Toronto’s dining scene has always been focused on diversity, but new initiatives are bringing people together to break bread at home.
Mariam Shirazi first got the idea to open up her Ramadan iftar dinners after hearing a visiting speaker at her mosque give a sermon about breaking down stereotypes and misconceptions simply by sitting down with people and getting to know them. It was the day before Ramadan, an Islamic holy month where Muslims fast from sun-up to sun-down, marking the end of each day with an evening meal, known as iftar. Shirazi thought, “Hey, why not find a way to invite people into our home?”
It was a time when she felt there was a lot of misrepresentation of Muslims in the media. She built a website and called around to people in her network. In its inaugural year, Experience Ramadan hosted over 200 iftars.
That was three years ago. The network has expanded to 1,200 people.
“People come in not knowing about what Ramadan is or not knowing what Muslims are like because they’ve never had a chance to meet one, or they’ve never had a chance to ask questions,” she says. “It’s a really cool way for people to come in and understand a little bit of our culture, and have a good time and enjoy a celebration with us.”
Prospective guests and hosts sign up through her website, ramadan.fyi, and specify whether they wish to host or attend. Shirazi connects them, a location gets sorted out and away they go. Shirazi has hosted five dinners and attended at least 10 of them.
Her dinners often involve a mix of Pakistani and Canadian dishes. First they break the fast with dates and water, customary for most Muslims. At her typical iftar you’ll find samosas on the table, as well as chaat (a yogurt dish with chickpeas, fried lentils and spices) and pakoras. The group has also thrown a Middle Eastern feast, with tabbouleh, kafta and shish taouk skewers with tahini sauce, ajvar and toum, a garlic sauce.
Her first dinner as a host was attended by a Christian couple from Pickering, and, she says, they spent much of the evening talking about their cultural similarities rather than differences. Now, the couple send her family a card every Eid and every Ramadan, and she sends them a Christmas card every year.
“When the New Zealand attacks happened, they sent us a card telling us that they were so sorry to hear what happened and that it was through that dinner that they got to learn about us and to realize that what they hear about in the media is not completely true,” she says.
The Intercultural Dialogue Institute (IDI) has been running a similar program since 2005. Meet Your Neighbour (MYN) matches people of different religions and cultures to get together for religious celebrations, including Easter, Shabbat dinners and iftars. This upcoming Ramadan, which starts May 5, they expect to have 80 to 90 hosts, with around 420 guests participating in the program in nine cities across Canada.
“It’s two-way learning. It’s not just one-way learning,” says Ahmet Tamirci, the national director of IDI. “When people attend a Shabbat dinner, the guests are learning from the hosts, and the hosts are learning from the guests.”
There has never been a better time for cultural dialogue: recent current events like the church bombings in Sri Lanka and the mosque shootings in Christchurch, New Zealand, have highlighted anti-Muslim sentiment across the world.
Closer to home, a survey published last August by Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center revealed that “15 per cent (five million) Canadians express views that could be construed as antisemitic.” The same survey suggested that Ontario displayed the second-highest percentage of intolerance on average, following Quebec. Last year, Statistics Canada released a report that stated that police-reported hate crime in Canada nearly doubled from the previous year.
Although participants who are willing to open their homes to strangers and bond over cultural differences are less likely to harbour racist sentiment than others, MYN organizers say that these conversations allow for a more nuanced learning process.
“One of the things that this project addresses indirectly is the need to build bridges between communities,” says Jackie Kovacs, the project co-ordinator for MYN. “We’ve given them the tools to better understand the different faiths and to have a stronger understanding of the individuals within certain faiths.”
Imam Irshad Osman works with the Danforth Islamic Centre. Last year, he attended a Shabbat dinner at a rabbi’s family home.
“Muslims and the Jewish did not have a healthy relationship throughout history,” he says. “Our enmity, our unknown enmity, which cannot be pinned down, is completely run by something that has happened miles and miles away. So how can we clear that misconception and understand?”
He says he walked away from the table inspired by their conversations, which touched on not only their cultural customs, but also harmless dinner topics, such as parenting teenagers.
“When you [get to] know a person by sitting at a dinner table, it’s not just a conversation about religion or their social values,” he says. “It’s also about their family values. You realize that you connect, and then, automatically, the labels of being a Jew or a Christian or a Buddhist or Hindu or Muslim goes away. You connect with them on a deeper level, a human-to-human level.”
