Douglas Todd: Canadian aboriginals joining Christian clergy despite residential-school legacy

2016/02/09 Leave a comment

Interesting piece by Douglas Todd on indigenous peoples and spirituality. When I was looking at religious affiliation in my book, Multiculturalism in Canada: Evidence and Anecdote, one of the bigger surprises was the low number following traditional Aboriginal spirituality:

The biggest group of Canadian aboriginals, 506,000, affiliate with Roman Catholicism. The National Household Survey found another 134,000 associate with the Anglican Church, 59,000 with the United Church and 36,000 are Pentecostal.

Almost one in five aboriginals say they have “no religion.” And 63,000 say they follow traditional aboriginal spirituality.

Dozens of aboriginal clergy in the Anglican, United Church, Lutheran and Presbyterian churches have trained through the Native Ministries Consortium at Vancouver School of Theology on the UBC campus. Every summer, 40 to 60 aboriginal theology students take programs at The Native Ministries Consortium, says director Ray Aldred, who is Cree.

The students are often from the West Coast — Salish, Haida, Tsimshian, etc. Other indigenous students hail from Ontario, the Arctic and the Prairies. That’s not to mention Lakota, Navajo or Nez Perce from the U.S.

Contrary to most media reports about Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Aldred believes “aboriginal anger about white Christianity” and the legacy of residential schools abated more than a decade ago.

“I think in the 1950s the churches began realizing they had made a mistake with residential schools. But it took another 50 years to get out of them,” said Aldred, 56.

The churches closed almost all residential schools by the 1970s, but the federal government’s billion-dollar compensation and healing program is continuing.

“Now we can do Christian faith on our own terms,” said Aldred, who was baptized in the United Church but is now a minister in the Alliance Church. “That’s the cool thing about Canada. We seem to find ways to get along.”

Both Aldred and Nahanee feel they have integrated Christianity into their aboriginal traditions.

“I believe Christianity is everyone’s religion. It’s not just white man’s religion,” said Nahanee, 63, who also chairs the Canadian Catholic Aboriginal Council.

Nahanee often holds a talking stick or eagle feather when he’s in the pulpit at St. Paul’s Church, which is decorated with aboriginal designs and where he co-ministers with his Filipina wife, Emma, 53.

The Catholic Church allows deacons, unlike its priests, to be married. However, Nahanee and Emma joked about how the church would not permit him to remarry if she died.

Even though Nahanee would like to see Pope Francis repeat earlier Vatican apologies for Canada’s residential-school system, including one that operated a few hundred metres from St. Paul’s Church, he regrets how some good things that happened in the schools are being ignored.

“People are now afraid to say positive things about the schools,” said Nahanee. He noted, for instance, that in the late 1800s the Catholic priest for St. Paul’s Church and its related residential school stopped an attempt by the legendary Vancouver saloon owner, “Gassy Jack” Deighton, to seize Squamish Nation land.

Nahanee is convinced Christianity, at its best, adds to aboriginal culture. He knows it might not be for everyone, but he urges aboriginals and others who are angry about the past to find ways to transcend it.

“I think forgiveness is a way of healing and getting on with our lives. We’ve had so many problems because of anger and alcoholism. It has to end.”

Source: Douglas Todd: Canadian aboriginals joining Christian clergy despite residential-school legacy

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Light Government Touch Lets China’s Hui Practice Islam in the Open – The New York Times

2016/02/03 Leave a comment

Interesting contrast to the repression of the Uighurs:

As the call to prayer echoed off the high walls of the madrasa and into the surrounding village, dozens of boys, dressed in matching violet caps, poured out of their dorm rooms and headed to the mosque.

That afternoon prayer ritual, little changed since Middle Eastern traders traversing the Silk Road first arrived in western China more than 1,000 years ago, was at once quotidian and remarkable.

That is because in many parts of the officially atheist country, religious restrictions make it a crime to operate Islamic schools and bar people under 18 from entering mosques.

