Should Muslims shake hands with politicians, or not engage at all?

Two weeks after receiving the vile “Christchurch 2.0” terror threat on its opening day, the Australian Islamic House (AIH) in southwest Sydney faced a second public challenge — this time, from the Muslim community.

In response to the threat, and in the shadow of a looming election, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese met with mosque management to address the urgent need for measures to protect congregants.

The meeting ended with the Prime Minister’s Office taking the customary choreographed photo of Albanese with AIH representatives doing the smile and handshake, then posting on social media for proof Labor’s finger is on the community pulse.

The visit was against the backdrop of a string of assaults, a shooting, and a general rise in anti-Muslim sentiment. Two more mosques have received the Christchurch threat.

Islamophobia Register Australia has reported a 568% increase in anti-Muslim incidents since October 7, 2023, and aside from one overworked Muslim academic heading a (so far) unimpactful anti-Islamophobia envoy, little is being done to fight the surge in assaults.

“Every Australian has the right to worship openly and proudly,” the prime minister posted. But for the rest of southwest Sydney’s Muslim community, the timing of Albanese’s visit was lamentable. Two days earlier, a stretch of ceasefire-defying airstrikes ordered by Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu killed 400 Gazans, mostly women and children. At the time of writing, 600 more have been killed.

That Muslim leaders could pose with a smiling Albanese was seen by a livid Muslim community as complicity with silence on the killing of Palestinians. The moment also breached a quiet but unmistakable shift over the last year where, for Muslims, the only response to genocide has been complete disengagement.

This movement gained momentum after October 7, 2023; some trace it to the Islamic Council of Victoria (ICV) and the Board of Imams rejecting Iftar invitations from the Victorian government last year. But figures like Nour Haydar and Antoinette Lattouf — who was dismissed by the ABC for sharing a Human Rights Watch post on Instagram alleging Israel’s use of starvation as a weapon of war — have since fortified it in the community psyche. Senator Fatima Payman famously crossed the floor and voted against her party. Countless others have quietly done the same in their own workplaces.

Each of these examples was brave, personally costly, and importantly, raised awareness about the selective coverage surrounding Islamophobia and the Palestinian struggle. They became cultural moments to remind people that refusing to engage is power.

But the thing about power is: it has to be a choice. Behind all of these battles is the larger war for self-determination, which, in essence, is about the right to be heard however and whenever we choose.

This is why I winced reading comments under the mosque’s Instagram post. Voices I respect — lawyers, writers, activists and artists — simply writing “shame”. Some went further: “Rage is running in my veins”.  It was uncomfortable, but to the commenters, it was supposed to be.

I wondered if these comments signalled the dangerous morphing from political choice into dogma.

When disengagement is used to delegitimise government rituals complicit in harming us, it can be a useful tool. When it begins to silence other Muslims for choosing to engage differently, it starts to mirror the very state silencing it claims to resist.

The idea of state silencing is explored in Arun Kundnani’s The Muslims Are Comingwhere he outlines how political activism and criticism of foreign policy are often treated as precursors of extremism. This framing explains the widespread and ongoing political muting of Muslims since 9/11.

We can see examples of this silencing around the globe. Lattouf’s fight was precisely about this. In the US, Columbia and Tufts University students Mahmoud Khalil and Rumeysa Öztürk face possible deportation for their pro-Palestine activism on campus. In Palestine itself, we’ve seen an entire people silenced for generations, with devastating consequences.

It turns out removing legitimate avenues for expressing discontent doesn’t make discontent go away, it creates it.

Herein lies a contradiction in the fight for self-determination and the willingness to shame those who engage with politicians while doing it. We fight for the right to use our voice and shame those who fall out of line with how we’re supposed to do it.

But for many, anger at Israel’s treatment of Gazans has made an open-door policy untenable. Liberal MP Jason Wood was met with jeers from the Afghan community during a large Eid prayer after pledging $6.5 million for a new mosque if Peter Dutton becomes leader. Muslim academic Abdulah Hamimi described anger in the hall as palpable.

Local Palestinian activists, Stand For Palestine, are urging followers to “interrupt, disrupt and expose” pro-Israel politicians attempting to enter mosques to preach their own policies during the election in what looks like an orchestrated campaign.

Mukhlis Mah, a member of the group, told the ABC that such appearances “cheapen the Muslim community” because it’s a “very shallow interaction”.

Immigration Minister Tony Burke was scheduled to speak at a Ramadan prayer event in Lakemba, but withdrew after a tip-off from AFP agents that activists intended to disrupt proceedings.

Education Minister Jason Clare later claimed that Stand For Palestine’s posts amounted to a threat, and that’s “not how democracy is done in Australia.”

These reactions reveal the continued trend of underestimating the Muslim community’s anger and the state’s propensity for policing it.

Combine this with mounting Gazan deaths, and my all-approaches-are-equal position becomes difficult to defend. Extending goodwill to politicians who support structures that continue genocide isn’t just awkward. To many, it feels like a death sentence.

Some groups, like Muslim Votes Matter, aim to remedy this structural imbalance by mobilising Muslim votes, which can be crucial in certain seats. They advocate for political engagement on one’s own, informed terms. Both Burke and Clare face challenges from independents endorsed by The Muslim Vote (MVM) in their safe Western Sydney seats, seats that boast the largest Muslim constituencies in the country. But even MVM has detractors within the Muslim community.

Speaking to Hamimi in a recent Boys In The Cave podcast, Islamophobia scholar Dr Yassir Morsi criticised MVM for ignoring “the deeper architecture of state power”, arguing that it creates “the illusion that if we’re close to the spheres of influence, we can somehow shape the system”. This, he says, conceals the real sources of violence. The democratic process, he feels, is an apparatus designed not to serve Muslims.

So while power is about choice, recent events show that to many, it’s not necessarily about personal choice. For groups like Stand For Palestine, putting individual autonomy aside in favour of uniting against overarching structures represents the kind of self-governance it wants for Palestine. How to combat those structures and reconcile this pluralism in approach is still unclear.

Nasser Mashni, president of the Australian Palestine Advocacy Network, spoke of grappling with this very issue at an Iftar during Ramadan recently by pointing to his shifting relationship with Albanese. “I used to call him Albo,” he said. “We’d fist-bump. He’d say, ‘Hey, it’s the Nassman!’” Now, he said, “I call him Mr Prime Minister. I ask, ‘What are you doing to end the genocide in Gaza?’”

While, for now, the deeper structures remain untouched, his message offered a compromise on how to engage with power while retaining our own, personally and collectively.

The door can stay open, but the performance must end.

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