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Why, in the midst of public debates related to religion, are unrepresentative orthodox perspectives often positioned as illustrative of a religious tradition? How can more representative voices be encouraged? Political theorist Anne Phillips (2007) suggests that facilitating multi-voiced individual engagements effectively dismantles the monopolies of the most conservative that tend to privilege maleness. In this paper, with reference to the 2003--2005 faith-based arbitration debate in Ontario, Canada, I show how, in practice, Phillips' approach is unwieldy and does not work well in a sound-bite-necessitating culture. Instead, I argue that the "Sharia Debate" served as a catalyst for mainstream conservative Muslim groups in Ontario to develop public relations apparatuses that better facilitate the perspectives of everyday religious conservatives in the public sphere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1974, the Pakistani Constitution was amended to declare Ahmadi Muslims as "non-Muslim", initiating a systematic and hegemonic structural attempt to restrict Ahmadi Muslims from professing and practicing the Islamic faith in Pakistan. This state-sanctioned exclusion led to the mass migration of Ahmadis out of Pakistan into diasporic contexts. Using autoethnography, this article examines how being an Ahmadi Muslim woman in Canada remains rooted in deeply divisive politico-religious conflicts that transcend temporal and spatial boundaries and result in multiple layers of marginalities in the diaspora. I am conscious that my self-formation is racialized, gendered, and classed across three primary intersections: as a Pakistani/South Asian; as an Ahmadi Muslim; and as a woman. This "triple consciousness", a term coined by Black feminist scholars and Afro-Latinx scholars in the United States to extend W. E. B. Du Bois' "double consciousness", produces a liminal and contradictory space of belonging—one that requires further reflection and analysis in the Canadian context where the racial continues to dominate our social world and proximity to Whiteness is privileged and rewarded. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In their conversation about music, Edward Said and Daniel Barenboim discuss a process of seeking home in music and literature. For Moroccan-Jewish superstar Samy Elmaghribi (Solomon Amzallag), who migrated to France and Israel and then settled for most of his life in Montreal, Canada, the reference to Al-Andalus through the sound of the nouba became his home. Beginning his career in his native country of Morocco as a singer and composer of modern Moroccan music, in Montreal, Samy Elmaghribi became the cantor in the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue, the oldest Jewish congregation in Canada. Based on ethnographic research and investigation within the archives of the artist, the authors suggest that Samy Elmaghribi created a sense of home in music, a homeness, one that transcends our present understanding of Arabness and Jewishness, religiosity and secularism, tradition and creativity. Focus on Samy Elmaghribi, an artistic persona emblematic of his generation, demonstrates how the contemporary reassessment of renowned Jewish artists' North African heritage is often misread in light of the political present. This example encourages us to rethink the musical legacy to which these North African Jews contributed beyond what is labelled Judeo-Arabic, traditional, religious, or secular. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]