In November 2017, ICLMG held its general assembly meeting. We invited Azeezah Kanji to give a talk to our member organizations. Azeezah is Director of Programming at Noor Cultural Centre. She has a Bachelor of Health Sciences from McMaster University, a JD from University of Toronto’s Faculty of Law, and an LLM (Master’s of Law, Islamic Law specialization) from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. She is also an opinion columnist at The Toronto Star on race, law and national security. Here is a transcript of her talk, thanks to Matthew Behrens. It was lightly edited for length and clarity.
I am a huge appreciator of the work of ICLMG, which has helped me in shaping my knowledge and approach to national security policy and publicizing that in the media.
It is quite a refreshing change to be here. I spend a lot of time talking to audiences who have some scary and strange views. I’m at a bit of a loss to be among people who have the basic premise that Muslims are human beings like most other people.
A few weeks ago, I was speaking to a continuing education class at Ryerson. I was planning to talk about Islamophobia and media. The class got extremely angry at me. They only wanted to talk about sharia and jihad and niqabs. One woman came up to me and said, “I thought you were only going to be talking about sharia and if you’re not, I’m walking out of the class.” So I let her go. I did end up talking about sharia in the end.
It strikes me how the questions that people have about Muslims are so completely oriented around Muslims as a source of terroristic and misogynistic danger, sources of jihad, the threat of sharia and the threat of niqab; even though for Muslims, Islamophobia is far more salient, far more a part of our lives than waging jihad or imposing sharia in the rest of Canada.
There are ways in which the questions that come to the fore about Muslims, the way in which Muslims are legible through the lens of threat, not through the lens of Muslims as the victims of violence. There is nothing natural or inevitable that the things people want to know about Muslims have to do with Muslims as a source of danger. As Foucault reminds us, problems don’t exist out there in the world as natural entities. Things are problematized as a result of the dominant discourses that we have. So when we think about the types of questions, and the types of things people think are important about Muslims, the fact is that people are more concerned about jihad than Islamophobia, even though we know in this country, as in the United States, we are far more likely to be killed for being a Muslim than to be killed by a Muslim.
But the fact that these questions about Muslims focus around Muslims as a source of violence rather than victims of violence are a product of dominant discourses that really need to be interrogated for the racial assumptions that are embedded in them and that are further entrenched. We can see very clearly the types of disparities in questions that are asked about Muslims as opposed to the rest of the Canadian population when we look at recent surveys about Muslims and Muslim issues. In a recent Environics survey on Muslim experiences in Canada, which was hailed for supposedly debunking many predominant assumptions about Muslims in Canada, we can see the very formulation of the questions that were asked reflect the racialized lenses through which Muslims are seen as a source of violence.
For example, Muslims were asked: “what are your views on ISIS.” We had encouraged them to frame the question instead as: “do you support deliberate attacks on civilians,” because that is a question that would provide a comparison between Muslim and non-Muslim Canadians in their views on violence. But instead the question was framed as asking Muslims whether they support ISIS, and Muslims’ innocence was only then thought to be proven through the survey, not to be assumed at the outset. On the other hand, we don’t see similar questions asked of Canadians of all backgrounds about military violence which we know has led to far more civilian casualties than Muslim terrorists. For example, you don’t see Canadians being asked, “do you support drone attacks, or the killing of civilians?” When Canadians are asked about the “war on terror” they are asked, “do you think we need to engage in more violence to make Canadians safer?” Surveys are conducted asking whether Canadians through the Trudeau government should be making more military violence in Syria in order to make Canadians safer. Continue reading
