HALIFAX – Arabic signs and emergency brochures might seem odd in different parts of Canada. Yet, the situation is different in Halifax, Nova Scotia, which welcomed a growing Muslim population recently.

“In Halifax, I’m starting to see welcome signs and instruction signs and organizations … doing their pamphlets in Arabic, especially this year when we’ve seen a lot of people at one time speaking one language coming into the province,” Gerry Mills, executive director of the Immigrant Services Association of Nova Scotia, told The Canadian Press on Sunday, December 18.

Mills added that some sports facilities, libraries and banks are now posting signs in Arabic.

“If you go into the banks and the grocery stores, you’ll begin to see people who clearly don’t have English as their first language,” she noted.

“I don’t think you used to see that 15 years ago, but you do see that now and that’s wonderful.”

Zia Khan, the imam and director of the Centre for Islamic Development, agrees.

When nine-year-old 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.”

Demographic Shift

Provincial Immigration Minister Lena Diab (far left) says Nova Scotia welcomes the influx of diversity. (Robert Short/CBC)

Co-founding the mosque about 17 years ago, Khan has watched that change over the last few decades.

The most recent census in 2011 listed Arabic as the third most commonly spoken language or mother tongue in Nova Scotia — at roughly 6,700 people — and second in Halifax, ahead of Mi’kmaq and Chinese.

Many of the Arabic speakers are part of the province’s Lebanese population, much of which is Christian, but a rising number are from other countries like Egypt, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Kuwait.

Moreover, the arrivals of about 1,500 Syrian refugees in the province this year has boosted the number of Muslims and Arabic-speaking people.

As a result of the shift, the sight of a woman donning hijab in the street is no longer stange for Nova Scotians, who are learning to see immigrants as a solution to the aging province’s demographic crisis.

Moreover, there are at least five mosques in the province now, up from only one when the Khans arrived.

Despite of the overwhelming acceptance of immigrants, some Arab and Muslim communities say the atmosphere has been marred by a lack of understanding and outright racism.

Mohamad El Attar, a Palestinian who grew up in Halifax, says he has experienced subtle and overt displays of “ignorance” that he chalks up to a lack of exposure to his Muslim faith. Both he and his sister have faced abuse from strangers, who have called her a terrorist and told both to “go back to where you came from.”

El Attar tries to laugh it off, usually responding with a smile and a question, “I’m from here, so do you want me to go back to Halifax or Dartmouth?”

“Some people think, ‘Oh this is the guy I saw on the news,’ and it is misreported that we’re violent crazy terrorists who have come to take over and I’m just like, ‘Man, I’m just looking for a job. I’m just paying off tuition fees and just here working and trying to pay rent,”‘ says the 22-year-old accountant.

“Not everyone has encountered an Arab or Muslim, especially in Nova Scotia, and some people may not have ever had a friend who wasn’t white.”

Yet, Nova Scotians’ overwhelming response to the plight of Syrian refugee families, donating thousands of bags of clothes, furniture and other items when the call was put out to help arriving Syrians late last year, highlights a more typical attitude to the province’s growing diversity.

“Diversity brings strength and we welcome that,” Immigration Minister Lena Diab said.