Opinion

Islamophobia is being normalized at the highest levels. Christians need to learn to fight it.

(RNS) — Learning about Islam can make one a better and more knowledgeable Christian.

Aerial view of group prayer at a mosque. (Photo by Moh Makhfal Nasirudin/Pexels/Creative Commons)

Anna Piela
December 12, 2025
RNS


(RNS) — In recent weeks, Christian men in Texas and Florida have reportedly harassed praying Muslim students. The hecklers were trying to interrupt the prayers in Jesus’ name. “Kaaba 2.0 Jesus is Lord,” one of their signs read, implying that the Christian God should replace the Kaaba in Mecca, the holiest place in Islam, toward which Muslims pray.

“You need Jesus,” the harassers said.

Earlier this month, President Donald Trump reinforced Islamophobic sentiment by calling the American Somali community “garbage” and by significantly restricting the processing of immigration visas for Afghans following a shooting committed by an Afghan immigrant. This week, he launched into a vitriolic tirade against U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, falsely accusing her of being in the U.S. “illegally” and mocking her name and her hijab.

The men who harassed the Muslim students might be surprised to learn that these Muslim students already know Jesus, whose birth story and life are described in the Quran. Muslims venerate Jesus as a prophet but do not believe him to be God. Muslims also know Mary, who is exalted in the Quran. Perhaps these Christian men would insist that the Muslim Jesus is not their Jesus. Fair enough: As a Baptist minister, I say that a Jesus who inspires tormenting others is not my Jesus.

I am tempted to say, further, that this is not real Christianity and that these men are not real Christians. But that would be disingenuous: Christians have a long history of hostility toward Muslims. The fact that Warriors for Christ, a group that livestreamed the disruption of the Muslim prayers and has been designated as a hate group by Southern Poverty Law Center, is just the latest example.

Three men disrupt Muslim teenagers offering their evening prayer outside the Original Mocha coffee house in Murphy, Texas. (Video screen grab)

In one of the earliest recorded Christian responses to Islam, John of Damascus described the new faith as an “Ishmaelite heresy.” His treatise, “The Fount of Knowledge,” written about 743, helped shape negative Christian attitudes toward Islam for centuries. Another eighth-century text, “Storia de Mahometh,” presented for the Christian reader a sort of counter-biography of the Prophet Muhammad, freely mixing fact with highly disparaging fiction. Many such works followed, sowing seeds of anti-Muslim prejudice early on.

These early Christian polemics were produced before the Quran was translated into Latin. Peter the Venerable, the abbot of the Benedictine Abbey of Cluny, who believed that Muhammad was the precursor of the antichrist and the successor of Arius, commissioned the first Latin translation to Robert of Ketton. This 1143 work, “Lex Mahumet pseudoprophete,” was not meant to help build bridges. Rather, its creators hoped to use it to convert Muslims to Christianity.

The first printed Latin publication of the Quran, in 1542, was produced with similar aims. Its preface was written by none other than Martin Luther, the father of the Protestant Reformation, whose goal was to “expose” the Quran as “a work full of lies, fables, and abominations in comparison to Christian scripture,” writes Franzvolker Greifenhagen, a professor at Luther College University of Regina, Canada. Luther, whose view of Islam as Satan’s ploy and, at the same time, divine punishment intended to spur Christian repentance, further entrenched anti-Muslim rhetoric in Christian thought and helped cement it into Protestant identity.

These polemics should be relics of an embattled mindset of medieval and Reformation times, but unfortunately the notions of Islam as an existential threat to Christianity continue to echo across generations and reverberate in vitriolic political rhetoric. Former New York Mayor Andrew Cuomo, who lost to Mamdani in New York City’s mayoral primary and the general election, suggested in the waning days before the election that Mamdani would fail New Yorkers if terrorists attacked while he is mayor: “God forbid another 9/11,” Cuomo said. “Can you imagine Mamdani in the seat?”

Days later, Republican Congressmen Randy Fine of Florida and Andy Ogles of Tennessee demanded that the U.S. Department of Justice investigate Mamdani’s naturalization for fraud. Fine invoked the notion of the “enemy within,” clarifying that he meant “people who have come to this country to become citizens [and] to destroy it.”

Slovakian historian Tomaž Mastnak wrote in his 2002 book, “Crusading Peace: Christendom, the Muslim World, and Western Political Order,” that before the crusades, Christian hostility was directed at all non-Christian peoples. Palestine, once the “Promised Land,” was recast as “Holy Land,” necessitating extermination of Muslims and other non-Christians who inhabited it. Mastnak cites the 12th-century saint Bernard of Clairvaux, who wrote that “a pagan’s death was a Christian’s glory, because, in it, Christ was glorified.”

Bernard’s notion that Christ could be glorified in the suffering of Muslims is likely not consciously driving those who shoot and stab Muslims in the United States and Europe. Their violence can’t be separated from this ancient idea that some places are inherently Christian or that Muslims are inherently evil. The man who murdered 6-year-old Wadea al Fayoume a week after Hamas attacked southern Israel in 2023 shouted, “You devil Muslim, you must die!” as he attacked the boy’s mother.

Islamophobia among Christians of all denominations surveyed by the Institute of Social Policy and Understanding is on the rise. Compared to 2022, in 2025 white evangelical Christians gained 15 points, Catholics 12 points, and Protestants 7 points on the National Islamophobia Index, ISPU’s instrument measuring Islamophobia. The Index is based on the respondent’s level of agreement with five anti-Muslim stereotypes.

In a survey of American Baptist clergy I conducted for a forthcoming book I co-wrote with the Rev. Michael Woolf, “Challenging Islamophobia in the Church: Liturgical Tools for Justice,” more than half of respondents said they had no formal education about Islam. These clergy were less likely to teach about Islam in their congregations, engage with Muslim communities or address Islamophobia in their communities than their peers who had studied Islam in seminary. Some claimed that teaching about a non-Christian faith in church would be heresy and talking about Islam would dilute Christian faith.

In the book, I argue that, on the contrary, learning about Islam can make one a better and more knowledgeable Christian. Learning about Muslim critiques of Christian theological concepts can refine one’s understanding of Christianity. I also argue that standing up for one’s Muslim neighbors is Christian witness and an expression of discipleship.

Such discipleship is embodied by my colleague’s critique of Donald Trump’s recent description of American Somalis as “garbage.” The Rev. G. Travis Norvell, pastor of Judson Memorial Baptist Church in Minneapolis, wrote recently, “I hope the president soon learns that God doesn’t make garbage. God only makes beautiful things. And my Somali neighbors are beautiful.”

The Muslim students who were harassed in Texas and Florida deserve more than legal remedies. They cannot depend solely on state institutions when political leaders spew demeaning rhetoric about Muslims and immigrants. They need and deserve support from neighbors, teachers and fellow students. Christians should be the first to stand with them in solidarity, defend their right to pray in peace and openly reject the acts of hate carried out in the name of Jesus. Our history does not have to define our present or our future.




Anna Piela. (Courtesy photo)

(Anna Piela, an American Baptist Churches USA minister, is a visiting scholar of religious studies and gender at Northwestern University and the author of “Wearing the Niqab: Muslim Women in the UK and the US.” The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.)

KULTURKAMPF

Emilia Pérez isn’t groundbreaking, it’s colonialist

It’s up for the most Oscars this year, but the film, its star, and its director are all propping up dangerous tropes.

Ali M. Latifi
Asia Editor

NEW HUANITARIAN

Editor’s take
28 February 2025

Faye's Vision/Cover Images via Reuters ConnectEmilia Pérez has been a critical hit since its Cannes premiere, but Latino and queer audiences, in particular, have found the musical about a trans Mexican druglord to be full of tropes and racism.

Editor’s note: This opinion piece is part of an occasional series exploring cultural topics adjacent to our humanitarian coverage.

BANGKOK

Emilia Pérez has been earning critical acclaim since its Cannes premiere last May. The musical – about a Mexican drug lord who transitions into a woman in an attempt to leave her violent past behind – has been racking up nominations at major awards shows. At the Oscars this weekend, it’s up for 13 prizes, the most of any film.

