Our guest today says that instead of deterring anti-Muslim hate, Canadian laws are actually making it worse - in essence, legalizing Islamophobia. Natasha Bakht is an award-winning legal scholar who has spent the past five years researching the rise in anti-Muslim attitudes in North America. She is a professor in the faculty of law at the University of Ottawa and the author of In Your Face: Law, Justice, and Niqab Wearing Women in Canada. In her book, Natasha explores the stories of niqab-wearing women who have faced discriminatory laws.
Many people have an idealized vision of Canada as a gentle, kind and accepting society. However, last year, as a Muslim Canadian family took their evening stroll during lockdown in London, Ont., a white man rammed his pickup truck into them. Four of the five family members were killed.
The incident sparked horror and outrage. But the truth of the matter is anti-Muslim sentiment has been on the steady rise in the 20 years since 9/11.
According to a report from July 2021 by the National Council of Canadian Muslims, more Muslims have been killed in Canada in targeted attacks and hate crimes than in any other G7 country.
Our guest today says that instead of deterring anti-Muslim hate, Canadian laws are actually making it worse - in essence, legalizing Islamophobia.
Natasha Bakht is an award-winning legal scholar who has spent the past five years researching the rise in anti-Muslim attitudes in North America. She is a professor in the faculty of law at the University of Ottawa and the author of In Your Face: Law, Justice, and Niqab Wearing Women in Canada.
In her book, Natasha explores the stories of niqab-wearing women who have faced discriminatory laws.
Listen to this episode — and subscribe to Don’t Call Me Resilient — on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen to your favourite podcasts.
We’d love to hear from you, including any ideas for future episodes. Join The Conversation on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram and use #DontCallMeResilient.
Read more: Quebec's niqab ban uses women's bodies to bolster right-wing extremism
Islamophobia and hate crimes continue to rise in Canada
Remembering the Québec City mosque attack: Islamophobia and Canada’s national amnesia
Media portrays Indigenous and Muslim youth as ‘savages’ and ‘barbarians’
Islamophobia in western media is based on false premises
Art show takes on the misrepresentation of Muslims
Vinita: From the conversation, this is. Don't call me resilient. I'm Vinita Srivastava.
Natasha: As soon as you have laws that promote exclusionary politics that say you don't belong in our community. And that's essentially what laws like Bill 21 are laws that promote bans of certain kinds of clothing. That's what they do. They're saying you don't belong in our community.
Vinita: Last year as a muslim family took their evening stroll during lockdown in London, Ontario. A white man rammed his pickup truck into them. Four of the five family members were killed. The incident sparked horror and outrage. But the truth is, anti-Muslim sentiment has been on the rise in the 20 years since 9/11. My guest today says that instead of deterring anti-Muslim hate, Canadian laws are actually making it worse, in essence, legalising Islamophobia. Natasha Barth is an award winning legal scholar who has spent the past five years researching the rise in anti-Muslim attitudes in North America. She is a professor of law at the University of Ottawa and author of In Your Face Law, Justice and Niqab Wearing Women in Canada. In her book, Professor Buck explores the stories of niqab wearing women who have faced discriminatory laws. I actually first met Natasha Bakht as a child. We were members of a small South Asian community that got together for family basement parties.
Vinita: I'm really excited to be speaking with you again after so many years. Natasha You may know that I used to live in New York and even though I'm Canadian, I succumb to all the stereotypes of Canada and I thought, yes, I'm going to move back to a kinder, gentler, more multicultural, more accepting society. And pretty soon after I moved back, I realised things were pretty bad here in Canada too. Professor Natasha Bakht I'm going to ask you to break it down for us. How do you think Canada treats its Muslim population, including citizens of this country?
Natasha: I also have some of that idealised vision and I like to cherish that. But it's also really important to unpack what's really happening with minority communities and Muslim women who cover themselves with a niqab or a face veil where most of their face is covered except for the eyes. It's interesting. The first time I came across this issue was I'd heard about a story in the United Kingdom of a muslim woman who wore a niqab, who was a lawyer, and she was advocating on behalf of her Sikh client at an asylum tribunal. And obviously, the client didn't have a problem with who his lawyer was or what she was wearing. And she was making submissions to an adjudicator. And the adjudicator said, I'm sorry, I can't hear you. Could you take off your niqab? And she said, No, I won't take off my job as an adjudicator. You do need to hear the advocate. So, I mean, that's a fair point. But he might have said, could you speak up or I can't hear you. Perhaps we could get a microphone. Lots of different things that could have happened. And because she refused to take off her niqab, he adjourned the case and she was replaced the next day by a male lawyer in her firm. And this is a very simple accommodation that could have been made. So this view that I was seeing with politicians from the media, from educated judges, professors who seemed to be in favour of inclusion and in favour of diversity, seemed to draw a line to the niqab that sort of set the limit of our multicultural nation, that that was going too far.
