Limited physical space to pray, ‘stonewall’ communication are biggest setbacks
How much do you know about the multi-faith centre (MFC)?
The student-run service was established around 2010 by the now-defunct student union, the Student Federation of the University of Ottawa, but non-practicing religious students may not be familiar with it. The MFC was designed as a “space for faith-based groups to meet, celebrate and practice their beliefs” in an inclusive environment.
It was one of the handful of the University of Ottawa Students’ Union (UOSU) services that were shuttered in 2024, in the wake of budget cuts, but it appeared to go out with a whimper rather than a bang compared to other student services. But lying in its wake is a stream of unresolved issues, leaving students of different faiths at a disadvantage.
In mid-October, then-equity commissioner, Imani Bunzigiye, and UOSU Board of Director (BOD) for health sciences, Farah Mourad, co-led a ‘multi-faith Caucus’. The caucus served as sort of a follow-up for a previous meeting, led by the MFC with different religious student clubs on campus back in February — an idea helmed by both Bunzigiye and UOSU president Delphine Robitaille.
Mourad has always been proud of her heritage as a Muslim and an Egyptian and has since found a wider community since beginning at the U of O, but also acknowledged how isolated that community appears against the broader student population.
“Even though everyone’s talking to each other and … trying to help each other out, and recognize that [we’re] Arab, we’re here to talk to each other, I also noticed as a whole how isolated the [Arab and Muslim] community is,” said Mourad.
She continued, “[The Muslim population is] huge here at the University of Ottawa, the Muslim Student Association has done fantastic things. But it didn’t go unnoticed to me, the lack of support that the association received as well, just talking on the religious side. So that’s what sort of sparked my interest in the caucus, just trying to see what are some of the main barriers they’re facing.”
The multi-faith caucus was attended by around 10 students, with an established goal to “identify barriers facing religious students on campus and advocate for practicing religious freedom.” The caucus discussed a number of issues affecting religious students on campus, including the accessibility of examination accommodations during holidays and the installation of an ablution room, but it is unsure if they will meet again due to the resignation of the equity commissioner.
Unfortunately, none of these issues are new to the university students who face numerous barriers in trying to practice their different religions.
Which space is the right space?
For years, students have been asking the university to improve the conditions of the multi-faith prayer spaces on campus. There are currently two on the downtown campus, with an additional one at the Lees and Roger Guindon campuses each.
However, during the multi-faith caucus, Muslim Students Association (MSA) vice-president Areeba Mallick clarified that it was Muslim students who were regularly cleaning the primary multi-faith prayer space, located in UCU 125, three times a week. This comes as a shock, as it is the university administration who rents spaces to UOSU (including the multi-faith prayer spaces), and externally contracts custodial staff.
“The multi-faith space is owned by the university, but after many, many years, there wasn’t a lot of upkeep in the room,” Mallick explained in an interview with the Fulcrum. “And specifically for Muslim [students], cleanliness is a very big thing. So at some point, the Muslim Student Association kind of took it upon themselves to kind of do more thorough cleanings.”
It is unclear if the university has been ordering proper building maintenance of the room, including checking for proper air circulation and fire hazard standards. Mallick and other students additionally informed the caucus of a mould problem that occurred in the room earlier this year.
Mallick added that the MSA had been working with the multi-faith centre to try and resolve their issues of cleaning and space since at least 2022 when Mallick first became an executive for the MSA. “We wouldn’t discuss the multi-faith room with anyone except [the MFC], because it’s obviously under their jurisdiction,” she said.
“But that’s as early as we can pinpoint that these discussions came more into focus, because [the MSA] started accruing a lot of costs over the years. Then, when the administration was a bit more hesitant to give us what we needed to further support our students, it would be used to a certain degree as a leverage point that the MSA is pretty self-sustainable.”
Mallick continued, “we don’t ask the university for money to clean the multi-faith room. We have students who go in there and clean it, even though that realistically, this is the responsibility of the university to upkeep this room, as well as every other room on campus, right?”
In addition to the inconsistent maintenance of the prayer spaces, the university has been delaying the installation of an ablution room on campus for years. In 2015, the MSA announced the news of an ablution room when the renovations of the UCU dining hall were announced — nearly 10 years later, these plans have yet to come to fruition.
“We’ve had students receive comments while they’re performing ablution in the public bathrooms,” said Mallick. “And so with an ablution room, that will kind of take away that aspect, but it would also make sure would mitigate the concerns about accessibility issues when it comes to performing ablution on campus.”
Ablution, the process of washing one’s self, is imperative for prayer. Yet, many students have resorted to using nearby university bathrooms to perform ablution, which can cause stress for Muslim students, as well as stress on bathroom systems.
“Depending on how high the sink is, it can be difficult for students with limited mobility to get their arms and feet underneath the water. So we also think that’s very important to consider as well. For the university to be aware that if they can make these changes, not only is it good in terms of accommodating Muslim students, but also accommodating, specifically students who have these accessibility issues.”
Ryan Farrell, a member of the multi-faith chaplaincy office through the Ottawa Campus Chaplaincy, recently spoke to Bunzigiye following the multi-faith caucus, particularly about the multi-faith prayer spaces and the confusion over who is in charge of the space.
“I think some of the issues there are, and I think everybody agrees about this, there’s a bit of a lack of clarity about who is responsible, which creates a whole other series of issues, right? If there’s no clarity about even financially who’s responsible for the space, who’s upkeeping it, who’s caring for it, who’s making decisions about it … I think the chaplains share that confusion,” said Farrell.
