Marwan El Gaddafi, McMaster University
July 21, 2026
As of Sept. 1, Muslim students at Québec’s post-secondary colleges, known as CEGEPs, will have no place to perform their daily prayers. Jewish, Christian and Muslim independent schools may lose provincial funding. And group prayer in parks will require municipal permission.
These are key provisions of Québec’s new secularism law, Bill 9. A challenge to Bill 21, meanwhile — a law prohibiting public employees in positions of authority, such as teachers, police officers and judges, from wearing visible religious symbols at work — is currently before the Supreme Court of Canada.
Québec’s new secularism law claims to limit only religious symbols. In fact, it regulates religious obligations.
A religious symbol or an obligation?
As a PhD student researching Islamic legal theory at McMaster University, I believe the public debate has not yet addressed the core of what Bill 9 actually does.
Passed in April 2026 by a vote of 77 to 27 in the Québec legislature, Bill 9 is not simply an extension of the province’s 2019 religious symbols law, Bill 21. It’s a fundamental shift in what secularism is being asked to do.
To see why this shift matters, consider a framework from an unexpected source: Islamic legal theory. The 14th-century jurist Al-Shatibi argued that religious obligations are not arbitrary rules; they are responses to basic human needs that the law exists to protect: faith, life, intellect, lineage and property. He called these the maqasid — roughly, the “higher purposes” of Islamic law.
Daily prayer is an essential obligation in this framework. It serves as the practice through which a believer becomes a conscious servant of their creator.
By protecting the relationship between creator and creation — the highest of the five essential objectives in Islam — prayer functions not as a symbolic or optional act but as the fundamental, practical expression of that divinely designed purpose.
When I look at the CEGEP prayer bans through the lens of Islamic legal theory, I do not see a student expressing an identity. I see someone trying to fulfil an obligation tied to specific times, ritual washing and facing Mecca. Closing a prayer room does not ask students to remove a symbol. It asks them to violate a duty.
This distinction between symbol and obligation is not unique to Islam. The Jewish hospital patient relying on a kosher menu, the Sikh day-care worker whose dastaar (turban) is an extension of their commitment — these are not optional symbols, but deeply held obligations, binding regardless of whether anyone is watching.
Regulating the state versus the citizen
By imposing dress codes at subsidized daycares, restricting religiously accommodated meals in certain public institutions and banning unpermitted outdoor group prayer, the law pulls personal religious practice under government control.
These citizens exercise no state power. Their only shared trait is visibility — a trait that Bill 9 seems to be treating as the problem itself. In framing visibility as something to be eliminated, the law pushes against foundational principles of a liberal democratic society.
Supporters, including French Language Minister Jean-François Roberge, argue the law ensures the “religious neutrality of the state” and equal rules for all. In their view, neutrality demands uniformity.
But uniformity is not neutrality. A rule that treats a daily obligation and a decorative pin as the same thing has not achieved equality — it has arguably just stopped closely examining what it’s actually regulating.
The opposition to Bill 9 is unusually broad. The Archbishop of Montréal has called for the law’s withdrawal, and Jewish, Sikh, Christian and Muslim communities have all raised concerns about its scope.
Legal challenges
The province has pre-emptively invoked the notwithstanding clause in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms — a constitutional override that lets governments suspend certain rights under the charter — to shield Bill 9 from court challenges.
Opponents can still challenge how the law is applied through Québec’s administrative tribunals by invoking the Québec Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms or by raising Canada’s treaty commitments at the United Nations.
But these avenues are slow, and because of the notwithstanding clause, they can only limit enforcement case by case; they cannot cancel the law.
Meanwhile, the Supreme Court of Canada is weighing its ruling on the Bill 21 case it heard in March 2026. While the ruling will have no direct impact on Bill 9, it will establish the legal framework and precedents that will shape future challenges against the new law.
Bill 9 asks Canada to decide what kind of secularism it wants. One model keeps the state neutral and treats religious citizens as full participants in public life. The other demands the public sphere be free of visible religion, even when that religion takes the form of obligations its adherents cannot set aside.
A version of secularism that fails to distinguish between a religious symbol and a religious duty misses the true meaning of neutrality.
Marwan El Gaddafi, PhD Candidate in Religious Studies, McMaster University
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This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
