Under The Sheltering Crescent Moon

The other night, Asad Kassan’s mother called him from her home in Bangladesh. She asked him again, as she has so often did since he moved to Toronto fourteen years ago, when he was going to settle down like his brothers and sisters and marry. Then she began to cry. “And I said, ‘Mom, you can’t cry. Last time you cried ten dollars’ worth.’ ” Kassan is a sweet, soft-spoken man with liquid, dark eyes. There has been no shortage of males who have appreciated this, and he too has long understood the beauty of other men. But he didn’t accept that he was gay until 1997. Even now, though he is in his late thirties, it’s not something he will discuss with his mother. “She sort of knows, but we don’t talk about it. We talk about things like, what does it mean that I live in a basement apartment, because we have no such thing in Bangladesh. So she says, ‘I hear there’s snow in the winter. Can you get out?’ Or she’ll say, ‘You live under the ground like Osama bin Laden.’ ”

Kassan aches for home but he won’t be going back. Not too long ago he met a man from his homeland who was caught having sex with his boyfriend. As the man fled, he looked over his shoulder and saw his neighbours gathered in a circle, beating his lover to death. So Kassan doesn’t tell his mother that he has been happily living with a man named Peter for the past two years. He tells her that he is a faithful Muslim and he is telling her the truth, in a way. “I was a religious child. I always went to the mosque, and I loved the khutba [sermon],” he says. “I still have some Muslim beliefs because of the way I grew up. I still believe I am a Muslim. But for me, it is a human thing.”

The Prophet Muhammad, a forty-year-old merchant living in Mecca, proclaimed the Islamic faith fourteen centuries ago after the angel Gabriel revealed the first of 114 suras (chapters) of the Koran to him as he meditated. It was a religion of peace and generosity, and slowly transformed the pagan and tribal Arabian Peninsula. But today, in many of the world’s Muslim lands, the sheltering crescent moon symbolizing that dream has come to represent tyranny, intolerance, and the frustration that leads to terrorism. Kassan, a refugee from that intolerance, is one of 700,000 Muslims now living in Canada. The number is growing dramatically, with Muslim countries now supplying the second-largest number of new immigrants annually. While Kassan is free to express his sexuality and worship as he pleases, other Muslims who have come here would like to implement shariah, a strict code of Islamic law. It wouldn’t cost Kassan his life, but he would surely be shunned. These are the two competing faces of Islam in Canada: one which recalls the idealism and generosity of the seventh-century faith; the other a harsh and violent doctrine that evolved in the nineteenth century as a rejection of modernity.

Many Muslims who come to Canada are fleeing poverty and dictatorial regimes in their homelands, especially those that have made common cause with religious extremists. They seek a rebirth of their faith in the liberal democracies of the West—“a modern and moderate reformation,” in the words of Mohamed Elmasry, head of the Canadian Islamic Congress. For these Muslims the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms is also, in its way, a sheltering crescent moon. They come in the footsteps of clerics and intellectuals who, for at least a century, have declared that the democratic West truly reflects the values of Islam more than in their Muslim homelands. But hardliners and rejectionists, who preach that Muslims are superior, have also come to Canada. Many, like Toronto’s Aly Hindy, who believes men should be allowed to discipline their wives, or Vancouver’s Younus Kathrada, who once preached that Jews are the brothers of monkeys and swine, are the imams of large mosques. How will they be integrated into a multicultural society that calls for tolerance, and places the rights of the individual above religion?

“Islam” means submission, understood as submission to God. Most Muslims wish to live, in the words of the Swiss-based conservative scholar Tariq Ramadan, “a God-centred life,” an alternative to what they see as the rudderless secularism of the West. He describes this world as one in which children submit to parents, women to men, and men to religiously trained men. What many Muslims arriving in the West fear is the dilution of these values in a sea of secular liberalism, which they believe has already hollowed out the core of Judaism and Christianity. They remain wary of the idea of equal individual rights, which has never existed in Dar al-Islam (the House of Islam). The faith has instead evolved into a doctrine of reciprocity, whereby everyone has rights and duties originating in the Koran that vary according to whether they are man or woman, rich or poor, child or adult. Charity is obligatory; respect for women and non-believers, too, is proclaimed in the holy book.

Where, then, did the terrorism and corruption now associated with Islam come from? How did a Muslim world where homosexuals were at one time treated with tolerance become the frightful place from which Asad Kassan had to flee? Muslims from across the political spectrum speak of two historic catastrophes. The first was a cultural decline that became acute in the fourteenth century when Muslim rulers turned their backs on science and liberal religious thought. The other was the arrival of European imperialists three centuries later, armed with weapons that were much more advanced than any in the Islamic world. Many Muslim scholars claim that Western imperial powers also helped sow the seeds of today’s radicalism by suppressing Islamic institutions. The greatest loss was the decline of a powerful scholarly order called the ulema, which had helped defeat periodic outbreaks of fanaticism by reminding the faithful of religion’s peaceful origins.

In particular, the weakened ulema was unable to defeat an Arabian fanatic named Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab. By the time Wahhab died in 1792, he had established a xenophobic doctrine known today as Wahhabism. It posed no threat to the West until the discovery of oil in Saudi Arabia in the 1930s. The sect then pressured an increasingly corrupt Saudi regime to send money abroad to finance the spread of virulently anti-Western beliefs. Wahhabists have great contempt for non-Muslims and often impose their will on other Muslims through violence. They also reject contact with non-Muslims—as do followers of another hard-line Islamic doctrine called Salafism. When these doctrines are preached in Canada, they cause much distress among Muslims who are trying to understand Canada and establish relations with Canadians. “A lot of Saudi petro-dollars were spent here for new mosques,” says Nader Hashemi, a doctoral student in political science studying religion and democracy at the University of Toronto. “[Imams] preach as if they were still in Cairo or Amman or Damascus.”

Both Wahhabism and Salafism call for a return to the faith as it was practised in the mid-seventh century, with the stoning of adulterers and the cutting off of thieves’ hands. They reject the more moderate body of law developed in the centuries after Muhammad’s death, restricting themselves instead to the Koran, which condones such practices. As a rule, they preach their doctrines peacefully. But a splinter group of Salafists appeared in the Middle East after the Second World War, dedicating themselves to the violent overthrow of what they see as “Western-corrupted” governments like those of Egypt and Saudi Arabia.

Asked if he is preaching Wahhabism or Salafism, Aly Hindy, the imam of the Salaheddin mosque in the east end of Toronto, asserts that he is a peaceful Salafist. Because of his hard-line beliefs, and allegations by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (csis) that his mosque harbours extremists, he has become the symbol of an Islam that some say cannot be reconciled with Canada’s liberal democracy. It appears that the authorities in his native Egypt don’t trust him either. The last time he went there, he was handcuffed at the airport, then taken away and interrogated for thirty-six hours.

Hindy’s mosque is a sprawling concrete structure on a stretch of Toronto’s east end where Burger King wrappers blow across the street and a weed-choked rail spur runs alongside. On the bulletin board in the lobby, a pamphlet reminds the faithful that they are surrounded by the temptations of unbelievers who threaten their deen (submission to God, and purity of faith). To hold onto one’s deen in a country like Canada is “like holding a hot coal in one’s hands.”