ARCHIVES OF MUSLIMS IN CANADA: Environmental Scan

Institute of Islamic Studies Occasional Paper Series September 2019

PREPARED BY Moska Rokay, MI Acknowledgements

This environmental scan would not have been possible without the support and encouragement of Professor Anver Emon – thank you for placing your faith and trust in me.

I would like to thank Loryl MacDonald for her mentorship and experience in the Canadian archival world. Her guidance throughout my journey as a student of archival studies and now as a professional has been invaluable. I am also thankful for Linda Wicks for taking me under her wing and introducing me to the ield of Canadian religious archives. Thank you to Rebecka Sheield, Rodney Carter, and Sonia Nicholson for your insight and knowledge on community and religious archives in Canada.

I am grateful for the expertise and advice of Muhamed Amin, Marcel Barriault, and Kathryn Lagrandeur at Library and Archives Canada. Thank you for consulting with me and supporting my work with the IIS archival initiative. I am especially thankful for Muhamed’s suggestions and comments on this environmental scan.

Thank you to Hassam Munir and Faisal Bhabha for their illuminating conversations on primary source materials in Canada on/about Canadian Muslims. Both discussions were beneicial in guiding the aim and focus of this paper.

I would like to thank Fatima Sajan of NCCM and Dr Hasnain Walji at the Mulla Asghar Memorial Library and Resource Centre (MARC) for talking to me about their current work. I am particularly thankful for Fatima’s ininite networks, experience in the Canadian Muslim community, and enthusiasm to help whenever she can.

I would like to thank Daood Hamdani, a pioneer of Canadian Muslim scholarship and history, for his priceless advice especially regarding primary and secondary sources on Canadian Muslim history.

This work would not have been possible without the encouragement and energy of my fellow Fellow at the Institute, Sarah Shah. I also thank and appreciate Sanna Wani for her tremendous patience, superb graphic design skills, and time when editing this paper.

The views relected in this paper are mine and do not necessarily relect the sentiments of the Institute of Islamic Studies at the University of Toronto.

Moska Rokay Digital Humanities Research Fellow Institute of Islamic Studies University of Toronto Table of Contents I. Introduction II. The Archival Practice III. Methodology IV. Canadian Archival Environmental Scan A. University Archives in Canada B. Library and Archives Canada (LAC) C. Provincial and Territorial Archives D. Religious Archives in Canada E. Other Possible Archival Sources V. Comparative Analyses: American Archives VI. Situating the SIMiC Digital Archives

Footnotes I. Introduction

The Institute of Islamic Studies at the University of Toronto sponsors a research partnership with universities and community organizations to examine the history of Islam and Muslims in Canada. The project is called The Study of Islam and Muslims in Canada (SIMiC), and includes within its ranks scholars from universities across Canada and leaders from national organizations that represent Canadian Muslims and their interests. To leverage the research excellence of a university community to contribute to the public telling and retelling of the Canadian Muslim experience, SIMiC is undertaking a participatory, identity-based archival project to document the Canadian Muslim experience. Working with scholars and community partners, the SIMiC archival initiative aims to create a digital archives that will capture the Canadian Muslim experience and support advanced research around the world on the study of Islam and Muslims in Canada.

Before any such archives can be created, it is critical to conduct an environmental scan of existing archival collections, initiatives and/or acuisition policies that prioritize materials on or about the Canadian Muslim experience. As this scan will show, there is a dearth of archival commitment to preserving and showcasing the contributions of Canadian Muslims. Moreover, the digital architecture of Canada’s archival landscape suffers from considerable religious illiteracy, from the construction of archive search engines to the intricate metadata that makes effective arrangement and description and user-friendly access possible. To emphasize the signiicance of this lacuna in Canada’s archival landscape, the environmental scan briely examines existing Muslim archives in the United States as a comparator. The report will conclude by explaining the need for the SIMiC archive. If archives do not adeuately document marginalized communities, that community’s repository of materials are not available to future researchers. Essentially, that community’s experiences are erased from the historical record. As the mainstream media bombards Western viewers with stories of war, violence and extremism in Muslim-majority countries, and as institutions maintain archival descriptions rooted in Protestant and/or 19th century characterizations of Islam when describing these respective communities— essentially describing these communities to themselves— it is exceedingly imperative for Muslims in Canada to speak for themselves and to be given spaces to represent themselves the way they want.

4 II. The Archival Practice

Archives have tremendous power to shape narratives, inluence popular history, and, at the same time, silence stories. 1 Traditionally, archives have been repositories for a speciic institution’s records, designed with the express aim to document the organization’s activities in accordance with institutional and archival mandates.2 In Canada, archives are most often found at large institutions: federal, provincial, and municipal levels of government; educational institutions such as colleges and universities; large corporate organizations such as banks; some libraries or galleries; and a number of signiicant Jewish and Christian archives.

Archival practices relect early 20th century principles of record-keeping that originated from Western European and North American governments and institutions. Those principles continue to inform archival practices today, such as those relating to the provenance and original order of records, and their evidentiary value.

