, favour a more challenging approach, and can speak for themselves.
Rifi has been “surprised” by the controversy. “I reckon some people in my community, they don’t want us to send this message, they want our young people to feel almost always insular, and to feel insecure, not to interact or integrate,” he says.
Ihram acknowledges “the bigger picture” behind radical Islam-inspired violence, including debates over Australian foreign policy, but says: “It still doesn’t excuse the decision of a 15-year-old boy to go and commit murder. The fact these things are happening has gone beyond that.
“Recognising [Islamophobia] or not recognising it will not change the government involvement in the community at the moment, nor will it stop the recruiters from utilising the community’s disaffection,” she says.
“Before a crisis like this happens, a lot of us have been trying to get foothold in the media saying that not addressing the Syrian problem, sending warplanes and bombs into Iraq and Syria, are going to cause more problems.
“But now is not the time to say that,” she says. “Now is the time to say, OK, we can’t change government decisions at the moment, what we have to do is to ask: how can we prevent more 15-year-old kids being attracted to committing horrific crimes?”
Maha Abdo has watched the sometimes unruly discussion this week. The longtime head of the Muslim Women’s Association says the debate “is a healthy one, a learning process for the community”.
“You have some who don’t want to continue to be justifying or apologetic,” she says. “And those who feel the need to get out there and recognise that there are millions of Australians who want to hear that voice, and that’s OK. There’s room for both voices.
“I’m an optimist, and this week I’ve seen a few thorns. But soon the roses are going to come out.”