Beyond Accommodation: Everyday Narratives of Muslim Canadians

Problems – of integration, failed political participation, and requests for various kinds of accommodation – seem to dominate the research on minority Muslims in Western nations. Beyond Accommodation offers a different perspective, showing how Muslim Canadians successfully navigate and negotiate their religiosity in the more mundane moments of their lives. Drawing on interviews with Muslims in Montreal and St. John's, Selby, Barras, and Beaman examine moments in which religiosity is worked out. They critique the model of reasonable accommodation, which has been lauded internationally for acknowledging and accommodating religious and cultural differences. The authors suggest that it disempowers religious minorities by implicitly privileging Christianity and by placing the onus on minorities to make requests for accommodation. The interviewees show that informal negotiation occurs all the time; scholars, however, have not been paying attention. This book advances a new model for studying the navigation and negotiation of religion in the public sphere and presents an alternative picture of how religious difference is woven into the fabric of Canadian society.

Table of Contents:
Introduction 1 Figures That Haunt the Everyday 2 Knowledge Production and Muslim Canadians' Historical Trajectories 3 Secularism in Canada 4 Narratives of Navigation and Negotiation 5 Mutual Respect and Working Out Difference Conclusion Notes; References; Index

About the Author :
Jennifer A. Selby is an associate professor of religious studies and an affiliate member of the Department of Gender Studies at Memorial University of Newfoundland. She is the author of Questioning French Secularism and co-editor of Debating Sharia: Islam, Gender Politics and Family Law Arbitration (with Anna Korteweg). Amélie Barras is an assistant professor in law and society at York University. She is the author of Refashioning Secularisms in France and Turkey: The Case of the Headscarf Ban and co-editor of Réguler le religieux dans les sociétés libérales? (with François Dermange and Sarah Nicolet). Lori G. Beaman is the Canada Research Chair in Religious Diversity and Social Change and a professor in the Department of Classics and Religious Studies at the University of Ottawa. She is the author of Deep Equality in an Era of Religious Diversity and co-editor of Constructions of Self and Other in Yoga, Travel, and Tourism: A Journey to Elsewhere (with Sonia Sikka), Atheist Identities: Spaces and Social Contexts (with Steven Tomlins), and Varieties of Religious Establishment (with Winnifred Fallers Sullivan).

Review :
"In sum[...]Beyond Accommodation offers a useful contrast to the more politically oriented approach of reasonable accommodation. It shows the potential for ethnographic research to highlight the local particularities of secular political discourses and frameworks and, in doing so, to productively critique representations of secular neutrality claims that tend to reproduce a kind of 'view from nowhere'." - Samuel Victor (Anthropologica)