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Islam is Canadian, and Canada is Muslim, he said. “One only complements the other. There is no contradiction.”

This is the thesis of his new book, Canadian Islam: Belonging and Loyalty, which is published at yet another crisis moment for the ancient global faith.

Once it was 9/11 and the resulting panic, much of it justified, over terrorism and the broader fears of extremist preachers advocating domestic attacks.

Then it was the less dramatic consequences of failed societal integration, with concerns over misogyny in mosques, or whether genders were segregated for prayer, and the headscarf debate. Now it is the rising fear of foreign extremism, spread over the Internet, in which young Canadian men, often converts, are turning up dead overseas in the service of the Islamic State.

It is not Canadians who are radicalizing these young Muslims, Mr. Delic said, but the “virtual world classroom.”

“If they are ostracized, they will go online and find some sheikh,” he said. “This book talks to them more than anybody else… They are not doing any service to our faith.”

He said a key aim of his book is to “wake up” that part of the Muslim community that is “in deep sleep,” unaware of the world around them, especially new immigrants from Muslim societies. For them, he advocates an open-minded Islamic identity that does not copy from the old country, but creates in the new.

“When I came to Canada [20 years ago], I realized that I lived in a different world as far as my comprehension of Islam is concerned. I was shocked with the universality of Islam and Muslims. I was thinking when I was coming from Bosnia that my understanding of Islam is the only way, and all of a sudden I realized there are many expressions of Islam that are a little bit different than mine, so I had to juggle and adapt and basically accept some of the other expressions, and create quite a different expression of Islam that is not Bosnian, not Saudi, not Egyptian, but rather that is a combination of many, a Canadian expression of Islam,” he said. “More and more people are realizing that is the way out for the community.”