Asked about the Chinese government’s light touch here, Liu Jun, 37, the chief imam at the Banqiao Daotang Islamic School, offered a knowing smile.

“Muslims from other parts of China who come here, especially from Xinjiang, can’t believe how free we are, and they don’t want to leave,” he said, referring to the far-west borderlands that are home to China’s beleaguered Uighur ethnic minority. “Life for the Hui is very good.”

With an estimated Muslim population of 23 million, China has more followers of Islam than many Arab countries. Roughly half of them live in Xinjiang, an oil-rich expanse of Central Asia where a cycle of violence and government repression has alarmed human rights advocates and unnerved Beijing over worries about the spread of Islamic extremism.

But here in the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, a relatively recent administrative construct that is the official heartland of China’s Hui Muslim community, that kind of strife is almost nonexistent, as are the limitations on religion that critics say are fueling Uighur discontent.

Throughout Ningxia and the adjacent Gansu Province, new filigreed mosques soar over even the smallest villages, adolescent boys and girls spend their days studying the Quran at religious schools, and muezzin summon the faithful via loudspeakers — a marked contrast to mosques in Xinjiang, where the local authorities often forbid amplified calls to prayer.

In Hui strongholds like Linxia, a city in Gansu known as China’s “Little Mecca,” there are mosques on every other block and women can sometimes be seen with veils, a sartorial choice that can lead to detention in Xinjiang.

Source: Light Government Touch Lets China’s Hui Practice Islam in the Open – The New York Times

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ICYMI: Islam isn’t inherently violent or peaceful

2016/02/03 Leave a comment

Good lengthy piece by Andrew Mack providing context and data regarding violent extremism:

The reality is that Islam—like Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, and other major world religions—is neither inherently violent nor inherently peaceful. Like every other great religion, the history of Islam is darkened by periods of violent bloodletting. And the holy texts of all religions can be mined for quotes to legitimize terrorism—or indeed principled nonviolence.

Thus ISIS and other extreme Islamist radicals have no difficulty finding justification in medieval Islamic texts for their ultra-violent ideology and barbaric practices. But these extreme interpretations have minimal support among Muslims around the world and tell us nothing about the propensity for violence in mainstream Islam.

In October 2014, the first opinion polls on public attitudes toward ISIS were published in three Arab countries for the Fikra Forum. The findings were instructive. Just 3 percent of Egyptians held favorable views of ISIS. The figure for Saudi Arabia was 5 percent and for Lebanon less than 1 percent. A year later Pew Research found that just 1 percent of Lebanese held “favorable opinions” of ISIS, 3 percent in predominantly Sunni Jordan, and 1 percent in Israel. In the Palestinian territories the figure was 6 percent, but even here a massive 84 percent held unfavorable opinions of ISIS. Previous polls revealed very similar trends about Muslim opinions toward al-Qaida.

Discussions about the violence of contemporary Islam focus overwhelmingly on armed conflict and terrorism. But a more appropriate metric for determining the propensity for violence of a particular society, culture, or religion is the incidence of intentional homicide.

In almost all societies it is murder, not war, that accounts for the large majority of intentional killings. And perpetrating homicide, unlike embarking on wars or terror campaigns, does not require long preparation, intensive organization, a huge range of weaponry, complex logistics, political mobilization, intensive training, or a great deal of money—which is one reason why war and terrorism death tolls around the world are far smaller than the number of homicides. It is far more difficult to mount an armed campaign against a state than to kill an individual.

And even today, wars directly affect only a relatively small minority of countries. All countries suffer from homicides, however. In 2015, the Global Burden of Armed Violence published by the Geneva-based Small Arms Survey, found that between 2007 and 2012, for every individual killed in war or terror campaigns around the world, seven individuals were murdered. Worldwide, for most people, in most countries, most of the time, murder is a far greater threat to human security than organized political violence.