The industry has wholeheartedly embraced the film. “It’s bold, it’s daring, it’s a vision,” said James Cameron. British actress Emily Blunt called it “a singular experience”. Honduran-American actress America Ferrera, who has long talked about challenging Anglo-Saxon beauty standards and advancing Latino representation, simply said, “Don’t miss it”, in an Instagram post. Director Greta Gerwig, who served on the jury at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, gave its four leads the Best Actress prize.

But for all its industry support, audiences – and Latino and queer audiences, in particular – have largely been confused by the film’s acclaim.

To its many detractors, Emilia Pérez’s attempts at representation are hollow – full of too many missteps to be taken seriously. The Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, for example, called it out as “a step backward for trans representation”.

Though the story takes place in Mexico and was shot in France, it was eventually co-opted as some sort of treatise on politics in the United States, which was in the midst of a presidential election during the film’s promotional cycle.

Had Kamala Harris won the election, it would likely have been held up as an example of the kind of multicultural, gender-affirming, and feminist society her backers purported a Harris victory would herald.

Of course, the former prosecutor did not become the first female president. Nor did she become the first Indian-American to ascend to the highest office in the land.

Instead, Donald Trump, the embodiment of a straight, white man, made history himself as only the second president to secure two non-consecutive terms. Immediately after returning to the Oval Office, Trump made it official government policy to recognise only two genders, embarked on a mass deportation effort, and claimed he would “wage war” against the cartels in Central and South America.

To some critics, high-profile directors, and actors who showered the film with effusive praise for its supposed representation and for simultaneously tackling the issues of cartel violence and gender identity, Trump’s declaration that Mexico was “essentially run by cartels” made the film even more politically potent.

“Emilia Pérez’s Golden Globes triumph is a giant middle finger to Trump,” a Telegraph headline read after the film won four prizes at the January ceremony.

But this did not ring true for people from the communities the film claimed to represent. For them, Emilia Pérez highlighted the flimsiness of the kinds of identity politics the Democratic Party hoped would lead them to a history-making victory.

In fact, it may be more in line with Trump’s bombastic rhetoric that managed to combine and conflate the racism behind the United States’ failed wars on drugs and terror, both of which were aimed almost directly at brown and Black men.

As online film critic Grace Randolph said, the film made the industry “look tone deaf” because it was “forcing representation on people who were saying ‘this is horrible representation, we don’t want it.’”

Considering a University of Southern California study found that between 2006 and 2022 only 4.4% of leads and co-leads were Latino, that’s saying a lot about how they view Emilia Pérez’s portrayal of Latinos.
“I don’t speak English, I don’t speak Spanish”

For its strongest critics, Emilia Pérez is nothing more than a straight white Frenchman’s offensive and reductive vision of Mexico, transnational drug violence (which has claimed at least 500,000 lives since 2006), and transgenderism.

The numerous controversies that have plagued the film since the announcement of its 13 Oscar nominations – the second-highest in history – have done little to disavow its critics of that view.

When director Jacques Audiard set out to make the movie, he said he didn’t feel it necessary to learn Spanish or shoot the film in Mexico. In fact, he said Mexico was too limiting a place for what he had envisioned. He went on to write the script, which has earned him a nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay, despite not speaking the two languages of the protagonists, before shooting the film in a studio in his native France.

“When it comes to languages, I’m a loser. I don’t speak English, I don’t speak Spanish, so on. But every morning when I went to work, I had to figure out how to speak Karla Sofía [Gascón], how to speak Selena [Gomez], how to speak Zoë [Saldaña], these vernacular languages,” Audiard said, after an October screening of the film at the Directors Guild of America.


Audiard’s disregard for linguistic and geographic accuracy is in itself an act of colonialist hubris.

So Audiard ended up directing a film about some of the most important and contested political and societal issues of the day with a cast speaking (both on and off the set) entirely in languages he didn’t understand.

Zoë Saldaña, the Puerto-Rican actress who plays one of the four leads, tried to defend this during an online roundtable, saying Audiard’s vision isn’t “limited by language”.

The way the now Best Supporting Actress nominee saw it, the camaraderie on the set overcame any language barriers between the director and his stars, “When you’re synced with people, a language is just one more tool.”

“It was a beautiful process,” she said.

Despite Saldaña’s positivity, the truth is that Audiard’s disregard for linguistic and geographic accuracy is in itself an act of colonialist hubris. The history of Hollywood is littered with examples of an outsider presuming to push his own vision of a community and a country he doesn’t belong to under the guise of art. From The Good Earth to Lawrence of Arabia to Out of Africa, many have been rewarded with gold statuettes.

It’s not to say there haven’t been successful examples of directors working outside their native language. Taiwanese filmmaker Ang Lee admitted it was his limited “pidgin English” that kept him from being an actor and eventually turned him to directing. When he was making 2005’s Brokeback Mountain – which earned him Best Picture and Best Director nominations – Lee admitted: “There’s nothing further away from me than Wyoming gay cowboys”. However, he managed to traverse that disconnect and, unlike Audiard, won praise for crafting a film that offered an authentic and understated look at struggling with one’s sexuality in the 1960s.

For the world’s 500 million native Spanish speakers, who are among the film’s sharpest critics, the inaccuracies that Audiard’s lack of proficiency led to are glaringly obvious.

“Given that I don’t speak Spanish, the nuances of the Mexican accent versus the Castilian were lost on me,” Audiard admitted to The New York Times. “We had all these problems with accents, but we fixed them in the edit. We did a lot of dubbing.”

When Audiard spoke to French media about his views on the Spanish language, he did not mince his words.

“Spanish is a language of modest countries, of developing countries, of the poor and migrants,” he said. Audiard’s inability to see that due to colonialism the same could easily be said about French and English highlights how little he understood about the communities he sought to portray, and how colonial his mindset truly is.

For a man whose portrayal of Mexico was called “hypnotic and beautiful” by famed Mexican director Guillermo Del Toro, his assumptions about the economic status of entire swathes of people in Central and South America, Europe, and the African continent, don’t sound too far off from Trump, who has made it his goal to deport millions of people from such backgrounds.

It also falls in with how Hollywood has typically portrayed Latinos. According to that USC study, 24.4% of Latino leads played immigrants. The same amount were portrayed as low-income characters. Criminals made up 57.8% of the roles, and of those, 46.2% were violent criminals.

The characters in Emilia Pérez represent all of those at one time or another.

Ironically, America Ferrera, who seemed to love the film, had spoken out against such representations back in 2023.

“According to the numbers, the dominant narrative our industry puts into the world is that Latinos either don’t exist or they are poor, immigrant criminals,” she said at an Academy luncheon.

When speaking of the drug war that spans the American landmass, Audiard was just as trite and reductive. “What interested me also is the endemic violence that Mexico deals with and the tremendous amount of people who have disappeared,” he said to The New York Times about 100,000 missing people, a matter that becomes a major plot point towards the end of the film.

The overly simplistic redemption arc for Gascón’s Emilia and Saldaña’s Rita has also come under severe criticism. “It outrages us by not considering the daily pain that consumes us every day. Here, in reality, there are no happy endings – only tragedy, abandonment, and desolation,” a group of mothers of the disappeared said of the film’s portrayal of the search for the missing.

To the film’s sharpest critics, for whom the attempts at representation were laughable, there was only way to get back at Audiard, with their own humor. That’s exactly what Mexican filmmaker Camila Aurora decided to do when she made Johanne Sacrebleu, a satirical send-up of Emilia Pérez that is laden with French stereotypes, including a star-crossed trans love story between the heirs to baguette and croissant fortunes respectively. The 20-minute short was a hit with Latin American audiences.


