Hindu-Muslim Family’s Choice Of Cremation Arouses Anger
By ANNE BARNARD
Published: October 3, 2008
Friends and family remember Shafayet Reja as an affectionate young man who stayed up late to write poetry, danced exuberantly at weddings and explored the faiths of his father and mother with an openheartedness that led him to declare on his Facebook page, “I never get tired of learning the new things that life has to offer.”
But within hours of his death on Sept. 10 after a car accident, his memory — in fact, his very body — had become the object of a tug-of-war over religious freedom and obligation. It began when his mother, who was raised Hindu, and his father, who is Muslim, decided to have his body cremated in the Hindu tradition, rather than burying him in a shroud, as Islam prescribes.
His parents, Mina and Farhad Reja, say a small group of Muslims who do not understand their approach to religion are trying to intimidate them over the most private of family choices. “This is America,” Mrs. Reja said. “This is a family decision.”
The couple say that people accosted them at their son’s funeral, that an angry crowd threatened to boycott a shopping center they own in Jackson Heights, Queens, and that on Sept. 13, two men they know threatened to bomb and burn down the building.
The men they accused in a complaint filed with the police — one is a doctor and the father of a close friend of Shafayet Reja, the other a Bangladeshi business leader — say that they made no threats and deny that they have called for a boycott. They say they and others simply expressed their concern about what they see as a deep violation of their religion and of the wishes of the son, who, according to some of his college friends, had recently chosen Islam as his sole religion.
The Police Department’s hate crimes unit is investigating whether the threats took place, whether they would constitute aggravated harassment, and whether they qualify as bias crimes, which carry tougher penalties, a spokesman for the department said. No charges have been filed.
What is not in doubt is that the episode is a source of consternation, from the Queens neighborhoods where Mr. Reja’s parents live and work to their native Bangladesh, one of the world’s most populous Muslim countries, where it has been national news.
The dispute has especially swept up several bustling blocks in Jackson Heights, where dozens of businesses are Bengali. It had business owners on edge during the busy shopping season before this week’s Id al-Fitr festival. The festival marks the end of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan and brings throngs of shoppers to dine and to buy jewelry and sparkling traditional dresses.
The neighborhood is a place where business rivalries and family arguments often intersect with disputes over Bangladesh politics, especially in the case of Mrs. Reja, a prominent property owner and outspoken advocate of the rights of Bangladesh’s religious minorities. Her 1999 self-published book, “God on Trial,” angered some Muslims in the neighborhood with its critique of Islamic fundamentalism.
The cremation dispute goes to the heart of a debate among Muslims in America about what makes someone a Muslim — to some of the critics, the fact that Shafayet Reja listed Islam as his religion on Facebook is enough — and how to reconcile this country’s freedom of religion with what some Muslims see as a communal obligation to uphold religious observance.
But to the family, the dispute is a frightening imposition that they say violates their civil rights.
“We have freedom of religion, and we have the Constitution,” said the Rejas’ son Mishal, 19, who studies at Washington University in St. Louis. “Why would they bother us? It’s none of their business. Even if he was the most hard-core Muslim.”
To some Muslims, the fact that Shafayet Reja prayed and attended mosques trumps his family’s wishes.
“It was the community’s business because the community knew he was a Muslim,” said Junnun Choudhury, secretary of the Jamaica Muslim Center, one of several mosques around the city whose worshipers came to the funeral to plead with the family. “It is our job to bury him in the Muslim way.”
Neither he nor any other mosque leader has been accused of making threats, and there have been no further protests.
Abu Zafar Mahmood, an adviser to the Jackson Heights Bangladeshi Business Association, said he was disturbed by the cremation but was urging people not to confront Mrs. Reja. “It would be harmful,” he said. “We have a multicultural community.”
Mrs. Reja said she brought up her children by attending both Hindu temples and Muslim mosques. “Humanism is what I taught my children,” she said. “I want to see my son as a perfect human being, and not as a perfect religious person.”
Whether or not her son was beginning to move closer to Islam is another thread in the tangle of hurt feelings and disagreements.
Shafayet Reja, 22, graduated from the State University of New York at Stony Brook in 2007. He was living with his parents in Richmond Hill, studying to be a licensed insurance broker.
He was also spending a lot of time at the Long Island home of Dr. Khondeker Masud Rahman — who was eventually accused of threatening his parents — and Dr. Rahman’s daughter, Farah, a friend from Stony Brook.
He was also spending a lot of time at the Long Island home of Dr. Khondeker Masud Rahman — who was eventually accused of threatening his parents — and Dr. Rahman’s daughter, Farah, a friend from Stony Brook.
Farah Rahman said that he had begun praying more often and talking to Dr. Rahman about Islam, and that he had quarreled with his mother, saying she blamed the religion unfairly for the mistakes of some of its followers. He had even, she said in an interview, mentioned that he wanted a Muslim burial. His family members and childhood friends say he would have wanted his mother to choose.
On Sept. 2, Shafayet Reja broke the daily Ramadan fast with friends at Stony Brook’s Muslim Students Association. Afterward, Farah Rahman was in the car behind his when he lost control on a wet road. He was hospitalized, and died on Sept. 10 without regaining consciousness.
When word spread that the family would hold both Muslim and Hindu rites for their son and then have him cremated, the Rahmans and others were upset. Father and daughter both asked the family to give him a Muslim burial. They said the conversations were polite; the Rejas said they were hostile.
Several dozen people, including the imams of the Jamaica Muslim Center and other mosques, came to the funeral home in Richmond Hill on Sept. 12, to attend the Muslim rite and express objections to the cremation. The Rejas say people crowded around them to press their case as they wept beside their son’s body. “I was having my last moment with my son,” Mrs. Reja said. “What gave them the guts to do that?”
The funeral staff called the police in part because the Rejas feared the crowd would try to block the hearse going to the crematorium. Mishal Reja stood in the door of the funeral home, asked the group to leave the family in peace, and promised he would try to get the cremation canceled — just to get them to leave, he said. The crowd dispersed peacefully.
Later that day, Dr. Rahman, an anesthesiologist at Elmhurst Hospital Center in Jackson Heights, spoke to a group of people breaking the daily Ramadan fast at a restaurant across the street from the family’s Bangladesh Plaza mall.
According to the Rejas, and a report in a local Bengali-language newspaper, he called for a boycott of the mall and for shop owners there to stop paying rent, though he denied that in an interview.
Afterward, some of the people from the restaurant gathered outside the mall, waving their sandals in an insulting gesture and threatening to boycott the mall, according to two men who run shops there, who did not want to be quoted by name for fear of damaging business relationships. One said that at least one person in the crowd threatened to burn the building.
In the crowd, according to the merchants, was the secretary of the Jackson Heights Bangladeshi Business Association, Zakaria Masud. Mr. Masud, too, denied calling for a boycott, but said that protesting the cremation was “a social obligation and a religious obligation.”
The next day, Mina Reja held a press conference at the mall, at which she denounced the critics and asked for privacy.
Afterward, according to complaints the Rejas made to the police, Dr. Rahman told Mishal Reja, “We will bomb your building,” and Giash Ahmed, a real estate broker and former Republican candidate for state senator, told Farhad Reja it would be burned.
Dr. Rahman and Mr. Ahmed said in interviews that they never threatened anyone and were not even at the mall that day. Mr. Ahmed said Mrs. Reja’s decision was her business.
Dr. Rahman said expressions of anger at Mrs. Reja should wait: “She should have a time of healing.” He accused her of orchestrating the scandal and fabricating the threat.
Meanwhile, under the neon signs and rainbow lights of Bangladesh Plaza, shopkeepers worry that a boycott even by part of the community will hurt their holiday business.
“Why should they involve people who are not involved? How will we survive?” one of the shop owners said. Another said of the cremation: “It’s a family matter. The parents, they decide.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/04/nyregion/04cremate.html?_r=1&em&oref=slogin
Friday, October 3, 2008
Wednesday, September 24, 2008
The Twenty-First Tarawîh
Source
Title: The Twenty-First Tarawîh
Author: Mufti Afzal Elias
Book: Gift of Tarawîh
The entire 25th Juz is recited in this Tarawîh. This recitation begins with verse 47 of Sûrah Hâ Mîm Sajdah and includes Sûrah Shura, Zukhruf, Dukhân and Jâthiya.
Allâh makes it clear that He is the only One Who knows when Qiyâmah will take place. Allâh then speaks of man’s ingratitude when He says, “When We favour man, he is averse and turns away. But when hardship afflicts him, he becomes one of vast prayers.” (verse 51, Sûrah Hâ Mîm Sajdah)
Those who doubt the advent of Qiyâmah should bear in mind that Allâh has the might to do as He pleases. Sûrah Shura begins after Sûrah Hâ Mîm Sajdah and Allâh tells the Mushrikîn that there is nothing astonishing about the fact that He teaches His book to the Ambiyâ via revelation. Allâh adds that the sins of the Mushrikîn are so grave that it would be no wonder if the severity of their sins should cause the sky to come crashing down on them. They are also warned that their abode shall be Jahannam where there will be none to assist them.
Allâh instructs Rasulullâh Sallallâhu 'alayhi wasallam to tell the people, “Say, ‘I ask of you no recompense (for my preaching), save for the love between relatives` (verse 23). This obligatory love demands that the Kuffâr at least refrain from harming Rasulullâh Sallallâhu ‘alayhi wasallam. Allâh will ensure that people are rewarded in full for their good acts. In verse 43 Allâh lauds the persevering people when He says, “Whoever will exercise patience and pardon, that will certainly be of the most resolute matters.”
Allâh says further that it is inappropriate that He speaks directly to any human being. Allâh says, “It is only appropriate for a human that Allâh speaks to him by means of inspiration, or from behind a veil, or that He sends a Nabî who conveys the revelation by Allâh’s command, as He pleases. Verily Allâh is Exalted, The Wise.” (verse 51)
Sûrah Zukhruf follows Sûrah Shura. Allâh tells the Mushrikîn that they should not fool themselves by thinking that revelation of the Qur’ân will cease because of their disobedience and sins. Allâh has never stopped sending Ambiyâ, or revelation on account of the Kuffâr’s evil. On the contrary, Allâh kept sending Ambiyâ with revelation, as a result of which the evil of the Kuffâr was crushed.
Allâh also stresses that He has no children and that none has the ability to intercede on behalf of those who have gone astray.
Sûrah Dukhân follows Sûrah Zukhruf as the 44th Sûrah of the Qur’ân. Allâh states, “We have revealed it (the Qur’ân) on a blessed night. Verily We are the Warners. The decision of every matter of wisdom is passed on this night as a command proceeding from Us.” (verses 3-5)
Listening and reciting the Qur’ân draws Allâh’s mercy on condition that a person has perfect conviction. Everything is within Allâh’s kingdom and He alone gives life and death. When punishment overtakes people because of their sins, they cry out to Allâh saying, “O our Rabb! Remove this punishment from us and we will surely believe” (verse 12). However, when Allâh removes the punishment they do not take heed but revert to their former ways of disbelief. However, the Âkhirâh shall certainly arrive when they will be cast into Jahanham where “the tree of Zaqqûm shall be food for the sinful.” (verse 43-44)
Sûrah Dukhân is followed by Sûrah Jâthiya where Allâh mentions many signs of His might. Among these are the creation of man, the creation of the animals, the alternation of night and day, the flourishing of barren ground after rains, the turning of the winds and the sailing of the ships. All these phenomena are for man’s benefit and will teach him about Allâh’s greatness, if he takes the time to reflect.
The last two verses of the Sûrah declare: “All praise is for Allâh, the Rabb of the heavens and the earth; the Rabb of the universe. To Him belongs all majesty in the heavens and the earth; and He is The Mighty, The Wise.” (verses 36-37)
May Allâh grant us the ability to recognise His Might and may He bless us with the wealth of conviction. Âmîn.
Thursday, September 18, 2008
The First Little Mosque on the Prairie
A Canadianized version of Islam once flourished out west. Can it take root again?
by Guy Saddy
illustration by Graham Roumieu
Published in the October/November 2008 issue
I am praying. Sort of. My eyes are cast downward, hands held apart, palms up and slightly cupped, as if holding open an invisible book. That this is not going well is hardly a surprise. It has been a long time, and truth be told I was never shown how to do it properly. My stance is awkward and imitative, a cheap copy of what I have witnessed at the odd solemn occasion that intersected our lives. The last time I tried to pray was more than ten years ago, in Istanbul. It was at the Blue Mosque, a structure so indescribably beautiful, so clearly a tribute to humankind’s transcendence, that its existence seemed to render less significant the promise of the divine.
This place of worship is spare. The pulpit, as it were, is off to the side of the rectangular room. Next to the main hall is an antechamber for ritual ablutions, containing a wash basin and jug perched atop a simple wishbone cabinet. A curtain separating the men’s prayer area from the women’s is not evident today, though one was once erected, many years after both sexes, blissfully ignorant of — or perhaps unconcerned with — tradition, had begun praying together. Rugs cover the hardwood; most are worn thin in spots, perhaps where foreheads met floor. Wind whistles through the building. An eerie wail breaks the silence. I am completely alone here — although to the faithful there is no such thing.
This, the original Al Rashid Mosque, is essentially a museum now, its congregation limited to tour bus voyeurs who, having had their fill of Fort Edmonton’s sexier sites, poke their heads through the front doors and wonder how a mosque, of all things, figured in the early history of northern Alberta. Built in 1938 and relocated in 1991 to a berth in the city’s premier historical park, it is the oldest Muslim house of worship in Canada. From the outside, however, it hardly looks like a mosque at all. Instead, its design evokes the early-twentieth-century Ukrainian Orthodox churches that dot central Alberta’s rural landscape. This is not a coincidence: the mosque’s contractor, Mike Drewoth, was a Ukrainian Canadian unfamiliar with Islamic architecture.