So if there really is an inherent—Islam-driven—propensity for deadly violence in Muslim societies, we should expect to find that the greater the percentage of Muslims in society, the greater would be the numbers of homicides. In fact, the reverse is the case: The higher the percentage of Muslims in a society, the lower the homicide rate.

In 2011, a major study by University of California, Berkeley, political scientist M. Steven Fish presented cross-national statistical data showing that between 1994 and 2007, annual homicide rates in the Muslim world averaged just 2.4 per 100,000 of the population. That was approximately a third of the rate for the non-Muslim world and less than the average rate in Europe. It is also approximately half the homicide rate in the United States.

In comparing individual countries, the difference is even greater. The latest homicide statistics from the U.N.’s Office on Drugs and Crime reveal that for every murder perpetrated in Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim state, seven people are murdered in the United States. This reality should give American Islamophobes pause.

It is possible in principle, as some critics have argued, that the lower murder rates in Muslim countries could be due not to a generally low propensity for homicide but to authoritarian governments whose harsh anti–violent crime policies are more effective in reducing the incidence of murder than those of democracies like the United States. But Fish’s careful statistical analyses controlled for this possibility and found no evidence to support it.

When it comes to war, Fish found no statistical evidence to support Samuel Huntington’s controversial “clash of civilizations” thesis that Muslim societies are inherently more war-prone than non-Muslim states.

Moreover, a lot depends on what type of war is being counted. A 2011 analysis by the Human Security Report looked at which states had fought most international wars—including colonial wars—since the end of World War II. The top four were France, Britain, Russia/Soviet Union, and the United States—in that order. No Muslim-majority country was in the top eight.

Yet another metric for determining the violence-proneness of countries is the “conflict year,” the number of armed conflicts—civil as well as international—that a country experiences in a calendar year. Some particularly conflict-prone countries—Burma is the prime example—have frequently found themselves fighting several different wars in a single calendar year for decades. Here the Human Security Reportfound that the countries that had experienced most “conflict years” since the World War II were—in this order—Burma, India, Ethiopia, the Philippines, Britain, France, Israel, and Vietnam. Again no Muslim-majority country was in the top eight.

Fish does not, however, claim that Muslim societies are less violent than those in the non-Muslim world with respect to all forms of deadly violence. Indeed, he points out that when it comes to terrorism, Islamist radicals were responsible for 70 percent of deaths from “high-casualty terrorist bombings” around the world between 1994 and 2008. This means, he suggests, that while terrorism is very far from being a uniquely Muslim phenomenon, “… its perpetrators in recent times are disproportionately Islamists.” Since 2010, the incidence of Islamist terrorism has increased sharply.

But in this context it is instructive to note that approximately 600 million of the world’s 1.8 billion Muslims live in Southeast Asia and China, while a little more than half that number—317 million—live in the Middle East and North Africa. Yet the rate of deadly political violence associated with radical Islamist groups in Southeast Asian and China today is only a tiny fraction of that of the less populous Muslim states of the Middle East and North Africa region.

Why should the level of political violence in the populations of these two regions differ so dramatically even though they share the same allegedly violence-prone religion? One possible answer is that religion is not the primary driver of conflict in these regions. In Southeast Asia, national governments in Muslim-majority countries have what political scientists call “performance legitimacy”—meaning they deliver the goods and services that their citizens want. With few exceptions, the governments of their co-religionists in the Middle East and North Africa do not.

In the radical Islamist conflicts that are tearing apart Syria, Iraq, and other parts of the region, the exclusionary politics, state repression, rights abuses, corruption, and incompetence of the regimes that the radicals have sought to overthrow provide more compelling insights into what drives the abhorrent violence of ISIS than does the extreme Islamist ideology that seeks to legitimize the killing.

Source: Islam isn’t inherently violent or peaceful.

