‘We had to hide we’re Muslim’: ambient fear, Islamic schools and the geographies of race and religion

Over the past 30 years, there has been a virulent urban politics surrounding the provision of government-funded religious schooling in suburban south-western

Sydney. Our concern in this paper is to emphasise how race and religion constitute

contestations of urban space around the establishment of government-funded

Islamic schools. We argue these particular contestations are unique, and fail to

emerge when other types of government-funded religious schools, such as Christian

schools, are proposed and established in Sydney. The politics surrounding Islamic

schools reveals a coded urban politics pertaining to Islamophobia and racialisation,

that can be understood by paying attention to the ambiance of racialised-religious

fears produced in part through the policies of government-funding of non-secular education.