Al Rashid Mosque: Building Canadian Muslim Communities

by Earle H. Waugh, Baha Abu-Laban (Foreword)

Forty years ago, as a young scholar in Islamic Studies at the University of Alberta, Al Rashid's Muslims welcomed my queries, tolerated my ignorance, and joyfully opened their homes and their hearts.

Edmonton's Al Rashid Mosque has played a key role in Islam's Canadian development. Founded by Muslims from Lebanon, it has grown into a vibrant community fully integrated into Canada's cultural mosaic. The mosque continues to be a concrete expression of social good, a symbol of a proud Muslim-Canadian identity. Al Rashid Mosque provides a welcome introduction to the ethics and values of homegrown Muslims. The book traces the mosque's role in education and community leadership, and celebrates the numerous contributions of Muslim Canadians in Edmonton and across Canada. Written to mark the 75th anniversary of the mosque's opening in 1938, Al Rashid Mosque is a timely and important volume of Islamic and Canadian history.

288 pages, Paperback

First published June 18, 2018

Reviews

[Zainab Bint Younus]

Canadian Muslim history is woefully under-researched and under-preserved. This book features as perhaps one of the most focused works on Masjid al-Rashid in Edmonton, which was the first masjid in all of Canada. It was far more comprehensive than I expected, detailing its earliest days, its growing pains, and how it has changed and developed over the years until the late 2010s.

The book is written in an easy-to-understand way, not overly academic, but fairly thorough. It is noticeable, however, that the author is not an "insider" in the community, and some questions were left unaddressed or glossed over fairly quickly - e.g. race and gender dynamics/ relations within a community that has been primarily Lebanese, and whose leadership reflects this.

There was also some commentary on Al Rashid as a reflection of "Canadian Islam," which I don't think can accurately be stated - I have a lot of opinions on Canadian Muslims, and no one community (no matter how old/ well established) can truly represent the width and breadth of the Canadian Muslim experience (which, to my cynical eyes, consists of a lot of internalized Islamophobia and intellectual colonization and political cowardice and petty squabbling and terrible mismanagement and disorganization with no cohesive vision for the Canadian Ummah).

I appreciate this book for what it is, alongside the reminder that some insights will only come from "community insiders" who understand the unspoken elements at play.