The author is a professor of literature in Montreal, contributor to the journal Argument and essayist. He notably published These words that think for us (Liber, 2017) and Why do our children leave school ignorant? (Boreal, 2008).
“Seventy-three percent of Muslim women in Quebec plan to leave the province” because of the Law on State Secularism (Law 21), says Professor Nadia Hasan on the basis of a study she co-signed with Lina El Bakir and Youmna Badawy, and which includes a survey conducted with the Abacus Data team among 411 Muslim women living in Quebec.
I am not an expert in surveys, but it seems to me that a sample of 411 people is not sufficiently representative of the approximately 200,000 Muslim women in Quebec for us to draw a conclusion of this kind. According to the 2021 census, the province has more than 400,000 Muslims, or around 5% of the total population.
This at least invites us to take this result with a grain of salt. It would also be necessary to know how this sample was assembled. We will undoubtedly know more this Thursday noon, when the study will be revealed to the public. It would also be relevant to include Muslim women who do not wear the veil and who therefore have no reason to consider themselves discriminated against by Law 21. In 2011, this was around 88% of them. . This percentage is undoubtedly lower today, but it probably remains significant.
All these relatively obvious reservations did not prevent Radio-Canada from asking the following question during one of its information programs: should the law be repealed in order to avoid the departure of all these women? This is how the dubious conclusions of a study without much objectivity lead journalists from a public channel to suggest that this law on secularism will lead to a real human catastrophe by expelling at least 150,000 people from the province. women and causing Quebec to lose an equivalent number, or even double, of jobs (because we can assume that their husbands will follow them to Ontario or British Columbia).
However, all this panic is born from a confusion of roles, which is unfortunately more and more frequent today: so-called experts, whose official titles seem to attest to expertise, are in reality activists, who seek less to establish a factual truth than to serve a cause.
This is the case of M.me Hasan, who until 2023 was employed by the National Council of Canadian Muslims, an Islamist lobby strongly opposed to secularism. But she is not alone in wearing the double hat of researcher and activist, and it is increasingly common to see, in certain faculties, professors who seem recruited more for their past (or their present) of activism. only for the rigor of their intellectual and research work. This mix of genres even seems to be put forward as a strength. So, surprisingly, on her presentation page on the University of York website, Nadia Hasan is described as being a “ scholar and activist » which practices both « research and activism “.
It is obviously entirely legitimate to be an activist and to be socially engaged when you are an academic and it is hardly surprising that intellectuals adopt strong convictions in the political domain. But we also know, since the indictments of Max Weber, Julien Benda, Raymond Aron and, more recently, Nathalie Heinich, how important it is to clearly distinguish the two roles of political activist and scholar. In other words, even if a university researcher is driven, including in the choice of the subjects he deals with, by strong socio-political convictions, he must, in the context of his research, absolutely avoid any departure from scientific rigor or simple intellectual honesty.
It is this prerequisite of objectivity and impartiality which is today knowingly rejected by academics who explicitly reject any claim “to the Truth” in the name of “the building of more humane, more just and more inclusive societies”. (a most laudable objective, but which does not relate to science), while considering “scientific objectivity” as “a myth”, an “illusion”, “an illusion which obscures power relations” (all these quotes are taken from an open letter entitled “In defense of responsible and committed scientific knowledge”, which was signed in 2018 by more than a hundred members of the Quebec Network in Feminist Studies).
The problem raised by this committed work by experts whose methodology is often questionable is that their results – even when they are taken up without much discernment or precaution and disseminated on a large scale by the media – are only convincing for already convinced them. In the eyes of many people, these works appear rather, and sometimes rightly so, as biased studies whose conclusions are written in advance.
For example, this study by Mme Hasan, funded by a grant from Women and Gender Equality Canada (FEGC), was commissioned by the same National Council of Canadian Muslims which was until recently her employer. It would therefore have been surprising if she had reached different conclusions regarding Bill 21 than those she presented before the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights of the House of Commons in Ottawa.
This tendentious work results in a loss of confidence in experts in general, even if not all are concerned, and in public cynicism, distrust and cynicism which, in turn, serves as breeding ground for a credulous pseudo-scepticism which unreservedly admits certain fake news or give in to the sirens of conspiracy.