A recent Environics poll in association with the CBC, Canada’s national broadcaster, surveying attitudes of and toward Canadian Muslims, seemed to be good news for Canada. It was released and widely reported, it would appear, with an expectation that the findings should have a calming effect on Canadian fears of homegrown terrorism. Since the arrest last summer of 18 Muslims of varying ages for allegedly plotting terrorist attacks in and around Toronto, Canadians have had good reason to be concerned. Unfortunately, there is nothing in the survey to dispel those anxieties. A hard look at the statistics suggests that what occurred in Britain in July 2005--when four British Muslim suicide bombers struck London’s underground railway and a bus, killing 56 fellow citizens--could just as likely happen here.
The survey interviewed 2,545 individuals, 500 of them Muslims. Seventy-three per cent of Muslim respondents described themselves as “very proud” Canadians. When asked how they viewed the arrests of the 18 alleged terrorists, 73 per cent responded, “These attacks were not at all justified,” and 82 per cent said they, “had no sympathy for those who wanted to carry them out.”
Licia Corbella of the Calgary Sun, however, exposed the unsavoury reality buried within the survey. She notes that 12 per cent of Muslims surveyed--a figure amounting to 84,000 in a population of 700,000 Canadian Muslims--identified themselves as extremists supporting terrorism. Even taking into account the margin of error of 4.4 per cent either way in the survey (19 times out of 20) and rounding the figure at seven per cent of the population, the number of Muslims self-identifying as extremists comes to 49,000. To give that figure some context, it means there are more than twice as many extremists in this country as there are soldiers in Canada’s standing army, according to Canadian Conference of Defence Associations statistics.
The CBC spin notwithstanding, the survey is bad news for Canada. In a society open and hospitable to immigrants, Canadians have learned that a sufficiently large number of people belonging to a particular faith tradition, Islam, approve of and may be prepared to engage in violence against their fellow citizens and country. More to the point, the survey shows Canada is not really much different than Britain and some other European countries in harbouring extremist Muslims who hate the West, and who use multiculturalism as a cover for importing sharia-based religious laws into secular democracy.
In a recent opinion piece on the Arab reformist website aafaq.com (made available by MEMRI, the Middle East Media Research Institute), editor Omran Salman suggests Britain is the largest exporter of terrorism in the non-Muslim world. Salman observed that Britain is, “alongside Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Egypt, Algeria, etc., at the top of the list of countries that regularly export terrorists to the rest of the world. The basic difference is that the Islamists in Britain enjoy the protection of the law and the sympathy of many political figures in Britain--or at least their activities and their presence do not present any problem for these political figures.”
For Britain, the end of the empire came with a brutal irony, with those once colonized arriving in such numbers as to change the face of a kingdom that had once ruled a great portion of the world. Muslims in Britain make up a large segment of the new population. The English writer Melanie Phillips titled her book Londonistan quite aptly, for the extremists in their ranks publicly demonstrate their support for Osama bin Laden and the politics of jihad (holy war) against the West and Israel.
Canada is not quite there, but it is also not much behind Britain. There is no colourful public figure in Canadian politics like London’s Mayor Ken “Red” Livingstone who pointedly embraced Sheikh Qaradawi, the notorious preacher of Muslim extremism and jihad on the Arab television station Al Jazeerah. Livingstone compared Qaradawi to Pope John XXIII, the reigning pontiff from 1958 to 1963, remembered as a great reforming pope who strived for harmony among religions.
Livingstone is a notorious headline grabber, but British politicians in general during the decade of Tony Blair’s reign have gone after votes by ingratiating themselves with the most vocal Muslim community leaders--the leader of the Muslim Council for Britain, Iqbal Sacranie, was knighted by the Blair government in 2005. And they’ve been willing to pay a hefty price to win the electoral support of organizations like the Muslim Council for Britain, bending the country’s foreign policy, in rhetoric if not in substance, to accommodate Muslim demands, as in favouring Palestine (opposing Israel) and Kashmir (opposing India).
