Susan Carland: ‘ISIS are no friend to Muslim

Susan Carland: ‘ISIS are no friend to Muslim

The Muslim sociologist and academic appeared on Ten’s Studio 10 this morning, discussing her pledge to donate $1 to children’s charity Unicef for every hateful tweet she receives.

“It was just something I wanted to do to live what I believe, I guess, but I’m already well past $1000 now,” she told the panel.

She said one Twitter user spent the morning sending her photos of corpses.

“It can be pretty vile,” she admitted.

But the conversation soon shifted to Friday’s co-ordinated massacre in Paris, where at least 129 were killed across six attack sites in the French capital. Ms Carland, who converted to Islam at the age of 19, shut down the misguided belief that the 480,000 Australians of the Muslim faith were in any way a “friend” of IS.

“ISIS are no friend to Muslim, by any stretch of the imagination, and so it’s really important that we never fall into the trap of thinking this is about Muslims against other people or anything like this,” Ms Carland said.

“This is about a very, very problematic group that is trying to set themselves up against the rest of the world, and to say that all Muslims are with them, nothing could be further from the truth.”

The former Muslim Australian of the Year, who is who is married to The Project co-host Waleed Aly, delivered a heartfelt message to Australians, imploring society to stick together and not lay blame in times of terror.

“Society tearing itself apart is actually one of the intended outcomes of terrorist attacks done by ISIS; this is what they want. ISIS have openly spoken about wanting to eliminate the grey area; they want a world that is black and white, that is us and them, that is good and evil as far as they define it,” she said.

“A flourishing, pluralistic society is the last thing ISIS want to see and so, in times like this, we all have to make the choice about whether we retreat into fear and anger and blaming or whether we actively choose to come together and say we will not allow this to pull us apart because that is part of the goal. It is a political tactic that is part of their approach and we can never let those be the people who define us as individuals or as a community.

Completing her PHD thesis on Muslim feminists, Ms Carland said she found it “ironic” when people tried to tell her what she believed about Islam and sexism.

“What I would say is that, while certainly there are Muslim women around the world in horrifically oppressive situations — I would never want to deny that, like in any community, sexism exists — so many Muslim woman and the woman that I interviewed for my PHD would say that is a perversion of what Islam brings. They feel that Islam is something they can use to actually achieve the rights they deserve and we shouldn’t be throwing the baby out with the bath water,” she said.

Ms Carland has encountered ugliness and hatred on a daily basis as a result of her faith, but said she refused to let the haters define her, despite the backlash many Muslims had encountered as a result of the acts of terror committed by IS.

“You’re always going to have awful people doing crazy things in the name of any religion or any ideology and I can’t let them define.