A Battle Over Prayer in Schools Tests Canada’s Multiculturalism<br />"What Peel shows is that even in places with huge racial diversity, you can have people who identify with different communities<br />but disagree about human rights issues." To the Peel school board and many Muslims in the district, the strife over religious accommodation is little more than Islamophobia.<br />For nearly two decades, Muslim students in the Peel School District, outside Toronto, had been allowed to pray independently<br />on Fridays, part of a policy in many Canadian provinces to accommodate religious beliefs in public schools.<br />In allowing prayer in its schools, the Peel district relied on a provision in the Ontario Human Rights Code<br />that the Ontario Human Rights Commission has interpreted as requiring government-funded schools — both public and Catholic — to "accommodate" students in observing their personal faiths.<br />For Farina Siddiqui, 43, a Muslim activist whose children attend public<br />and Catholic schools in the Peel district, allowing students to worship once a week in school is a matter of religious freedom.<br />Rabia Khedr said that These are people trying to fuel the fire and brew our ignorances,<br />The group has protested outside recent school board meetings<br />and says it plans to bring a lawsuit challenging the policy of allowing prayer in the Peel schools, arguing that the law does not explicitly permit it.
