A Toronto imam said yesterday he did not intend to insult non-Muslims during an address at his mosque on those who want the niqab and burka banned.
Said Rageah, the imam at Toronto’s Abu Huraira Centre, said that only someone who did not understand Islam would have come away from last Friday’s prayers thinking that anyone at his mosque hated members of other faiths.
He was specifically addressing an article that appeared in the National Post on Thursday in which some critics said the language he used was inflammatory.
Imam Rageah used a prayer last week that, in part, said “Allah destroy them from within themselves, and do not allow them to raise their heads in destroying Islam.” And in another part of he asked Allah to “damn the infidels.”
Imam Rageah yesterday said in a brief interview that in both references he was not literally meaning “destroy” but rather to confound or weaken those that would infringe on their rights.
In last week’s address, he used the word “kuffar” repeatedly, a word some say is highly derogatory of non-Muslims, especially Christians and Jews. Tarek Fatah, a Canadian Muslim commentator, likened the word to a racist slur.
Walid Saleh, professor at the study of religion at the University of Toronto, said this week that kuffar could be seen as a neutral term. But given the way so many ordinary people understand it today, the imam could simply have used terms like “Jews” and “Christians” that would have no danger of being misinterpreted.
But yesterday, Imam Rageah said the word is mentioned more than 500 times in the Koran and it would make no sense for Allah to have used a word repeatedly that was so offensive.
“The word has more than one meaning,” he said. “It’s not always negative but it can be negative. Now if the suggestion is, ‘Why don’t we avoid the word,’ that’s an excellent suggestion. But until this issue was raised we didn’t think people found the word insulting.”
When the word is used negatively, he said, it can apply to Muslims who are liars or non-Muslims who are active enemies of the faith.
At yesterday’s prayer service there were close to 1,000 men in attendance, most of whom were dressed in western garb. As well, the vast majority of women entering the mosque through a separate entrance did not have their faces covered.
Earlier this month, the Canadian Muslim Congress called on Ottawa to ban the wearing of the burka or niqab in public.
They said the right should not be protected by the Charter’s guarantee of religious freedom because nowhere in the Koran is there a requirement for women to cover their faces in public, though it does call for modesty. They argue that the burka “marginalizes women.”
Imam Rageah said no one group should try to trample the rights of others. For example, he said no Muslim should ever walk up to someone with multi-coloured hair and say that they object to that person’s style.
He acknowledged that many countries, including Muslim countries, restrict free speech, and said it was important that Muslims in Canada exercise their rights by writing to MPs and the media to protest those that would restrict their faith.