Little mosques on the ocean: Halifax welcomes a growing Muslim population
HALIFAX — When nine-year-old Zia Khan arrived in Halifax in the late 1970s, the boy was something of a novelty to newfound friends who knew little about his Muslim heritage or his distant homeland.
Khan and his family immigrated to Canada’s east coast from Pakistan, answering a call for families and well-educated foreigners interested in settling in less populated parts of the country under then-prime minister Pierre Trudeau.
For the Khans in 1978, that meant finding their way in a province that was predominantly Christian, anglophone, and more than 90 per cent white.
“I was an oddball,” Khan, the imam and director of the Centre for Islamic Development, says with a laugh. “I had very good friends and they were mostly all Christians. We had a very small pocket of Muslim communities and an even a smaller pocket of Arab communities.”