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Praying to the West with Omar Mouallem
113 Plays3 years ago
We are joined by author Omar Mouallem for a must-listen conversation on his just released book Praying to the West: How Muslims Shaped the Americas. We chat about why it's important to not be a shithead atheist, his book lining up nearly exactly with the 20 year anniversary of 9/11 and how liberal media types just can't help themselves when it comes to excusing fascism.
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Transcript
Introduction to The Progress Report and The Forgotten Corner
00:00:00
Speaker
The Progress Report is a proud member of the Harbinger Media Network. A podcast on the network that I want to highlight is The Forgotten Corner, featuring Scott Schmidt, Mo Cranker, and frequent Progress Report contributor Jeremy Appel. The Forgotten Corner is a weekly podcast recorded in Medicine Hat, the 65,000 citizen hub of southeast Alberta, and one of the big reasons why you should listen to The Forgotten Corner is because I'm going to be a guest very soon.
00:00:23
Speaker
Look for an episode on my quote-unquote Senate campaign coming very soon. But Harbinger is a fantastic project, so please become a supporter and get exclusive supporter-only content at HarbingerMediaNetwork.com. Now, on to the show.
Introduction of Guest Omar Mualim and his Book 'Praying to the West'
00:00:49
Speaker
Friends and enemies, welcome to The Progress Report. I am your host, Duncan Kinney. We're recording today here in Amiscochi, Wisconsin, otherwise known as Edmonton, Alberta, here in Treaty 6 territory on the banks of the Kasis-Kasa-Wanesipi, or the North Saskatchewan River. Joining us today to discuss their new book, Praying to the West, How Muslims Shaped the Americas, is writer Omar Mualim. Omar, welcome to The Progress Report. Thank you so much for having me on the show, Duncan.
00:01:17
Speaker
Ah, it's a pleasure. Pleasure to have you back. You are one of our like original OG guests. Oh, that's right. Yeah. Yeah, that's right. We we discussed. I mean, we discussed Islamophobia. Yes. And it was in the aftermath of Michael Cooper reciting the words of the New Zealand mosque shooters manifesto into the wreck in Parliament. That's right. That's right.
00:01:42
Speaker
Well, you know, it's been about two years and the situation has progressed so much. And I'm so glad that those days are behind us and we don't have to talk about anti-Muslim hate anymore. Yeah, we've sorted it. It's good. The book has come out and the book has sorted it. Yes, my book has resolved everything. So what should we talk about instead?
00:02:07
Speaker
Well, it's funny because, you know, we both live in Edmonton, Alberta, and we have to talk about it because we have to talk about it.
Discussion on COVID-19 Mismanagement and Criticism of Alberta Politicians
00:02:16
Speaker
But I mean, I've set a firm seven minute time limit on our COVID disaster discussions. But I have to ask you, as we head in to the summer solstice or to the fall equinox, does it feel like you've had the best summer ever?
00:02:38
Speaker
Oh, man. Yeah, and that was the problem, wasn't it? Wasn't that the problem that we all had the best summer ever and we weren't really thinking about how the summer would end or what the summer would would lead to? Yeah, I mean, look, I knew that I knew this was stupidity. I knew that, you know, opening this province up willy nilly like that was stupidity. But
00:03:09
Speaker
it's this cognitive dissonance where you know that your politicians are making the wrong decisions. And you also know that you will always try to get away with what you can get away with. And so in this case, I spent the summer
00:03:31
Speaker
going to museums again and art galleries and restaurants and going to dinner parties at friends. And I was just so excited to get my kid in preschool. And then when I got the email from her teacher a month ago that the preschoolers would be masked at all times, I was like, shit, wasn't this inevitable? Isn't this where we were gonna go?
00:04:00
Speaker
And, um, you know, I started to roll back on my, on my hot vac summer, uh, about a month ago, but, um, you know, obviously for myself and, and, and everyone else in this province, it was way too late. It was way too late. Yeah. I mean, you know, I assume you and I got vexed pretty early on in the process, but that doesn't mean.
00:04:21
Speaker
that our healthcare system and our hospitals are still. I jumped the queue. That's how excited I was to get a vaccine. I'll say I jumped the queue. I cheated to get an early vaccination. That's how excited I was to get vaccinated. And it just, it boggles the mind that 30% of this province, including people I know and love and people I'm related to. And, you know, really people like, I
00:04:45
Speaker
I, you know, hold close to my heart, still don't feel like it is the safe choice. And I don't know what I don't know what to do. I just don't know what to do about these folks. And a lot of them, I just want to say, are not the stereotypical white right wing conservatives. There there is a contingency
00:05:10
Speaker
on the left, within progressive circles, that still thinks that they're smarter than the experts. Yeah, I definitely have run into those folks as well. I know you have. I bet you've run into more of them than I have. But it is, I think open for summer or it's corollary, best summer ever. This is a phrase that is going to live in infamy, right? Oh my God.
00:05:35
Speaker
When I was a kid, I had this big book of disasters that my parents had. And there were section titles. There was wars. There was man's inhumanity to man. And then there was mad made disasters like Bhopal or whatever. And this is a man made disaster. The behavior of a disease like COVID is predictable. And multiple people have predicted these waves based on the data that was publicly available.
00:06:04
Speaker
And yet Kenny and Hinshaw, you know, found the one out lying. And it's hubris, the hubris of these of these Alberta politicians and bureaucrats. I mean, like Hinshaw is a politician. I think she's revealed herself as a politician by now. Remember when when Alison Redford resigned over the Sky Palace? Well, that and a few other things. Yes, OK. As far as I know, nobody died because of Alison Redford's mistakes.