Filed under Radicalization, Religion Tagged with , , ,

Azeezah Kanji: Counterpoint: While on the topic of Muslims, here are a few other numbers to note

2016/01/30 1 Comment

Kanji effectively rebuts Barbara Kay’s early piece stoking fear of Muslims (Barbara Kay : Most Muslims aren’t jihadists, of course. But some of them are), providing context to the numbers Kay uses and comparisons to attitudes within other religious groups:

In order to cast her net of suspicion beyond the small number of Muslims actually involved in violent activity, Kay cites data regarding the percentage of Muslims around the world who “hold beliefs in retrograde cultural practices that cannot co-exist in harmony with Western civilization.” These beliefs include a minority of Muslims’ endorsement for capital punishment for apostasy, adultery, and homosexuality: opinions which are certainly disturbing, and are vigorously opposed by Muslim activists in those countries. But the Pew study Kay relies on does not suggest that Muslims are trying to impose these beliefs in “the West” (on the contrary, available research indicates the opposite) — so on what basis is the threat to Western civilization construed?

Indeed, when it comes to attitudes deleterious to “harmony,” surveys suggest that Kay should be directing her gaze elsewhere. American Muslims are more likely to oppose attacks on civilians (which Barbara Kay defines as “terrorism”) than any other major religious group polled in the United States. And while Kay claims that “support for terrorism is high in Islamic countries” (where, according to Pew, support for such attacks ranges from 1 per cent to 40 per cent), a 2011 Gallup poll question on whether it is ever appropriate for a military to target civilians reveals it is proportionately far higher among Christian Americans (58 per cent) and Jewish Americans (52 per cent). Curiously, Kay references the numbers on Muslim support for “terrorism” but is silent on the non-Muslim statistics.

Kay’s tunnel-vision perspective leaves out more than half the picture. In addition to her selective use of statistics, Kay also makes unsubstantiated accusations about Muslims’ use of the legal system and “political/institutional membership” to advance some nefarious but unspecified agenda — recalling the fomentation of moral panics about other minority groups in other periods of history. Exaggerated narratives about the “disease of radical Islam” have been debunked by government data, academic analyses, and expert commentary. The fact that they still have any purchase reveals the perturbing resistance of stereotypes to reality.

Source: Azeezah Kanji: Counterpoint: While on the topic of Muslims, here are a few other numbers to note | National Post

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Shias, Catholics and Protestants: Sectarian splits are widening in Islam and lessening in Christianity | The Economist

2016/01/29 Leave a comment

Worth reflecting upon:

ONE OF this week’s most arresting news photographs featured Pope Francis in smiling conversation with President Hassan Rouhani of Iran, who is touring Europe in the hope of asserting his country’s emergence from international isolation. The Iranian visitor asked for the pontiff’s prayers, and the Vatican announced afterwards that “common spiritual values” emerged during the conversation. It was the first meeting between a pope and an Iranian president since 1999.

A 40-minute chat, with interpreters, probably wasn’t long enough for much investigation of those shared sensibilities. But among observers of the world of religion it has often been suggested that Islam’s Shia-Sunni split corresponds in certain ways with the Catholic-Protestant divide in Christendom. Of course, as with any broad generalisation about religion, you can’t push it too far.

But Vali Nasr, an Iranian-American scholar-cum-diplomat who is a leading world authority on Shia Islam, finds the parallel quite striking. As he has argued, both Shia Muslims and Catholics have a respect for clerical authority and for theological tradition as it has evolved over time; that is in contrast with the stress put by many Sunnis, and Protestants, on going back to the original divine revelation and ignoring whatever came later.

In the Shia tradition, as in the Catholic one, there is a long line of succession through which sacred authority is thought to have been transferred over the centuries. Both among the Shias and the Catholics, there is emphasis on the idea of martyrdom leading to redemption. Some images of the slain Ali, whose murder in 680 is a primordial event for Shias, bear at least a passing resemblance to Christian depictions of Jesus Christ.

