I. The Religious Situation
in Canada and the USA
Although the Christian population
has been dominant in North America since the 1700s, there have always been
significant religious minorities. Of course, the indigenous peoples who
met the European explorers from 1492 onwards were the original dominant
presence. But their numbers were decimated by the new diseases brought
by Europeans and, especially in the USA, by warfare that continued down
to the end of the 19th century – and even into the 20th century in New
Mexico and Arizona. The Christians in North America were initially Spanish
Catholic Christians in the South (now Mexico and southwestern USA) and
French Catholic Christians in the North (now Canada) and English and European
Protestant Christians along the Atlantic Coast from Massachusetts to Georgia.
The Protestant Christian presence came to dominate English Canada and the
USA from the 1700s down to the mid-20th century. In the 1980s, the majority
of Canadian Christians became Roman Catholic (47%, Bibby) with the Protestant
percentage declining to 41%. In Ontario, Canada’s largest province, the
majority became Roman Catholic in the 1970s as it did in the USA. Today
we have a Canadian population of c.30 million and a population in the USA
of c. 280 million.1
Although only 7% of the Canadian population,
according to Statistics Canada, identifies itself as having ‘no
religion’, the percentage of Canadians attending church services either
weekly or monthly has decreased dramatically in recent decades. The Canadian
Institute of Public Opinion reports nearly a 50% decline among the Roman
Catholics and over 50% among the Protestants between 1945 and 1985.2
The decline of attendance has not been quite so dramatic in the USA, but
nearly so. The curious phenomenon, at least in Canada, is that more than
90% of the population still identifies itself as having some religion.
And 90% of those identify that religion as Christianity. In Canada, a decade
ago (1985) Statistics Canada reported that the non-Christian population
was small, less than 7%. Members of the Jewish faith were the largest non-Christian
group and they constituted only 1% of the population (in the USA, the number
is c. 5%) and ‘others’ an additional 4%. Those ‘others’ included Muslims,
Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, etc. There has been a Jewish population in Canada
since the 1700s. The Buddhist population in Canada came, initially, with
the importing of Chinese laborers to work on the building of the railroads
in the 1870s and 1880s. The Sikh population came to British Columbia at
the turn of the century and the Hindu population is largely of more recent
decades. Significant Muslim population begins in Canada in the 1970s mainly
through emigration. For example, many East African/Indian Muslims came
to Canada from Uganda in the early and mid-1970s.
II. Muslims in North America:
A Growing Presence
The first census year in which Muslims
in Canada were specially included was 1981 and they then numbered c. 100,000.3
By 1991 the number had grown to more than 250,000. It is now estimated
that there are 5 to 7 million Muslims in the USA. Unlike Canada, a significant
number of American Muslims are converts. (A Canadian informant and herself
a convert to Islam told me she only knew of six converts out of 4000 Muslims
in the Kitchener-Waterloo area of Southern Ontario where she lives). Farid
Nu‘man estimates that there are 135,000 Americans converting to Islam
per year and nearly 50% of those are African Americans, nearly 25% are
South Asians, only 1.6% are white Americans.4
E. Grant reports that the Muslim population in Canada is due to immigration.
And that immigrant population is about equally divided between Middle Eastern
Muslims from Egypt to Turkey and South Asians from Pakistan, India, Bangladesh
and Indonesia, though there are significant numbers from Africa and the
Caribbean. Press reports in 1997 estimate the Muslim population to be nearing
500,000 in Canada which is a very significant growth over the past 15 years.
Ontario is the home of nearly three-fifths
of Canada’s Muslims, while Quebec has one-fifth, virtually all in and around
Montreal. Ontario’s Muslim population is concentrated in the Greater Toronto
area. American Muslims are also centered in the urban areas of California,
New York, Illinois, and New Jersey. In Canadian newspapers, it is now common
to have articles on the beginning of Ramadan and the observance
of Eid.
Some of these general comments concerning
the growing Muslim presence in Canada can be made a bit more concrete by
focusing on the area of Canada I know best. I live in the Kitchener-Waterloo
areas. Kitchener and Waterloo are twin cities with a combined population
of over 265,000 in southern Ontario, and hour and a half from Toronto.
It is home to two universities: Wilfred Laurier University (3,000) and
the University of Waterloo (16,000). I originally came to this area in
1967. At that time there was no visible or noticeable Muslim presence.
Now there are an estimated 4000 Muslims in the area with a thriving mosque
in Waterloo headed by an Egyptian Professor from the University of Waterloo.
