Ahmadiyya Muslim group launch campaign to prevent youth radicalization

YorkRegion.com
Nov. 12, 2014
By Adam Martin-Robbins

Canada’s Ahmadiyya Muslim community is launching a large-scale, national campaign aimed at preventing youth radicalization and stamping out the influence of Islamic extremist groups such as ISIS.

The campaign, dubbed Stop the CRISIS, includes events in Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa, Brampton, Mississauga, Calgary, Saskatoon and Vancouver, among other communities.

“Radicalization has become one of the most pressing and volatile issues of the past two years,” Lal Khan Malik, president of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Jama’at Canada, told members of the media gathered at the campaign kickoff Wednesday morning at Tahir Hall in Vaughan. “(The attacks) on soldiers in Quebec and on Parliament Hill have brought this important issue to the forefront and made it a national concern for all Canadians.”

The campaign comes in the wake of the killings of two Canadian soldiers - warrant officer Patrice Vincent, south of Montreal, and Cpl. Nathan Cirillo in Ottawa - by individuals allegedly linked to Islamic extremist groups.

Events taking place in each community features a keynote address, a multimedia presentation and an “in-depth” question-and-answer session with a panel of Islamic scholars.

The aim is to provide a “counter-narrative” - focusing on the Ahmadiyya motto: love for all, hatred for none - to the philosophy that attracts youth to extremist groups, noted local Imam Farhan Iqbal.

“It’s a wrong interpretation of Islam that this ISIS is projecting and we are standing as a rock against (it),” said Imam Mubarak Nazir said.

The first Stop the CRISIS event happens at York University today (Thursday) starting at 6:30 p.m. with future instalments taking place at universities and community centres across the country over the coming weeks.

Malik acknowledged that radicalization of Muslim youth is a complex problem and that the campaign is just one part of a larger effort that needs to be undertaken to tackle it.

“We do realize that our initiative of Stop the CRISIS may not be the only solution to this problem, but we are a religious community, we are attacking this problem from a religious angle,” he said. “We believe that some reasons for radicalization are the wrong interpretation of Islam.”

Beyond the campaign, Iqbal said he’s working with York police to develop a plan to try to prevent youth from becoming radicalized and going abroad to join the fight as members of ISIS, as reportedly happened with a former York University student earlier this year.

“We’re trying to come up with a list of indicators that can tell us what are the things that could give us an idea that a person has been radicalized,” he said. “The problem is, we’re not the thought police. We can’t determine if somebody is thinking in a certain way, but we can try and come up with certain indicators that may tell us that such-and-such a person is drifting in that direction.”

For more about the campaign and local events, visit stopthecrisis.ca.