Of course, you can find points of similarity between any pair of religions and cultures if you look hard enough and set aside the major differences. But John Allen, a commentator on Vatican affairs, has argued that Catholics and Shias have geopolitical reasons for keeping in touch, as well as the religious and cultural reasons cited by Mr Nasr.

When it looks at Syria, the Vatican is instinctively protective of the Iranian-backed Assad regime, because it fears that the government’s overthrow by Sunni militants would spell doom for Christians. (That has not prevented some individual Catholic priests speaking out bravely against the Syrian regime’s atrocities.)

In September 2013, the Holy See strongly resisted American threats to bomb government forces in Syria. Then, at least, the Iranians had good reason to feel grateful to the Vatican. Another point is that wherever fundamentalist Sunnis (from conservative monarchs to populist Muslim Brothers) have held power, they have generally been anti-Shia and anti-Christian in equal measure.

But there is one big difference between intra-Muslim and intra-Christian divisions. The former are tending to grow wider, as tension between Iran and Saudi Arabia exacerbates the sectarian chasm in every other place where different forms of Islam coincide, from the civil-war zones of Syria and Yemen to the streets of Beirut and Islamabad.

Among Christian leaders, meanwhile, it is generally agreed that everything should be done to overcome division. As well as welcoming his Iranian guest, Pope Francis announced this week that he would go to Sweden in October to attend the start of a year of commemorations of the religious Reformation initiated by Martin Luther on October 31, 1517. In some ways, that is an extraordinary thing for a pope to be celebrating; the fact that the Vatican lost its sway over northern Europe, and blood-letting between Catholics and Lutherans convulsed the centre of Europe for a couple of centuries.

But a joint reflection by Catholic and Lutheran theologians has come up with an elegant way in which both churches can mark the event; it stresses that Luther’s original intention was to reform Catholicism from within, not to start a new church; and that everybody can agree that some reform was needed.

In the same sort of spirit, Shia and Sunni theologians get together from time to time and stress that whatever their differences, they recognise one another as Muslims and monotheists; but at the moment Islam’s sectarian hotheads seem to be making a much louder noise. If the pope and Mr Rouhani had a bit longer together, they might usefully have reflected on how people can be persuaded to stop killing one another because they have different interpretations of events in sacred history that took place long, long ago.

Source: Shias, Catholics and Protestants: Sectarian splits are widening in Islam and lessening in Christianity | The Economist

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Can America’s political discourse get any cruder? Neil Macdonald

2016/01/26 Leave a comment

Interesting if uncomfortable parallel Neil Macdonald makes between the religious extremists in the Iranian revolution and the US evangelicals:

In fact, Palin’s speech reminded me of another one I attended, years ago, in Tehran during my time as CBC’s Middle East correspondent.

Mohammed Khatami, the reformer, had been elected president of Iran, and you could taste the craving for change in the city’s mountain air.

On a whim, I decided to attend a Friday sermon by Ayatollah Taghi Mesbah Yazdi, probably the most hardline cleric in the theocracy.

He scorned the reformers and called down divine judgment on them, and exhorted the crowd to go and impose the will of the people.

It was a speech filled with hatred and religious bigotry and nativism, and the crowd absorbed it with the same sort of ecstasy U.S. conservatives evidently experience at Republican rallies nowadays.

I spoke to several people as they exited the sermon; most were rural, uneducated, and were bused in for the event. In cosmopolitan Tehran, Yazdi wouldn’t likely have been able to fill a big classroom, let alone pack in thousands of panting zealots.

‘You’re fired’

Sarah Palin, likewise, feels most comfortable outside America’s big cities, talking to the white evangelical Christians she calls “real Americans,” as opposed to the ethnic stew of the more permissive, homosexual-tolerating, non-God-fearing souls who populate the coastal population centres.

…Watching Palin and Trump, it was impossible not to wonder, once again, how America, a country that has achieved such excellence, and has so often shown the world a better way, descended into a political discourse that demonizes enlightened thought and glamorizes mean-spirited, lowbrow crudeness.

