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An Islamic news portal has reported on a lecture by
former Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) President Ingrid Mattson
in which she suggests that Canadian Muslims should base their identity
on Canadian “First Nations” people. According to the
report,
Ms. Mattson bases this view on the relationship between the injustices
experienced by African-Americans and those she believed suffered by U.S.
Muslims:
In her lecture, she said that the demographic makeup of the American
Muslim community has influenced how Muslims there understand their
identity. ‘The reason why I think American Muslims have been able to
extract themselves a little bit from simply making American Islam into
an anti-Western discourse is for one simple reason and that is
approximately 25 percent of the American Muslim community is African
American,’ Dr. Mattson told the audience. ‘The priorities of African
Americans, in terms of justice, and seeking justice and identifying what
is not just, are different than immigrants.’ ‘African Americans are
looking at their lives in terms of the structural injustices within the
United States, as Americans, and they see an economic system, a legal
system that has resulted in the highest incarcerated population in the
world, in terms of percentages, and that African Americans are
incarcerated in far greater numbers,’ she added. ’They see all around
them, not only their history of repression within the United States, but
also current legislation and practices.’ She opined that the African
American Muslims have pushed the Muslim community to question their
understanding of justice. ‘So they were the ones that turned the
question around to their immigrant brothers and sisters and said wait a
minute – you talk about injustice but ignore the injustices being done
to us; you talk about injustice yet you ignore the fact that there are
people in your own community who are contributing and participating in
systems that oppress us, who are participating in economic systems in
the inner-city that take advantage of poor African Americans.’ Dr.
Mattson went on to tell the audience that this interaction between
African American Muslims and immigrant Muslims has resulted in the
discourse moving beyond identity politics to ethics. ‘So I think for
American Muslims, African Americans really elevated the issue of justice
and generalized it and made it a universal principle and brought it out
of simply identity politics – the West versus Islam,’ she said ‘They
made us look more deeply at systematic injustice and understand that
justice is not about identity but it is about ethics that we should
carry wherever we were and we needed to start prioritizing our issues
differently.’ She then proposed that, for the Canadian Muslim community,
First Nations people can be the challenging conscience for Canadian
Muslims as African Americans were for U.S. Muslims.
Read the rest here.
Ingrid Mattson was elected as President of the Islamic Society of
North America (ISNA) in 2006 after long service as an ISNA functionary
including as ISNA Vice-President. She is also the
director of
the Director of the Macdonald Center for the Study of Islam and
Christian-Muslim Relations which appears to be developing growing
ties with
the International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT), another
important part of the US Muslim Brotherhood and one of the funders of
the Huron chair. Mattson was
appointed in 2009 to the then newly established IIIT Council of Scholars and was
replaced in 2010 as ISNA President. A
post fro
October 2011 reported on the appointment of Dr. Ingrid Mattson as the
first Chair of Islamic Studies at Huron University College, Previous
posts have
reported on the controversy surrounding the decision by Huron
University College to accept funds from Canadian and U.S. Muslim
Brotherhood groups to fund the chair in Islamic Studies. A Hudson
Institute
report details the Muslim Brotherhood origins and ties of both ISNA and IIIT.
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