Camila D. Aurora/YouTubeDirector and writer Camila Aurora González in a scene from Johanne Sacrebleu, a 20-minute short satirical film in response to Emilia Pérez.
“An Afro-Korean festival”

After the film’s Cannes premiere – where it secured the Jury Prize – Karla Sofía Gascón started gaining Oscar buzz for her turn as the titular character. When Gascón did secure her Oscar nomination last month, she too made history as the first openly trans Best Actress nominee.

At the Golden Globes, where the film won in the Best Picture (Musical/Comedy) category, Gascón made it a point to invoke her identity, saying, “The light always wins over darkness… I am who I am, not who you want.”

The ceremony took place in Los Angeles two weeks before Trump assumed office.

However, as the campaign season rolled on, her own darkness came to light after her years-long history of bigoted tweets were exposed. Though they went as far back as 2016, many of her most egregious statements were posted between 2020 and 2021.

Each post showed that despite her words at the Golden Globes, Gascón herself prefers entire communities of people to be as she wishes.

In September 2020, she posted a photo of Muslim woman in a niqab saying, “Islam is marvelous, without any machismo. Women are respected, and when they are so respected they are left with a little squared hole on their faces for their eyes to be visible and their mouths, but only if she behaves. Although they dress this way for their own enjoyment. How DEEPLY DISGUSTING OF HUMANITY.”

That was just one of several posts that highlighted that Gascón believes there are too many Muslims in her native Spain and that the religion should be banned. To help make her point, she turned to old colonial tropes, referring to Moroccans as “fucking Moors”.

Her prejudices were not limited to Spain and Islamophobia. She also felt it necessary to comment on the Black Lives Matter movement and police brutality in the United States.

Only days after the May 2020 police murder of George Floyd, she said in a now-deleted tweet, “I really think that very few people ever cared about George Floyd, a drug addict swindler, but his death has served to once again demonstrate that there are people who still consider black people to be monkeys Without rights and consider policemen to be assassins… They’re all wrong.”

Even the Academy Awards were not free from her disdain. Reacting to the 2021 ceremony, in which Chloe Zhao, Daniel Kaluuya and Yuh-Jung Youn won Best Director and Best Supporting Actor and Actress respectively, Gascón said: “More and more the #Oscars are looking like a ceremony for independent and protest films. I didn’t know if I was watching an Afro-Korean festival, a Black Lives Matter demonstration or the 8M.”

The one person she did seem to have some sympathy for: Adolf Hitler. “I do not understand so much world war against Hitler, he simply had his opinion of the Jews. Well, that’s how the world goes,” she said of the Third Reich leader in 2019.

Gascón, it seems, wants to be accepted for who and what she is but has little sympathy for others.

Even in her apology, sent to El País, Gascón doubled down on her hubris and ignorance.

“I will never agree with women being forced to wear a burqa,” she said in reference to her picture from a restaurant in Spain. For someone who asked for “forgiveness” and says she should not be held responsible for “what others interpret” her statements to mean, Gascón seems to have few qualms about airing her own Islamophobic assumptions about a religion of more than a billion people.

The fact is, there was no proof the woman in Gascón’s photo was forced to cover. Furthermore, the garment she was wearing was a niqab, not a burqa. Though it has become a catch-all for any covering worn by conservative Muslim women, “burqa” is the Westernised term for a specific all-encompassing garment some Afghan women wear.

Gascón proceeded to invoke the term “lynching” to describe the online backlash her posts have received. It is both surprising and confirming that a woman who is under fire for years of racist rhetoric would employ the term lynching in her defense.

For Black people in the US, the term has historically been used to show the white supremacist policies and vigilante violence that led to the deaths of thousands of mostly Black men at the hands of angry white mobs.

Taken together, Audiard’s and Gascón’s comments show that the era of good intentions in Hollywood must come to an end. Simply claiming you have something positive to say is no longer enough. Identity politics can no longer be used to shield you from criticism. Representation matters, but that alone is also not enough.

Rather than checking boxes, the focus should be on understanding, accuracy, and yes, decolonisation.

As the director and star (not to mention the content of the film itself) show, whiteness and imperialism are still powerful, potent forces, and their stranglehold is not limited by a political ideal, gender, or medium.

Swiss ‘Burqa Ban’: Why Face Covering Is Prohibited In Switzerland Beginning January 1

The ban came about after a referendum held in 2021, in which Swiss citizens narrowly voted in favor of prohibiting face coverings in public, including the burqa and niqab worn by some Muslim women. The final tally was 51.2 percent in favor versus 48.8 percent opposed.

Outlook Web Desk
Updated on: 1 January 2025

Representative image

In Switzerland, the law prohibiting facial coverings has officially come into effect beginning January 1, 2025. The law known as the “burqa ban,” restricts face covering in public – including wearing the burqa or niqab which is commonly worn by Muslim women. Those who violate this law will be charged with fines of up to 1,000 Swiss francs (Rs 94,651.06).

What is exactly banned under this new law?

The new law specifically bans the covering of the nose, mouth, and eyes in both public spaces and private buildings accessible to the public. However, there are some exceptions – the ban does not apply to facial coverings worn for health reasons, such as medical masks or during cold weather; and coverings are permitted in places of worship, for artistic performances, or in advertising.

The ban also makes room for personal protection in cases where face covering is necessary for freedom of expression or assembly, as long as public order is maintained, and the responsible authorities approve such instances.

The facial coverings, notably, are still allowed on planes and in diplomatic or consular premises, as well as in certain sacred sites.

ALSO READ| The Shadow of Burqas

Why did Switzerland ban face coverings?

The ban came about after a referendum held in 2021, in which Swiss citizens narrowly voted in favor of prohibiting face coverings in public, including the burqa and niqab worn by some Muslim women. The final tally was 51.2 percent in favor versus 48.8 percent opposed.

The proposal was proposed by the right-wing Swiss People’s Party (SVP), which campaigned with slogans such as “Stop extremism.” Although the proposal did not explicitly target Islam, it has been widely perceived as a response to Islamic face coverings.

The Swiss government itself opposed the ban, arguing that it was not the role of the state to dictate what individuals, especially women, wear.

The ban's primary objective is to address what proponents argue is a symbol of extremism and a potential security risk.

Controversy over the ban proposal

Human rights groups, including Amnesty International, have sharply criticized the measure. Amnesty called the ban “a dangerous policy that violates women’s rights, including their right to freedom of expression and religion.” Critics argue that the ban disproportionately affects Muslim women, many of whom choose to wear the niqab or burqa as an expression of faith or personal conviction.

ALSO READ| If You Want To Ban Burqa Then 'Ghunghat' Should Go Too: Javed Akhtar

Research from the University of Lucerne revealed that the actual number of women in Switzerland who wear the burqa is negligible, with around 30 women reported to wear the niqab. Muslims make up about 5 percent of Switzerland’s population of 8.6 million, with the majority of Muslim residents hailing from countries like Turkey, Bosnia, and Kosovo.

Despite the relatively low number of people directly affected, the law's passage has ignited a broader debate about religious freedom, the rights of women, and cultural integration in the country.

SMOKERS’ CORNER: FEAR AND LOATHING IN BRITAIN

Nadeem F. Paracha 

Published August 18, 2024 

DAWN

Illustration by Abro

From July 30, deadly riots erupted in Britain when three young girls were stabbed to death in a quiet seaside town of the country. Britain’s far-right groups took to the streets when rumours of the murderer being a Muslim asylum-seeker spread, especially from social media platforms such as X. The murderer is actually a Rwandan youth who is a British citizen. But this didn’t stop far-right leaders from milking the rumour.

The riots were largely pitched against Muslims. But this is not the first time this has happened. However, till the 1980s, violence between white far-right groups and non-whites in Britain was often described as “race riots.” In these, far-right gangs fought pitched battles against immigrants from Caribbean countries and from South Asian regions.

It was from the late 1990s onwards that race riots in Britain increasingly began to be seen as violence between far-right groups and Muslims — especially after the 9/11 attacks in the US, and a spate of terrorist attacks by militant Islamists in Britain. Consequently, incidents of Islamophobia, too, witnessed a manifold increase.

