2025_1124_1238

What if I told you that every aspect of our society, our calendars, the way that we measure time, the days that we get off from work, our legal system, everything is built on religion. For many of us, this is an obvious fact. For me, I grew up in a religious household, so for me, the idea that religion is essential to every aspect of your life is not revolutionary. I grew up in a Muslim household where we were measuring time in a different manner than we measure it in the Western society, and I understood that that was built on Christianity as the norm in the West, that we use a lunar calendar or the Gregorian calendar, which revolves around Christianity, and that Islamic calendars are different, that those rely on the lunar cycle, and it's different. Each month does not correspond to, like, Ramadan is different each month, each year. Ramadan is different each year, and at a different time, when I was younger, it was in the summertime, and now it's in the wintertime, and it's still the same month, it's just entirely different. The days that I get off from work for Christmas and for Easter Monday, there is no religious significance in that for me, but there is for other people, or for some others, they do not realize that there is a religious undertone to each of these things that operate silently in our society. So why is that important? It's important because the way that we study world religions and secularism is not the way that we should, according to this course that I took on theories and in the study of religion. So the world religion's model is harmful because it asserts that, oh man, this is hard, and it asserts, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm Today, I really just want to talk to you about the ways that religion operate, um, underneath, like, almost silently in our society, under things that we consider to be just normal, part of our culture. I also want to talk a little bit about culture, because culture and religion are very intertwined, and during this podcast, I will be bringing up a lot of personal religious background, um, as I already did in the beginning, um, like I mentioned, I grew up in a religious household, and that is why I am taking this course today. I left religion when I was 18, so I'm giving a little context as to my own stance, and I now am agnostic, which means that I don't think, um, I don't think we can, I don't think that we can know whether or not God exists. I don't think that God is just beyond our capacity to know, although I am more of an atheistic agnostic, which means that I lean more towards the side of, there probably is no God, but if there is, I wouldn't know, um, and if there isn't, I also wouldn't know, because I'm just not capable of knowing something so transcendent and beyond my ability to comprehend, and not just me specifically, but human beings, um, so yeah, that's a little bit about me. So, I want to go through this podcast talking about five different thinkers. Thomas King, Bruce Lincoln, Tomoko Masuzawa, um, I forgot what the first name is. Muhammad Bayoumi, I can't remember. Tomoko Masuzawa, Mustafa Bayoumi, and Sabah Mahmoud. Um, so, let's start with Thomas King. So, Thomas King wrote, or actually he delivered this, um, lecture, let me pull it up so that we have all the right information, so he delivered this lecture at, at the, so Thomas King delivered this lecture called You'll Never Believe What Happened. And in this narrative, he tells us about this story of, um, indigenous creation myths, where the animals are speaking, and, um, there's a girl who falls through the earth, and falls into the water, and then, no, I need to, I need to rewind. 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and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, Lewis Lincoln is criticizing cultural relativism because of a different reason. He thinks that by assuming the cultural relativist lens, we are saying that, almost that we don't need to study other religions and cultures, that there's nothing there for us to learn. Although that, that is not true. There's a lot in other cultures for us to learn, um, from. And he also thinks that it assumes, It assumes homogeneity in a way that I didn't mention yet. In that, which is to say that all cultures are, Which is to say that, like, he thinks that pro-cultural relativists do not look at other cultures and take into account the context of other cultures. They don't take into account the context and the nuances of their cultures, but instead that they view it as one single, essential, reductionist entity. Bruce Lincoln is not saying that we should be critical of other religions and be disrespectful to them, but simply that in order to learn from other cultures, and in order to do a proper history of religion, or history and religion, we need to look at other cultures. Um, this kind of ties into Tomoko Masuzawa's argument that the world religions model comes from Christianity as the norm, um, and European Christianity as the norm. The world religions model categorizes other religions that do not fit into that, into either the study of anthropology, if they don't have a written language, and thereby are presumed to be primitive, Um, or into the study of Orientalism, which is, as Edward Said mentioned in his book on Orientalism, I think it's called, um, he says that Orientalism is the way of viewing the East as the West's foil, as, um, inevitably, inherently different from the West. And that kind