[URBAN NOTE] "Toronto’s First Mosques"

[rfmcdonald]

In a Historicist post from last November, Torontoist's Jamie Bradburn looked at the genesis behind Toronto's first mosques, and its Muslim population.

Toronto’s first mosque had little going for it physically. The former leather shop at 3047 Dundas Street West was, according to early attendee Alia Hogben, a “very cheap, very dirty, very crummy little place. But it was ours.”

When the Muslim Society of Toronto (MST) opened its Islamic Centre in 1961, it served a tiny community. The earliest presence of Muslims in Canada was recorded in the 1871 federal census, when 13 people recorded Islam as their faith.

A trickle of Albanians, Lebanese, Syrians, and other ethnicities from the Ottoman Empire crossed the Atlantic in the years leading up to the First World War, adding up to around 1,500 Muslims across the country by the time hostilities broke out in 1914. Many initially found work as unskilled labourers or peddlers.

The Canadian Muslim community barely grew during the interwar years, due to a combination of restrictive immigration policies and those who returned to their homelands following the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire. After the Second World War, numbers were boosted via the arrival of refugees from Communist regimes in the Balkans and a small group of professionals from elsewhere.

Among the early arrivals in Toronto was Regip Assim, who fled Albania with his brothers after participating in a failed independence movement prior to the First World War. Settling in Toronto, the Assims found that their religion’s association with the perceived barbarism of the Ottoman Empire, which fought against the Allies during the war, hampered employment attempts. They settled into candy making, eventually operating the High Park Sweets restaurant on Bloor Street. Assim was involved in the formation of the Albanian Muslim Society of Toronto in the early 1950s, becoming president when it dropped “Albanian” from its name a few years later.