Yet, even the roots of anti-Muslim riots in Britain can be found in the history of race riots in the country, despite the fact that the violence then was largely aimed at non-whites and not against Muslims alone. One of the first major ‘race riots’ in Britain took place in 1919. White working class men and soldiers returning from the First World War, began to attack non-whites for ‘usurping’ their jobs. The Chinese community suffered the most in these ‘riots’. It wasn’t religion but race that was the target.

Although far-right groups in the UK have initiated hostile attacks against Muslims for decades, could the recent ‘race riots’ prove to be a tipping point for both the rioters and Muslims in Britain?

This would remain the case across the decades till the 1990s. In a 2016 essay, Palestinian Professor Emeritus at Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium Bichara Khader wrote that immigration was not a serious issue as such in Europe till the mid-1960s. In the 1950s, large numbers of immigrants from Caribbean countries, South Asia, Southeast Asia, the Middle East and Africa began arriving in various European cities.

As European economies boomed, these immigrants were seen as vital contributors to this boom. It was only when the economies began to contract from the early 1970s that the term “migration problem” gained increased usage. Yet, it was still not linked to a “Muslim problem” as it is today.

The economic turmoil of the 1970s triggered vicious riots. These were explained as ‘race riots’ because they involved white far-right ‘hooligans’ on the one side, and non-whites on the other. The reasons were economic. The far-right accused their governments of allowing non-white immigrants to “steal white jobs.” It really wasn’t a clash of cultures as such — or not yet.

Till the early 1980s, Muslims in Europe were not very exhibitionistic about their faith. For example, their lifestyle in Britain mirrored that of white working class men, who would work all day in factories and then gather in pubs in the evenings for a drink. But, once settled, Muslim men began to marry women from their home countries.

They then brought them to Europe, even though it wasn’t uncommon for some to marry European women as well. According to Khader, most of the women who came as wives were from rural and peri-urban areas of South Asia, the Middle East and North Africa. They had been influenced by Islamist social movements that were initiated in their home countries from the mid-1970s. The influence of the wives changed the settlers’ attitude towards their community’s ‘cultural values.’

This attracted an influx of Muslim preachers, who began to set up shop in various European cities, especially in Britain. They were particularly appealing to the second-generation of British Muslims, especially from families that had failed to be fully assimilated by European integration policies.

This generation began to adopt the ideas proliferated by the preachers. The second generation used these to invent an identity for themselves, as Muslims in non-Muslim countries. Consequently, the presence of veiled women and mosques grew. This is when the “migration problem” began to be seen as a “Muslim problem”, triggering episodes of Islamophobia.



The chaadar, niqab and hijab were vigorously promoted by the preachers among the women of Muslim diasporas in the West. Men, too, were encouraged to adopt an “Islamic look” by letting their beards grow. From the 1990s, ‘multiculturalism’ began to be championed by most Western countries.

It was closely linked to the rise of neoliberal economics, which aimed to construct a global, interconnected economy. This meant that a Muslim community (in the West) didn’t have to completely immerse itself in the secular values of the West, as long as it was knitted to an integrated economy and remained productive.

But what happens when such an economy begins to struggle? A publicly asserted cultural identity, especially that of a diaspora, becomes that much harder to be accepted. It often comes under scrutiny, and criticised for being purposely ‘alien’ and even provocative.

After economies in Europe and the US began to come under stress in 2008, the number of complaints against Islamophobia increased. A majority of Muslims, who had adopted the identity that was first formulated by Islamist evangelical groups, found themselves in a quagmire. The way they looked, or publicly practised their faith, had been accepted by a multicultural West, but now this was changing.

The result was the electoral rise of populist far-right groups and the growth of anti-Muslim sentiment. Even though, according to most surveys, this sentiment is not widespread as such, it does get magnified online during riots or when Muslims are actually involved in any violent activity.

It is believed that non-Muslim immigrants in the West have gradually succeeded in pragmatically integrating themselves in the cultures of the countries they are settled in, but the Muslims have not. What’s more, this has been the case even in wealthy Muslim countries. For example, countries such as the UAE have imposed visa curbs on citizens of some Muslim-majority countries who want to work there. The UAE government has complained that workers from these countries are not willing to appreciate UAE laws against certain political and religious activities.

All this is not to suggest that white far-right groups have a point. They are simply using the Muslims as scapegoats, to divert attention from their own miserable failings. For example, Brexit, which was championed by these groups, has rapidly shrunk Britain’s economy and influence. But it is also high time for the Muslims in the West to realise that the zeitgeist of multiculturalism has eroded, and that they should accordingly refigure the way they exhibit their Muslim identity.

Published in Dawn, EOS, August 18th, 2024

The dispute over the Islamic veil in Russia

by Vladimir Rozanskij

Moscow is debating the possible ban on wearing the Niqab proposed by deputies and opinion makers who insist on the need to curb extremist tendencies, recalling how in several Central Asian countries this measure has existed for some time. Mufti are divided among themselves, while some members of United Russia are also against it, fearing repercussions in relations with the Islamic world.

Moscow (AsiaNews) - Discussions have been going on for weeks in Russia over the possible ban on wearing the Niqab, the Islamic veil that covers the entire face leaving only a slit for the eyes, often associated with the fundamentalist current of Wahabism. It was the president of the Human Rights Council, Valerij Fadeev, who once again proposed the ban, supported by various deputies and opinion leaders who insist on the need to curb extremist tendencies among Muslims throughout the country, even though the Ministry of the Interior has not provided any statistics to support these fears.

The issue of the Niqab, moreover, also divides the Muslim community in Russia, and religious leaders simply rule out restrictions on the Hijab, the bare-face veil. The Kprf communists have announced that the draft law on the ban, which envisages at least a 15 thousand rouble (150 euro) fine for any form of face covering, has already been sent to the government for official consideration. Fadeev said he was 'disturbed that so far the Niqab has not been banned in Russia', whereas in several Central Asian countries such a restriction has been in place for some time. The politicians intend to discuss the issue directly with the leaders of traditional Islam and regional authorities.

The Grand Mufti of Moscow, Ildar Aljautdinov, warns that a ban that is too direct could lead to tensions in society: "These attempts may appear to be a violation of the secular norms of law and the constitution, which guarantee all citizens of Russia the freedom to profess their religion, and to observe its canons". United Russia deputy in the Moscow Duma Ildar Gilmutdinov, head of the Federal National and Cultural Autonomy of the Tatars, spoke in favour of the Niqab, warning in turn that a ban could make Russia's relations with the entire Islamic world more difficult.

A member of the Human Rights Council, Kirill Kabanov, a long-standing supporter of the strict line on migrant issues, reacted to these statements by claiming that 'for traditional Russian Islam, this type of clothing is not at all natural', and that its recent spread is nothing more than 'a provocation by radicals, who have a hostile attitude towards us and our country, and are alien to our traditions and our world'. He, too, recalled that in Central Asia the Niqab and even the Paranja, the veil that completely covers women's bodies, is not allowed, and Kprf deputy Mikhail Matveev believes that 'first of all we need an official pronouncement from religious leaders on what clothes are appropriate for Muslims in Russia'.

Some recalled a speech by President Vladimir Putin in 2012, in which he argued that "the Hijab is not part of our culture, part of our traditional Islam, why should we take on traditions that are foreign to us?" Aljautdinov replied that 'if the decision of the ban really helps to protect the lives of our citizens, curbing the growth of Islamic extremism, then we will all support it, but this argument must be supported by real data'. It was the deputy interior minister, Andrej Khrapov, who responded to these appeals by noting that 'there are no clear signs of a radicalising trend in Islam in Russia'.

Other religious leaders, such as Kamil Samigullin of the Islamic administration of Tatarstan, also affirm that 'the ban is an attack on Muslims', while the Mufti of Volgograd, Kifakh Mokhamad, supports the proposal, recalling the recent attack on Krokus City Hall, pointing out that 'the Niqab is not a religious attribute, but only a habit of some Muslim societies, which has no reference to Sharia law'. Some propose to leave the decision 'in the hands of the governors, depending on regional traditions', and from many quarters it is reiterated that the key issue is not the (unproven) danger of radicalism, but rather to 'avoid the growth of Islamophobia' in Russia, which often becomes a form of repression of migrants.

