Mosques: From Nondescript To Full-Fledged Traditional

Madina Masjid: From a nondescript building to a full-fledged traditional mosque

I had previously blogged about a new, non-camouflaged mosque soon to be completed in the downtown Toronto skyline.

Zak Ghanim, the architect, who is fittingly an Egyptian immigrant, is disclosing some design and architectural plans he has for this new mosque. He has been asked by the President of Madina Mosque (as this mosque is called) to emphasize the traditional elements in order for it to have " a 'real' mosque look" which incorporates "classical minaret, domes, geometric detailing and elaborate columns."

This is a far cry from corner "Islamic centers" (euphemisms for mosques) and mosques attached to strip-malls , when it seemed that the Muslim community wanted to hide its presence from the city's inhabitants. The same was true of the original Madina Mosque, which was really a nondescript building in an unattractive part of the Danforth.

Even Ghanim makes this observation by saying, "The first mosques in the city were not very elaborate, so we could build each part quickly. Now, it seems, each mosque is fancier than the next."

Now that Muslims have acquired a new-found confidence, they are not afraid to publicize their presence at all, as is evident by their new plans for the Madina Mosque, which has all the traditional paraphernalia of minarets and domes. The only things that appear to be missing from the Madina Mosque are the loudspeakers and recording devices for the multiple calls to prayer. But, we have to wait and see for that one.

Ghanim is already making plans for another city's mosque. This time, he would like to put more modern and avant-garde elements into it. He says that his modern vision for the mosque in Kitchener, Ontario, would be,"an original Canadian contribution to Islamic architecture."

This is how far we have come in Canadian architecture. Islamic architects can now talk about their "contributions". Unlike the exotic architecture of Moorish influences and revivals of past centuries, we are not talking about short, concentrated architectural influences which didn't change the cultures of the countries where they were erected. In fact, these buildings blended into the prevailing architecture, for all their foreignness.

What we're seeing, when Ghanim says "an original Canadian contribution to Islamic architecture", is buildings that are distinguishable and foreign from distances away. More importantly, the purpose of these buildings is not as attractive, even beautiful, exotica, but as functioning buildings that cater to cultures and religions which have no bearing on the predominant and historical culture of the cities and towns in which they are built.

In short, their purpose is to allow Muslim populations to unabashedly follow their own cultural and religious traditions in buildings that resemble - from function to design - those (traditional ones) that they left behind in their Muslim lands.

Thus, we have come from hidden Islamic "centers" to unequivocally traditional mosques, within a matter of a few years.

Muslims in Canada are no longer afraid to build fancy, traditional mosques. Which also means that they will not be afraid to publicly use them either.

InControl: A Christian (Sort of) Magazine

Here is a new Canadian online magazine which calls itself InControl Magazine and whose first lines define it thus:

InControl Magazine online is a Christian-based website that provides Canadians and International users with contemporary practical day-to-day online tools and resources that are geared towards helping people take control of everyday issues from a Godly perspective and consequently finding liberty in dealing with everyday encounters.

In the fourth paragraph of its "about us" page, here is what it says:

We believe that all religions lead to the same God. And because of that no one is excluded from being a part-taker of InControl Magazine. Although InControl Magazine is Christian-based, the content is consciously selected to serve all religions (Judaism, Muslim, etc)...

It is also geared toward:

A new, different and creative Christian magazine primarily for teens and generation Y.

I'm not sure if the ultimate agenda of InControl is to give the "Christian" youth a bit of slack, or if it is to attract the attention of other non-Christian theists. But, I think they're playing a dangerous game. Theologically, of course they have been proven wrong on the "God" issue. The God of the Muslims is different from the God of the Jews and the Christians. Even if they declare their similarities loudly, Muslims will not agree, and will not join.

So what is happening is that the Christian youth they convince to be more relaxed followers of Christ will be left with a wide open option on the true nature of God.

These irresponsible, and to be frank, flat out deceivers, are more dangerous than atheists, who at least call themselves something concrete and tangible.

I'm not sure what is ultimately the plan of these pseudo-Christian liars. But, given the force of atheism, and the even bigger energy of Islam, young people are prone to be hijacked by all kinds of things these days.

I've noticed that those who lack a strong fundamental belief are easy targets for those who propose strong fundamental beliefs. These days, it isn't even atheism. The big contender is Islam. People don't stay non-religious or half-religious for long. Yes, even atheism becomes a form of belief. But even stronger than that is Islam.