In his ignorance, though, Drewoth accomplished something far more meaningful than any aesthetic flourish. Although clearly unintended, his fusion of East and West stands as a metaphor for a made-in-Canada Islam, a pliant and less conservative version of the faith that grew out of the western prairie like a field of tall grass. It was an Islam that forgave the odd trespass and contextualized some of the religion’s more rigid proscriptions as remnants from the past. It was practised here.
Near the entrance, I pick up a book titled Muslims in Canada: A Century of Achievement. It is a textual and photographic record of the early community, their assimilation reflected in the names they had adopted or that were chosen for them. Leafing through its pages, I note that Bedouin Ferran became Peter Baker, while Ali Ahmed Abouchadi and Mahamud Abuali Gotmi were christened Alexander Hamilton and Frank Alex Coutney, respectively. And so on. On one page, however, was a list of clearly Muslim names, direct from the old country, thirty-two in all. These were the founders of Al Rashid, its charter congregation.
One name stands out, initially because of its length: Rikia Mahmoud Saeed el Haj Ahmed. She was known to me, but not by this ostentatious designation. I knew her as Mary Saddy, my grandmother.
Memories of my father’s funeral are hazy, but a few details remain. We decided to have the ceremony at a funeral home instead of the mosque, since the vast majority of my father’s friends were non-Muslim. As the only son, I was asked to help prepare his body for burial, a role I declined because it would have been too painful to fulfill. There was, I recall, some minor wrangling over how Dad would ascend to the hereafter. My immediate family thought it would be fine to dress him in the clothes in which he was most comfortable — white sports shirt, tennis shorts and running shoes — but my uncle felt that those who had agreed to prepare my father’s body would not approve. So Dad was wrapped in a kafan, a simple white sheet, for his final journey.
We also had a difficult time choosing a photograph to place beside the casket. In his more recent photos, the lung cancer that eventually raced through him seemed to have altered his face long before any actual symptoms appeared. In many shots, it looked as though he was forcing his smile, as though death was stalking him and subconsciously he knew it. We had to go back to a trip he and my mother took to Japan several years earlier to unearth a good photograph. Two things had to be Photoshopped out first, though. One was my mother. The other was the large can of beer in his hand.
The first trickle of Muslim immigration to North America began in the last three decades of the nineteenth century, primarily from Ottoman-occupied Greater Syria, a region that included Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Palestine. Most of the early immigrants were single men; many, like my paternal grandfather, were teens from villages in present-day Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley who were fleeing conscription into the Ottoman army. The majority of the initial Arab émigrés settled in Montreal; some of the more intrepid went west.
Of these, many were peddlers who travelled throughout rural Saskatchewan and Alberta, hawking wares they carried on their backs. Others were drawn to the north. My maternal grandfather, Bud Alley (formerly Mohammed Khalil Ali Nogedi), became a trader in the small, primarily First Nations outpost of Fort Simpson, nwt, where his competition was the Hudson’s Bay Company. My father’s family ended up in Alberta, helming a mixed farming operation in the south for a while, before settling in Edmonton in the mid-1930s. The 1931 census put the number of Muslims in Canada at 645. If that was accurate, my father’s immediate family accounted for about 1.5 percent of them.
It was a tiny pioneer community founded amid a small but growing city. As a result, the emphasis was on getting along and fitting in. Over time, alcohol was consumed by many, if not most; the salaat, the prayers said five times daily, were often ignored. In several homes, Christmas trees were trimmed, Easter egg hunts were organized, and Halloween was celebrated. Friendships between Arabs and Jews were common. The odd intercultural business relationship resulted, and members of Edmonton’s comparably small Jewish community helped fund the Al Rashid Mosque.
For these Edmonton Arabs, religion was a less significant bond than ethnicity. Intermarriage between Christians and Muslims (both Arab and not) was fairly common, and among the eight children in my father’s family only half married within the faith. My mother’s side was even less bound by tradition. Her father, a Lebanese Muslim, had married a Canadian-born woman of Scottish ancestry, and of the five children in her family only one, my mother, married a Muslim.
Because the Arab community was small, practices that emphasized similarities between Christians and Muslims were played up, and differences played down. The mosque functioned more as a community centre, a place where Arab youths would gather to dance the traditional dubke or, on occasion, the jitterbug. Things as seemingly unimportant as music and cuisine — fatiya and kibbeh, tabbouleh and hummus — became bridges between two groups that were increasingly identifying as one.
Still, some traditions endured. While halal butchers were practically unheard of, the prohibition against eating pork was widely observed by Muslims, though certainly not in every home. Once, when my grandmother was visiting, she encountered something in our kitchen that would make any contemporary cleric’s blood curdle.
“Bobby!” she shouted to my father. “There’s a big ham in your refrigerator!”
My dad, ever the dutiful son, sauntered over. He opened the fridge door and looked inside, then furrowed his brow. “That’s not a big ham, Mother,” he said, closing the door.
“Bobby, don’t lie, ya haram. I saw it with my own eyes.”My father reopened the door. “Oh, that,” he said. “That’s a little ham.”
All that said, the community was far from idyllic — or, for that matter, monolithic; certain families hewed more closely to the ways of the old country than others. It was engaged in a pattern typical for a newly arrived group: a struggle to negotiate old traditions within the slipstream of a new and very different culture. Most first- and second-generation Arabs adopted a flexible approach to their Islamic faith; in turn, the faith proved flexible enough to allow for its North Americanization.
Over time, the community spawned its share of businessmen, academics, and sundry other pillars. My father’s brother, Edward Saddy, was the first Muslim judge in Canada. Another uncle (by marriage, to my father’s sister), Larry Shaben, was Alberta’s minister of economic development and trade — the first Muslim in Canada to hold a provincial cabinet position. One of my father’s sisters married Muhammad Ali Bogra, from 1953 to 1955 the prime minister of (then united) East and West Pakistan.
While boundaries were stretched by the second generation, the third-generation kids — us — pushed them even further. We experimented with drugs, had friends and lovers of every faith and persuasion, and became increasingly secular. We mainstreamed. It was a quintessentially Canadian experience, repeated countless times in dozens of other ethnic communities across the nation. The only thing truly notable about it was how ordinary it was.
But things have changed. Since that early tally of Canadians of Islamic faith, the number of Muslims here has grown more than a thousandfold. Many mosques have attracted an increasingly conservative leadership and a similarly conservative following, drawn largely from the 90 percent of the current community born outside Canada.
For those inclined to cherry-pick the negatives, there has been a bounty: The Toronto 18. Vancouver cleric Younus Kathrada and his characterization of Jews as “brothers of monkeys and the swine.” Momin Khawaja. A taxi driver who refused to pick up a blind man with his guide dog, since to do so would, according to some aberrant reading of the faith, be prohibited. And so on.
What has happened? Some observers feel that with this new community, integration is not necessarily in the cards. Or is it? Can Islam be Canadianized? Or, more accurately, can it be Canadianized again?
It’s Islamic Awareness Week at the University of Alberta, and the students’ union building is the centre of the action, such as it is. On a cool Wednesday afternoon, just a few visitors mill about the displays. On one table lies a selection of children’s books: Tell Me About Hajj, Hurray It’s Ramadan, I Am a Little Moslem, and other tales designed to imbue fealty. At another, Iman, a stunning hijabi whose high cheekbones and fine features are common to East Africa, is selling Islamic Awareness Week T-shirts for $15. Nearby, they’re offering henna tattoos. There’s also a draw for an iPod.
Under the banner of the Muslim Students Association, Fatima Ahmed, a Canadian-born volunteer, is handing out a questionnaire. “Want to try it?” Sure. As I fill it out — questions range from “Who do Muslims worship?” to “Where was the first mosque in North America built?” — I ask Ahmed about her hijab. “It’s actually a scarf,” she says. She made the decision to wear it in 2001.
“You have excellent timing,” I say.
Ahmed smiles. “I got some looks,” she says, “but in the post-secondary community it’s not an issue.”
Two decades ago, when I was a student here, overt displays of religious symbolism were limited to the odd Sikh turban or (very) rare Jewish yarmulke, the crucifix having already been watered down to the status of prop in a Madonna video. Expressions of solidarity with, as Edward Said might have put it, the “Oriental other,” were limited to the odd Palestinian kaffiyeh scarf. Nobody I was acquainted with — not any of my aunts, or my female cousins — wore head coverings. The hijab was as uncommon as the bow tie.
Today it’s part of a changed landscape. It has been three years since I’ve been back to Edmonton, the city I called home for the first thirty years of my life. So much of what I once knew is missing now; more than any other place that comes to mind, Edmonton cannibalizes its past. The original city hall, a lovely modernist building erected in 1956 and reflective of the era in which the city began to come of age, was torn down, replaced in 1992 by a couple of cool-looking glass pyramids that evoke, well, triangles. The city’s premier live music venue, the Sidetrack Café, was demolished to make way for yet another banal condo, and Flashback, its preeminent gay bar, is long gone. Even the name of Edmonton’s best-used park wasn’t safe from repositioning: in 1976, Mayfair Park was re-christened William Hawrelak Park, in honour of a mayor whose resumé read like a rap sheet. As a teenager, I was arrested there for marijuana possession, which seemed both ironic and fitting.
What remains triggers a sense of overwhelming loss. Leaving the campus behind, I drive past the junior high where I first kissed a girl, the field where I played baseball, the area around Twin Bridges where as teenagers we’d get shitfaced on flats of Hi-Test and fall asleep next to a fire on the banks of Whitemud Creek — all signposts from a youth that has long since passed. I turn down our old street. Our family home is not ours anymore. Since my father’s death, even my family is greatly changed.
And yet so much of who I am springs from this city. Who we are — what we become — is largely a product of time, place, and circumstance. Context shapes us. And the context that informs this newest generation of Muslims is much different.
On a brisk Thursday morning, I meet Nida Farooqui, one of the organizers of the Mosquers, an annual film festival that for the past two years has showcased videos made by local Muslim youth. I pick her hijab out of the crowd at the Second Cup near Holt Renfrew downtown, and over coffee she gives me a quick overview. In 2007, the Mosquers’ inaugural year, the entries tended to be serious and a little political. This year, she says, was different. The winning comedy entry, called Thinly Sliced Strips — yes, it’s about an obsession with bacon — played to a standing-room-only crowd. The film is by no means polished, but there are some funny bits. Its message, though, is mixed. After searching for and finally discovering halal bacon, one of the main characters scarfs it back — and almost chokes to death. A mild reproach is the intent. Eve, a serpent, and an apple come to mind.
Although the majority of those who attended the Mosquers were Muslim, the intended audience was much broader. “The whole point of it is to decrease negative stereotypes of Muslims,” says Farooqui. She has found Edmonton’s non-Muslims by and large receptive, which, she says, has helped the city’s Muslim community to grow. “We’ve gained a lot of confidence,” she reflects. “We know who we are, we’re proud of who we are, and we know what we stand for. We don’t need to get on the defensive.” I’d like to believe that. But isn’t going on the defensive what the Mosquers is all about?
In one sense, Farooqui is following in my footsteps. We were both born in Edmonton, roughly twenty years apart. We grew up in the city’s southern suburban reaches and attended the same high school, Harry Ainlay Composite, a concrete bunker home to about 2,000 kids of all backgrounds. But that’s where the similarities end. Farooqui has, at twenty-six, never dated. She has never drunk alcohol; none of her Muslim friends drink. She lives at home, and will until she marries. Most tellingly, her choices are reinforced by her peers. Farooqui’s close friends are largely Muslim; of those, all are Canadian born. Her life revolves largely around her religion. Because I was raised outside the apron of the mosque, my high school experiences were almost entirely the opposite, right down to my peer group, which consisted exclusively of non-Muslim friends. But then, I had little choice.
In 1971, there were 33,000 Muslims in Canada. Three decades later, there were 580,000, and most estimates put today’s population at around 850,000. These increases, due almost entirely to immigration, mean the community is now large enough to form its own enclaves. It can publish its own newspapers, support its own retailers, live in its own neighbourhoods, operate its own summer camps, marry its daughters to acceptable sons, and construct its own schools, such as the newly opened Islamic Academy, a 135,000-square-foot K–9 institution situated on a sprawling plot in north Edmonton. Factor in the relative ease of intercontinental travel and the ability to reconnect via the web with whom and what you’ve left behind, and you have a recipe for maintaining religious traditions within a largely secular culture. You also have a potential formula for insularity.
Farooqui’s environment, though, is far from closed: in addition to having non-Muslim friends, she has nearly completed a contract with the provincial government to promote post-secondary education. Even though she wears the hijab, she says she has never really been subject to discrimination — a testament to a dominant culture that has truly come to believe in the Canadian multicultural model.
I’m glad to hear it, although it runs counter to my experiences growing up in this city in the late 1970s and early 1980s, a time when Paki jokes were an actual comedy genre, and anyone who looked remotely brown, including me, was caught up in the same vile net. “We’re just like everybody else,” Farooqui tells me. She has repeated this three times in the past minute. For some reason, the nickname I was saddled with in junior high leaps to mind: “Rug Rider.”
Farooqui is right, of course. Muslims are like everybody else. They pay their taxes and, according to pollster Michael Adams, love their country and (I’m guessing here) ice hockey. Red blood might even course through their veins. But they are also unalike in very significant ways.
Although the demonization of Arabs and Muslims began much earlier, September 11 was a crucible. In the United States, racist attacks, including murder, took place in the immediate aftermath, while the introduction of draconian legislation such as the Patriot Act also set the American Muslim community on edge. In Canada, the reaction was less far reaching but still severe. Bill C-36, with its sweeping powers of arrest and detention, was introduced, albeit with a sunset clause. The extraordinary rendition of Maher Arar, and rcmp complicity in it, made the simple act of flying through the US a small gamble. csis came calling on some, hoping for a chat.
