This surge of worry about cultural integration is stronger among Conservative supporters than it is among Canadians at large. Indeed, when we examine the values of Canadians broken out by party preference, wariness of cultural difference is a key differentiating value of Conservatives. Given that Dr. Leitch is currently running not for prime minister of Canada, but for leader of the Conservative Party, critics who say that her threat of cracking down on anti-Canadian values is itself anti-Canadian are unlikely to do her much harm and may do her some good – for now.
Recent years have shown us that a backlash constituency does exist – a constituency alarmed by some aspects of living in a diverse society, and affronted that they are not permitted to air their alarm without being accused of racism. (It is no accident that Dr. Leitch’s campaign literature had an aggrieved tone: “If you are tired of feeling like we can’t discuss what our Canadian values are, then please help me to fight back by making a donation.…”) U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump is one champion of this backlash; he proposed ideological screening for immigrants a few weeks before Dr. Leitch did. Here in Canada, there was Rob Ford, lavish in his political incorrectness yet beloved by many newcomers, who embraced his little-guy-fighting-smug-liberal-elites narrative. And there was the Parti Québécois’s Charter of Values, which would likely have won them an election had their leader not careened off-message.
A political opportunity exists with those who feel angry and dismissed, but when Dr. Leitch courts Conservatives who want to “fight back,” she is playing a risky game that may trade short-term partisan gain for long-term political pain.
Yes, the wider Canadian context is more fearful than it was 20 years ago, but it is still positive toward immigrants and, importantly, proud of not being xenophobic. Canadians feel pride in their country (and immigrants are especially proud, surveys show), but one of the things Canadians are most proud of is a belief that different kinds of people can live here in harmony and that immigrants can be just as good citizens as anyone born here – sometimes better.
If voters see particular groups of immigrants as a threat to that harmony, Dr. Leitch might win support among Conservatives. But if many Conservatives and even more ordinary Canadians, including the four in 10 of us who are immigrants or their children, see Dr. Leitch as the threat, she will not become prime minister – and Conservatives will feel that so-called hotline sting for a second time.
But the harshest words for Ms. Leitch have come from Mr. Harper’s former policy director Rachel Curran – now a senior associate at the former prime minister’s new international consulting firm, Harper & Associates.
Ms. Curran called Ms. Leitch’s proposal “really dangerous politics” and accused her of specifically targeting Muslim immigrants.
“We have never had the government actually test people on what their thoughts and beliefs and their values are in Canada, and I don’t think we should go down that path,” Ms. Curran said.
“It’s a pretty dangerous path. It’s actually a pretty Orwellian path.”
Ms. Curran called the barbaric cultural practices tip line an “ill advised policy” that was poorly communicated at the time, but defended it as a last-minute request from a specific ethnic community that she declined to identify. She said she hasn’t spoken about the issue with her former boss, but doesn’t feel he would support Ms. Leitch’s proposal.
“Much of our party’s support came from new immigrants who believed in what the party was doing, and believed in what prime minister Harper was doing. And there is simply no way that he ever would have pursued or proposed a policy that was frankly fundamentally anti-immigrant,” she said.
“I think it does the party a tremendous amount of harm, and if nothing else it divides the party, which is also a bad thing.”
Ms. Leitch denies her proposal targets Muslims in any way.
“I understand the compulsion to paint a discussion about values in this way. But I actually don’t think it’s fair, and I don’t think it’s right,” she said.
Ms. Leitch also brought up two instances where her party sought to block the entry into Canada of those who she said contravene Canadian values of gender equality and women’s rights: so-called “pick-up artist” Julien Blanc in 2014, and in February, Daryush Valizadeh, also known as “Roosh V,” an American blogger who says rape should be legalized on private property.
Kingwell on political correctness and civility, making the important distinction between politeness and a willingness to engage in meaningful yet respectful discussion and debate:
Civility is much misunderstood. It is not politeness, the stifling of personal opinion in the service of social niceties. Politeness is a minor virtue of communal life. I might reply, when asked my opinion of a dinner, that it was “quite good.” I don’t really believe it and probably my host doesn’t either. Enough said.
