Hello. I'm Katherine Bullock. When I start my lectures at my university, I usually explain why my name is Katherine Bullock and I'm dressed like this. I converted to Islam in 1994 and I started wearing the head scarf in the same year. I decided not to change my name when I converted.
What I teach as a professor is that one of the key problems of Bill C-51—indeed, of the Canadian counterterrorism approach in general—has been the move from what's called criminal space to prevention space. This is the move from “will” commit an offence to “may” committee an offence. In the move from “will” to “may”, we enter the realm of interpretation.
In an environment of increasing Islamophobia, the “may” space becomes a space of problematizing and criminalizing Muslim faith communities for their everyday practices. Growing a beard or putting on a head scarf becomes a potential security threat rather than a spiritual expression. We have indeed seen this through the recent travel limitations to the United States that were imposed on visibly Muslim individuals simply for who they are.
As a professor in the university system, I am deeply committed to the importance of freedom of expression, freedom of thought, and freedom of conscience. I am especially worried about how Bill C-51 can lead to the curtailment of these core liberal values.
A recent round table with Muslim youth found that while most of them saw political and civic engagement as a key, core aspect of Canadian identity, most of them also felt that there was not enough of it in their community. One reason they gave was the fear amongst the youth of being attacked for voicing their opinions on controversial topics.
A similar finding is in the data collected by the last Environics survey of Canadian Muslim opinion, conducted in 2016, which found that “One in six (17%) says he or she has felt inhibited about doing so because of [race], ethnicity or religion. This impact is...to be expressed [most] by Canadian-born Muslims (32%), those under 35 years of age (24%), and those who have experienced difficulties crossing borders (27%).”
This finding is troubling for three reasons at least. The first, of course, is the signal that a segment of a democratic society feels less than equal to their fellow citizens in expressing their points of view, without which a democracy cannot properly function. The second problem is that the feelings of inhibition, of not feeling free to speak out, are higher amongst Canadian-born and the youth, who are the future of our community, the very segment of the Muslim community who should feel most embraced for their Canadianness. Finally, those who feel inhibited in expressing their political or social opinions also express a weakening sense of belonging to Canada, 13%. I'm sure we don't have to tell you that the best defence Canada has is a population that feels a strong sense of belonging to Canada.
Candice Malcolm, a journalist for TheRebel, in her praise for Bill C-51, argued that “while our rights and freedoms [are sacred and] should never be needlessly sacrificed, freedom means nothing if we are not safe.” In fact, this is not true. Over the centuries, people have sacrificed their lives to bring freedom to their country. Safety without freedom is Pinochet's Chile, Stalin's USSR, Mao's China, Castro's Cuba.
We do not want to turn Canadian Muslims into the canary in the mine, making them into scapegoats, political prisoners, or prisoners of conscience. The terrain for what constitutes support for terrorism currently represents a slippery slope whereby core Muslim traditions and concepts—noble concepts, like sharia, hijab, and even the much-maligned jihad, which is a concept that means “to struggle for justice”, wrongly slandered as “holy war”—are refracted through an Islamophobic lens into prohibited speech in a liberal democracy.
The youths, the converts, the uninformed among the Muslims as well as the wider community need to be able to hold seminars and lectures and round tables and private conversations about these religious verses and traditions and concepts, the very ones the Muslim extremists call upon when trying to justify their turn to violence: what remains of jihad, what are the proper rules of engagement in war, what about participating in secular democracies, what is extremism from an Islamic point of view, what is the sharia, and what is the caliphate?
Bill C-51, Bill C-23, the preceding Anti-terrorism Act and the narrative swirling around it in the mainstream, especially in the right-wing media, do not give us this space to investigate these questions. A thought that cannot be debated in the open, in the cleansing light of day, will go underground and grow up twisted in the swamps of darkness.