The tenor of intercultural discussion also changed. Media outlets, notably the Asper-owned National Post, led the charge: “We should not pretend that an effective fight against terrorism can be waged in a truly colour-blind fashion,” wrote columnist Jonathan Kay. “The fact is, those who plot the annihilation of our civilization are of one religion and, almost without exception, one race.” Even Ian Brown, a writer not given to simple stereotyping, sang a similar refrain in the Globe and Mail, although he couched his poison in a paragraph chocked with equivocations: “I will never see another devout, turban-wearing Muslim without wondering — unfairly, I admit, against my better instincts, I realize, but doing so nevertheless — was he part of it? Or, at least, did he feel remorse? And I will never know the answer.” From the rabid right to the squishy centre, a choir of reactionaries reciting Samuel Huntington, chapter and verse.
In this occasionally toxic environment, Canadian Muslims have had to negotiate their identity — or, more accurately, identities. Edmonton’s roughly 35,000 Muslims comprise almost sixty nationalities, several languages (including Urdu, Arabic, Farsi, Malay, Turkish), and at least a handful of sects (Sunni, Shia and Ismaili, as well as much smaller groups like Ahmadis and Sufis). A community of communities, each vastly different from the other. Compared with the original Edmonton Muslims, who spoke the same language, were of the same sect, shared the same culture, and largely hailed from the same two villages, it is extraordinarily diverse. Because of this, trying to find out “who Muslims are” today is roughly akin to asking who Torontonians are.
Who, then, can claim to speak on behalf of such a diverse group? The short answer is no one and anyone. Because Islam lacks a formal hierarchy, anyone can claim to represent it. This wasn’t always the case in Edmonton; because the pioneer community was small and tightly knit, leaders emerged naturally. “In the earlier years, the seniors were always spokespersons of the community,” says my uncle Edward Saddy, a past president of the Canadian Islamic Centre. “You got there on merit — everybody knew who would be the right person for the right job.”
Today competing essentialist visions tend to drown out more reasoned voices. Mohamed Elmasry, chair and president of the conservative Canadian Islamic Congress, has ripped into some moderates using the rustiest of canards: “Self-hating Muslims secretly (or not so secretly) despise their religion and curse the day their parents gave them Muslim names. Yet most lack the courage to change either name or faith,” he writes. “Instead, they try to accommodate their ambivalence by being very selective, or even minimal, in their Islamic practices.”
Elmasry’s excesses are often matched by those who oppose him, most notably Tarek Fatah, former head of the liberal Muslim Canadian Congress. Since many schools of Islamic jurisprudence decree that apostates be put to death, Fatah reasons that conservatives who imply that he and others like him are anti-Muslim are essentially levelling a death sentence. The mcc’s solution? Make any implication of apostasy illegal — an act that would cut short heated discussion of who is a Muslim, but also deliver a body blow to free speech.
Then there are those taking action on behalf of Muslims against skewed depictions of themselves and their faith — often misguidedly, and with spectacularly poor results. The Osgoode Hall law students who went after Maclean’s for running an excerpt from Mark Steyn’s new book, America Alone, generated a tsunami of negative publicity when they filed complaints against the magazine with both the Ontario and Canadian Human Rights Commissions. Calgary cleric Syed Soharwardy’s grievance to the Alberta Human Rights and Citizenship Commission about the Western Standard and its former publisher, Ezra Levant, for reprinting the Danish “Mohammed” cartoons, essentially came down to the right not to be offended. (Soharwardy eventually dropped his complaint, and both hrcs opted not to proceed against Maclean’s, for different reasons. But the case was forum-shopped by members of the Canadian Islamic Congress and is currently being heard in BC.) The unintended result: Ezra Levant and Mark Steyn, two minor-league provocateurs, were recast as free speech icons.
The community has fared better when it has been able to cast itself, as it has quite literally with the Mosquers and, more important, with Little Mosque on the Prairie. Created by Zarqa Nawaz, a Muslim writer and producer who worked for cbc and ctv, Little Mosque is that rarest of things: a hit Canadian sitcom. Equally rare, it portrays Muslims who don’t spontaneously combust. Set in the fictional town of Mercy, Saskatchewan, the series revolves around a small group of devout followers surrounded by the often baffled and sometimes reactionary citizens of the dominant “white” culture. Hilarity occasionally ensues.
The world Nawaz has created is a product of her experiences. Born in Liverpool in 1967, she moved with her family to Canada in 1972, eventually settling in Brampton, Ontario. Like many of her peers, she rediscovered her faith in her teenage years. At thirteen, she began wearing the hijab; later she grew even more serious. “I went through this ‘little fundamentalist’ stage when I was in high school,” she says. “I’ve since come full circle. But when you’re young and you discover faith, you tend toward the black and white.”
In 1993, she married her husband, a Muslim and a doctor born in Montreal and raised in Saskatchewan. They ultimately landed in Regina. Over the years, she produced four children and an equal number of short films, as well as 2005’s Me and the Mosque, a well-regarded documentary. Then came Little Mosque, for which, she admits, she softened a few edges. For example, Mercy hosts one lone fundamentalist, of whom she says with a laugh, “Baber — whooo! He’d be, like, 90 percent of a mosque.” And then there is Amaar, the town’s forthright and very modern imam: clean shaven and without any accent, he’s as Canadian as puffed wheat. “Completely fictional,” she says. “There’s no such thing as an indigenous Canadian, born-and-raised imam.”
Ah, but there is. Or was. Sort of. When my father was taught his prayers in Arabic every Sunday, it was often by Ameen “King” Ganam, a Saskatchewan-born farm kid who played fiddle with Tommy Hunter and had his own cbc radio show. And as for modern touches, the first imported imam to preside over Al Rashid, Hammudah Abd Al-Ati (born and trained in Egypt), was a clean-shaven sophisticate. He eventually left his flock for Princeton, where he completed a Ph.D.in sociology.
It’s hard to fault Nawaz for being unaware of the history of her culture. In a way, it’s not really hers at all. But her representations are often taken to be emblematic of Canadian Muslims generally, which can be a problem. For instance, although most of the show’s female Muslim characters wear the hijab, in fact only 42 percent of Muslim women choose to visibly identify themselves as members of the faith
To be fair, Nawaz is being criticized from both ends: her generally rosy portrait has also made her the object of suspicion among those who think Islam and comedy shouldn’t mix. The problem is that, like most representations of the community, positive or not, her portrait is largely one-dimensional.
A more accurate reflection of Canadian Islam can be found in the admittedly unexciting form of a political action coalition from Edmonton. Formed in the wake of 9/11 and designed to coordinate the community’s response to uncertain times, the Edmonton Council of Muslim Communities has already made an impact locally: its efforts recently led to the endowment of a chair in Islamic Studies at the University of Alberta.
More remarkable is the fact that the ecmc exists at all. Historically, sectarian divisions presented an impossibly high hurdle for Muslims attempting to present a broad-based, unified front. Animosity between Sunni and Shia traditionalists can be intense, and many Muslims don’t consider Ismailis to be part of the greater Islamic whole. But by agreeing to work together, the ecmc participants — from Sunni to Shia to Ismaili — tacitly made room not only for each other, but for alternate versions of Islam. All in all, a very Canadian compromise, perhaps one indicative of the future of Islam in this country.
That said, the ecmc unfortunately decided to carry on Syed Soharwardy’s fight with the Western Standard. Alberta’s human rights commission dismissed the case in August, but by then it had become a cause célèbre among free speech defenders of all stripes. I would have expected a more nuanced response from the coalition, especially since its chairperson happens to be a second-generation member of Edmonton’s original Muslim community. Ezra Levant has suggested that the chair, Larry Shaben, is a fascist. Most news organizations refer to him as a respected community leader. I call him Uncle, and have enormous regard for him. But with the ecmc’s actions, I must disagree.
Is there a new Canadianized Islam? No. Clearly there are several, each a natural outgrowth of time and circumstance. There are the Ismailis, the followers of the Aga Khan, a well-integrated and influential community of about 75,000 that has produced a disproportionate number of high-profile leaders, such as former Ballard Power Systems chair Firoz Rasul and Liberal senator Mobina Jaffer. There are the gay Muslims of groups such as Salaam, whose founder, El-Farouk Khaki, ran as the ndp candidate in the last Toronto Centre by-election and lost to Bob Rae. There are the secular Muslims, some of whom see evidence of “sharia creep” around every turn. There are the traditionalists, who harbour a culture-bound and often narrow view of who is a Muslim. There is an assertive new generation, Canadian born yet observant, both a part of and apart from the “dominant” culture.
And then there is us, the descendants of the first Islamic wave. For some, I am a cautionary tale, evidence of what can happen to Muslims in Canada when the bonds of faith are allowed to fray. But they can rest easier knowing I am largely a charlatan. Although my father considered himself a Muslim, he wasn’t particularly observant, and we, his children, were raised without religion. I am a Muslim in about the same way as Barack Obama is: by bloodline at most. It was only as “Arab” became conflated with “Muslim,” and “Muslim” with “terror” that I found myself identifying with a people and a faith with which I thought I had little in common.
Whether many Muslims would identify with me is another question. But the community, like this city in which it thrives, has already changed dramatically. More change is sure to come. There may even be a time when this faith, this culture, will make room for those of us who no longer believe in any god.
Before I return to Vancouver, I pay my respects to my father. He lies in the Muslim section of Beechmount Cemetery, next to his mother. Snow surrounds his grave, and my feet sink in as I make my way over. The back of his headstone reads khalid. This was his Arabic name, but it was only one part of him.
His mother once told me that when my father was young, at night he would sometimes demand that she lie beside him on the bed. When she thought he was asleep, she would try to creep away, but my he would grab her arm and hold her close. This would continue until he finally went to sleep. Now they lie side by side for eternity, their headstones monuments to endurance and change.
Backing away from the graves, I retrace my steps so as not to fill my shoes with snow. On this Friday, the forecast calls for more flurries. As I drive to the airport, snow begins to fall, a bitter wind whipping the flakes. Soon the city will again be covered in white. By tomorrow, the tracks I made will be gone.
http://www.walrusmagazine.com/articles/2008.10-religion-guy-saddy-first-little-mosque-on-the-prairie-muslims-in-canada/6/
by Guy Saddy
illustration by Graham Roumieu
Published in the October/November 2008 issue
I am praying. Sort of. My eyes are cast downward, hands held apart, palms up and slightly cupped, as if holding open an invisible book. That this is not going well is hardly a surprise. It has been a long time, and truth be told I was never shown how to do it properly. My stance is awkward and imitative, a cheap copy of what I have witnessed at the odd solemn occasion that intersected our lives. The last time I tried to pray was more than ten years ago, in Istanbul. It was at the Blue Mosque, a structure so indescribably beautiful, so clearly a tribute to humankind’s transcendence, that its existence seemed to render less significant the promise of the divine.
This place of worship is spare. The pulpit, as it were, is off to the side of the rectangular room. Next to the main hall is an antechamber for ritual ablutions, containing a wash basin and jug perched atop a simple wishbone cabinet. A curtain separating the men’s prayer area from the women’s is not evident today, though one was once erected, many years after both sexes, blissfully ignorant of — or perhaps unconcerned with — tradition, had begun praying together. Rugs cover the hardwood; most are worn thin in spots, perhaps where foreheads met floor. Wind whistles through the building. An eerie wail breaks the silence. I am completely alone here — although to the faithful there is no such thing.
This, the original Al Rashid Mosque, is essentially a museum now, its congregation limited to tour bus voyeurs who, having had their fill of Fort Edmonton’s sexier sites, poke their heads through the front doors and wonder how a mosque, of all things, figured in the early history of northern Alberta. Built in 1938 and relocated in 1991 to a berth in the city’s premier historical park, it is the oldest Muslim house of worship in Canada. From the outside, however, it hardly looks like a mosque at all. Instead, its design evokes the early-twentieth-century Ukrainian Orthodox churches that dot central Alberta’s rural landscape. This is not a coincidence: the mosque’s contractor, Mike Drewoth, was a Ukrainian Canadian unfamiliar with Islamic architecture.
In his ignorance, though, Drewoth accomplished something far more meaningful than any aesthetic flourish. Although clearly unintended, his fusion of East and West stands as a metaphor for a made-in-Canada Islam, a pliant and less conservative version of the faith that grew out of the western prairie like a field of tall grass. It was an Islam that forgave the odd trespass and contextualized some of the religion’s more rigid proscriptions as remnants from the past. It was practised here.
Near the entrance, I pick up a book titled Muslims in Canada: A Century of Achievement. It is a textual and photographic record of the early community, their assimilation reflected in the names they had adopted or that were chosen for them. Leafing through its pages, I note that Bedouin Ferran became Peter Baker, while Ali Ahmed Abouchadi and Mahamud Abuali Gotmi were christened Alexander Hamilton and Frank Alex Coutney, respectively. And so on. On one page, however, was a list of clearly Muslim names, direct from the old country, thirty-two in all. These were the founders of Al Rashid, its charter congregation.
One name stands out, initially because of its length: Rikia Mahmoud Saeed el Haj Ahmed. She was known to me, but not by this ostentatious designation. I knew her as Mary Saddy, my grandmother.
Memories of my father’s funeral are hazy, but a few details remain. We decided to have the ceremony at a funeral home instead of the mosque, since the vast majority of my father’s friends were non-Muslim. As the only son, I was asked to help prepare his body for burial, a role I declined because it would have been too painful to fulfill. There was, I recall, some minor wrangling over how Dad would ascend to the hereafter. My immediate family thought it would be fine to dress him in the clothes in which he was most comfortable — white sports shirt, tennis shorts and running shoes — but my uncle felt that those who had agreed to prepare my father’s body would not approve. So Dad was wrapped in a kafan, a simple white sheet, for his final journey.
We also had a difficult time choosing a photograph to place beside the casket. In his more recent photos, the lung cancer that eventually raced through him seemed to have altered his face long before any actual symptoms appeared. In many shots, it looked as though he was forcing his smile, as though death was stalking him and subconsciously he knew it. We had to go back to a trip he and my mother took to Japan several years earlier to unearth a good photograph. Two things had to be Photoshopped out first, though. One was my mother. The other was the large can of beer in his hand.