Genuine civility, by contrast, marks a willingness to engage the other in the service of understanding, not competition. This is never easy. Will what I say offend someone else? Well, maybe. Is there still good reason for saying it, and saying it this way? What, finally, is the point, here?
Nobody anywhere, on campus or off, has ever had the privilege of saying anything at all without consequences. The next time you think political correctness has “gone too far,” ask yourself if maybe you are the one saying unproductive, small-minded or stupid things. Just as important, we all need to remember that nothing is ever correct until we argue the point – and usually not even then.
Good and interesting analysis regarding the differences among Chinese Canadians voting patterns and the efforts by the Liberals and Conservatives to attract their votes. For the breakdown of major voting groups in the 33 ridings where visible minorities are in the majority, see 2015 Election Top 33 ridings more than 50 % visible minorities):
As Justin Trudeau tries to build economic ties during his first state visit to China, he may also be helping himself a little with a political goal back home: breaking through with the country’s largest immigrant group.
Among the very few disappointments for Mr. Trudeau’s campaign team, in last year’s election, was how their party fared with Chinese-Canadians. Liberal candidates did as well or better with just about every other demographic as they could reasonably hope; this was one with which they struggled, and the Conservatives retained strength, more than they anticipated.
Markham-Unionville, with the highest concentration of Chinese-Canadian voters of any riding nationally, was one of the very few Greater Toronto Area seats where the Liberals failed to top the Tories – and, according to members of Mr. Trudeau’s inner circle, the only seat in the country they wrongly expected to win.
The one other riding where more than half of eligible voters are of Chinese descent, the Vancouver-area Richmond Centre, also proved beyond their grasp; narrower-than-expected margins in a few ridings they did win, notably in Toronto’s inner-suburb of Scarborough, suggested a pattern.
It’s one the Liberals need to break, as the country’s largest immigrant population – 1.5 million and growing – could yet be the difference in a close election.
But there are no shortcuts, in the form of goodwill from foreign trips or anything else, to breaking through. Based on conversations with party organizers who have worked on the ground in Chinese communities, the reality is more an array of complex factors that the Liberals will have to work hard to change.
Underscoring the nuance is a key distinction between families who came from Hong Kong, mostly through to the 1980s, and those who have come from mainland China in the past couple of decades. The general consensus is that the Liberals tended to do better with the former and the Conservatives with the latter in last year’s vote.
While that may have helped the Liberals at least significantly narrow the gap from 2011 in a riding like Richmond Centre, where many of the Chinese-Canadian voters have Hong Kong roots, it’s of little consolation since even there those voters are increasingly being overwhelmed by waves of mainland emigrants.
The Liberals’ election postmortems seemed to leave them with all sorts of explanations for why they’ve struggled with the newer arrivals.
The most popular of those explanations, among Mr. Trudeau’s top officials, is social conservatism. The Conservatives made a concerted effort to convince immigrant voters (not just Chinese-Canadians) that the Liberals would allow the sale of marijuana to children; in Ontario, the Liberals also had to contend with controversy around their provincial cousins’ sex-education changes.
While such concerns may have gotten traction among evangelicals with Hong Kong roots, Liberals say they especially heard about them from mainlanders new enough to Canada to be worried about the radicalism of a party they had not seen much (if at all) in power.
Those issues may have penetrated partly because the Tories out-advertised the Liberals in Chinese-Canadian media. And Conservative-friendly ownership of leading outlets such as Fairchild TV and the Sing Tao Daily newspaper helped the Tories get more positive earned media than the Liberals in primary news sources for many relative newcomers – if not as it related to hot-button social issues, then in how the leaders and their agendas were generally presented.
That ties into a whole bunch of other explanations floating around. The Liberals’ polling, according to a source familiar with it, suggested former mainlanders were receptive to what some other Canadians saw as Stephen Harper’s authoritarian streak, considering him a much stronger leader than Mr. Trudeau.
