Conclusion

The purpose of this volume has been to provide a much-needed update on the field of Islamic studies in Australia, which has come a long way since the pioneering work of both Riaz Hassan (see Chapter 2) and Gary Bouma (see Chapter 3), to whom we are indebted. In doing so, we seek to show that there is much more to Australian Muslim communities than the narrative that Muslims are predominantly terrorists in waiting, which has dominated both
the political and media discourse in this country since the advent of 9/11 (see Abdel-Fattah, 2020; Akbarzadeh and Smith, 2005). This is not to say that the threat of terrorism is not real or that Islamophobia is not an ongoing challenge. As many chapters in this volume show, these issues persist, and the matter of Islamophobia remains a serious problem. Indeed, the Albanese Labor government recently appointed Aftab Malik to the role of Islamophobia
Envoy1 (Evans, 2024b) on account of a sharp increase in animosity following the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, and the subsequent muscular Israeli response (BBC News, 2025; The Guardian, 2025); the Islamophobia Register Australia (2024) found a 13-fold increase of Islamophobic incidents one month later, and a 39-fold increase in incidents reported on university campuses.