Nation, citizenship and belonging: Negotiating Muslim cultural politics in Canada

Muslim communities have become increasingly salient in the social, cultural and political landscape in Canada. This has been largely due to the aftermath of 9/11 and the racial politics of the ongoing ‘war on terror’ that has cast Muslims as the new “enemy within.” The narratives of citizenship, nationalism, and security have become inextricably linked in public discourse and policy-making in ways that disproportionately target Canadian Muslims as potential threats to public safety and compromise their civil liberties. Driven by media sensationalism, narrow and limiting constructions of Muslims are commonly purveyed reproducing Orientalist archetypes of illiberal and anti-democratic foreigners that test the limits of Canadian multiculturalism. Islam has become a permanent feature in the Canadian hinterland and Muslim cultural politics have become prominent flashpoints in the social and political landscape.

Increasingly Muslims figure prominently in contemporary public debates that shape the Canadian national consciousness and public policies from security certificate detainees, the arrests of 18 Muslim youth in Toronto on charges of ‘home grown terror’, racial and religious profiling and the debates over shari’a tribunals in Ontario to Quebec’s questions of ‘reasonable accommodation’, the banning of Islamic headscarves and face veils and xenophobic “citizens codes.”

This discussion will focus on how Muslim cultural politics in Canada is being negotiated in ways that determine the boundaries of nation, citizenship and belonging. The current debates over the banning of Islamic face veils in Quebec as well as during citizenship oath taking ceremonies will be discussed to highlight the way inclusion and exclusion from the imagined spaces of national belonging and the legal requirements of citizenship are being shaped by xenophobic and Orientalist narratives and how women’s bodies have become a battleground upon which the image of the multicultural nation is being re-defined in a post 9/11 context.