Whether in offhand conversation or in media reports, the concept of “Islam” tends to be treated as a monolithic idea in Canada. The word too often becomes shorthand for a reductively narrow set of beliefs, represented by its most zealous and intransigent proponents.

In truth, Islam is no more (or less) rigid and uniform than Christianity or Buddhism. It ranges across a swathe of countries and cultures from south-east Asia through the Indian subcontinent and the Middle East to Africa and Mediterranean Europe—not to mention growing communities in inhospitable climes like Scandinavia and Canada. Its true meaning is as vexed and elusive as that of any other set of beliefs shared and disputed by large numbers of followers. There are Shiites, Sunnis, Sufis, and more, each with their own interpretations. For every regime of hardline mullahs, there is a pluralistic and tolerant vision of Islam, like that of the Indian Mughals. Talking about the ethnic hodgepodge of Montreal’s Mile End neighbourhood, Abdallah, a Djiboutian Muslim, tosses off metaphors for multiculturalism: bees gathering pollen from different flowers, a store attracting customers by offering various products. In a certain light, Islam too could serve as such a metaphor. As its manifold forms around the world reveal, it is as much a blueprint for diversity as a recipe for authoritarianism. – DD

Shee Jean moved from China to Canada six decades ago; she has lived here since, given birth here, grown old here. She is an immigrant, a Chinese-hyphen-Canadian That hyphen, today such an accepted part of the language of identity, makes of her a hybrid of two cultures. It implies that she is not quite Chinese, not quite Canadian, but partakes of both.

But is she, in fact, “Chinese-Canadian”? She lives in Canada, yes, but does not speak any of the country’s default languages; she worked in Chinese restaurants all her life, using Mandarin. She lives in Windsor, yes, but—like the nonna buying cannelloni and ricotta in her native tongue at a Little Italy deli; like the strictly-kosher saba attending the synagogue in Hebrew every Shabbat—she also lives in a simulacrum of her homeland willed into being by the mutual need and nostalgia of her compatriots. By choice or necessity, she is at a slight remove from “normal” Canadian life, whatever that is.

It might therefore be more accurate to say that Shee Jean is both Chinese (culturally, linguistically, emotionally) and Canadian (legally, statistically, demographically), but not Chinese-Canadian. She lives an unhyphenated life. She has completed the physical trajectory of immigration, the uprooting, the displacement, without regret, but she has also, in a sense, refused the personal transformation that it implies. Perhaps for her and those like her, we should replace the linking hyphen with the divisive slash, and call her “Chinese/Canadian.”