Jonathan Kay: Judaism’s fundamentalism problem

2013/11/22 Leave a comment

Good piece by Jonathan Kay that all religions have fundamentalists, and the impact on women in particular:

Since the dawn of modern feminism, social liberals have sought to liberate women from the clutches of conservative Christian doctrines that keep them under their husbands’ thumbs. Since 9/11, a similar project has been underway in regard to Muslims. It is time to take a broader view toward this project. All patriarchal religious traditions that make a fetish of separating the sexes, that entertain phobic and repressed attitudes to human sexuality, that privilege group solidarity over the well-being of children, and that treat women as debased creatures who cannot be trusted to walk among us, except under wig or veil, must be subject to the same scrutiny.

Jonathan Kay: Judaism’s fundamentalism problem | National Post.

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Garderie à Verdun: «J’ai choisi seule de porter le niqab»

2013/11/22 Leave a comment

An interesting article on the daycare centre in Quebec with niqab wearing daycare workers:

«J’ai peur que la petite communauté que nous avons créée dans notre garderie soit déchirée à cause d’une photo devenue virale. Nous choisissons de porter le niqab et les parents choisissent de nous laisser leurs enfants. Avec les enfants, nous nous dévoilons et ils n’ont pas de problème à ce que nous le revêtions pour sortir à l’extérieur. M. Drainville, vous n’avez pas à nous confier vos enfants, mais si les autres parents veulent le faire, c’est leur choix.»

La femme plaide qu’elle et ses éducatrices s’occupent très bien des enfants. «Nous rions avec eux, nous les consolons quand ils pleurent. Nous avons travaillé très fort pour créer un environnement de tolérance, d’amour et de soin avec les parents de nos enfants. Nous voulons le meilleur pour eux.»

Elle indique qu’on la questionne souvent sur le port du voile intégral. «En discutant, on élimine la peur. Même si vous n’êtes pas d’accord avec nos décisions, sommes tous des humains.» Elle conclut en priant les passants «de ne pas nous cracher dessus ou de nous insulter devant les enfants, comme vous l’avez fait par le passé».

Of course, fathers are not able to have face-to-face communication, unlike women and the children.

Garderie à Verdun: «J’ai choisi seule de porter le niqab» | Katia Gagnon | Éducation.

Filed under Charte des valeurs québécoise, Interculturalisme, Multiculturalism, Religion Tagged with , ,

The Right’s attitude to radical Islam is as bad as the Left’s » Spectator Blogs

2013/11/21 Leave a comment

A few pieces from the UK on Islam, starting with an opinion piece in The Spectator by Nick Cohen, noting how many on the right are weakening the voice of Muslim moderates:

Consider the title [Silent Conquest]. Muslims and by extension ex-Muslims are not a part of the West. They are outsiders, ‘silent conquerors’, who have sneaked in and torn up our rights. Nowhere can the filmmakers acknowledge that many Muslims, who have come to the West or indeed been born in the West, hope to enjoy the same rights as everyone else. More seriously, they display an ignorance of totalitarian movements, which would embarrass a first-year history student. They ought to know that, just as the first victims of communism were the Russian working class, which the Bolsheviks regimented and all but destroyed, and the first victims of Nazism were Hitler’s German opponents, so the first victims of radical Islam are the Muslims it claims to ‘own’. If they were to acknowledge that elementary truth, however, they would have to abandon their gratifyingly horrific story of a white West under attacks from dark barbarians, and that they will never do.

The right, or at least the most vocal part of it, are as willing as the most vocal elements on the liberal-left to ignore liberal Muslims and ex-Muslims. Like the left it is leaving them to fight unequal battles without help from mainstream society. As I said earlier, their behaviour is one of most glaring and depressing treacheries of our age.

The Right’s attitude to radical Islam is as bad as the Left’s » Spectator Blogs.

And UK Faith Minister Baroness Warsi being quoted in a Pakistani site, reiterating her standard message on Islam, and arguing strongly against the xenophobic views of UK Independence Party:

 “To be an adherent, one must also be a historian. This is a point that the late Benazir Bhutto, the first female Prime Minister of a Muslim country, once put particularly well when speaking of teachings in the Quran. She said: “In an age when no country, no system, no community gave women any rights, in a society where the birth of a baby girl was regarded as a curse, where women were considered chattel, Islam treated women as individuals.” …

“Deep, entrenched anti-Muslim bigotry goes against everything this great nation stands for,” she said. “I am concerned that the deeper Islamophobia seeps into our culture, the easier becomes the task of extremists recruiting.”

