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How two moms and a teacher are helping Toronto celebrate Islamic Heritage Month
10-04-2017
Bilal Moore, 16, went to school for the first time this year. Previously he was home-schooled by his mom, who has some vocational training in education, and he took some virtual learning classes. His mom worried at the lack of multicultural education in the Toronto District School System—she worried that he wouldn’t have a full education that included his Islamic heritage.
“I learnt about my heritage at home, but I know a lot of my friends who are in school who have felt like they don’t really know a lot about their history,” said Moore. “They know more about other people’s history over theirs because they grew up here and went to the schools here.”
Moore has never seen any mention of Muslim contributions in the textbooks he has now. He lists the things his history class never talks about: Algebra was invented by Muslims; coffee, too.
“They don’t even know that the zero was invented by Muslims,” he exclaims, excitedly.
But a new initiative will address this as TDSB celebrates Islamic Heritage Month for the month of October.
Islamic Heritage Month has been a federally designated event since 2007, (Ontario made it official last year), but little has been done to mark it. This realization brought together two mothers and a TDSB educator, who have created a poster of 12 Muslim Canadians who have made significant contributions to Canadian life, a resource guide for educators to use to plan events and classes during the month, and a series of events to help raise awareness.
The poster will be placed in all 580 schools in the TDSB, and viewed by 250,000 students. Some of the names are recognizable: Minister of Immigration, Ahmed Hussen; the first refugee elected to office, Maryam Monsef, Ontario’s Attorney General, Yasir Naqvi, and the Mayor of Calgary, Naheed Nenshi. Others include Toronto Maple Leafs hockey player, Nazem Kadri, the Raptors In-Arena Host, Mark Strong, and the first hijab-wearing news anchor, Ginella Massa.
“There’s a whole spectrum of who identifies as Muslim,” said Nazerah Shaikh, a co-chair of the initiative. “It’s important for all kids to see themselves, among teachers, among professionals and to be inspired to aspire to something.”
Shaikh and her co-chair, Haniya Sheikh, are moms of Muslim children and parent representatives to the TDSB. Their project has been entirely grassroots, beginning by contacting friends who contacted their friends. The discussions took place on the social media platform WhatsApp, and the designing and writing took place on Google Docs.
Educators, parents, community members, Islamic schools and TDSB officials created lists of over 100 books, movies, music, art projects, poets, artists, athletes—which they collated in an all-encompassing resource book with a primer on Islam and Muslim Canadians for educators. All of it was vetted by TDSB officials.
“We have educators who don’t know very much about Muslims and what they believe in,” said Qaiser Ahmad, the head of guidance at Albert Campbell Collegiate, and another member of the team. “We wanted teachers to have an authentic resource that could be used and drawn upon when they were doing their curriculum work.”
“I think Islam and Muslims are the most misunderstood population right now in 2017,” said Shaikh. “This is a really nice, friendly way to create a cultural dialogue, a cultural understanding, and to help address ignorance.
“That’s the whole beauty of heritage months, whether it be Islamic, Jewish, Black,” she said. “It creates a wonderful setting for that dialogue to help our neighbours understand more about their own neighbours.”
Sheikh’s children have heard Islamaphobic slurs around the playground when they were as young as nine years old. Shaikh, who grew up in the U.S, is unsettled by the negativity trickling into Canada after the election of U.S. President Donald Trump.
Three months into their project, the shooting at the Quebec Mosque happened, making the resource book and the month-long events even more important. Shaikh and Sheikh were on a conference call just as the news broke. Thousands of volunteer hours later, they launched the book and the poster at the Aga Khan Museum on Sept. 25 in the presence of an excited Muslim community and representatives from all three levels of the government.
“One of the things we know, from the feedback we get from our students, is that they do so much better when they see themselves reflected in the curriculum that’s in front of them,” said Jim Spryopoulos, executive superintendent for equity and engagement at the TDSB. “And we know we have a lot of learning to do. This resource book is a start.”
In the book, there’s a letter Einstein wrote to Kemal Ataturk, founder of the Republic of Turkey in 1933. He asks Attaturk to take the Jews into Turkey and help them escape the violence of the Nazis. “We don’t remember this. And the fact that we have that letter in our guidebook somehow, that’s phenomenal,” said Ahmad.
“It’s going to help,” said Moore, who will perform at an Islamic musical event during the month.
“People will finally understand why you wear a hijab, why you don’t eat pork, why you fast for 30 days.”
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