The first trickle of Muslim immigration to North America began in the last three decades of the nineteenth century, primarily from Ottoman-occupied Greater Syria, a region that included Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Palestine. Most of the early immigrants were single men; many, like my paternal grandfather, were teens from villages in present-day Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley who were fleeing conscription into the Ottoman army. The majority of the initial Arab émigrés settled in Montreal; some of the more intrepid went west.
Of these, many were peddlers who travelled throughout rural Saskatchewan and Alberta, hawking wares they carried on their backs. Others were drawn to the north. My maternal grandfather, Bud Alley (formerly Mohammed Khalil Ali Nogedi), became a trader in the small, primarily First Nations outpost of Fort Simpson, nwt, where his competition was the Hudson’s Bay Company. My father’s family ended up in Alberta, helming a mixed farming operation in the south for a while, before settling in Edmonton in the mid-1930s. The 1931 census put the number of Muslims in Canada at 645. If that was accurate, my father’s immediate family accounted for about 1.5 percent of them.
It was a tiny pioneer community founded amid a small but growing city. As a result, the emphasis was on getting along and fitting in. Over time, alcohol was consumed by many, if not most; the salaat, the prayers said five times daily, were often ignored. In several homes, Christmas trees were trimmed, Easter egg hunts were organized, and Halloween was celebrated. Friendships between Arabs and Jews were common. The odd intercultural business relationship resulted, and members of Edmonton’s comparably small Jewish community helped fund the Al Rashid Mosque.
For these Edmonton Arabs, religion was a less significant bond than ethnicity. Intermarriage between Christians and Muslims (both Arab and not) was fairly common, and among the eight children in my father’s family only half married within the faith. My mother’s side was even less bound by tradition. Her father, a Lebanese Muslim, had married a Canadian-born woman of Scottish ancestry, and of the five children in her family only one, my mother, married a Muslim.
Because the Arab community was small, practices that emphasized similarities between Christians and Muslims were played up, and differences played down. The mosque functioned more as a community centre, a place where Arab youths would gather to dance the traditional dubke or, on occasion, the jitterbug. Things as seemingly unimportant as music and cuisine — fatiya and kibbeh, tabbouleh and hummus — became bridges between two groups that were increasingly identifying as one.
Still, some traditions endured. While halal butchers were practically unheard of, the prohibition against eating pork was widely observed by Muslims, though certainly not in every home. Once, when my grandmother was visiting, she encountered something in our kitchen that would make any contemporary cleric’s blood curdle.
“Bobby!” she shouted to my father. “There’s a big ham in your refrigerator!”
My dad, ever the dutiful son, sauntered over. He opened the fridge door and looked inside, then furrowed his brow. “That’s not a big ham, Mother,” he said, closing the door.
“Bobby, don’t lie, ya haram. I saw it with my own eyes.”My father reopened the door. “Oh, that,” he said. “That’s a little ham.”
All that said, the community was far from idyllic — or, for that matter, monolithic; certain families hewed more closely to the ways of the old country than others. It was engaged in a pattern typical for a newly arrived group: a struggle to negotiate old traditions within the slipstream of a new and very different culture. Most first- and second-generation Arabs adopted a flexible approach to their Islamic faith; in turn, the faith proved flexible enough to allow for its North Americanization.
Over time, the community spawned its share of businessmen, academics, and sundry other pillars. My father’s brother, Edward Saddy, was the first Muslim judge in Canada. Another uncle (by marriage, to my father’s sister), Larry Shaben, was Alberta’s minister of economic development and trade — the first Muslim in Canada to hold a provincial cabinet position. One of my father’s sisters married Muhammad Ali Bogra, from 1953 to 1955 the prime minister of (then united) East and West Pakistan.
While boundaries were stretched by the second generation, the third-generation kids — us — pushed them even further. We experimented with drugs, had friends and lovers of every faith and persuasion, and became increasingly secular. We mainstreamed. It was a quintessentially Canadian experience, repeated countless times in dozens of other ethnic communities across the nation. The only thing truly notable about it was how ordinary it was.
But things have changed. Since that early tally of Canadians of Islamic faith, the number of Muslims here has grown more than a thousandfold. Many mosques have attracted an increasingly conservative leadership and a similarly conservative following, drawn largely from the 90 percent of the current community born outside Canada.
For those inclined to cherry-pick the negatives, there has been a bounty: The Toronto 18. Vancouver cleric Younus Kathrada and his characterization of Jews as “brothers of monkeys and the swine.” Momin Khawaja. A taxi driver who refused to pick up a blind man with his guide dog, since to do so would, according to some aberrant reading of the faith, be prohibited. And so on.
What has happened? Some observers feel that with this new community, integration is not necessarily in the cards. Or is it? Can Islam be Canadianized? Or, more accurately, can it be Canadianized again?
It’s Islamic Awareness Week at the University of Alberta, and the students’ union building is the centre of the action, such as it is. On a cool Wednesday afternoon, just a few visitors mill about the displays. On one table lies a selection of children’s books: Tell Me About Hajj, Hurray It’s Ramadan, I Am a Little Moslem, and other tales designed to imbue fealty. At another, Iman, a stunning hijabi whose high cheekbones and fine features are common to East Africa, is selling Islamic Awareness Week T-shirts for $15. Nearby, they’re offering henna tattoos. There’s also a draw for an iPod.
Under the banner of the Muslim Students Association, Fatima Ahmed, a Canadian-born volunteer, is handing out a questionnaire. “Want to try it?” Sure. As I fill it out — questions range from “Who do Muslims worship?” to “Where was the first mosque in North America built?” — I ask Ahmed about her hijab. “It’s actually a scarf,” she says. She made the decision to wear it in 2001.
“You have excellent timing,” I say.
Ahmed smiles. “I got some looks,” she says, “but in the post-secondary community it’s not an issue.”
Two decades ago, when I was a student here, overt displays of religious symbolism were limited to the odd Sikh turban or (very) rare Jewish yarmulke, the crucifix having already been watered down to the status of prop in a Madonna video. Expressions of solidarity with, as Edward Said might have put it, the “Oriental other,” were limited to the odd Palestinian kaffiyeh scarf. Nobody I was acquainted with — not any of my aunts, or my female cousins — wore head coverings. The hijab was as uncommon as the bow tie.
Today it’s part of a changed landscape. It has been three years since I’ve been back to Edmonton, the city I called home for the first thirty years of my life. So much of what I once knew is missing now; more than any other place that comes to mind, Edmonton cannibalizes its past. The original city hall, a lovely modernist building erected in 1956 and reflective of the era in which the city began to come of age, was torn down, replaced in 1992 by a couple of cool-looking glass pyramids that evoke, well, triangles. The city’s premier live music venue, the Sidetrack Café, was demolished to make way for yet another banal condo, and Flashback, its preeminent gay bar, is long gone. Even the name of Edmonton’s best-used park wasn’t safe from repositioning: in 1976, Mayfair Park was re-christened William Hawrelak Park, in honour of a mayor whose resumé read like a rap sheet. As a teenager, I was arrested there for marijuana possession, which seemed both ironic and fitting.
What remains triggers a sense of overwhelming loss. Leaving the campus behind, I drive past the junior high where I first kissed a girl, the field where I played baseball, the area around Twin Bridges where as teenagers we’d get shitfaced on flats of Hi-Test and fall asleep next to a fire on the banks of Whitemud Creek — all signposts from a youth that has long since passed. I turn down our old street. Our family home is not ours anymore. Since my father’s death, even my family is greatly changed.
And yet so much of who I am springs from this city. Who we are — what we become — is largely a product of time, place, and circumstance. Context shapes us. And the context that informs this newest generation of Muslims is much different.
On a brisk Thursday morning, I meet Nida Farooqui, one of the organizers of the Mosquers, an annual film festival that for the past two years has showcased videos made by local Muslim youth. I pick her hijab out of the crowd at the Second Cup near Holt Renfrew downtown, and over coffee she gives me a quick overview. In 2007, the Mosquers’ inaugural year, the entries tended to be serious and a little political. This year, she says, was different. The winning comedy entry, called Thinly Sliced Strips — yes, it’s about an obsession with bacon — played to a standing-room-only crowd. The film is by no means polished, but there are some funny bits. Its message, though, is mixed. After searching for and finally discovering halal bacon, one of the main characters scarfs it back — and almost chokes to death. A mild reproach is the intent. Eve, a serpent, and an apple come to mind.
Although the majority of those who attended the Mosquers were Muslim, the intended audience was much broader. “The whole point of it is to decrease negative stereotypes of Muslims,” says Farooqui. She has found Edmonton’s non-Muslims by and large receptive, which, she says, has helped the city’s Muslim community to grow. “We’ve gained a lot of confidence,” she reflects. “We know who we are, we’re proud of who we are, and we know what we stand for. We don’t need to get on the defensive.” I’d like to believe that. But isn’t going on the defensive what the Mosquers is all about?
In one sense, Farooqui is following in my footsteps. We were both born in Edmonton, roughly twenty years apart. We grew up in the city’s southern suburban reaches and attended the same high school, Harry Ainlay Composite, a concrete bunker home to about 2,000 kids of all backgrounds. But that’s where the similarities end. Farooqui has, at twenty-six, never dated. She has never drunk alcohol; none of her Muslim friends drink. She lives at home, and will until she marries. Most tellingly, her choices are reinforced by her peers. Farooqui’s close friends are largely Muslim; of those, all are Canadian born. Her life revolves largely around her religion. Because I was raised outside the apron of the mosque, my high school experiences were almost entirely the opposite, right down to my peer group, which consisted exclusively of non-Muslim friends. But then, I had little choice.
In 1971, there were 33,000 Muslims in Canada. Three decades later, there were 580,000, and most estimates put today’s population at around 850,000. These increases, due almost entirely to immigration, mean the community is now large enough to form its own enclaves. It can publish its own newspapers, support its own retailers, live in its own neighbourhoods, operate its own summer camps, marry its daughters to acceptable sons, and construct its own schools, such as the newly opened Islamic Academy, a 135,000-square-foot K–9 institution situated on a sprawling plot in north Edmonton. Factor in the relative ease of intercontinental travel and the ability to reconnect via the web with whom and what you’ve left behind, and you have a recipe for maintaining religious traditions within a largely secular culture. You also have a potential formula for insularity.
Farooqui’s environment, though, is far from closed: in addition to having non-Muslim friends, she has nearly completed a contract with the provincial government to promote post-secondary education. Even though she wears the hijab, she says she has never really been subject to discrimination — a testament to a dominant culture that has truly come to believe in the Canadian multicultural model.
I’m glad to hear it, although it runs counter to my experiences growing up in this city in the late 1970s and early 1980s, a time when Paki jokes were an actual comedy genre, and anyone who looked remotely brown, including me, was caught up in the same vile net. “We’re just like everybody else,” Farooqui tells me. She has repeated this three times in the past minute. For some reason, the nickname I was saddled with in junior high leaps to mind: “Rug Rider.”
Farooqui is right, of course. Muslims are like everybody else. They pay their taxes and, according to pollster Michael Adams, love their country and (I’m guessing here) ice hockey. Red blood might even course through their veins. But they are also unalike in very significant ways.
Although the demonization of Arabs and Muslims began much earlier, September 11 was a crucible. In the United States, racist attacks, including murder, took place in the immediate aftermath, while the introduction of draconian legislation such as the Patriot Act also set the American Muslim community on edge. In Canada, the reaction was less far reaching but still severe. Bill C-36, with its sweeping powers of arrest and detention, was introduced, albeit with a sunset clause. The extraordinary rendition of Maher Arar, and rcmp complicity in it, made the simple act of flying through the US a small gamble. csis came calling on some, hoping for a chat.
The tenor of intercultural discussion also changed. Media outlets, notably the Asper-owned National Post, led the charge: “We should not pretend that an effective fight against terrorism can be waged in a truly colour-blind fashion,” wrote columnist Jonathan Kay. “The fact is, those who plot the annihilation of our civilization are of one religion and, almost without exception, one race.” Even Ian Brown, a writer not given to simple stereotyping, sang a similar refrain in the Globe and Mail, although he couched his poison in a paragraph chocked with equivocations: “I will never see another devout, turban-wearing Muslim without wondering — unfairly, I admit, against my better instincts, I realize, but doing so nevertheless — was he part of it? Or, at least, did he feel remorse? And I will never know the answer.” From the rabid right to the squishy centre, a choir of reactionaries reciting Samuel Huntington, chapter and verse.
In this occasionally toxic environment, Canadian Muslims have had to negotiate their identity — or, more accurately, identities. Edmonton’s roughly 35,000 Muslims comprise almost sixty nationalities, several languages (including Urdu, Arabic, Farsi, Malay, Turkish), and at least a handful of sects (Sunni, Shia and Ismaili, as well as much smaller groups like Ahmadis and Sufis). A community of communities, each vastly different from the other. Compared with the original Edmonton Muslims, who spoke the same language, were of the same sect, shared the same culture, and largely hailed from the same two villages, it is extraordinarily diverse. Because of this, trying to find out “who Muslims are” today is roughly akin to asking who Torontonians are.
Who, then, can claim to speak on behalf of such a diverse group? The short answer is no one and anyone. Because Islam lacks a formal hierarchy, anyone can claim to represent it. This wasn’t always the case in Edmonton; because the pioneer community was small and tightly knit, leaders emerged naturally. “In the earlier years, the seniors were always spokespersons of the community,” says my uncle Edward Saddy, a past president of the Canadian Islamic Centre. “You got there on merit — everybody knew who would be the right person for the right job.”
Today competing essentialist visions tend to drown out more reasoned voices. Mohamed Elmasry, chair and president of the conservative Canadian Islamic Congress, has ripped into some moderates using the rustiest of canards: “Self-hating Muslims secretly (or not so secretly) despise their religion and curse the day their parents gave them Muslim names. Yet most lack the courage to change either name or faith,” he writes. “Instead, they try to accommodate their ambivalence by being very selective, or even minimal, in their Islamic practices.”
