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Islamophobia in Canada refers to set of discourses, behaviours and structures which express feelings of anxiety, fear, hostility and rejection towards Islam and/or Muslims in Canada. The definition of Islamophobia is contested and its usage has been widely criticized, leading to suggestions from academics for alternative terms.

Particularly since the September 11, 2001 attacks in the United States, a variety of surveys and polls as well as reported incidents have consistently given credence to the existence of Islamophobia in Canada. However, the methodology of research into the prevalence of Islamophobia in general has been questioned.

The Canadian media have played a mixed role in their coverage of Islamophobia, and have been described as having perpetuated it and/or countered it for Canadian audiences. Canada’s public education system has also been scrutinized for its role as the site of Islamophobic incidents and of the development of Islamophobic attitudes in youth.

Definition

The definition of the term “Islamophobia” is contested. The term is a neologism formed by combining Islam and the suffix -phobia, implying the basic meaning of Islamophobia to be “fear of Islam” or “aversion to Islam”. The Oxford English Dictionary defines Islamophobia as “intense dislike or fear of Islam, esp. as a political force; hostility or prejudice towards Muslims” and pinpoints its first known usage in English to 1923. This definition reflects the view that hostility toward Islam as a religion can potentially overlap with the more xenophobic and racialized forms of hostility toward Muslims as a community or people.

In 1996, the Runnymede Trust in the United Kingdom established the Commission on British Muslims and Islamophobia. In Islamophobia: A Challenge for Us All, a 1997 report of the Commission's findings, Islamophobia was defined as “an outlook or world-view involving an unfounded dread and dislike of Muslims, which results in practices of exclusion and discrimination.” Islamophobia: A Challenge for Us All outlined the following eight recurring views of Islam that constitute Islamophobia:

(1) seeing Islam “as a monolithic bloc, static and unresponsive to change”;

(2) seeing Islam “as separate and ‘other’” without “values in common with other cultures”, being neither affected by them nor having any influence on them;

(3) seeing Islam as “inferior to the West”, more specifically, “as barbaric, irrational, primitive and sexist”;

(4) seeing Islam “as violent, aggressive, threatening, supportive of terrorism and engaged in a ‘clash of civilisations’”;

(5) seeing Islam “as a political ideology used for political or military advantage”;

(6) “reject[ing] out of hand” criticisms made of the West by Islam dismissing criticisms of the West made by Islam;

(7) using “hostility towards Islam... to justify discriminatory practices towards Muslims and exclusion of Muslims from mainstream society”;

(8) seeing anti-Muslim hostility “as natural or normal”.

— Ontario Human Rights Commission, Human Rights and Creed: Research and Consultation Report, p. 30

After analyzing the nuances in many definitions of Islamophobia, Robin Richardson, a former director of the Runnymede Trust and the editor of Islamophobia: A Challenge for Us All, concludes that the term can be acceptably defined as “a shorthand term referring to a multifaceted mix of discourse, behaviour and structures which express and perpetuate feelings of anxiety, fear, hostility and rejection towards Muslims, particularly but not only in countries where people of Muslim heritage live as minorities.”

Criticism of Usage

Islamophobia has been described by the Council for Muslims Facing Tomorrow (MFT), a Canadian reformist Muslim organization, as “a contrived phrase” which is used by certain Muslims to pander to a self-victimizing ideology and to stifle debate and conversation. The term Islamophobia has also been criticized for promoting the idea that there is a singular interpretation of Islam.

Canadian author and advocate for Islamic reform Irshad Manji has said that the defensiveness displayed by Muslims that causes a critic of Islam or Muslims to quickly be labeled an Islamophobe or accused of collusion with Islamophobes sends a message to actual Islamophobes that Muslims have something to hide and that they are reactionary in nature, implying that such questionable accusations of Islamophobia actually end up perpetuating Islamophobia.

Robin Richardson has discussed several disadvantages of using the term “Islamophobia”. These include the implication that Islamophobia is merely a mental illness which affects only very small segments of society, the implied separation of religion from other relevant factors such as skin color, concerns about terrorism, and immigration, and the implied overlap between those who are hostile to religion in general and those are hostile to Islam or Muslims in particular.

