Salim Mansur: Call To Prayer and the Rule Of Law

When mayors and city councillors favour one group ahead of the rest, the rest need to sound the alarm. To warn its residents and taxpayers that the rule of law has been subverted.

If not checked and reversed, then the rule of law, which binds people together in our beloved democracy, will unravel and eventually break.

The raging controversy surrounding the public Call to Prayer during Ramadan is an example of local politicians privileging one group of people, in this instance, based on their religion, over the rest.

Given the ongoing pandemic and shutdown of the economy, this should not be prioritized.

In any political setting, there are at least two sets of actors. In this Call to Prayer controversy, there are at a minimum three sets of actors. 

There are the municipal councillors and the mayors, religious Muslims charged with mosque-related activities, and the rest of the residents and taxpayers from these municipalities.

The public has been informed during the lockdown that apart from those working in designated essential services, everyone else needs to abide by the rules and by-laws (including noise by-law) for this period, promulgated and enforced by the three levels of government. 

People have been warned of penalties if these rules are broken, all the while religious institutions are prohibited from performing service to their congregation. This is especially true during the most significant occasions in their faith. 

As we have witnessed, churches were not allowed to hold Easter services on Good Friday and Easter Sunday. Christians were denied gatherings in churches, as were the Jews in synagogues for Passover.

But now, we see an exception unilaterally granted by municipal authorities in Mississauga and in the Greater Toronto Area, in granting permission – or in not enforcing the requisite rules and by-laws during the lockdown – to mosques allowing the Islamic Call for Prayer during Ramadan.

Why the exception was made has yet to be explained by the respective authorities.

If the rationale was to accommodate the religious practices of Muslims, then why haven’t such accommodations been extended to Christians, Jews, and other religious groups?

Why was this request from religious institutions not foreseen and allowance made equally for all religions when the authorities were engaged in writing the by-laws and voting on them?

With municipal governments engaging in political favouritism, they openly insult non-Muslims by not considering its consequences long term for a secular society.

Speaking from experience, the authoritarian decision-making was advocated by the vocal sub-set of Islamists who administrate mosques across Canada.

The Islamist mindset is not about religion as a private matter between man and God or in a communal setting where ‘brothers’ and ‘sisters’ pray. It is about religion, Islam, as a politicized weapon to be wielded for Islamist supremacy over non-Muslims and other Muslims that are not of their tribe.

The Call to Prayer in public is a matter of tradition and not doctrinal faith.

The first requirement of tradition in a pluralist society, however, ought to be respect for others and earning their goodwill for the maintenance of peace and order across all peoples.

Canada is not Turkey or Iran, Pakistan or Saudi Arabia. Mississauga and the GTA are not Istanbul, Cairo, or Karachi, where thousands of mosques issue the Call for Prayer five times a day. The Muslim majority populations of these countries take this tradition for granted as a signature item to their respective cultures.

In Canada, like elsewhere in western liberal democracies, Islamists are bent upon pushing their supremacist agenda for a parallel Sharia-based society in the name of politically weaponized Islam. It is this agenda that is at play in the Call for Prayer controversy.

Through the guise of multiculturalism, under section 27 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the stealth jihad of Islamists in the Call to Prayer becomes obligatory, as is adorning the hijab/niqab for Muslim women.

Muslims not disposed to Islamists, or are unwilling to engage publicly in opposing Islamists for any number of reasons, of which fear of Islamists within their mosque community is uppermost, are taken for granted by Islamists because they will not protest openly against the Islamist agenda.

Consequently, by default and through intimidation of non-Islamist Muslims, the Islamists claim authority as the sole representatives of Islam.

Those politicians and political parties reaching out to Islamists and coordinating with Islamist policies, as in this case of accommodating Call to Prayer, have empowered them to speak for and represent Muslims in general while ignoring Muslim opinion that is anti-Islamist.

In municipalities where the Call to Prayer has minimally aroused negative views, the question, or concern, is if there are enough people prepared to challenge the authorities on the unfairness of giving special allowance for Muslims when such allowance is not extended to others.

Unless enough, if not a majority, of the public, express their strong disapproval of how the rule of law is bent for Muslims in general, the privileging of Islam over other religious traditions in Canada, a secular liberal democracy, will proceed unchecked.

So, what keeps the majority of the Canadian public not sufficiently moved to express strongly their disapproval of what their politicians are bent on doing?

Again, the answer is not difficult or obscure. Enough members of the public are both lacking in information and understanding of the situation. They are fearful of expressing publicly any politically incorrect opinion, which would then bring about accusations of bigotry directed at them by the mainstream media and the politicians who exploit such tensions to their advantage.

Non-Muslims concerned by these tensions primarily ask, as many ask me, why is it that those Muslims who disagree with Islamists, and if they are a majority, not publicly oppose Islamists? This is a fair question.

But then it is a question which can be asked of the public at large, who are a majority in the majority non-Muslim country: Why is the majority not sufficiently moved to disapprove such political favouritism and hold their representatives accountable firmly?

The failure of the Canadian public to defend the rule of law, as we witnessed while it’s most egregious undermining by Justin Trudeau and his Liberal government during the SNC-Lavalin affair in the 2019 election, inevitably has grave consequences.

When politicians and elected authorities can get away with subverting the rule of law, as is happening, and for which they are not held to account, we witness our country descend further into the chaos of unbridled identitarianism.

Countries with authoritarian leanings lack a culture of democracy and freedom, as do most Muslim-majority countries. And this is the direction where Canada is headed as we concede to the Islamist agenda.