Elmasry’s excesses are often matched by those who oppose him, most notably Tarek Fatah, former head of the liberal Muslim Canadian Congress. Since many schools of Islamic jurisprudence decree that apostates be put to death, Fatah reasons that conservatives who imply that he and others like him are anti-Muslim are essentially levelling a death sentence. The mcc’s solution? Make any implication of apostasy illegal — an act that would cut short heated discussion of who is a Muslim, but also deliver a body blow to free speech.
Then there are those taking action on behalf of Muslims against skewed depictions of themselves and their faith — often misguidedly, and with spectacularly poor results. The Osgoode Hall law students who went after Maclean’s for running an excerpt from Mark Steyn’s new book, America Alone, generated a tsunami of negative publicity when they filed complaints against the magazine with both the Ontario and Canadian Human Rights Commissions. Calgary cleric Syed Soharwardy’s grievance to the Alberta Human Rights and Citizenship Commission about the Western Standard and its former publisher, Ezra Levant, for reprinting the Danish “Mohammed” cartoons, essentially came down to the right not to be offended. (Soharwardy eventually dropped his complaint, and both hrcs opted not to proceed against Maclean’s, for different reasons. But the case was forum-shopped by members of the Canadian Islamic Congress and is currently being heard in BC.) The unintended result: Ezra Levant and Mark Steyn, two minor-league provocateurs, were recast as free speech icons.
The community has fared better when it has been able to cast itself, as it has quite literally with the Mosquers and, more important, with Little Mosque on the Prairie. Created by Zarqa Nawaz, a Muslim writer and producer who worked for cbc and ctv, Little Mosque is that rarest of things: a hit Canadian sitcom. Equally rare, it portrays Muslims who don’t spontaneously combust. Set in the fictional town of Mercy, Saskatchewan, the series revolves around a small group of devout followers surrounded by the often baffled and sometimes reactionary citizens of the dominant “white” culture. Hilarity occasionally ensues.
The world Nawaz has created is a product of her experiences. Born in Liverpool in 1967, she moved with her family to Canada in 1972, eventually settling in Brampton, Ontario. Like many of her peers, she rediscovered her faith in her teenage years. At thirteen, she began wearing the hijab; later she grew even more serious. “I went through this ‘little fundamentalist’ stage when I was in high school,” she says. “I’ve since come full circle. But when you’re young and you discover faith, you tend toward the black and white.”
In 1993, she married her husband, a Muslim and a doctor born in Montreal and raised in Saskatchewan. They ultimately landed in Regina. Over the years, she produced four children and an equal number of short films, as well as 2005’s Me and the Mosque, a well-regarded documentary. Then came Little Mosque, for which, she admits, she softened a few edges. For example, Mercy hosts one lone fundamentalist, of whom she says with a laugh, “Baber — whooo! He’d be, like, 90 percent of a mosque.” And then there is Amaar, the town’s forthright and very modern imam: clean shaven and without any accent, he’s as Canadian as puffed wheat. “Completely fictional,” she says. “There’s no such thing as an indigenous Canadian, born-and-raised imam.”
Ah, but there is. Or was. Sort of. When my father was taught his prayers in Arabic every Sunday, it was often by Ameen “King” Ganam, a Saskatchewan-born farm kid who played fiddle with Tommy Hunter and had his own cbc radio show. And as for modern touches, the first imported imam to preside over Al Rashid, Hammudah Abd Al-Ati (born and trained in Egypt), was a clean-shaven sophisticate. He eventually left his flock for Princeton, where he completed a Ph.D.in sociology.
It’s hard to fault Nawaz for being unaware of the history of her culture. In a way, it’s not really hers at all. But her representations are often taken to be emblematic of Canadian Muslims generally, which can be a problem. For instance, although most of the show’s female Muslim characters wear the hijab, in fact only 42 percent of Muslim women choose to visibly identify themselves as members of the faith
To be fair, Nawaz is being criticized from both ends: her generally rosy portrait has also made her the object of suspicion among those who think Islam and comedy shouldn’t mix. The problem is that, like most representations of the community, positive or not, her portrait is largely one-dimensional.
A more accurate reflection of Canadian Islam can be found in the admittedly unexciting form of a political action coalition from Edmonton. Formed in the wake of 9/11 and designed to coordinate the community’s response to uncertain times, the Edmonton Council of Muslim Communities has already made an impact locally: its efforts recently led to the endowment of a chair in Islamic Studies at the University of Alberta.
More remarkable is the fact that the ecmc exists at all. Historically, sectarian divisions presented an impossibly high hurdle for Muslims attempting to present a broad-based, unified front. Animosity between Sunni and Shia traditionalists can be intense, and many Muslims don’t consider Ismailis to be part of the greater Islamic whole. But by agreeing to work together, the ecmc participants — from Sunni to Shia to Ismaili — tacitly made room not only for each other, but for alternate versions of Islam. All in all, a very Canadian compromise, perhaps one indicative of the future of Islam in this country.
That said, the ecmc unfortunately decided to carry on Syed Soharwardy’s fight with the Western Standard. Alberta’s human rights commission dismissed the case in August, but by then it had become a cause célèbre among free speech defenders of all stripes. I would have expected a more nuanced response from the coalition, especially since its chairperson happens to be a second-generation member of Edmonton’s original Muslim community. Ezra Levant has suggested that the chair, Larry Shaben, is a fascist. Most news organizations refer to him as a respected community leader. I call him Uncle, and have enormous regard for him. But with the ecmc’s actions, I must disagree.
Is there a new Canadianized Islam? No. Clearly there are several, each a natural outgrowth of time and circumstance. There are the Ismailis, the followers of the Aga Khan, a well-integrated and influential community of about 75,000 that has produced a disproportionate number of high-profile leaders, such as former Ballard Power Systems chair Firoz Rasul and Liberal senator Mobina Jaffer. There are the gay Muslims of groups such as Salaam, whose founder, El-Farouk Khaki, ran as the ndp candidate in the last Toronto Centre by-election and lost to Bob Rae. There are the secular Muslims, some of whom see evidence of “sharia creep” around every turn. There are the traditionalists, who harbour a culture-bound and often narrow view of who is a Muslim. There is an assertive new generation, Canadian born yet observant, both a part of and apart from the “dominant” culture.
And then there is us, the descendants of the first Islamic wave. For some, I am a cautionary tale, evidence of what can happen to Muslims in Canada when the bonds of faith are allowed to fray. But they can rest easier knowing I am largely a charlatan. Although my father considered himself a Muslim, he wasn’t particularly observant, and we, his children, were raised without religion. I am a Muslim in about the same way as Barack Obama is: by bloodline at most. It was only as “Arab” became conflated with “Muslim,” and “Muslim” with “terror” that I found myself identifying with a people and a faith with which I thought I had little in common.
Whether many Muslims would identify with me is another question. But the community, like this city in which it thrives, has already changed dramatically. More change is sure to come. There may even be a time when this faith, this culture, will make room for those of us who no longer believe in any god.
Before I return to Vancouver, I pay my respects to my father. He lies in the Muslim section of Beechmount Cemetery, next to his mother. Snow surrounds his grave, and my feet sink in as I make my way over. The back of his headstone reads khalid. This was his Arabic name, but it was only one part of him.
His mother once told me that when my father was young, at night he would sometimes demand that she lie beside him on the bed. When she thought he was asleep, she would try to creep away, but my he would grab her arm and hold her close. This would continue until he finally went to sleep. Now they lie side by side for eternity, their headstones monuments to endurance and change.
Backing away from the graves, I retrace my steps so as not to fill my shoes with snow. On this Friday, the forecast calls for more flurries. As I drive to the airport, snow begins to fall, a bitter wind whipping the flakes. Soon the city will again be covered in white. By tomorrow, the tracks I made will be gone.
http://www.walrusmagazine.com/articles/2008.10-religion-guy-saddy-first-little-mosque-on-the-prairie-muslims-in-canada/6/
Wednesday, September 17, 2008
Nobody's father: Coping with a child's death
I am posting this article from the Toronto Star because my nephew Saleem died of cancer too. His last moments were exactly the same.
Nobody's father: Coping with a child's death
September 17, 2008
Allan Wilson
SPECIAL TO THE STAR
This week, TouchWood Editions publishes Nobody's Father: Life Without Kids – a collection of essays by men. Today, part three of a five-day series of reprinted essays from the book.
Our only child, Josh, died from cancer and now we are alone, in our house, and in ourselves. And yet we do go ahead with work and friendships, we laugh and sometimes tap our feet to a tune or get involved with a film or with travelling, with teaching, with caring for someone else's children. We breathe in the hard peacefulness that is borne out of the 10 years that spanned our son's diagnosis, hope, relapse, terminal diagnosis, death and then our living after his death.
My heart is 100 years old. I can sit and let the light warm my face today, I can listen to the "Flower Duet" and catch the milliseconds of silence between the notes and know that peace exists. I can look at the farthest edges of the sky and know that something is beyond all that. I can sit comfortably in his room and absorb the calmness, feel it making my heart heavier, richer.
Reader, I want to tell this story: it is what I have left of him, a narrative as unwieldy and disjointed as life itself. You can learn from this.
I remember a business conference in Chicago in the fall of 1983. I got the call that the baby was early, so I hopped on a flight, arriving in Vancouver four hours late. When I saw Josh in an incubator, I cried. He was fine; just a bit jaundiced and premature. Sandy was already able to walk around; she had been so collected and natural that she took photos during the delivery, using the overhead mirror.
I remember bringing Josh home a few days later, getting out of the hospital, into the car and into the apartment, wrestling with the confusing physical tasks of first-time parents. As soon as we closed the apartment door, I felt a clear line of demarcation: he was now with us, and everything changed.
I remember Sandy making him an orange spaceman Halloween costume. When someone asked him who he was, he would say, "Orange spaceman Eliot Wilson happy 2-year-old son Joshua." The next year she made him into a blue corduroy stegosaurus with spikes, a hood and a tail.
"Don't you think it's neat to have a mum like me to make you a costume?" Sandy asked him.
"Don't you think it's neat to have a kid like me?" Josh answered.
I remember the "Summer of Josh," as he called 1997: a February trip to Disney World, a summer drama camp with a part in A Midsummer Night's Dream and a week of rafting, biking and camping in the mountains.
I remember the next winter, his physical education teacher telling us: "If I were to have another son, out of all the students I know, I would want him to be like Josh."
I remember that in March Josh started to have a sore knee. We thought it was growing pains. It began to hurt more often: after a ski trip, after delivering papers, after slipping on an icy sidewalk. Then at school another boy checked him hard during floor hockey and he went down in pain. Sandy took him to the clinic for X-rays. Then we crossed that invisible line.
It was a cold spring afternoon when Sandy called me. Before she said anything, I knew something was terribly wrong.
"Josh has cancer." The words hit me in the chest.
"The doctor says it's 99 per cent certain. It's above his right knee. We have to go to the Children's Hospital tomorrow."
"How is he?"
"He cried a bit. He's okay now. We'll be home soon."
I hung up the phone and tried to let the information settle. I had to sit down. There was a tightening across my chest, inside my breathing. I came to the realization of any frightened parent: I would do anything for my child. I would cut off my hands if that would help.
But nothing worked. I look back on the 22 months that followed as the hardest journey ever. Diagnosis, treatment, amputation, treatment, reprieve, relapse, terminal diagnosis, death. And since I had to support Josh, to find ways to be with him and distract him and have a few cramped bits of comfort and laughter amid the fear, I could not give way to my pain in his presence. Although he knew how hurtful it was for me, we faced the facts but tried to find ways to enjoy what little time we had.
When went to the hospital for the last time he soon began to drift away. By morning, he could only keep awake and respond for a few seconds; the rest of the time he was babbling as the tumours on his heart and lungs restricted the oxygen to his brain.
We made the phone calls and gathered around him on that last morning. We told him how much we loved him, how he was such a wonderful son. By 12:45 he could no longer respond to questions and I turned his head toward me.
His eyes were looking at me, but it was as if he were asleep. I looked at Sandy and said, "He can't respond any more."
A minister came and said a prayer: all I remember was that it was about God. A nurse from the cancer clinic came in and suggested we give him a bolus, an extra hit of pain medication. His breathing remained shallow and fast for the next 15 minutes.
Now there was only Sandy and me, Josh's friend Matt and Matt's father. Others waited in the hall. I felt calm, watching his chest rising and falling while I held his hand.
Soon there was more space between his breaths. And then I watched as he took a breath, paused, took a breath, paused, took a breath, paused longer, took a breath, paused longer, took a breath – and then not another. His chest was still. I looked to Sandy and we nodded. I turned to Matt and said, "He's gone."
We were silent. The nurse came in with a stethoscope, put it on his chest, nodded to us and went out. I shook a bit, had tears at the edges of my eyes but was calm.
Sandy went outside to tell those waiting. I remember looking at Josh as he lay peacefully with the grey window light on his face, the delicate frost on the trees outside. I thought, "Well kid, you made your mark, you really did this well."
Two and three at a time, his friends came into the room. A few shook with grief and all shed a lot of tears, but I was turned away from them, stroking my son's hair. I told them the briefest details of how he died: his heart wore out, it slowed down and stopped, it was peaceful.
Focus on these seven words for a moment: bereaved parents have an indifference to life.
Psychologists and psychiatrists who have no direct experience with such a loss would prescribe medication, analysis, counselling. They believe indifference indicates suicidal tendencies, but that is not the case. It is a sort of lifelong tiredness. As one bereaved father said to me, "I just want to lie down beside her." I know what he means and I know him well. He is energetic in most things, a good father for his surviving child and a responsible husband. He will not purposefully give up living, but if his life should end soon through no plan of his own, he wouldn't be overly concerned.
I returned to teaching after several months. Initially nervous about resenting healthy, obnoxious students who had every physical advantage but weren't living up to their potential, I hid the brief times of anger.
Over the years, I have found myself becoming a better teacher, reaching out to the students more than ever. I wrote a book to guide them, Standards of Excellence: for Students of Life.
Sandy has had some difficult times, as all bereaved parents have.
