Middle East Media and Book Reviews Online Volume 1, Issue 1 | Page 31

2/2/2016

Middle East Media and Book Reviews Online

Islam in the Hinterlands: Muslim cultural politics in Canada
By: Jasmin Zine
Islam in the Hinterlands: Muslim cultural politics in Canada. Vancouver, BC, Canada: UBC Press, 2012. 340pp. $90.00.
ISBN: 978-0774822732.
Volume: 1 Issue: 1
April 2013
Review by
Paul Rowe, PhD
Trinity Western University
British Columbia, Canada
Since the events of September 11, 2001, Muslims across the Western world have endured challenges to their citizenship and sense of belonging.
The security concerns that arose in the wake of that day have had a deep impact on Muslims, as their loyalties have been questioned, their lives
marked for surveillance and criminal profiling, and their status as residents called into doubt. The concern that Muslims might constitute a sort of
fifth column of radical Islamism has become a common theme of numerous speaking tours, books, and websites. Many Muslims and others have
raised concern over the spread of “Islamophobia” as a result of the fear generated throughout these media.
The impact of these influences on the cultural politics of Canada sets the backdrop for this collection of essays. While cultural pluralism is a source
of pride for most Canadians, several developments over the past decade have drawn attention to the ways in which Canadian cultural politics have
proved punitive toward Muslims. One was the 2004 refusal of the Ontario government to contemplate adding Shari‘a courts to approved forms of
personal arbitration amid widespread suspicion of Muslim social mores. Another was the ongoing use of “security certificates” by the Canadian
government to detain a number of Muslims suspected of ties to international terrorism without publicly revealing any evidence. Yet another was the
passage of an infamous 2007 Citizen’s Code in the town of Herouxville, Quebec, which pointedly sought to “inform new arrivals” to the way of life
in Quebec where women could drive, hold a job, and be certain that they would not be killed or publicly beaten—the assumption being that
immigrant cultures did not share similar values. That same year saw the death of Aqsa Parvez, a Pakistani teenager killed as the subject of a socalled “honor killing”. The scholars contributing to this book hold that these developments and others provide normative ways in which Canadian
society forms boundaries to marginalize and exclude immigrant communities.
The collection holds together well as a set of critical reflections. The contributors are almost all Muslim scholars based in Canadian universities,
working in the fields of communication, sociology, political science, religion, and education. Most of the authors view the issue of Muslim
absorption into Canadian culture through the lens of critical theories of race, culture, and gender. In this sense, the editor understands the effort
made by these scholars as a sort of authentic “jihad” for understanding, awareness, and social justice (p. 34). The contributors use several different
methods, including content analysis of prominent local newspapers, interviews with young Muslim women, and historical and documentary
analysis of relevant texts. Their focus is on the use of media and public policy as a means of reinforcing how the essentialized Muslim “Other”
differs from the equally essentialized Canadian identity. The collection is well written and the difficult editorial task of bringing together a diverse
set of scholars on a topic such as this has been ably performed by Dr. Zine.
Throughout the text, the contributors marshal evidence well to make the point. They use a widely varying analysis to point to ways that Muslims are
classified as outsiders to an essentialized Canadian identity. The two content analyses of Canadian news