 Religion Hub

France’s headscarf ban in the 2024 Summer Olympics reflects a narrow view of national identity

Laïcité, which historically upheld individual freedom, denies minority rights today, as seen in the ban on French athletes wearing hijabs at the 2024 Paris Olympics.

May 30, 2024

By 

Armin Langer

(The Conversation) — The 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris have sparked a discussion about whether female Muslim athletes who wear a headscarf should be allowed to compete.

In September 2023, the International Olympic Committee, upholding freedom of religious and cultural expression for all athletes, announced that athletes participating in the 2024 Paris Games can wear a hijab without any restriction.

French athletes, however, are bound by France’s strict separation of religion from the state, called laïcité. French Sports Minister Amelie Oudea-Castera said that French athletes would be barred from wearing a hijab during the Paris games to respect this commitment to the principle of laïcité.

Human rights organizations argued that such a ban infringes upon the religious freedoms of Muslim athletes, perpetuating discrimination and marginalization. The United Nations human rights office stated that “no one should impose on a woman what she needs to wear, or not wear.”

This debate highlights the conflict between laïcité and the right to express one’s religious beliefs. As a scholar of European studies, I know about laïcité’s impact on sports, politics and society in general. In my view, laïcité, which historically upheld individual rights and freedoms, increasingly denies minority rights today, as seen in the ban on French athletes wearing hijabs at the 2024 Paris Olympics.

Laïcité yesterday and today

Before the 1789 revolution, France was an absolute monarchy, where religion and the state were deeply intertwined.

The close relationship between the French monarchy and the Catholic Church began when King Charlemagne was crowned by the pope in 800 A.D. Over the centuries, the church became very powerful, owning land and controlling education and health care. It formed strong political alliances, with many nobles holding top positions within the church.

After the French Revolution succeeded and the monarchy was abolished, the revolutionaries still resented religion for its long relationship with the crown. They saw the church as a source of unfairness in society and wanted to reduce religion’s influence in public life and push their ideas of freedom, fairness and unity.

They nationalized church properties and introduced secularism to create a separation between religious and governmental affairs. Since then, France has maintained laïcité as one of the republic’s core value

The evolution of laïcité in France coincides with significant demographic shifts in the latter half of the 20th century. As France transformed into a diverse nation with various religions and ethnicities, including a significant Muslim population, the interpretation and application of laïcité faced new challenges. With millions migrating from former French colonies in northern and western Africa in search of economic opportunities, France now hosts the largest Muslim community in Europe, comprising about 10% of its population. This demographic change has sparked debates about the role of religion in public life and the extent to which laïcité should accommodate religious diversity.

While laïcité was originally introduced alongside principles such as freedom and equality, as times changed, so did its meaning. Initially, laïcité meant keeping religion separate from the state. Lately, however, it is often interpreted to mean that citizens should refrain from showing their religious identities in public.

This shift has led to bans on religious symbols in public schools and spaces, disproportionately affecting Muslim women who wear veils.

A debate about the Olympics – and beyond

Activists and scholars have argued that today’s laïcité poses a threat to both human rights and religious freedom. In their view, it promotes a narrow view of republican values and national identity, rejecting diversity and unfairly targeting Muslim women who wear headscarves.

Laïcité can be seen as discriminatory because it often treats Christian customs as just part of everyday culture, while it treats visible signs of other religions, such as the hijab worn by some Muslim women, as unacceptable. This means Christian symbols and traditions are more easily accepted, but non-Christian ones are often not allowed.

It is also important to note that Christian traditions focus mostly on beliefs, which are private, while Islamic and Jewish traditions emphasize practices, such as wearing headscarves, that are visible. This means laïcité affects people differently, often more strictly targeting visible signs of non-Christian religion

A 2023 survey showed that almost 80% of French Muslims believed that their country’s secular laws are discriminatory. Research shows that laïcité disproportionately affects Muslim girls from marginalized communities, perpetuating social inequalities. For example, the ban on headscarves in schools forces Muslim girls to choose between their education and their religious beliefs, leading to feelings of exclusion and isolation. This policy can also hinder their academic performance and personal development, limiting their future opportunities.

Banning hijab for players

French Muslim athletes have faced challenges on the field for a long time. For example, in 2023, the French Soccer Federation decided not to adjust meal and practice timings during Ramadan, even though it occurred during a break when there was no competition.

This decision effectively prevented Muslim players from fasting and led to notable departures, such as Lyon midfielder Mahamadou Diawara leaving the France under-19s camp. Other French players, too, left French professional sports. Basketball player Diaba Konate also opted to pursue her career in the United States because of the French ban on wearing the hijab.

In 2004, France prohibited religious symbols in public schools, including the hijab, Jewish yarmulkes, Sikh turbans and large Christian crosses.

The nonprofit Human Rights Watch criticized it as an unjustified restriction on religious practice. In 2010, France extended the ban to face-covering headgear in public places, including the burqa and niqab, which are garments worn by some Muslim women that cover the face and body. Last year, France banned the abaya in schools.

A ban on cultural pluralism?

The hijab debate extends beyond the realm of sports, touching upon broader issues of identity and belonging in multicultural societies. For many Muslim women, the hijab is not just clothing – it is an expression of religious identity and empowerment.

Banning it from the Olympics could be seen as limiting their freedom of expression and denying their right to fully engage in society while staying true to their religious and cultural backgrounds.

France’s ban on religious symbols in official sports activities highlights the struggle to balance religious freedom with national values. This becomes especially complicated in the Olympics, where athletes’ individual expressions clash with their roles as representatives of their countries.

(Armin Langer, Assistant Professor of European Studies, University of Florida. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.)

Muslim, Jewish voters leaning away from the federal Liberals as Gaza war grinds on: poll

CBC
Thu, May 16, 2024 

Protesters for Gaza gather outside a downtown hotel in Toronto, the planned location of an event for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, on Friday, Mar. 15, 2024. (Cole Burston/The Canadian Press - image credit)


A new poll suggests Muslim and Jewish voters are leaning away from the federal Liberals in voting intentions — a possible sign that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's efforts to straddle gaps in public opinion over the Israel-Hamas war are falling short.

The new poll of voting intentions by the Angus Reid Institute says the federal NDP is leading the Liberals among Muslim voters 41 per cent to 31 per cent, while the federal Conservatives are beating the Liberals among Jewish voters 42 per cent to 33 per cent.

"This does feel to the Liberals, in terms of their outreach around diaspora politics, to now be a fairly untenable situation," Shachi Kurl, president of the Angus Reid Institute, told CBC News.

"The Jewish diaspora is now saying, 'You haven't gone far enough in condemning Hamas and condemning the violence and stopping antisemitism in Canada.' And you've got pro-Palestinian voters and populations, many of whom are Muslim, obviously saying, 'You haven't gone far enough to condemn the Israeli Defence Forces for its counterattack in Gaza.'"

The data shows only 15 per cent of Muslims polled say they would vote for the Conservatives, while just 20 per cent of Jewish voters say they would support the New Democrats.

Protestors are seen on Parliament Hill during a pro-Israel protest on Parliament Hill in Ottawa, on Monday, Dec. 4, 2023.

Protesters attend a pro-Israel rally on Parliament Hill in Ottawa on Monday, Dec. 4, 2023. (Spencer Colby/The Canadian Press)

Kurl said that under Trudeau's leadership, the Liberals have made a concerted effort to appeal to Muslim voters since 2015, when the Conservatives under Stephen Harper ran an election campaign that included controversial promises like a ban on the niqab and a "barbaric cultural practices" tip line.

An Environics Institute poll looking back on that election found 65 per cent of Muslims who said they voted cast their ballots for the Liberals, while only 10 per cent voted for the NDP.