00:06:33
Speaker
She rightfully resigned. She read the room. But the hubris of Jason Kenney, his cabinet, and Dr. Dina Hinshaw, to not have just read the room and resigned with even a fraction of grace, it blows my mind. It blows my mind. And then to hear on that announcement a couple of days ago about the new public health emergency measures.
00:07:03
Speaker
to hear Dr. Hinshaw in her soulless robotic voice to say the same thing she says every time, I can't express enough my grief and remorse. I can't express enough my grief and sorrow for the families
00:07:26
Speaker
And it's like, yeah, you obviously can't express enough. You can't emote. Like if, if walls could talk, they might actually sound like you. Like there's nothing, there's nothing actually inside.
00:07:41
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, everyone involved in opening up Alberta so that Jason Kenny could flip pancakes and glad hand with donors at the Calgary Stampede. They all need to walk into the sea and never. It's like Jason Kenny, what did he apologize for? It was the first time I've heard him apologize. He apologized for just opening. Was it just apologize for opening too soon? Do you remember?
00:08:11
Speaker
Who cares what his apology was because then he walked it back like within the same press conference. That's exactly that's exactly what I was going to say. It was like the first time I've heard him actually apologize. And then it was like immediately he like absolved himself of true accountability of it. Like, man, this guy is just so I look at my theory is that Jason Kennedy's never been loved.
00:08:37
Speaker
He's never experienced love. He doesn't understand how people can be motivated by love.
Exploration of Jason Kenney's Political Motivations
00:08:45
Speaker
He's only motivated by power and adulation and a sense of control. And so it makes sense that his hubris makes sense in that context.
00:09:01
Speaker
I think he's motivated by always wanting to be the smartest person in the room, which is something that I think you and I... Which is a sense of power. Which is something that I think you and I can relate to. You can relate to it, Duncan. I don't give a shit if I'm the smartest guy in the room or not.
00:09:16
Speaker
Well, it's in the notes later on. We'll get into it. But as an independent journalist, I live in a high information environment. I am keeping tabs on what is going on in our province. And the stuff that I read about where our health care system is at, where our acute care system and our hospitals are at is incredibly frightening. And I am not a guy who prays. I'm not much of a prayer.
00:09:41
Speaker
But, I mean, our current situation, Alberta, is enough for even a godless atheist like me to start speaking of prayer and talking about prayer. And that is my artfully written segue into our book. We've reached our seven minute time limit. And we are, we're here to talk about your book, man.
Omar Mualim's Book on Diverse Muslim Communities
00:10:00
Speaker
You wrote a whole ass book. It is a whole ass book, 330 some pages.
00:10:08
Speaker
And you visited 13 kind of wildly diverse mosques across North and South America. Yeah. I mean, honestly, I probably visited like 40 or 50 in the process of writing it. And a good chunk of them are covered in the book to an extent, but it's 13 that I decided to home in on and make sort of central to each chapter. And each chapter
00:10:33
Speaker
Each chapter is a profile of a distinct Muslim community somewhere in the Americas, from Brazil through the Caribbean and Southern Mexico, across the states, across Canada, and into the Arctic Circle, or on the edge of the Arctic Circle, let's say.
00:10:52
Speaker
And, you know, these communities, I decided like I would home in on a mosque in each one of those communities and sort of moving in concentric circles, go from that mosque to the congregation understanding their
00:11:09
Speaker
not just their history, not just their experience, their contemporary experience, but the history of that community and the influence they've had on the region around them and the influence that the region has had on them in order to sort of paint a
00:11:26
Speaker
giant portrait of not just, you know, Muslims in the West, but actually a little bit of a glimpse into what the global Muslim really looks like, or rather the diversity of the global Muslim Ummah, which is the sort of the Muslim nation. And so, yeah, I mean, that's that's what I've been doing for the past
00:11:51
Speaker
four and a half, almost five years. I mean, as you know, um, I've been traveling a lot, like three of those years. I was, you know, up basically right before COVID hit, I was almost always on the go, probably a trip a month. And, um, yeah, I, it's, it's, I can't believe it's out actually. It's out on September, it's already out now, but officially on September the 21st.
00:12:16
Speaker
Yes, by the time you will be listening to this podcast, it will be available in bookstores. And there are incredible and powerful pieces of writing in this book. The chapter on Quebec is incredibly well done. I mean, I like the book. I think we have some fundamental disagreements on politics and how we view the world, how to change the world. But one thing that I think we absolutely share is that we were insufferable, shithead, atheist people.
00:12:44
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, this is this is probably true of a lot of college aged males in the early to mid to late 2000s, you know. And this book seems like a partial apology for your asshole atheist phase, right? Is that fair? Yeah, I think that's I think that's pretty fair and pretty insightful, actually. Yeah. I mean, it is
00:13:11
Speaker
In a sense, it is a letter, I think, to family members, a letter to, you know, people of faith who I probably offended, you know, that I was probably disrespectful to. And, you know, I think it was, in a sense, it was a little bit of an act of atonement, if you will.
00:13:40
Speaker
while we're talking about religion. Because you and I know that a lot of those new atheist talking points that were popular with Richard Dawkins, Michael Shermers, and Sam Harris's of the world, though Sam Harris has mellowed out quite a bit since that time, a lot of those talking points were sort of veiled bigotry.
00:14:07
Speaker
And in the last few years, long after I'd sort of mellowed out into more of just sort of an ambivalent person on matters of faith and religion, I saw Islamophobia sort of reach this crescendo, at least I hope it's a crescendo in the last few years. And a lot of the really ugly stuff reminded me kind of vaguely of things that I had said or thought in the past.
