CANADA: 'MODERATE' MOSLEMS MUST REWORK THEIR IMAGE

Muslim women ask moderates to help shape community's image

GATINEAU, Que. -- The media have not been kind to Muslims, says a rising Muslim media personality, but Muslims themselves are partly to blame.

Speaking at a conference in Gatineau, Que., Saturday, journalist-filmmaker Nelofer Pazira (Kandahar and Return to Kandahar) told the audience it is time for the Muslim community to start looking in the mirror.

Instead of complaining that the media only show fanatics and extremists, "we must look at ourselves and see how much we have contributed to that," she said. Reticence and fear of being labelled have silenced too many moderate Muslims, Pazira added.

She was speaking at the 24th annual conference of the Canadian Council of Muslim Women, which drew close to 200 women, and a handful of men, from across Canada.

Pazira spoke after morning prayers, the singing of the national anthem (full versions in both English and French) and a keynote address by noted Mideast expert Mai Yamani.

"I'm tired of all our complaints about the media," she said, smiling. (Pazira works for CBC's The National.) "We do not make it easy for the media to cover us."

Besides being silenced by fears regarding their portrayal, the Muslim community has also, ironically, hobbled its own image by its emphasis on careers in science leaving too few representatives in the social sciences.

"We do not have a lot of experts who can talk eloquently about issues relating to Muslims," she said.

The result, said Pazira, is unfortunate.

"We are Canadian, and we are Muslims but that image of Muslim Canadians is completely missing from the media."

Pazira's challenge fitted the conference theme Canadian Muslim Women at the Crossroads which was also addressed by the keynote speaker.

For Yamani an anthropologist who was the first Saudi Arabian woman to obtain a doctorate at the University of Oxford, and now a research fellow at the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London the challenge is broad.

Muslim women at the crossroads, she said, must choose between an open Islam that embraces the modern and a closed version that rejects the realities of our time. But the choices made will affect everybody.

"We are all at the crossroads Muslims, Christians, Jews and we have no option but to face the future together. We all share a humanity."

The fundamentalist approach to Islam, both abroad and at home, came in for much criticism at the conference. The council, which does not claim to speak for all Muslim women, says its membership is mostly educated and professional women.

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1) Muslim women ask moderates to help shape community's image