Provenance and an Archives' Intended Audience

When applied to the arrangement and description of archival materials, the principle of provenance emphasizes that all records tracing their origin to a speciic creator—whether an individual, organization or department/unit—must be kept together. Archivists use the French term fonds to relect this macro-level of document organization. As the largest organizational unit, a fonds can contain hundreds if not thousands of individual records across a range of themes, subjects and issues. In the most basic terms, a fonds is a collection of documents. To give greater detail to a collection of documents, we use other terms to indicate smaller groupings of records. For instance, a series is a smaller grouping of records within a fonds, and contains records that concern, for example, a broad functional activity within an organization (such as human resources, inance, administration or publications). Even smaller than a series is the ile unit. Files are a grouping of documents that pertain to a more speciic topic within a series. We use the term iles because the individual records are often stored in an actual ile folder. For example, a ile titled “Outgoing” under the series “Correspondence” would refer to records of outgoing correspondence only. Lastly, in archival practice, the term item is the smallest archival unit. An item usually refers to an individual document but can also indicate a record made up of several pieces such as a photograph album or a single photograph. The units fonds, series, ile, and item are speciic terms that imply varying levels of archival arrangement and description within a speciic collection of materials. However, a fonds does not necessarily need to have every hierarchical level of groupings (i.e. series, iles, and items). Ultimately, the level of descriptive detail depends largely on the archival materials acuired but also the priorities and aims of the archive, the archivist’s time, and even its intended audience. Whatever level of description is utilized, an archivist will publish with the fonds a inding aid. A inding aid is similar to the catalogue record of a library book because it gives the user information about the respective book, such as the author, the number of pages in the book, a brief plot description, and so on. Finding aids are written documents that broadly describe the content of the fonds in order to assist users to understand in broad terms the scope and contents of the collection of documents in front of them.

The organization and structure of an archive often depends on the intended audience. For instance, archives stand in stark contrast to libraries, which are generally more familiar to the general public. Categorized by subject headings, the principles, traditions, and structures of a library differ greatly from archives. A member of the general public normally possesses the information-seeking knowledge, capacity, and behaviours necessary to navigate research in a library - relying on subject categories, for example - but is not usually able to do the same at an archive because archives are generally structured for an audience of academics. 5

Archival materials are often arranged by provenance (creator or origin of the records) rather than by subjects or other categories for two inter-related reasons relating to audience. Most archives assume an audience of academic researchers and genealogists. Moreover, archivists assume that academic researchers or genealogists using an archive are already familiar with what and/or who they are looking for, thereby making provenance of paramount importance. In other words, an academic researcher would know to look at Professor John Doe’s fonds to learn more about his research on Muslims in Canada because the researcher has ample experience and expertise on the topic. Of course, not all users of an archive are academic researchers. As the intended audience shifts, archivists will need to reconsider whether provenance is the best and most effective way to organize an archive. For instance, a member of the general public typically has little experience in an archive; it is reasonable to assume that they would not be well-versed enough in a subject area to also engage traditional archival practices in order to ind any information on Canadian Muslims or Islam in Canada. A member of the general public without academic research expertise might be more interested in approaching an archive by subject matter or theme (at the series or ile level), rather than by provenance at the fonds level.

Evidential Value, Original Order, and Archival Authenticity

The 20th century pioneers of English-speaking archival theory, Sir Hilary Jenkinson and Theodore Schellenberg, stressed that records held authority and authenticity when accumulated during the course of activities and, thus, “should be kept in their entirety without mutilation.” 3 They also recognized that an archive’s organic nature—growing with the activities of its parent organization—attested to the authenticity of the records that were archived.4 As organizations grow and develop, archives not only preserve their history but also signal the organization’s salience, signiicance and importance to society. Moreover, to appreciate that history of ongoing activity, an organization’s archives must arrange and describe items, iles, series, and fonds in their original order. The evidential value of a record and its authority as part of an organic growing and developing archive, therefore, are lost if the archive abandons the principle of original order.

But the concept of evidentiary value and the principle of original order presume an audience of academic researchers, genealogists or staff members of the archive’s parent organization. For instance, genealogists value original order and the organic nature of archives because they tend to work with families to uncover lost family members, family histories, and family trees, which reuire chronological ordering of items over a long period of time. Staff members of a given organization may consult the organization’s archive to explore old meeting minutes of a committee in their department to learn more about a policy or decision that was made in the past—organizing these minutes by reference to original order would enable the staff member to uickly access the reuisite material. Finally, researchers—e.g. historians—use archival documents as primary sources for academic articles, publications, and books that eventually inluence the history one learns in the classroom. The traditional archival principles are fundamentally designed to enhance and facilitate the historian’s research.

For the purpose of this environmental scan, these principles pose an important uestion that must be addressed prior to any acuisition of archival material—who is the audience? Addressing that uestion will inform not only how the SIMiC archive is organized, but also the varying arrangement and description techniues that can be employed to serve the interests of a wide range of users, not all of whom are researchers. For that reason, among the proposals this scan offers is the implementation of more than one arrangement and description standard, as discussed in the conclusion.