Vinita: What do you think some of those reasons are? Why are we drawing the line here?
Natasha: I undertook a project to really look at what are the reasons that the objectors of the niqab give? What are these objections that they have? And I found a trace about ten different objections, but some of them are. The niqab makes things difficult to communicate, right? It's difficult to identify people. Right. Another common objection that you hear and that you see as a justification for legislation banning the niqab is that it's a security threat. Another one that I sometimes hear Muslims offering is that it's not a requirement in Islam to wear a niqab. We have been through and are still going through a global health pandemic, which I think has actually been really helpful.
Vinita: Has it has it changed this idea that the general population is not seen as a general threat because their mouth and nose are covered?
Natasha: Before the pandemic, politicians were essentially making the argument that our society would fall apart. Yes. Muslim women wear the niqab. They were essentially saying this would make it very difficult for judges and lawyers to assess credibility and it would be difficult for citizenship judges to assess whether a woman was correctly saying the oath of citizenship. So they were making all sorts of arguments. And I think what the pandemic has revealed is how disingenuous those arguments are. Our society is not falling apart. We are having conversations with everyone, having most of their face covered.
Vinita: I mean, teachers are teaching classes. You know, the idea in Quebec that people are banned from accessing certain services or leading a classroom.
Natasha: That's right. Teachers are teaching with faces covered. Students have been learning with faces covered. Judges, witnesses, lawyers in the early days of the pandemic were all performing their usual functions in court with their faces covered. And so clearly identification was not a problem, because if you need to identify someone, you just use the government issued documents that we all have.
Vinita: Right.
Natasha: Somehow not being able to know at precisely every moment who is around you is not a security threat. You know, there may be moments in time like airports when you need to identify yourself. And the truth is, niqab wearing women have always been willing to remove their niqab in those particular situations. But what I have found in. This country and others is that politicians really fabricated problems and created an issue where there was none. I think what the pandemic really reveals is these are not true justifications. They're not genuine.
Vinita: No. Can we talk a little bit about this idea of the legalisation of Islamophobia and what that means? Like how have Canadian laws supported Islamophobia?
Natasha: I think the most obvious example these days is Bill 21 in Quebec, in which the government has essentially said, if you wear a religious symbol, you cannot work in certain positions in the public service. And if you cover your face so they don't name niqab-wearing women per say. But of course, it's only niqab-wearing women who typically cover their faces. If you cover your face, you cannot receive certain government services. So that is the most, I think, blatant example of systemic Islamophobia, even though this is legislation that affects all sorts of religious minorities, it affects Sikh men and women, it affects Jewish men and women. But when you look at the way the government has the various ministers have promoted the legislation and talked about the legislation, you can see that their main concern are Muslim women. There is clear consensus in the legal community that a law like this is discriminatory and it's discriminatory on the basis of religion and probably on the basis of religion and equality for women. But what they have done is they've invoked the notwithstanding clause or section 33 of the charter and its equivalent in the Quebec charter. And I think that's really a declaration that they know that this law is discriminatory, but they are invoking these two clauses to essentially say you can't rely on the usual routes to constitutionally challenge this legislation. The fact that a government can just opt out of that, I think is the clearest signal of systemic Islamophobia.
Vinita: Some of these laws that you're talking about impact how Canadian Muslims are treated. In other words, there is a direct correlation to the restrictive laws for Muslims and Muslim women with violence and hate crimes against Muslims in Canada. Can you tell us a little bit about that?
Natasha: As soon as you have laws that promote exclusionary politics, so laws that say you don't belong in our community, and that's essentially what laws like Bill 21 are laws that promote bans of certain kinds of clothing. That's what they do. They're saying you don't belong in our community. Right. As soon as you have laws like that, I think those exclusionary ideas really seep into mainstream consciousness such that ordinary people, it changes what they feel they can say and do to Muslims and in particular to Muslim women. And there are multiple civil liberties and human rights groups that have been tracing hate crimes against Muslims. And there is a clear correlation between controversies involving niqab wearing women and the assaults and the violence and the hostility that these women then experience on the streets. It's almost as though ordinary people, some ordinary people feel that they are like vigilante police and they're enforcing the law.
Vinita: I mean, once the law is put in place or once, like, as you say, if your leaders are saying this is okay or this attitude or behaviour is okay.
Natasha: Exactly. Legal recognition has an impact on people's views.