I sent the following letter to the editors:

To whom it may concern:

I read your new online magazine with great interest, and I thought it would be a strong force against the double-edged sword of atheism and Islam that is facing young people today. Both these groups have strong campaigns which attract young people to their sides (for example, look at the "atheist" bus ads now in view throughout Toronto, and the many recruiting methods of Islam including TV shows and sitcoms.)

Christianity is doing very little of that. In fact, it is one of the most timid movements of them all, and since it is in constant fear of being maligned by other groups, it conspicuously scales down its messages for outreach.

Your magazine is doing exactly that. Rather than put out a forceful message that Christians believe in the Old and New Testaments, and nothing else, you become all-inclusive and, with your illustrative phrase: “We believe that all religions lead to the same God”, you accommodate anyone who believes in some kind of God

By declaring the gods of Muslims and other theists as being similar to that of the Judeo-Christian God, you are not only theologically incorrect, you are also sending a dangerous message to the very youth you're trying to reach.

Islam is a strong and aggressive religion. It needs just a crack to get in, and once in, it will act precipitously and aggressively to take hold of the innocent bystanders. You have opened this crack by including Muslims as part of your magazine's focus, and thus endangered the Christians who participate. This is very irresponsible behavior.

If you wish an ecumenical magazine, please say so. Otherwise, Muslims (and other non-Judeo-Christian believers) have no room in a review that calls itself "Christian-based". It will only confuse your readers, and it might (although I pessimistically predict that it will) cause them to have a change of heart and leave Christianity altogether.

We need strong, confident messages from Christian leaders; not wishy-washy, unclear, sentimental messages about "All religions lead to the same God". That is false and deceitful, and will only spiritually harm your readership.

Sincerely,

Kidist Paulos Asrat

Islam on IMAX

Sultans of Science: 1000 Years of
Knowledge Rediscovered
Exhibition at the Ontario Science Centre

The Ontario Science Centre's Imax theater started screening a film called Journey to Mecca on February 6. This alone wouldn't make much of a story since Imax makes many kinds of films. In fact its roster of current films at the Science Centre includes: The Mysteries of the Great Lakes, Roving Mars and The Alps.

What is peculiar about this film is that it is not really a film on a great landscape or equally impressive architecture, or even the microscopic, but macroscopically projected Bugs! (made by the same director as Journey to Mecca) . This film is the journey of a 14th century Muslim scholar making his pilgrimage to Mecca from Morocco, overcoming all kinds of adversity along the way. This looks like a script more conducive to regular theaters, rather than the giant Imax theater with its 3-D, wrap-around walls for screens.

I wonder if the director, Jonathan Barker, is using this huge projection to overwhelm us with Muslims, Mecca and Islam in general? Here is his explanation for making the film:

[O]ur whole idea for this film...is to try to bring people together and have more understanding of one another. It's very regrettable, but in many parts of the post-9/11 world, seeing three million Muslims in one place evokes fear, and the word 'Muslim' means 'Islamic terrorist.' We want to build bridges, reduce that fear.

Concurrently, the Ontario Science Centre is hosting an exhibition entitled: Sultans of Science: 1000 Years of Knowledge Rediscovered , which started just a day before Journey to Mecca. The website for Sultans of Science says:

Sultans of Science’ is a global touring exhibition celebrating the contribution of Muslim Scholars in Science and Technology during the Golden Age of the Islamic World (700-1700 BC) and the influence their inventions and contributions has towards modern society.

Focused on increasing knowledge and understanding of these invaluable contributions, Sultans of Science has been created as a global travelling exhibition in order to enable its message to be far reaching through science centres and museums around the world.

Now, I keep hearing about the great contributions of Muslim scholars during that ephemeral Islamic Golden Age, but each time I look into this further or into the great Muslim contributions in art and design, I usually come up short. I often find that people who insist on the great Muslim Golden Age are devout liberals who want to promote a sophisticated image of Islam, as an antidote to regular news coverages of bombs and blasts. There is, in other words, an agenda to this exhibition.

As there is an agenda to John Barker's Journey to Mecca, which he himself has admitted to.

The problem is that these shows will be viewed by school-aged children, since the Science Centre is a favorite destination. Here is one more way that Islam's proponents are pushing their message, undetected, to slowly and gradually seep into our lives. Their clever strategy is also to get at the young children, whose natural curiosity will allow them to imbibe whatever "interesting" information is put in front of them, and who will be ready to spout all this propaganda at the necessary time.

