Free speech and tackling tough topics
Calgary imam Navaid Aziz says tackling radicalization goes beyond pointing out how terror groups distort religious texts.
For him, it’s about addressing grievances, like the ones Farah Mohamed Shirdon — who left Aziz’s mosque last year to join ISIL in Syria — still fixates on.
“I find a lot of the anger and frustration that young Muslim men feel, it has to do with foreign policy,” Aziz says, noting ISIL propaganda focuses on perceptions of Muslims suffering worldwide, and how Islam requires helping one’s fellow believers.
“There needs to be a component of education on how to lobby for policy, or how to make change in government.”
But such conversations can’t take place in a Canadian mosque, Ottawa imam Sikander Hashmi told Postmedia.
“A lot of Muslims will actually refer to jihad as the ‘J word,’ because they’re just afraid of having someone hear them mention the word or even worried about their phones being tapped or bugs in their homes or in the mosques, so they won’t even mention the word.”
Aziz agrees: “The Muslim community will not voice their opinions in the mosque, because there’s just not a space for it.”
That’s where Stéphane Pressault steps in. The 27-year-old Ottawa man leads a program that promotes open dialogue among Muslim youth.
Pressault briefly knew fellow classmate John Maguire before he left to join ISIL in December 2012. Maguire later surfaced in a video explaining how a hockeyloving Canadian ended up on the battlefields of Syria.
“Mosques need to become spaces for intellectual engagement, and specifically not this fear of talking about positions that differ from the norm,” says Pressault, the head of Project Communitas.
The cross- country program, bankrolled by a $250,000 federal grant, aims to create space for discussion among Muslim youth in existing groups in six cities, from Vancouver to London, Ont.
“A lot of the conversation that I’m having with young people is this dissatisfaction: ‘I can’t do anything; what’s the point,’ ” says Pressault, a project co-ordinator with the Canadian Council of Muslim Women.
He says those who feel this sense of hopelessness are drawn to action, often through violence.
To prevent that, Pressault works with more than just imams and social workers. He trains young leaders about how to host tough discussions and suggest productive responses.
He uses the analogy of how Toronto’s black community successfully lobbied to get police to stop arbitrary stop-and-search carding. At first, young men would act out when they were carded, prompting criminal charges. But a group trained them to write op-ed newspaper articles and hold police accountable.
“If you can actually have that debate, then I think you can convince a lot of people,” Pressault says.
But mosques across the country have reportedly ended uncomfortable political discussions. Michael Zehaf-Bibeau was kicked out of a Vancouver mosque for speaking against a pluralistic society months before attacking Parliament and killing a soldier in Ottawa.
Toronto imam Yusuf Badat says some mosques shut down all sensitive conversation, worried that tackling explosive topics like political violence will invite the glare of the media and law enforcement.
“To avoid all this unnecessary difficulty, some imams and some mosques just say: ‘ You know what, we don’t want to welcome any sort of discussion here, we don’t want any media and we don’t want any CSIS or anything here,’” he says.
Badat is co-chair of the Canadian Council of Imams, a Toronto roundtable that advises governments on policy issues. Since 2012, the group has had around 50 senior imams sign a pledge to embrace these tough questions.
The idea, Badat says, is “to try and bring about understanding and engagement in the community; not necessarily to turn a person down. If we ourselves can’t help them, then let’s direct them to some agencies or counselling.”
Muslim human-rights activist Farzana Hassan, who was recently appointed to the government’s national-security advisory panel, supports Project Communitas’ goals, but still has questions.
“Philosophically and ideologically, it’s a great concept,” Hassan says. “It’s just the parameters of the debate on the issues of jihad that I’m concerned about.”
Hassan says while few people engage in terrorism, she believes there is widespread support among Canadian Muslims for the concept of jihad as an armed struggle — and that’s the issue the project needs to tackle.
“Islamist jihad is very real. It’s something they’re willing to substantiate from the Qur’an and not without reason, not without a valid basis,” she says, predicting Pressault’s groups will have to navigate these inflammatory issues.
“I’m not opposed to the concept, but sometimes the devil is in the details.”
Mosques need to become spaces for intellectual engagement, and specifically not this fear of talking about positions that differ from the norm