A veteran organizer in the Chinese community suggested economic conservatism was borne of relatively affluent recent arrivals being concerned about their assets’ safety from government intrusion. Just as earlier waves of immigrants had a positive association with the Liberals because that party was in power when they got here, more recent ones might have felt that way about the Tories.
Merely having won government may help the Liberals with that last factor, and some of the others besides. They can set to rest some of the more extravagant fears about their social liberalism by not legislating like radicals. Mr. Trudeau will seem stronger just by virtue of his office.
A trip like this week’s is a prime opportunity to forge better relations with Mandarin media outlets, while also getting copious coverage in them. (Although it also runs the risk of alienating some of their supporters who came here from Hong Kong, and are wary of Canada’s government cozying up to the Middle Kingdom.)
But there is also an underlying reality that belies quick fixes, and will test the Liberals’ commitment to their “hope and hard work” mantra to winning over voters.
One of the better commentaries on Kellie Leith’s “barbaric cultural practices” repeat performance:
The good news for Kellie Leitch — and she might need some right now — is that many Canadians believe this country needs young, female political leaders.
The bad news is that most Conservatives — the people who make up the party Leitch wants to lead — do not share that view.
These findings come from new research by Abacus Data. By sheer happenstance, Abacus and the Leitch leadership campaign were out in the field in late August, doing some survey work that touched on Canadian values. The two surveys dovetail in some fascinating ways.
The Leitch survey asked, controversially, whether respondents would support screening immigrants for “anti-Canadian values.” This was quite the surprise coming from the MP for Simcoe-Grey, once the federal labour minister, who only months ago was apologetically backtracking for her role in the infamous “barbaric cultural practices” tip line proposal of the 2015 election campaign.
Now, we seem to be back in the middle of a debate we thought had been settled in the last election. Maybe it wasn’t.
The Abacus survey sounded people out on the traits and values they’re seeking in political leaders. Leitch and her supporters no doubt will be heartened to hear that 54 per cent of respondents to the Abacus poll said they would prefer a woman leader. Moreover, a whopping 65 per cent — nearly two-thirds — said they would rather have someone under 50 years of age. Leitch, 46, comfortably meets both criteria.
The problem for Leitch, however, is that her own fellow Conservatives aren’t as enthusiastic about young female leaders. Almost 60 per cent of Conservative respondents to the Abacus poll said that if they had their choice between someone over 50 and someone under 50 to lead a political party, they’d select the older candidate. Only 13 per cent said they would prefer a younger, female leader.
Those results are even more striking when compared to the views of Liberal and NDP supporters who participated in the Abacus poll. Nearly 70 per cent of Liberals and 77 per cent of NDP supporters said they’d opt for a woman leader given a choice between a man and a woman of equal qualifications.
The obvious conclusion, then, is that Leitch is running for the wrong party. Then again, she might have trouble selling Liberal or NDP voters on the idea of screening immigrants for potential anti-Canadian values.
Clearly, Leitch’s campaign believes this issue taps into a rich vein of support, at least in Conservative circles. Which could explain why Bernier called the idea ‘unworkable’ rather than, say, ‘egregious.’
Abacus conducted its poll online in late August, asking 2,010 Canadians of voting age all kinds of questions about their ideal political leaders. When they got around to the subject of leadership qualities, the results turned out to be highly interesting.
The top two traits? “Understanding different parts of the world” and “thinking about what’s right for the next generation.” Respondents also placed a high value on leaders who “think a lot about the future of the world”, are “open-minded about different lifestyles” and “care about the poor.”
Buried in the list, however, is a possible rationale for Leitch’s controversial survey question.
Only 18 per cent of the respondents to the Abacus poll said that a leader must embrace the idea that “immigration is good for Canada.” Understanding different parts of the world is one thing, apparently, while welcoming them here is another matter entirely.
Nick Kouvalis, Leitch’s campaign manager, has said that the survey was based on what the campaign had been hearing out on the road over the summer. Kouvalis, for those who may have forgotten, has not been shy in the past about courting controversy with provocative survey questions. His firm, Campaign Research, was scolded by the Commons Speaker several years ago for polling Montreal residents about Irwin Cotler’s allegedly imminent resignation. (Cotler, then the MP for Mount Royal, protested in the Commons that the survey breached his parliamentary privileges, though he did eventually step down before the last election.)
