From accommodation to religious acceptance
A recent meeting of the Peel District School Board had to be cleared by police after a man in the gallery stood up and tore pages out of the Qu’ran. The incident is the latest in a string of protests directed against Peel’s policy of allowing Muslim prayer in schools.
In response, Mississauga Mayor Bonnie Crombie stated, “the reaction we have seen does not reflect our community.” If only this were true.
Racism and bigotry have long been part of the communities of the GTA. If we are serious about diversity and pluralism, this reality needs to be accepted and we need to begin to have difficult, honest conversations with those who hold racist and bigoted views.
First, it is important to note, that while those who oppose prayer in public schools are continually painted as a loud minority or lunatic fringe, this view is more mainstream than people realize. According to OISE’s 2012 Public Attitudes Toward Education survey, only 38 per cent of Ontarians support prayer sessions during school hours. And while the legal protection of rights should not be guided by public opinion, this shows there are large swaths of the public that need to be taken seriously and engaged with, rather than simply being dismissed. In 2014, in response to the Boston Marathon bombings, Justin Trudeau stated, “We have to look at the root causes.” Trudeau was pilloried for this comment by both the press and then prime minister Stephen Harper, who famously went on to state that terror threats are no time to “commit sociology.” But to many progressives, Trudeau’s comment was spot on, and it was Harper that was deserving of mockery. However, when it comes to addressing racism and bigotry, it seems it is progressives who are reluctant to understand root causes and commit sociology. Instead, the response to these outbursts has been a mixture of surprise and dismay, along with continued attempts to marginalize such views from the public discourse.
However, opprobrium is not going to make these views (and the people that hold them) go away. Pushing racists and bigots further away from the public spotlight is only going to drive them underground with their views perfectly intact, from which they will again bubble up to the surface, again to everyone’s surprise. This wave of anti-Muslim paranoia is not new. In a now famous 2006 Maclean’s magazine cover story titled “Why the future belongs to Islam,” writer Mark Steyn opined that continued Muslim immigration into Western societies would eventually lead to those societies becoming fundamentally reshaped along Islamic lines. Following this line of thinking, it seems that some in Ontario today see Muslim prayer in schools as the canary in the coal mine.
We have seen the same sentiment in other provinces. In response to the Quebec mosque shooting, plans were announced to build a Muslim cemetery in the town of SaintApollinaire. When word of the cemetery got out, many residents were terrified. In an email to the town’s mayor, one stated, “This cemetery is just the embryo of other projects. These people are here to grab religious and political power.” This is the same paranoia that has gripped many in Ontario.
When it comes to our schools, the build up of this paranoia is easy to see. At the board meeting in Peel, one person reportedly shouted “This is a Christian country.” Historically speaking, this is correct. Canada has never had the strict separation of church and state found in the U.S. And this was the case in our public schools until relatively recently. Up until 1990, all Ontario public schools were mandated to provide one hour per week of religious (i.e. Protestant Christian) education. And prior to 1988, our public schools were required to begin or end each day with the Christian “Lord’s Prayer” and Biblical readings.
So, in the span of a few decades, many middle-aged Canadians have seen our public schools go from Christian, to secular, to in their view, increasingly Islamic.
We need to be more proactive about addressing these fears. The problem with providing religious accommodations in the form of prayer spaces and religious sermons is that it does absolutely nothing to rehabilitate people who probably do not have many meaningful personal relationships with Muslims, and in an era of Daesh and terrorism, are triggered by the very concept of Islam. We need to move from religious accommodation to religious acceptance. And this can only be achieved by taking a more honest approach and engaging in ongoing, dialogic work directly with racists, bigots and Islamophobes.