Imam speaks out after threats
Leader opens up about brush with extremism as teen
The photo emailed to Ibrahim Hindy showed five men hanging by their necks. “Islamic wind chimes,” the email read. Around the same time, a message arrived calling his mosque “one of many satan safe houses that need to be burned to the ground.”
The 33-year-old reported the troubling messages to police in Mississauga, Ont., where he lives and serves as imam at the Dar Al-Tawheed Islamic Centre, but he also took to Facebook on Tuesday to say enough is enough. “We have to make this stop,” he wrote.
The threats were the culmination of months of antiMuslim rhetoric coming from some opponents of a Peel District School Board policy that accommodates Friday prayers on school grounds for Muslim students.
Groups fighting the board have called Islam evil and its prophet a child-rapist. They have urged the banning of Islam and the mass deportation of Muslims. “It’s almost all-out war here,” one of them said after ripping up a Qur’an during a school board meeting.
As a member of the school board’s faith advisory committee who had supported the policy, Hindy has been targeted online as a radical and criminal. He was told he was being watched and that he should have stayed silent.
Hindy knows that kind of extremism better than most. Although reluctant to talk about it, he alluded to it in Tuesday’s Facebook post, disclosing that he had once been “exposed to the dangers of extremism and seen its destructive face.”
In an interview with the National Post, he spoke publicly for the first time about those experiences, which he said began during a 1999 trip to Peshawar, the city in northwest Pakistan that had served as a base for al-Qaida.
The son of controversial Toronto imam Aly Hindy, he said he had just turned 15 when Abdurahman Khadr came to Toronto. Khadr lived in Peshawar with his father Ahmed Said Khadr, who was officially a Canadian humanitarian worker in Afghanistan and, unofficially, an al-Qaida bagman.
Hindy said Abdurahman told him how good it was over there, how the Khadrs lived an Islamic life, helping Afghanistan’s war orphans. He was invited to come see for himself. Hindy was homeschooling at the time and he was bored. “And I said OK,” he said.
He flew to Karachi and then on to Peshawar, straight into the vortex of the Khadr family. It wasn’t what he had expected. They watched a lot of movies, Hindy said, “but then I started to get introduced to other people who were there.”
The men Hindy met looked and behaved like spiritual people, and they constantly quoted from scripture, but they spoke in harsh, strident tones about a dark world that was conspiring against them as Muslims.
They said all the Muslim leaders and scholars were disbelievers. They were sellouts and nobody was really looking out for the oppressed Muslims. The West hates us, they said, so we have to fight back. “They go through this process of making you feel like a victim,” Hindy said. “I never really fully embraced it.”
Hindy had never heard of alQaida, and the 9/11 attacks were still two years away. This was all new to him, and it was confusing, the opposite of the merciful outlook he’d been taught growing up. “Even then I was like, ‘I want to leave.’ I just felt uneasy with all of it.” “So I left,” he said. Hindy returned to Toronto after two and a half months. It took time to work out the poison the extremists had tried to implant, but he worked through it and never looked back, an experience he said has given him a useful insight into extremism.
He went on to study religion at the University of Toronto’s Mississauga campus and took a course on the Holocaust. As a member of the student council, he listened to Jewish and black students and realized Muslims were hardly the only group that struggled. He earned a master’s degree in Islamic studies.
In one sense, Hindy said, he wished he’d never been exposed to extremism. But it had given him a perspective and credibility he is able to draw upon to help others. “The way I look at it is, I was there and now I have to kind of use that experience to be able to do outreach to youth.”
He said he began about five years ago, when people who “had the wrong idea about who I was” approached him and he talked to them about what he had been through. Parents also began to seek him out, saying they had caught their children reading extremist propaganda online. Before long, Canadian Security Intelligence Service officers were asking him if he would speak to youths they suspected might be radicalizing, and he agreed.
He doesn’t know for sure whether CSIS investigated him after his Pakistan trip “because they don’t tell you they’re investigating you, but I’m sure they had an interest in me and it lead to a lot of interactions and conversations with them,” he said.
“And I think over time, through those conversations, for sure they were able to see that I’m not a threat at all. And also through those conversations I was able to meet a lot of people in CSIS who are very sincere and genuine over keeping Canada safe. So in a way it actually ended up building a relationship between us, where we were able to get to this point where we’re able to co-operate with each other.”
When the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant announced itself, Hindy came out against it, opening the door to conversations with young people about extremism, how it destroyed lives and turned people into what he calls “the worst possible version” of themselves.
“This guy does a lot of work and he’s got a lot of influence and we need people like that on our side,” said Mubin Shaikh, the former CSIS and RCMP undercover agent who infiltrated the Toronto 18 terrorist group that plotted attacks in Ontario in 2006.
Shaikh said those targeting Hindy were going after the wrong guy. Despite being exposed to extremist recruiting narratives at a young age, he walked away from them. “He didn’t go down that road,” said Shaikh, who similarly abandoned extremism and is now active in fighting radicalization. “He could have.”
Former Canadian Jewish Congress CEO Bernie Farber similarly praised Hindy. The two spoke after Hindy was threatened. The threats brought Farber back to his own days in the crosshairs of the racist far right, which had plotted to murder him.
Farber, executive director of the Mosaic Institute, said Hindy’s personal encounter with extremism as a teenager should not be held against him but rather should be seen as a “point of reference that encouraged his change and made him what he is today.”
“These kinds of dalliances with extremism,” Farber said, “can be used to help others in the long run turn from extremism back to a proper straight path of life. And I believe that’s what Ibrahim is doing. I believe that very, very sincerely.”
In his Facebook “call to action” this week, Hindy said the threats showed that “the extremist mindset that we have worked so diligently against in our own community exists in other communities as well and is gaining prominence.”
The imam said he fears that leaving the rising anti-Muslim rhetoric unchallenged has opened up a space for extremists.
Hindy has proposed bringing together Canadians from across communities and faiths to tackle extremism — whether it’s antiMuslim, anti-Semitic or the kind inspiring ISIL terrorist attacks in Western cities like Paris.
“Extremists seek to pit people against each other and destroy the social fabric of society by forcing people to embrace hatred. The purest, strongest form of resistance is having good people support each other, work together and share experiences,” he wrote.
“The future of our country is at stake.”
I WAS THERE ... I HAVE TO KIND OF USE THAT EXPERIENCE TO BE ABLE TO DO OUTREACH TO YOUTH.