“We should remember, a mosque was not just attacked. On that day, the freedom of speech, the freedom of values, the freedom of religion was attacked. It could happen to any place of worship.”
Source/Credit: Regina Leader-Post
By Barb Pacholik | February 7, 2017
The lone man with a hard-to-miss, lime-green sign stood outside the Regina mosque.
As worshippers walked down the steps and caught sight of him, nervous looks quickly gave way to smiles and thankful nods.
“You are welcome,” read the first line in black marker. “You are loved/Canada wants you here/As-Salamu Alaykum.” The last phrase means peace be with you in Arabic.
The idea wasn’t original — Cody Hutchinson borrowed it from a fellow down in Texas — but his effort was singular.
It’s easy to sit at home on a wintery day in Regina; Hutchinson chose to take a stand outside Mahmood Mosque.
He knows something of the sting of prejudice and of policies aimed at undermining and dividing people. “Being First Nations, I know what it’s like to be behind the eight-ball of public opinion.”
Hutchinson is a child of the Sixties Scoop, when hundreds of First Nations children were adopted out to white families. When he eventually found his birth mother, she recalled how she’d seen him as a newborn for five minutes before the mother and child were forcibly separated, with a warning that there was nothing she could do about it.
Hutchinson was with the Canadian military for 18 years, service which took him overseas and left him with PTSD. “I don’t really talk about it.”
When Syrian refugees started coming to Regina last year, he pitched in as a volunteer. “Each and every one of them that I talked to were just happy to be here,” he told the critics he faced. “I’ve been in a war zone, and I’ve seen how horrible it is. I don’t blame them for wanting to get out.”
And so Hutchinson stood outside on Friday — “just to let them know they’re not alone.”
Like many mosques around the country, Mahmood Mosque, spiritual home for the city’s Ahmadiyya Muslims, threw open the doors to visitors a week after the tragic events in Montreal. They’ve laid out the welcome mat even before then.
One of the hosts was Zeeshan Ahmed, the imam who moved here from Toronto when the new mosque opened last year.
His family, fleeing persecution, came to Canada from Pakistan when he was a year old. “They couldn’t practise their religion in the country they were in,” Ahmed explained. Ahmadiyya Muslims, a religion founded in India and which believes the messiah has already come, risk prison, even death, in some countries.
They chose Canada for their new home and refuge specifically for its values, freedoms and acceptance.
It echoed of something University of Regina lecturer Zainab Azadbakht told me hours earlier when she spoke out against the U.S. travel bans. Born in Iran, she has lived in Canada for nine years. Her father deliberately chose this country for his family. “He wanted us to have a better chance of freedom and living.”
They are the same reasons my own grandparents came here decades ago.
As I talked with the imam about the events in Montreal and the U.S. bans, he voiced a notion that’s been rattling around in my own brain. While much of the focus has been on religion, it’s really an attack on human rights.
“We should remember, a mosque was not just attacked,” Ahmed said. “On that day, the freedom of speech, the freedom of values, the freedom of religion was attacked. It could happen to any place of worship.”
Within days of the shootings in Montreal, I roamed through the Canadian Museum for Human Rights in Winnipeg for the first time. There’s a wall as you enter the breathtakingly beautiful space that features snippets from world human rights history – sort of two-steps forward, one-step back progress. The Canadian Bill of Rights – a leap forward – Indian residential schools – a giant step back. And I found myself thinking how killing people at prayer in a Montreal mosque, in the midst of the U.S. travel ban on those from Muslim-dominated countries, will now find a place on that wall. They are crimes by a Canadian who felt emboldened in an atmosphere that advocates for walls instead of bridges.
Many words have been written since those events, and by those more powerful than this lowly scribe. And for that reason, I wondered what more I could add.
But then I thought about one of the last places I visited at the human rights museum. It focused on the Holocaust, and more specifically, on those who never spoke out as the rights of one group of people were slowly eroded — until millions of lives were taken.
And so like Cody Hutchinson, I hoped even the smallest of efforts might have an impact.
bpacholik@leaderpost.com
Read original post here: Canada: Taking a stand 'to let them know they're not alone'
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