of also ties into Bayoumi's argument, which is, I'll go back to Tomoko Masuzawa, but Bayoumi says that since 9-11, but also before that, but more prominently since 9-11, race and religion have become one. And what does that, what does that even mean? How can race and religion become the same thing? In the context of the Middle East and the Arab world, people assume that those who look Arab are inevitably Muslim. And therefore, racialization and religion become one. You can't sit down and explain, when you're at border control, being flagged for your last name, that, oh no, although I may have been born in Saudi Arabia, I may wear the cultural clothing, I may look Arab, I am not Muslim, I'm actually Jewish, or something like that. There's no space for that anymore. There's no space for nuance. There's no space for individuality. Everyone who looks Muslim is Muslim, according to the public consciousness, and according to the legal system, too, not just in the U.S., but also in Canada. And that leaks into our public consciousness in Canada, too. Um, a lot of the times, like, many times, I, myself, am asked by, like, strangers at Walmart if I'm Muslim if I celebrate Christmas. Which, like, yeah, I was raised Muslim, but there's no space for me to say, no, but I left religion. And even with, like, friends, sometimes they'll be like, especially if they're Muslim themselves, I have a Palestinian friend who's like, why are you eating that? You're Muslim! And I'll be like, I told you a thousand times, I'm not! But, it's like, once you, if you are South Asian, or Arab, or even just, like, if you have family who is Muslim, you're automatically assumed to be Muslim. Um, I watched this film by B.H. Yael, who is an Iraqi Jewish woman, um, born in Iraq, and then she moved to Israel, and then to Montreal, and then to Toronto. So she's been all over the place. But, she's ethnically Iraqi, and she has these, this footage of her mother, who's got this Iraqi accent, and she looks so Arab, and then she's talking about how pro-Israel she is. And it's, the mother. And it's so, like, mind-blowing, even to me, that, like, someone who looks exactly how I would expect a Muslim to look is not a Muslim. Someone who sounds exactly as a Muslim would sound is not a Muslim. And I can wrap my head around someone leaving Islam, but religious minorities in, like, in the Arab world are almost entirely erased. And that's the thing that Saba Mahmoud talks about as well, in her piece on secularism in the East, and she talks about how secularism is actually the reason why, um, secularism is the reason why a lot of religious minorities in Egypt and other Middle Eastern cultures and countries are actually in harm's way. I don't know much about the Middle East, but I can say, in Pakistan, there are a lot of, um, Muslim minorities. Like, Muslims are not hegemonic, or sorry, Muslims are not homogeneous in the way that a lot of us, like, believe that Muslims are. Even Muslims themselves, they claim that we are all, we all believe in the same thing, but then within themselves they have a lot of disagreement. And there are sectarian differences. Um, there's the Sunnis, which is the majority, and they claim that they are the only real Muslims, sometimes. But then there's also the Shia group, which the Shias have, um, they place a lot of emphasis on the Prophet's family instead of the Prophet himself. Which almost, sometimes, in Sunni viewpoints, that makes them not Muslim at all. So there's a lot of, there's a lot of disagreement there. And then there's, um, Sufi and Ahmadi and Ismaili, there's so many different religious sects within Islam. And for example, in Pakistan, Ahmadis are often killed. And I didn't know this until I met a Pakistani Ahmadi, and she told me that, yeah, my people are being targeted in Pakistan right now for our religious difference. And I wonder how much of that is because of secularism, as Sabah Mahmood points out. I wonder if that existed before, because obviously, like, a lot of this stuff I don't study myself, but I know from, from the news, just from being at the GO station or something and seeing the news and people talking about it. People talking about what's happening internationally and, um, in my classes when we talk about politics. I know a lot of these things just because of that, and I wonder if this is something that's always happened. And if Sabah Mahmood is wrong, if people have always targeted those who are not the hegemonic religion, or if that could possibly be because of secularism. And I know that, um, I was watching this film for my other class called Quran My Heart, and it's about these kids from all over the world who memorize the Quran, and they go to Egypt, Cairo, for the recitation competition. And so you have to memorize every single word of the Quran, and then you go there and they pick one, and you have to recite it. And based off of how beautiful your recitation is, and your errors, or lack thereof, you get a score and then you continue. And that's not the point. The point is that there's this one kid in the film from Tajikistan, and he was going to this religious school up until the moment that he left for Cairo, and when he comes back to Cairo, his school is no longer operational. Because according to the film, it says that the secular government in Tajikistan shut down his school for fear of religious extremism. I wonder if that's something that's also happening alongside the fear of religious minorities, is the