The Tragic Story of the School Mosques of the Peel District School Board
The Peel District School Board (“PSDB”, “Board”) along
with a number of public school boards in
the adjoining city of Toronto, established school mosques where on Fridays, the
cafeteria of the schools are converted into mosques where the Muslim students
hold a congregational Friday prayer followed by a sermon given by one of the
students. The duration of the proceedings cut into the afternoon scheduled
class room instruction.
The establishment of these has been and continues to be strenuously opposed by both progressive members of the
Muslim community who wish to keep religion a private matter and out of secular
public schools as well as by other
non-Muslim parents and community members.
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The Board of the Peel District schools
is one of two parties and the one immediately responsible for the divisiveness,
acrimony and social upheaval caused by the establishment of Friday mosques in
the schools under its jurisdiction.
This is so because had the Board
thought through the issue by proceeding in an informed, rational and logical fashion,
the issue of the accommodation of Friday prayers in schools would not have
arisen in the first place.
The Ontario human rights legislation
imposes on the school boards, among others, the duty to accommodate the special
needs of students which in this particular case, happens to be to attend the
Friday prayer which is performed at noon.
According to my friends and acquaintances who are
Sunni and Shiite Muslims the formal Friday community prayer known as Salat Jumaa or the Juma’a and lasts
about 15 minutes and its proper performance does not require the delivery of a
sermon. While the prayer is supposed to be performed at noon in the winter and
1 p.m. after the change of time, some mosques hold the prayer in two or more shifts
between noon and as late as 3 p.m. depending of the attendance patterns in each
mosque.
When a group of parents requests the
school to provide a specific accommodation for a particular need of their
children, the decision as to whether to grant it or not is reached in three schematic
stages. In the first stage, the threshold question is whether the request is a valid
one. In the event the Board considers the request to be valid; the next step is
not to simply to provide the accommodation requested, but to inquire as to why
the parents cannot accommodate the specific need in question without involving
the school. In this case, given the widely shared value and tradition of
secularism in the public school system, the answer to this particular question
would be of critical importance to the Board.
Canadians rightfully expect
immigrant groups to make an effort to accommodate themselves to their new
environment. as part of their integration into the Canadian society. Hence, clearly,
if the parents, could accommodate the need themselves that would be the end of
the matter. In this particular case, the parents could have easily accommodated
the specific need for their children to attend the Friday prayer by making sure
that they attend the nearest mosque, during their school lunch hour, on foot or
by public transportation; in the alternative by driving them there and back
while also attending to their own prayer, or, in the further alternative, by
arranging for their transportation by chartering one or more buses.. That would
have been the end of the matter.
This first and most sensible
solution of students attending the nearby mosque did not satisfy either the
requesting group nor the Board: First, from the Board’s perspective they feared
that some or a lot of these students may decide to use the opportunity to play hooky
after the prayer and not return to class, as it happened in the Valley Park
Middle School of a Toronto school district in 2012; and second, from the
requesting group’s perspective, in the mosque, the students would not be
allowed to give sermons.
On the first count, the Board
could have taken the position that playing hooky will not be tolerated and
would be dealt with severely. On the second count, having been born, raised and
educated in Turkey, a Muslim country whose religious credentials are
impeccable, under-age kids giving Friday
or any other kind of religious sermon was in my days and is presently unheard of, possibly save in
schools specifically mandated with the training of imams and only by way of
training. More tellingly, one would not find many, if indeed any, school age
kid skipping school to attend a Friday prayer in a mosque.
In the event, the group claims to
be unable to or refuses to accommodate by itself, then the second stage of the
process is to determine the reason or reasons for the group’s inability or
refusal to accommodate itself. If the
reasons are valid, then this would lead to the third stage where the questions
would focuses on the nature and purpose of the accommodation sought and the
accommodation. granted
Clearly, neither the apprehension
of the school board about students playing hooky nor the insistence on having
the students give sermons are valid reasons that could be given in good faith
in order to avoid proceeding with the simple solution to the problem. And once
again, that would have been the end of the matter.
Instead, the Board proceeded with
the present arrangement, which permits the Muslim students to absent themselves
from regular classroom in order to participate in the Friday prayer. Again, in
Turkey the very notion of failing to attend regular scheduled classes on
account of Friday prayers. or for that matter any one of the prescribed five
daily prayers that fall during classes was and is still not acceptable.
Hence, the Board’s decision to
proceed as it in the name of “inclusiveness and equity” instead created
divisiveness and inequity. and led to the ongoing problems we have been
witnessing thereafter.
The cruel irony of this case is
that by acting as it did, the Board turned the concept of accommodation into a
zero sum game; the zero being awarded , among others, to Muslim parents
who wish their children to attend
secular public schools; the parents of all other faiths who objected
strenuously to importing religious activity into public
schools; against Muslim students who do
not care to mix religion and school who feel pressured or forced to
participate in the religious activity
for fear of being singled out , ridiculed or harassed by his or her Muslim
classmates; the sensitive or private female students who do not care to be
forced to let the world know that she is going through her period; the society
at large whose basic values include secularism and secular public education,
After the establishment of the
school mosques, the Board kept on compounding the problems created by its original decision; first, by reversing itself when particular decision did not suit
the parties who sought the establishment
of the school mosques and their associates; second, by conceding literally
every additional public demand made them, and thirdly, by the Board’s ignorance of the
contents of the prayers and sermons and its refusal to provide full transparency on these proceedings to
calm the anxieties and the anger of the
people who vehemently object to the
whole scheme.
By way of illustration, Tarek Fatah, the
columnist of the “Sun” newspaper, a Muslim, has both testified before a Senate
Committee and written about the fact that in many mosques in Canada and around
the world, there is a specific Friday ritual prayer uttered by imams. This
supplication comes after the sermon, is not obligatory, and the decision not to
utter it does not in any way adversely affect the holiness or solemnness of the
collective community prayer that follows it.
This ritual prayer to Allah is to
grant Muslims victory to non-Muslims: “O Allah pour patience upon Muslims,
strengthen their feet and give them victory over ‘Qawm-el Kafiroon’ (non- “O
Allah, give victory to our brothers the Muslims, the oppressed, the tyrannised
and the ‘Mujahedeen’ (those who fight jihad against non- Muslims Muslims).
Equally objectionable are supplications that curse homosexuals, non-Muslims and
secular Muslims and Jews, the last of which has been documented on numerous
occasions and reported here.
The second party which is both
originally and ultimately responsible for the tragedy is the Liberal government
of Ontario first under McGuinty then under Ms. Wynn. First, despite the
constitutional requirement that the government must be neutral in religious
matters, the Liberals adopted the policy of encouraging prayers in school and
in the work place, provided the prayers were conducted individually but not
collectively. They took this unprecedented step as a matter of political
expediency, without a specific political mandate to do so or proper public
consultations and thorough study of the issue. Second, when the problems of the PSBD and of both the
Muslim and non-Muslim communities about
the PSBD decision began and continued to
hit the fan with increasing , McGuinty and Wynn then as Minister of Education ,and now as Premier, have consistently ran for the
woods. They did so, instead of assuming their responsibilities to provide
peace, order and good government by intervening in a timely fashion, sorting
out and settling all the contentious issues wisely and fairly.
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