Last week marked the 22nd anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks when nearly 3,000 innocent people were killed by 19 Muslim terrorists. In the ensuing American-led war on terror waged overtly and covertly in more than 80 countries, nearly 900,000 Muslims have been killed and at least 37 million have been displaced, according to Brown University’s Cost of War Project.
We also know about the parallel cultural warfare on Muslims. The Green Scare turned out to be worse than the Red Scare of the 1950s – it has had a bigger footprint, lasted longer and affected, besides the Muslim world, Muslim minorities across the West, estimated at more than 30 million.
What we know little or nothing about is this:
Muslims in the West are emerging as an integral part of the mainstream, despite or because of the heavy odds they’ve encountered.
This is particularly true of Canada’s 1.8 million Muslims and the estimated 3.5 million Muslims in the United States, that hotbed of Islamophobia.
Muslims are assuming prominent roles in a range of fields, from politics to business to culture to sports
Not only is this good news for this beleaguered minority but also our democracies, which, despite bouts of abominable bigotry, do provide the legal and political mechanisms for victims to reassert their rights, eventually.
Post-9/11, Muslims became defensive: “I am a Muslim but not a bin Laden Muslim,” “ … not a fundamentalist Muslim,” “ … not a Wahhabi Muslim,” but rather, “a moderate Muslim,” or “a Sufi Muslim.” Not that many knew who or what a Sufi was, only that the designation signalled you were Muslim Lite and unlikely to blow up planes and buildings.
But as Islamophobia intensified, many Muslims gravitated to their faith. Their ethnic, linguistic, racial, cultural, nationalist and doctrinal affiliations began to take a back seat to their pan-Islamic identity. Or, pan-Muslim identity, in the case of the non-observant.
While 48 per cent of Canadian Muslims consider their ethnic or cultural identity as important, more than 80 per cent cite being Muslim and being Canadian as markers of their identity.
Muslim and Canadian. Muslim and American. Muslim and British.
It used to be that demonized minorities in North America kept their heads down and played down their identities. During and after the Second World War, for example, Mennonites in southern Ontario nearly disappeared from the census. But Muslims announced themselves in the 2011 and 2021 censuses when the decennial religion question was asked.
Mosques are overflowing, in part due to increased immigration but not just because of it. Politicians were the first to sniff this out and troll for votes there. On the Friday sabbath, most mosques are holding two or three services. In Ramadan, the late-evening prayers when the entire Quran is recited in the month, congregations are spilling into corridors, classrooms, gyms – in an orderly Canadian manner.
An unprecedented number of women in Canada – and the United States, Britain and parts of Europe – are wearing the hijab. Most were born or bred in the West, and the first in their families to do so, often defying parents. They’ve marched proudly and fearlessly into the front lines of battling both religious and gender discrimination. They are also carving out new paths: Playing hockey and basketball, acing postsecondary education, and being professors, doctors, lawyers, engineers, entrepreneurs, business partners, authors, TV producers, news anchors and stand-up comedians. In my books, they are the real Muslim heroes of the post-9/11 period.
Even the Halal industry is booming, said to be worth around $1.5-billion in Canada alone.
Ismaili Muslims, followers of the Aga Khan, are beginning to fast in Ramadan, and perform the annual hajj pilgrimage in Saudi Arabia. Given that such obligations had long been left to individual choices among the Ismailis, the new trend by their young denotes strong ecumenical solidarity.
This increase in faith activity may spook those who consider religion incompatible with secularism. On the contrary, freedom of religion, including the right to public assertion of it, is a bedrock principle of liberal democracy. So long as a faith practice is within the law, we have little or no reason to panic. Indeed, it can lead to ethical behaviour and a more humane society. Sikh gurdwaras, for example, serve Sikhs and non-Sikhs alike at their langar, free mass feeding, as they did during the COVID-19 pandemic. Churches routinely house refugee claimants.
Mosque-based food banks are feeding people of all faiths and no faith, and mosques are raising funds for neighbourhood public schools and hospitals. The Toronto-based International Development and Relief Foundation – founded in 1984 by a pious Niagara Falls physician, Fuad Sahin – provides humanitarian aid and development programs without discrimination in Canada and abroad. The Aga Khan Foundation Canada is partnering with the federal government to deliver development programs abroad.