Farrell has worked with the multi-faith chaplaincy office for about two and a half years, but communication between campus chaplains and the multi-faith centre has been lacking for the time being. “I think originally the goal was that the student union, [the] multi-faith group and multi-faith chaplaincy office would do some functions or initiatives together. And I think that has happened in the past.”
However, student complaints about the multi-faith space have reached the chaplaincy office for a while — but chaplains are in more of a position to support student needs and coordinate with them and university administration than to control campus spaces.
“I think at one point the chaplains were a little more involved in the prayer spaces, but I don’t know to what extent. I know that now, the consensus seems to be you can’t have affiliate volunteers getting super engaged in facility issues, we just don’t have the ability to navigate that internally in the university. But we do hear concerns from students about the space,” said Farrell.
“[The administration] is not even fully meeting the needs of Muslim students who are the ones predominantly using [the space]. We have conversations with students where that comes up, or we get inquiries sometimes because folks think that we might have space as a chaplaincy team that’s bookable for religious purposes. And so we hear those inquiries and those needs, and we can’t do anything about it because we don’t have any space like that.”
Hana Jahan Sereda is a second-year international development and globalization student, as well as the vice-president of the Ottawa Ismaili Students Association, representing the U of O campus. For Canadian university Ismaili Student Associations, students gather based on population numbers rather than strictly per campus.
Ismaili Muslims follow the teachings of a living Imam who interprets the Qu’ran in modern contexts. To be permitted into their spaces of prayer, one must have completed their bay’at, and those who have not must be separated — this means the Ismaili Students Association (ISA) needs complete privacy for prayer.
“If you haven’t gone through your bay’at, you can’t even view religious proceedings. The things that we do inside of our place of worship are not, I would say, secretive, but very private. And it’s meant for those who have taken their oath and who have gone through their by that so nobody can watch us pray, for example, like, that’s just not how we do things,” Sereda explained in an interview.
For Ismaili students at the U of O, this makes room bookings for prayer quite limited — there cannot be glass doors or windows. They often use classrooms in older buildings, such as Thompson.
“So every time that the university tries to find accommodations for us, and they’re like, ‘take this room’, we’re like, ‘glass door, we can’t. Find us another room’. But it’s been really, really hard to do that,” Sereda went on. “I don’t know if it’s because of the amount of students that have come in or the lack of rooms available, but it’s been really, really, really hard to book rooms to the point where sometimes we need to, like, cancel religious prayer.”
Sereda outlined that ideally, Ismaili students are to have prayer five days a week — in practice, prayer occurs two or three times.
Stonewall after stonewall
For many students, the university’s legacy is dismissing the very pertinent needs of expressing their religious beliefs. Despite finding solace in communities across the city, the lack of support and communication from the University of Ottawa is very much felt.
“The biggest issue, from what I noticed was that they just get stonewalled a lot by the upper administration. So if they want to initiate anything, for example, like they want to talk to the administration about prayer rooms — something the Muslim Student Association has been trying to do for years now — they get stonewalled every single time,” said director Mourad.
“The administration makes promises, nothing gets executed. [The students] don’t feel listened to, and they started to get blocked out instead of collaborated with, or they don’t really receive any effort from the other side.”
Mourad and Bunzigiye were asked by the university to create a report about the experiences of Arab and Muslim students on campus, a move that shocked her. Although the administration originally asked for one to two pages, Mourad’s draft reached over five.
“When I was writing it, I was very blunt. I did not hide myself. I did not hide the words that other Arab or Muslim students wanted to say they’re putting everything on paper, because there needs to be some level of recognition,” she explained.
Sereda says the Ottawa ISA has been in contact with upper members of their organization for support in acquiring room bookings for members, but feel they shouldn’t have to resort to these means of support.
“We shouldn’t have to tell mommy and daddy to come fix our problems for us. It should be there and accessible and ready for us. And I think it’s a misunderstanding and a lack of education on the part of like, the university as a whole, that they don’t get our culture and they don’t try to — because we’re not the only club like this,” she contended.
“For sure we have our specific needs, like a room without windows, but I feel like that’s not the hardest thing to ask for in the world. It’s miseducation and it’s ignorance. And you’ll find that everywhere, this is a problem that countless ISAs are facing in the entire country.”
Mallick said one of the biggest things the MSA has been pushing for by the university administration is a public statement addressing the cases of Islamophobia on campus. She feels disheartened the university has yet to make a move.
“Internally, we kind of kept showing them so many different experiences on campus. There have been reports filed on campus with protection services about these cases of Islamophobia, and still, the administration is very hesitant to admit whether or not publicly that Islamophobia is alive and well on our campus, and this is something we’ve been pushing for the last year.”
Mallick discussed some members of the MSA even meeting with university president Jacques Fremont about the Islamophobia students have been reportedly facing, in hopes that his influence would produce a statement of acknowledgement.
“We’ve also asked for more concrete strategies to combat Islamophobia on campus to administration, so whether that be anti-Islamophobia training for staff and faculty, as we have experienced that.”
“There have been students who have experienced forms of Islamophobia, from faculty members, from members of administration. I think that would be a very important place to start, you know, starting with education first and foremost, but maybe even a broader picture, in terms of like, services that the university or UOSU could help provide, our biggest thing is still prayer spaces,” she went on.
Mallick acknowledges that a lack of adequate prayer spaces doesn’t just affect Muslim students, but students of all faiths. “Different faiths might have different conflicting spiritual practices, and the fact that the university, after all these years, has still yet to introduce more prayer spaces as the U of O community grows is a very big concern of ours.”
