Hussein Hoballah, Sada al-Mashrek
Among the projects of the Institute for Islamic Studies at the University of Toronto is the Muslims in Canada Archives (MiCA), which according to the institute’s website is “a collaborative and participatory initiative that provides a platform for the missing Muslim voices in Canada.”
Sada al-Mashrek has spoken to Anver Emon, Professor of Law and History and Director of the Institute of Islamic Studies at the University of Toronto, who was originally born and raised in Los Angeles, California, and whose parents are originally from Hyderabad, India.
Why has the MiCA project been launched?
In 2018, when I became director of the institute, I was very interested in what an institute like this in a public university and democratic Canada should do on the study of Islam. I’m an academic and advanced researcher. I’m a believer in the virtue of advanced research for its own sake, but I also knew that the study of Islam is politicised, so I did a consultation, and my stakeholder, community organisations, government folks and faculty advised me on what important, big-ticket things that a university is uniquely positioned to do are. One of the ideas that came up is we need to change the narrative of Muslims in Canada. How do we do that without the stuff that makes Muslim life? And so universities are well-positioned to be home to archives because they have libraries, IT departments and storage facilities, and that’s how it was born.
Which archive exactly helps your project: a personal one, that of community activities or that of students at the universities?
Everything, so we don’t discriminate on who or where. Our job is to simply have a discussion with potential donors. Obviously, for many of the first lookers, it’s, “Oh, Muslim organisations are very important!” And they are, but I actually think just the ordinary person doing his job, the storekeeper, the guy that works for the government, the guy that takes his family out, or the woman that does the grocery shopping for the family in the local market are as important. The same can be said about one who spends her life in the field of public health, taking care of other people; that’s really a noble profession, and these are people that are leaving their own legacy in Canada, so I’m not looking for anyone or anything in particular. The archive is here, simply to document Muslim contributions across the board. And that could be as ordinary as working your life in a profession or as extraordinary as being prime minister.
Do you get in touch with non-Muslims to learn about their experiences with Muslims, for instance, like churches inviting Muslims to their activities, or synagogues/Jewish groups or Sikhs?..
Our aim as an archive is to centre the Muslim voice, perspective and collection, so our focus is on people or organisations that identify as Muslim in Canada with all the different variations of what that can be, so if they’re or have been in Canada, and if they identify as Muslim, that’s our focus. We’re not at the stage where we’re looking at other organisations and what they do with or for Muslims. We’re not at that stage yet; we’re focusing on centring the Muslim voice.
What about those considered Muslims but are against Islam? Do you take their archive?
We are donor-driven. If the donor identifies himself or herself or themselves as Muslim, then they qualify for being Muslim; we don’t have a test.
So Sunni, Shi’a, Ahmadi, Ismailia, gay, lesbian and even Islamophobes – Muslims who contribute to Islamophobia, if they identify as Muslims.
What about the political background – let’s say Muslims who are accused of anti-Semitism or whatever, will you take their archives?
As a policy, we don’t promote hate, so does that mean that the person is disqualified from contributing? You can contribute whatever you want. Whether or not we can preserve, maintain or digitise it – subject to our non-discrimination policies- is a different story.
We’ll always have a conversation with whomever decides that they have something that fits our mandate.
You talk about being interested in any event of the Muslim-community. For example, a centre that holds a celebration for new 9-year-old hijabis every year, which gets attacked by media. They are not promoting hate. Are you interested in such an event? It’s part of the culture; hijab is a teaching of Islam.
If the donor identifies themselves as Muslim, and they have records that contribute to the Muslim footprint in Canada, then that’s our mandate. Again, we can’t discriminate. We don’t do theology tests or political-correctness tests. We won’t promote hate, obviously, but we must walk that line very carefully because as an archive, our mission is maximal inclusion; sometimes that’s good, and sometimes that reveals bad or ugly findings, but every archive does that. For instance, whenever the US National Archives declassifies documents, those documents oftentimes show that the government made mistakes or acted badly. The US-government CIA did not predict the ‘Soviet testing of a nuclear bomb,’ and there are documents that are there.
After 9/11, what did the National Archives do? The CIA declassified documents, why? It had wanted to hide its incompetence. So we have to be mindful that documentation is about putting the light on all things related to Muslim life, and not all of it is pretty, nice or fair. But 150 years or 200 years from now, when we’re all dead, the historians will look at these records and try to make sense of them.
You talk about donors to archives, will you pay if it’s important?
No, we don’t pay for archives, but if there’s an archive that is significant enough, and if we know it has historical value that we would like, we’re willing to consider the possibility of doing an analysis of it from a tax perspective so that we can issue a tax receipt because we’re a non-for-profit corporation that’s a charity; we can issue tax receipts. We do not do appraisals as a matter of course.
Should the archived documents be in English/French or could it be in the native language of the donor? For example, our newspaper, for 25 years, has been in Arabic.
Any language can come in. Our archivists have capacity, as of now, in Farsi, in Pashtu, and we have some Arabic competency. I’m hiring some staff with Arabic and Punjabi competence, so our job is to make sure that we can manage the languages.
With respect to digital-dissemination-platform design, we are bilingual with respect to the Canadian public, so it’s an English and French bilingual platform.
The interview was done during an event organised by COR, an association that promotes communication, openness and cultural ties, in collaboration with L'Université Laval. Before Professor Emon spoke, a speech was made on behalf of Chairman of the Muslim MPs Parliamentary Assembly, Sameer Zuberi. Then COR Chairwoman Samira Laouni addressed her association’s scope of work. Kathryn LaRoche, the Assistant Professor at the Department of Anthropology at L'Université Laval interpreted Emon’s speech into French.