And something else occurred, a notion I’ve always shied away from because I find jingoism distasteful: None of this stuff would go anywhere in Canada. It would draw snickers and derision, not cheers.

The only reason I can cite for this difference in national attitudes is religion. Not the quiet, old-line religiosity whose adherents believe worship is a private matter, best practised in church.

I’m referring to the messianic, aggressive religion of certain evangelical Christian sects, which believe that even other streams of Christianity, never mind other faiths, are false, and that their job is not just to spread the word of God but to impose it, and that the best way to do that is to run the government.

That sort of religion happily ignores inconvenient facts and contradictions, and has always been ripe for the con job pulled by the Republican elite: promise to end atheistic permissiveness, then get into office and implement an economic agenda most friendly to Manhattan billionaires like Trump and multi-millionaires like Palin. (She recently put her 8,000 square-foot Arizona compound up for sale for $2.5 million.)

To be fair, this loopy form of religio-political fantasy is particular to the Republicans, and lots of religious Americans find it offensive to rational thought.

But it should not be dismissed, as clownish as its heroes can seem.

Think about Iran: Yazdi and his fellow hardliners triumphed. The reformers were shut down and jailed. The urban elites were cowed. It can happen.

Source: Can America’s political discourse get any cruder? – World – CBC News

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Douglas Todd: Movie shines a ‘Spotlight’ on corruption

2016/01/25 Leave a comment

Douglas Todd’s reflections on why the Catholic Church’s pedophilia scandal and cover-up was challenged earlier and more effectively in Canada:

People have to be ready for the truth before it can be revealed.

That’s a theme of the riveting, award-winning movie, Spotlight, which recounts how the Boston Globe newspaper laid bare an ecclesiastical and political coverup of rampant pedophilia by more than 87 Roman Catholic priests and brothers.

After years of Boston Globe staff ignoring clergy abuse cases, the newspaper’s investigative team, called Spotlight, broke its explosive story in 2002. It led to the resignation of Cardinal Bernard Law and helped elevate clergy abuse into an international issue, which continues to reverberate.

The Canadian media, however, produced many stories about widespread sexual abuse by Catholic priests and brothers much earlier than the Boston Globe. The spate of Canadian articles began in 1989 with Newfoundland’s Mount Cashel Orphanage scandal, first reported by The Sunday Express under publisher Michael Harris.

That was 12 years before the Boston exposé. Nevertheless, the historical timeline of 20th-century Catholic abuse that is on the Spotlight film’s website contains no mention of the mass abuse of Mount Cashel orphans (which powerfully impacted two Metro Vancouver Catholic schools) or scores of other Canadian cases.

It appears most Canadians were ready, before most Americans, to admit to the horrible truth of Catholic clergy pedophilia. By the time the Boston exposé was published, the Canadian media had run thousands of articles about molesting clergy.

The Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops, under the direction of retired Vancouver archbishop Adam Exner, had also responded to the debacle as early as the mid-1990s — by creating a complaints process that supported abuse victims in going to police.

That kind of protocol was not in place in 2002 in the U.S., and especially in Boston, where Catholics dominated culture, politics, business, philanthropy, high society, the police and even the judiciary.

Almost every city has a powerful elite that operates behind the scenes to sway regional affairs. In Boston, it was the Catholic establishment, which did everything it could to keep a lid on decades of the clergy’s destructive behaviour.

At one point in Spotlight the Boston Globe’s publisher cautions his staff against running the clergy abuse investigation by warning that 53 per cent of the newspaper’s readers are Catholic.

Such pervasive resistance to the Catholic Church exposé leads one of Spotlight’s investigative reporters (played by Mark Ruffalo) to finally burst: “They control everything! Everything!”

Even though the Canadian census says 43 per cent of Canadians have an affiliation with the Catholic Church, Canadian courts, governments and journalists have been less hesitant than most Americans to wade assertively into church sex-abuse cases.