Sayeeda Warsi defends Islam in British parliament – thenews.com.pk

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La réplique › Charte de la laïcité – On accorde trop d’attention à Mme Houda-Pepin | Le Devoir

2013/11/21 Leave a comment

A bit of the “arrogance of the expert” in this opinion piece by Yara El-Ghadban of Université d’Ottawa. As I discussed in my book, Policy Arrogance or Innocent Bias: Resetting Citizenship and Multiculturalism, a mix of anecdote and evidence likely gets us closer to reality than relying only on one perspective, and academics, while important contributors to analysis and discussion, do not have a monopoly on the truth as this piece implies:

Quelle autorité ont-elles, ces femmes, à part le fait d’être musulmanes et d’avoir eu une mauvaise expérience à l’école dans leur pays d’origine ? Faut-il rappeler que nous ne sommes pas en Tunisie ou au Maroc ou en Algérie ? Faut-il rappeler dans le cas de Houda-Pepin qu’à part le fait de mentionner des femmes voilées entre elles qu’elle a vues dans une maison quelque part, elle n’a rien démontré de sa thèse sur l’intégrisme musulman au Québec ? Faut-il souligner que Benhabib ne cherche ses exemples que dans d’autres pays que le Québec ? Il y a bien une raison à cela : soit la réalité dont elle parle n’est pas tout à fait celle qu’elle représente, soit elle ne connaît tout simplement pas cette réalité et donc ne pourrait pas en chercher des exemples.

Vous voulez entendre absolument des musulmanes ? Pourquoi pas Leila Benhadjoudja, Sherene Razack, Amel Belhassen, Leila Bedeir et les innombrables femmes qui oeuvrent au sein de la Fédération des femmes du Québec ? S’il vous plaît, n’allez pas les interpeller parce qu’elles sont musulmanes, mais parce qu’elles ont la compétence intellectuelle pour le faire.

Je vous prie de faire votre travail de journalistes et d’arrêter de répéter sans aucune distance critique les dires de certaines figures simplement parce qu’elles affichent leurs identités ou parce qu’elles disent des choses spectaculaires.

La réplique › Charte de la laïcité – On accorde trop d’attention à Mme Houda-Pepin | Le Devoir.

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Libre opinion – Le racisme masqué | Le Devoir

2013/11/21 Leave a comment

A nuanced opinion piece on the questions related to more rigid or more flexible approaches to laicisme by Marie Darrieussecq, including the difficulties in communication with women wearing the niqab (full face covering), and the links to racism and fear of the “other”:

Je précise que je suis aussi peu pour le port du voile ou du foulard que pour l’exposition de femmes nues dans tous les kiosques à journaux de France et de Navarre (ou du Québec). Pourtant, si je suis contre le voile intégral — cet effacement du corps féminin du domaine public comme un objet sale ou « trop » attractif —, je suis beaucoup plus mesurée sur le foulard. Car ce que masque ce débat obsessionnel en France, c’est surtout un racisme vivace. Frantz Fanon repérait dès les années 50 comment l’idéologie raciste isole des éléments coutumiers chez l’autre pour les ridiculiser ou les monter en objets de menaces, en phobies. Mettre en exergue sans aucune nuance le port du voile — ou l’abattage halal —, c’est non seulement réduire les Arabes de France à un rite religieux, mais c’est une des stratégies pérennes du racisme.

Dans le contexte colonial, il s’agissait en effet, pour mieux asservir la culture de l’autre, d’en garder des bouts folklorisés, comme un rappel constant de ce qu’étaient les colonisés et dont les civilisateurs allaient les « sauver ». La même logique continue aujourd’hui : les anciens colonisés menacent, selon le fantasme, de nous envahir. Pour faire consister cette peur irrationnelle, on isole quelques éléments chez l’autre pour discréditer globalement le « barbare » en lui : regardez comment il voile son cheptel de femmes, comment il abat sa viande ! Et c’est bien pratique aussi de laisser croire que la menace sur les femmes vient surtout de l’extérieur…

Libre opinion – Le racisme masqué | Le Devoir.

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WHEN DOES CRITICISM OF ISLAM BECOME ISLAMOPHOBIA? | Pandaemonium

2013/11/18 Leave a comment

Good opinion piece by Kenan Malik on trying to provide some criteria for distinguishing between legitimate public debate and discussion and when this crosses over into islamophobia. Similar discussions and criteria take place with respect to criticism of Israeli policies and antisemitism:

Much of the problem arises from the way that the debate about Islam is filtered through the lens of the ‘clash of civilizations’, the claim that there is a fundamental civilizational difference between Islam and the West that will, in the words of Samuel Huntingdon, the American political scientist who popularized the term, set the ‘battle lines of the future’, unleashing a war ‘far more fundamental’ than any ignited by ‘differences among political ideologies and political regimes’. The ‘clash of civilizations’ is a threadbare argument, but it is part of a genuine academic debate. It is also the frame through which the ‘otherness’ of Muslims is established, a frame within which both popular discussion and the arguments of the bigots, including tellingly those of Islamists, have developed.

The academic arguments need challenging. So do popular perceptions, and the arguments of the bigots, too. The academic debate is clearly distinct from the popular discourse which in turn is separate from the claims of the bigots. Yet not only does each shade into the other, but the academic debate also provides the intellectual foundation for both the popular discussion and for the arguments of the bigots.

