When Omar Elgazzar found that there weren’t many dedicated spaces for Muslims — or people of other faiths — at the public schools he attended, he took matters into his own hands. At 12, he pushed interfaith initiatives forward inside and outside of school, establishing multifaith prayer rooms in his middle and high schools in Whitby and Oshawa, Ont. That work earned the now 17-year-old the TD Scholarship for Community Leadership, a $70,000 scholarship he’s using to study mechatronics engineering at the University of Waterloo in Ontario.
Inspiration In Grade 7, I started being serious about prayers and the values I wanted to have. I went to my principal, and they gave me an unused classroom to pray in, which two to four people used. When I got to high school in 2020, I established a bigger multi-faith room open to all students. We had almost 200 people praying with us at one time.
Results Since one of our mandatory prayers was during school, some Muslim students had to go home to pray, which would make them late for class. It’s a lot of missed time for the 350 Muslim students. But now they can get a well-run education. Once a small group of people were courageous enough to advocate for a prayer space, it became a chain reaction.
Lessons My whole life builds on one value: respect for others and for their beliefs. If you disagree with somebody about their beliefs, I think it’s really important that you remain respectful of what they believe in. We can voice our disagreements in a respectful manner. The interfaith rooms allowed this, because while most students were Muslims, Chris- tians also used the rooms freely on occasion. As long as there’s respect among people, we can learn to live with our differences and make peace. Everything else easily follows.
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Fernando Arce is a Toronto-based freelance journalist focusing on social issues, local politics and Indigenous resistance to colonization. He is a co-founder and senior editor of The Grind a free print news and arts publication. He’s also an amateur photographer, an okay drummer, and a lifelong animal-lover.
This article first appeared in Broadview’s March 2025 issue with the title “Omar Elgazzar.”
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