I wrote a story in 1993 that calculated the Canadian media had by then reported on more than 100 Canadian Catholic priests and brothers who had been charged or convicted of sex crimes.

It’s hard to know why Canadians were more ready to recognize the appalling truth.

It may have grown out of the way Canadians are, in some ways, less deferential than Americans to Catholic leaders, more questioning of authority in general, more frank about homosexuality and more willing to deal with the shame associated with sexual abuse.

Source: Douglas Todd: Movie shines a ‘Spotlight’ on corruption

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David Cameron to back Muslim veil ban, will announce anti-radicalization measures

2016/01/20 Leave a comment

Sigh. Pandering to the base (and UKIP) more than improving integration, and by applying it to Muslims only as appears from press accounts (some other religions have separate seating for men and women), further reinforces the Islamist narrative:

Muslim women can be banned from wearing veils in schools, courts and other British institutions, David Cameron has said.

The Prime Minister said he will give his backing to public authorities that put in place “proper and sensible” rules to ban women from wearing face veils.

The Government is also preparing to announce a series of measures designed to stop British Muslims becoming radicalized and travelling to the Middle East to join terrorist groups like Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.

As part of the plans, ministers will pledge to outlaw gender segregation in public buildings amid concerns that some Muslim organizations are forcing women to sit separately.

Nicky Morgan, the Education Secretary, will also today announce plans to force schools to help stop teenagers travelling abroad to fight alongside jihadist groups such as ISIL.

Schools will be required to inform councils when pupils stop attending without any explanation and Muslim parents will be encouraged to carry out checks to ensure their children are not being radicalized.

Cameron also announced that tens of thousands of Muslim women would face deportation unless they pass a series of English language tests after coming to Britain on spouse visas.

The Prime Minister’s comments about veils will reignite the row over whether British institutions should be able to stop women covering their faces for religious reasons in public places.

The Prime Minister refused to endorse a French-style blanket ban but made clear that individual organizations could choose to stop Muslim women wearing the veil.

Source: David Cameron to back Muslim veil ban, will announce anti-radicalization measures

Filed under Multiculturalism, Radicalization, Religion Tagged with ,

On the Saudis and human rights, Canada needs to stop contradicting itself: Mendes

2016/01/15 Leave a comment

Errol Mendes’ suggestion to broaden the mandate of the Ambassador for Religious Freedom to Ambassador of Human Rights:

The Harper government earned itself a lot of criticism for creating its Office of Religious Freedom, a quasi-diplomatic operation which is supposed to promote the cause of faith rights around the world. This office, run by Christian scholar and public servant Andrew Bennett with a budget of $5 million, has a narrow mandate — and while Mr. Bennett has met with many diplomats, officials and groups from many religions in Canada and around the world, he hasn’t really achieved much.

Many want his office abolished. I have a better idea: replace it. Establish one with a wider mandate — an Office of the Ambassador for Human Rights. This office could go beyond merely shining a light on the persecution of religious minorities abroad by taking on a mandate to keep the Government of Canada itself honest. It could engage with the relevant government departments, conduct proactive analysis of Canadian interests abroad and seek ways to reconcile our vital diplomatic and economic interests with our principles.

While there are officials in Global Affairs whose job it is to focus on human rights matters as they affect our economic and diplomatic interests, an ambassador’s office could go outside the hierarchy and directly challenge individual ministerial decisions that could undermine Canada’s reputation. It could help establish a whole-of-government policy framework on human rights, and engage in outreach with civil society groups advocating a principled approach to trade and human rights. That could be useful to public servants too overburdened by management and accountability duties to see the bigger picture.

A human rights ambassador could be Canada’s eyes and ears abroad, monitoring — for example — how these Canadian-made armoured vehicles are being used in Saudi Arabia, and whether they’re being used against civilians. It could help the government frame its response to any evidence the Saudis were using these weapons against civilians.