fear of religious extremism. And so everyone who's religious just feels targeted and feels like, well, maybe when it's a Muslim-majority country, then the Muslim majority is the safest one. And I guess that also gives you license to religious extremism of the majority sect. You can see that happening in Afghanistan as well, and Iran. I think I'm not well-versed in a lot of these things I'm talking about. I know culturally what happens, or what has happened in Afghanistan and Iran in the past couple years, but I don't know how to criticize that. I don't know how to view it critically. And so I think it's just a lot to deal with, and also I get news fatigue, so there's that as well. So overall, this course has taught me that the world religions model needs an upgrade. And the way that we are taught in elementary and high school also needs to be upgraded. Like Tomoko Masuzawa said, that the world religions model assumes that religion equals Christianity, and that anything other than that you view through the lens of Christianity, how similar is it or how different is it from Christianity. And therefore, based off of that, if it is very similar to Christianity, then it can be considered a religion, such as the Abrahamic religions. And not just that, but it can be considered one of the major religions. Even though Judaism, which is monotheistic, like Christianity, and is actually very similar to Christianity because a lot of their rules are similar, the Old Testament is very similar to the Jewish Bible. Judaism doesn't have quite as many people as Sikhism has as followers, and yet Judaism, monotheistic, similar to Christianity, is assumed to be one of the major world religions, while Sikhism, which has more followers, but is polytheistic, and a Hindu, or like a religion which emerged from the Eastern world, that is then, or from the South, and a religion that emerged from South Asia, that is then considered to be not one of the major world religions. And it's just kind of, it's very Eurocentric, and very Christian-centered, and very much, and it shows that the people who created the world religions model already had some preconceived notion of what is religion and what isn't. And then that is built into our legal system. Even within secularism, which asserts that, as Sabah Mahmood says, it asserts that the government is not involved in people's personal religious affairs, that religion is a private thing, not a public thing. And yet, it becomes, within secularism, religion becomes more and more of a public issue, more and more of a political issue, because, first of all, we now have, under secularism, we have the freedom to practice our religion, the freedom of religion, freedom of consciousness. And what that means is that there are cases where people are, like, in front of the law, telling the government, this is my religion, and the government is saying, no it is not. Your religion is not strong enough, or your belief is not strong enough. Or, your religion doesn't resemble what I think religion should look like. A lot of this is like, when it comes to indigenous belief, which is more of like a spiritual, and doesn't often have, like, the same kinds of rituals and a set, like, a book that Christianity does. There isn't any of that, but it is still considered a religion to people who practice it. So, when we're talking about, um, when the government talks about religion as a private affair, they undermine that by creating this notion that it is actually not. And secularism, I don't think there's any way for it to escape this contradiction, because while it is supposed to be a private thing, then we also need to create all these measures to protect religious freedom. And yet, underneath all this, what religion really is, is assumed to be just Christianity. And, in Quebec, you can see how, um, the bill that was passed, which doesn't allow people to show, like, to wear religious symbols when they have, like, teacher jobs or government jobs. That assumes that religion is something that is an internal belief, instead of something like in Islam, where you wear the hijab, um, as a Muslim woman, a lot of Muslim women wear the hijab. That is brushed to the side. And in Judaism, you wear the kippah, that is also brushed to the side. None of that seems to be important to a lot of, to the government, which is built on Christian narratives that religion is something which is internal belief and not something that is external. Um, not something that is built on ritual or on symbols. There is only one way to be religious, according to this Christian narrative, and that one way to be religious is to be Christian. So there's really no room for movement within this model. Um, and then going back to the schools, the way that we are taught religion in schools, I never took a world religions course in grade 11, but I did take world history. And that one, like always, focused on the civilizations that turned into hubs for modern day Christianity, such as the Byzantine Empire. Um, we never really learned anything about, for example, the Abbasid Dynasty, or all the civilizations of like ancient China. We never learned about any of those, and it was supposed to be a world religions course, or sorry, a world history course. So, you can see how this idea that Christianity is superior shows up in a lot of different ways. Um, and, and then there's also like, in the world religions courses, a lot of the time, we learn about, like I said, I never took it, but