Discussion challenges religious stereotypes

Julia Redmond

The Silhouette

It has been said that September 11, 2001 is “the day the world changed.” At a recent lecture and teach-in, McMaster students were given the opportunity to explore what that really means.

Just over a month after the ten-year anniversary, on October 19, people braved Hamilton’s driving rain to participate in an event organized by McMaster Muslims for Peace and Justice.

The session, entitled “9/11 – Then and Now” was introduced as an opportunity to hear and challenge ideas. “Intellectually speaking, university should be a dangerous place,” vice-president Mariam El-Fawal said before introducing the speakers for the evening.

Three members of the McMaster community were in attendance to give their thoughts on 9/11 and the role of Islam in the world today.

First, Dr. Virginia Aksan of McMaster’s Department of History gave what she called “a riff on the cultural origins of Islamophobia.”

Drawing from her knowledge of the history of the Ottoman Empire, she explained the “cultural amnesia” that the world is experiencing when it comes to Islam, and that it can trace its roots back to early Enlightenment thinking. She also called for the abolishment of Islamophobia today.

“Our society drives civility, but is not really a civil society,” explained Aksan, insisting that a paradigm shift is necessary.

Next, Ken Stone of the Canadian Coalition Against Racism took to the podium. He told the story of the local incident that happened on September 15, 2001—the burning of a Hindu temple, mistaken for a mosque by its vandal. He spoke fondly of how the community came together in the wake of the incident, raising money to rebuild the temple and creating the Hamilton Centre for Civic Inclusion.

He would like to see a similar reaction to recent Islamophobic incidents, he said, namely Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s speech a month ago in which he claimed that the major threat to Canada in the wake of 9/11 “is still Islamicism.”

The last lecturer of the evening was Dr. Atif Kubursi, professor emeritus of Economics at McMaster and current Arts and Science professor.

Like Dr. Aksan, he argued that Islamic society had made a significant contribution to western civilization; it was in the Ottoman Empire that the foundations of science and mathematics were laid, for example, and where the world’s first university was founded: “McMaster can eat its heart out,” he joked.

Kubursi also made the more controversial suggestion that 9/11 “was not such a watershed.” Rather, he argued, it provided an excellent pretext for the United States to assert their power in the Middle East in an effort to establish hegemony.

The audience was given the opportunity to respond to these arguments from the speakers when the session moved into the discussion portion of the “teach-in.”

The students in attendance engaged in conversation about such topics as the role of the UN in a post-9/11 world, conspiracy theories about the terrorist attacks, the importance of oil as a commodity, and the political power of the United States, to name a few.

McMaster Muslims for Peace and Justice plans to run similar teach-ins over the course of the year.