Dr. Zijad Delic came on board with the Canadian Islamic Congress as Executive Director last November, and his presence has entailed a definite shift in perspective.  The hiring of an Executive Director gave the Congress the ability to do more “on the ground” with Muslims and in reaching out to the wider Canadian society.  He wants to remove misconceptions about Islam and improve understanding of the faith both among Muslims and in the wider community. He describes his approach as “collaborative.”  He speaks of moderation rather than extremism of either the left or the right.  His remarks in this regard seemed to echo Aristotle’s Golden Mean and the Buddhist Middle Way.  While he comes from Bosnia, where he was trained as an imam, his higher education has been in Pakistan, the University of Oregon, and Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. 

Delic says that “I always work to defuse tension in the community.”  He is open to others and is prepared to work with them on common goals.  At the theological level, he sees very little difference between Sunni Islam and the main Shi’a movement.  The difference, he said, “is political.”

Dr. Delic says that sharia must be re-examined in the light of modernity in the West.  He gave the example of a couple going to an imam from the East with a marital problem.  Using an old way of looking at sharia, the imam might advise the husband to beat his wife.  “That,” said Delic, “could get him in trouble because it is against the law.  And if I am called as a witness, then he will really be in trouble,” because there are Islamic legal sources forbidding such behavior. 

He says that there are more important things to do than to spend time sighting the moon (for Ramadan), and Muslims must not be stuck in the past.  “If we only live in the past, how can we deal with the present?  We need to learn from the past but not live in the past.” 

He decried the tendency of some Muslims, including imams, of thinking the way they learned in the East.  The world has changed, and the East they remember no longer exists.  The East also has changed.  It is impossible to go back. So what does this dynamic new face mean for the Muslim scene in Canada?  For one thing, I don’t expect Delic to wage a war of words with the more secular Muslim Canadian Congress, the way that the Canadian Islamic Congress has done in the past.