From the Toronto Star , 15th July 2005
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Clinging fast to cultural identities
LYNDA HURST
FEATURE WRITER
Much has been made of the fact that the four suicide terrorists in London last week were born and bred in Britain.
That they may have been, but it seems apparent they didn't view themselves as "British."
If, as they made their way to London that catastrophic morning, they'd been asked how they defined themselves, they likely would have said Muslim, or more likely, Islamist, its fundamentalist political form.
Likelier still, they would have said they were jihadists: Warriors in a global holy war. It was to that they owed their loyalty.
Warriors in a holy war. In 21st century Britain. How could it have happened?
As Britons emerged this week from their shock and anger, several debates were begun.
To what degree were the country's Muslims in denial about extremists in their midst? To what degree would they now accept that condemnation of terrorism was not enough, that they would have to take tangible action to root out the poison within?
But the toughest and most sensitive discussion centred on the policy of multiculturalism. For all its good intentions, has it failed? More specifically:
Has encouraging immigrants to retain their cultural identities backfired, leading to self-contained ghettos alienated — by choice as much as exclusion — from the mainstream? And when does this phenomenon become detrimental to the common good?
Are groups whose culture and religion are effectively one and the same being made sufficiently aware they have chosen to live in a country where religion and state are separate entities, deliberately so?
Should the concept of ethnic and racial diversity set limits on religious diversity, at least in the public realm?
The discussion has resonance for Canada, certainly Toronto, where 44 per cent of the population is now foreign-born and where "ethnic enclaves," though celebrated by many, raise scarlet-red flags for others.
Tarek Fatah, executive director of the Muslim Canadian Congress, is emphatically one of them. Political Islamism exists here, just as it does in the U.K. and the rest of Europe, he says, and in large part for one reason: "Countries fail to tell immigrants right at the start that they're entering a zone where religion and the state are separate."
A Pakistani-born secular Muslim, Fatah has been writing letters to MPs for 15 years trying to explain that most Muslim immigrants come from nations where religion is the state.
"People should be told about the concept of citizenship, not just multiculturalism," he says. "They should be told that Canada's laws are created by human beings, by Parliament, and are not divinely inspired. They don't come from the Bible or the Qur'an or the (Hindu) Gita."
The irony is that most Muslim immigrants are fleeing from states based on fundamentalism, he says, "but their children are growing up to embrace it."
"It's because of the influence of certain Islamist imams and the (private-school) madrassas. Here in Canada, they're being told that the West is decadence incorporated, that all human-made laws are anti-God."
Through ignorance or naïveté or fear of offending minorities, Ottawa and the media are letting the situation slide, Fatah says. He cites the fact that sharia law is about to be approved by Ontario for use in Muslim family disputes, despite the vehement opposition of many Muslims who view it as "multiculturalism run amok."
There are problems ahead for Canada, he says, "but the danger is not yet recognized."
It was, in Britain last year, by Trevor Phillips, head of the Commission on Racial Equality. Born in London of Guyanese parents, Phillips called for the policy, if not the reality, of multiculturalism to be abandoned.
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`People should be told about the concept of citizenship, not just multiculturalism.'
Tarek Fatah, Muslim Canadian Congress
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"We live in a different world from the '60s and '70s," he said in a controversial interview with the BBC. "We should be talking about how we reach an integrated society, one in which people are equal under the law, where there are common values."
Phillips said there was a need to "assert a core of Britishness" in all citizens. "Even if we disagree with some peoples' views on the Middle East, religion or anything else, they are all one of us. The first thing we must do is call them British, again and again and again."
His remarks were picked up by many commentators, among them former MP Matthew Parris, who says the aim of public policy should be to soften differences and promote shared views — the reverse of the way multiculturalism has played out.
"We should be honest about what this means. In practice, it must mean the slow erosion of minority value systems, minority cultures and minority languages."
Canadian author Neil Bissoondath pre-dated the British scrutiny by a decade with his highly critical book, Selling Illusions: The Cult of Multiculturalism in Canada.
Trinidad-born Bissoondath thinks our much vaunted cultural mosaic "has tiles separated by cement" because multicultural policy doesn't encourage newcomers to think of themselves as Canadian.
"With its emphasis on the importance of holding on to the former homeland, with its insistence that Thereis more important than Here,it encourages such attitudes," he argues.
Many Canadians of both long-time and more recent vintage echo what political scientist Rias Khan, at the University of Winnipeg, has said: "Whether or not I preserve my cultural background is my personal choice; whether or not an ethnic group preserves its cultural background is the group's choice. The state has no business in either."
Noted American historian Arthur Schlesinger agrees. He's written that multiculturalism "exaggerates differences, intensifies resentments and antagonisms, drives even deeper wedges between races and nationalities."
The endgame? "Self-pity and self-ghettoization, cultural and linguistic apartheid."
The conventional wisdom that all immigrant communities in Canada will integrate within a generation or two is being challenged by many analysts. They say that what was true for post-war, mainly European, nominally Christian newcomers is far less likely to occur with visible minorities, especially those whose religion plays a dominant part in their lives.
The blame game is an easy one. Muslims object that mainstream Canadians think all Muslims are by definition extremists. Mainstream Canadians object that the racists among them are deemed to represent the views of all.
Round it goes, on it goes.
"We're living in a world where there is a mixing up of different cultures, like it or not," says University of Toronto sociologist Wsevolod Isajiw. "A natural process of integration does happen, but not with all immigrants."
Integration occurs through "cultural negotiation," he says. "You give up something when you come to a new country, and you retain something. You negotiate your identity."
But Michel Ferrari, who specializes in multiculturalism and personal identity at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, counters that self-identity is "very fluid. We can present different stories about ourselves at different times to different people."
The three British-born terrorists may well have seen themselves as British some of the time, Ferrari says, but also as Pakistani, as well as — at one point — soldiers embarked on a lethal jihad against the West.
"Britain, like Canada, seemed to have adapted well to the changing pattern of immigration," says Isajiw. "They thought we were protected."
But extremism recognizes no borders. It moves in and out. "For that you can't blame multiculturalism. In any event, what is the alternative?"
It's a question currently without an answer.
But one thing Isajiw knows for sure: "Not talking about this will make it worse."
What's the thought that multiculturism is actually promoting ethnic ghettos that breed Islamist discontent?
I've read Bissoondath and Will Kymlica, both of whom decry the loss of a core Canadian identity that has been usurped my multiculturism and I tend to agree.
Not only have we lost our identity but it appears multiculturism is actually causing more rifts between Canadians of different ethnicity and could possibly be aiding the recruitment of extremists from the hyphenated-Canadian communities.
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