WHEN DOES CRITICISM OF ISLAM BECOME ISLAMOPHOBIA? | Pandaemonium.

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Book Excerpt: Policy Arrogance or Innocent Bias in Inside Policy

2013/11/12 Leave a comment

My excerpt, from the Anecdote or Evidence chapter, of my book, Policy Arrogance or Innocent Bias: Resetting Citizenship and Multiculturalism, in The MacDonald-Laurier Institute‘s bimonthly publication, Inside Policy. Direct link to November issue (pdf, see page 30 for excerpt below):

Inside Policy November 2013

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Why Muslims should love secularism

2013/11/09 1 Comment

A good piece by Hussein Ibish on secularism and Islam, and how false definitions of secularism have been misappropriated, and that secularism offers, given the diversity within Islam and other religions, “religious freedom, religious authenticity, and religious meaning”:

What devout Muslims need to understand is that real secularism alone offers them something most of them seem to badly want: freedom. If there really is no compulsion in religion, only a secular society can provide that. Only in a secular system can Muslims be free to practice Islam exactly as they see fit. Any \”Islamic\” polity will of necessity be imposing a particular version or interpretation of Islam, which is an extremely heterodox set of traditions.

The claim that secularism is really just Christianity in disguise is manifestly false. The language is European, inherited from the Enlightenment. But both Western chauvinists and anti-Western demagogues badly misread the fact that although the specific language of modern human rights and freedoms is, for historical reasons, currently packaged in Western terms, this hardly means that they lack non-Western cognates, origins, or bases.

Since at least the 10th century, most Muslim societies have distinguished between political and religious authority, and it\’s absurd to claim that religious freedom originates only or even mainly as a concept from the Protestant Reformation. There are deep roots in both traditional and modern interpretations of Islam that lend themselves to political secularism.

Why Muslims should love secularism.

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Il faudrait se brancher! | Lysiane Gagnon

2013/11/04 Leave a comment

Lysiane Gagnon, asking the question, if Quebec is worried about Muslim immigration, why do its selection criteria favour French competency, which means more immigration from the Magreb? Of course, the experience in anglophone regions and countries (e.g., Australia) suggests language is a key determinant of integration and success in the labour force; and language training is less effective than already having language competency. Selecting immigrants for “cultural suitability” has a long history in Canada of immigration restrictions, largely racist in origin (e.g., Chinese head tax, continuous journey clause).

Peut-être faudrait-il aussi penser à diversifier les sources de l\’immigration, tout en continuant à favoriser l\’immigration en provenance de la francophonie méditerranéenne qui a jusqu\’ici si bien servi le Québec.

Pourquoi ne pas penser, par exemple, aux Grecs ou aux Espagnols que la crise européenne pousse à l\’exil? Aux chrétiens du Moyen-Orient avides de paix? Aux Chinois, aux Vietnamiens ou aux Philippins qu\’on ignore sous prétexte que leur langue seconde est généralement l\’anglais… mais qui sont remarquablement «adaptables» ? Il s\’agit d\’une main-d\’oeuvre travaillante et flexible, qui accorde une valeur primordiale à la scolarité de ses enfants, et qui ne transporte pas de lourd bagage religieux (sauf les Philippins qui sont… catholiques!).

Il faudrait se brancher! | Lysiane Gagnon | Lysiane Gagnon.

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Canadian Muslims: The Highlight of A Mosaic

2013/11/01 Leave a comment

Imam Delic provides a good demographic overview of Muslim Canadians, as well as some general thoughts on what it means to be a Muslim in Canada. A bit overly general as, like with all religions, the challenge arises when one’s beliefs are in conflict with society:

To be a Canadian Muslim is to act according to the teachings of Islam within the adopted society.

By exploring core Islamic sources regarding the notion of Muslim identity and at the same time considering the texture and Canadian lifestyle, we can see that there is no contradiction for Muslims in taking up full citizenship and embracing Canada as their own country.

This is what is meant by the path of constructive integration of Muslims, as compared to the less constructive choices of assimilation and exclusion.

This is the path that will take Canadian Muslims towards new horizons of opportunities and help them express their beliefs openly while enjoying Canada’s democratic standards.  Only as such they will be able to claim the Qur’anic title of honour — UmmatanWasata (A community of enlightened moderation).

Being part of Canadian society means facing reality, with all its challenges, head on. It means reforming themselves individually and collectively within the positive contexts of their adopted liberal democratic pluralist culture, while remaining faithful to the basic religious principles that define their core religious identity as Muslims.

Thus, when they settle suitably and reconcile effectively, they can productively live in harmony amid new environments and contribute to the well-being of all. This is a responsibility of both — Canadian Muslims as well as policy makers in Canada.

Canadian Muslims: The Highlight of A Mosaic – Americas – Politics – OnIslam.net.

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