But Canada’s politicians have proven no different, if less flamboyant, than their British counterparts in courting ethnic votes (see story page 19). Here, as in Britain, public space has been seized by Muslim organizations that have allowed the lines between moderates and extremists in their ranks to become blurred.
The ready explanation advanced in the mainstream media for the increasing extremism among Muslims in the West is the Iraq war. It is by now reflexive among the “sophisticated"--media pundits, academic intellectuals and lib-left public figures from the arts, business and politics--to insist on a causal relationship between President George W. Bush’s “blunder” in Iraq and the global spread of Muslim violence and terrorism. The events of Sept. 11, 2001, which preceded the Iraq war by 18 months, are conveniently forgotten, along with the entire decade before the al Qaeda gang brought down the twin towers in New York City.
What’s not discussed is the role of Saudi Arabia and its allies in nurturing the global spread of the brand of Islam practised in the kingdom. Osama bin Laden now has a blood-drenched quarrel with the Saudi rulers, but his brand of Islam is the same as the official doctrine--Wahhabism--of the House of Saud.
Wahhabism’s founder, Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab (1703-92), made a pact with a desert chief, Muhammad ibn Saud, founder of the House of Saud, that if they attained power, political administration would reside with the Saud clan and religious administration with the al-Wahhab clan. Al-Wahhab’s vision of a return to the seventh-century practices of the Prophet Mohammed and his followers was contained within the sandy wastes of Arabia by Ottoman rulers in Istanbul through the 18th and 19th centuries. But through the early 20th century, a desert warrior of the Saud clan, Abdul Aziz ibn Saud (1876-1953) won power, united much of the desert peninsula of Arabia under his sword, and established the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The tumult brought al-Wahhab’s reformed version of Islam to prominence among the Saudi clan. And wealth from the kingdom’s oil, discovered with American help in 1938, allowed the extreme sectarian teachings of a very petty preacher to be spread far and wide, and funded Saudi Arabia’s expansive ambition to be the dominant voice of the Arab-Muslim world.
Charles Allen, an English historian, in God’s Terrorists: The Wahhabi Cult and the Hidden Roots of Modern Jihad, notes that since 1979, the Wahhabi establishment has distributed an estimated $70 billion to Islamist missionary work. Funds have been provided for running some 10,000 madrassas (schools where learning is mostly limited to memorizing the Koran), and constructing mosques, seminaries and community centres across the Muslim world and the West. Canada has received its share of funding, for mosques built across the country, where Wahhabi preaching prevails and Muslim dissidents are excluded.
Following the money trail explains why so few alarm bells are ringing. Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal reputedly donated $50 million to the Council of American-Islamic Relations recently, to assist in improving understanding of Islam and Muslims in the United States. The prince has also spread his largesse among such reputable American centres of higher learning as Harvard and Georgetown, each having received $20 million. The Islam the prince supports, that CAIR promotes and that many of the universities in the West give the cover of scholarship, is the same Wahhabi version that, in the era before Saudi oil wealth, a majority of Muslims knew to be bigotry cloaked in faith.
The result has been predictable. Muslim reform efforts of the late 19th and early 20th centuries--a sort of renaissance reconciling Islam with the modern world of science and democracy--have been effectively subverted by the oil wealth of desert warriors. Islam has been Arabized into a political ideology--as Islamism in opposition to the West--and Muslim extremists are the vanguards of this global movement, as once communists were directed by the Third International of Stalinists from Moscow.
Canada has drifted perilously in indiscriminately accommodating multicultural demands that, like the push for sharia by Muslim extremists in Ontario in 2005/6, can and will cause harm. Will Canadians awaken and heed Britain’s example as a dire warning? Or will they keep their eyes shut, whether in denial or fear of political incorrectness, and allow their country to become a haven for extremists, with predictable consequences for Canada and its friends? The outcome is likely to be more favourable if Canadians don’t rely on polls or the CBC for their wake-up call.