Australia’s first Muslim senator on the limits of belonging

SYDNEY, Australia (MNTV) — Mehreen Faruqi arrived in Australia from Lahore, Pakistan, in 1992 with her husband, a young child, and two suitcases. More than three decades later she is the country’s first Muslim senator — but says questions about whether she truly belongs have never fully gone away, in an interview with ABC News.

Faruqi, a senator for the Greens, said some colleagues hold a stereotyped view of Muslims, particularly of a Muslim woman’s independence. 

She recalled being asked, on her election to the New South Wales state parliament, whether she would compromise her religion for party policy — then noted she introduced that parliament’s first bill to decriminalize abortion. “If you break that mould, people just get confused,” she said.

She described hostility inside federal parliament, saying colleagues have told her to “pack your bags and piss off back to Pakistan” or called for banning Muslims from the country. 

“In which other workplace would even a skerrick of this be tolerated?” she said, adding that her Australianness had felt conditional on “keeping my head down and my mouth shut.”

Faruqi defended her protest against the Australian government lighting up Parliament House in the colors of the Israeli flag after the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attack, which she called distressing. 

She condemned the killing of civilians as “completely wrong,” said she was criticizing the Israeli and Australian governments rather than Jewish people, and stressed that criticism of Israel should not be conflated with antisemitism.

 Jewish people, she said, should “never be made to feel hate against them,” and antisemitism must be tackled like any other racism. “There’s no room for racism anywhere, against anyone,” she said.