All this represents a remarkably swift evolution for a relatively recent immigrant group, especially the Ismailis. Refugees from East Africa in the 1970s, they’ve shown themselves to be highly organized, self-reliant and successful – a model minority within a minority. Former prime minister Jean Chrétien told me during the 1990s recession that what his hometown of Shawinigan, Que., needed was “a dozen Ismaili entrepreneurs.”
Muslim advocacy groups helped turn the politically docile Muslims into a formidable voting bloc. In the 2015 election, nearly 80 per cent of Canadians Muslims voted, according to the group The Canadian Muslim Vote. Nationally, they voted 65 per cent for the Liberals, 10 per cent for the NDP and just 2 per cent for the Conservatives. In the 2021 election, 28 Muslim candidates ran and 12 won. Four have been ministers: Maryam Monsef (a refugee from Afghanistan), Ahmed Hussen (a refugee from Somalia), Omar Alghabra (an immigrant of Syrian descent), and my Toronto area MP Arif Virani (a refugee from Uganda), now Canada’s first Muslim minister of justice. Naheed Nenshi of Calgary was the first Muslim mayor of a large North American city, and Ausma Malik is the first hijab-wearing councillor in Toronto, indeed Canada.
In the United States, 57 Muslims were elected in the 2020 national and state elections. Keith Ellison, the first Muslim elected to the House of Representatives, took his oath of office in 2007 on a copy of the Quran owned by president Thomas Jefferson who, unlike contemporary American politicians, wanted to better understand Muslims. Mr. Ellison has been followed by three others: representatives Andre Carson, Rashida Tlaib and the hijab wearing Ilhan Omar.
In Britain, which has been slower in integrating minorities, there were 55 Muslim candidates in the 2019 general election and 19 were elected. Two were named Conservative ministers – Sajid Javid and Nadhim Zahawi. In Scotland, Humza Yousaf became First Minister earlier this year, the first Muslim to lead a major U.K. party, and the first Muslim to lead a democratic Western European nation. His wife, Nadia El-Nakla, is a councillor in the City of Dundee, the first member of any minority elected there.
The mayor of London since 2016 has been Sadiq Khan. Earlier as a Labour MP, he voted against his own government’s draconian anti-terrorism legislation in 2006, fearing it might snare innocent Muslims. In 2009, he was sworn in as a member of the Privy Council at Buckingham Palace on the Quran. Upon discovering that the palace had none, he left his copy there.
It’s not just politics.
Goldy Hyder is the first Muslim chief executive of the Business Council of Canada, which represents the heads of Canada’s 150 leading businesses. Toronto lawyer Walied Soliman, Canadian chair of Norton Rose Fulbright, has also served as its global chair.
Authors include M.G. Vassanji, Canada’s first two-time winner of the Giller Prize for fiction; Uzma Jalaluddin; Kamal Al-Solaylee; and Omar Mouallem. Rappers K’naan and Belly. TV anchors Omar Sachedina, Farah Nasser and Ginella Massa; broadcaster Adnan Virk. There’s hockey star Nazem Kadri and the wrestler Sami Zayn. Comedian Ali Hassan and Zarqa Nawaz, producer of the CBC sitcom Little Mosque on the Prairie, which drew a record audience of 2.1 million when it premiered in 2007.
We are familiar with American entertainers Hasan Minhaj, Mahershala Ali, and Aziz Ansari; the writers Fareed Zakaria, Reza Aslan, and Ayad Akhtar, who is also the president of PEN America; the painter Salman Toor and his partner, singer Ali Sethi, whose song Pasoori, Punjabi for conflict, has exceeded 500 million views and was the most searched song in 2022, according to Google Trends.
Muslims have traditionally divided the world into Dar al-Islamand Dar al-Harb, the dominion of Islam and the dominion that barred the free practise of Islam. Canadian Muslims speak of Canada as Dar al-Amn, an abode of peace – sans Quebec.
