Citation: Sahib, Rizwan, and Vanessa Katakalos. 2024. Muslim Social Activity and Placemaking in Australia. Religions 15: 6. https://doi.org/ 10.3390/rel15010006 Academic Editor: Enzo Pace Received: 27 August 2023 Revised: 18 November 2023 Accepted: 24 November 2023 Published: 20 December 2023 Copyright: © 2023 by the authors. 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 Muslim Social Activity and Placemaking in Australia Rizwan Sahib 1, * and Vanessa Katakalos 2 1 School of Humanities and Communication Arts, Western Sydney University, Penrith 2751, Australia 2 The Gadigal Centre, University of Sydney, Camperdown 2050, Australia; vanessa.katakalos@sydney.edu.au * Correspondence: 30065803@westernsydney.edu.au Abstract: For generations, Muslims have engaged in daily life in the West—what this study identifies as Muslim social activity. Through social activity in Western societies, Muslims transform spaces into places by seeking to belong, feel at home, care, materialise religious and ethno-cultural values, and live meaningfully. The concept of place has not been used to explain Muslim social activity in the West. This study addresses this lacuna by explaining it in Australia as placemaking. Keywords: Muslim social activity; Muslims; Australia; place; space; placemaking 1. Introduction Muslims’ presence in the West and their subsequent engagement with daily life has been met with positive and negative responses from the political, legislative, media, and social spheres of society. On the negative side, Muslims are perceived as cultural pollutants (Ali 2018) whose presence has introduced foreign values and customs to secular societies. Advocates of the Muslim Question discourse (Norton 2013) question whether Muslims should have the freedom to engage in practices such as wearing hijabs, slaughtering animals according to shari’ah (Islamic law), or constructing places of worship. In contrast, Muslim social activity is viewed from a positive perspective and celebrated, or at the very least recognised, when freedom is given to cultural minorities to practice their beliefs and customs in multicultural societies. Both positive and negative discourses surrounding Muslim social activity in the West consider the Muslims’ presence an issue of space, as such activity occurs in public areas such as parks, beaches, shopping malls, airports, and streets. The issue of space becomes a question of how these spaces are utilised and by whom. This study takes a trajectory of thinking about these issues through the lens of place as defined by human geographers. In human geography, place is perceived as a space given meaning through human actions and emotional attachment (Cresswell 2014). Using this approach to examine Muslim social activity in Australia relates to this special issue topic by being a way of describing the Islamicate diaspora. The construction of the Ground Zero Mosque in New York City is a famous case that illustrates how space and place can become problematic in relation to Muslim social activity. This physical space, located just blocks away from the World Trade towers that were attacked by terrorists on 11 September 2001, was perceived as a symbol of resistance to Muslim extremism. A proposed mosque was viewed as transgressing the meaning that part of New York City held for many residents and even those who do not reside there. Drawing on the idea that places are contested spaces (Cresswell 2014), it could be argued that some viewed a Muslim place of worship to be out of place because the location was associated with trauma, terror, and a place of national pride or state pride. A mosque seemed to challenge these commonly held ideas and was therefore perceived as an unreasonable structure to occupy the location. Others, namely the organisation that proposed the mosque and those who supported the proposal, saw Ground Zero as a space for resistance to hate. Religions 2024, 15, 6. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel15010006 https://www.mdpi.com/journal/religions