Conference on Preserving Western Civilization

This Weekend


This site started its odyssey (strong word for such a small blog, I know, but the ambitions were high) with the intention of recording the good and the bad that is happening in (my) Western culture. I wanted to focus on art and culture, but inevitably I had to get into areas like immigration and multiculturalism, factors which are negatively affecting the culture I'm writing about.

There is an important conference taking place this weekend in Baltimore, Maryland entitled Preserving Western Civilization. As far as I know, it is the first of its kind. I think it is a timely and necessary conference. It represents what I'm trying to do here at Camera Lucida and Our Changing Landscape, at least in blogging about the issues.

Some participating speakers include:

- Lawrence Auster from the View From the Right, whose website covers issues from Islam, to liberalism, to Christianity and Darwinism with a traditionalist perspective.

Mr. Auster will be presenting on A Real Islam Policy for a Real America.

- John Philippe Rushton, psychology professor from the University of Western Ontario, who has been criticized by Canadian media, and has even received the honor of David Suzuki's attention with Suziki saying, "There will always be Rushtons in science, and we must always be prepared to root them out!" for his views, including his book Race, Evolution and Behavior.

- Peter Brimelow, founder of Vdare, an immigration restriction site, and Brenda Walker contributing writer at Vdare.

I'm not sure about hotel reservations and conference tickets, but there's more information here, including the topics the speakers will be discussing. I would think Washington D.C. and Baltimore residents can go for the day (both days or one only).

Belgian Converts Getting Their Own Flemish Mosque

'Cities against Islamisation' in Antwerp,
17 January 2008.

I have recently added Islam in Europe as another link to my blog roll. A recent post from there caught my attention, in view of the convert stories I have written about here and here.

Belgian converts are having a hard time following the Arabic in the cities' mosques, and have decided to open their own mosque with Flemish as the principal language.

Rates of converts are pretty high, with the Antwerp Imam seeing to one to two converts every day. Now this could be an exaggeration by the Imam, but even one to two every week is pretty high.

According to Islam in Europe, there are 150 Muslim converts in Flanders (seems a little low). But numbers are growing, and these dedicated new Muslims want to get into the business of worshiping as fast as possible.

What is more interesting, though, is that more than half of the citizens of this Antwerp suburb, where the mosque is being established, are Muslim.

My argument all along has been that with more Muslims in a certain location, the more likely the non-Muslim population is going to get influenced by them. You cannot get a sufficient number of converts to build their own mosque without this influential presence in the first place.

Ingrid Mattson's Strange Journey

Michelangelo's Pietà in St. Peter's Basilica in
Vatican City. I wonder if Ingrid Mattson went there?
[Click on image to see larger version]

[This post has been revised somewhat to include more biographical material, and some information on Mattson's "journeys".]

Ingrid Mattson is a Canadian convert to Islam. She is the President of the Islamic Society of North America. She recently was part of an ecumenical group of Christian, Jewish and Hindu leaders who participated in the traditional National Prayer Service at the National Cathedral following Obama's inauguration.

Mattson's ISNA has been linked with Hamas and terrorist activities. I am not particularly interested in this, since I will always presume that Islamic societies will at some point or other support, or even fund, Jihad-advocating groups, of which Hamas is certainly one.

What interests me is Ingrid Mattson's conversion. When I saw her photograph, I saw immediately that this was a white woman convert. Her face reminds me of countless women I see around me, with the rounded cheeks and small chins, who resemble no Muslim from a Middle Eastern country.

Sure enough, she is originally from Ontario, and her story is as intriguing as any.

She was a philosophy and fine art student at the University of Waterloo and worked as an archivist cataloging art slides in the university library. She traveled to Paris and spent whole days in the Louvre. She calls this episode in her life "The summer I met Muslims". She went to daily mass as a young girl and adolescent. But neither the art nor her Catholic faith was strong enough to keep her with her family.

Right after graduating from university - when she says that she had already started her "personal study of Islam" - she went to British Columbia by train for a tree-planting job for the summer (another one of those "summers".) She took with her Fazlur Rahman's Islam, which she had found in a bookstore a only few days before. She read this book on her cross-country train ride, at the end of which she decided to apply for graduate studies in Islamic studies. And the rest, as they say, is history.

