Billed as “Canada’s first professional theater company dedicated to celebrating Muslim stories,” the Silk Road Theatre Company was born out of a desire to “change the narrative that we always hear about Muslims,” says Bochra Manaï, Vice-Chair of the Montreal theater company. “It means that we finally can have a space, a welcoming space for under-represented communities, for Muslim communities to share their narratives, to tell their stories, to talk about Islamophobia.”
The company is premiering their first play The Domestic Crusader this week. Written by Wajahat Ali, the play premiered off-Broadway in 2005 and explores an inter-generational family conflict in a post-9/11 world. Zeshaun Saleem plays the role of Salahuddin, the eldest of three siblings in a Pakistani-American family. He says that the central question to the play is “to what extent do we hold on to that identity…? How do we negotiate that identity?”