6 III. Methodology

This brief archival scan began by contacting and/or searching online archival inding aids or descriptive databases of major Canadian archival institutions, including but not limited to the following:

Library and Archives Canada University archives at major Canadian universities Provincial and Territorial archives in each of Canada’s Provinces and Territories

The aim of the inuiry was to determine whether their holdings contained any materials related to the Canadian Muslim experience, or if their mandates and acuisition policies prioritized Muslims in Canada. My objective throughout this entire environmental scan was to analyze Canadian archives through the lens of a member of the general public, who presumably would have only a general interest in the topic, but not an academic or archivist with specialized training in record-keeping.

I began by visiting the websites of each major Canadian archival institution listed above between May and August 2019. It is common practice for archival institutions to clearly state their acuisition priorities and policies, especially on their websites. I examined their acuisition/collection policies, mandates, and visions to determine if they had any explicit priorities to collect archival materials of marginalized communities, speciically the Muslim- Canadian community.

Secondly, I also used their inding aids and online search tools to attempt to ind materials on Canadian Muslims. I used keyword search terms such as “muslim” or “islam” and also browsed for these terms by subject if the institution’s website allowed browsing by subject. As will become evident below, many of these attempts proved futile. In the case of Library and Archives Canada, I also met with their archivists in person to discuss their archival priorities and the scope of their collections on Muslims in Canada, on the off chance that they had materials that were simply not described or available online. It is important to note that a majority of the listed archives do not have all their inding aids online. Moreover, most did not employ a total digitization process, and thus not all of their collections were digitally accessible through online vehicles.

Additionally, I consulted with key archivists and members of the Association of Canadian Archivists (ACA). The ACA is a non-proit organization “that represents the needs and interests of archives and records professionals throughout Canada.” 5 I speciically consulted archivists who were aware of the state of religious archives in Canada. These exchanges were conducted through email. Finally, I engaged Canadian researchers, scholars, and faculty who study Islam and Muslims to obtain valuable insight regarding their individual experiences with archival research on Islam and Canadian Muslims.

7 IV. Canadian Archival Environmental Scan

For the most part, the environmental scan demonstrates that the Canadian Muslim experience is inadeuately and insuiciently represented in Canadian archival collections.

A. University Archives in Canada

A lthough a small number of university archives have conducted community archival initiatives, this environmental scan could not identify any university archive that has organized and housed an archival initiative on the Canadian Muslim experience or the Islamic faith in Canada. University archives across Canada are not adeuately positioned to capture the Canadian Muslim experience or the study of Islam in Canada and, considering their mandates, nor are they meant to do so. This is not surprising considering university archives generally implement traditional archival structures, described above, which do not facilitate the discovery of materials based on topic, category or subject.

Most university archives in Canada have mandates that focus on acuisition, preservation and providing access to archival materials relating to university business: the records of various departments at the university as well as the papers of the university’s staff, faculty, and notable alumni. A part of major academic institutions, and therefore funded by them, university archives often do not prioritize private or community archival materials documenting activities outside of the university’s realm of inluence. To the extent university archives hold “private” records—which pertain generally to the materials of individuals— they include principally the private papers of notable university staff, faculty or alumni.

Some university archives may have secondary or additional mandates to document non- university activities, individuals and/or organizations that support the research foci of the university. In other words, if one of the university’s research strengths include Islamic Studies, the university’s archives may prioritize research on the study of Islam or Muslims in Canada. In Canada, McGill University is known to have a strong Institute of Islamic Studies degree granting program, with an associated library. When consulted, librarians at the Islamic Studies Library revealed that their scope focused on literary and classical materials spanning multiple historical periods and language families. McGill’s Institute of Islamic Studies, therefore, is structured around the scholarly research of faculty and others at the Institute itself in the literary history of the Islamic tradition. It does not hold records or maintain an active archival acuisition policy on contemporary Muslim Canada. The McGill University Archives, which documents the activities of the Institute of Islamic Studies as well as the rest of the university, has a ile-level list (inding aid) of the materials collected from the Institute. This inding aid lists materials related to the academic administration of the Institutes programming and instruction since its founding in 1952. To the extent the Institute does not create programming on the history of Muslims in Canada, the McGill University Archives unsurprisingly would not also contain archival materials on Muslims in Canada. Despite its prestige and strength in Canada on the study of the historical and literary traditions of Islam, McGill’s Institute of Islamic Studies has no initiative to document the history of Muslim Canada. 8

Additionally, some university archives may also include a commitment to documenting community- based history/archival initiatives as a secondary mandate. For example, the University of Toronto Scarborough Library hosts an archives with a mandate to capture the experiences of the Scarborough, Ontario community. Similarly, York University’s Clara Thomas Archives and Special Collections (CTASC) in Toronto includes in their acuisition policy that they collect records of individuals and organizations not associated with York but whose archival records are acuired to support the research and teaching programmes offered at York in selected subject areas. Areas of strength include Canadian writers (notably Don Coles, Margaret Laurence, Bruce Powe, Susan Swan, Joyce Wieland, Adele Wiseman), individuals and organizations associated with the arts in Canada (particularly dance and theatre) and with urban reform movements in Ontario.6

For example, CTASC is the home to the Greek Canadian History Project which is a community archival initiative dedicated to the history of Canadians of Greek descent. Despite these encouraging mandates and initiatives, as already mentioned, no university archive has built a community archival initiative to document the Canadian Muslim experience.