"We saw the Liberals go out and court Muslims in Canada to vote Liberal," Kurl said.

She said the Liberals appear to be feeling the fallout from trying to appease both Muslim and Jewish voters since Hamas's attack on Israel of Oct. 7, 2023. Israeli officials say up to 1,200 Israelis were killed and 253 were taken hostage in that attack. Health authorities in Gaza say the Israeli military operation launched in response has killed almost 35,000 people.

Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre addresses the national Conservative caucus on Parliament Hill in Ottawa on Sunday, Jan. 28, 2024. The Conservative Party of Canada raised more than $35 million during Pierre Poilievre's first full year as leader — and the federal Liberals brought in less than half that amount.

Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre addresses the national Conservative caucus on Parliament Hill in Ottawa on Sunday, Jan. 28, 2024. (Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press)

Asked at a news conference Thursday about his party's apparent slide among Muslims and Jewish voters, Trudeau defended the Liberals' approach and accused the other parties of picking sides while he has been striving for unity.

"To put it in political terms, I think it's important that there be at least one major party in this country, in our democracy, that has both lots of Jewish MPs and lots of Muslim MPs," he said, adding that he will continue to advocate for a two-state solution and a ceasefire.

In December, CBC News reported a group representing influential Canadian Muslim donors was leaving the top donor ranks of the Liberal Party, citing Trudeau's disinclination at the time to call for a ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas conflict.

The government started to call for one a few days later after that announcement.

In February, hundreds of mosques and Muslim organizations co-signed a letter telling Canadian MPs not to appear at mosques during Ramadan unless they were willing to openly call out Israel for "war crimes" or demand the government stop sending weapons to Israel.

The Liberals have pointed out that they have not exported lethal aid to Israel since the start of this latest conflict and also voted in favour of a heavily amended NDP motion that called on Canada to "cease the further authorization and transfer of arms exports to Israel."

That motion outraged many Jewish-Canadians. "We are deeply disappointed that the Liberal government has chosen to effectively sub-contract Canadian foreign policy to anti-Israel radicals within the NDP and the Bloc Québécois," the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs said in a media statement at the time.

No party leader making a dent with either group

Angus Reid also polled respondents on their opinions of Trudeau, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre and NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh. Fifty-one per cent of Muslims said their opinion of Trudeau had "worsened recently," according to the Institute, while a similar share, 47 per cent, said the same about Poilievre.

Forty-seven per cent of Muslim respondents said their opinion of Singh had not changed.

Among Jewish voters, 49 per cent said their opinion of Trudeau had worsened; a slightly lower number, 38 per cent, said the same of Singh. A quarter of Jewish respondents said their opinion of Poilievre had improved, but 31 per cent reported the opposite.

By law, the next federal election must be held by October 2025.

As with most recent polls since last summer, this latest one shows the Conservatives would be in a comfortable position to form a majority government if an election were held today.

Kurl said the data held no big surprises, given recent events. "You just see the hill that the Liberals now have to climb, or call it the corner they have painted themselves into," she said.

Editor's note: The Angus Reid Institute survey was conducted online from April 19-23, 2024 among 3,459 Canadian adults who are members of the Angus Reid Forum. A probability sample of this size would carry a margin of error of +/- 2 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.

From April 19 to May 9, the Institute also polled 166 Canadian Muslim, 164 Canadian Hindu, 165 Canadian Jewish and 118 Canadian Sikh adults online. These samples are not included in the general population sample.

Haroon Siddiqui’s My Name is NOT Harry

Memoir of a Toronto icon

by Eric Walberg / March 29th, 2024

Haroon Siddiqui’s 2023 memoir, My Name is Not Harry, is a dazzling journey through Indian Sufism, pre-partition Muslim-Hindu harmony, the horrors of partition, a leap across the ocean to the middle of nowhere (sorry, Brandon Manitoba), finally finding his home at the Toronto Star, from whence, back to central Asia (Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India during the tumultuous 1979+), hobnobbing with media and political stars, stopping for heart surgery, all the time building and defending his new multicultural faith, adding his own distinct, Muslim flavour to what it means to be a Canadian. A whirlwind tour of the 20th-21st centuries, as if by a latter day Muslim Christopher Columbus, one meant to try to undo the five centuries of imperialist horror that Columbus unleashed.

He relishes slaying the dragons of bigotry he encounters, starting with

*Winston Churchill, the racist. He who had labelled Indians ‘a barbarous people’, ‘a beastly people with a beastly religion’, ‘the beastliest people in the world next to Germans’. Who exacerbated the 1943 Bengal famine that had killed millions by insisting that Indian rice exports for the allied war effort not be interrupted. He who had called Gandhi ‘a naked fakir’ whom he wanted ‘bound hand and foot at the gates of Delhi and then trampled by an enormous elephant with a new viceroy seated on its back.’

*Even the Toronto Star‘s iconic Gordon Sinclair, who won fame in the 1930s with his dispatches form India – ‘the pagan peninsula’ with its ‘wild and woolly Hindus’, Brahmins, the supreme high hooper-doopers of this impossible land’, ‘scrawny, underfed untouchables’, impossible-looking beggars’ and ‘yowling idiots’. In tune with those times, [the Star] still going ga-ga over Sinclair well into my own time.

*On Iran, the only Muslim ‘experts’ and commentators on TV and in print were anti-revolution or anti-Khomeini, authenticating the worst of western prejudices. Anything different, such as mine, must have been a welcome novelty, brought to them by Canada’s largest newspaper.

*On 9//11, Rushdie see below.

One of those should-haves of his life as dragonslayer was at the annual press gallery dinner in Ottawa, where he hosted Solicitor General Robert Kaplan. When they were walking to dinner, Kaplan started waxing eloquently about his love for India and yoga but his dislike of Muslims! He assumed that being from India I could only be a Hindu. What a testament to power the Zionist Jewish mindset had/has over even a proud Muslim like Siddiqui. But bravo, Harry (sorry, Haroon) for owning up. That’s the great thing about him. He lives his multiculturalism, which means meeting the other on his/her grounds, looking for the middle ground, not stoking enmity.

Iranian Ayatollahs, Afghan communists

He shines on the thorniest issue, one of which confronted him soon after arriving at the Star, when he was sent off to Iran in 1979. Speaking Urdu (close to Persian) and fully versed in Sunni and Shia Islam, he was able to make sense of the chaos, making his way to Qom to visit Ayatollah Madari, Khomeini’s rival, who lived just down the maze of alleys from Khomeini, who was already commanding the revolution from his modest home there, rather than Tehran.

He was told it was impossible to meet with Madari, even for a Canadian Muslim, but when he revealed that he’d just come from Tabriz, where Madari’s People’s Republican Party followers had risen up against Khomeini, rejecting the Islamic state constitution, Madari relented. Madari wanted a secular state and ‘the sovereignty of the people’ not a person. He answered every question patiently for nearly two hours. That was his only interview in the wake of the revolt. It would be his last. He was placed under house arrest until his death six years later.

He also met with Morteza Pasandideh, 82, Khomeini’s older brother, who was quite jovial. Siddiqui admired them all for their stress-free lives, their inner peace all, living productive lives into their 80s or 90s. Qom is famous for sohan halwa (sweet sweet) made with pistachios, almonds and butter. Back in Toronto, he asked John Ralston Saul to taste and guess which enemy country it was from. Whatever it is, it could only have been made by a great civilization.

He toured the now-occupied US embassy and chatted amiably (sympathetically?) with the students about how they had pulled off the siege, overpowering the bulky Marines. They said their resolve got strengthened after seeing a large-size picture of Khomeini on a dartboard and several crude cartoons of Khomeini from American and British newspapers in the embassy. At Christmas they made cookies for their captives. An American priest who had come to perform the Christmas Mass said: We should be grateful that we are in a Muslim country and there are not drunk guards. Canadian Ambassador Ken Taylor told him: There are no anti-Canadian feelings here. No one has indicated any inclination to leave Tehran. There’s no panic. When he met Taylor later, he said: Mr Taylor, you’re a great liar. Taylor: That’s what I got paid for.