She loved being a mother and was so good at it and then it was taken away. There was nothing to do, the doctors did their best and only the fantastic luck of having an X-ray of my son's leg four months before diagnosis could have possibly saved him – the tumour was already six inches long when they first saw it. After many stops and starts, she has found providing daycare to little ones the most fulfilling. She volunteers and keeps socially active.
We are more respectful to each other than we were before the diagnosis. I know of the hurt I went through and everyone grieves differently, but I know her pain is equal to mine. Whatever she has to do to maintain equilibrium, to get through the day, is acceptable.
Although this half-life we have is quieter and emptier, in some ways we are now better at living together.
And so it comes back to you, dear son. Here I sit in the quiet of the study, surrounded by books, tapping away on the keyboard, looking around the room and counting the photos of you: more than a dozen from your short, brilliant 16 years. This mountain of hurt and loss is now part of my landscape. I think of you often, your jokes and smiles and friendship. I can imagine part of you is in the delicate light of sunset at the unseen edge of clouds, beyond even the clouds I can see.
I will keep going, teaching, writing and trying to help others. Just as you bravely lived 22 months with a deadly disease, I will try to turn this into a meaningful experience. And, one day, I will lie down beside you.
Allan Wilson is a teacher and writer living in Lethbridge, Alta. His play, Walking Upright Through Fire, has been performed in Lethbridge, Calgary, Toronto and Saskatchewan. His book, Standards of Excellence: for Students of Life, was published by Blue Grama Publications. He is working on a novel and a screenplay.
Toronto Star
Nobody's father: Coping with a child's death
September 17, 2008
Allan Wilson
SPECIAL TO THE STAR
This week, TouchWood Editions publishes Nobody's Father: Life Without Kids – a collection of essays by men. Today, part three of a five-day series of reprinted essays from the book.
Our only child, Josh, died from cancer and now we are alone, in our house, and in ourselves. And yet we do go ahead with work and friendships, we laugh and sometimes tap our feet to a tune or get involved with a film or with travelling, with teaching, with caring for someone else's children. We breathe in the hard peacefulness that is borne out of the 10 years that spanned our son's diagnosis, hope, relapse, terminal diagnosis, death and then our living after his death.
My heart is 100 years old. I can sit and let the light warm my face today, I can listen to the "Flower Duet" and catch the milliseconds of silence between the notes and know that peace exists. I can look at the farthest edges of the sky and know that something is beyond all that. I can sit comfortably in his room and absorb the calmness, feel it making my heart heavier, richer.
Reader, I want to tell this story: it is what I have left of him, a narrative as unwieldy and disjointed as life itself. You can learn from this.
I remember a business conference in Chicago in the fall of 1983. I got the call that the baby was early, so I hopped on a flight, arriving in Vancouver four hours late. When I saw Josh in an incubator, I cried. He was fine; just a bit jaundiced and premature. Sandy was already able to walk around; she had been so collected and natural that she took photos during the delivery, using the overhead mirror.
I remember bringing Josh home a few days later, getting out of the hospital, into the car and into the apartment, wrestling with the confusing physical tasks of first-time parents. As soon as we closed the apartment door, I felt a clear line of demarcation: he was now with us, and everything changed.
I remember Sandy making him an orange spaceman Halloween costume. When someone asked him who he was, he would say, "Orange spaceman Eliot Wilson happy 2-year-old son Joshua." The next year she made him into a blue corduroy stegosaurus with spikes, a hood and a tail.
"Don't you think it's neat to have a mum like me to make you a costume?" Sandy asked him.
"Don't you think it's neat to have a kid like me?" Josh answered.
I remember the "Summer of Josh," as he called 1997: a February trip to Disney World, a summer drama camp with a part in A Midsummer Night's Dream and a week of rafting, biking and camping in the mountains.
I remember the next winter, his physical education teacher telling us: "If I were to have another son, out of all the students I know, I would want him to be like Josh."
I remember that in March Josh started to have a sore knee. We thought it was growing pains. It began to hurt more often: after a ski trip, after delivering papers, after slipping on an icy sidewalk. Then at school another boy checked him hard during floor hockey and he went down in pain. Sandy took him to the clinic for X-rays. Then we crossed that invisible line.
It was a cold spring afternoon when Sandy called me. Before she said anything, I knew something was terribly wrong.
"Josh has cancer." The words hit me in the chest.
"The doctor says it's 99 per cent certain. It's above his right knee. We have to go to the Children's Hospital tomorrow."
"How is he?"
"He cried a bit. He's okay now. We'll be home soon."
I hung up the phone and tried to let the information settle. I had to sit down. There was a tightening across my chest, inside my breathing. I came to the realization of any frightened parent: I would do anything for my child. I would cut off my hands if that would help.
But nothing worked. I look back on the 22 months that followed as the hardest journey ever. Diagnosis, treatment, amputation, treatment, reprieve, relapse, terminal diagnosis, death. And since I had to support Josh, to find ways to be with him and distract him and have a few cramped bits of comfort and laughter amid the fear, I could not give way to my pain in his presence. Although he knew how hurtful it was for me, we faced the facts but tried to find ways to enjoy what little time we had.
When went to the hospital for the last time he soon began to drift away. By morning, he could only keep awake and respond for a few seconds; the rest of the time he was babbling as the tumours on his heart and lungs restricted the oxygen to his brain.
We made the phone calls and gathered around him on that last morning. We told him how much we loved him, how he was such a wonderful son. By 12:45 he could no longer respond to questions and I turned his head toward me.
His eyes were looking at me, but it was as if he were asleep. I looked at Sandy and said, "He can't respond any more."
A minister came and said a prayer: all I remember was that it was about God. A nurse from the cancer clinic came in and suggested we give him a bolus, an extra hit of pain medication. His breathing remained shallow and fast for the next 15 minutes.
Now there was only Sandy and me, Josh's friend Matt and Matt's father. Others waited in the hall. I felt calm, watching his chest rising and falling while I held his hand.
Soon there was more space between his breaths. And then I watched as he took a breath, paused, took a breath, paused, took a breath, paused longer, took a breath, paused longer, took a breath – and then not another. His chest was still. I looked to Sandy and we nodded. I turned to Matt and said, "He's gone."
We were silent. The nurse came in with a stethoscope, put it on his chest, nodded to us and went out. I shook a bit, had tears at the edges of my eyes but was calm.
Sandy went outside to tell those waiting. I remember looking at Josh as he lay peacefully with the grey window light on his face, the delicate frost on the trees outside. I thought, "Well kid, you made your mark, you really did this well."
Two and three at a time, his friends came into the room. A few shook with grief and all shed a lot of tears, but I was turned away from them, stroking my son's hair. I told them the briefest details of how he died: his heart wore out, it slowed down and stopped, it was peaceful.
Focus on these seven words for a moment: bereaved parents have an indifference to life.
Psychologists and psychiatrists who have no direct experience with such a loss would prescribe medication, analysis, counselling. They believe indifference indicates suicidal tendencies, but that is not the case. It is a sort of lifelong tiredness. As one bereaved father said to me, "I just want to lie down beside her." I know what he means and I know him well. He is energetic in most things, a good father for his surviving child and a responsible husband. He will not purposefully give up living, but if his life should end soon through no plan of his own, he wouldn't be overly concerned.
I returned to teaching after several months. Initially nervous about resenting healthy, obnoxious students who had every physical advantage but weren't living up to their potential, I hid the brief times of anger.
Over the years, I have found myself becoming a better teacher, reaching out to the students more than ever. I wrote a book to guide them, Standards of Excellence: for Students of Life.
Sandy has had some difficult times, as all bereaved parents have.
She loved being a mother and was so good at it and then it was taken away. There was nothing to do, the doctors did their best and only the fantastic luck of having an X-ray of my son's leg four months before diagnosis could have possibly saved him – the tumour was already six inches long when they first saw it. After many stops and starts, she has found providing daycare to little ones the most fulfilling. She volunteers and keeps socially active.
We are more respectful to each other than we were before the diagnosis. I know of the hurt I went through and everyone grieves differently, but I know her pain is equal to mine. Whatever she has to do to maintain equilibrium, to get through the day, is acceptable.
Although this half-life we have is quieter and emptier, in some ways we are now better at living together.
And so it comes back to you, dear son. Here I sit in the quiet of the study, surrounded by books, tapping away on the keyboard, looking around the room and counting the photos of you: more than a dozen from your short, brilliant 16 years. This mountain of hurt and loss is now part of my landscape. I think of you often, your jokes and smiles and friendship. I can imagine part of you is in the delicate light of sunset at the unseen edge of clouds, beyond even the clouds I can see.
I will keep going, teaching, writing and trying to help others. Just as you bravely lived 22 months with a deadly disease, I will try to turn this into a meaningful experience. And, one day, I will lie down beside you.
Allan Wilson is a teacher and writer living in Lethbridge, Alta. His play, Walking Upright Through Fire, has been performed in Lethbridge, Calgary, Toronto and Saskatchewan. His book, Standards of Excellence: for Students of Life, was published by Blue Grama Publications. He is working on a novel and a screenplay.
Toronto Star
Tuesday, August 19, 2008
Set apart for God and Torah
Set apart for God and Torah
The BBC's Erica Chernofsky in Jerusalem gets a rare insight into the lives of members of Israel's Ultra-Orthodox Jewish community.
Sitting on a park bench in the late afternoon, Michal Greenwald watches her children run around the playground with dozens of other kids as she takes a few minutes rest from her hectic day.
A full-time property lawyer, Mrs Greenwald is the sole breadwinner and also takes care of her four young children and tends to the housework. Her husband, Shmuel, spends his days studying in a religious seminary for men. She says she cannot imagine life any other way.
''Girls are raised this way from a young age, and such are the lives of Haredim in Israel,'' she says of the Ultra-Orthodox Jews who choose to live separately from mainstream Israeli society.
It is difficult to walk the streets of Jerusalem without running into Haredim, but their community can seem isolated and closed.
The men are distinct in their long black wool coats and trousers, stark white button-down shirts and black hats, even in the heat of the Middle Eastern summer.
Living 'with a purpose'
Mrs Greenwald, 34, lives in Har Nof, an ultra-orthodox neighbourhood of Jerusalem where absolutely everything is closed on Saturday - the Sabbath - and only kosher food is sold in shops
Like all Haredi women, she dresses very modestly, covers her hair with a wig or scarf and will not allow physical contact of any kind with any man other than her husband.
"Being Haredi means being someone who fears God," Mrs Greenwald says. "It means that first and foremost in life are the Torah (Bible) and keeping the mitzvoth (commandments)."
She is referring to the 613 commandments in the Bible that Jews believe were given to them by God. "Everything in my life is built around the Torah," she says.
"If I go on a trip with my family, I can't eat just anything, I can't go mixed swimming, and I'm constantly thinking 'what is the proper thing to do now?' As Haredim we don't just live, but we live with a purpose."
That purpose, as she defines it, is to fulfil the Torah and mitzvoth by bettering herself as well as the world around her, and in so doing striving to become closer to God.
It is for this reason that she proudly supports her family while her husband pursues his religious studies.
'Positive energy'
Currently Haredim make up about 10% of Israeli society, and have a less than positive reputation among secular Israelis, many of whom view their customs as primitive and disapprove of their choice to study at seminaries and thus avoid the mandatory army draft.
"It's an ancient concept in Judaism that the spiritual and the physical are united, that to win a war you need both spirit and strength," says Moshe Eliahu, a Haredi father of two and full-time student at a Jerusalem seminary.
"You need people fighting, but you also need people learning and praying."
According to government figures, the majority of Haredi men do not have paid jobs.
Mr Eliahu, who also earns a meagre wage working at a support centre for Haredi youth in the evenings, explains that Haredim believe that there must always be a certain amount of men learning the Jewish books in order for life, as we know it, to go on.
He is a direct descendant of the Hatam Sopher, a leading 19th Century rabbi of European Jewry and one of several key figures who were the early leaders of the various Haredi sects.
Mr Eliahu says Israel and the world need the "positive energy" that comes from learning Torah.
"This sounds funny to the western ear - what can a man learning in a yeshiva all day possibly give back to the world?" he says. "Torah learning that we do is the hidden code of the physical existence of all mankind, and if for one single second there is no Torah learning in the air, all the world would go back to chaos."
Mr Eliahu's wife, Miriam, teaches English at two Jerusalem schools and takes care of their children. "There's no point to our physical existence without a spiritual purpose, and I, as the husband who is learning all day, am primarily responsible for that," he explains.
'Defence mechanism'
He also rejects the view that Haredi gender roles are primitive. In Judaism, he says, women are actually considered to be closer to God than men. ''They are the ones who create life, they are the queens."
Dressed in classic Haredi garb, he acknowledges he stands out on the street.
''We look different, in fact we look very weird. We dress how people used to dress 100 years ago, we have long peyote (side locks), and all these things set us apart."
He explains that Haredi men dress this way as a "defence mechanism" to "protect ourselves from assimilation".
Mrs Greenwald too defines herself by her religious ideals, setting herself apart from the values of wider society.
"I don't live life for myself," she says. "My priority is my family, my home, and then my career. I can't say I desire to become a famous lawyer, or to be a millionaire.
"For us, there is a bigger picture here. We know this world is just a hallway to the real life, to the Garden of Eden."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/7553860.stm
The BBC's Erica Chernofsky in Jerusalem gets a rare insight into the lives of members of Israel's Ultra-Orthodox Jewish community.
Sitting on a park bench in the late afternoon, Michal Greenwald watches her children run around the playground with dozens of other kids as she takes a few minutes rest from her hectic day.
A full-time property lawyer, Mrs Greenwald is the sole breadwinner and also takes care of her four young children and tends to the housework. Her husband, Shmuel, spends his days studying in a religious seminary for men. She says she cannot imagine life any other way.
''Girls are raised this way from a young age, and such are the lives of Haredim in Israel,'' she says of the Ultra-Orthodox Jews who choose to live separately from mainstream Israeli society.
It is difficult to walk the streets of Jerusalem without running into Haredim, but their community can seem isolated and closed.
The men are distinct in their long black wool coats and trousers, stark white button-down shirts and black hats, even in the heat of the Middle Eastern summer.