There are two mosques, one Shi’ite and one Isma‘ili in Kitchener.
There is a Muslim Student Association at the University of Waterloo, with
many members being foreign students currently studying in Canada. And Muslims
in their distinctive dress are now commonplace in and around Kitchener-Waterloo.
In addition to the Sunni mosque in Waterloo also attended by some
Shi’ite
Muslims, there are groups of Isma‘ili that meet in people’s
homes. My local informant tells me that every mosque she has visited here
in K-W is packed for Friday prayers and during Ramadan for evening
prayers. More space is needed. There are heritage language programmes in
Arabic in the K-W schools on Saturdays. There are also plans for an Islamic
Centre in Waterloo geared towards young people. I am aware of increasing
numbers of stores and shops owned and run by Muslims and note that one
convenience store has even refused, on the basis of religious conviction,
to sell tobacco. And there is a thriving Egyptian Muslims restaurant and
a fine Indian restaurant run by a Muslim from Bangladesh. There have been
Muslim voices raised in the current debate about ‘religion in the public
schools’ and the ‘teaching of religion’. Muslims in the K-W area have become
a real and visible presence.
III. Muslim Institutes
in Canada
Eleanor Grant reported to me that
a handbook of mosques in Canada published by the Muslim World League lists
55 mosques in Canada, almost all established since 1995. They also include
five Islamic schools. Mosques are to be found in nine of the ten Canadian
provinces (Prince Edward Island is the exception). Most are in major Canadian
cities, but some are in smaller centres like Red Deer, Alberta, Cornwall
and Ontario, which also has a full-time Muslim school. Farid Nu‘man
reports
that there are more than 1000 masajid in the USA and 108 full-time
Islamic schools. Attempts to organize Canadian Muslims are still in their
early stages. The Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) and the Islamic
Circle of North America (ICNA) do have Canadian branches located in Toronto.
ISNA supports such ventures as the Toronto Housing Cooperative and a registry
of Halal meant sources. ICNA has started to publish a monthly magazine
called The Message. In its recent editorial, we read that ‘many
Muslims see the reawakening as a reassertion of their identity and a return
to their roots, an alternative to secular materialism. The West perceives
it as a threat – the so-called threat.’5
There is a nationwide Canadian Council of Muslim Women that works on issues
such as employment equity and family violence.
Some Muslims are beginning to emerge
in more prominent positions in the media and in politics. A Muslim woman,
Fatimah
Houda-Pepin, was elected to the Quebec National Assembly in 1994, and
now sits as the Liberal Opposition’s critic on Culture. Azhar ‘Ali Khan
and Harun Siddiqi have served as editors of two major newspapers,
the Ottawa Citizen and the Torono Star. (But in 1995, a Liberal
candidate for the provincial legislature in Ontario, who was a Muslim,
had his party status revoked because of remarks about Christians and homosexuals
in a small book he had written). Canada’s multi-faith television channel,
Vision TV, regularly has two half-hour weekly programmes hosted by Sadi‘ah
Zaman. There are many distinguished Muslims in the field of higher
education including the University of Waterloo’s Prof. Elmasry in Electrical/Computer
Engineering Department.
IV. Muslims in Canadian
Life: Perception and Problems
How do Muslims find their life in
Canada? Ahmad Yousuf studied the Muslim Community in the Ottawa region
and found that their ‘comfort level was fairly high; most reported that
they liked Canada as a place to live. When asked about the ‘life-style’
issues they found most troubling, they listed three: the media, the acceptability
of premarital sex and the difficulty of finding a suitable marriage partner
in Canada. When the media issue was probed, the respondents indicated that
it was not only negative portrayals of Muslims in the media, it was also
the alcohol commercials and the casual sex depicted on TV. In the early
1970s, there was considerable stereotyping of ‘Pakis’ or immigrants
from Pakistan. But as Prof. Sheila McDunough of Concordia University in
Montreal reports the overriding concern for Muslims in Canada is the ‘unfair
or inaccurate stereotyping of their culture’.6
In Montreal, in 1994, a Muslim girl was expelled from a private school
for wearing a ‘headscarf’ or Hijab. She appealed to the Human Rights
Commission and won. But there remains a problem here.