Alternatives

Alternatives to the use of “Islamophobia” have been proposed by scholars. An argument has also been made for the introduction of the term “Islamoprejudice”, and research suggests that it would effectively allow for differentiation between prejudiced attitudes toward Islam and Muslims and secular criticism of Islam.

Statistics on Islamophobia in Canada

A variety of surveys and polls conducted in Canada by research institutes, think tanks and Statistics Canada have given credence to the existence of Islamophobia in Canada.

Especially since 9/11 there has been an upsurge in attention paid to religious diversity by researchers, and therefore this is a developing field of research.

The 2003 Ethnic Diversity Survey conducted by Statistics Canada found that only 0.54% of Muslims reported being a victim of a hate crime based on religion between 1998 and 2003.

A 2006 survey conducted by Environics revealed that that about 1 in 3 Canadians believed that Muslims and Aboriginal Peoples “often” experience discrimination in Canada and they do so more than other minority groups, including the Jews and the Chinese.

Statistics suggest that Islamophobia is particularly prevalent in Quebec. An Angus Reid poll in 2009 found that 68% of Quebecers surveyed held an unfavourable view of Islam. This had risen just slightly in 2013 to 69%. However, the same poll showed that the increase of Islamophobic attitudes in the rest of Canada was greater than it was in Quebec, rising from 46% in 2009 to 54% in 2013.

In 2011, around the tenth anniversary of the September 11 attacks, a poll conducted by Ipsos Reid found that 60% of Canadians surveyed felt there was increased discrimination against Muslims. 59% of respondents also said that the 9/11 attacks had given them a negative impression of “certain ethnicities and religious faiths”. While 81% of respondents maintained that Canadian Muslims should be treated the same as any other Canadians, 31% of respondents in Alberta, 21% of respondents in Quebec, and an average of 15% of respondents nationwide believed that Muslims should be treated differently.

In 2012, police forces from across Canada recorded 45 hate crimes against Muslims that were deemed to be “religiously motivated”. By 2014, this number had more than doubled to 99. During this same period there was a decrease in the total number of hate crimes in Canada overall.

In July 2016, a survey conducted by the polling firm MARU/VCR&C revealed that there was an “epidemic” of Islamophobia in Ontario. One-third of those surveyed had a positive view about Islam and more than half believed that mainstream Islamic teachings promote violence. This survey was conducted following the arrival of nearly 12,000 Syrian refugees to Ontario in the first half of 2016. The survey also found that opposition to the arrival of Syrian refugees was higher among those who had negative views of Islam.

Though similar findings have not emerged in Canada, a detailed analysis of FBI records of Islamophobic hate crimes in the United States between 2001 and 2011 suggested that hate crimes were more commonly committed against blacks, homosexuals and Jews than they were against Muslims. The analysts claimed that Islamists used flawed statistics on Islamophobia to silence criticism of Islam.

Incidents of Islamophobia in Canada

History

The term Islamophobia is sometimes applied retroactively to incidents occurring in the distant past. In the early twentieth century many Muslims living in British Columbia were discouraged by the riots which followed an economic depression in the province, and subsequently relocated to California. This led to a decline in the population of Muslims in Canada from 797 in 1911 to only 478 in 1921. Very few Islamophobic incidents were reported and/or recorded between 1921 and the 1990s. The relatively small (though rapidly-expanding) size of Canada’s Muslim population, which stood at roughly 500,000 in 2000, may also have played a role in the limited number of Islamophobic incidents and/or coverage of them in the Canadian media.

Post-9/11

There have many incidents in Canada that may be described as being Islamophobic in nature, particularly since the September 11, 2001 attacks.

The vilification and abandonment by the former Conservative government of Omar Khadr, the former child soldier who was imprisoned and tortured at Guantanamo Bay, has been linked to Islamophobic attitudes. After an Edmonton judge denied the federal government’s request in May 2015 to keep Khadr in prison upon his relocation to Canada, Khadr’s lawyer Dennis Edney referred to former Prime Minister Stephen Harper as a “bigot” who “doesn’t like Muslims”. Maher Arar and Abdullah Almalki, both Canadian Muslims who were detained and tortured without charge by the CIA in Syria, have also been described as victims of Islamophobia in Canada due to Canadian agencies’ collusion with the US extraordinary rendition program, which victimized Muslims in particular.