After an exhausting year in Tehran, the Soviets invaded (came to the assistance of) secular revolutionary Kabul and he was ordered to get there asap. But first he flew to the Iranian border and crossed into Afghanistan to meet a local tribal chieftain, who told him, ‘We’ll kick the bastards out.’ How to get there legitimately? Pakistan? Better India, which had good relations with the communists in Moscow and Kabul, so off to New Delhi and the Afghan embassy. Indira Gandhi never condemned the Soviet invasion. (How wise in retrospect.) In Kabul he was told not to go anywhere and only communicate through an official guide. Ha, ha! He snuck out the back door of his hotel, spoke to a soldier in Urdu, said ‘Canada’ and quickly found a local driver.

He credits Canada’s reputation for peaceful relations, a well-known eye clinic in Kabul. Off to (Shia) Herat where he heard Long live Islam, Long live Iran! He bought a Russian fur cap but was told never to wear it in public or he might be shot. He left via Pushtunistan to Jalalabad, Pakistan, where he met the legendary 91-year-old frontier Gandhi Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, who like the Siddiquis had protested the division of India. He was ailing but contemptuous of Soviet attempts to appease religious Afghans. Everything in Afghanistan is done in the name of religion. But this is a political religion, not the religion of Islam and Allah and Muhammad. Communism has nothing to do with religion. It has to do with the stomach. The Russians knew this and tried to convince the Afghans that they could keep their religion, but it was too little, too late. The Russians refused to try to treat their Gandhi, fearing if he died, they would be accused of killing him.

He pressed on to the Khyber Pass, the route for a stream of invaders – Cyrus, Darius, Genghis Khan, Alexander, the Mughals. Tribal chief Mohammed Gul told him: if the Iranians can knock off the Shah and the Americans, we certainly can kick out the Russians. He saw that resistance was beginning to jell within weeks of the Soviet occupation. It took a decade for the Soviets to depart, the US and allies, including Canada, taking double the time to conclude that Afghans have both the courage and patience to bleed any occupier dry.

This being the days before internet, getting copy out required ingenuity. Siddiqui would go to the airport on the days Indian Airlines came to Kabul, meet the crew and cajole/tip them into taking copy and dropping it off at the Reuters news agency in Delhi for forwarding to Toronto. He also went on the day Pakistan International Airlines came just in case. Later he was told everything came, sometimes twice. He met Brzezinski in Peshawar (!) but he wouldn’t give Siddiqui the time of day.

Following the Iraq-Iran war, he was disgusted that western media ignored the poison gas supplied to Iraq by American, German, French, Dutch, Swiss and Belgian companies. On the Iranian front line he hid from Iraqi snipers and marveled at how soldiers dying from gassing were rushed from the front to Tehran hospitals. He was appalled by Khomeini’s hitman, a sadistic prosecutor Ayatollah Sadegh Khalkhali, the hanging judge. Later in Paris, he met Bani Sadr, the first president, who had been impeached and fled the country disguised as a woman in a chador, in an Iran Air Force jet piloted by a sympathizer. He laments that US hostility prompted Khomeini to restart the nuclear program begun under the Shah, after ending it as unIslamic.

Siddiqui’s credo

I must admit, I’ve become jaded about multiculturalism. Toronto is now mostly first or second generation immigrants. Our culture feels shallow and American now. I find the turban-wearing Uber electric scooters grazing me unawares on bike paths frightening, and pointless, as they ferry onion rings to lazy people with too much money. I bemoan the lack of interest in Canadian history, our struggle to define an identity that’s not American. Most immigrants really would prefer big, rich, warm America to Canada and would have no problem if the US decided to invade. What has happened to Canadian culture?

But then I’ve become equally jaded about our heroic history. We are all immigrants, in the case of the paleface, mostly riff-raff, having decimated our poor brown natives. The post-WWII immigrants from brown countries like Siddiqui’s India/ Pakistan are mostly university-educated, the elites of their countries, so they really are a step up from my Irish-English-Swedish peasant ancestors.

But then, I find that equally disturbing. We stole the land from the real Canadians. Now we steal the intellectual wealth from poor countries. Sure we’re richer; the imperialist ‘centre’ is always richer. Our Canadianism was and is still a fraud. So, white flag, hello multiculturalism, for better or worse. But one that should give first place to our natives as the real owners, spiritually, of the land. And no more stealing, whether it be minds from ‘over there’, or land here or ‘over there’. That means Israel, our ‘best friend’, according to PM Harper in 2013 and PM Trudeau in 2015.

Siddiqui is unapologetically for mass immigration and has no time for the ecological problems that mass migration entails. He boasts having visited India 50 times in 40 years, not to mention his other peregrinations. That grates. Yes, brown/black is just as good as white, but what’s holding us together anymore? I don’t know, but I’m happy for Siddiqui, who at least has helped Canada transform from a country of bigotry and chauvinism to … a nice, tame, bland cosmopolis.

His journey through the swinging ’60s into the terrible ’20s is an upbeat panorama of not only Canada at its peak of popularity and feel-goodness, but, reading between the lines, also the decline of Canada, its loss of feel-good innocence transformation into an unapologetic toady of US empire. He took pride in being Canadian when Ambassador Taylor helped US hostages escape Tehran in 1980, when Chretien refused to go along with the invasion of Iraq in 2003, but it’s been downhill since then, with Harper’s disastrous commitment of Canadian troops to Afghanistan, his open Islamo- and Russophobia, his worship of Israel. While Trudeau has welcomed Syrian refugees (and now Afghans, fall out from Harper’s war), he did not fulfill his pledge to renew relations with Iran, despite the Iranian exile community’s pleas. His Russophobia is pathetic. Multiculturalism is looking mighty threadbare.

Yes, following Trudeau senior, Siddiqui’s credo is that all cultural communities have ‘the right to preserve and develop their own cultures within Canadian society’, which he notes is the ethos of India, best articulated by Indian novelist Shivaram Karanth: There’s no such thing as Indian culture. Indian culture is so varied as to be called cultures. But what has happened to India’s multiculturalism under arch-Hindu nationalist Modi?

Star Foreign Editor Jimmy Atkins (R) with Star chair John Honderich, South African President Nelson Mandela & first lady Graca Machel, Star editorial board editor Haroon Siddiqui.

Free trade, Sikhs, Laïcité

Siddiqui gets along with everyone, doesn’t drink or smoke (anymore), a model Muslim in the House of War.¹ He traces his ancestors to the first caliph Abu-bakr Siddiq, and second caliph Umar al-Khattab al-Faruq. A worthy disciple of the Prophet Muhammad, the multiculturalist par excellence.² The fearsome Bee (Star editor-in-chief Beland Honderich) famously got along with Haroon. Siddiqui started from scratch in Brandon (no halal, no yogurt in 1968), then the Star, rising quickly through the ranks to foreign correspondent, front page editor, editorial page editor, and finally columnist, all the time the only Muslim in mainstream Canadian media.

He and the Star were against Mulroney’s ‘free’ trade pact with the yankee devil, realizing it was only good for fat cats. He has acted as a public spokesman explaining the problems of all immigrants and BIPOC,³ an acronym he promotes. He highlights the racism which feeds on the changing demographics from white to nonwhite, recountiing a Tanzanian immigrant pushed onto Toronto’s subway tracks, crippling him, and the existence of a KKK chapter operating openly in Toronto.

The case of Sikhs is thorny. Sikh Canadians were mostly quietist, but when Sikh separatists were ejected from the Golden Temple by Indira Gandhi in 1984, she was assassinated, and Sikh separatists blew up an Indian Airlines plane full of Hindu Canadians in 1985. This still ranks as Canada’s worst such tragedy, but was downplayed by the Canadian government with the investigation bungled by the RCMP, as anti-Sikh/ Hindu racism grew. And it continues, the latest being a hit job on a (Sikh separatist) Canadian, openly, by India’s militant Hindu nationalist government. Multiculturalism is easily abused and hard to defend.

