By NAZIM BAKSH

The lifeline of Muslim communities in Canada and the United States has been Islamic conferences, particularly in the 1980s and ’90s. Conferences in turn gave rise to a cadre of jet-setting Muslim scholars. No one in government ever batted an eye at these speakers in the years before Sept. 11, 2001. But since then, this loose assortment of charismatic speakers have come under intense scrutiny by intelligence organizations and lobby groups in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom.

The squeaky clean Yusuf Islam was put on a U.S. no-fly list and denied entry into the United States. It appears the United States has reversed its position on him, but has not accorded the same to Professor Tarek Ramadan or Dr. Zaki Badawi when the latter was alive. These two were invited by respected universities and organizations in the United States, but Washington crossed their names off the guest lists.  

The situation is so tense that in the last five years many speakers have wisely declined invitations to speak in the United States out of fear that they may be arrested or worse, end up in the U.S. detention center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. 

In the post-9/11 years, Canadian authorities have been relatively easy going, allowing into the country a variety of speakers from Tarek Suwaidan to Tarek Ramadan. That all changed when the popular British Shaykh Abu Yusuf Riyadh ul-Haq was invited to speak at Islamic conferences in Montreal and Toronto in late June.  Riyadh ul-Haq never made it across the Atlantic.

Riyadh ul-Haq has visited Canada and the U.S. many times before and there have hardly been any substantial complaints either about his lectures or his religio-political views. In the world of Muslim bloggers, he was lightly flogged, after speaking in Toronto last December, for objecting to clapping as a form of applause as well as the playing of anasheeds (Islamic songs) before or after his lectures. Although his objections may come from a strict application of Islamic legal rulings, they are hardly grounds for Ottawa to bar him from entering the country.

The trouble for Riyadh ul-Haq started when Judeoscope, a Canadian website (www.Judeoscope.ca) that describes itself as being “dedicated to shedding light on anti-Semitism, anti-Zionism, and militant Islam in Canada,” published audio excerpts from a few of his hundreds of lectures.