00:14:38
Speaker
And so this book I think was a little bit of a, you know, do over for some of the, you know, more performative things that I had said written about wrapped about, you know, regarding religion but you know specifically Islam.
00:14:58
Speaker
Yeah, and it's not just an apology. I mean, it's also, like you said, at a letter to your family, you know, you want to show that you love and respect them as well as the other kind of like practicing Muslim folks in your life. And it's a feels to me like an attempt to try and explain yourself and like where you've kind of come to as you know, a person who is who is not like a practicing Muslim and, you know, but you still
00:15:25
Speaker
through the process of this book, you talk about your relationship to both religion and this particular religion, right? Yeah, and you know, this was something that was not so intentional, not at the start anyway. You know, early drafts of the proposals and very early chapters were really kind of a straight on look about the
00:15:48
Speaker
about these communities, the history, the influence they've had, like I said, and what their experience sort of tells us about true Muslim experiences and the diversity of Islam. Through that process, though, I mean, I was finding myself in mosques. And another thing is that I didn't really realize that I was going to be writing these profiles of mosques until I started writing them.
00:16:13
Speaker
And I was finding myself in these mosques, and I realized that I was being welcomed not so much as a journalist, but more as like a Muslim brother. And I was being invited and often expected and sometimes cajoled into joining prayer. And so at some point, I just, you know, kind of had to let my guards down and be a part of it. And I think that that process of doing it over and over and over again in all these different communities with all these different people, people opening up to me,
00:16:41
Speaker
and me starting to open up to them a little bit more, too, in the sake of transparency about where I am and where I've come from, that I think forced me to want to be more transparent with the reader. And the way to do that, I think, was to sort of maybe imagine family members as those readers and to sort of try to explain not just
00:17:11
Speaker
not just my past journey, but the journey that I was going through in the process of writing this and reporting this.
00:17:20
Speaker
Yeah, and we share this similar kind of arc as asshole young atheists who have realized that it's just not a very fruitful or kind way to live your life and that there is value in religion. It's just a different kind of zealotry and performative zealotry as well.
00:17:42
Speaker
And I am a leftist. I exist on the left. I try and change the world through my politics. And we've all run into people on the left who are these asshole atheist people. And they're just absolutely terrible to work with.
00:18:01
Speaker
And they're never, you're never gonna get anywhere. Imagine living with them. I know, right? I wish you should ask your wife. Yes. But you're just never gonna get anywhere with that type of approach, right? And I think leftists need to understand that like,
00:18:16
Speaker
You know, the Christian church, Islam, it is this kind of like pre-capitalist tradition that instead of alienating and atomizing us and extracting value from people, it does bring people together in a common purpose. Well, it can. It can. You know, what I like the biggest takeaway that I want from this book is that it like it depends on the mosque. It depends on the domination. It depends on the individuals. It depends on like the family.
00:18:45
Speaker
There is so much potential for good, and there's so much potential for bad. And it just depends on how people are sort of
00:18:56
Speaker
Not just like how they use the religion, but because maybe that suggests that they have a little bit more autonomy over the information that they consume about Islam or whatever religion it might be. But also just about, like I said, the information that they consume.
00:19:21
Speaker
But I'm jealous of people who can go to a church or a mosque and be a community of like-minded folks and enjoy themselves and sing and worship and pray together. I wish I had a routine like that in my life with people who shared my values. Absolutely. Me too. I write about this in the epilogue of my book.
00:19:44
Speaker
My auntie, who was just an upstanding member of the local Muslim community, who started an Islamic school, an online Islamic school, and who actually had committed the Quran to memory. She died of COVID this year, right at the beginning of the year. And it was,
00:20:12
Speaker
I mean, it was a really difficult thing for all of us, but I did sense that those who were truly pious people and who had a sense of conviction about what happens
00:20:36
Speaker
to a soul in the afterlife or after they pass, I sense that they were able to find closure maybe more easily and find peace more easily. So yeah, I mean, there are reasons to be, you know, there are reasons to envy, I think, the truly religious and reasons to admire them. Not always, you know, but... No, not always, but I think it's something worth, you know, discussing and it's a belief I hold.
00:21:06
Speaker
Your book also inspired me to do some digging into the religious faith tradition that I grew up in, the Christian and missionary alliance.
Personal Reflections on Religious Upbringing and Muslim Missionaries
00:21:14
Speaker
You ever heard of this? No, sir. I know very little about Christianity. So most Canadian cities, in fact, all major kind of North American cities will have
00:21:25
Speaker
usually several large alliance churches. And this is a Credition tradition that is well before mega churches and prosperity gospel stuff, but they tend to agglomerate and grow quite large. It is a Keswickian tradition, which means nothing to me.
00:21:41
Speaker
that was started by some guy named Keswick. It grew out of Methodist tent revivals in England, and it is the branch of Christianity right before you get to the Pentecostals. And you might be familiar with the Pentecostals from their habit of speaking in tongues or snake handling, those folks? Yes, I'm familiar, yes. I watched that HBO documentary, Alabama Snake Handler, whatever it was called.
00:22:08
Speaker
And so my Christian tradition is right before that happens. And the Christian and Missionary Alliance is definitely, we like to sing our songs, but there's none of the speaking in tongues, none of the stake handling. But it is a very patriarchal, very boring, very conservative
00:22:27
Speaker
and very focused on missions, right? It's right in the title, right? Missions both internally where they live as well as abroad with missionaries. And we were raised in this tradition to venerate missionaries. There would be like mission weeks where, you know, these missionaries who were sponsored by our church would come back
00:22:47
Speaker
and give little presentations and then everyone would give money to them. And it was a whole to do. And going back and looking at this of this family that was living in Papua New Guinea or whatever and trying to convert just random ass people trying to live their lives to this small sect of Christianity is pretty fucked up and colonial and bad when you think of it, right?
