Doug Firby, Managing Editor, Troy Media
When the Liberal government of Pierre Elliott Trudeau made Canada the first country in the world to officially embrace multiculturalism in the early 1970s, it’s a safe bet those politicians did not foresee the security and gender equality problems western democracies are vexed with today.
Sure, we discovered great new cuisine and colourful traditions that form the centre of major festivals across the country every year. But, there has emerged a darker side – cultural pressures that threaten gender equity, shared values and individual rights.
“Some of what is brought from elsewhere is different, but not desirable,” said Janet Keeping, president of the Sheldon Chumir Foundation for Ethics in Leadership.
Keeping’s opening remarks set the context for a two-day symposium held in Calgary last weekend to probe tough questions about gender, culture and religion.
Should niqabs and burkas (the full-face coverings) be banned? When should the state intervene in family practices that are at odds with accepted norms in Canada? And, most importantly, in our desire to be an open and welcoming society, are we allowing ourselves – as one presenter alleged – to be bamboozled by “fascist” forces who tell lies in the name of Islam?
‘Elephant in the room’
“There is an elephant in the room, and please don’t try to pretend it’s not there,” said Tarek Fatah, the outspoken founder of the Muslim Canadian Congress. “We are confronting a force of which I’m afraid most non-Muslims are not aware.” Fatah was referring to extremists who have hijacked the Muslim faith to advance their own patriarchal, anti-Western agendas.
But presenter Alia Hogben, executive director of the Canadian Council of Muslim Women, objected strongly to Fatah’s assertions. “If you’ve come here to bash Muslims, you’re in the wrong place,” she said, to applause from many of the more than 200 participants in attendance.
In a heated retort, Fatah said, “The issue here is that you do not wish to wash your dirty linen in public.”
In fact, the symposium addressed cultural issues that cross the religious spectrum, with members of the Christian, Jewish and Sikh faiths all noting examples of cultural practices within their faiths with which they do not agree. They include preferential treatment for men (such as the orthodox Jewish rule that allows only men to grant religious divorces, or gets). And extreme family violence, such as so-called “honour” killings – in which a family member who steps out of line is murdered in a perverse attempt to restore a family’s honour – are not unique to a specific religion, but are driven by the home culture of immigrants from South Asia and the Middle East in particular.
Family stayed silent
Journalist Richelle Wiseman, executive director of the Centre for Faith and the Media, recounted the murder of Aqsa Parvez, a Toronto-area Muslim teen who refused to wear the hijab (hair, not face, covering) as her father demanded. In 2007, she was was lured back to her family’s home in Mississauga. Her father and brother strangled her to death; her mother later told police she did not intervene because she believed her husband only intended to break Aqsa’s legs. (Wiseman noted such familial complicity is common in honour violence.)
A key theme that emerged during the discussions was the difficulty in assessing who is being harmed and whether a person, often a woman, is truly in a position to make a free choice.
Dan Shapiro, research associate at the Sheldon Chumir Foundation, spoke of his personal revulsion to burkas and niqabs as symbols of oppression, although he defends a woman’s right to choose.
But, “How do we sort the oppressed from those who freely choose?” he asked.
Ban adds to victimization
Banning burkas and niqabs, as the Province of Quebec has proposed, may only further victimize a woman if she feels she is unable to go out of her home unless she is fully covered, he said.
Fatah, who favours a ban, insists that the burka is not worn out of choice, except by “white women who have converted to Islam and see it as a symbol of anti-American sentiment.” The burka, he added, is “a symbol of the utter hatred of Western democracy. This is not clothing; it’s a face mask (like) the one that Zorro wears.”
How can it be free choice? he argued, when five-year-old girls are rushed into religious indoctrination.
Jennifer Koshan, a law professor at the University of Calgary, argued we cannot assume women of minority religions are victims of brainwashing. The determining factor always has to be whether there has been harm. She said it makes more sense to ban the requirement to wear a niqab or burka than it does to ban the wearing of the niqab or burka itself.
Michael Vonn, policy director for the B.C. Civil Liberties Association, spoke of the difficulty of determining whether the polygamous wives in the fundamentalist Mormon community of Bountiful make a free choice. At best, she said, agencies can provide “meaningful support so people are free to make choices.”
Meaningful support, though, is not always an easy thing to deliver. Aruna Papp, a Toronto-based family counselor who spoke of her own 18-year marital ordeal with an abusive husband, noted that providing shelter for women threatened with violence is often ineffective because the women end up isolated from their communities.
“I’m working with people every single day who don’t know how to get out of (abusive relationships),” she said.
Most are convinced that if they do flee they will be harmed, and perhaps killed.
Education a basic right
One of the highlights of the two-day event was Saturday’s keynote presentation by Lauryn Oates, Vancouver-based projects director for Canadian Women for Women in Afghanistan. Oates spoke eloquently of her interaction with Afghani women in that war-torn country, and attacked the “cultural relativism” that allows some people to believe that certain practices are acceptable because it is part of their culture.
“I was often told that human rights are western,” she told the delegates. “But denying a girl the right to go to school is not cultural.”
Instead, in Afghanistan such a tactic is the Taliban’s means to exert power and control over the female gender – a practice Oates called “gendercide” or “gender apartheid.”
“Cultural relativism is going mainstream,” she said, defining it as a way to explain “why someone else’s suffering does not apply to us.”
Oates’ words set the context for later discussions on whether Canadians have lost sight of core values as they strain to accommodate other cultures. Morton Weinfeld, chair in Canadian Ethnic Studies at McGill University, argued that while Criminal Code provisions against any threat of violence are strong legal protection, they alone are not enough. He encouraged Canadians to be more proactive in ensuring they speak out against family violence, which may go unreported.
Fatah accused Canadian liberals, and even liberal Muslims, of being victims to political correctness – fearing that if they criticize Islam, they will be labeled racists.
“The more the liberal, left-leaning non-Muslims try to accommodate . . . the more they fall into their (Islamists’) trap.”
‘Blackmailed’
“In the name of freedom of speech, (extremists) have blackmailed the more progressive aspects of Islam into silence.”
Ultimately, though, Weinfeld said the changes that are needed – the adoption of Canadian liberal values – must come from within the cultures of those that are new to Canada. Perhaps as an encouragement, he noted this phenomenon is not new, and follows historical immigration patterns to Canada.
Papp argued that Canadians must focus more on the perpetrators of the violence – often husbands – “out” them, and tell them that what they are doing is unacceptable in this society. She urged Canadians not to lose sight of what makes this country so attractive.
“Canada was built on certain values,” she said. “That’s why some immigrants have come here. Don’t let those values be eroded.”
Salima Ebrahim, a Calgarian who is now a member of the Canadian Council of Muslim Women in Toronto, talked about growing up in Canada and having a very clear sense of the freedoms it stood for. Since then, that clarity has faded, she says.
“Today, I’m pretty sure I don’t know what Canada’s values are.”
Approximately 240 academics, students, lawyers, activists and ordinary citizens registered for the symposium. Many of the presentations will be available on the Chumir Foundation’s web site.