The most intriguing comment she makes is:

[I]n the end, I found even the strongest reaction to a work of art isolating. Of course I felt some connection to the artist, appreciation for another human perspective. But each time the aesthetic response flared up, then died down. It left no basis for action.

What a strange thing to say! All those pietàs and Madonnas, all those crucifixions and portraits of saints? All those paintings of the infant Jesus? She left all that to go to Islam?

Which is what happened, as she describes it:

Then I met people who did not construct statues or sensual paintings of gods, great men and beautiful women. Yet they knew about God, they honored their leaders, and they praised the productive work of women. They did not try to depict the causes; they traced the effects.

If a young woman so imbued in the most beautiful productions of Western culture and Christianity cannot find the grace to remain in that culture and faith, what is it that pulled her away from it?

She does say that her studies in philosophy eventually led her to Existentialism.

In college, philosophy had brought me from Plato, through Descartes only to end at Existentialism - a barren outcome.

I've always said that where there is a barren and empty heart, an unbeliever's heart, which is nonetheless always searching for something, then this heart is easy prey for Islam.

Perhaps this is what happened to her. And this should be a warning to all those in the West. If you take belief, and specifically Christianity, out of the equation, it will get filled with something else, which ultimately will not be the "nothing" of atheism, but could well be the something of Islam.

And Islam is around us everywhere these days. Even Mattson, almost twenty years ago, found enough Muslim influence in her metaphorical and real journeys to make final, fundamental decisions in her life. And how much more susceptible we are now, with Muslim influences that much more dominant in our daily lives.

Brigitte Gabriel Has Another Interview At Frontpagemag.com And Says Even Less Than She Did In 2006

A very vocal Muslim woman from Iran, Homa Arjomand, made it her life's goal to stop Sharia in Ontario a few years ago. To avoid the many negative impacts of Sharia on Muslim women, as was her main argument, the Jewish and Catholic arbitrations were also dismantled, and the Muslim Sharia thus lost its bid. Multiculturalism won a strange victory.

I wrote about this in Islam's Missionary Women where I say:

All these women [Homa Arjomand, Hirsi Ali, Wafa Sultan and Irshad Manji] are pleading that their Western compatriots help them reform Islam and support their fellow Muslim women in achieving their dreams of transformed lives in the West. Each of them is using the rhetoric of freedom of the individual, freedom of expression, and a simplistic concept of secularism to justify her appeals.

But our duty as Westerners is not to reform Islam, nor to accommodate Muslim women--those very women who will have male and female Muslim off-spring, thereby turning our countries into what they left behind. Our responsibility is to make sure that Islam is kept at a distance, which includes Muslims...We can never be sure if our assistance to these multitudes of Muslim women would alleviate their plight, but making drastic changes in our own societies in response to their grievances will only damage us.

Brigitte Gabriel is another Arab woman speaking against Islam, but who is a few steps ahead of the rest perhaps because she is Christian. Her new book, They Must Be Stopped, attempts to address what to do with the growing Muslim presence in the US. It is equally relevant in Canada.

I have written about Brigitte's impassioned demands previously [also links to her 2006 Frontpagemag.com interview], and in her recent January 16, 2008 interview at Frontpagemag.com, she still doesn't come up with a better plan than stopping them from doing whatever it is they're doing through regulations, laws and constant monitoring.

Her argument is to stop them once they are here. One major thesis of her argument should be to stop the from coming here in the first place. She doesn't say this at all in her interview, although in her 2006 interview she does say "close our borders". That's it. In fact, in her 2008 interview, she seemed to have regressed. No mention is made about border closing at all.

They Must Be Stopped has to include the argument that allowing such a large, dangerous group in our society is unacceptable.

Brigitte now needs to think one more step ahead. In a sane world, no Muslims should be admitted into our countries. In an even saner world, we should find ways to remove such a large presence of a group that is eternally set to destroy us (for reasons of their own which they certainly find valid) . The policies need to be fine-tuned, but that is the direction that Brigitte, as a vocal and well-known spokesman, should be going.

Although to be fair, the full title of her book is They Must Be Stopped: Why We Must Defeat Radical Islam And How We Can do It .

In order to really critique it, I should read the whole thing, including the part where she says "How we can do it." But the problem is, she never talks about the "how", always about the "what" (sometimes about the "why".) I don't know why this is, but Robert Spencer once told in me in an interview that he feels the public is not ready for the "how".

But, if they never talk about it at important interviews, how is the public ever going to be interested in, and realize the feasibility of the "how"?