Hawzah News Agency- For over 1,400 years, this message has gradually been carried by Muslims to wherever they have gone, and by the mid-20th century the Canadian far north was one of the very few places left in the world still not exposed to the faith and its followers. But by the 1940s, this was changing. And it was there, in a small northern town in the province of Alberta, that Islam’s century-long journey to Canada’s far north began.
By 1969 the Muslim community in Lac La Biche made up around 10% of the town’s population, the largest proportion of Muslims in any town or city in North America at that time. In 1957, twelve members had come together to form the Arabian Muslim Association of Lac La Biche. The following year, the Alkareem Mosque (as it came to be known) was built in the town, the second mosque in Canada and only the third in all of North America. The mosque served as a place of worship, a Qur’ān school, and a general place of gathering for Lac La Biche’s Muslim community.
In 1962, arrangements were made for a qualified Lebanese ‘ālim (a person educated in the traditional Islamic disciplines) to come to Lac La Biche on a three-year contract to serve as the community’s imām. Part of his work was to preside over marriage and funerary ceremonies, and as a Qur’ān teacher.
Because of this imām’s limited knowledge of English, he made little effort (nor was he asked to do so by the community) to engage with members of other religious communities in Lac La Biche. However, he was very active within the Muslim community. As one observer noted, “here on the edge of the great boreal forests of the Canadian northwest one can hear each weekend the chanting of Qur’ān and Arabic dictation, all much as if one were sitting in a Biqā‘a Valley village''.
This is a very broad-strokes description of the early Muslim community in Lac La Biche, Alberta, and doesn’t explicitly delve into the many day-to-day challenges faced by individual Muslims and the community in maintaining their faith. Not only did they lack the technology that allows today’s Canadian Muslims so stay interconnected with Muslims across the country and around the world, but they also lived in a very remote part of Canada.
A 1969 study of the Muslim community in Lac La Biche showed the difficulties in maintaining everything from the daily prayers to the fasting of Ramadan, and questions about reciting the Lord’s prayer in school, celebrating Christmas, marriage, dating, observing ‘Īd, and “Muhammad” becoming “Mike” were often uncomfortably debated within families and the community.
Nevertheless, the community survived and held on firmly to its faith and traditions. Though no longer leading North America as the town with the largest of the proportion of Muslims in the population, to this day nearly one of every six residents of Lac La Biche is of Lebanese origin. The Alkareem Mosque was rebuilt in 1986 and is still in operation today, and is recognized by the residents of Lac La Biche as an important part of their heritage.
Source: About Islam
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