Assma Galuta, aka Asoomii Jay, 25, has been an active YouTuber since 2011 when she began doing hijab tutorials. “I saw a lot of my friends removing their hijab and it made me sad,” she explained, “They were just doing it to fit in with their Canadian friends and they would say ‘I don’t look good in a hijab’ or ‘I don’t feel welcome in a hijab’. I started my YouTube Channel because I wanted to show girls that they could still look pretty and feel pretty and be stylish and wear the hijab.” Her channel became popular internationally with thousands of subscribers on YouTube and tens of thousands of Facebook followers.

Muslim Link is grateful to Shady Hafez for letting us publish his original blog post discussing media and community reactions to Carlos and Ashton Larmond’s application for Indian Status.

The 24 year old Larmond Twins converted to Islam five years ago, according to the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network (APTN), and were raised by their grandmother, Linda Brennan, in Vanier where they attended Rideau High school. Both twins have been arrested on allegations of participating in the activity of a terrorist group as part of the RCMP’s Project Servant arrests. Carlos Larmond has been accused of planning to leave Canada with the intention of joining ISIS.

As it snowed on the evening of February 11th, students gathered in front of the Human Rights Monument in downtown Ottawa to recognize the victims of the Chapel Hill Shooting in the US. Syrian American Deah Barakat, 23, his Palestinian American wife Yusor Abu Salha, 21, and her sister Razan Abu Salha, 19, were shot at gunpoint by Craig Stephen Hicks reportedly over a parking dispute, but many allege that the motives run far deeper and that this is a hate crime against Muslims.

Friday morning I found out that an Ottawa mosque was vandalized. Someone had broken a couple of windows and the double-paneled glass door at the sisters' entrance. How do I know that this was the sisters' entrance? Because this is my mosque. I would know that bench and shoe rack anywhere.

What do Canada’s one million Muslims really think?

Nobody knows but it’s certainly a question that the research firm Environics, along with several national partners, hope to answer in a new survey of Canadian Muslims coming soon.  

As World Hijab Day is wrapping up, many of us who are advocates of religious freedom in Canada are grappling with outrage at how the tragic death of Naima Rharouity has been covered in some media.

Certainly, the hijab has come under increased scrutiny, thanks to the highly controversial values charter, proposed by the PQ government. The charter, which aims to enforce a rigid form of secularism within the province, has already been blamed for mounting abuse and harassment of Muslim women. Whether or not this law is passed, the coverage and subsequent reactions to Naima Rharouity's death further indicate that the floodgates of hatred towards Muslim women have already been opened. Every Muslim woman in the province, and possibly beyond, will be affected negatively by the racist and patriarchal discourses playing out during hearings on the charter at Quebec's national assembly.

The recent Supreme Court of Canada judgment in the NS case – deciding whether a woman who brought charges of childhood sexual abuse against male relatives could wear her niqab while providing testimony – sparked much discussion that reflected the ongoing tension of a Canadian society where misperceptions and mistrust of anything associated with Islam remain a constant.

Part of those tensions reflect an Islamophobic lens that, as University Of Ottawa professor Natasha Bakht points out, positions the niqab as a symbol that is “experienced by non-wearers as a form of confrontation or criticism against national ways of living and dressing.”