Muslims in Canada Archives (MiCA): Transforming Canada’s Representational Lens

In the political climate engulfing democracies on both sides of the Atlantic, the categories of “Islam” and “Muslim” increasingly represent the fault line of political, cultural, and social debate. In Europe, many states have banned burkas and now sponsor “moderate” Islam projects. In the United States, over two dozen states have legislated “Sharia bans”; right-wing groups protest the construction of mosques; and immigration from Muslim-majority countries has become a proxy for debates on terrorism and security. Canada is no stranger to these debates—Ontario’s Sharia arbitration debate of 2004–5, Quebec’s Charter of Values and Bill 21, the federal government’s 2015 proposed “barbaric cultural practices hotline,” and its more recent debate on Islamophobia are just a few examples. Even Canada’s ordinary bureaucratic activities, like charity audits,¹ operate in the shadow of anti-terrorism when it comes to Muslim-led charities. In all these cases, the “story” of Muslims, Islam, and the “Muslim Question” invokes threat and terror and public values, with the governmental implication of policing and security following not too far behind. Is it any surprise that these circumstances inform the representation of Muslims in academia, parliamentary debates about Islamophobia, and even Muslim community debates about leadership and representation? For example, the research on Canada that does exist is narrowly framed by a post-9/11 focus on national security and the global War on Terror, as Amelie Barras and Jennifer Selby show in their Bibliography Project at Memorial University. ²

To transform this singular representational lens into a more robust kaleidoscope, the Muslims in Canada Archives (MiCA) aims to feature the records, documents, and images of Muslims that showcase their contribution to Canadian heritage in the ordinary course of living their lives across the country. As MiCA’s lead archivist, I believe that in order to resist the onslaught of one-sided, often negative representations, we must seize our narrative power and shift them by telling our stories in our own words through MiCA. There’s a growing momentum amongst minority and marginalized communities whose story has been told to, rather than told from, who are seizing their narrative power. Canadian society, and especially the archival landscape today, embraces the idea of communities telling their own stories in their own words. 

Moreover, through its efforts in capturing the Muslim experience in and contribution to Canada, MiCA will also contribute to professional archival practice by creating new and innovative professional practices that calibrate with the representational possibilities of a community that has alternated between being invisible archivally and hypervisible in terms of security policy. Prevailing practices across Canadian archives do not categorize Muslims or Islam by religion but rather use ethnic groupings as a base reference category. At best, the “Muslim” experience can only be inferred. At worst, this erases a minority religious group from Canada’s archival holdings at a time when being Muslim has become a very public and political touchstone in Canada. 

MiCA offers a proactive, generative response to what has tended to be a mostly defensive posture in academia and policy sectors. While this defensive posture is important as a mode of critique, it also leaves in its wake a narrative vacuum. MiCA employs a positive, affirmative posture of enabling a plurality of stories through institutional stewardship of Muslim heritage in Canada. A project of the Institute of Islamic Studies, MiCA began from a series of consultations with stakeholder communities and organizations in 2018. Those consultations led to a commissioned environmental scan of Canada’s archival landscape,³ which revealed that the Muslim contribution to Canadian heritage was shamefully missing. An unprecedented study in Canada, the study showed not only a fundamental absence of records in Canadian archival holdings but also the predominance of metadata that relies on antiquated and distinctively Protestant modes of describing Muslims and Islam. 

Governance is organized through a policy committee that is composed of stakeholder organizations, academics, and archival partners. MiCA enjoys participation from national organizations such as the Canadian Council of Muslim Women and the National Council of Canadian Muslims, as well as major archival institutions such as Library and Archives Canada and Archives Ontario. The project currently enjoys seed funding from SSHRC, which enables the project to focus on Ontario at the outset, as MiCA begins to scale across the rest of Canada. Already, we’re fortunate that MiCA’s partner, Memorial University, has secured a grant to begin archival planning for Newfoundland and Labrador’s Muslim communities. 

At the heart of MiCA are carefully articulated, dynamic acquisition and stewardship policies that recognize the nuances and changing needs of a diverse and under-represented community in Canada by committing to continuous consultation and participation. These policies and mandates determine the records that become part of the archive. A “record” is almost anything that has some sort of information or data recorded on it and in almost any medium or format possible. A record should also present some kind of information to the viewer—whether physically or digitally. MiCA acquires these records, organizes them to make them understandable, and facilitates their access to the public for a variety of user groups through physical, onsite viewing and digital platforms. 