In August 2010, Inas Kadri was assaulted and had her niqab ripped off at the Sheridan Centre in Mississauga, Ontario, in the presence of her young children. The assailant, Rosemarie Creswell, pleaded guilty after video evidence from a surveillance camera in the shopping mall was revealed. Creswell was given a one-year suspended sentence, as well as a requirement of 100 hours of community service. Cresswell also submitted a handwritten apology to Kadri. The incident was dubbed by some as a case of “niqab rage”.

In November 2015, the mosque of the Kawartha Muslim Religious Association in Peterborough, Ontario was set ablaze in what was believed to be a hate crime. The fire caused $80,000 in damages to the mosque and rendered it unusable. The incident prompted messages of solidarity and support from Peterborough MP and federal Minister of Democratic Institutions Maryam Monsef and the Peterborough community. An online fundraising campaign raised over $100,000 to repair the building and several Peterborough-area churches and a synagogue offered to share their prayer space with the Muslim community while their mosque was undergoing repairs. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau visited and spoke at the mosque, which is the only mosque in Peterborough, when it reopened in January 2016.

Several incidents were reported in November 2015, leading to suggestions that they may have been a response to the attacks in Paris that same month. A Muslim University of Toronto student wearing a topi (a skullcap that is popular in South Asia) was assaulted on campus. The assailant allegedly cursed the student, spat in his face and told him to take his “turban” off. A few days later, a Muslim woman was robbed and beaten outside a Toronto elementary school by two men who called her a “terrorist”, told her to “go back home” and tore off her hijab before punching her in the stomach and fleeing the scene with her cellphone and money.

Role of the Media

Claims the Media Perpetuates Islamophobia

The Canadian media have been criticized for their role in perpetrating Islamophobia, both generally and in their news coverage of specific events. Canadian professor of journalism Karim H. Karim asserts that in the post-9/11 era an “Islamic peril” has replaced the “Soviet threat” of the Cold War years in Canada.

After comparing Canadian mainstream media coverage of religious minority communities in Canada, Mahmoud Eid concludes that the Canadian media commonly apply the frames of dehumanization, extremism, fanaticism, inequality and Islamophobia to Muslims.

The now-defunct Canadian Islamic Congress (CIC) started to monitor Canadian media coverage for Islamophobic sentiment in 1998. The CIC opposed the use of expressions such as “Muslim militants” and “Islamic insurgency” by arguing that no religion endorses terrorism or militancy. The CIC singled out the newspaper National Post as a leading consistently Islamophobic media outlet in Canada. This was supported by the National Post’s coverage of the 2006 federal election, as 42% of the Post’s election-time articles associated Islam and Muslims with terrorism, compared to 9% of stories in the Globe and Mail and 14% of stories in the Toronto Star.

In 2007, the CIC filed complaints with the Canadian Human Rights Commission and the Ontario Human Rights Commission against Maclean’s Magazine, accusing the magazine of publishing 18 Islamophobic articles between 2005 and 2007, including a derogatory article titled “The Future of Islam” by Mark Steyn. Maclean’s refused to allow representatives of the Muslim community to publish rebuttal of the Islamophobic content of its articles in the magazine. In the case of “The Future of Islam”, the editors of Maclean’s allegedly maintained that they would rather run Maclean’s Magazine into bankruptcy than allow a Muslim organization to publish their response to it in the magazine. The Canadian Human Rights Commission dismissed the CIC’s complaint. The Ontario Human Rights Commission, in 2008, published a statement describing Maclean’s articles as xenophobic, Islamophobic and promoting prejudice; however, the Commission maintained that it did not have the jurisdiction to actually hear the complaint.

In April 2016, the Toronto Star’s former columnist Haroon Siddiqui gave a talk at the Aga Khan Museum in which he decried the role of Canada’s mainstream media in conflating Muslim terrorists with Islam and all Muslims, and thereby contributing to Islamophobia. Siddiqui cited a personal conversation he had with the Toronto Star’s publisher, John Cruickshank, in which Cruickshank claimed that “a big segment of the Canadian media has been peddling ‘flat-out racism and bigotry’ against Canadian Muslims.” In particular, Siddiqui pointed out the role of the National Post and the Postmedia group of newspapers in perpetuating Islamophobia.