Vinita: So it sounds like in some ways we could actually place blame for the increase in violence and hate crimes against Muslims in Canada on our lawmakers.
Natasha: Many politicians have behaved very poorly and as I said, they have fabricated issues where there have been none. There is no doubt about that. So, yes, I think we can place some blame.
Vinita: So it's not just in Canada, though. We're seeing some of these laws crop up elsewhere. Can you give us maybe a few examples?
Natasha: Sure. So France has a ban of niqabs and their ban is much more far reaching than the one in Quebec, because theirs covers all public spaces except places of worship. So it literally means that women cannot move freely in public spaces wearing the clothes that they want to wear. They can't work wearing the clothing that they. Want to where? It's created very absurd situations such that during the pandemic, people were being fined in France for not wearing medical face coverings, and women who wore the niqab were also being fined for covering their faces. One scholar commented, and I thought this was such a poignant comment, he said. Niqab bans have moved through Europe, almost like a political swine flu. It has been picked up from one country to the next.
Vinita: It's like a viral negative idea. You're saying it just spreads.
Natasha: The justifications for the bans are very similar. Even though each country's local context is specific, their relationship with Muslim populations is different. It's local. Yet these same justifications come up again and again and again, even though they've really been debunked.
Vinita: So for your book In Your Face, you've interviewed niqab-wearing women who shared their lived experiences with you about what it feels like to be viewed as a threat. What are some of the things that you have learnt?
Natasha: The book for me is really more about why is it that we as a majority community feel the need to restrict what a small minority of people are doing? But I did want to interview niqab-wearing women because I thought it was important to hear from them. And I really thought that if we heard from the wearers of the veil, it just might change the kinds of conversations that we're having in this country and others. Contrary to the idea, the pervasive, prevalent view that the men or women in their families forced them to wear the niqab. What the women were telling me was that it was the opposite. They were actually if there was any pressure or coercion that was being placed on them, it was to not wear the niqab. And they asked them why they chose to wear the niqab. The primary reason given was religious, that they wanted to be closer to God.
Vinita: The thing I loved about reading your stories that you talked about is the diversity, the vibrancy, the idea that the complexity of the lives. Yes. What about men? Have Canadian lawmakers legalised hate and intolerance towards them as well?
Natasha: One of the things that Islamophobia does is it promotes anxiety, fear, hostility, bias, stereotypes, rejection towards Islam and Muslims and of course, even those perceived as Muslims. And perhaps the most serious stereotype about Muslim men in the Muslim community is that they are a greater security threat. And, of course, that is a racist belief. But it's prevalent it's prevalent within our society and it's prevalent within our institutions. And it has an impact on Muslim men and of course, the violence that Muslim women have experienced on the streets, the harassment. That's also been something that has been experienced by Muslim men. We know about the shooting attack at a Quebec City mosque. We know that in June 2021, five members of a muslim family were the victims of an attack in London that was premeditated and motivated by anti-Muslim hate. So, you know, all of these incidents have an impact on both Muslim men and women.
Vinita: You've talked about growing up in a mixed Hindu-Muslim household. Your parents had to get married in England to avoid potential violence in their community because of their marriage. How has your parents approach towards religion and beliefs shaped your work and your understanding of Canadian society or Islamophobia?
Natasha: My parents values were very much about openness and respect for beliefs that may not have been their own. My father was born into a muslim family, but I don't think he identifies as a muslim. My mother, on the other hand, is a Hindu and really raised us as Hindus. And what they always said to me was, You must learn about other people's ideas, you know? And that has really been a lot of my experience very happily, that we might encounter people who are very different from us, people who have different eating habits. You know, you might not be able to hold a meeting at a particular time because someone might need to pray. But it's really very simple to have conversations to try to work those differences out. And I think that. Has always been something that my parents have instilled in me and that I have tried to incorporate into my scholarship. What I was amazed by when I interviewed the niqab-wearing women that I did. I thought they must be miserable, you know, given everything that is happening, the multiple incidents, the multiple controversies involving them in Canada. I thought they must be unhappy. And of course, they did express to me all sorts of distress around the daily incidents of violence that they encounter. But despite that, they were actually very fulfilled and very what seemed to me happy.
Vinita: What are you hoping that lawmakers will learn from their stories?
