Beyond Accommodation: Everyday Narratives of Muslim Canadians by Jennifer Selby, Amelie Barras and Lori G. Beaman (review)

Beyond Accommodation: Everyday Narratives of Muslim Canadians shares insights from a multidisciplinary study of the quotidian experiences of Muslims in Montreal, Quebec, and St John's, Newfoundland. Rather than focusing primarily on Muslimness as a question of identity, the researchers explore the ways in which their interlocutors experience the mundane and unexceptional moments of daily life. By paying attention to "non-events" (5) such as attending a work party, buying someone breakfast or exercising, the authors seek to offer an alternative perspective to the reasonable accommodation model, which they argue essentialises discourses on Muslims and Islam by centring on formal political requests for recognition. The authors propose a "navigation and negotiation" model that aims to capture the changing and dynamic aspects of lived religion in which social interactions with cultural and religious others are not always and only oriented toward the outcome of recognition. Although the power relations between majority and minority religious status remain salient, the participants' narratives shed light on the dialogical and morally ambivalent lived experience of intercultural situations.

The book's first chapter compiles a list of "figures" that reflect how Muslim Canadians are categorised according to stereotypes about and expectations for their identities and behaviors. Within the larger Good Muslim/Bad Muslim binary – a dichotomy closely tied to both state security and normative public discourses about secularism in Canada – five principle figures emerge: the Terrorist, the Imperiled Muslim Woman, the Enlightened Muslim Man, the Foreigner (and the Good Citizen) and the Pious Muslim. In addition to representing the ways in which Muslimness is perceived by Canadian society at large, the authors call attention to how these figures are reproduced in social research through the tendency to focus on piety and religious identity rather than on daily life and (banal) social interactions.

This critique of research sensibilities and methods carries over into the second chapter, which traces the history of Muslim settlement across Canada. Drawing on archival data and family histories, this chapter reveals how Muslims have been present throughout signpost moments in the mainstream Canadian story dating back to the mid-nineteenth century. The authors point to the dearth of scholarly accounts of Muslim Canadians prior to the contemporary periods of immigration and the post-9/11 era, periods marked disproportionately by studies about identity, discrimination and conflict. By taking into account people's everyday lives, the authors suggest that the study of Islam and Muslims in Canada might move beyond the tendency to "produce a functional image of Canadian Muslims as defined by their religion, which is negatively construed" (83).

Chapter 3 foregrounds the discursive paradoxes of secularism that undergird the notion of reasonable accommodation. The authors show how culturally Christian aspects of the secular become structuring elements of their participants' everyday lives in regard to time (for example, holiday periods), space (for example, prayer) and norms of social interaction (for example, greeting etiquette). The ubiquitous Christmas work party serves as a primary example for demonstrating the "embeddedness of Christianity" (92) in Canadian public life. The authors argue that although the secular is understood in Canadian public discourse as "neutral, inclusive and universal," the research participants' narratives reveal the ways in which "the rituals, sights and sounds" of Christianity are "rendered invisible" as simply part of a shared heritage, despite religious minorities' observation of public life as rooted in aspects of the majoritarian religion (92).

However, the research participants' accounts of finding quiet spaces for prayer, greeting opposite gender colleagues or navigating the presence of alcohol at holiday parties are not only narratives of conflict and negative experience. In fact, despite such moments of relational awkwardness and improvised theological deliberation, some narratives tell "a story where celebrating Christmas and being Muslim are not self-exclusionary, where prayer can be about being comfortable with a space and not solely about requesting a space, and where gender equality and Muslim identity are not incompatible" (120). These narratives are effective at conveying the...