Citation: Carland, Susan. 2023. ‘We’re Islam in Their Eyes’: Using an Interpellation Framework to Understand Why Being a Woman Matters When Countering Islamophobia. Religions 14: 654. https://doi.org/10.3390/ rel14050654 Academic Editor: Kathy Winings Received: 14 March 2023 Revised: 9 May 2023 Accepted: 9 May 2023 Published: 15 May 2023 Copyright: © 2023 by the author. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/). religions Article ‘We’re Islam in Their Eyes’: Using an Interpellation Framework to Understand Why Being a Woman Matters When Countering Islamophobia Susan Carland School of Social Sciences, Monash University, Melbourne 3800, Australia; susan.carland@monash.edu Abstract: Australian Muslim women are far more likely to be the target of Islamophobic attacks than men, and common narratives often paint Muslim women merely as victims of Islamophobia. This article takes a new approach and considers how Muslim women may counter Islamophobia and the various audiences they must contend with in their work. Using de Koning’s interpellation framework, this research investigates why Australian Muslim women believe gender matters in public countering Islamophobia work and proposes new developments to the framework based on the way Australian Muslim women must mediate the ascriptions of both non-Muslims and Muslim men. This research draws on in-depth interviews with Sunni, Shi’i, and Ahmadiyya women from around Australia who are active in public countering Islamophobia education initiatives. Keywords: Islamophobia; gender; Muslim women; Islam; social cohesion; interpellation; education; public religion 1. Introduction Muslims pre-date the arrival of the British and Christianity in Australia by hundreds of years (Ganter 2008; Stephenson 2010), making Muslims, as Ganter calls them, “[Australia’s] most long-standing non-indigenous segment” (Ganter 2008, p. 481). Muslims have also been recorded in every Australian census since records were first kept in 1911 (Census of the Commonwealth of Australia 1911). Yet, despite this long and foundational history, Muslims are viewed with suspicion, contempt, and as “the Other” in Australia (Dunn et al. 2007; Kabir 2005; Cherney and Murphy 2015). They are also viewed as being greater in number than they are. Despite just 3.2% of the Australian population being Muslim— around 813,000 people (ABS 2022)—Australians will regularly overestimate how many Muslims they think are in the country (Alikhil 2018). The current that electrifies this reality is Islamophobia. Islamophobia is a highly con- tested term (Allen 2010), as are its cognate terms, such as “anti-Muslim sentiment/prejudice” (Malik 2010; Gottschalk and Greenberg 2019), and even “Lahabism”, the term developed by Abdal Hakim Murad (2020) to offer what he felt was a more historically and theologically coherent term. It is beyond the remit of this paper to litigate between the extensive academic and community arguments over the definition (and even existence of) “Islamophobia” that have raged for decades, and for the purposes of this article, “Islamophobia” is defined as “the fear of and hostility toward Muslims and Islam that is driven by racism and that leads to exclusionary, discriminatory, and violent actions targeting Muslims and those perceived as Muslim” (Green 2021). The use of this definition should be seen as a pragmatic choice that aligns with the understanding my participants offered and not a definitive adjudication of the debate. It is important to contextualise this “fear and hostility” in Australia, with a particular focus on women. A decade-long study by the University of Western Sydney found nearly 50% of Australians self-identified as being anti-Muslim (Dunn 2011). Other studies have found that Australian attitudes towards Muslims are uniquely negative. For example, Religions 2023, 14, 654. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel14050654 https://www.mdpi.com/journal/religions