people mentioned in the class that, and the professor mentioned, that the way that grade 11 world religions courses are taught is based on a lot of focus on the top three, um, top three religions, so Islam, Christianity, and Judaism. And then the rest of them are kind of grouped into, oh, this is a South Asian religion, so under that it's Hinduism, Sikhism, and there's a lot of South Asian religions, but they're all grouped together. And ultimately they might have like various differences. Um, and then Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, those are all grouped together as like Chinese religions, or East Asian religions. So, you can see how race and religion are also coming into play together, and the only ones that are like, not really about race, um, would be the big three. Which, still, they are about race, but they are so, there's Muslims everywhere, there's Christians everywhere, and the Jewish diaspora is broad, broad, broad, broad diaspora, so like, people are everywhere, um, practicing the big three religions. And I guess people do see it as like an Arab thing for Islam, and a European thing for Christianity, but then again, since we're studying it in a place that's so multicultural, we see a lot of these people, and they have, um, like Muslims, you can see when people are Muslims. It's pretty obvious, um, a lot of the time. Um, so you can see cultural difference, you can see religious difference in Canada, and you can see that there's a lot of Muslims. So, there's that, there's that, yeah. Um, yeah, I just want to end off on like, a note of, our decolonization practice is, it's a long process. It's going to be years and years and years of work, because it took so many years for us to get to this very moment in time where we, we're struggling still as a society to understand how we can live on stolen land, um, how we can cooperate with each other. As people of religious and cultural differences, I myself am struggling to understand how I can be okay with living on this stolen land, and how much I owe to white men for me being in this place, in this space where I can leave religion, where I can leave Islam, and not be faced with honor killing. That is something that is very common where I could have been born, if my parents didn't immigrate here. And secularism, a lot of it is owed, I feel like, to the white man. So, I'm still sitting here struggling, like, trying to cope with this idea that so much of my freedom that I experience on a day-to-day basis is owed to the white man, who came here and colonized, and came here and brought secularism, and like, discovered so many scientific things and separated them from religion in ways that, often in the Arab world, although they were very mathematically and scientifically advanced, they wanted to hold on to their traditional values, very badly. And now, I owe a lot to them. And it's, I don't know, it's something that I'm struggling to cope with, something that... Like, I can't imagine what kind of life I would have lived if I weren't here, if I didn't have the ability to not be married at the age of 19. My mother was married at 19, my grandma was married at 16, and her mother was married at 14. That is the kind of world that I could have lived in. Not, like, not even 80 years ago. Like, maybe 60 years, 70 years ago. Like, it's wild. It's wild. And, like, my great-grandmother gave birth to her first child at the age of 15. And I owe a lot of this, the fact that I didn't have to go through that, I owe so much of that to the space that I live in now, this country that I live in now. So, the decolonization process is hard. And there's a lot of personal narratives within that for a lot of people, such as me. A lot of people come here for a better life. Some of us find it, some of us don't. But the fact remains that we still live in a society which exploits and undermines racialized people, even within a multicultural society. I'm doing a lot of work on this work in labor studies right now, and looking at the gig economy, and how racialized it is, and how they really, like, the platform gigs, like, bring in a lot of, like, they target international people, international students and recent immigrants. And these people are, the majority of them are racialized. And so they find themselves getting paid less than minimum wage and continuing to be exploited. So, there's a lot of work to be done. But I think an important place to start is to recognize when we think about religion, what are we really thinking about? Are we really thinking about world religions, or are we thinking about Christianity? That's one place to start. And to talk to people of as many different backgrounds as possible. Because, and to read. To read widely, to read broadly. Because these two things will get you places that an education in the Canadian university or high school or elementary system, they won't... Those spaces often don't challenge you enough, and don't bring in enough diverse voices for a broader understanding of what religion is, and the underlying issues beneath the world religions model, this issue of racialization and religion being tied together. There's so many things. So many things to think about, and I'm really excited to continue studying these topics. And yeah, just to, I want to focus on Islam, and yeah, I'm really excited to think about the ways that we got to this point, how I got to this point as well. So, thank you so much for listening, and have a wonderful day.