00:23:09
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there certainly can be. It certainly can be. I ran into quite a few, you know, a fair bit of Muslim missionaries in the process of writing this book, which was really actually interesting to me because it sounds dumb, but it never really occurred to me that there were
00:23:28
Speaker
like Muslim versions of Jehovah's Witnesses. But of course, of course there are, right? The whole point of this book is to show that Muslims are much, much, much more similar to Christians than not. So I would come across missionaries and very different missionaries. And sometimes, I'll admit, sometimes they gave me the creeps a little bit.
00:23:56
Speaker
There were missionaries who were just so, they were very, very warm, very polite, but so obsessed with the purity of one's practices that they were basically turning people into fundamentalists. I'm speaking very specifically about missionaries in Trinidad and Tobago.
00:24:24
Speaker
I mean, they were basically turning people onto fundamentalism and Salafism, which is sort of a ultra-orthodox Sunni Muslim movement, which isn't terrible in itself.
00:24:40
Speaker
But the thing is, they sort of primed people for now violent extremists like ISIS to recruit from that pile. And that's exactly what happened in Trinidad and Tobago. These missionaries had basically like, basically like primed a huge number, we're talking like,
00:25:05
Speaker
possibly 250 people who went off to join the Islamic State from Trinidad and Tobago. It's a country with the population just under Edmonton's.
00:25:17
Speaker
Like pound for pound, they were like the kings of sending people to go participate in the ISIS caliphate. Yes, they were. By my estimates, it was one in 450 Muslims of Trinidad and Tobago joined the Islamic State. That is astonishing. So there were those kinds of missionaries
00:25:41
Speaker
But then there were other missionaries, like people from the Ahmadiyya movement, the Ahmadi Order, which is this generally quite progressive Muslim movement, revivalist movement from the late 1800s. It's largely like mainstream, even moderate Muslims, a lot of them would consider them heretics.
00:26:07
Speaker
And they've been ostracized and persecuted for a very, very long time. But fundamental to their belief is dawah, which is basically religious propagation. And the way that they do it isn't just by preaching, but it's often through
00:26:26
Speaker
this humanitarian work and also seeking out people who are impoverished or marginalized, such as Maya Muslims in southern Mexico. And
00:26:43
Speaker
while this can give you, you know, this can give you some, this kind of echoes some icky colonialist, you know, themes, and there is, there can be a sense of that for sure. What I admire is that they
00:27:00
Speaker
often, you know, they often try to spread this movement in order to give these people a chance at leadership within the community, not just leadership within their own community, but in like the broader Ahmadiyya organizations of that
00:27:18
Speaker
particular region. So I thought that was really interesting, too, to see these two sides of missionary work. And what was really, really interesting about the one in Mexico is these missionaries were actually helping a Muslim community that had been exploited by fundamentalists.
00:27:41
Speaker
as well. And so and one of the things that was turning them away from the from Islam after having practiced it converted and then practice it for a number of years was that they didn't they felt like there was a you know there was no there was not enough
00:28:02
Speaker
of a place for feminism or for women to have more leadership roles and more say over their communities. And so the Ahmadiyya movement very much places women pretty close to the center of, you know, of their faith. And so they were able to sort of feel a little bit more comfortable with that strain of Islam and went that way.
00:28:26
Speaker
Yeah, that's just growing up in a Christian tradition that was so kind of hooked like deep into missionaries as a concept. It was it was fascinating to read the sections on on Muslim missionaries, just a totally kind of new concept to me.
Islamophobia and Cultural Reflections Post-9/11
00:28:40
Speaker
But, you know, Omar, I don't imagine that when you conceived of this book and the multi year writing process that entailed that you would be releasing it pretty much, you know, like 10 days after the 20th anniversary of 9-11.
00:28:56
Speaker
Yeah, tell me about it. You know, that that's can't be complete. I'll be completely honest about this because some people have, you know, asked me if that was intentional and because the book actually did end up coming out early. It came out on September the 10th. And I don't I don't know if it was rushed out for 9-11. If it was, I guess that's kind of a genius move. Well done publishers. Yes.
00:29:25
Speaker
But that was never my intention. The reason why I was really so close to the 20th anniversary of 9-11 is because I was 18 months late with my manuscript. I wanted to take a lot of care with this book. And so a one year deadline became a two year deadline, became a three year deadline.
00:29:44
Speaker
And so that's the reason why it came out when it did. And I didn't actually realize it until a few months ago when the rollout for the book started. And the Globe and Mail asked me to write an op-ed for the 20th anniversary of 9-11. And I thought, oh, that's interesting.
00:30:10
Speaker
Okay. Because I, like, you can't, you cannot talk about modern Islam, especially modern, like you can't talk about like modern Muslim communities, especially in the Christian world without talking about 9-11. And especially in, you know, North America, you can't. But, you know, I didn't want that to define
00:30:36
Speaker
these communities. I didn't want it to define my book. For me, it was more of a pathway into my own head early on in the book. I came of age during 9-11, and in a way, it set me on a path 20 years later to write this book. But if you're really, Muslims have been villainized and misunderstood and flattened into this nefarious monolith for a long time, but especially in the last 20 years.