Canada unlike the American ‘melting
pot’, thinks of itself as a ‘cultural mosaic’. But this view is often challenged
by English Canadians as well as French Canadians who want it ‘their way
or no way’. Many newspapers will have letters to the editors complaining
about recent immigrants who don’t conform to the writers’ version of ‘being
Canadian’. But Canada is, on the whole, a rather tolerant society – or
at least one that is more suspicious of the ‘melting pot’ mentality – where,
Eleanor Grant reports, that Muslims seldom experience overt hostility.
The problems of cross-religious and cross-cultural harmony are nonetheless
real but often more subtle.
A less subtle issue is racism, especially
in recent years in relation to Somali Muslims. But here the issue is race
rather than religion. This is also an issue that Muslims are facing within
their community. One writer wrote in The Message that intra-Muslim brother
and sisterhood broke down when it came to interracial marriage in the Muslim
community. Some issues arise from contact with other movements/currents
in Canadian life. For example the women’s movement. Eleanor Grant observes
that ‘it is an unfortunate and inescapable fact, that Muslim communities
in Canada are doing a poor job of dealing with inter-ethnic tensions, parent-youth
tensions and the frustrations of women’.
In the province of Manitoba, ‘Abdu’l-Wahid
Mustafa has contended that Muslim students encounter problems in the
public school system arising from faulty images of Islam and textbooks
that assume Christianity a normative. In other places one hears that Muslims
are often confused by what they see as a ‘Christian’ society that is so
lax morally and seemingly approving of destructive trends – alcohol consumption
and the free mixing of boys and girls – in society.
V. Muslim-Christian Relations
in Canada
Like other countries, the relations
between Muslims and Christians are many and varied. Some Christians regard
all people of other faiths with great suspicion and the only proper relation
to them is to convert them. But this is not the only view you find among
Christians. Within the Canadian Council of Churches, representing most
of the major Protestant denominations, there is a Christian-Muslim Dialogue
group. Within the Canadian Conference of Bishops there is also an interfaith
division. Both strive to promote positive Muslim-Christian relations. There
are also ‘multi-faith groups’ in several of the large Canadian cities –
Edmonton, Vancouver, Saskatoon, etc. – that promote interfaith dialogue
and understanding. I have also recently discovered that the chaplains of
Ontario have begun to develop a multi-faith awareness in relation to their
work with persons in hospitals. And there is a Muslim component to this.
But the general exchange between Muslims and Christians in Canada is infrequent
at best, non-existent in most places. Yet increasingly Muslims are in the
work force and the everyday life of Canadian society.
What should be the level of exchange
between Muslims and Christians? Should there just be a kind of benign tolerance
of each other? As a teacher of religious studies, I am often disturbed
to discover the lack of knowledge we have about other faiths and the unconscious
stereotypes and prejudices we carry. In 1998, I published, together with
Dr. S.A Ali of Hamdard University in New Delhi, Muslim Christian Dialogue:
Promise and Problems?7
Thus I very much support:
1. Local interfaith groups (including
Muslims and Christians) that meet to promote mutual understanding and,
where possible, cooperation on issues facing the community. This as well
as ‘official dialogue’ is crucial.
2. A multi-faith approach to the teaching
of religion in the public schools. Canada does not have the same obstacles
to the teaching of religion in the public schools that we find in the United
States with its constitutional separation of ‘church and state’. Yet most
teaching of religion in schools in Canada has been limited to the Christian
religion, where there has been any teaching at all. There are now some
high school courses in ‘world religions’. This should be, in my view, expanded.
3. We also need more teaching about
the many religious traditions in colleges and universities. Scholars perhaps
have a special role to play in relation to rewriting and revising materials
that carry inaccurate portrayals of Islam and Muslim people. We need more
public education.
Seen within the context of an increasingly
multi-religious and multi-cultural Canadian society, Muslims face a positive
future. Muslims, like Christians, will have to confront a dominant culture
that is increasingly secularised despite its partial origins in the Christian
traditions. That dominant cultural is materialistic, hostile to transcendence,
and relativistic in values. There will continue to be a significant gap
between Canadian commitments to multi-culturalism and the actuality of
day to day life. Muslims will also have to deal creatively with issues
of technology, life-styles, sexuality and marriage within their own communities
as they strive to preserve and deepen their religious identity within a
Canadian content.
Courtesy: The Hamdard Islamicus, Jan-March
2001
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