Kouvalis, let’s also remember, was one of the early backers and staffers for former Toronto mayor Rob Ford (he was also one of the first to walk away when things started to go crazy in Fordland). Kouvalis was on John Tory’s team in the last mayoralty election in Toronto and helped B.C. Premier Christy Clark pull off an unexpected victory in 2013.
On Twitter, Kouvalis has been predicting that all the leadership candidates eventually will perform some “world-class gymnastics” to embrace Leitch’s views on screening immigrants for anti-Canadian values. Clearly, her campaign manager believes this issue taps into a rich vein of support, at least in Conservative circles. Which could explain why Bernier called the idea “unworkable” rather than, say, “egregious.”
Among the other admirable leadership qualities cited by respondents to that Abacus poll were the ability to “ask for help when you need it,” to “seek advice from smart people everywhere” and to “apologize when you make a mistake.”
One can’t help but notice that Leitch hasn’t apologized for this survey question — perhaps on the advice she needed from people she considers smart.
“Oftentimes, debating and discussing these complex policies requires tough conversations — conversations that go well beyond media sound bites and simplified labels,” Leitch wrote in an emailed statement after the controversy.
“I am committed to having these conversations, to debating theses issues, and I invite Canadians to give their feedback.”
So, like it or not, immigration may become a hot-button issue in the Conservative leadership race. Consider this an early warning — especially for those complacent Canadians who say that Donald Trump’s rhetoric on immigration couldn’t possibly work here.
The people in Leitch’s Conservative party may not be the biggest fans of female leaders under 50, but this particular candidate could be giving them the campaign’s sleeper issue. In other words, the debate about “barbaric cultural practices” didn’t die in 2015; it’s simply been slumbering, waiting for an opening.
Not totally surprising that the CAQ would play identity politics but still disturbing given its predecessor, the ADQ, did so:
It was Legault who opened himself up to the attacks when, arriving for a two-day meeting of his caucus, raised the issue when asked if he still has confidence in his caucus chairperson, Nathalie Roy.
Roy said last week she wanted the burkini — a piece of clothing which covers the entire body and head leaving only the face, hands and feet visible — banned. It is the same clothing which sparked a furor on the beaches of France this summer.
Photos of police officers who intervened on the beaches because of Muslim women wearing burkinis were seen around the world.
After saying he has the same “malaise,” as Roy when it comes to the burkini, Legault said it explains why the CAQ — should it form a government — is proposing to create a values test for newcomers.
It would be CAQ policy to require new immigrants to pass a test on Quebec’s language, and cultural values, after a three-year probationary period. If they don’t pass after two tries, they would be asked to return to their country of origin or to another province in Canada.
Legault ventured that immigrants in favour of the burkini would likely fail those tests and could be refused citizenship because a burkini runs against the principle of equality between men and women.
“There are big questions to be asked on such a piece of clothing,” Legault said. “Does it respect the fundamental values we have in Quebec on the equality of men and women?”
Asked by a reporter what would happen to a person who had moved to Quebec and insisted that the burkini was part of their faith, Legault was clear:
The idea has become a commonplace: that Saudi Arabia’s export of the rigid, bigoted, patriarchal, fundamentalist strain of Islam known as Wahhabism has fueled global extremism and contributed to terrorism. As the Islamic State projects its menacing calls for violence into the West, directing or inspiring terrorist attacks in country after country, an old debate over Saudi influence on Islam has taken on new relevance.
Is the world today a more divided, dangerous and violent place because of the cumulative effect of five decades of oil-financed proselytizing from the historical heart of the Muslim world? Or is Saudi Arabia, which has often supported Western-friendly autocrats over Islamists, merely a convenient scapegoat for extremism and terrorism with many complex causes — the United States’s own actions among them?
Those questions are deeply contentious, partly because of the contradictory impulses of the Saudi state.
