Saturday, September 20, 2003
Speaking for Muslims:
A new group stirs the pot
by Marina Jimenez

The smell of chipati, kofta curry meatballs, biryani rice and Lebanese tabouli wafts through Tarek Fatah's airy, three-storey downtown Toronto duplex. He urges his guests to help themselves.

"Food. Food is key in our organization. We like to eat," says Mr. Fatah, the host of a television program called The Muslim Chronicle and of tonight's meeting.

Seated around his polished dining-room table are a Marxist accountant in his 60s, a 34-year-old Palestinian PhD student, a Bengali who runs a trendy Toronto fusion restaurant, and several lawyers, including a young woman in fashionable hip-hugging trousers.

"There are Sufis, Sunnis, Shias and also Sushis in our group," says Mr. Fatah, pointing to his daughter, Natasha, with a chortle. "She is half Sunni, half Shia, so I call her a Sushi." Natasha, a 26-year-old journalism student, nods indulgently at her father.

Welcome to the weekly gathering of the Muslim Canadian Congress (MCC), a new Toronto-based group with about 100 members across the country (although to date no president) -- and one not everyone in the Muslim-Canadian community is comfortable with.

They are not here tonight to discuss the teachings of the Prophet Mohammed or the opening of an Islamic school. Instead, this association of journalists, engineers, students and others stands for causes not commonly associated with Muslim activists -- aboriginal rights, secular schools, civil liberties and the separation of religion and the state.

They are together as Muslims, but religion is not their raison d'être. They campaigned against the war in Iraq, marched in a recent Labour Day Parade, and were the first group to hold a press conference to denounce the arrest in Toronto of 21 Pakistanis on allegations of terrorism. It was this case -- along with the recent arrest in Florida of two moderate Toronto imams -- that catapulted the group into the public limelight.

Yet the MCC doesn't campaign only for the civil liberties of Muslims -- it also showed solidarity with William Sampson, who says he was tortured in a prison in Saudi Arabia, and has called for reform in the desert kingdom. "We hold the Canadian Charter of Rights as defining Canadian citizenship," says Raheel Raza, a media consultant. "We wish countries in the Muslim world would adopt the Charter of Rights. This is what Canada has to offer the world."

The meeting focuses on how to help the imprisoned Pakistanis, who will probably be deported for immigration violations. There is also discussion of an upcoming speaker, Jeffrey Lang, an American professor and former atheist who converted to Islam.

"Some of our members pray five times a day. Some haven't prayed in five years. We are comfortable with both narratives," says Ms. Raza, who is devout herself but does not wear a hijab.

While it illustrates the increasing sophistication and ethnic diversity of Canada's Muslim community, the MCC has also exposed a fissure in the community, one that may culminate in a public legal battle. The dispute is ostensibly over intellectual property, but at its root is also a clash of ideas.

The Canadian Islamic Congress, the most high-profile Muslim association in the country, sent out a communiqué this week objecting to the name of the new group, saying it is so similar to the CIC's that it infringes on the group's reputation. National president Mohamed Elmasry says his congress "will seek an injunction if necessary. They are the aggressors in the sense that our name has been in the public domain first."

Mr. Elmasry, a professor of computer engineering at the University of Waterloo, insists that he objects only to the MCC's chosen name. Other observers say the argument is about more than nomenclature. It is about ideology and a quest for control: Just who speaks for the Islamic community in Canada?

Muslims now represent 2 per cent of the Canadian population. Many mosques are still divided along ethnic lines and struggling with the need to adapt to Canadian life while staying true to their faith. Some younger Muslims such as Amina Sherazee, a civil-rights lawyer, and Hanadi Loubani, a Palestinian doctoral student, joined the MCC because they didn't feel that the CIC or the Canadian chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations spoke to them.

Abdel Aziz Sachedina, a professor of religious studies at the University of Virginia, says Canadian reformist Muslims may be more daring than their American counterparts, and more willing to speak out, despite their small numbers.

"There are two trends in the Canadian community. One wants change to come, and one wants to preserve the authenticity and religiosity of Islam," says Prof. Sachedina, who used to teach at the University of Waterloo and has studied the community for three decades. "The CIC has the traditional leadership and the imams as a source of legitimacy. The MCC doesn't have this, they are more modernist and reformist."

The mission of the CIC is largely faith-based: To spread the teachings of Islam to Muslims and non-Muslims; to call Muslims and non-Muslims to Islam; to encourage study of the Islamic faith; to operate Islamic schools; and to facilitate an understanding of important social issues from an Islamic perspective.

The MCC, on the other hand, is inspired by the teachings of the Koran, the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the Canadian Human Rights Act. The group professes to "oppose the gender apartheid that is practised in parts of our community, and believe it is contrary to the equity among men and women enshrined in Islam. . . . We believe that fanaticism and extremism within the Muslim community is a major challenge to all of us."

The MCC formed after the terrorist hijackings of Sept. 11, 2001. It wanted to portray another kind of Muslim, who wasn't necessarily covered in a hijab or kneeling on a prayer mat.

"The Muslim identity was hijacked after 9/11, by both the U.S., which associated Islam with terrorism, and by the fundamentalist Muslims," Ms. Loubani says. "We criticize attempts to impose conservative Islam."

Ms. Raza says introspection and self-criticism are part of the group's mission. She and other members of the MCC recently wrote an article bemoaning the fact that imams were using weddings to put forward their own personal views: "Weddings are not meant to be dark and dreary as some dysfunctional mullahs indicate, when they pose themselves as reformers, exhorting misogynist theories supported by useless traditions and ranting about 'Western corruption,' " they wrote in the Toronto Star.

To Prof. Elmasry, this is Muslim-bashing: "This is anti-Islam rhetoric . . . which does not lead to progress in our community. You have to reform from within," he says. The views of the MCC are not shared by the majority in the community, he adds, although they are a "respected minority."

Prof. Elmasry has spoken out in newspaper opinion pages and elsewhere on same-sex marriage, child poverty and homelessness, and on various panels representing the Muslim point of view. "It is up to the community to judge whose views benefit the community and the public at large," he says.

In Mr. Fatah's spacious living room, the meeting of the Muslim Canadian Congress is just finishing up, over rasmalai, Bangladeshi sweets and Indian tea. The members do not want to get drawn into a dispute about their association's name. They have no plans to change it. In fact, they would welcome other groups with the words congress and Muslim in their titles.

"We are not in competition with anyone," Mr. Fatah says. "We believe in Islam as a progressive, liberal, pluralistic and democratic religion."

Adds Amina Sherazee, a civil-rights lawyer: "The Muslim world is often under assault. There is plenty of work to go around."

Marina Jimenez is a senior feature writer for The Globe and Mail.