Living 'with a purpose'
Mrs Greenwald, 34, lives in Har Nof, an ultra-orthodox neighbourhood of Jerusalem where absolutely everything is closed on Saturday - the Sabbath - and only kosher food is sold in shops
Like all Haredi women, she dresses very modestly, covers her hair with a wig or scarf and will not allow physical contact of any kind with any man other than her husband.
"Being Haredi means being someone who fears God," Mrs Greenwald says. "It means that first and foremost in life are the Torah (Bible) and keeping the mitzvoth (commandments)."
She is referring to the 613 commandments in the Bible that Jews believe were given to them by God. "Everything in my life is built around the Torah," she says.
"If I go on a trip with my family, I can't eat just anything, I can't go mixed swimming, and I'm constantly thinking 'what is the proper thing to do now?' As Haredim we don't just live, but we live with a purpose."
That purpose, as she defines it, is to fulfil the Torah and mitzvoth by bettering herself as well as the world around her, and in so doing striving to become closer to God.
It is for this reason that she proudly supports her family while her husband pursues his religious studies.
'Positive energy'
Currently Haredim make up about 10% of Israeli society, and have a less than positive reputation among secular Israelis, many of whom view their customs as primitive and disapprove of their choice to study at seminaries and thus avoid the mandatory army draft.
"It's an ancient concept in Judaism that the spiritual and the physical are united, that to win a war you need both spirit and strength," says Moshe Eliahu, a Haredi father of two and full-time student at a Jerusalem seminary.
"You need people fighting, but you also need people learning and praying."
According to government figures, the majority of Haredi men do not have paid jobs.
Mr Eliahu, who also earns a meagre wage working at a support centre for Haredi youth in the evenings, explains that Haredim believe that there must always be a certain amount of men learning the Jewish books in order for life, as we know it, to go on.
He is a direct descendant of the Hatam Sopher, a leading 19th Century rabbi of European Jewry and one of several key figures who were the early leaders of the various Haredi sects.
Mr Eliahu says Israel and the world need the "positive energy" that comes from learning Torah.
"This sounds funny to the western ear - what can a man learning in a yeshiva all day possibly give back to the world?" he says. "Torah learning that we do is the hidden code of the physical existence of all mankind, and if for one single second there is no Torah learning in the air, all the world would go back to chaos."
Mr Eliahu's wife, Miriam, teaches English at two Jerusalem schools and takes care of their children. "There's no point to our physical existence without a spiritual purpose, and I, as the husband who is learning all day, am primarily responsible for that," he explains.
'Defence mechanism'
He also rejects the view that Haredi gender roles are primitive. In Judaism, he says, women are actually considered to be closer to God than men. ''They are the ones who create life, they are the queens."
Dressed in classic Haredi garb, he acknowledges he stands out on the street.
''We look different, in fact we look very weird. We dress how people used to dress 100 years ago, we have long peyote (side locks), and all these things set us apart."
He explains that Haredi men dress this way as a "defence mechanism" to "protect ourselves from assimilation".
Mrs Greenwald too defines herself by her religious ideals, setting herself apart from the values of wider society.
"I don't live life for myself," she says. "My priority is my family, my home, and then my career. I can't say I desire to become a famous lawyer, or to be a millionaire.
"For us, there is a bigger picture here. We know this world is just a hallway to the real life, to the Garden of Eden."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/7553860.stm
Thursday, July 10, 2008
Big Oil poised to make triumphant return to Iraq
Small service contracts announced last week are a step toward major development deals
Jul 05, 2008 04:30 AM
Linda McQuaig
When Big Oil excutives and U.S. Vice-President Dick Cheney met for secret energy talks in the spring of 2001, one subject that weighed on all their minds was the potential loss of Iraq's bountiful oil reserves.
After more than a decade of hostile U.S.-Iraqi relations, Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein had negotiated deals with oil companies from a range of countries, including Russia, China and India, to develop Iraq's largely undeveloped reserves.
That meant U.S. oil companies were to be denied a stake in developing one of the last oil bonanzas left on Earth. It also meant that the U.S. risked being denied access to this vast new source of petroleum – the commodity it considers essential to its continued status as an economic and military superpower.
So it wasn't surprising that Cheney's energy task force – set up with urgency within weeks of the Bush administration taking office – took great interest in a document called "Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield Contracts." The document (eventually made public after a lengthy court battle with the Bush administration) included a detailed breakdown of Iraq's 97 oil fields, listing in each case the foreign company that was negotiating a development contract with Saddam, and the status of those negotiations.
But, according to the narrative presented by the White House and rarely challenged by the media, none of this mattered to Washington's strategic planners: the fact that Iraq's vast oil reserves were about to slip into the hands of America's rivals and Big Oil's competitors allegedly played no role in the administration's decision to overthrow Saddam two years later.
Of course, outside the narrow confines of the political and media establishment, most ordinary people have had little difficulty seeing through the official reasons offered up by the Bush administration to explain its insistence on invading and occupying a country that, apart from oil, consists mostly of sand.
Now there's some fresh fodder for that debate, with the announcement last week by the Iraqi government that it is signing no-bid contracts with five of the biggest multinational oil companies – the same corporate crowd that met with Cheney back in 2001 and fretted over Saddam's oil deals with "foreign suitors."
Those "foreign suitors" – including state-owned companies from oil-hungry China and India – have now been pushed aside. In their place, ExxonMobil, Shell, BP, Chevron and Total have been selected for the first stage of developing six of Iraq's largest oil fields.
So, for instance, Iraq's magnificent Rumaila oil field, which had been slated to go to the Russian oil company Lukoil back in 2001, will now go to British oil giant BP.
Although these new contracts are relatively small service contracts, they are considered a crucial foot in the door for getting what the companies are really after – major development deals known as Production Sharing Agreements (PSAs), where the companies invest in a project, control it and receive the lion's share of the profits.
PSAs resemble the kinds of arrangements that used to prevail in the Middle East when a handful of U.S. and British oil companies controlled the world's oil through their cartel known as the Seven Sisters.
That situation changed dramatically in the early 1970s when a wave of oil nationalism swept through the Middle East. National governments in the region took control of their own oil industries and (along with Venezuela) became dominant players on the world oil scene through their cartel OPEC.
Overturning these nationalistic policies has long been the dream of Big Oil, and the U.S. occupation of Iraq seems to have made that possibility more likely.
In the last two years, Washington has been pressuring Iraq intensely to pass a "petroleum law," which was drawn up with the help of American advisers operating under contract to U.S. consulting giant BearingPoint Inc.
The North American media describe this as an "oil-revenue-sharing" law (for dividing revenues between Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds), but the law would also create a legal framework for re-establishing foreign investment in Iraq's oil sector.
There's been fierce resistance to the law inside Iraq, and the Iraqi Parliament has repeatedly refused to pass it. Even direct pressure from Cheney, whose May 2007 visit to Baghdad focused almost entirely on the urgent need to pass the oil law, failed to mobilize sufficient parliamentary support.
The service contracts are seen as a way around that legislative opposition.
Ironically, four of the companies returning to Iraq – ExxonMobil, BP, Shell and Total – were the original partners in a consortium called the Iraq Petroleum Company that for decades held the exclusive rights to develop oil in Iraq. They were kicked out in 1972 when Saddam nationalized the country's oil industry.
That move proved extremely popular in Iraq. Indeed, oil nationalism and resistance to foreign control of oil has become part of the Zeitgeist of the Middle East.
The return of Big Oil to Iraq has some profound implications. If it leads, as expected, to the signing of full development contracts, hundreds of billions of dollars will be diverted outside the country into the already overflowing coffers of the multinational oil industry.
U.S. Congressman Dennis Kucinich, a candidate for the 2008 Democratic nomination, has said that would amount to "one of the biggest heists in the history of the world."
Certainly anyone who thinks the invasion of Iraq accomplished nothing probably isn't sitting inside the boardrooms of some of the most powerful companies on Earth.
http://www.thestar.com/article/454776
Jul 05, 2008 04:30 AM
Linda McQuaig
When Big Oil excutives and U.S. Vice-President Dick Cheney met for secret energy talks in the spring of 2001, one subject that weighed on all their minds was the potential loss of Iraq's bountiful oil reserves.
After more than a decade of hostile U.S.-Iraqi relations, Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein had negotiated deals with oil companies from a range of countries, including Russia, China and India, to develop Iraq's largely undeveloped reserves.
That meant U.S. oil companies were to be denied a stake in developing one of the last oil bonanzas left on Earth. It also meant that the U.S. risked being denied access to this vast new source of petroleum – the commodity it considers essential to its continued status as an economic and military superpower.
So it wasn't surprising that Cheney's energy task force – set up with urgency within weeks of the Bush administration taking office – took great interest in a document called "Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield Contracts." The document (eventually made public after a lengthy court battle with the Bush administration) included a detailed breakdown of Iraq's 97 oil fields, listing in each case the foreign company that was negotiating a development contract with Saddam, and the status of those negotiations.
But, according to the narrative presented by the White House and rarely challenged by the media, none of this mattered to Washington's strategic planners: the fact that Iraq's vast oil reserves were about to slip into the hands of America's rivals and Big Oil's competitors allegedly played no role in the administration's decision to overthrow Saddam two years later.
Of course, outside the narrow confines of the political and media establishment, most ordinary people have had little difficulty seeing through the official reasons offered up by the Bush administration to explain its insistence on invading and occupying a country that, apart from oil, consists mostly of sand.
Now there's some fresh fodder for that debate, with the announcement last week by the Iraqi government that it is signing no-bid contracts with five of the biggest multinational oil companies – the same corporate crowd that met with Cheney back in 2001 and fretted over Saddam's oil deals with "foreign suitors."
Those "foreign suitors" – including state-owned companies from oil-hungry China and India – have now been pushed aside. In their place, ExxonMobil, Shell, BP, Chevron and Total have been selected for the first stage of developing six of Iraq's largest oil fields.
So, for instance, Iraq's magnificent Rumaila oil field, which had been slated to go to the Russian oil company Lukoil back in 2001, will now go to British oil giant BP.
Although these new contracts are relatively small service contracts, they are considered a crucial foot in the door for getting what the companies are really after – major development deals known as Production Sharing Agreements (PSAs), where the companies invest in a project, control it and receive the lion's share of the profits.
PSAs resemble the kinds of arrangements that used to prevail in the Middle East when a handful of U.S. and British oil companies controlled the world's oil through their cartel known as the Seven Sisters.
That situation changed dramatically in the early 1970s when a wave of oil nationalism swept through the Middle East. National governments in the region took control of their own oil industries and (along with Venezuela) became dominant players on the world oil scene through their cartel OPEC.
Overturning these nationalistic policies has long been the dream of Big Oil, and the U.S. occupation of Iraq seems to have made that possibility more likely.
In the last two years, Washington has been pressuring Iraq intensely to pass a "petroleum law," which was drawn up with the help of American advisers operating under contract to U.S. consulting giant BearingPoint Inc.
The North American media describe this as an "oil-revenue-sharing" law (for dividing revenues between Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds), but the law would also create a legal framework for re-establishing foreign investment in Iraq's oil sector.
There's been fierce resistance to the law inside Iraq, and the Iraqi Parliament has repeatedly refused to pass it. Even direct pressure from Cheney, whose May 2007 visit to Baghdad focused almost entirely on the urgent need to pass the oil law, failed to mobilize sufficient parliamentary support.
The service contracts are seen as a way around that legislative opposition.
Ironically, four of the companies returning to Iraq – ExxonMobil, BP, Shell and Total – were the original partners in a consortium called the Iraq Petroleum Company that for decades held the exclusive rights to develop oil in Iraq. They were kicked out in 1972 when Saddam nationalized the country's oil industry.
That move proved extremely popular in Iraq. Indeed, oil nationalism and resistance to foreign control of oil has become part of the Zeitgeist of the Middle East.
The return of Big Oil to Iraq has some profound implications. If it leads, as expected, to the signing of full development contracts, hundreds of billions of dollars will be diverted outside the country into the already overflowing coffers of the multinational oil industry.
U.S. Congressman Dennis Kucinich, a candidate for the 2008 Democratic nomination, has said that would amount to "one of the biggest heists in the history of the world."
Certainly anyone who thinks the invasion of Iraq accomplished nothing probably isn't sitting inside the boardrooms of some of the most powerful companies on Earth.
http://www.thestar.com/article/454776
Amid sweeping change, a pivotal anniversary goes unremarked
With the province's dramatic revamp of human-rights system, events rooted in 1948 deserve new attention
Jul 06, 2008 04:30 AM
Kenneth Kidd
Feature Writer
When Ontario Attorney General Chris Bentley unveiled sweeping changes to the Human Rights Commission last week, he spoke forcefully about the crucial role of those rights, how the province had long been a leader in promoting them, and thanked everyone who'd worked so hard for the cause of civil justice.
But then, the briefing he'd received earlier induced Bentley to say something else. He talked about how Ontario's approach to human rights – and by that he meant the 1962 human rights code – was modelled on similar efforts that came out of the U.S. civil rights movement.
"It almost knocked me off my chair," says Lorne Foster, a professor of public policy and administration at York University.
By highlighting the U.S. experience, Bentley unwittingly omitted one of the darker chapters in Ontario history, a time when segregation in a small town sparked a civil rights campaign that predated the big efforts south of the border.
That it happened in Dresden, Ont. – the home of Uncle Tom's cabin and terminus of the old Underground Railroad that brought escaped slaves to Canada – could have been invoked as one of history's tragic ironies.
And that it all began in 1948, when an African-Canadian carpenter named Hugh Burnett launched the National Unity Association, could have made for a 60th anniversary celebrating Ontario's home-grown march of human rights.
"The people like the minister know nothing about 1948," says Bromley Armstrong. "It's tragic but it's true."
It was also a personal slight – it was a 21-year-old Armstrong who had stared down a racist wielding a meat cleaver in long-ago Dresden.
