PLANTING SOCIAL ROOTS
Mohamed El-Rafih, director of the Centre For Excellence, lauds students and volunteers during a grad ceremony for the Iman Fortress Summer Camp at the Genesis Centre.
Amid a recreational facility with groups of kids playing floor hockey in one room and adults going for daily workouts in another, a room in the corner of the building is filled with 30 children chanting in Arabic.
The five- to 12-year-old children are surrounded by their parents as they graduate from their Islamic summer school, but the class isn’t your average strict religious affair.
Instead, Mohamed El-Rafih, executive director of the Centre for Excellence, says the class focuses on anti-radicalization, or rather separating the idea of radicalization from the teachings of Islam.
However, in dealing with kids of such a young age, they aren’t tackling the ideologies head on, but are instead trying to fix the issue at its social root.
El-Rafih says that his experience of going to Islamic classes in the late 1980s was that the focus was solely on religion. That, mixed with a weak sense of identity where Canadian kids saw him as different and his Lebanese family saw him as Canadian, can be troublesome for children and young adults.
“It was hard for me to feel a sense of belonging, and that is a driving force and a prime risk factor towards radicalization,” said El-Rafih, who stresses that radicalization doesn’t stem from Islam, but from marginalization and isolation.
When Muslim parents are choosing what kinds of extracurricular activities to send their kids to, they generally only have entirely secular programs, or entirely religious programs to choose from.
El-Rafih’s anti-radicalization program is trying to find a middle ground.
“We might do some religious stuff, but then we go and play sports with everybody, or go into the common space and talk and do activities with other kids. So there is a component here of healthy integration, and understanding our Islam in a context of Canadian society, and understanding that two things don’t contradict.
“And we’re doing it at a community centre to show these students and show these youths that, look, we are Muslims that are part of this society,” said El-Rafih, noting that on some days they’d pray out on the community centre’s field.
So far, around 200 students have gone through El-Rafih’s anti-radicalization class, which runs for three weeks at a time. Another 1,500 students are involved yearly in other religious classes, all of which have an element of antiradicalization as well.
Some of the volunteer teachers are young teenagers themselves, including 13-year-old Sadia Begum, who says communication is one thing they teach that she hopes will effect change.
“We’ve been teaching them how to talk to their family but also how to interact with their neighbours,” Begum said.
“It’s such an important thing, learning to interact with strangers too.
“We’ve definitely seen a difference between the kids here since the beginning of the three weeks and today.
“They’re a lot more open and aren’t so shy with each other; they’re able to speak their mind.”
That sort of ability to interact with Canadians is what El-Rafih believes will lower their risks of becoming radicalized.
We might do some religious stuff, but then we go and play sports with everybody.