A little after its 6 p.m. start time, last Thursday’s hearing on the needs of Muslim students at UTSC was nearly empty. Organizer Mustafa Jilani, a director of the Scarborough Campus Students’ Union, patiently explained that most of the Muslim students attending the hearing were late because afternoon prayer had just ended.
It took a while for these students to arrive, as the only available prayer rooms are in the campus’s student centre, some distance away. They showed up just in time for the vegetarian food, which had to be specially ordered to meet Muslim dietary requirements.
These kinds of everyday inconveniences, experienced by Muslim students nationwide, encouraged the Canadian Federation of Students-Canada’s largest student lobby group-to create a taskforce on the needs of Muslim students. The project, which kicked off this September, will publish its report next spring.
Their examination includes a series of open hearings in universities and colleges across the province, which will allow Muslim students to voice concerns, suggestions, and personal experiences about the accommodation of religious needs, and the overall attitude towards Muslim students at their schools. As well as prejudice, or “Islamophobia,” students complained about the lack of vegetarian or halal food options on campus, and religious conflicts with exam times.
Both Jilani and Jeese Greener, the Ontario chairperson of CFS, commented on one case, in which a student’s only option for halal food near his campus was a Popeye’s Chicken a kilometre away.
Other issues that resonated with students at the hearing included women’s-only workout hours, an increase in the number of available private prayer spaces across campus and strategies for dealing with temptation for students living in residence to drink alcohol or smoke.
Zubeda Vahed of the CFS taskforce pointed out that many of the suggested services would help not only the Muslim students, but the entire student community.
“With the current generation where obesity is a serious issue, the need for a wide selection of healthy vegetarian food is an option all students can benefit from, not just Muslims. Women-only hours stand to also benefit students who prefer working out only with other females and feel uncomfortable exercising in front of males, especially in a period where so many young women have issues regarding personal image,” Vahed argued.
The main goals of the taskforce are to meet the immediate daily needs of Islam on-campus. Addressing the Muslim duty to pray five times daily and eat only meat prepared to halal requirements, Greener summed up the situation.
“People shouldn’t have to be forced to settle for food that has been prepared not to their religious requirement. […] We need to do better than that on every campus in Ontario, we need to identify what those needs are and make sure those needs are met.”