00:31:07
Speaker
if you want to really understand the conflicts, the triumphs, the successes, the tribulations of these communities, then you cannot define them by 9-11. You have to let them define themselves. And so that's what I sought out to do with this book was give people a chance, give Muslim people a chance to be actors in their own story
00:31:34
Speaker
you know, to be in, and, and not just that, but actors in the story of the Americas and not just spectators. Yeah. Like the book isn't about 9 11 or terrorism or Muslim extremism, right? But you do have to talk about it. Yeah. I mean, when you, when you want it, especially when you're talking to millennials, because like I said, like myself, we, we came of age during 9 11. And when you want to talk to millennials in, in North America about their Muslim identity,
00:32:04
Speaker
9-11 plays a big part of it. And I think that's actually really important. It's like if you were to talk to someone who is 80, 90 years old about their sense of self, the Second World War is going to be a big part of that. What people don't, I think, appreciate is that for
00:32:31
Speaker
Muslim people in the West, and especially millennials, 9-11 was felt in an extremely personal way, in an extremely psychological way. And so, yeah, I mean, it comes up, it just naturally comes up. And it doesn't always lead people to the place that they think it would.
00:32:59
Speaker
I mean, the more important thread about 9-11 to me, as someone who's not Muslim, who did not have to deal with the kind of backlash, is the absolute bloodthirstiness and white supremacy at the heart of American empire that that attack unlocked. It was 2001, right? We were in the middle of the end of history. Francis Fukuyama, right? The communism had been vanquished.
00:33:26
Speaker
capitalism, liberal democracy was ascendant. And now there was a global struggle.
00:33:35
Speaker
for the control of civilization, that all of these boomers who, you know, by virtue of kind of growing up at this time that the Vietnam War happened were, you know, against the Vietnam War because, you know, that the draft existed, they might have had to have gone over and fought. But all these people who like were against the Vietnam War, but maybe felt bad about it.
00:33:57
Speaker
can now look, you know, post 9-11, we're completely justified, completely justified in engaging in this kind of like, just absolute bloodthirstiness for kind of consequences and retribution and violence over on brown Muslim folks. Yeah, no, I mean, that is like, that is,
00:34:20
Speaker
one of the the oldest I guess sort of foreign policy or domestic policy tricks in the book right is like you you have to select someone for people to fear in order to justify you know militarism and a lot of like just
00:34:39
Speaker
A lot of things that are hard cells, like going to war to secure oil, a lot of things that are hard cells to the public, you have to firm up a idea of good and evil in their minds for that. Now, 9-11 obviously was a massive turning point.
00:35:09
Speaker
For me, at least for Canadians, I think that for Canadians, and I think for the general public in North America, I actually think that it was 2008 and the election of Barack Obama and Barack Hussein Obama.
00:35:33
Speaker
with sort of overlapping with the hysteria over the ground zero mosque, if you remember that, and how Fox News took both of those things. And, you know, obviously not just Fox News, you know, I'm talking about all sort of very sensational conservative right wing media, the Rush Limbaugh's and a lot of like Quebec's, you know,
00:35:58
Speaker
trash radio, as they call them. You can just like, yeah, the way the media is, especially, you know, Fox News, taking that running with those two things, the Barack Hussein, Obama, and the Ground Zero mosque, and just whipping people up in a frenzy. And it mainstreamed Islamophobia, in a way that
00:36:20
Speaker
wasn't so mainstream for quite a few years. Even if it was phony, there were still expressions of
00:36:38
Speaker
you know, sort of neutrality and peacemaking about Muslims in general and your Muslim neighbors and whatnot, from politicians, both in the United States and Canada, and in in the early 2000s, in the wake of 9-11. Now, we know that they were talking out of both sides of their mouths, because, you know, you know, state surveillance of Muslim communities,
00:37:04
Speaker
had ramped up and criminalization of Muslim criminalization exactly of Muslim people, you know, told a completely different story. But I think like 2008 marked the beginning of like, not even pretending anymore. And then we reach
00:37:22
Speaker
2014-15. And you have the ISIS and spider attacks happening across Europe and the United States, in particular, San Bernardino and the Paris attacks. And you have a massive refugee crisis of predominantly Muslim and Arab people from Syria, and the backlash against that. And you have, you know, on a
00:37:49
Speaker
local level, you have the Harper administration going full bigot in their twilight. And of course, you have the rise of Donald Trump. And you have the sort of transformation of social media, but especially Facebook as a news platform and and really a misinformation platform. And those whatever I just named five, six things coming together
00:38:18
Speaker
all within a matter of a couple of years, that created, I think, an Islamophobia like we'd never seen before. Yeah. And it's there. It's still there. It did not like it has not dissipated even without Trump, even without ISIS. We are seeing the increasing radicalization of white people here in Canada. Yes, we are.
00:38:47
Speaker
And, you know, we've seen it in this upcoming when this just this federal election campaign that's happening right now and the rise, so-called rise of the People's Party of Canada and Max Bernier. And not only do politicians play a part in this, obviously, but so does our media.
00:39:05
Speaker
And, you know, I sent this to you the other day when it popped up, but like John Ibbitson, the person you go to for the latest three week old analysis on current events from like your boring liberal uncle. Okay, I don't read John Ibbitson or any calmness enough to make that statement, but I'll, I assume you pay enough attention to his work that that is an accurate, you know, assessment of his work.
00:39:35
Speaker
fair. He wrote a piece. It came out on September 15th, the title, the People's Party is far outside the mainstream of Canadian politics, but it deserves representation.
00:39:48
Speaker
And this this piece was bad and it laundered kind of white genocide myths and it and it gave a sheen of respectability to fascism and the People's Party of Canada. And I am just going to read a section of it from you from it right now. And then I'm going to ask you a question.
00:40:09
Speaker
So, quote, there are plenty of reasons why so many people have become resentful and untrusting. The manufacturing jobs leaving due to offshoring, the increasing number of non-European immigrants, the stress of the pandemic, the self-empowerment that comes from rejecting authority. What did you think when I sent that to you the other day?
