When you are too close to something, someone, you are not the best analyst. Your feelings get in the way. You reveal more about who you are than who or what you love/hate. But you can see better from afar. That sums up Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who, despite accurately predicting the collapse of the Soviet Union, and being instrumental in achieving that, was deeply flawed in his understanding of his nemesis, provided really bad advice on how to extricate the huge Eurasian, multinational entity from its many crises, and contributed to the suffering of, in the first place, his beloved Russians. Hardly the most Christian act for the devout soul he claimed to be.

This is a draft of Canada's Muslims in Critical Muslim|36 2021

Humanity has always been on the move since we descended from the trees, stood up and started heading for the horizon. We have always been at war with each other too, and as we developed more technology, our wars become more and more lethal. Enter imperialism. Voila Canada today.

US-Canada were settler colonies, unlike the Asian subcontinent, which was merely raped and pillaged, with no real intent for Britons to settle and replace the natives. So while colonial Muslims began appearing in the ‘mother’ country as sailors, servants, students, soldiers as early as the 17th century, there were few Muslims crossing the Atlantic.

It was not till the 19th century that a few brave souls popped up in Canada, the legendary wandering Lebanese, who spread out across both North and South America, and Albanian revolutionaries (Toronto's oldest Muslim community). Once the native Canadians were pushed aside, ‘Canadians’ were de facto (mostly) British and Irish white immigrants. The flow of Muslim immigrants into Canada was almost nonexistent till after WWII.

Immigration is like a tornado. It begins far away and grows till it touches down, disordering lives and rearranging hopes, depositing the detritus of new identities, writes Ziauddin Sardar in Balti Britain: A provocative journey through Asian Britain (2008). Learning to cope with multiple selves became the quest of Sardar’s adult life.

Asian Britons are all the direct product of the British empire, which steamrolled around the world, razing whatever got in its way, leaving a lot of detritus, creating new identities (for better or worse) for hundreds of millions, with a legacy that keeps giving today (for better or worse).

As a Muslim Canadian, I enjoyed Sardar’s dissection of the British Muslim experience, which has some parallels with US-Canada, but a big difference.