In the realm of extremist Islam, the Saudis are “both the arsonists and the firefighters,” said William McCants, a Brookings Institution scholar. “They promote a very toxic form of Islam that draws sharp lines between a small number of true believers and everyone else, Muslim and non-Muslim,” he said, providing ideological fodder for violent jihadists.
Yet at the same time, “they’re our partners in counterterrorism,” said Mr. McCants, one of three dozen academics, government officials and experts on Islam from multiple countries interviewed for this article.
Conflicting Goals
Saudi leaders seek good relations with the West and see jihadist violence as a menace that could endanger their rule, especially now that the Islamic State is staging attacks in the kingdom — 25 in the last eight months, by the government’s count. But they are also driven by their rivalry with Iran, and they depend for legitimacy on a clerical establishment dedicated to a reactionary set of beliefs. Those conflicting goals can play out in a bafflingly inconsistent manner.
Thomas Hegghammer, a Norwegian terrorism expert who has advised the United States government, said the most important effect of Saudi proselytizing might have been to slow the evolution of Islam, blocking its natural accommodation to a diverse and globalized world. “If there was going to be an Islamic reformation in the 20th century, the Saudis probably prevented it by pumping out literalism,” he said.
Photo
The Seoul Central Mosque in South Korea, one of hundreds of mosques around the world built using Saudi donations.CreditChoi Won-Suk/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
The reach of the Saudis has been stunning, touching nearly every country with a Muslim population, from the Gothenburg Mosque in Sweden to the King Faisal Mosque in Chad, from the King Fahad Mosque in Los Angeles to the Seoul Central Mosque in South Korea. Support has come from the Saudi government; the royal family; Saudi charities; and Saudi-sponsored organizations including the World Muslim League, the World Assembly of Muslim Youth and the International Islamic Relief Organization, providing the hardware of impressive edifices and the software of preaching and teaching.
There is a broad consensus that the Saudi ideological juggernaut has disrupted local Islamic traditions in dozens of countries — the result of lavish spending on religious outreach for half a century, estimated in the tens of billions of dollars. The result has been amplified by guest workers, many from South Asia, who spend years in Saudi Arabia and bring Saudi ways home with them. In many countries, Wahhabist preaching has encouraged a harshly judgmental religion, contributing to majority supportin some polls in Egypt, Pakistan and other countries for stoning for adultery and execution for anyone trying to leave Islam.
Limits of Influence
But exactly how Saudi influence plays out seems to depend greatly on local conditions. In parts of Africa and Southeast Asia, for instance, Saudi teachings have shifted the religious culture in a markedly conservative direction, most visibly in the decision of more women to cover their hair or of men to grow beards. Among Muslim immigrant communities in Europe, the Saudi influence seems to be just one factor driving radicalization, and not the most significant. In divided countries like Pakistan and Nigeria, the flood of Saudi money, and the ideology it promotes, have exacerbated divisions over religion that regularly prove lethal.
And for a small minority in many countries, the exclusionary Saudi version of Sunni Islam, with its denigration of Jews and Christians, as well as of Muslims of Shiite, Sufi and other traditions, may have made some people vulnerable to the lure of Al Qaeda, the Islamic State and other violent jihadist groups. “There’s only so much dehumanizing of the other that you can be exposed to — and exposed to as the word of God — without becoming susceptible to recruitment,” said David Andrew Weinberg, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies in Washington who tracks Saudi influence.
Exhibit A may be Saudi Arabia itself, which produced not only Osama bin Laden, but also 15 of the 19 hijackers of Sept. 11, 2001; sent more suicide bombers than any other country to Iraq after the 2003 invasion; and has supplied more foreign fighters to the Islamic State, 2,500, than any country other than Tunisia.
Mehmet Gormez, the senior Islamic cleric in Turkey, said that while he was meeting with Saudi clerics in Riyadh in January, the Saudi authorities had executed 47 people in a single day on terrorism charges, 45 of them Saudi citizens. “I said: ‘These people studied Islam for 10 or 15 years in your country. Is there a problem with the educational system?’ ” Mr. Gormez said in an interview. He argued that Wahhabi teaching was undermining the pluralism, tolerance and openness to science and learning that had long characterized Islam. “Sadly,” he said, the changes have taken place “in almost all of the Islamic world.”