00:40:35
Speaker
I mean, you know, I think it's just like, it reminds me a lot of, you know, in the wake of Donald Trump's victory in 2016, 17, there was this, you know, this neediness from
00:40:55
Speaker
from the pundit class and from mainstream media to exhibit some sort of empathy with aggrieved, you know, the aggrieved white working class. But there's this false assumption that the aggrieved white working class are all kind of racist and that we should like hear them out or something for it. And, you know, I think this just sort of goes to show that
00:41:25
Speaker
I guess just how comfortable people are with accepting the idea that non-European people growing in numbers in this country is reason for people to feel alienated and left out.
00:41:48
Speaker
This is the laundering of the white genocide myth in one of the biggest platforms you can be afforded as a writer in Canada, like a columnist gig at the Globe and Mail. This ideology is responsible for mass murder. And to see it, and to see John Ibbotson kind of casually toss it off is like, oh yeah, people are just, you know, they're worried about brown people swamping them. It's like, what the fuck is wrong with you, man?
00:42:17
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, sure, and not just Muslim people, but you know, the mass murder of indigenous people going going back, however, many centuries now. Yeah, I mean, you know what? Look, the I don't pay, even though I'm sort of
00:42:36
Speaker
in some ways a part of the pundit class. I actually don't pay too much attention to the pundit class and to what like pundits actually write. Like there's never been a columnist that I've been, you know, excited enough about to like seek out what they write week after week. But all I knew about John Ibbitson is that he's like, he's credible and he's seen as a bit of a barometer of like mainstream Canadian views.
00:43:01
Speaker
Now, there's been quite a bit of backlash to that. And I think we need to pay attention to that backlash and maybe see a little bit of hope in that backlash. Because what that tells me is that
00:43:18
Speaker
What it tells me is that the power of people like John Ibbotson who hold onto these mainstream, what they see as mainstream views is slipping, and what they see as mainstream views is not going to be mainstream for much longer. Because when you see the sort of firing back
00:43:44
Speaker
at someone like him uh for what he said at the level that uh that we did um then i i think that's like those are the moments that keep people in check and i as you probably know have been like i've i've been on the serving end of those moments not many but i have been you know it took me quite a while i think to under to really like
00:44:10
Speaker
warm up and understand the core values and purpose of the Black Lives Matter movement. You know, and I like I was reluctant to like I was reluctant to really understand. The abuses of power in, you know,
00:44:36
Speaker
the police service, and specifically the local Edmonton police service. Because I was one of those people that was like, oh, police, anti-Blackness and anti-Black abuses from the hands of police, that's an American thing.
00:44:57
Speaker
And, you know, saying, I mean, that's not what I said, but those were obviously things that I believed in saying something stupid that kind of revealed those beliefs.
00:45:10
Speaker
in writing or online and then being served as Ibbotson just was. Those are the things that I think force us to really reconsider our beliefs and whether or not they're based in reality or whether they're just based in the biases that we have formulated because of the bubble that we have created for ourselves.
00:45:41
Speaker
Yeah, I think I think Ibbitson is a very good barometer of kind of like upper Canada business class kind of Canadian types. But I mean, that while that piece that I read was clarified, a clarification was issued and some of the language was changed about non-European immigrants.
00:45:59
Speaker
There's still another section that's really bad, and I'm going to read it to you right now. Quote, Mr. Bernier seeks to be their voice. If their voice is silenced, if PPC members fail to break through in parliament, just as Mr. Bernier was unfairly denied representation in the leaders debates last week, they will find another way to be heard. And you might not like. Yeah, that's I mean, that's always that.
00:46:20
Speaker
you know, that's always the argument against, you know, de-platforming or having some, you know, controls on hate speech, isn't it? Right? It's always like, you know, you got to give them, you got to give them a platform or they're going to burn down your house. And you're not going to like that. You're not going to like that. So what do you want? You want your house to burn down? Or do you want them to whip people into a frenzy to burn down your house?
00:46:47
Speaker
Smaller liberals can just not help themselves when it comes to excusing fascism like this, right? Like Andrew Coyne wrote pretty much the same column without the white genocide part, arguing that the PPC need to be included in debates and treated seriously. And here they are rising in numbers. And to me, that's the story.
00:47:10
Speaker
Like they're painting them as victims, but the numbers actually tell you between this election and the last election that, you know, they're growing in popularity and in support. And so they're not victims anymore. Compared to their last running, they're victors.
00:47:34
Speaker
And liberals and the business class will always ally with fascism over the working class actually gaining power. And the media has systematically squeezed out anything left of the mildest bit of social democracy. And as such, we don't have voices in the mainstream Canadian media that can actually explain why capitalism is breaking down right now, why fascism and white supremacy are on the rise.
00:48:02
Speaker
in order to deal with that contradiction of capitalism breaking down. None of these commentators have any idea on what could be done to combat this. So what do they do? They default to, well, let's bring them in. Let's hear what they have to say. Well, a lot of that has to do with the fact that newspaper subscribers are old.
00:48:22
Speaker
And so, you know, the people that write newspaper columns are not always selected because they are the best writers or the best, you know, critical thinkers, you know, judges of character, what have you. I mean, they're chosen because they are what readers want. That's why.
00:48:49
Speaker
Yeah. And I think the final kind of quote on this section, and this is something I've been thinking about a lot, especially in the context of this federal election, which is that white people and reactionaries are becoming increasingly radicalized. And it is time to start building the necessary social infrastructure to make sure that we can defend ourselves, take care of each other.
