Young, diverse and ready to talk

At 192 Spadina Avenue in downtown Toronto, close to Lake Ontario, stands an industrial heritage building that houses the Centre for Social Innovation. The centre provides hospitable co-working and office space to a variety of creative nonprofits. One of those is the Intercultural Dialogue Institute for the Greater Toronto Area (IDI GTA). A few artisanal objects in showcases – ceramic tiles, metalwork – suggest a connection to the eastern Mediterranean, but otherwise there is nothing too distinctive about the office. It blends in.

At the core of IDI is dialogue, says Serena*, a second-year astrophysics student at the University of Toronto. “It changes how I talk to people; I learn to express myself better. Being involved in IDI has helped me move from the faith my parents taught me to a deeper, more informed understanding of my faith.”

Serena grew up in Turkey, but moved to Canada after high school. Now she is one of many engaged volunteers who put the IDI idea into practice. The youth group she is part of is mostly self-directed and self-motivated in terms of the activities they want to do. Her group meets weekly; “girls chilling out” as she puts it, but they also read religious texts and dream up activities.

Tyler, a student of sociology and political science who plans to go to law school, values IDI mostly as a third place away from home and school. “People around my age are increasingly looking for a place to hang out, connect with their peers and talk about things,” he says. “That is the main reason I joined. Coming together with people around my age, as well as being with my own friends, making them connect and just building relationships.”

“We are specifically trying to get the youth organized by themselves,” says Fatih, IDI’s executive director. He himself came to Canada in 2017. “New generations have a different approach to the work than we do.” His role is mostly to offer practical guidance and mentorship as needed. This past summer, IDI Youth partnered with Kairos Canada and Camp Micah to run a camp for 15 to 30-year-olds called Model Youth Justice.

Abrahamic dialogue

The core of IDI is built by the Turkish immigrant community of the GTA, and Serena is one of them. She is a committed Muslim, and so is Leyla*, a nurse. Both have attended IDI iftar meals, the festive meal at the end of the day during Ramadan. IDI has partnered with Toronto churches and synagogues to host iftar meals since 2005 (with a break over covid). Leyla and Serena found it especially meaningful to be in a Jewish synagogue and hear the ezan, the Islamic call to prayer, marking sundown and the end of the fast. Serena says that during Ramadan she makes a special effort to hear the ezan, which includes the confession that God is greatest. “As Muslims, our lives begin and end with the ezan. The father whispers the ezan into a child’s ear as they are born, and my father did so to me. And when we die, and are buried, they pray the ezan as well.”

Leyla says Hizmet’s interfaith work helped her in the early years of her marriage. Her husband is a Filipino Catholic and they found faith-related questions really difficult to handle. That changed, however, after they attended an interfaith event where a Catholic priest spoke very positively about the Prophet Muhammad and how he put an end to idolatry and other sins the Arab tribes of his time were committing. The priest explained that for this to happen, Muhammad had to be a person with help from above, someone chosen by God.

“It was a wild moment for me to hear a priest say this. He said, you can believe that Muhammad was a prophet as long as what you believe about Jesus in your heart and in your mind does not change. Then my husband said, ‘Well, I guess if Father Dave – that was his name – said that, there is no harm for me to believe too that Muhammad was a prophet.’ And that helped our marriage to continue.”

For the past fifteen years, dialogue has enriched Leyla’s life. On most Sundays she attends Mass with her husband. While most of her co-workers are secular and not particularly open to either faith or a foreign culture, she finds that interfaith work does affect her interactions with hospital patients. It helps her to be more open and understanding towards them.

“Dialogue starts at the basic human level,” she says. “You cannot do that much coming from the top. You need to start interacting with people because that is how trust starts. Also, I do not have to worry about the big picture. I can pray for the big picture to change. So I do my part and pray that everyone else will do their part too.” Leyla does her part by volunteering at events, organizing food and other supplies, and through IDI’s ‘Meet your Neighbour’ program, where Muslim families open their homes to guests from other faith traditions.

‘Know one another’

IDI’s stated goal is to contribute to social cohesion. How does that work in a society where social cohesion does not come naturally? Fatih does not have a good answer, but he believes that social cohesion and diversity are two quite different things. A diverse society can easily produce social cohesion, but it depends on connections between groups. “As IDI, we would like to promote personal interactions to let people from different groups engage with each other to see the commonality that we share. Then diversity can lead to social cohesion. Otherwise, people always have their own opinions without interacting with others.”

IDI’s stated goal is to contribute to social cohesion. How does that work in a society where social cohesion does not come naturally?

Fatih does not have a good answer, but he believes that social cohesion and diversity are two quite different things. A diverse society can easily produce social cohesion, but it depends on connections between groups. “As IDI, we would like to promote personal interactions to let people from different groups engage with each other to see the commonality that we share. Then diversity can lead to social cohesion. Otherwise, people always have their own opinions without interacting with others.”

According to Fatih, to engage in interfaith dialogue is a responsibility given by God. This follows from the Quran and the life of the Prophet Muhammad, which Muslims try to imitate. Maryam Siahpoosh, a scholar of religion who engaged in formal Catholic-Shia dialogue during her studies in Tehran, admires Hizmet’s practical view and largely shares this understanding. She references Quran 49:13, which reads: “O Humanity! Indeed, We created you from a male and a female, and made you into peoples and tribes so that you may know one another. Surely the most noble of you in the sight of God is the most righteous among you. God is truly All-Knowing, All-Aware.”
Shiahpoosh says this verse captures the importance of dialogue. “It means that it is okay to be different; it is okay to have your belief, but you can learn from each other, you can know better because of each other.”

*Names have been changed for the safety and privacy of some interviewees.

The Hizmet controversy

The Intercultural Dialogue Institute branches in Canada are part of the Hizmet community, which means “service” in Turkish. It is an action-oriented community that was inspired by the Islamic preacher and organizer Fethullah Gülen, who taught that it is possible to live as Muslims in modern society and to embrace the benefits of science and technology. The community believes the Quran can be reinterpreted to speak to the modern era.

According to Leyla, Fethullah Gülen made it very clear that the goal of interfaith relations is not to make people convert. “The only goal for dialogue is to show people how we live, what we do, what we believe, and to learn what they believe, how they live, what they do. You cannot hate and you cannot be scared by what you know.”

In 2013, the Turkish government labelled the Hizmet movement as terrorist, a claim no Western country has accepted thus far. Almost every family in the IDI community has suffered from the government’s crackdown. Serena’s parents were stripped of their teaching licenses and her dad was imprisoned for several years when she was a child. Now that the family lives in Canada, she is happy to use her freedom to engage in IDI events. She was involved in an academic seminar commemorating Fethullah Gülen at the University of Toronto’s Victoria College last year.

“If everyone in the world lived their religion properly, there would not be any wars,” says Leyla, paraphrasing Gülen’s teachings on interfaith dialogue. She says the event helped her feel connected to her university and her upbringing. “It felt like I went back to times where our schools [in Turkey] were hosting these kinds of things.”