In a huge embarrassment to the Saudi authorities, the Islamic State adopted official Saudi textbooks for its schools until the extremist group could publish its own books in 2015. Out of 12 works by Muslim scholars republished by the Islamic State, seven are by Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, the 18th-century founder of the Saudi school of Islam, said Jacob Olidort, a scholar at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. A former imam of the Grand Mosque in Mecca, Sheikh Adil al-Kalbani declared with regret in a television interview in January that the Islamic State leaders “draw their ideas from what is written in our own books, our own principles.”
Small details of Saudi practice can cause outsize trouble. For at least two decades, the kingdom has distributed an English translation of the Quran that in the first surah, or chapter, adds parenthetical references to Jews and Christians in addressing Allah: “those who earned Your Anger (such as the Jews), nor of those who went astray (such as the Christians).” Seyyed Hossein Nasr, a professor of Islamic studies at George Washington University and the editor in chief of the new Study Quran, an annotated English version, said the additions were “a complete heresy, with no basis in Islamic tradition.”
Accordingly, many American officials who have worked to counter extremism and terrorism have formed a dark view of the Saudi effect — even if, given the sensitivity of the relationship, they are often loath to discuss it publicly. The United States’ reliance on Saudi counterterrorism cooperation in recent years — for instance, the Saudi tip that foiled a 2010 Qaeda plot to blow up two American cargo planes — has often taken precedence over concerns about radical influence. And generous Saudi funding for professorships and research centers at American universities, including the most elite institutions, has deterred criticism and discouraged research on the effects of Wahhabi proselytizing, according to Mr. McCants — who is working on a book about the Saudi impact on global Islam — and other scholars.
One American former official who has begun to speak out is Ms. Pandith, the State Department’s first special representative to Muslim communities worldwide. From 2009 to 2014, she visited Muslims in 80 countries and concluded that Saudi influence was pernicious and universal. “In each place I visited, the Wahhabi influence was an insidious presence,” she wrote in The New York Times last year. She said the United States should “disrupt the training of extremist imams,” “reject free Saudi textbooks and translations that are filled with hate,” and “prevent the Saudis from demolishing local Muslim religious and cultural sites that are evidence of the diversity of Islam.”
The burkini is, in fact, a sad symbol of Islam today going backward on gender issues. France’s ban on it is a sad symbol of liberalism today going backward in reply.
Classical liberals of any religion or none would do well to remember that this does not have to be a zero-sum game. It is possible to oppose the French ban on burkinis while also challenging the mindset of those who support burkas and burkinis.
As a reforming secular liberal Muslim, I do not endorse the gender-discriminatory body-shaming and moralizing of burkas. I recoil, too, at the silly idea of a burkini. But I also believe that France’s ban on them is ridiculous, illiberal, and incredibly petty. It is also cynical.
As for liberalism going backward, when Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel drove a truck through the crowd in Nice on July 14, he sought to deepen division, and to further the ISIS aim of a global civil war. Strategically, he chose the right location.
The French Riviera is a traditional stronghold of French reactionaries. The area sees consistently high poll results for the far right. Last year, National Front leader Marine Le Pen’s niece, Marion Maréchal-Le Pen, ran a high-profile campaign there and succeeded in making huge gains. The region is now rapidly turning into a polarized hotbed of tension, pitching far-right sympathizers against Islamist extremists.
In this respect, the burkini ban is nothing but a product of political opportunism. With the proximity of elections looming, shortsighted politicking is the only consideration that matters. Local petty political chieftains would rather provoke national turbulence merely to win a local council seat than do what is in their country’s national interest.
As the 2017 French presidential and legislative elections approach, the country’s politicians are desperate to prove who can do the most—or anything at all—against the pernicious effect of jihadist terrorism. They have only a few months left. Sadly, grand gestures such as bans on symbolic pieces of cloth carry political currency in this game of mass-hysteria identity politics.
