Dr. Sahin: One of the first Muslims in Niagara

In one memorable day in 1960, their British-made Ford Anglia arrived in Montreal. Shipped across the Atlantic along with all their other worldly possessions, the overseas delivery marked the beginning of their life in Canada.
They strapped luggage to the roof, and loaded their three girls, ages five, three and two, into the interior of the right-hand-drive car and began the journey (initially, on the wrong side of the road) to the northern Ontario community of Hearst, halfway between Kapuskasing and nothing.
It was there that Dr. Fuad Sahin, his wife Solmaz and their three children spent the next year of their life (which was entirely long enough, notes Sahin) as he practised medicine, and learned about the value of an electric engine block heater.
“It was so cold, you could hold cold with your hands and slice it,” says Sahin.
And when Solmaz was asked if she wore a hijab in her native Turkey, she'd respond with a smile: “No, but I cover my hair and face in Canada.”
Fittingly, on one especially frigid day in February, 92-year-old Sahin sips from a cup of Turkish coffee (sugar but no milk) in front of a fireplace in his Niagara-on-the-Lake home and talks about the beginnings of the Muslim community in Niagara. There are an estimated 5,000 Muslims in the region. That number is estimated to grow to about 14,000 by 2030.
His family was one of the first Muslims to live here. They came to the Falls in 1966, where Dr. Sahin worked as a urologist.
Back then, he would drive to Toronto, where Muslims would meet in church basements and other rented spaces to pray and socialize. And it was through the Islamic grapevine that he got word of Niagara's only other Muslim family, the Karachis.
As the Muslim community grew in Niagara, the two families opened their homes for prayer. The late Hassan Karachi invited Muslims to his home for Friday prayer. And twice a year, Muslims would gather at Sahin's home for Eid prayers. One hundred or more people from all parts of Niagara prayed on the front lawn of his Niagara-on-the-Lake home, a turn-of-the-century lakeside house the Sahins have lived in since 1971. (“We Turks love the water and the sea,” he says.)
And for a few years, that was good enough.
But as the Muslim community grew, and grew some more, they needed a bigger space.
“We made Canada our home. We love Canada,” says Sahin. “In part of our home we should have a mosque.”
In 1984, Niagara's first mosque was built in the Falls, on Lyons Creek Road. Over time, it offered a weekend Islamic school, and hired an imam. Then in 1992, with help from the Canadian government, the mosque expanded to include a gym and classrooms, which became a full-time private school, registered with the Ontario Ministry of Education, six years later. These day, the JK to Grade 8 school, has about 85 students.
Meanwhile, the St. Catharines part of this story begins in 1976 when the late Hussein Hamdani and his wife Arua, their seven children, and grandchildren, landed in Toronto as refugees from East Africa. They shared a two-bedroom apartment among 18 people, until they bought a farm and moved to Fort Erie.
The Hamdani's became one of the first Muslim families in St. Catharines when they bought Reid Cleaners, a dry cleaning business at Geneva St. and Welland Ave.
Hussein Hamdani, their 42-year-old grandson, remembers as a child travelling to Niagara Falls with his family for Friday prayer at the mosque. In St. Catharines, the community was gathering in rented space, and needed their own mosque, too, he says.
And then, with little fanfare, his grandfather bought the Goodyear Tire store at 117 Geneva St., with dreams of building a mosque on the property. Family members worked alongside a construction company to tear it down and convert a building with hoists and offices into a place of worship, he says.
In 1994, when it was complete, the Hamdanis gave the mosque to the community on one condition: “It had to be open and inclusive, regardless of ethnicity,” says Hussein.
“It had to be a place open to everybody.”
Indeed, to this day Sunni and Shia Muslims, historically a deep rift dividing the two, pray together, he says.
While his grandfather died in 2007 at age 84, his 90-year-old grandmother still lives in a house next to the mosque.
“One of her great joys is to look out and see that the mosque is full with congregants,” says Hussein.
“It's a beacon of spirituality in the middle of St. Catharines.
“Most people search to have an identity and purpose in life. To have a place of worship, it helps you define your Canadian-Muslim identity,” he says.
Back in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Sahin interrupts the conversation to move to a room next to the kitchen. It`s warmer, he says, muttering something about getting old. With a wood-burning fireplace and family photos on the mantel, it's his favourite space in the house on a cold winter day.
Rooms are important in his life, especially in a metaphorical sense. We must live in a room that is open to all winds, he says, paraphrasing a favourite Indian poet.
“But don't allow yourself to be carried away by the winds. Stand where you are.
“We have to learn from each other.”
After the terrorist attacks on 9-11, he spoke at an unity event at Optimist Park, hosted by the mosque and the United Church. On that day, he did not read from a written speech but shared what was in his heart.
“We Muslims are peaceful people,” he told the crowd. “This is a great sin.”
“I felt angry,” he says. “This was a great stabbing in the back.”
And on this day, from his sofa-turned-podium, he begins to speak about Islam and world peace as if he's back in front of that audience.
He starts by talking about his God. “We have to show thanks to Him. We have to love Him.
“How do we love Him? We can't kiss His hand,`` he says.
“We love, by appreciating all His creations. Human beings, animals, vegetation, air and sea.”
Sahin speaks about justice and balance and how they create harmony in the world. “You have to recognize the rights of every individual,” he says.
“Justice is not something made in the court. It is the universal justice.”
And the two sins – arrogance and hypocrisy.
"People look down on others," he says. "People say, 'I live in a big place. I'm white, you're black. I'm rich, you're poor'."
"There is a saying that whoever carries an ounce of arrogance in his heart has no place in paradise."
So, why do people hurt each other? "God gave human beings freedom of choice," he says.
And with that choice, comes selfishness, greed and power.
His thoughts turn to the generations below him. The ones whose choices will shape the future.
“Canada is our home. We owe Canada lots of things," he says.
“We give Canada lot of good, young people.