The sources that tell our stories are spread out throughout the country, online, and in multiple different institutions and places. An attempt to bring all these kinds of sources in one place can greatly improve access to primary sources that historians, community members, artists, writers, and more can use to present our stories to the spotlight. 

At the heart of MiCA is an acquisition policy that leverages technology to enhance dissemination and storytelling possibilities. MiCA is committed to ensuring its holdings are open, through analogue and digital formats. It is engaged directly with community partners, many of which shepherd content suitable for the archive and create opportunities for MiCA to educate marginalized communities about the importance of archives. MiCA relies on its partners to ensure national representation. In particular, our partner, the Inspirit Foundation, which works to promote inclusion and pluralism in Canada, has generated a national network of grassroots organizations that MiCA draws upon to ensure maximal representativeness. Moreover, through the forthcoming creation of a series of digital portals, MiCA’s online descriptive database and its curated digital platform will become a unifying hub in Canada featuring the documentary heritage of Canada’s diverse Muslim community. 

Scale: Creating an archive of this nature requires considerations of long-term stewardship and acquisition in a context of rapidly changing digital environments, community capacities, and availability of archival materials. At the outset, MiCA’s current focus is on Ontario’s Muslim communities, with viability tests in Quebec City and St John’s with the support of partner organizations Laval University, Memorial University, and the Muslim Association of Newfoundland and Labrador. Ontario is the obvious starting point given that recent demographic analysis shows it has the highest concentration of Muslims in Canada.⁴ Moreover, the community partners in this project either are headquartered in Ontario or have substantial networks in the province. Throughout this initial period, MiCA will pursue new institutional partnerships to consider effective scaling up province-by-province. 

Institutional Stewardship: What makes MiCA work is its close relationship with the University of Toronto Libraries (UTL). To ensure excellence in stewardship practices, MiCA will work closely with UTL archivists and staff to ensure effective compliance with relevant copyright and privacy law, as well as excellence in practice, preservation, and digitization. 

Our principal goal in organizing and creating MiCA is to reclaim narrative power, and institutionalize it for the future. At the present moment, MiCA aims to secure donations of records to feature Muslim stories in Canada. As we do that, we are also keen to ensure that MiCA exists into the future, well after those of us reading this article are long gone. For that reason, MiCA is now undertaking an endowment fundraising campaign to secure the financial resources that will support an archivist to permanently staff MiCA now and into the future. The MiCA endowment fund will provide the needed support to make sure that the archive, integrated as it is in the infrastructure of the University of Toronto, continues to engage the Muslim community as both MiCA and the community grows into the twenty-first and twenty-second century. For more information on MiCA or how you can support, please contact us at mica@utoronto.ca or visit us at https://islamicstudies.artsci.utoronto.ca/research-labs/muslims-in-canada-archives-mica/. 

Moska Rokay is the Archivist at the Institute of Islamic Studies (UofT) tasked with coordinating the Muslims in Canada Archives (MiCA). As a refugee and settler on Turtle Island, she is actively involved in the Afghan-Canadian diaspora community and is a co-founder of a Canadian nonprofit organization called ARCH (Afghans Reviving Culture and Heritage). In 2020, she was the recipient of the ACA New Professional Award as well as the Archivaria Gordon Dodds Student Paper Prize. She completed her Master of Information at the University of Toronto and defended her MI thesis in Toronto in 2019. 

1. Anver M. Emon and Nadia Z. Hasan, “Under Layered Suspicion: A Review of CRA Audits of Muslim-Led Charities,” Institute of Islamic Studies (University of Toronto) and National Council of Canadian Muslims, 2021, accessed October 15, 2021, https://www.layeredsuspicion.ca.
2. “Bibliography Project,” Department of Religious Studies, Memorial University, November 12, 2020, accessed October 15, 2021, https://www.mun.ca/relstudies/more/producingislams/biblio.php.
3. Moska Rokay, “Archives of Muslims in Canada: Environmental Scan,” September 2019, accessed October 15, 2021, https://tspace.library.utoronto.ca/bitstream/1807/96984/1/ARCHIVES%20OF%20MUSLIMS%20IN%20CANADA_%20Environmental%20Scan.pdf.
4. Sarah Shah, “Canadian Muslims: Demographics, Discrimination, Religiosity, and Voting,” Institute of Islamic Studies, October 5 2019, accessed October 15, 2021, https://tspace.library.utoronto.ca/handle/1807/96775.

This article is published in issue 38.3 of BlackFlash magazine. Get this issue