This is how our most valued asset, source of strength and global envy—liberalism—is capitulating to identity-based communalism, short-term electoral gain, populist appeasement, and a clamor to just do something.
Perpetual identity-based civil war, rather than war between countries, suits those who wish to build a new world order—a caliphate—carved out of existing states. Equal treatment on a citizenship basis means nothing to jihadists.
There is no better way to kickstart dividing people along exclusively religious lines than by committing atrocities in the name of Islam. Their hope is that everyone else also begins to identify Sunni Muslims primarily by their religious identities, in reaction to the atrocities. In this way, religious identity has won and citizenship becomes redundant.
But the backward trajectory of contemporary liberalism is matched by a backward trajectory within Islam today.
In modern Muslim-majority contexts and up until the 1970s, the female body was not shamed out of public view. As one Egyptian feminist asserts, this was mainly due to the social dominance of the relatively liberal, middle-class elite in urban centers.
But throughout the ’80s, theocratic Islamism began replacing Arab socialism as the ideology of resistance against “the West.” As is always the case with misogynist dogma, the war against the “other” necessitated defining what is “ours” and what is “theirs”—and our women, of course, were deemed “ours.”
Suddenly, women’s bodies became the red line in a cultural war against the West started by theocratic Islamism. A Not Muslim Enough charade was used to identity “true” Muslims against “Western” stooges. Religious dress codes became a crucial marker in these cultural purity stakes. Only the fanatic can ever win in this Not Muslim Enough game. Any uncovered woman was now deemed loose, decadent, and attention seeking.
In short, too Western.
Many Islamists advocate total segregation between the sexes, and in fact they would reject the burkini. The full-body swimwear would certainly not be allowed in today’s Saudi Arabia: still too revelaing!
In that sense, it is actually a step forward from Islamism’s peak in the ’90s. But it is still a step backward from before theocratic Islamism took hold among Muslims. The more women succumb to this Not Muslim Enough charade, the more theocrats demand of them. Is it any wonder, then, that some of the most abusive, oppressive societies for women happen also to be the most religiously conservative?
When writing recently in defense of her burkini invention, Aheda Zanetti equated concealing the female form with “modesty” no less than three times.
She confessed to not participating in sports when young “because we chose to be modest.”
But the assumption that “modesty” equates to covering up is a subtle form of bigotry against the female form. It goes without saying that harassment on Western beaches, where the female form is more normalized, occurs less than in conservative societies, even though it is still present. But in too many instances across Muslim-majority contexts this “modesty theology” has led to slut-shaming of women who do not cover.
In the worst of cases, misogyny disguised as modesty has led to mass sexual harassment on the streets, most recently by gangs of Muslim migrants in Cologne. In Egypt, it has even given rise to a mass public rape phenomenon. As Muslim feminists note, violating Muslim cultural “honor codes” (‘irdh) and modesty theology (hayaa’) can lead to heinous legal and societal reprimand and the gross fetishization of a woman’s body.
Just like any other practice rooted in religiously inspired misogyny, the burkini cannot be detached from the body-shaming tied to its origins. Aheda Zanetti continued to insist that her product is “about not being judged” as a Muslim woman, yet she is wedded to a practice that inextricably judges the female form as being “immodest,” as she, too, did in her own piece.
“I don’t think any man should worry about how women are dressing,” she argued.
OK. But it has only ever been conservative-religious Muslim men telling Muslim women how to dress.
Over the course of my years immersed in Islamic theology and Arabic, I remain unaware of any medieval female Muslim exegete used as authority by Muslim women for the “duty” of wearing a hijab. It is only ever male exegetes of the Quran who are cited preaching for the duty of female “modesty.”
And it is simply an undeniable fact that most Muslim women judged and attacked around the world for how they dress are attacked by other Islamist and fundamentalist Muslims, not by non-Muslims. These are religious fanatics playing the Not Muslim Enough game.
I am a liberal. The headscarf is a choice. Let Muslim women wear bikinis or burkinis. Liberal societies have no business in legally interfering with the dress choices women make. I have consistently opposed the ban on face veils in France, just as I oppose their enforced use in Iran and Saudi Arabia.