“It's our home now. And we need to build a better home.”
Credit to y Cheryl Clock,

The rise of political Islam in Turkey- William Armstrong

‘The Rise of Political Islam in Turkey: Urban Poverty, Grassroots Activism and Islamic Fundamentalism’ by Kayhan Delibaş (I.B. Tauris, 344 pages, £68)
The rise of political Islam in Turkey and the Middle East is hardly an under-examined subject. Endless articles, academic papers and books are churned out to feed an insatiable demand for work in the area. Into this cacophony steps Turkish academic Kayhan Delibaş, whose new book examines the advance of political Islam in Turkey in the 1980s and 90s. Delibaş makes a plea for objectivity throughout, saying he seeks to examine the causes of the rise of Islamism in Turkey “rather than dealing with appearances.” It is not, he writes, his goal to “judge, condemn or defend the Islamists’ worldview.” The book strives to be academic in a particular sense of the word: For Delibaş, political Islam in Turkey is neither good nor bad, it simply is.

“The Rise of Political Islam in Turkey” is divided into two broad sections. The first details how Turkish politics and society in the latter decades of the 20th century provided the necessary conditions for the growth of Islamist parties. The second explains how those parties were able to capitalize on this opportunity through grassroots activism and service provision, which the author observed through qualitative research on the ground with Islamist activists in the suburbs of the capital Ankara. The results are very impressive, though the book is not without flaws.

After 1970, Turkey was rocked by a series of socio-economic shifts. Urbanization that had been ongoing for decades accelerated throughout the 1980s, prompted largely by an economic restructuring plan recommended by the IMF after the military coup d’état of 1980. In less than 20 years after 1980, Turkey’s urban population more than doubled from 19.6 million in 1980 to 40.8 million in 1997. The nature of the economic measures meant that post-1980 mass migration was motored more by rural push than by urban pull, meaning that many of the new migrants were unable to find work or were trapped in insecure, low-paid jobs. Major cities expanded well beyond their physical boundaries, with settlements of makeshift “built overnight” (gecekondu) housing springing up everywhere. The waves of migration exhausted the industrial and service sectors, overwhelming already scarce resources for housing, health, education, and local services. Turkish workers also experienced a drastic drop in real wages and a sharp rise in inequality.

