Her federal role was cut. Now Amira Elghawaby is launching a new tool to force government action on Islamophobia
2026/10/22 Leave a comment
Will be interesting to see the results and usage over time:
…The Muslim Communities Research Observatory (MCRO) portal, called macro for short, goes live Friday. It will be a global hub, a one-stop shop for advocacy groups who may “not even be aware of what research is out there” and for academics who “struggle with knowledge mobilization.”
“This is about raising the ability to ask for policy changes that are fully rooted in the evidence,” she said.
The site will be an important platform to disseminate a new five-year survey of Muslims in Canada by the University of Toronto’s Institute of Islamic Studies on social issues, faith and belonging that will also be announced Tuesday.
The last research on Muslim identities was the landmark Environics Survey in 2016, in which a question was, “Do Muslims want to embrace Canadian values or Muslim values?” said lead author Anver Emon. In this survey, researchers did away with that binary and found a majority of Muslims and non-Muslims saying Muslims in Canada want to adopt both Canadian and Muslim values.
It also found that while first-generation Muslim immigrants would overwhelmingly choose to immigrate to Canada again, nearly half (47.5 per cent) of second- and later-generation Canadian Muslims would choose to live in another country over concerns of affordability and inequality. The study reflects the perceptions of 903 Muslim households and 1,072 non-Muslim households across Canada, making it the largest sample of Canadian Muslims surveyed to date, Emon said.
MCRO is an ideal partner for the dissemination of research, said Emon, because, “as academics, we’re not the best at putting our ideas in 30-second sound bites, let’s be honest, right?”
Elghawaby’s experience with government, knowledge of policy and background as a journalist makes her “ideally suited” to translate that knowledge, he said….
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