The First Little Mosque on the Prairie

It was a tiny pioneer community founded amid a small but growing city. As a result, the emphasis was on getting along and fitting in. Over time, alcohol was consumed by many, if not most; the salaat, the prayers said five times daily, were often ignored. In several homes, Christmas trees were trimmed, Easter egg hunts were organized, and Halloween was celebrated. Friendships between Arabs and Jews were common. The odd intercultural business relationship resulted, and members of Edmonton’s comparably small Jewish community helped fund the Al Rashid Mosque.

For these Edmonton Arabs, religion was a less significant bond than ethnicity. Intermarriage between Christians and Muslims (both Arab and not) was fairly common, and among the eight children in my father’s family only half married within the faith. My mother’s side was even less bound by tradition. Her father, a Lebanese Muslim, had married a Canadian-born woman of Scottish ancestry, and of the five children in her family only one, my mother, married a Muslim.

Because the Arab community was small, practices that emphasized similarities between Christians and Muslims were played up, and differences played down. The mosque functioned more as a community centre, a place where Arab youths would gather to dance the traditional dubke or, on occasion, the jitterbug. Things as seemingly unimportant as music and cuisine — fatiya and kibbeh, tabbouleh and hummus — became bridges between two groups that were increasingly identifying as one.

Still, some traditions endured. While halal butchers were practically unheard of, the prohibition against eating pork was widely observed by Muslims, though certainly not in every home. Once, when my grandmother was visiting, she encountered something in our kitchen that would make any contemporary cleric’s blood curdle.

“Bobby!” she shouted to my father. “There’s a big ham in your refrigerator!”

My dad, ever the dutiful son, sauntered over. He opened the fridge door and looked inside, then furrowed his brow. “That’s not a big ham, Mother,” he said, closing the door.

“Bobby, don’t lie, ya haram. I saw it with my own eyes.”My father reopened the door. “Oh, that,” he said. “That’s a little ham.”

All that said, the community was far from idyllic — or, for that matter, monolithic; certain families hewed more closely to the ways of the old country than others. It was engaged in a pattern typical for a newly arrived group: a struggle to negotiate old traditions within the slipstream of a new and very different culture. Most first- and second-generation Arabs adopted a flexible approach to their Islamic faith; in turn, the faith proved flexible enough to allow for its North Americanization.

Over time, the community spawned its share of businessmen, academics, and sundry other pillars. My father’s brother, Edward Saddy, was the first Muslim judge in Canada. Another uncle (by marriage, to my father’s sister), Larry Shaben, was Alberta’s minister of economic development and trade — the first Muslim in Canada to hold a provincial cabinet position. One of my father’s sisters married Muhammad Ali Bogra, from 1953 to 1955 the prime minister of (then united) East and West Pakistan.

While boundaries were stretched by the second generation, the third-generation kids — us — pushed them even further. We experimented with drugs, had friends and lovers of every faith and persuasion, and became increasingly secular. We mainstreamed. It was a quintessentially Canadian experience, repeated countless times in dozens of other ethnic communities across the nation. The only thing truly notable about it was how ordinary it was.