Natasha: Well, I'm hoping that it will dispel a lot of the myths that the lawmakers have themselves produced. You see how they're not promoting any of the goals of social justice that we want our laws to be a reflection of. I talked early in the introduction about the controversy from the eighties involving a Sikh RCMP officer who wanted to wear his turban as part of the RCMP uniform. And this created a massive controversy. People were like, no, no, no, this is tradition. We can't suddenly change this uniform. That particular police officer and Sikh people across Canada were receiving death threats and there were assaults. And now we don't blink an eye when we see ministers wearing turbans. And that's not to suggest that people from the Sikh community don't experience racism. But it is to note that we've been through these kinds of controversies before and we've come out on the right side of history, I would suggest.
Vinita: There's been so much conversation in Quebec about specific laws, but when we're talking about the federal Canadian constitution, the idea that this is baked into laws across the country but also federally. Are there specific laws that you can point to?
Natasha: You know, people often ask me whether what's going on in Quebec is somehow really specific to Quebec. Yeah. And my response to that is, I don't think it is. And the reason I say that is because I can point to a number of incidents involving niqab-wearing women that involve the same sorts of inaccurate conceptions of who these women were, or indeed the kinds of laws that are being promoted federally. So, for example, the citizenship ceremony controversy was a muslim niqab-wearing woman who had met all of the requirements for citizenship and their onerous requirements. She had to meet the residency requirement. She had to meet the requirement to speak one of our official languages. She met all of the requirements and the last thing that she had to do was say the oath of citizenship, which is a requirement under the Canada Elections Act. And Jason Kenney, then minister, changed the requirement from saying the oath of citizenship to being seen to be saying the oath of citizenship. This is what I mean about politicians fabricating issues where none existed. But that was a federal issue. The Harper government tried to change the voting legislation such that niqab-wearing women or again, they never named them. They're, you know, pretending it's neutral and saying you cannot vote if your face is covered. Well, then the chief electoral officer said, I can't implement that because we allow people to vote as long as they can produce two pieces of non-photo identification. You can vote. We have voting by mail in this country. In other words, no one is checking to see that you're able to compare that to a photo. We don't have a problem of voter fraud in this country. And yet the Harper government at that time was trying to suggest that we do and that niqab wearing women were part of that problem. That's something that is not specific to the province of Quebec. It's playing out in a very particular way, and it has for many years in Quebec, unfortunately. And I think that really has an impact on how Muslim women in particular feel their sense of belonging. It's not just that you're studying for three years, four years to become a lawyer, and suddenly you can't get your dream job as a crown prosecutor because you wear a hijab. It's that people are now realising they can't work. They can't feel that they belong in that province. And so they're moving. That is a real loss. It's a real loss for Quebec. I don't think it's possible. So now in this day and age, have a provision in the charter that says governments can opt out of basic fundamental human rights. I mean, that to me is not a progressive democracy. So we're going to, I think, see some really creative argumentation at the various levels of court. And I hope that the judges really listen carefully to the kinds of arguments that are put forth. This is really about what kind of society do we want to live in. And I think that for me is what the stories of niqab wearing women are also about. Do we really want to live in a society where people can't express themselves in the way that they want to express themselves, even though it's not causing harm to anyone?
Vinita: Thank you very much for all of that. You know, the one thing we didn't talk about, but you are an incredible dancer besides this amazing researcher. And I don't know if you want to say anything about that before I let you go.
Natasha: You go to law school, then you sort of believe in the legal route being one of those avenues for change. And it is one route. But there's all sorts of other ways in which we can make the world a better place without sounding too naive or too idealistic. Art, for me has also been another way in which to advance change in the best possible way and in a fun way. So I guess that's the only thing that I'd add.
Vinita: That's it for this episode of Don't Call Me Resilient. I've been speaking with Professor Natasha Bakht from the Faculty of Law at the University of Ottawa. As always, I'd love to hear what you're thinking and feeling after that conversation today. Tell us your stories about Islamophobia. Share them with us. I'm on Twitter @writevinita. Don't forget to tag our producers at conversation s.a and use the hashtag #Don'tCallmeResilient. For additional research and resources, go to the conversation icon. To check out our show notes on this episode. If you like what you heard today, please help spread the love, tell a friend about us or leave a review on whatever podcast app you're using to listen to us. Why You Don't Call Me Brazilian is a production of The Conversation Canada. This podcast was produced with a grant for journalism innovation from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. The series is produced and hosted by me Vinita Srivastava. The producer on this episode is Vaishnavi Dandekar. Our other producers are Naheed Buie, Haley Lewis and FOLARIN O'Donnell. Reza Dahya is our sound designer. Lygia Navarro is our sound producer. Jennifer Moroz is our consulting producer. Lisa Varano is our audience development editor and Scott White is the CEO of The Conversation Canada. And if you're wondering who wrote and performed the music used on the Pod, that's the amazing Zaki Ibrahim. The track is called Something in the Water. See you back here next week.