The mainstream center-right and center-left parties were helpless in the face of these tides, unable to speak to the growing constituency of disaffected new urbanites. Decimated by the coup and restricted by the conditions that the military regime later imposed, the major parties failed (and were generally unwilling) to forge organic local connections through people on the ground. As the years progressed, Turkey’s political landscape became increasingly fragmented and voters found themselves disillusioned with mainstream parties who failed to solve bread and butter issues.

Into this vacuum stepped the Islamists. From the late 1980s, the Welfare Party (RP) of Necmettin Erbakan established its power base in the alienated gecekondu neighborhoods on the urban fringes. The Islamists developed a political rhetoric that combined a comforting cultural identity with a populist “Just Order” (Adil Düzen) economic program. In the words of Delibaş,

the RP saw the problem and developed policies and a political rhetoric that addressed the social, cultural and economic problems of the gecekondu masses. It gave the new migrants an identity, and an avenue through which they could participate in politics; they could air their opinions and express their grievances against the establishment.

The RP seemed to be the only party that cared about the problems of the urban poor, and “emerged as the ‘one guardian’ of the exploited, poverty stricken urban masses … [combining] religious and class appeal.” Islam offered the swelling ranks of the urban poor a sense of fraternity and cultural values that helped them to overcome the threat of the city environment. The urban fringe became the platform from which the RP was catapulted to national prominence, and the party seized both Istanbul and Ankara against all expectations in 1994.

Crucial in developing the party’s appeal were vast and well-oiled grassroots organizations and local branches. The most original part of Delibaş’s book is its second half, which details his primary research on the ground in the Ankara districts of Keçiören and Mamak, watching activists of the RP’s successor, the Virtue Party (FP). Before the RP was closed down after the “post-modern coup” of 1997, it had acquired a massive 4 million members; although the coup removed the Islamists from power, the deep organizational roots they had planted in local districts remained strong. These on-the-ground networks would later be inherited and developed by today’s Justice and Development Party (AKP).

Most activists operated in gecekondu and low-cost housing neighborhoods with low-quality public services. They developed a kind of social security network providing material and non-material aid, not only dropping in during election campaigns but remaining embedded in neighborhoods. They struck up relationships and become active residents within communities, visiting households for social gatherings, wedding celebrations, wakes, and funerals. The RP seemed to be the only party on the ground talking to people, listening to their problems and grievances, and its activists were able to cultivate a receptive audience for the party’s message. Crucially, the Islamists were fulfilling a role that parts of the left, decimated by the 1980 coup, had previously played. As one assistant to an FP district mayor in Ankara tells Delibaş: “It was the left who used to welcome those newly migrated people from rural areas to the big cities. They used to build some of their houses to show solidarity and find them jobs. But later the leftist parties stopped doing this. Instead of the left, now the [FP’s] cadres have been doing these things.” Also important were the Islamists’ innovative youth and women’s branches, which could take their parties’ message directly into homes, gathering in places that their rivals did not even think about reaching.

The book’s research is well-marshalled and its conclusions are convincing, enlightening an underappreciated factor of why today’s AKP retains the loyalty and trust of vast sections of Turkey’s poorer sections of society. But it still misses some key points. Delibaş conducted his research at the end of the 1990s and start of the 2000s, but he does not address the critical changes that have since taken place. It is true that the Islamist parties of the 90s capitalized on discontent and alienation from rapid neoliberal restructuring, but the AKP has been a keen supporter of neoliberalism and was eager to continue IMF-recommended reforms after 2002. Islamists rose to power by striking a chord with demands for social justice and equality, and the feeling that the system had let people down, but what now that they are nominally in charge of that system? The RP once promised a “Just Order” to clean up a corrupt and discredited old politics, but what now that serious allegations of corruption are leveled at the AKP? Are identity politics so strong in Turkey that such scandals don’t matter, so long as “our people” are in power? Delibaş suggests that Islamism appealed to a constituency disillusioned with the patronage-based politics of mainstream parties, but today the AKP is sustained by lucrative clientelistic networks developed over its 12 years in government, as well as through its sophisticated and far-reaching ground-level operation. Addressing these contradictions falls outside Delibaş’s purview, so the book sometimes feels slightly limited.

Nevertheless, this remains an impressive and deeply researched study. Amid countless other things being written on the subject, it’s certainly a must read for those interested in the rise of political Islam in general - and in Turkey specifically.