To their credit, the Sikhs in Canada have bounced back, entering politics (Justin Trudeau boasted more Sikhs in his cabinet than Modi), joining the RCMP, police, army, working hard, being good citizens. The bad apples didn’t spoil the whole barrel, though Sikhs have no use for India, and they really did capture the lackluster leadership convention of the NDP out of nowhere in 2017. The unlikely NDP leader Jagmeet Singh has been earnest, if not inspiring.

How does this multiculturalism pan out? Quebec separatists don’t like immigrants much, as they are not interested in living in a parochial, xenophobic province, and have enough trouble learning passable English, let alone Quebecois. They voted en masse against independence, and the pesky Muslim women want to wear hijab or worse, niqab. Vive la laïcité. Quebec has chosen to copy France’s punitive banning hijab and other restrictions. Still, English and French get along.

Tribalism, French vs English, Sikhs vs Hindus, Buddhists remains strong. That contrasts with Muslims, who quickly drop their ethnic identity for universal Islam and Canadianism (84% cite being Muslim and 81% cite being Canadian as their primary identity),⁴ as I’ve noticed at Muslim conferences, where a truly united nations reigns. That brings us to Jewish Canadians vs Muslim Canadians, the most tragic stand-off of the past century. Siddiqui doesn’t go to this forbidding territory. On the contrary, (wisely) he has spoken to Bnai Brith and Canadian Jewish Congress gatherings and kept a low profile as a Muslim Canadian. As the sole prominent Muslim journalist here, he was operating in enemy territory, as his encounter with Kaplan confirmed.

Enlightening Canadians on things Islamic

More important, he wrote engagingly about Muslims in Toronto, which hosts the largest Iranian emigre community after the US, mostly in ‘Tehronto’, a mix of pro- and anti-Khomeini, but able to live peacefully, all agreeing that the Canadian government nonrecognition of Iran and boycott is bad politics for everyone. His appreciation for this ‘great civilization’ contrasts with the negative press that Iran uniformly gets here.

Siddiqui realized quickly that Canadian media coverage and commentary ‘smelled of American propaganda’ and the US and allies were inflicting too many horrors on Muslims and Muslims lands. In 1988, the US warship Vincennes shot down an Iranian civilian airliner killing 290, prompting Bush I to boast: I will never apologize for the US. I don’t care what the facts are. Instead, Washington awarded medals to the captain and crew of the Vincennes. Did any other mainstream journalist note this then or now? He refused to blacken Islam after 9/11. Now a columnist he wrote his third post-9/11 column ‘It’s the US foreign policy, stupid,’ causing a storm of letters to the editor, a majority ‘thank you for saying it’.

Ismailis came in 1972, expelled by Idi Amin of Uganda, joined later by Ismailis from Kenya and Tanzania. Self-reliant, educated, entrepreneurial, they inspired the Aga Khan to build a museum of Islamic culture in Toronto in 2014, the only such museum in the West. Ironically it was officially opened by arch-Islamophobe PM Harper. We celebrate today not only the harmonious meeting of green gardens and glass galleries. We rejoice above all in the special spirit which fills this place and gives it its soul. But then, to Islamophobe Harper, Ismailis are Islam-lite, not considered real Muslims by most.

There are two chapters dealing with the ummah: Cultural Warfare on Muslims, and Harper and Muslims (In his ugliness, he was well ahead of Trump – and more effective). Some particularly painful episodes he covered:

*Harper invited (till then terrorist) Modi to Canada in 2014 when first elected, accompanying him to Ottawa, Toronto and Vancouver,

*He established an office of religious freedom, which he unveiled at a Mississauga Coptic church. He announced the position of a new ambassador of religious freedom at the Ahmadiyya mosque in Vaughan, defending Christian and other minorities in Muslim nations, doing nothing for Uighurs, Rohingyas, Shia in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.

I could go on – I haven’t even got to the Rushdie circus – but I urge all Muslim Canadians, no, all Canadians, to read for yourselves. Siddiqui provides an excellent survey of all the post-9/11 Islamophobic nonsense, especially in Euroland.

The West has discredited democracy by allowing anti-Islam and anti-Muslim discourse to be one of our last acceptable forms of racism and bigotry. It’s in this milieu that Rushdie and the Rushdie affair have thrived. Has Rushdie been exploiting western prejudices or has the West been using him as a shield for its own prejudices? Or is this a case of mutual convenience?

Having rid ourselves of Harper, how quickly we forget the pain when it stops. As it has under Trudeau Jr. For all his silliness and US-Israel fawning, Justin Trudeau is true to his father’s legacy, and undid much of Harper’s bigotry, especially relating to Muslims.

We should be wary of letting the unrepentant Conservatives take back Parliament Hill. However, I don’t think it’s possible to relaunch the Harper take-no-hostages Crusade. 9/11 (whoever did it) is what motivated me and many more to become a Muslim, and October 7 is now rapidly expanding the Muslim ummah, especially in the West, the heart of the beast. The trouble for the Harpers is that the more Islam and Muslims are reviled, the more Muslims (re)turn to their religion. But then that’s the way of imperialism, creating its enemies, stoking them, as Israel did with Hamas, thinking they can then pick off the ‘terrorists’, ‘mow the grass’.

Siddiqui draws from his experience surviving partition in India, adhering to Shaykh Madani’s view that ‘there is too much diversity within Islam for democracy to work, that an Islamic state would inevitably be authoritarian.’ Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Iran are the leading examples. The best protection for peoples of faith was a democratic state that stayed neutral between faiths and advanced mutual respect.⁵

The Harpers accuse Muslims of being unwilling to integrate. Canada, Britain and the US are shining examples of the opposite.

*In the 2021 federal election 12 Muslims won seats. Two hold senior Cabinet portfolios: Omar Alghabra and Ahmed Hussen.

*In Britain, in 2019, 19 were elected. Sadiq Khan has been mayor of London since 2016.

*Humza Yousaf became first minister in Scotland in 2023, the first Muslim to lead a western nation. When Khan was sworn in as a member of the Privy Council at Bukhingham Palace in 2009, it was discovered there was no Quran in the palace, so he brought his own and left it as a present to the Queen.

*In the US 57 Muslims were elected in 2020. Keith Ellison, the first member of the House was sworn in on a copy of the Quran owned by President Jefferson, who had bought an English translation out of the ‘desire to understand Islam on its own terms.’

*Arab and Muslim entertainers, stand-up comedians, writers, actors, Little Mosque on the Prairie …

*To welcome Syrian refugees arriving in Canada, Ottawa French public schools joined to sing Talaʽ al-Badru ʽAlaynā,⁶ which went viral on YouTube.

Siddiqui’s openmindedness and lack of prejudice are his not-so-secret weapon, able to find common humanity where western propaganda serves up bile. To no small degree, thanks to Haroon and other new (brown) Canadians, Marshall McLuhan’s global village is a reality at home, the most successful heterogeneous experiment in human history.

ENDNOTES

• 1
  Dar al-harb vs Dar al-Salam, House of Peace, referring to the Muslim world.
• 2
  Quran16:13 And all the [beauty of] many hues-which He has created for you on earth: in this, behold, there is a message for people who [are willing to] take it to heart.
• 3
  Black, indigenous, people of colour.
• 4
  Half of Muslim Canadians consider their ethnic identity as very important. Statistics Canada, ‘The Canadian Census: A rich portrait of the country’s religious and ethnocultural diversity,’ 2022.
• 5
  Siddiqui, My name is not Harry: A memoir, 392.
• 6
  (طلع البدر) nasheed that the Ansar sang for the Islamic prophet Muhammad upon his arrival at Medina from the (non)battle of Tabuk.

Eric Walberg is a journalist who worked in Uzbekistan and is now writing for Al-Ahram Weekly in Cairo. He is the author of From Postmodernism to Postsecularism and Postmodern Imperialism. His most recent book is Islamic Resistance to Imperialism. Read other articles by Eric, or visit Eric's website.