Had such an office been in place when the previous government was negotiating the Saudi deal, it might have lobbied against it — or not; we’ll never know. But setting it up now would go a long way to ensuring the federal government is more transparent and accountable with future arms export deals.

Our economic and diplomatic interests are vitally important to us as a nation. So is our international reputation. We shouldn’t have to sully one to support the other.

And Errol Mendes says it’s time for Ottawa

Filed under Multiculturalism, Religion Tagged with ,

ICYMI: The Great Hypocritical Muslim Cover-Up – Majid Nawaz

2016/01/13 Leave a comment

Majid Nawaz makes valid points regarding Wear Hijab Day:

The fact that it is OK for my fellow Muslims to suggest Wear Hijab Day, yet these same voices are aghast at the mere suggestion of Remove Hijab indicates just how much religious-conservative dogma has engulfed our Muslim communities.

When it comes to Muslims, Western liberals seem perennially confused between possessing a right to do something, and being right when doing it.

For example, American Christian fundamentalists have the right to speak, but non-Muslim liberals routinely—and rightly—challenge their views on issues such as abortion and marriage rights. To do so is not to question their right to speak, but to challenge their belief that they are right when they speak.

Let Muslim women wear bikinis or burqas, liberal societies have no business in legally interfering with the dress choices women make.

To my mind no liberal, Muslim or otherwise, could adopt any other policy toward Muslim religious-conservatives unless they hold a double standard for Muslim peoples as not capable or deserving of liberty. If liberals are comfortable challenging Christian fundamentalist attitudes toward marriage and birth control, then we should be equally as comfortable challenging the Muslim religious-right’s “modesty” theology.

Why is a woman in a headscarf deemed more modest than one without, and what implication does that have in attitudes toward the “honor” of women who do not cover? Only a racism of low expectations would prevent liberals from asking these questions of my religious-conservative fellow Muslims. No idea is above scrutiny, just as no person should be beneath dignity.

In Arabic, the word hijab actually means “screen,” not headscarf. It is used traditionally by Muslims to denote the woman’s attitude and demeanor, not just about her hair, but also toward religious-conservative assumptions. The niqab is the face veil, the jilbab is the long body-gown, and the burqa is the Taliban-style full body covering.

Muslim women wear headscarves called hijab for many different reasons. For some it is simply a religious duty, others believe it to be a sign of “modesty,” some do so as a badge of identity. For them wearing their hijab is like a Muslim flag. And others, still, are forced to do so by their families.

Even when adopted through individual choice, it is the religious-conservative assumption, this modesty theology, that women who do not wear headscarves are somehow sinful, less modest and not pious, that we liberals must critique. For at the root, it is this same attitude that is invoked in honor killings, and heinous acid attacks.

Many non-Muslims simply assume there is only one—conservative—way of being Muslim. But we Muslims are no longer this distant and native other that liberals can afford to homogenize, visit once a year and take holiday snaps with. We are born and raised among you, and Islam is now firmly native to our societies.

Naive non-Muslims need to be aware that their intervention and interaction with Muslims’ intra-religious debate around these issues is not neutral. Liberal Muslim theologians such as Britain’s Usama Hasan and Pakistan’s Javaid Ghamidi argue that the hijab is not a religious duty (fard) at all, but a religious choice (mubah). Then there are progressive Muslim voices such as the late feminist Huda Sha’rawi, who argued that, as it is merely a choice dictated by custom (‘urf), and because that custom has moved on, Muslim women should be encouraged to remove their headscarves. In 1923, in Egypt’s public square, Sha’rawi did just that.

As well as ignoring the damage done by theocracies, it is this internal diversity that World Hijab Day is in danger of obscuring among non-Muslims.

So, yes, let’s have a day devoted to the question of hijab. But let’s not call it World Hijab Day, let’s make it Hijab Is a Choice Day.

Source: The Great Hypocritical Muslim Cover-Up – The Daily Beast

Filed under Multiculturalism, Religion Tagged with , ,

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