Religion

The Anglican Church worldwide is currently facing the gravest threat ever to its international unity. Where the vitriolic debates over the ordination of women failed to shatter the Anglican Communion, the ordination of an openly gay bishop in the US in late 2003 may well succeed. Conservative bishops have demanded that the American Episcopal (Anglican) Church’s leaders be disciplined. If the Archbishop of Canterbury does not oblige once an international report has been tabled later this year, the break-up of the Anglican Communion is highly probable.

Iran’s Islamic revolution in 1979, the disintegration and demise of the Soviet Empire a decade later, and the attacks in New York and Washington in 2001 have all heightened interest in ‘understanding’ Islam in the West. The Iranian Revolution was very much a revolution of the ‘countryside’ against the glitter, domination and corrupt politics of the ‘metropolis’. Its success created an enormous interest in Islam. For the West, the demise of the USSR was more than the demise of what Ronald Reagan had dubbed an ‘Evil Empire’; it removed the ‘enemy’ whose containment had dominated the politics of the Cold War in the US and its European allies. Its historical significance was described by the American political scientist Francis Fukayama in his influential essay ‘The End of History’. The search was on for the enemies of international capitalism and liberal democracy. A few years later, in an equally influential and widely read work, The Clash of Civilizations (1993), Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington identified Islam as one of the potential enemies of Western civilisation.

With the growing politics of fear focused on Islam, and the pervasive ‘Othering’ of Muslims both nationally and internationally, this book on the everyday lives, beliefs, and practices of Australian Muslims is an important social antidote. Abdullah Saeed, a leading Australian Muslim scholar of Islam, provides us with a readily accessible book that introduces the basics about the religion of Islam, and a short social and cultural history of Muslims in Australia. It explores Islamic religious organisations and leadership in Australia, the diversity of Muslim communities, common stereotypes and misunderstandings about Islam as well as the difficulties and discrimination Muslims have experienced in Australia. This is a clear, concise, culturally sensitive and diplomatic little book for a general readership.

Companions may be in short supply in the world of the flesh, but in the print media there are many on offer. Cambridge University Press has just released its seventh ‘Companion to Religion’, and another nine are waiting in line. If none of these appeals, there are a host of companions from other publishing houses offering their services. Companions, it seems, are now adjudged to be the suitable mode for bringing the latest in religious scholarship to a wider readership. ‘Handbooks’ are perhaps too simple; ‘Essays’ too boutique: both have attempted to package information in theology, religion and biblical studies.

This book is a study of Muslims’ perceptions of religion and society. Among the related aspects it explores are self-image and gender relations in Islam. The study is a survey-type questionnaire, carried out in four Muslim countries: Indonesia, Pakistan, Egypt and Kazakhstan. The book comprises nine chapters, including a comprehensive Introduction that relates the aims of the study to a variety of literature on Islam, ranging from the fourteenth-century work al-Muqaddima, of Ibn Khaldun, to contemporary writings by influential Islamologists such as Fazlur Rahman and Muhammad Arkoun. The author is clearly well-versed in a wide-ranging literature on Islam. In this respect, the book is impressive in its intellectual scope.

When the appointment of Archbishop Hollingworth as governor-general was announced last year, some critics argued that the separation of church and state was placed at risk. This objection was not heard when Pastor Doug Nicholls was appointed governor of South Australia in 1976, nor when Davis McCaughey, a Uniting Church minister, became governor of Victoria in 1986. Was the governor-generalship of Australia seen as being in a league of its own, or did the title ‘Archbishop’ ring alarm bells? And when the new governor-general became embroiled in the controversy over the church’s response to cases of child abuse, this secularist undercurrent bubbled to the surface again. I was struck by the strain of virulent anti-clericalism that ran through much of the talk-back commentary. Somehow the Anglican Church seemed easily identified in the popular imagination as part of the Establishment – remote, authoritarian and out of date.

It wasn’t long before myths and legends grew up around the story of St Francis of Assisi. James Cowan is right to suggest that this process began before Francis died and that Francis himself allowed or willed it to happen. He may even have encouraged it: ‘Francis endeavoured to make a metaphor out of his own life.’

The huge changes that have occurred in Australia in the space of a century were reflected in the recent centenary of Federation celebrations in Melbourne. They were evident, for example, in the repeated acknowledgment of Aboriginal Australians and in the selection of a young female Asian-Australian to speak on behalf of the future.

This lengthy analysis of Catholics and the anti-Communist struggle in Australia during the 1950s uncovers important and previously unreleased primary sources. In line with the author’s background as a Catholic Redemptorist priest, this particularly applies to material from Australian church archives and those of the Vatican, and from the files of B.A. Santamaria’s anti-Communist ‘Movement’. At the time, Santamaria’s ‘crusade’ against the atheistic and allegedly revolutionary Communist Party was strongly supported by the Redemptorist order, especially in Victoria.