CAIRO – Canadian Muslim actors, producers and poets are using their art works to address identity and religion problems to counter unrecognizable stereotypes in the North American nation, The Globe And Mail reported on Tuesday, July 5.
“I learned about terrorism from CNN,” said Boonaa Mohammed, a teacher at an Islamic school in Scarborough, Ont.
Being a spoken word poet of Ethiopian extraction, Mohammed celebrates Islamic history in his work by writing poetry about Islamic heroes and values
“After 9/11 you were either brave enough to wave the flag and declare yourself and be proud of your faith or you just shriveled up and tried to blend in,” Mohammed says, explaining his urge to counter unrecognizable stereotypes.
“There was this joke: Mohammed turns into Moe.”
For Canadian Muslim artists, political events and the gap between stereotypes of Islam and their own cultural experiences have provided plenty of inspiration.
Shaped in post 9/11 terrorist attacks era, Alia Toor, a Toronto visual artist, identified herself as a Muslim through art.
Addressing identity and religion through art, Toor, who was born in Pakistan and raised in Canada, created work about security and religion.
“Maybe it would be easier if I just took photographs of Muskoka,” says, “but that is not who I am.”
Muslims make around 1.9 percent of Canada’s 32.8 million population, and Islam is the number one non-Christian faith in the Roman Catholic country.
A survey has showed the overwhelming majority of Muslims are proud to be Canadian.
A 2006 Environics poll of 2,045 Canadians found out that 49 percent of those who had never had a contact with Muslims held a negative view of them.
On the other hand, the majority of 70 percent of those who were often in contact with Muslims had positive views of them.
Arab Hip Hop
Blending their cultural and religious background with westernized Canadian culture, artists represented a new generation of Canadian Muslims who were more capable of addressing their problems.
Now, they use new vocabularies similar to those used in Western media – stand-up comedy, contemporary visual art, documentary film and popular music.
“We learned from the African American community on how to be vocal about our experience artistically,” said Yassin Alsalman, a Montreal rapper known as The Narcicyst who uses the aggressive language of hip hop to denounce the heavy hand of US Homeland Security and the war in Iraq, his parents’ homeland.
Alsalman wrote in an e-mail explaining the development of what is known as Arab hip-hop.
“Before hip hop and the Arab world met, we were silent. Now our generation is speaking out more than ever.”
Unlike Alsalman’s westernized hip hop, other artists, like Tazeen Qayyum, adapted traditional art forms.
Qayyum, a visual artist who lives in Oakville, Ont., trained as a miniaturist in her native Pakistan, creates work about political issues, painting intricate images of cockroaches, for example, that represent the civilian body counts in Iraq.
Yet, artists still disagree about the affect of their work to shift Canadian negative attitudes about Islam and Muslims.
Alsalman, for example, believes that racism is still very prevalent and that the image of Muslims is generally a negative one.
On the other hand, Sabrina Jalees, a comic of Pakistani-Swiss heritage, perceives a gradual change in attitudes since the panic of 2001.
“The racism and the intolerance and ignorance when it comes to Muslims is no longer cool; people know it is unacceptable,” Jalees says.