Middle East Media and Book Reviews Online Volume 1, Issue 1

2/2/2016 Middle East Media and Book Reviews Online articulate what it is that genuinely inspires her about Islam renders her critique unpersuasive and unmoving even to worldly and self-critical Muslims” (p. 156). Ironically, though Muslims are said to be marginalized by Orientalist and racist tropes in Canadian society, they do possess enough agency to become a part of the story of their own marginalization. But this complexity points to some of the limitations of race theory, Orientalism, and Islamophobia as theoretical tools. Critical race theory often seems a little over determined and occasionally petulant in the Canadian context. First, Canada has not (yet?) seen the most egregious forms of Islamophobia, like arguments over mosque construction, or wide-ranging headscarf bans. Muslims are well-connected in Canadian society, boasting a higher-than-average level of education and participating in both formal electoral politics (indicated by the number of Muslims voted into electoral office) and in informal politics of community organization (as indicated by Katherine Bullock in her contribution to this volume). Canada has also provided the context in which the reconstruction of the social imaginary of the Muslim in the form of the unique sitcom Little Mosque on the Prairie has taken place, as is explored by Aliaa Dakroury in her chapter. There are other problems and limitations that arise out of the use of critical and race theory. The first is that Muslims are not all immigrants and the category of Muslim, though most often tied to immigrant communities, is also a religious category that can be divorced from race. Religion as a category can be understood as a concept that is different from race in the sense that it is cognitive: it is subject to defense and debate, and its very nature is heterogeneous and malleable over time, making it a unique social category. Many of the problems that are identified with race in this volume could also be said of other religious communities who do not suffer the same racial stigmas as Muslims. For example, the assertions about gendering in certain cultures are frequently made about fundamentalist, evangelical, and Mormon communities. Equally, the refusal of the government of Ontario to countenance Shari’a law courts also led to the elimination of all forms of religious arbitration in that province, granted as a means of seeking to overshadow what might otherwise have been a basic form of racial prejudice. What is more, the problems faced by Muslims in achieving their rights amid the educational system in Ontario are shared by many religious communities. Nadeem Memon’s observation in his chapter that Islamic schools are a creation of “parents who espouse a sentiment of selective engagement with public institutions in Canada” (p. 200) could just as easily describe the motivations of Christian school parents. One wonders how the constructivist use of religion as a social category might be helpful to put in dialogue with these critical assessments. Occasional logical jumps and editorial problems mar the text. For example, Flatt’s content analysis judges perceptions of Muslims in sample that is already selected based on references to security certificates. The application of this sample to coverage of Muslims as a whole suffers from an ecological fallacy. She also immediately associates these articles’ depiction of immigrant men as “Muslim males”, even if those descriptors are not evidenced in the manifest content. Finally, there are occasional editorial problems that are relatively minor but nonetheless irritating. Strangely, the editors seem to have used an odd variant spelling, ignoring the usual standard transliteration of the term Shari’a. Nevertheless, Islam in the Hinterlands stands as a fascinating contribution to scholarship of critical race studies, Muslim status in Western societies, and the politics of Islam and politics in the Canadian context. Middle East Media and Book Reviews Online http://localhost/membr/review.php?id=17 2/2

Middle East Media and Book Reviews Online Volume 1, Issue 1 | Page 32