Outside of this legal debate, though, and as a reforming secular liberal Muslim, I reserve the right to question my own communities’ cultural traditions and taboos.
As a liberal, I reserve the right to question religious-conservative dogma generally, just as most Western progressives already do with Christianity. Yet with Muslims, Western liberals seem perennially confused between possessing a right to do something, and being right when doing it.
Of course American Christian fundamentalists of the Bible Belt have a right to speak, but liberals routinely—and rightly—challenge their views on abortion, sexuality, and marriage. To do so is not to question their right to speak, but to challenge their belief that they are right when they speak. I ask only that secular liberal Muslims are also supported in challenging our very own “Quran Belt” emerging in Europe.
This is the real struggle. It is intellectual and it is cultural, more than it is legal.
While I see the need for this educator’s guide, disappointed that there is minimal language in the Guide (Helping Students Deal with Trauma – Eng) on the linkage to other forms of racism and discrimination and the need to promote an overall message of acceptance and inclusion, including among Canadian Muslim youth.
A missed opportunity:
Newly welcomed Syrian refugees and Muslim children are on the receiving end of Islamophobia in Canadian schools across the country, say the human rights groups that want to put and end to it.
The National Council of Canadian Muslims (NCCM), The Islamic Social Services Association (ISSA) and the Canadian Human Rights Commission (CHRC), launched a new educator’s guide at a press conference on Parliament Hill Thursday morning, which is intended for teachers to help students deal with trauma related to Islamaphobia.
Currently, the guide is available for free online, and the groups hope that eventually a hard copy will make its way into elementary, high school and university classrooms across the country.
NCCM’s executive director, Ihsaan Gardee, said Canadian Muslims along with newly arrived refugee and immigrant youth are suffering in different ways.
“Whether it’s being afraid to speak about their Muslim identity or whether it’s the shame of being a refugee or dealing with post-war trauma many young people are hurting,” said Gardee.
Families have told NCCM that they hope and expect their childrens’ classrooms to be safe and teachers have told NCCM they need tools to provide support to Muslims in their classrooms. Many have said they feel let down.
“We have heard too many stories of Islamophobia in our schools. We’ve heard about school teachers making hurtful comments in the classroom or on social media about refugees and about Muslims and Islamic practices. We’ve heard about children being afraid to raise their voice to explain their beliefs to their peers,” Gardee continued.
Chief commissioner of the CHRC, Marie-Claude Landry, referencing the Liberal government’s generosity in accepting nearly 30,000 Syrian refugees, said that as the message from our country’s leaders continues to be positive and optimistic, “there is a natural tendency among many Canadians to take for granted that we live in a society guided by inclusion, respect and equality.”
“But the reality is that now more than ever, we must be extra careful not to take our Canadian values for granted,” said Landry.
Landry said this isn’t a Muslim issue – it’s a Canadian issue.
When a Muslim woman is verbally assaulted while shopping with her child, we are all diminished by it, she said.
And when an 8 year-old-child is accused of carrying a knife because of a head covering, we are all the lesser for it, she continued.
Landry believes this guide will help teachers create more inclusive spaces for Canadian Muslim students, and said that at the heart of the guide is the powerful idea that “all children deserve a classroom where they feel safe and understood.”
They can blame him [Harper] for other things, too. His scorched earth election strategy drove suburban immigrant voters out of the Conservative coalition, leaving the party weakened in the all-important ridings of Greater Toronto and Greater Vancouver. The niqab debate. Barbaric cultural practices. Worst of all, according to senior Conservatives, the law to strip dual citizens who commit certain crimes of their citizenship. That one killed them at the door in the 905.
Whoever Mr. Harper was trying to win over with these toxic policies during the 2015 election campaign, the price he paid in immigrant votes and the votes of those who welcome immigrants was high. The new leader will have a long row to hoe to win them back.
Clearly, Leitch’s campaign believes this issue taps into a rich vein of support, at least in Conservative circles. Which could explain why Bernier called the idea ‘unworkable’ rather than, say, ‘egregious.’
