Ring of peace
Multi-faith groups form protective circles around Toronto mosques. Paradkar,
“For though we are grieving and many in our communities are afraid and feeling victimized, the Prophet (peace be upon him) did not come to teach us to be paralyzed by our fears or to wallow in self-pity, or to be mouthpieces for grievances. He came to teach us how to heal and how to be healers, how to respond to ugliness with beauty, how to be fully human in times of ease and in hardship.” — Imam Abdul Aziz Suraqah, Imdadul Islamic Centre, North York
No chanting, no speeches, no political signs.
As the imam comforted his congregation, an extraordinary gesture of solidarity was unfolding outside his mosque and across the Greater Toronto Area on Friday.
Followers of multi-faith groups led by the oldest Jewish congregation in Toronto formed protective circles around at least half a dozen mosques from Oakville to Scarborough, while Muslims were at prayer on the holiest day of their week. It was their first jum’ah, or Friday prayer, since Sunday’s bloody carnage at a Quebec City mosque killed six worshippers.
Rabbi Yael Splansky of Holy Blossom Temple set the wheels in motion, inspired by the “Ring of Peace” created by about 1,000 Muslims around an Oslo synagogue in 2015, following a string of anti-Semitic attacks in Europe by Muslim gunmen, including the killing of 17 people at a kosher grocery store. Love begets love. Hate? As someone who comes from a culture with centuries-old feuds between Hindus and Muslims, I can assure you identity-based phobias resolve nothing. Hostilities can smoulder endlessly, ready to be poked into flames by exploitative politicians and power-hungry leaders. These are unsettling times for Canada, the latest pallbearer of the victims of division. As the stench of U.S. President Donald Trump’s dark ideologies drift north, mingling with the festering Islamophobia here, Canadians will be hard-pressed to keep our identity intact.
We should seize the opportunity to hold a mirror to ourselves, and first recognize and acknowledge the limits of our virtuous self-image.
After the mosque attack, even as non-Muslim Canadians reached out to one another to ask, “How can we help?” crimes against Muslims rose, revealing a split personality in Canada’s behaviour.
The 24 hate crimes reported in Montreal in three days after the attack are part of a rising pattern of crimes that are largely ignored, until along comes a disaster of a scale that makes it impossible to look the other way. Now that Canadians are forced to look, it’s time to remove scales from our eyes.
Muslims have nothing to gain from the terrorism that is unleashed in their name. It wraps them in a loneliness that is threefold. The fear of recrimination means every report of violence in the West makes them desperately hope the perpetrator is not Muslim. Then, isolated and burdened with accusations of guilt, they also have to bury their own; invariably, terrorist attacks in the West also kill Muslims. The same terrorists also slaughter Muslims in Asia and Africa. This is why it did not matter if the Quebec mosque killer was Muslim or not. Either way, Muslims are victimized.
While it was heartening to see the turnout of non-Muslims at the funerals for the victims, we all know the outpouring of grief would have been at global scale had it been a Muslim man who had killed six white Canadians (praying or otherwise). Different labels applied for similar crimes appear to be driven by whether the attacker invokes Allah, and have come to represent the gap between “us” and “them,” the exception and the norm, a bad apple and a rotten bunch.
Parliament Hill shooter Michael Zehaf-Bibeau: terrorist, the norm. Far-right ideologue and RCMP murderer Justin Bourque: a depressed lone wolf, the exception.
Quebec shooting accused Alexandre Bissonnette, the 27-year-old, French-Canadian? No charges of terrorism or even a hate crime yet, although his social media accounts showed his affinity to far right, Islamophobic views.
Friday’s alleged machete-wielding Louvre attacker in Paris, who reportedly said “Allahu Akbar”: “rad- ical Islamic terrorist,” according to Trump, who didn’t bother to comment personally on the Quebec attacks. Yet, the Toronto imam told the worshippers: “We cannot allow for the hatred directed towards us to fill us with hate.”
Around them, for the moment, at least, was an uplifting example of the possibilities that kind of thinking could herald.
“Their loved ones are in a better place, of this we are sure and in this we find comfort. They are with the One Who loves them more than the most loving mother loves her child. They ended their lives in a state of prayer. This life is a fading shadow, and without doubt the best way to leave this world is while in prayer.” Shree Paradkar tackles issues of race and gender. You can follow her @shreeparadkar