Responding favorably to a demand from the Association of Muslim Students of the University of Montreal (AEMUDM), management agreed to transform certain premises into prayer rooms during lunchtime.
This is a very serious error.
“Did the University of Montreal wonder if its decision could not have a knock-on effect on colleges and other universities in Quebec, at a time when the affirmation of limited secularism and in the continuation of our modern history encounters strong resistance?
Screenshot
For what
It is not the act of praying that is problematic, but of subordinating the usual functioning of a public establishment to the requests of a religious group.
I would be equally opposed to the development of a chapel. Catholic prayer, however, does not need to be visible and mark its territory.
Although we may say that these rooms will be multi-faith, they will only be used by those who claimed them.
It is not impossible that they become places of community gathering on a religious basis.
Formulated for the first time twenty years ago, this request had never been satisfied until now. The administration cited the lack of premises.
And then, suddenly, while the student population has increased significantly, while professors are told that the shortage of premises requires them to teach evenings and weekends, a miracle occurs.
Clearly, like the multiplication of loaves in the Bible, religion has unsuspected powers.
Did the University of Montreal wonder if its decision could not have a knock-on effect on colleges and other universities in Quebec, at a time when the affirmation of limited secularism and as an extension of our modern history faces strong resistance?
Does the University of Montreal realize, as a reader noted, that it provides an instrument of pressure that practitioners can exert on non-practitioners: “we don’t often see you in the prayer room”.
- Listen to Joseph Facal’s column via QUB :
If the University of Montreal ends the experiment, it will be accused of “Islamophobia” and it will be its fault.
The AEMUDM may brandish a petition, but it is both easy to sign and, sometimes, embarrassing not to sign.
For the most part, the request is brought forward, as is always the case in the associative world, by the most militant.
However, this AEMUDM had invited, on April 9, 2022, the Wahhabi preacher Eric Younous, listed as S by French security (see screenshot).
In 2017, the French weekly Marianne reported the decision of a mosque in Roubaix to cancel the conference that Younous was to give there in the company of Hani Ramadan, brother of Tariq Ramadan.
Women
The weekly recalled that Younous, in a sermon available on YouTube, was angry against “the conception of woman according to the West” where “freedom is to walk half-naked in the streets and not be than an object of temptation.
Was the University of Montreal aware?
Did she also know what the late Fréderic Bastien reported on the AEMUDM in his column of April 15, 2023 in our pages?
Clearly, no matter how much we twist this in every direction, this is a decision, draped in openness and benevolence, that is profoundly ill-advised.