Intercultural contact, knowledge of Islam, and prejudice against muslims in Australia

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Abstract

This article empirically investigates the relationship between intercultural contact, factual and self-reported knowledge of Islam, and prejudice against Muslims in Australia. We propose an original measure of factual knowledge of Islam, based on the measurement of political sophistication, used alongside more established measures of intercultural contact and self-reported knowledge. The results show that possessing more knowledge about Islam and having more contact with Muslims is associated with less prejudice against Muslims regardless of whether an individual identifies or not with conservative parties (such as the Liberal–National coalition), whether they are older or younger, female or male, or more or less educated or religious. Moreover, factual knowledge and self-reported knowledge are found to have different effects on prejudice: whereas factual knowledge is associated with less prejudice, self-reported knowledge tends to be associated with more prejudice. Subsequently, we use mediation analysis to clarify the empirical and theoretical relationships between intercultural contact, factual knowledge, and prejudice against Muslims.

Introduction

In the current global environment of heightened risk of conflicts, refugee flows, and economic insecurities, intercultural relations seem under more pressure than ever before (Mansouri, 2015). Nothing captures intercultural tensions and other contemporary social anxieties, and their attendant moral panics, better than the rising fear of Islam and Muslims, no longer confined to right-wing groups (Lee et al., 2009; Bleich, 2011). This fear has been consistently on the rise since the September 11 attacks of 2001 (Vertigans, 2010). Islamophobia, the unfounded hostility towards and fear of Islam and Muslims (Allen, 2010), is therefore a crucial point of debate in many multicultural democracies.

Various factors may explain the rising hostility towards Muslims, in particular those living in the West. The political context undoubtedly matters (Said, 1978; Mansouri et al., 2015). Indeed, academic research (Werbner, 2005) and opinion polls have shown that the growing anxiety about terrorism related to the so-called ‘Islamic State’, as well as the asylum seeker crises that followed the instability in the Middle East and North Africa, amplified concerns about Muslims in Europe, North America, and Australia (see, for example, Chalabi, 2015; Hassan, 2015; Booth, 2016; Vergani & Tacchi, 2016). These concerns have triggered intergroup anxiety (Hopkins & Shook, 2017) and increased perceived threat (Vedder et al., 2016), which have been found to be associated with prejudice against Muslims, especially in contexts where Muslims are conflated with immigrants by the majority.

Out-group knowledge is one of the most consistent individual-level predictors of negative attitudes towards other religious and ethnic groups across different country contexts (see Allport, 1954; Pettigrew and Tropp, 2008; Meeusen et al., 2013; Czerwionka et al., 2015). Recent research suggests that corrective factual information about Islam may cause a positive shift in the ratings of Islam, especially among those who initially viewed Islam more negatively than they did Judaism and Christianity (Moritz, Göritz, Kühn, Brooke, Krieger, Röhlinger, & Zimmerer, 2017). In this article, we extend this line of research by looking at the relationships between prejudice against Muslims and different types of knowledge of Islam and Muslims. Out-group knowledge can be operationalized in different ways: it can be both knowing out-group members (i.e., contact) and knowing about out-group cultures and traditions. Moreover, the knowledge about out-group cultures and traditions can be perceived and/or factual. This article is the first to examine the extent to which knowledge of Islam in its various forms (factual knowledge, self-reported knowledge, and intercultural contact with Muslims) can influence prejudice against Muslims in Australia, beyond the effect of known predictors of prejudice such as education, political ideology, age, and gender.

Australia is an optimal case study to investigate this relationship because, like other multicultural democracies, it is experiencing high levels of interreligious and intercultural tension. For example, a recent Australia-wide poll conducted by the Scanlon Foundation, although reporting some overall positive findings regarding the state of multiculturalism, found anti-Muslim attitudes to be approximately five times higher than negative attitudes towards other religious groups (Markus, 2016). Other, less scholarly, opinion polls concur: the 2016 Essential Poll, for instance, suggests that almost half of Australians would support a ‘ban on Muslim immigration’ (Essential Report, 2016). Although this may be an exaggeration of the level of resistance and fear of Muslims and Islam, it echoes the findings of more rigorous academic studies that report an intensification of Islamophobic attitudes, which have polarized communities along cultural, religious and ethnic lines more deeply than ever before (Mansouri et al., 2015). Indeed, Australia’s recent history has been characterized by a heightened fear of Muslims, who are routinely associated with crime, misogyny, terrorism, and violence in general (Aslan, 2009).

Investigating the relationship between knowledge, intercultural contact, and prejudice has important theoretical as well as policy implications. The latter is of critical importance given the current sociopolitical climate of intercultural tensions, persisting levels of racism in culturally pluralist societies, and rising incidents of conflicts informed by sectarian divisions (Mansouri, 2015). Further, Australia’s history as an émigré society provides for complex sociopolitical dynamics and an increasingly diverse cultural and religious demographic profile (Bouma, 2011; Markus, 2016).

In this article, we examine the role of knowledge and intercultural contact in relation to other individual-level predictors of prejudice, and investigate theoretically driven relationships between knowledge of Islam (in terms of factual knowledge, self-reported knowledge, and intercultural contact) and negative attitudes towards Muslims. Before we present the results from a representative, cross-sectional survey conducted Australia-wide, we reflect on some methodological and procedural issues related to the operationalization and the measurement of factual knowledge in social research.

Section snippets

Discussing Islamophobia

Islamophobia identifies Islam and Muslims as the ‘minority of the worst’, characterized by the ‘behavior of the least desirable’ (Vertigans, 2010, p. 29). Although Islamophobia is not a new phenomenon, its current state is linked to the influential late-twentieth-century report ‘Islamophobia: a challenge for us all: report of the Runnymede Trust Commission on British Muslims and Islamophobia’, also known as ‘the Runnymede Report’ (Allen, 2010). This report was launched in the UK in 1997, during

Data

Six hundred and twenty-one questionnaires were collected as part of the Australian Survey of Social Attitudes. The respondents were recruited from a simple random sample from the Australian electoral roll, which contains 95 percent of the citizens 18 years and above.1 The questionnaires were collected between June and October 2016.

The sample represents the characteristics of the general Australian population. The geographical

Results

We first conducted exploratory factor analysis. The structure of the data (scree plot) clearly suggested a single-factor structure, which explained 55.86% of the variation in the original matrix (see supplementary materials for the scree plot, descriptive statistics and factor loadings using principal axis factoring). The analysis suggested that we remove from the scale the item ‘practicing Muslims are pious and therefore they are more trustworthy’ because of the low factor loading. After

Discussion and conclusion

This article reports findings from an original empirical examination of the relationship between different forms of knowledge of Islam and prejudice against Muslims in Australia. Current research shows that education is an important and consistent predictor of prejudice (Caravacho et al., 2013), with out-group knowledge consistently reported as a factor that mediates the relationship between intergroup contact and prejudice (Pettigrew & Tropp, 2008). Yet, no research to date has empirically

Limitations and future research directions

The main limitation of this study was the need to use proxy and narrow measures. Because of the limited space available in the questionnaire, it was not possible to use validated measures of knowledge and intercultural contact. These proxy measures were used for the first time in this study. Although we established a significant association between contact, knowledge, and prejudice, we acknowledge that our adopted measure of intercultural contact remains too narrow, because it does not

Funding

This work was supported by the by the Australian Research Council (ARC) (Discovery Grant number DP 130102601)

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