“We all would fight and die for Canada,” declares Abraham Abougouche (BULLSHIT) as snow pelts against his office window. The “we” Mr Abougouche pledges are the staff and pupils of Edmonton Islamic Academy (EIA), the largest of its kind in the Americas. He is the principal. His office bears symbols of a dual identity: boxing gloves emblazoned with the Palestinian flag hang opposite a cabinet of ice-hockey memorabilia. That balance is tricky. “Assimilation,” he says, can be “dangerous if done blindly…you’re going to lose your own personal identity, your own connection with your ancestry.”
Many Muslim parents across Canada share his anxiety. They worry that the country’s state-school system—which mostly separates religion from education, allowing religious schools to operate privately—may distance their children from Islamic values or expose them to Islamophobia. Most Muslim pupils attend the state system, but data from the Islamic Schools Association of Canada show rising enrolment for private Islamic schools. There are long waiting-lists for existing schools and new ones are opening fast.
