Our closed open minds

Globe and Mail Thursday, June 6, 2002

At first blush, what links the travails of a 12-year-old Montrealer, Gurbaj Singh, whose right to carry a Sikh kirpan to school is being challenged by the Quebec government, and the harassment of a 22-year-old Harvard student, Zayed Yasin, for including the word jihad in the title of his graduation speech today, is simply the failure of tolerance. In both cases, cliché images prevail over reality, prejudice over principle. And there is the shadow of mob justice, made longer and darker in the aftermath of the events of last September.

But there is more to these latest episodes of bigotry in Boston, Quebec and elsewhere on the continent than mounting the learning curve that comes with the arrival of "strangers" in our midst, especially in times of crisis. We are seeing the fault lines in how this society deals with notions of the secular and the sacred.

How quaint it seems that as recently as the 1990s, mainstream Canada went into a furor over the right of Sikhs to wear turbans with their RCMP uniforms -- despite the fact that this country abounds with sentimental photographs from a century ago of the British army, whose ranks included turban-wearing Sikh soldiers. How odd it seems that Ontario, too, sought to ban kirpans in a country where gun control faces active resistance.

There is also irony in the campaign of hate (and even a death threat) directed at Zayed Yasin by pro-Israeli and other fellow students. Hilary Levey, who organized the opposition to Mr. Yasin's speech, was quoted in a New Jersey newspaper as claiming that she felt on behalf of the victims of the Sept. 11 attacks like she'd been "kicked in the stomach." Never mind that the Harvard officials who had seen the text of the speech found that Mr. Yasin's "jihad, like ours, is to promote justice and understanding in ourselves and in our society."

What does it say of a country at war with religious zealots abroad that its own elite students fail to grasp the meaning of free speech and open inquiry even within the secure confines of an ivory tower? (To their credit, some local U.S. journalists used the occasion to expose the appalling persecution that Arab- and Muslim-Americans have faced in recent months, not least from municipal and federal authorities who even treated praying Muslims as potential terrorists. This is quite apart from the routine harassment of air travellers with Muslim names, dark complexions and beards.)

But it is hardly a serious challenge to prove that kirpans have never been the cause of violence, or that jihad is not a slogan for militancy but an idea steeped in spirituality. Besides, North Americans have had more than a century's experience of fateful encounters with migrant "others," including the legacy of slavery, to learn the lessons of pluralism.

What's striking about these latest failures of tolerance is that they betray a deeper malaise, one that goes to the wellsprings of the pluralist ethos that we prize. It is hinted at in the plaintive insistence of an angry Quebec parent who argued, "You have to adapt to the rules when you come here." Those rules are, at bottom, about the separation of church and state -- into which is assimilated, alas, the dichotomy of secular and sacred.

Civil society does, indeed, thrive on a healthy institutional distance between religion and politics. This cornerstone of constitutional law is a worthy prescription for many a war-torn society in Asia and Africa today. But the notion that it requires citizens to park their religious affinities at the door every time they enter the public arena is invidious.

For Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims -- and, at one time, Christians and Jews -- the idea of freedom of religion would be utterly bereft if those affinities were thus compartmentalized.

Outside of our modern version of the Judeo-Christian ethic, the secular world is not sundered from the sacred as if "reality" were a schizophrenic dream. Leaving the kirpan at home is an easy surrender to that schizophrenia, rather like forgetting that Mohammed famously deemed true jihad to be the constant struggle against one's baser instincts, including intemperate behaviour.

What binds Eastern ethics most visibly is the emphasis on moral restraint; no amount of militant yelling to the contrary can alter that.

Civic space is enriched by religious fidelities that require respect for the integrity of communities as well as individuals. That is why we have a robust cottage industry of lament about the fate of civil society where "secular" values amount to no more than a celebration of consumerist individualism.

From Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone and Stephen Carter's The Culture of Disbelief, to Richard Neuhaus's The Naked Public Square and Charles Taylor's The Malaise of Modernity, the social cost of disenchantment with religious institutions has been found painfully high. So much so that the very idea of "ethics" in North American discourse is now said to be unrelated to morality. That's a claim made by John Ralston Saul in his current bestseller, Equilibrium, and he has plenty of company thanks to a flood of media stories about scandals in the church. No wonder there is a deafening silence even from civil libertarians when fellow citizens who espouse a civic ethic informed by religious affinities are derided by secular fundamentalists.

That happens to be the upshot of Mr. Yasin's oration at Harvard. It was originally titled "American Jihad"; now it is less controversially billed "Of Faith and Citizenship." If his message gets through, like plucky Gurbaj Singh running the gantlet of jeering white parents at his Montreal school, we will all ultimately be the richer for it.
Amyn B. Sajoo is a former adviser with the Canadian Human Rights Commission in Ottawa, and the editor of Civil Society in the Muslim World: Contemporary Perspectives.