In general, university archives across Canada do not contain archival materials relating to the Canadian Muslim experience. At most, they contain the papers of their own scholars, departments, and alumni, some of which might relate to the Canadian Muslim experience. But even if that were the case, the archival material would be widely dispersed across the country, across different archival platforms, and manifold arrangement regimes. Even if one were interested in such material, current archival practices in Canada impede meaningful access and use except to the trained archivist, research scholar or genealogist. In effect, they are inaccessible to the general public interested in the history and contribution of Muslims who have called Canada home.

B. Library and Archives Canada (LAC) Library and Archives Canada (LAC) is both the records repository of the Canadian federal g overnment—with its various agencies and departments—and the archive of Canadian society at large. This archival scan will focus on how LAC approaches its latter priority. As the federal institution charged with the task of acuiring, preserving, and making accessible Canada’s documentary heritage and memory, LAC follows a “total archives” concept which concentrates on capturing all aspects of Canadian society, not just the activities of the Canadian government or elite members of society. As outlined in the Preamble to the Library and Archives of Canada Act, LAC’s mandate is as follows:

to preserve the documentary heritage of Canada for the beneit of present and future generations; to be a source of enduring knowledge accessible to all, contributing to the cultural, social and economic advancement of Canada as a free and democratic society; to facilitate in Canada co-operation among communities involved in the acuisition, preservation and diffusion of knowledge; 7 to serve as the continuing memory of the Government of Canada and its institutions. 9 Because LAC collects both “public” and “private” archives, it follows a “total archives” concept. The documents of the federal government are generally referred to the “public” archives of LAC while archival materials from individuals and organizations outside of the government are considered “private” archives. The “total archives” concept constitutes a pledge to ensure that the entire mosaic of Canadian society is represented in Canada’s documentary heritage.

1. LAC Website and General Public

The LAC has an online searchable database for descriptions of all their collections, including

archival, library, special collections, and so on. Obviously, their expansive archival materials have not been digitized. But more troublingly, their materials are not subject to thick searchable descriptions. Given these systemic li8mitations, it is hardly surprising that it is diicult to access the LAC archive to promote storytelling about the Canadian Muslim experience. To inform this environmental scan, attempts were made to use the search tool as a member of the general public might use it, i.e. someone who has little experience on the topic of Muslims and/or Islam in Canada.

As seen in Figure 1 below, the Archives search tool 8 allows the user to search by keyword, type of material, hierarchical level (i.e. fonds, collection, series, ile, item, and so on), and its online availability.

Figure 1: the LAC's Archives search tool

10 When one enters the keywords “islam” and “muslim”—including a few variations of this— the results vary widely. See Figure 2 for a sample of the results for the keyword “islam” and Figure 3 for the keyword “muslim”. When searching “islam”, there is only one fonds-level result 9 that appears and only 2 series-level results. The rest of the results are at ile and item-level which can be seen on the right sidebar in Figures 2 and 3. This suggests that materials relating to “islam” are most likely scattered among different and distinct fonds that may have no intellectual connection to the search term “islam” or “muslim”, let alone any connection to each other. This examination indicates that material on Islam or Muslims in Canada held by the LAC is generally hard to locate, if not entirely inaccessible to a member of the general public

Figure 2: The results of keyword search “islam.” Notice on the right sidebar that most results are at ile and item-levels.

Figure 3: The results of keyword search “muslim.” As is evident above, again, most results are at ile and item-levels.

11 2. LAC Consulation

To better understand LAC’s mandate and collections policy, an in-personal consultation with LAC representatives took place on August 1, 2019. Speciically, I met two LAC archivists of the Social and Indigenous Life section of the Archives Branch. The aim of the consultation was principally to identify the LAC’s collections on the history of Muslims and Islam in Canada, and the steps being taken to represent under-represented communities across Canada. This consultation began with an email exchange between myself and an LAC archivist. I was informed that LAC’s strengths do not lie in the history of Muslims in Canada. Most of the materials relating to Canadian Muslims and/or Islam in Canada are currently at the ile- level which, as mentioned previously, means that they are part of larger fonds or collections that may have nothing to do with Islam or Muslims in Canada. For example, a photograph of a mosue (item-level) could be part of a grouping of building photographs (ile- level) which, in turn, could be a part of a fonds of a uebecois architectural irm that never had anything to do with Islam in Canada, except through a contract to design a mosue. This vital photograph would be lost at the ile or item-level is effectively inaccessible to those studying Muslims and Canada unless they independently know about the architectural irm and its design of the mosue, or have the time and resources to individually examine each item included in the fonds. Locating ile-level or item-level archival materials that are relevant to a speciic topic—in this case, Muslims in Canada—is laborious, time-consuming, and inconvenient through digital open access platforms.

