A Battle Over Prayer in Schools Tests Canada’s Multiculturalism
"What Peel shows is that even in places with huge racial diversity, you can have people who identify with different communities
but disagree about human rights issues." To the Peel school board and many Muslims in the district, the strife over religious accommodation is little more than Islamophobia.
For nearly two decades, Muslim students in the Peel School District, outside Toronto, had been allowed to pray independently
on Fridays, part of a policy in many Canadian provinces to accommodate religious beliefs in public schools.
In allowing prayer in its schools, the Peel district relied on a provision in the Ontario Human Rights Code
that the Ontario Human Rights Commission has interpreted as requiring government-funded schools — both public and Catholic — to "accommodate" students in observing their personal faiths.
For Farina Siddiqui, 43, a Muslim activist whose children attend public
and Catholic schools in the Peel district, allowing students to worship once a week in school is a matter of religious freedom.
Rabia Khedr said that These are people trying to fuel the fire and brew our ignorances,
The group has protested outside recent school board meetings
and says it plans to bring a lawsuit challenging the policy of allowing prayer in the Peel schools, arguing that the law does not explicitly permit it.