Hugh Burnett grew up on a farm just outside of Dresden, near Chatham, Ont., a descendant of escaped American slaves, like most of the African Canadians in that part of the province.
The small routines of racism were part of Burnett's everyday childhood, like having to eat ice cream in a restaurant's kitchen, lest his dark presence alarm the white patrons in the dining room. But after returning from service in World War II, any hint of being second-class on his home turf began to grate.
To push for their rights, Burnett and other African Canadians in Dresden formed the National Unity Association in 1948 and gathered 115 names on a petition calling for the local council to prevent businesses from discriminating.
It led to a referendum the following year, in which locals were asked: "Do you approve the passing of legislation compelling restaurant owners to serve, regardless of race, creed or colour?"
The result: 108 in favour, 517 against.
But Burnett was undaunted. "The great thing about Hugh was that he had this never-say-die attitude," says John Cooper, the author of Season of Rage: Hugh Burnett and the Struggle for Civil Rights.
Nor would he toil alone for long. In the late 1940s, a number of ethnic and labour organizations had begun pushing for civil liberties, sending joint delegations to Queen's Park and Ottawa to lobby, initially, for an end to discrimination in the workplace.
"They used to tell me, the motto was, `Agitate, agitate, agitate, make alliances,'" recalls Foster, who, as a 16-year-old, was best man at the wedding of Burnett's daughter. "Those were the four rules."
Slowly, it began to pay off. And it helped that activists had a sympathetic ear in Ontario Premier Leslie Frost, who began enacting legislation on fair employment practices and equal pay for women, often over the objections of his caucus.
All the while, Dresden loomed in the background as the next test. After the province's then-attorney general told Burnett that Ontario had no legal power to end discrimination in municipalities that had not themselves passed laws banning it, Burnett turned to Toronto labour groups for help.
That spawned a legal brief – penned by, among others, lawyers Bora Laskin and David Lewis – and another delegation to Frost in early 1954, led by the Toronto Association for Civil Liberties.
Burnett became the delegation's most prominent voice and adopted a clever tack, given that this was also the height of the Cold War. He took to wondering aloud about whether racial discrimination might be linked to any rising popularity of communism.
"There are no Communists among the coloured people of Dresden," Burnett said, "but I don't know how long we can assure that, if the discrimination practised there is to continue."
Less than a week later, Frost introduced Canada's first Fair Accommodation Practices Act, banning the sort of commercial discrimination that reigned in Dresden.
There was also an enforcement process, in which complaints could be laid, triggering a bureaucratic investigation, an attempt at mediation and, if necessary, prosecution.
Some businesses in Dresden continued to flout the law. Complaints poured in, prompting Queen's Park to appoint Judge William Schwenger as a kind of one-man commission on the town.
More than 200 people attended a public hearing in Dresden in September 1954, centred on whether African Canadians were still being refused service at Kay's Café, owned by Morley McKay, and Emerson's Soda Bar Restaurant.
McKay remained defiant. "I have to break the law to protect my business," he said. "My customers have told me if we serve Negroes, they won't come in."
The provincial minister of labour later refused to make public Schwenger's ensuing report.
But the pressure of activists wasn't about to go away. And by then, they'd already delivered what came to be seen as the decisive blow: a test, shrewdly played out before the media.
Bromley Armstrong had come to Ontario from Jamaica to study business at the University of Toronto, but he wasn't here long before he got caught up in the events surrounding Dresden.
A plan was hatched, partly by a Toronto freelance writer named Gordon Donaldson, to send people of colour to Morley McKay's restaurant. Armstrong, a budding student activist who was astonished anyone in Canada could be refused service, ended up being one of them.
But this time, there would be a reporter and cameraman in tow to record the evidence.
Armstrong met with Burnett in Dresden. They walked into McKay's restaurant and took their places at a booth.
"We sat there, and nobody would pay any attention to us and the waitress didn't come over," recalls Armstrong. "I got up and went to the waitress and said to her, `Excuse me, we've been here for awhile and we'd like to have something to eat.'
"She looked at me, no reaction at all. I kept talking to her, but she wasn't responding so I finally said to her, `Where's the manager?'"
Her eyes directed Armstrong back to the kitchen, where Morley McKay stood in a white apron.
"He was at a chopping block with a meat cleaver in his hand and I said, `Excuse me, are you the manager?' No word out of him. He was chopping at the block. Chop, chop, chop, chop."
Armstrong, who went on to be a member of the Ontario Human Rights Commission in the 1970s, was undaunted.
"The more I talked to him, the faster the cleaver was going. And I said, `You know, I've come all the way from Toronto, and I'm thirsty and hungry.'
"I could see his face turning, his complexion, it was getting redder and redder and redder, so I knew he was getting angry and I figured he may throw the damn cleaver."
Armstrong retreated to his booth, when Donaldson and a cameraman came in to sit at an adjacent booth. They were promptly served.
When the cameraman started taking pictures of the haves and the have-nots, McKay finally realized how he'd been set up.
He locked the front door, closed the blinds, and turned off the lights. "Left us all in darkness," says Armstrong.
The restaurant might have been closed for the day, but it was front-page news in Toronto the next afternoon.
Not long afterward, McKay and the wife of the owner of Emerson's became the first to be prosecuted and found guilty under the Fair Accommodations Act.
They appealed. A county judge overturned the decision, ruling that a restaurant owner couldn't be held responsible if a waitress refused service and, at any rate, there was evidence merely that service had been "postponed."
It was only after activists arranged another sting operation that McKay was successfully prosecuted, this time losing his appeal before a different judge. His penalty: $50 on each of two counts, plus costs of $600.
And while the Ontario Supreme Court granted McKay leave to appeal, he never followed through.
By 1956 – eight years after Burnett began his campaign – McKay was serving African Canadians.
Hugh Burnett may have won, but he was scarcely a local hero. He ended up moving to Chatham.
"He was ostracized," says Armstrong.
"That poor guy died almost a pauper for what he believed in."
And though he's buried in Dresden, there's no memorial or statue in town testifying to his legacy.
"That's the irony of it," author Cooper says of the town. "Here you have this fantastic historic site, the end point of the Underground Railroad, and justifiably we are proud of it as Canadians.
"At the same time, you've got this other side of history just a stone's throw away, this other side of our history that we've been denying and we've been trying to cover up or just ignore and hope that it goes away."
TheStar.com | News | Amid
sweeping change, a pivotal anniversary goes unremarked
Jul 06, 2008 04:30 AM
Kenneth Kidd
Feature Writer
When Ontario Attorney General Chris Bentley unveiled sweeping changes to the Human Rights Commission last week, he spoke forcefully about the crucial role of those rights, how the province had long been a leader in promoting them, and thanked everyone who'd worked so hard for the cause of civil justice.
But then, the briefing he'd received earlier induced Bentley to say something else. He talked about how Ontario's approach to human rights – and by that he meant the 1962 human rights code – was modelled on similar efforts that came out of the U.S. civil rights movement.
"It almost knocked me off my chair," says Lorne Foster, a professor of public policy and administration at York University.
By highlighting the U.S. experience, Bentley unwittingly omitted one of the darker chapters in Ontario history, a time when segregation in a small town sparked a civil rights campaign that predated the big efforts south of the border.
That it happened in Dresden, Ont. – the home of Uncle Tom's cabin and terminus of the old Underground Railroad that brought escaped slaves to Canada – could have been invoked as one of history's tragic ironies.
And that it all began in 1948, when an African-Canadian carpenter named Hugh Burnett launched the National Unity Association, could have made for a 60th anniversary celebrating Ontario's home-grown march of human rights.
"The people like the minister know nothing about 1948," says Bromley Armstrong. "It's tragic but it's true."
It was also a personal slight – it was a 21-year-old Armstrong who had stared down a racist wielding a meat cleaver in long-ago Dresden.
Hugh Burnett grew up on a farm just outside of Dresden, near Chatham, Ont., a descendant of escaped American slaves, like most of the African Canadians in that part of the province.
The small routines of racism were part of Burnett's everyday childhood, like having to eat ice cream in a restaurant's kitchen, lest his dark presence alarm the white patrons in the dining room. But after returning from service in World War II, any hint of being second-class on his home turf began to grate.
To push for their rights, Burnett and other African Canadians in Dresden formed the National Unity Association in 1948 and gathered 115 names on a petition calling for the local council to prevent businesses from discriminating.
It led to a referendum the following year, in which locals were asked: "Do you approve the passing of legislation compelling restaurant owners to serve, regardless of race, creed or colour?"
The result: 108 in favour, 517 against.
But Burnett was undaunted. "The great thing about Hugh was that he had this never-say-die attitude," says John Cooper, the author of Season of Rage: Hugh Burnett and the Struggle for Civil Rights.
Nor would he toil alone for long. In the late 1940s, a number of ethnic and labour organizations had begun pushing for civil liberties, sending joint delegations to Queen's Park and Ottawa to lobby, initially, for an end to discrimination in the workplace.
"They used to tell me, the motto was, `Agitate, agitate, agitate, make alliances,'" recalls Foster, who, as a 16-year-old, was best man at the wedding of Burnett's daughter. "Those were the four rules."
Slowly, it began to pay off. And it helped that activists had a sympathetic ear in Ontario Premier Leslie Frost, who began enacting legislation on fair employment practices and equal pay for women, often over the objections of his caucus.
All the while, Dresden loomed in the background as the next test. After the province's then-attorney general told Burnett that Ontario had no legal power to end discrimination in municipalities that had not themselves passed laws banning it, Burnett turned to Toronto labour groups for help.
That spawned a legal brief – penned by, among others, lawyers Bora Laskin and David Lewis – and another delegation to Frost in early 1954, led by the Toronto Association for Civil Liberties.
Burnett became the delegation's most prominent voice and adopted a clever tack, given that this was also the height of the Cold War. He took to wondering aloud about whether racial discrimination might be linked to any rising popularity of communism.
"There are no Communists among the coloured people of Dresden," Burnett said, "but I don't know how long we can assure that, if the discrimination practised there is to continue."
Less than a week later, Frost introduced Canada's first Fair Accommodation Practices Act, banning the sort of commercial discrimination that reigned in Dresden.
There was also an enforcement process, in which complaints could be laid, triggering a bureaucratic investigation, an attempt at mediation and, if necessary, prosecution.
Some businesses in Dresden continued to flout the law. Complaints poured in, prompting Queen's Park to appoint Judge William Schwenger as a kind of one-man commission on the town.
More than 200 people attended a public hearing in Dresden in September 1954, centred on whether African Canadians were still being refused service at Kay's Café, owned by Morley McKay, and Emerson's Soda Bar Restaurant.
McKay remained defiant. "I have to break the law to protect my business," he said. "My customers have told me if we serve Negroes, they won't come in."
The provincial minister of labour later refused to make public Schwenger's ensuing report.
But the pressure of activists wasn't about to go away. And by then, they'd already delivered what came to be seen as the decisive blow: a test, shrewdly played out before the media.
Bromley Armstrong had come to Ontario from Jamaica to study business at the University of Toronto, but he wasn't here long before he got caught up in the events surrounding Dresden.
A plan was hatched, partly by a Toronto freelance writer named Gordon Donaldson, to send people of colour to Morley McKay's restaurant. Armstrong, a budding student activist who was astonished anyone in Canada could be refused service, ended up being one of them.
But this time, there would be a reporter and cameraman in tow to record the evidence.
Armstrong met with Burnett in Dresden. They walked into McKay's restaurant and took their places at a booth.
"We sat there, and nobody would pay any attention to us and the waitress didn't come over," recalls Armstrong. "I got up and went to the waitress and said to her, `Excuse me, we've been here for awhile and we'd like to have something to eat.'
"She looked at me, no reaction at all. I kept talking to her, but she wasn't responding so I finally said to her, `Where's the manager?'"
Her eyes directed Armstrong back to the kitchen, where Morley McKay stood in a white apron.
"He was at a chopping block with a meat cleaver in his hand and I said, `Excuse me, are you the manager?' No word out of him. He was chopping at the block. Chop, chop, chop, chop."
Armstrong, who went on to be a member of the Ontario Human Rights Commission in the 1970s, was undaunted.
"The more I talked to him, the faster the cleaver was going. And I said, `You know, I've come all the way from Toronto, and I'm thirsty and hungry.'
"I could see his face turning, his complexion, it was getting redder and redder and redder, so I knew he was getting angry and I figured he may throw the damn cleaver."
Armstrong retreated to his booth, when Donaldson and a cameraman came in to sit at an adjacent booth. They were promptly served.
When the cameraman started taking pictures of the haves and the have-nots, McKay finally realized how he'd been set up.
He locked the front door, closed the blinds, and turned off the lights. "Left us all in darkness," says Armstrong.
The restaurant might have been closed for the day, but it was front-page news in Toronto the next afternoon.
Not long afterward, McKay and the wife of the owner of Emerson's became the first to be prosecuted and found guilty under the Fair Accommodations Act.
They appealed. A county judge overturned the decision, ruling that a restaurant owner couldn't be held responsible if a waitress refused service and, at any rate, there was evidence merely that service had been "postponed."
It was only after activists arranged another sting operation that McKay was successfully prosecuted, this time losing his appeal before a different judge. His penalty: $50 on each of two counts, plus costs of $600.
And while the Ontario Supreme Court granted McKay leave to appeal, he never followed through.
By 1956 – eight years after Burnett began his campaign – McKay was serving African Canadians.
Hugh Burnett may have won, but he was scarcely a local hero. He ended up moving to Chatham.
"He was ostracized," says Armstrong.
"That poor guy died almost a pauper for what he believed in."
And though he's buried in Dresden, there's no memorial or statue in town testifying to his legacy.
"That's the irony of it," author Cooper says of the town. "Here you have this fantastic historic site, the end point of the Underground Railroad, and justifiably we are proud of it as Canadians.
"At the same time, you've got this other side of history just a stone's throw away, this other side of our history that we've been denying and we've been trying to cover up or just ignore and hope that it goes away."
TheStar.com | News | Amid
sweeping change, a pivotal anniversary goes unremarked
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