Although Canadian archival arrangement guidelines generally do not instruct archives to arrange archival materials by subject, topic or theme—provenance is the accepted practice— LAC’s website has convenient subject guides. LAC’s “Browse by topic” 10 section lists 24 subjects in alphabetical order and the “Browse AZ” 1 1 section has even more. Religious identity is not a topic in either section. The consultation revealed that LAC has not prioritized religious archives in the past because religious groups have historically chosen to preserve their own archival materials. Christian and Jewish communities across the country have established archives to document their community’s respective experiences in Canada. The early 20th century saw LAC certainly taking into account migration lows, resulting in substantial Eastern European collections. Nevertheless, this explanation relects a certain history of Canada that largely does not include the implication of immigration lows and demographic growth statistics since the 1970s on Canada’s religious landscape.1 2 This effective erasure is corroborated by the fact that, despite Jewish-Canadians having their own archives across Canada, the LAC still holds an archival presence for the Jewish Canadian community. It may be true that Muslims have not contributed to or participated in the Canadian archival community but that gives LAC even more reason to create a legible space for Canadian Muslims, given its ‘total archive’ policy. 13 The LAC’s past practices against thematic organization around religious identity is arguably based on a particular Judeo-Christian archival lens and the existence of privately organized, independent archives. On this account, minority faith groups—which, considering their lack of representation, pose the greatest need 12 for an LAC intervention—remain neglected and insuiciently documented. As demonstrated above, the absence of any robust religious search category makes religious groups particularly invisible as part of the Canadian fabric. Moreover, this absence is highly problematic at a time when certain religious groups, such as Muslims, are targeted precisely because of their religious identity.Curiously, the “Browse by topic” webpage has a broad topic titled “Ethno- cultural Groups.” Given Canada’s commitment to multiculturalism, this is not surprising. The webpage on Ethno-Cultural groups lists a number of immigrant groups in Canada, most of which are of European descent, suggesting that LAC’s conception of multiculturalism has predominantly (though not exclusively) relected a certain politics of whiteness.1 4 Each ethno- cultural group has an embedded link that leads to webpages presenting useful resources from LAC collections that pertain to that group, including speciic archival materials and their call numbers for easy retrieval. Two of the listed immigrant groups, Jews and Mennonites, are not entirely ethno- cultural but ethno-religious. It is clear that substantial research into LAC’s collections was conducted for each listed group on the Ethno-cultural group page. That research provides helpful and easily accessible resource guides for a novice wishing to conduct some research into that group. According to these indings, LAC currently lacks similar guides on/about racialized immigrant groups and the Muslim community.During the consultation itself, we discussed a range of steps that can be taken to capture under-represented communities in archives. LAC archivists noted the LAC’s lacuna on the history of Muslims in Canada, though have expressed renewed and committed efforts to change that situation. They explained that their current aim is to support the representation of under- represented groups in archives, whether that means through the LAC’s own efforts or LAC support for community archival initiatives already in existence. They were receptive and committed to a working relationship with the SIMiC archive project in order to meet their goal of documenting under-represented communities—in this case Muslim Canada—in Canadian archives. The meeting was the beginning of a working relationship between the Institute of Islamic Studies and LAC, and further discussions/meetings would need to be held in order to determine future, concrete steps.

C. Provincial and Territorial Archives

Similar to LAC, each province and territory of Canada has a provincial/territorial archive that collects both “public” records of the provincial/territori al government, and “private” records of individuals and organizations that have provincial/territorial signiicance. Because provincial and territorial archives follow the same structures and standards as LAC, I did not expect these archives to contain signiicant materials on the history of Muslims in Canada. A uick search on each of their online descriptive databases for the same terms - “muslim” and “islam” - proved to be largely unsuccessful. However, the Archives of Ontario has one signiicant series pertaining to Canadian Muslims: the “Islamic Canadian photographs” series in the Multicultural History of Ontario (MHSO) fonds. The MHSO and the “Islamic Canadian photographs” will be discussed in greater detail below.

13 D. Religious Archives in Canada

Because religious communities have created their own archives, they fall outside the scope of government-based archival initiatives. To better gauge the landscape of private, religious community-based archives, I contacted the Association of Canadian Archivists (ACA) to ascertain whether it has institutional knowledge of Muslim archives in Canada. The ACA has a special division called the “Special Interest Section on Archives of Religious Organizations,” which focuses on all matters related to religious archives in Canada. An email conversation with a former chair of the Special Interest Section revealed that the principal faith groups that have institutional membership in the ACA are Roman Catholic, Protestant Christian, and Jewish. At this time, Muslim archives have no presence in Canada’s professional archival community. Archives of Christian denominations predominantly saturate the landscape of known religious archives in Canada.

