De-link Islam from Terror: Canadian Muslims
“Lead by example, change the rhetoric, and stop saying these words. They hurt,” said Dr Hamid Slimi, former chairman of the Canadian Council of Imams and current chairman of the Muslim seminary, the Canadian Centre for Deen Studies, the National Post reported.
Dr Slimi was speaking at a conference to combat radicalization held last week in Toronto.
He was referring to remarks made by Prime Minister Stephen Harper weeks before that characterized mosques as potential spaces of radicalization.
Clothing terror in Islamic terms “has skewed the public’s perceptions of Canadian Muslims as some kind of dangerous and ‘un-Canadian’ group and reinforces stereotypes of the Muslims as some kind of fifth column and whose loyalty is suspect,” said Ihsaan Gardee, executive director of the National Council of Canadian Muslims.
Other Canadian Muslims have rejected the government’s use of the language of Islam to describe terror as stigmatizing.
Sheik Aarij Anwer of Khalid Bin Al-Walid Mosque in the Toronto suburb of Etobicoke tried to correct the meaning of the term “jihad” based on the Qur’an.
He added that the use jihadism to describe terror is “careless”, saying it draws an inaccurate link from “irrational violence” to theology and implicates all Muslims in violent extremism.
Muslims make around 2.8 percent of Canada's 32.8 million population, and Islam is the number one non-Christian faith in the country.
A recent survey showed that the overwhelming majority of Muslims are proud to be Canadian, and that they are more educated than the general population.
The dual terror attacks in Ottawa and Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu, a few months ago, coupled with Paris shooting spree have led to unprecedented levels of anti-Muslim attacks in Canada where several mosques were vandalized.
Source: OnIslam.net
