On the first day of Eid, the Lebanese Muslim Association (LMA) faced intense criticism from across the Muslim community for inviting Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke to attend Eid prayers.               

The backlash did not emerge in a vacuum.

It came in the aftermath of two years of genocide in Gaza, and at a moment in time when Israel, backed by the United States, is escalating attacks on Lebanon as part of its war with Iran, displacing more than a million people, killing over a thousand civilians, and injuring thousands more. It is worth noting that Australia has been among the first countries to publicly support US-Israel military attack on Iran.

At the mosque, some attendees confronted the two politicians directly, calling them “genocide supporters” and chanting “get them out” and “go home”. Two individuals were forcibly removed by police outside their own mosque. The LMA’s reflection statement, issued the following day after significant backlash, claimed that the decision to invite Albanese and Burke was

made deliberately … to ensure that those in positions of power were confronted directly with the reality of what our community is feeling. This includes the ongoing devastation in Gaza, the current was in Lebanon, the rise in Islamophobia, and the broader failure of government policy to reflect the concerns of Muslim Australians. (my emphasis)

However, Albanese later claimed that the “hecklers” were protesting his government’s recent ban on Hizb ut-Tahrir, which he designated as an extremist Islamic organisation. This comment not only dismissed and distorted the community’s grief, by deploying a familiar Islamophobic trope that frames Muslim political dissent through security terms, but also exposed the LMA’s ineffective strategy of engaging politicians in order to have them “confronted” by the community’s disappointment in Australia’s leadership and its ongoing grief.

The LMA’s invitation, and the intense criticism it received, reveal that, despite a shared sense of collective grief, the Australian Muslim community currently lacks a unified strategy for interacting with a political system that continues to marginalises it. 

What does Muslim political engagement look like?

I’m a researcher who has analysed Australian Muslim community organisations’ understandings of, and responses to, Islamophobia in the period leading up to the Christchurch massacre and the War on Gaza. Before the latter, most Muslim community organisations I interviewed understood political advocacy as maintaining “good” relationships with politicians to enable lobbying on behalf of Australian Muslims. Conventional engagement with those in power, often confined to the state’s terms of engagement guided by the language of “social cohesion”, was seen as both an asset and a goal based on the belief that it ensured Muslim voices were heard and their needs acknowledged.

However, as I argue in my recent book, when the War on Gaza erupted and Australia made clear where it stood, these 20+ years of relationship-building appeared to be in vain. Many Muslims felt reduced to second-class citizens: their voices, needs, and grief dismissed or actively policed in order to protect Zionists feelings.

Muslims’ feelings of being betrayed, particularly from the Labor Party, historically the preferred party among many of us, led to coordinated boycotts in 2024 by a majority of associations and organisations. Ramadan iftars, long used as spaces to strengthen relationships with political figures, became sites to assert Muslims’ political rejection of Australia’s foreign politics. Many realised that years of  cultivating  “good” relationships with politicians and breaking bread over iftar dinners were never enough to humanise Muslims in the eyes of those in power, particularly when the state allyship with perpetrators of injustice requires Muslims’ dehumanisation to make way for geo-political dominance.

At the backdrop of this realisation, new forms of political mobilisation emerged. Initiatives such as Muslim Votes Matter (MVM) and The Muslim Vote (TMV) sought to break down the political landscape for everyday Australian Muslims adopting political accountability as its guiding strategy by developing public “scorecards” and candidate assessments, compiling politicians’ records and positions on Palestine to inform voters and apply pressure. MVM, particularly, produced electorate-specific “how-to-vote” guides and strategically directed preferences in marginal seats with significant Muslim populations, sometimes placing Labor candidates below their opponents to signal electoral consequences for their stance on Gaza.

This marked a significant shift from seeking access to politicians, to holding them publicly accountable and disciplining them electorally.

Many Muslims were hopeful that renewed ways of political engagement might be underway.

The LMA’s invitation to Albanese and Burke, seating them in a position of prominence where the Imam normally sits, coupled with the forceful removal of protesting Muslims from their own mosque, proves otherwise.

Albanese’s remarks, framing the hecklers as reacting to the banning of an “extremist” organisation, not only demonstrated the ineffectiveness of such forms of engagement, but further insulted the community’s grief. They signalled a lack of empathy, awareness and accountability regarding the impact of Australia’s political positions on its Muslim population.

This all come on top of mounting frustration with government inaction toward rising Islamophobia and the persistence of double standards in responding to hate affecting communities, particularly when comparing the government’s response to the Bondi Beach attack on Jews in 2026 with its inaction following the Christchurch massacre of Muslims in 2019, carried out by an Australian terrorist.

Moreover, despite documented increases in anti-Muslim incidents, several anti-Muslim remarks by senators and repeated calls for action by the Muslim Communities and the Australian Human Rights Commission; the government has shown no real nor tangible interest in protecting Muslims in Australia. This stands in contrast to the speed and scale of legislative responses following the Bondi Beach attack, including rejecting a motion to comate raising Islamophobia in what has been criticised as cherry-picking which lives are more valuable than others. In effect, in order to protect one group, the Australian government is marginalising another.

Nonetheless, LMA statement on the same day defending its decision to reengage with politicians after boycotts over its support for the War on Gaza, stripped bare the conundrum facing Australian Muslims and exposes their vulnerability within a system that doesn’t see them as equal:

Walking away from engagement has not advanced our community. Nor has changed outcomes overseas. It has not reduced Islamophobia here and it has not strengthened our ability to influence decisions that affect us.

The LMA further claims that

Choosing to engage with elected leadership of this country is not a betrayal of those concerns. It is how we give them a voice.

Yet decades of conventional models of Muslim political engagement have failed to give Australian Muslims meaningful voice to power when put to the test. Boycotts, too, have proven limited.

Where to from here?

As my research has shown, fragmentation and the existence of diverse, often discordant, views within and across Muslim communities is not new and are not unique to Muslims. What is distinct in this moment, however, is that Australian Muslims are unified through collective grief, deep disappointment in the government domestic and foreign policy on issues concerning Muslims and are currently facing a renewed surge in Islamophobia levels. Yet, they remain without a shared vision of what political engagement should look like.

While older approaches of engagements are being rejected, new ones are still not fully comprehended, consolidated or coordinated. There is no clear consensus on what political engagement should look like, particularly when dealing with the systems that have enabled, or endorsed, the very conditions producing Muslims’ grief.

Without meaningful internal consultations, coordinated strategies and collective direction, efforts to advocate on behalf of Australian Muslims will remain fragmented and ineffective, particularly in a climate of rising Islamophobia shaped, and at times enabled, by the very political system Muslim communities are seeking to engage with.

Image: Eid Prayer at Lakemba Mosque (Wikimedia Commons)