This limited scope of membership in the ACA implies that the professional archival community is principally aware of archives associated with these three faith groups, whose members thereby inform and shape discussions within the professional archival community on religious archival documentation. Under the ACA, the professional community of archivist come together to establish standards of excellence in archival practice. To the extent a community does not participate in these professional contexts, the archival challenges of that community do not feature as part of the professional discourse on archival inclusion and best practices. My contact suggested two possible reasons Muslims and other minority faith groups do not participate in the professional archival context: (a) they do not have formal archives in their organizational structure and, thus, have no need to be a part of the ACA or; 2) they have archives but are unaware of ACA’s existence, or cannot afford ACA institutional membership fees (see Table 1 for membership fees).

Participation in the ACA is crucial for faith groups to have their archives incorporated into the broader work of Canada’s professional archival community. Active participation in the ACA increases visibility and access to best archival practices and resources. Institutional members of the ACA can promote new and diverse archives through the published ACA Membership Directory, thereby publicizing these archives and bringing a professional community’s collective attention and expertise to the project.

Table 1: ACA Membership Fees. The fee is based 15 on the number of staff employed by the institution.

14 E. Other Possible Archives Sources

This section briely discusses 3 memory institutions in Canada that currently contain or have intentions to collect some archival materials on Muslims in Canada.

Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21

Dedicated to the history of immigration in Canada, especially through - but not limited to - Pier 21 in Nova Scotia, this museum ought to be a home for Canadian Muslim stories, given that many, Muslims in Canada are here by virtue of immigration, whether recent or in the distant past. A portion of the museum’s descriptions and collections are on its website. Through an online database, this study found an archival structure that lacks religious literacy and thereby creates few opportunities to identify materials on Muslims in Canada. The museum’s online search functions are even more limited than LAC’s: one can only search by keywords, collection type (i.e. oral history, image, story, and so on), accession number, arrival ship, arrival from/to, and language. There are no subject or topic features, and the languages in the drop-down menu include only English, French, German, Italian, Tibetan, and None. Similar to LAC, the keywords “muslim” and “islam” provide minimal results, most of which are oral histories. The results of a search for “muslim” includes a short list of item-level materials in their collections that are each further categorized and tagged with a “culture”. The existence of this “culture” category suggests

that archival materials in this repository are also categorized by ethno-cult1u6ral group. Not all of the archival materials on the museum’s website are tagged with “culture” metadata but those that are can beneit from visibility and easy access when a user searches for a speciic ethno-cultural group. There does not seem to exist a similar religious category. In other words, the chosen metadata categories relect a certain religious illiteracy. Moreover, even if one considers ‘Muslim’ a cultural designation, there is no search interface that allows the user to search for Muslims as cultural category. Other religions that are tagged as culture can be identiied on the platform, such as Sikhs, Mennonites, and Jews. In general, not only does the archive feature very little on Muslims, its data architecture casts them in cultural and not religious terms, which would not necessarily occur to a member of the general public seeking to tell stories about Muslim- Canadian experiences.

Multicultural History Society of Ontario (MHSO)

The MHSO is a non-proit educational organization and archives founded in 1976. 1 6 As is evident from its name, this archive’s focus is the documentation of the ethnic diversity and immigrant history of Canada. Most of their materials are not digitized but they have some of their descriptions and inding aids online. One of their strongest collections is an oral history collection and, judging from their inventory list online, they categorized the oral histories by ethnic group. The religious ailiations of the individuals interviewed are not speciied and not easily discernible from the records. 15 Alternatively, the MHSO also has some of its archival materials collected (until 1987) in the Archives of Ontario (AO), which created a detailed description of the MHSO fonds on the AO description database. 17 The inding aid for the MHSO fonds is divided into multiple series (53 photograph series and 41 series of textual records) and each series is arranged by ethnic group. One such “ethnic” photo series is curiously titled “Islamic Canadian photographs.”1 8 The phrasing is awkward and arguably relects a Christian world view on religious identity. Certainly followers of Christianity take their name from the religion itself—Christians. But followers of Islam do not. Islam is an Arabic term that denotes the religion and is only awkwardly translated into English as surrender, submission, or peace. One who follows Islam is a “Muslim”. In Arabic grammar, “Muslim” is an active participle denoting ‘one who submits’. While this archive may have had Christianized-end users in mind, this does not relect the multicultural landscape of Canada, not to mention its Canadian Muslim minority who would not normally identify themselves as “Islamic Canadian”. Although this series has 172 photographs of Canadian Muslims and Canadian Muslim organizations in Ontario, dated from 1921-1978, the archive’s online arrangement and description practices make them diicult and inconvenient to access, aside from being framed contrary to the very identity and purpose of the archive. Putting aside this awkward phrasing, the archive categorizes these “Islamic Canadian” materials in ethno-cultural terms, and not religious terms, putting them alongside Chinese Canadians, Greek Canadians and Lebanese Canadians.