00:49:10
Speaker
when and if something bad happens and the shit goes down, right? And to bring it back to your book and Islam, the charity stuff at the heart of Islam, the food distribution, the social services, that is fantastic and what you need.
00:49:32
Speaker
in a society that's going to take care of each other when the state breaks down.
Muslim Community Initiatives in Canada
00:49:36
Speaker
Yeah. So I mean, what you're referring to with food banks is the Midnight Sun Mosque in Inuvik, which is a part of the mosque. And it is a food bank in the far north serving a community that is largely Inuit and First Nations.
00:50:01
Speaker
And incredibly, there was no food bank for the capital of the Inuit region in the Northwest Territories. There was no food bank. And so this community of Muslims who are largely refugees, by the way,
00:50:21
Speaker
like the vast majority of them from Sudan, Somalia, Palestine. And they, you know, they through great effort created this mosque and were welcomed by this indigenous community and really like really, really welcomed and kind of like given a chance to be sort of absorbed into the community. And as a way of
00:50:52
Speaker
I don't know, showing their appreciation, yes and no, really just as a way of just like doing something for their neighbors. They created this food bank that sometimes as many, I'm told, as many as 20 to 25% of the community relies on. Like imagine that one in four people in a small town,
00:51:14
Speaker
or in a small region, I guess, because it's people who are sort of in the larger Inuvik area. Imagine that many people surviving on food bank rations.
00:51:28
Speaker
And I think that this does sort of reveal a little bit of the socialist soul at the heart of Islam. There's much more informed scholars and writers on this section of Islam that you can talk to. But my understanding is that
00:51:56
Speaker
Islam was like Muhammad's Islam was a socialist revolution.
00:52:02
Speaker
It was seizing power from the religious elite, the sort of like Arabia's sort of polytheist priest class. And it was giving it back to the people and saying, if you want to be a person of God, you don't have to pay this or that. You don't have to pay someone to give you this. You can, if you want,
00:52:32
Speaker
You can practice this on your own. You can convert on your own. You just have to declare that there's no God, but God Muhammad is his messenger.
00:52:46
Speaker
and you're good to go. And if you feel that in your heart, that's it, you're good. Like here's some practices, good to pray five times a day, here are some prayers, and here are some rituals that sort of will humble us and remind us of our oneness with each other and God's oneness.
00:53:12
Speaker
And so it really was a decentralizing kind of religion. And it's one of the reasons that it spread so wide and so quickly. Now, of course, another reason that it spread was war, was violence. That can't be denied. It really just depends on the region. In many parts of Africa, the way that Islam spread was through literacy.
00:53:40
Speaker
Right. And so, yeah, but I think that I think that when you drill down to it, at its at its heart, it is a socialist movement. Yeah, and I definitely wish there was a chapter of socialist Muslim group. Of course I would. Of course I would.
00:54:05
Speaker
But the final chapter was also very good, and I wanted it to be kind of longer. I wanted to know more about inclusive Islam, you know, the unity mosque. You know, if you were gonna be going to a mosque, would it be something like unity mosque? So unity mosque is, unity mosque, sometimes called Joma circle. Those Joma circle is more, you know, more description of the way they worship. And I'll get to that in a moment. It is this,
00:54:35
Speaker
movement, this mosque in Toronto, held in disclosed areas that rotate. And the reason that it's undisclosed is because a huge number of the congregants are
00:54:55
Speaker
LGBTQ. The main imam, two of the three founders, maybe even three, actually, I don't know if the third one is, but two of the three are a gay couple, Troy Jackson and Elfer Rukaki. Lovely people had a chance to not just worship at Unity Mosque and with their congregants, but actually spend some time at their home with their beautiful two-year-old son.
00:55:25
Speaker
And I mean, they created a mosque for themselves and people like them who were
00:55:36
Speaker
outsiders, outcasts, who didn't feel comfortable going into a mosque, who maybe had been disavowed by their family or just didn't feel comfortable going to a mosque where family members might see them. And it has become something else over the years. As the number of refugees in Canada grows or asylum seekers and sort of informal refugees grows,
00:56:07
Speaker
Canada is attracting a lot of refugees who are persecuted because of their sexual orientation. And oftentimes they end up in Toronto. And so this mosque that was created for outsiders who were Canadians is now becoming a mosque of refugees who are escaping persecution for their sexual identity.
00:56:35
Speaker
And it is not just led by queer people. It's actually led by the whole collective, which is made up of, you know, gays and lesbians and trans, but also it is made up of, you know, women imams. It is made up of atheists. It's made up of Jewish people who have just an affinity for Islam.
00:57:01
Speaker
It's quite remarkable. And, you know, I had a lot of pretty, I think, emotional and transformative experiences. But I think that was the one that came closest to sort of a feeling of, you know, transcendence, I think, like a true spiritual
00:57:29
Speaker
a true spiritual experience where I felt kind of transcended by worshiping with others. And whether or not I will ever be a true believer, it showed me that there is a seat in the Ummah, in the broader Muslim nation, for a disbeliever.
