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VAUGHAN, Canada: The homes come with separate living rooms for men
and women. Streets are named Bashir, Zafrulla Khan, and Abdus Salam.
And every house has a view of the mosque, visible from miles around.
This is Peace Village, a residential housing
development in a Toronto suburb that caters to Muslims—but is open
to anyone.
It grew around a small mosque that sprouted in
the early 1990s in a cornfield along a desolate highway in this
nondescript suburb of Toronto, Canada’s largest metropolis with
five million residents, where one in two people are immigrants.
Built by a handful of devout Ahmadiyya
Muslims—a sect founded at the end of the 19th century in what is
now Pakistan, but considered heretics by some—the mosque is today
the centerpiece of this emerging neighborhood.
Initially, “the main motivation was to bring
worshippers close to the mosque,” developer Naseer Ahmad told
Agence France-Presse. Born in Pakistan, the 54-year-old immigrated
to Canada in 1976.
From each residence, homeowners have a clear
view of the central mosque. Each home has a double garage and a
green lawn to trim in summer.
Officially started in 1998, the village is now
home to more than 260 upper-middle class families.
The area streets borrow names from Pakistan’s
official language, Urdu, or honor famous Pakistan nationals such as
1979 Nobel laureate Abdus Salam.
Every kitchen is equipped with an extra powerful
ventilation system to help clear the air when preparing extra spicy
or smoky ethnic dishes.
And homes are designed with two living
rooms—one for men, and another for women.
Adil Malik, a businessman, has lived with his
wife in Peace Village since 2001.
“My children are growing up here. It is really
positive for them,” Malik said of his three sons.
“I have seen other kids [grow up here]. Now
they are teenagers and they are very productive members of society .
. . going to university,” he said.
“We look at it in the point of view that it is
a community that supports each other.”
A house here costs about $500,000 (Canadian, US
or 345,000 euros) and strong demand has forced developers to add a
second phase, now under construction.
“It have given true meaning to [Canada’s]
multiculturalism concept,” said the developer Ahmad, photographs
of himself with leading Canadian politicians littering his office.
But even if it was conceived for Muslims, Peace
Village is open to anyone, he said.
To date, only Muslims have bought homes here,
leading some to accuse Ahmad of having created a Muslim ghetto or a
segregated community within a vastly multicultural society.
“It is a very good neighborhood,” he
insisted, not a place where poor immigrants are forced to live in
squalor.
“There were some fears at the beginning” of
it becoming a Muslim ghetto, he said. “But the time has proven
that it has not become a ghetto. The property values are very high.
There is no violence and the streets are clean.”
Patricia Wood, an associate professor at York
University who has researched multiculturalism and immigration, also
defended the housing development, noting that while some aspects of
the project may seem new, the creation of ethnic or religious-based
neighborhoods “is actually a very old practice” on this
continent.
“If you look at the history of North America,
some of the earliest settlements have specific groups coming and
establishing their own communities with their own buildings and
their own institutions in very close proximity to one another.”
There are very few immigrant groups that did not
create their own neighborhoods within larger cities, and
historically it has been good for them and society at large, she
said.
Wood concedes that some people may have some
difficulty with the concept, which can also be seen in an
all-Catholic village in Florida called Ave Maria.
Some people have “a more generalized fear of
the Muslim community” since the attacks of September 11, 2001,
that killed almost 3,000 people in New York, Pennsylvania and
Washington, she said.
Whether it be the Muslim Peace Village, or
Vancouver’s century-old Chinatown, “there is so much mutual
support in these communities that would not necessarily be available
in Canadian society.”
“It’s been a very important part of
successful migration in Canada and the United States,” she said.
-- AFP
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