Mulla Asghar Memorial Library and Islamic Resource Centre (MARC)

During my research for this environmental scan, I came across the MARC, an institution created and run by the Khoja Shia Ithna-Ashari Muslim community, and located in Thornhill, Ontario. As a library and Islamic “resource centre” there was potential that this institution contained archival materials on the history of Muslims in Canada. On July 2, 2019, I visited the MARC and met Fatima Sajan, an executive member of MARC, who gave me a tour of the center. During that meeting, we had a phone call discussion with the institution’s current president and board member, Dr Husnain Walji. While MARC’s purpose is to be a center for Islamic research and a facilitator of interfaith dialogue, Dr Walji explained that MARC documents the history of the Khoja community around the world, including the Khoja Muslim community in Canada, through its Khoja Heritage Project. The initiative focuses on, among many things, collecting and digitizing books relating to Khoja history and culture, a Khoja oral history project, creating a Khoja family tree, and so on. As the only institution in Canada strictly dedicated to the history of a particular, ethnically-identiied, Muslim community in Canada, the scope of the MARC is narrow as compared to the proposed SIMiC archive on the history of Muslims and Islam in Canada. Nevertheless, the MARC is open to collaboration and consultation with the SIMiC archive initiative.

16 V. Comparative Analyses: American Archives

This section highlights certain Muslim American archival initiatives to provide comparison and contrast to the Canadian archival landscape. The United States features a large number of archival initiatives dedicated to the history of Muslims in America. The following are just a few of them:

Archive of Muslim American History and Life: A project of Indiana University and Purdue University, this digital archive documents American Muslim life with a regional focus on Indiana. This archive also collects the ISNA USA magazine.

Portland Muslim History Project: This initiative began as a community archive to document the lives of Muslims living in Oregon and Southwestern Washington. In 2018, it was transferred to the Reed College Special Collections and Archives. The project is funded by the Harvard Pluralism Project and by the Oice of the President of Reed College.

“Muslim Lives” Project at the Islamic Stud ies Center at Duke University: The Islamic Studies Center at Duke University has launched an oral history project to record the stories of American Muslims. Through oral histories, this project aims to illustrate both the challenges and successes in Muslim-American lives. According to their website, they will feature interviews with Dr Ingrid Mattson, calligrapher Mohamed Zakariya, and Suzanne Barakat, a relative of the Muslim students murdered by a gunman in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. This round of interviews will be followed by oral histories with leaders of the American Muslim community, starting with the African-American Muslim community.19

Collections & Stories of American Muslims, Inc. (CSAM): A community archival/historical initiative, this non-proit organization, founded in 1996, is dedicated to the history of Muslims in America. It features “an Islamic museum, traveling exhibition, and archives” 20 and has exhibited its archival materials in multiple cultural institutions across the United States since its founding. The Islamic Heritage Museum & Cultural Center, a physical center located in DC, is a division of CSAM and houses the artifacts and archival materials that CSAM collects. This organization depends heavily on public donations; any alternative funding sources are unknown.

With the exception of CSAM, the American initiatives listed above are ailiated with US universities, and have scopes limited by region, state, or city. From these disparate initiatives, we can discern an attempt at the local level to tell the stories of Muslims in America to different audiences. We were not able to identify any national-level attempt to collect, curate, or otherwise support the telling of Muslim stories in the United States.

17 VI. Situating the SIMiC Digital Archives

As is evident from this environmental scan, the history of Muslims in Canada is largely absent in Canada’s archival landscape, and there is an urgent need for the SIMiC archive to ill a gap in the Canadian historical narrative.

As an entity within the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Arts & Science, the Institute of Islamic Studies’ SIMiC archive would beneit from the wealth of resources and support available at the University. Although some archival materials relating to Muslims in Canada exist in piecemeal, however awkwardly catalogued, at different Canadian archives, it is clear that a single platform is needed to eiciently and meaningfully make accessible the history of Muslims in Canada to a diverse audience. Current Canadian archives generally 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 minority religious groups from Canada’s archival holdings at a time when religious identity has become a very public and political touchstone in recent elections. From uebec’s attack on the headscarf to right wing extremism that resulted in the terrorist attack at a uebec City mosue, being ‘Muslim’ is often associated with a national security and threat narrative that dehumanizes a portion of Canada’s citizenry. A digital archive provides Muslims in Canada a uniied platform to present their contributions to Canadian history and, at the same time, resist this dehumanization. Moreover, prevailing practices of archival arrangement and description virtually erase religion by “ethnicizing” it, thereby impeding searches for Muslim- Canadian content that might traverse ethnic and racial categories. This report concludes that Canada’s archival practices do not accommodate the ‘Muslim’ through traditional and digital arrangement and description practices that preserve an ahistorical image of Canada’s demographic landscape. At the time this environmental scan was completed, other Canadian archives did not have a collecting priority or mandate to document Muslim Canada speciically. The SIMiC archive has the potential to ill in a large gap in the history of Canada while simultaneously making visible and accessible the voice of Muslim Canada. To do so will reuire any such archival project to consider the following goals and aspirations:

collaborate with the Muslim communities themselves to better understand how that community sees itself, understands itself, and recognizes itself. coordinate a national campaign of archival acuisition to create a central hub of archival research, while coordinating with stakeholder parties and institutions across levels of government and regions of Canada. coordinate effective knowledge transfer of archival best practices to communities new to the practice of archiving engage the archival professional community to both learn from and contribute to the development of best archival practices participate with government archives projects in order to enhance digital and archival metadata practices to render ‘Muslim’ and ‘Islam’ visible and legible employ more than one archival practice of arrangement and description that speaks to distinct audiences, rather than privileging the scholarly or the archival communities, as is dominant in archival practice. 18 Footnotes 1. For more on the power of archives over history and archival silences, see: Carter, Rodney. "Of Things Said and Unsaid: Power, Archival Silences, and Power in Silence." Archivaria 61 (2006): 215-233. Carter explains how state power and the elite can perform “archival violence” against marginalized or minority groups, silencing their memory. Ultimately, what is chosen to be a part of a state archive or major archival institution is based on the state’s or parent organization’s agenda. What is not included is an act of silencing, whether intentional or not. 2.See Cook, Terry. “Archival science and postmodernism: new formulations for old concepts.” Archival Science 1 (2001): 3-24 and Stoler, Ann Laura. “Colonial Archives and the Arts of Governance.” Archival Science 2 (2002): 87-109. Both Terry Cook and Ann Laura Stoler provide exceptional explanations and histories of how archives were created, by whom, and their purpose throughout time. Cook explains that archives “traditionally were founded by the state, to serve the state, as part of the state's hierarchical structure and organizational culture” (p. 18) and Stoler emphasizes the colonial past of archives. 3.Tschan, Reto. "A comparison of Jenkinson and Schellenberg on appraisal." The American Archivist 65, no. 2 (2002): 179. 4. Tschan, “A comparison of Jenkinson and Schellenberg on appraisal,” 177 & 179. 5. “ACA Governance," Association of Canadian Archivists, n.d., https://archivists.ca/Governance 6. “Acuisitions,” York University Libraries, n.d., https://www.library.yorku.ca/web/archives/acuisitions/ 7. “Our Mandate,” Library and Archives Canada, May 5, 2017, http://www.bac-lac.gc.ca/eng/about- us/Pages/our-mandate.aspx 8. “Enhanced Archives Search – Basic,” Library and Archives Canada, September 4, 2019, http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/lac-bac/search/arch 9. “Mohammad S. aadri fonds,” Library and Archives Canada http://collectionscanada.gc.ca/ourl/res.php?url_ver=Z39.88-2004&url_tim=2019-10- 21T15%3A12%3A04Z&url_ctx_fmt=info%3Aoi%2Ffmt%3Akev%3Amtx%3Actx&rft_dat=102773&rfr_id=i nfo%3Asid%2Fcollectionscanada.gc.ca%3Apam&lang=engFoot 10.“Browse by Topic,” Library and Archives Canada, http://www.bac- lac.gc.ca/eng/discover/Pages/discover.aspx 11. “AZ Index,” Library and Archives Canada, http://www.bac-lac.gc.ca/eng/discover/Pages/AZ- Index.aspx 12. Yasmeen Abu-Laban and Christina Gabriel, Selling Diversity: Immigration, Multiculturalism, Employment and Globalization (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002). 13. Recent conversations with LAC suggest that these spaces for under-represented communities are now being prioritized under an upcoming, reoriented mandate. 14. For more on the multicultural mandate at LAC see the following very informative article: Vernon, Karina. “Invisibility exhibit: The limits of library and archives Canada's "multicultural mandate",” in Basements and Attics Closets and Cyberspace: Explorations in Canadian Women's Archives, ed. Linda M. Morra, and Jessica Schagerl (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2012), 193-204. Vernon explains how the multicultural mandate at LAC came about and speciically points out LAC’s weaknesses when documenting under-represented ethnic groups. 19 15. “Membership Categories,” Association of Canadian Archivists, https://archivists.ca/Membership- Categories 16. More on MHSO and its beginnings here: http://mhso.ca/wp/who-we-are/ 17. AO online description of the MHSO fonds: http://ao.minisisinc.com/scripts/mwimain.dll/144/PROV/PROV/REFD+F+1405?SESSIONSEARCH 18. “Islamic Canadian photographs” series: to: http://ao.minisisinc.com/scripts/mwimain.dll/144/ARCH_DESCRIPTIVE/DESCRIPTION_DET_RE P/SISN%2018435?SESSIONSEARCH 19. More on “Muslim Lives” Project: https://islamicstudies.duke.edu/muslim-lives 20. More on CSAM: http://www.muslimsinamerica.org/about.html 21. The cover image of this report is of the Al-Rashid Mosue at its opening in 1938, acuired from: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Al-Rashid_Mosue.PG

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