00:57:57
Speaker
who does still cherish a lot of these traditions, who finds a sense of inner peace with Islamic traditions. And that's what that mosque showed me. Now, since then, it has grown into a sort of international movement. And in itself, it's actually part of a much bigger movement that you hinted at, called the sort of
00:58:24
Speaker
inclusive Muslim movement. And so the inclusive Muslim Muslim movement is mosques that are queer friendly, or also like very feminist and, and, you know, all women mosques with feminist values, that kind of stuff. But
00:58:41
Speaker
Unity Mosque has basically created its own unique Muslim practice that is a combination of many different Muslim rituals and indigenous, you know, share, you know, story or share circles. And also like very Western progressive
00:59:04
Speaker
decolonial politics and it's starting to shape into its own framework for a new practice of Islam that is being adopted in cities all over North America and at last count I think it was seven or eight
00:59:22
Speaker
in the United States and Canada. I wouldn't be surprised if it's more, especially because in the pandemic, they were well-suited to take worship online because they had actually been doing that for a very long time. They would broadcast worship on Facebook Live for the private group so that persecuted queer Muslim people all over the world
00:59:47
Speaker
could on Friday have a Friday prayer with like-minded Muslims. And it's kind of an interesting thing because you could have people in Saudi Arabia worshipping on Toronto time, which is kind of a quirk of it all.
01:00:05
Speaker
But so when the pandemic happened and we took worship online, they were very, very well suited for that. I ended up going to a couple of their online Friday warships. And I mean, they must have had, you know, 80 people present in these. It was yeah, it was quite it was quite amazing to see.
01:00:30
Speaker
Well, it's, it's interesting to hear that you had a, you know, a transcendent and a spiritual experience at unity mosque. And I think, you know, you're human, right? Humans, we are, we are built for whatever reason to seek out these spiritual experiences. It is totally a human connection that like, you know, it allows us to sort of turn off the analytical for a moment and just feel something.
01:00:54
Speaker
And to ignore that is you do that at your own peril. Even atheists want to have a spiritual experience. Even atheists want to have some type of framework to seek forgiveness for the fucked up and selfish shit they've done. Religion is a framework for that. And to throw it all out for whatever reason.
01:01:17
Speaker
Look, do what makes you happy and do what makes you a happier person. If you need to, quote unquote, throw it all out and move on and, you know, find other, you know, another framework to make sense of the world or to find inner peace. You know, for me, when it like when I talk about prayer and when I, you know, when I occasionally
01:01:45
Speaker
you know, use a Muslim prayer. For me, I'm not actually, it's not like prayer praying for something to happen. For me, it's a meditation.
01:01:54
Speaker
For me, it's about the calming effect of it. And even through my most belligerent, atheist years, I would still recite the fethaha, the opening verse of the Qur'an, to myself in private, in my head often, when I felt like
01:02:17
Speaker
I needed to, when I needed some calmness. So that gives you a sense of the power of faith rituals.
01:02:32
Speaker
regardless of whether they are attached to dogma or conviction in the actual scripture, just the rituals themselves have a positivity and have potential nourishment in them.
01:02:56
Speaker
All right, we are coming to the end of our time chatting and I wish we could keep talking but for reasons of brevity We've got to cut it off Now is the time to plug your pluggables the many things that are happening not just your book
01:03:11
Speaker
plug your book, where can you get it? What's the title? Say it again also. But you've got another exciting project on the go as well.
Release of Omar's Book and Documentary
01:03:16
Speaker
Please plug all the things down. So I don't know how it happened, but I'm releasing a book and a movie at the same time. So the book is Praying to the West, How Muslims Shaped the Americas. You'll find it everywhere where books are sold.
01:03:30
Speaker
The response to the book has just been so gratifying. I mean, it's the hardest thing I've ever done professionally, truly the hardest thing. And it took me years to write. And I'm happy to see that people are responding to it in the way that they are. But the book has kind of a...
01:03:51
Speaker
you know, in a way a supplementary movie that is actually comedy. It's a comedic documentary about the Burger Baron restaurants of Alberta, which is
01:04:06
Speaker
I don't have to explain it to your audience who are almost probably majority Albertans. You guys know the Burger Baron. What you might not know is that it is a restaurant that has been dominated by Lebanese immigrants largely of the civil war for
01:04:27
Speaker
you know, decades. And if it wasn't for the immigrants, the refugees, the foreign workers from Lebanon, like this restaurant would not exist anymore. And I mean, there's a whole lot more to it, like how it became kind of a free for all, where you could do whatever you want with the restaurant, you can use the logo, not use the logo, make your own logo, you can call it Burger Baron, Kelly's Burger Baron, give it whatever subtitle you want.
01:04:57
Speaker
But I mean, in the end, both the movie and the book are about the untold legacies of immigrant and racialized communities in Canada and North America. Yes. And how can people watch The Last Baron?
01:05:16
Speaker
They can find it on CBC Gem, which is the free streaming platform from our state broadcaster. It's like Netflix for Canada. So it's there now. It just premiered. It's free to watch. And we are turning it into a feature film.
01:05:33
Speaker
for the international market, in particular, the U.S. and Middle Eastern North African market. We are crowdfunding for the money to finish it. We're halfway toward our first goal of fifteen thousand. If you like the last Baron, the TV version of the movie, there's so much more to that story. And we would love your help to tell the rest. Yes, please help out Omar if you can buy his book, watch his movie.
01:06:00
Speaker
contribute to is GoFundMe, Patreon, whatever. And if you like this podcast and you want to keep hearing more podcasts of this nature, there's a few things you can do. I'll be brief because we went a little long, but the easiest thing to do is just within the body of this podcast, there is a link.
01:06:19
Speaker
to a patron page, put in your credit card, five, 10, $15 a month, whatever you can afford. It really helps keep this little independent media project going. The 500 people who contribute monthly are absolutely pivotal.
01:06:32
Speaker
to keeping this free and, you know, relatively unique media project on its feet. Also, if you have any notes, thoughts, comments, I'm very easy to get ahold of. You can reach me on Twitter at Duncan Kinney, and you can reach me by email at DuncanKatprogressalberta.ca. Thanks again to a cosmic famu communist for our theme. Thank you to Omar Mualim for being an incredible guest. Thank you for listening and goodbye.