Photo: Religious Freedom Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Dr. Andrew Bennett, ambassador to the Office of Religious Freedom, (right) sit down with Lal Khan Malik, national president of Ahmadiyya Muslim Jama'at Canada, prior to announcing the establishment of the Office of Religious Freedom in Vaughan on Tuesday Feb. 19, 2013. (PMO handout)
Source/Credit: Toronto Sun
By Farzana Hassan | February 21, 2013
The Conservative government’s new Office of Religious Freedom purports to condemn religious bigotry across the world. As part of the Foreign Affairs Office, it has been created in response to a worldwide increase in religious persecution. It is also a specific reaction to the March 2011 assassination of Shahbaz Bhatti, the Pakistani Christian minister for minority affairs.
Shahbaz Bhatti was murdered for calling for the repeal of Pakistan’s infamous blasphemy laws, under which Asia Bibi, a Christian woman, still languishes in jail awaiting execution. The governor of the Punjab province in Pakistan, Salmeen Taseer, had been assassinated for the same reason two months earlier.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper chose a mosque in Maple, Ontario this week to announce the establishment of the office. This mosque hosts the Ahmediya Muslims, a historically persecuted and marginalized religious community in Pakistan declared non-Muslim by Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto’s government in 1974.
The Ahmediyas have indeed endured terrible persecution in Pakistan, as have the Shias; the most recent outrage against the latter group was last week’s bombing of a market in Quetta, which killed almost ninety. Sikhs, Hindus and other designated religious minorities also suffer persecution in Pakistan. The Copts face dangers in Egypt every day, and Christians have been slaughtered periodically in Nigeria by the radical group Boko Haram.
The new department is a valuable first move to uphold freedom of conscience and freedom of religion as fundamental human rights. This may be symbolic, but symbolism can matter.
The office purports to work against religious intolerance and to protect religious minorities who are marginalized or threatened. It also seeks to export Canadian values of moderation. Admirable goals, but still there must be concerns about its scope. The department will promote religious freedom worldwide, but will it also embrace vulnerable dissident Muslim voices in Canada who advocate full equality for Muslim women and eschew jihad and violence in the name of Islam?
Toronto Sun columnist Tarek Fatah and I received a death threat in 2007 for “insulting” Islam and being “hypocrites”, for which both of us ought to be “slaughtered.” Even after six years, those words are bone-chilling. Writers like Fatah and I live constantly under the shadow of such threats and face the wrath of angry co-coreligionists simply for speaking our minds on the ills that plague Muslim societies across the world.
The persecuted Christians, Hindus, Sikhs, Shias and Ahmediyas of the world are indeed targets. But reform-minded Muslim dissidents can also be. The label “hypocrite” may seem innocuous enough to most Canadians, but orthodox Islamic discourse considers hypocrites to be on the lowest rung of the ladder and worthy of execution.
Many fundamentalist Muslims would, at least in private, support such a fate for any progressives in their midst. Hopefully the new office, with its stated purpose of “opposing religious hatred and intolerance,” will offer some protection to vulnerable Muslims in Canada.
Through its research, its policy statements, and its initiatives in enforcing and expanding current hate laws, the office hopefully will enhance religious tolerance at least in Canada, though this all seems a tall order given the paltry size of the budget for the office.
Despite this limitation, the office is a useful first step. Its brief needs to be fine-tuned in the coming months to include designated as well as non-designated at-risk religious groups like reformist Muslims within Canada and abroad.
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— Hassan is author of Unveiled: A Canadian Muslim Woman’s struggle against Misogyny, Sharia and Jihad
Read original post here: Protect vulnerable Muslims in Canada
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