Alternative Representations

Some Canadian media outlets have occasionally been praised for their coverage of issues relating to Islam and Muslims. For example, the CIC praised the Toronto Star and La Press for their sympathetic and comprehensive coverage of the 2006 “Toronto 18” terrorist plot. A 2005 survey of 120 Canadian Muslims showed that 66% of respondents trusted the Toronto Star as their source for information, compared to 12% who trusted The Globe and Mail and 4% who trusted the National Post.

Some Canadian media commentators maintain that, in their coverage of Islam and Muslims that is perceived to be Islamophobic, the Canadian media are simply doing their job. Jonathan Kay has argued that the media are fascinated with the subject of terrorism because that is what their audience, the Canadian public, are interested in. Kay also argues that Islam is conflated with terrorism in the media only because prominent terrorist groups consistently commit atrocities in the name of Islam, which the media is obliged to report as such.

It has also been argued that in recent years both Stephen Harper’s Conservative federal government and Pauline Marois’ Parti Québécois provincial government have been voted out of office due to “Islamophobic fearmongering” in their campaigns, and that the Canadian media played a key role in denouncing their Islamophobic messages to Canadians.

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s internationally-acclaimed television sitcom Little Mosque on the Prairie, which aired from 2007 to 2012, has been described as having "opened up a public space for Muslim Canadians to express their traditions, rituals, culture, and religion on primetime Canadian television.” However, others have argued that the underlying assumptions of the show continue to re-affirm, rather than challenge, certain Canadian hegemonic values and expectations about Muslims.

Role of Education

Public Schools

The role of public education in promoting or denouncing Islamophobia has been studied. There have been many reported incidents at public schools in Canada that have been described as Islamophobic. The interactions of non-Muslim students, teachers and administrators have been described by one antiracist and gender-equity practitioner at a Canadian school board as based on stereotypes that are “reminiscent of the long-gone colonial era.” Research also suggests that teachers’ low expectations racial and ethnic minoritized youth can lead to negative evaluation and biased assessments, and this is compounded by Islamophobic attitudes. One student, for example, believes that in high school she was often treated according to the misconception that education is not valued for Muslim women, and therefore her educational aspirations were not taken very seriously by the school’s guidance counselors. Hijab-wearing Muslim girls in elementary school have also reported being asked questions such as “Do you have some kind of head injury?” or “Are you bald?” by teachers.

In August 2016, the National Council of Canadian Muslims (NCCM) in partnership with other Muslim organizations as well as the Canadian Human Rights Commission published a guidebook for educators on how they can fight Islamophobia and its effect on Muslim children in Canadian classrooms. The creation of the guide was inspired in part by the case of an Ontario high school teacher who was fired in 2015 after it was discovered that he had tweeted racist and Islamophobic messages on Twitter. In December 2016, the York Region District School Board (YRDSB) in Ontario elected a new chair shortly after the NCCM (in conjunction with other community groups) filed a human rights complaint following a series of Facebook posts were published by the principal of a public school.

Universities

Islamophobic attitudes and incidents have also been reported on Canadian university campuses. In August 2015, a report was published in Convergence, an undergraduate community research journal, in which Muslim students at McGill and Concordia were surveyed. The surveys revealed that 36.6% of respondents said that they may have been discriminated against at their place of education because of their religion, while 12.2% were certain that they had experienced this. In 2013, a McGill professor was found guilty by the McGill Committee on Student Grievances of having issued death threats and of engaging in “religious, cultural and personal offences” toward a Muslim graduate student. In December 2016, the University of Toronto’s St. Michael’s College Student Union’s vice-president resigned from his position after a video displaying what was deemed to be Islamophobic conduct at an SMCSU event, which he had posted to social media, became viral.

See also

• Islamophobia
• Islam in Canada
• Islamophobia in the United States
• Islamophobia in the United Kingdom
• Islamophobia in Australia