Of Mosques and Myths

Inspired by a ridiculous Ceeb shill-com, "little mosques" could crop up far and wide. From the Winnipeg Free Press:

An architect in French Polynesia wants to build a mosque on an oil platform. A lawyer in Toronto wants to build a mosque every year for 30 years in Ontario. A city in Sweden wants a mosque for its 20,000 Muslims, most of whom are Iraqi refugees who have no place to worship.

These and other stories about communities that want to build Islamic places of worship were inspired by the little mosque that was built in Winnipeg and is now wending its way to Inuvik on the Arctic Ocean.

Hussain Guisti of the Zubaidah Tallab Foundation in Winnipeg, which is funding the mosque, has been receiving phone calls from around the world from people who want "to make Islamic history" the way Canada's northernmost mosque has been doing.

Many of the callers want Guisti to raise money for their projects, while some merely want to praise the Tallab Foundation for the inspiration it has provided.

The unlikely story of shipping a trailer-size wooden mosque 4,000 kilometres by road and barge to one of the globe's most remote locations has caught the world's imagination. Several TV networks, including the Saudi-based Al-Arabiya and Al-Jazeera, plan to broadcast live from Inuvik when the mosque opens, probably on Nov. 7, Guisti said in an interview.

Al-Arabiya, in an article on its English-language website, has even given the mosque a name: "The Mosque at the End of World."

In fact, Guisti said, no name has been selected, but some of the contenders include Arctic Mosque, Mosque on the Tundra and Eskimo Mosque.

Technically speaking, a mosque in Norilsk, Russia, is the world's northernmost mosque by one degree, but Inuvik is closer to the ice, Guisti said. With only one degree blocking our claim to the title, however, perhaps it's time for geographers to re-examine their calculations.

Guisti has many explanations for all the attention -- the difficult and long journey, the remote location, the near disasters and the endless references to the TV show, Little Mosque on the Prairie...

The 'Peg writer, Dave O'Brien, sees these wee mosques as a great Canadian success story, something to lord over "Islamophobic" Americans who aren't so thrilled about that humungous mosque some of the faithful want to put up near Ground Zero:

So is this a tale of two mosques, one a symbol of a tolerant and loving nation, the other a victim of prejudice and ignorance?  

It is probably unfair to compare the American story with our northern epic, particularly since the Canadian mosque is not intruding on anyone's backyard or upsetting the neighbourhood.

American patriotism sometimes looks like an admirable virtue, but it too often has a habit of turning ugly, as in the case of the reaction to the New York mosque.

Canadian patriotism, on the other hand, sometimes looks too anemic, although we occasionally rise to the occasion. It might be a stretch to describe our northern mosque as a source of Canadian pride, but it certainly fits comfortably with our national myths of pluralism and multiculturalism.

Most of all, it's one hell of a good story of a struggle against the odds in difficult circumstances and hostile terrain, which is as Canadian as it gets.

Oh, please. If anything it fits comfortably with the Islamic struggle (a.k.a. the jihad) which, against all odds, strives to bring Islam to locations both accessible and remote around the world. And that, to quote Madonna's ex-brother-in-law, ain't no myth, Dave.