The province has been aping France and certain European jurisdictions in banning the hijab and the niqab (and the turban and the kippa) in public service, on pain of the wearers losing their jobs. France recently also banned the abaya in state schools, the long dress worn by some Arab women. The discrimination is rationalized in the rubric of laïcité, secularism – oblivious to the irony that while the Taliban and the ayatollahs tell women what to wear, these guardians of secularism order women what not to. The urge to control women is the same. Quebec recently banned religious activity (i.e. prayers) in schools, which disproportionally affects Muslim students. China has banned beards in Muslim Xinjiang in the name of curbing “extremism.” We are left to argue only about the degree of the control and the punishments for disobedience.
Quebec also shares another unfortunate trait with France and other parts of Europe. The only Muslims it grants prominent roles in government and the public sector are those who attack fellow Muslims, especially the observant. No dissident voices are allowed to disturb the certitudes of anti-religious secularism.
Happily, in English Canada, Muslim-baiting no longer pays political dividends. Stephen Harper found that out in the 2015 election when Canadians decided that his Barbaric Cultural Practices Act was one dog whistle too many.
Today, no Islamophobic party can win a national election, nor a xenophobic one.
Yet, as we know, Canada has not been immune from Islamophobia.
Six worshippers were massacred in Quebec City in 2017. A caretaker at a Toronto mosque was murdered in 2020. A family of four was mowed down in London in 2021; the trial of the accused is taking place as I write this.
Muslims face hostility – including, shamefully, by the right-wing mainstream media. They suffer high unemployment and underemployment. Hijab-wearing women are still harassed, spat upon, pushed, shoved and kicked in public spaces, pointing to yet another irony: The West thinks that Islam and Muslims mistreat women, yet it is Muslim women in the West who are the biggest victims of discrimination by liberals and louts alike.
Ottawa has appointed a Special Representative on Combatting Islamophobia, Amira Elghawaby, a hijab-wearing human-rights activist. Her role is akin to that of the Special Envoy on Preserving Holocaust Remembrance and Combatting Anti-Semitism. This is appropriate, given that Islamophobia is the new antisemitism.
Through these tough times, as during others through the ages, Muslims have been sustained by a resiliency born of sabr, patience/perseverance, enjoined by the Quran and the Prophet Muhammad. Even the non-observant have it in their DNA. One common refrain among Muslims is that as bad as they’ve had it here, they are blessed, compared with the plight of many Muslims and non-Muslims around the world.
Overcoming adversity, succeeding as a minority, and integrating into the larger society have had two significant beneficial side effects for Muslims:
1) Going or gone is the notion that Muslim states “back home,” or at least the influential ones, would come to the rescue of Muslims here. Or that the Organization of Islamic Co-operation, the Jeddah-based, 56-member umbrella organization of the world’s 1.8 billion Muslims, would.
2) Old-world interdenominational rivalries are dissipating. All strands of Islam co-exist here: There are no Orange Day-like parades, with one set of Muslims needling the other.
All these transformational changes speak to a greater truth: Democracy is the best polity for Muslims, as it is for peoples of other faiths and no faith, so long as it treats all groups fairly.
This is not an exclusively secular idea. It was enunciated with stunning clarity by Islamic clerics back in the 1930s in colonial British India. Its strongest proponent was Husain Ahmed Madani, rector of a highly regarded orthodox madrassah in Deoband, north of Delhi. I’ve been reading about him while tracing my family history in those precincts.
He was a steadfast supporter of Mahatma Gandhi’s joint Hindu-Muslim struggle for independence from the British. He opposed dividing India into a majority-Muslim Pakistan and Hindu-majority India, and would ask: Whose Islam would prevail in Pakistan? Given the range of theological diversity among Muslims, only an authoritarian government could impose the kind of Islam it opted for. He was making the case for Muslims to stay in the democratic framework of postcolonial India. His prescience is being proven over and over in the West, especially Canada.
Haroon Siddiqui is editorial page editor emeritus of the Toronto Star and a senior fellow at Massey College. His latest book is My Name is Not Harry: A Memoir.
Multicultural Meanderings 
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