Don’t give in to prevailing prejudices by Haroon Siddiqui
The Toronto Star, March 8, 2007
BRUSSELS – Is Quebec aping Europe’s Islamophobia, just as Europe is pulling back from it?
The question is prompted by the ban imposed on a Muslim hijabi girl at a soccer tournament in Laval, and the decision of the town council of Herouxville to ban immigrants who might support the stoning of women or other objectionable practices.
On reflection, the answer is this:
No, Quebec is not necessarily going berserk.
The hijab case is just another variation on finding reasonable accommodation for a myriad of minority practices. Catholics, Hutterites, Jews, Sikhs and others have posed similar challenges before. Muslims are now following the honourable Canadian tradition of standing up for their rights, and Canadians will no doubt use common sense to find common ground. We hope so.
As for Herouxville, its pronouncements have already been widely derided.
My concerns lie elsewhere – in the emotionalism and double standards that have characterized recent debates on Muslims. A democratic society is in trouble when it allows prejudice or fear to drive its discourse toward incoherence and irrationality.
Herouxville has banned a practice that was not coming, and could not possibly have come, to Canada.
This is a replay of Ontario banning the sharia, which was not coming and could not possibly have come to Canada, even if some of its proponents foolishly thought so and some of its critics cleverly exploited the assertion to fan public fears that an Islamic penal code was indeed on the way.
All that had been asked was that Muslim Ontarians be allowed to use the 1991 Arbitration Act in family disputes the way Christians and Jews had been for more than a decade. Confronted with a public furor, the government banned the practice for everyone – a right decision arrived at for all the wrong reasons.
Similarly, in Australia and across Europe, several nations have decided that their failure to integrate Muslims because of widespread racism is, in fact, the fault of multiculturalism, a policy they never had, in the sense you and I understand it, namely, extending equality and the dignity of citizenship to all people, regardless of race, religion or ethnicity.
Yet Australia, Germany, Britain, Sweden and others are publicly abandoning what they never practised.
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