The fight against Islamophobia plays out around world
Three years ago, a man apparently fuelled by rage against Muslims picked up two firearms and gunned down people at prayer in a Quebec City mosque, killing six, injuring 19, leaving one paralyzed for life and shattering any pretense that the Islamophobia that plagues this world exists only as verbal venting in Canada.
Alexandre Bissonnette, then 29, pleaded guilty to the killings and was sentenced to life in prison, eligible for parole after 40 years. In a bizarre coincidence, the Quebec Court of Appeal is hearing his defence plea this week that 40 years is too long. The Crown is seeking 50 years.
Islamophobia is a hateful ideology, one that relies on the murkiness of historical bloodshed to provide a fig leaf for contemporary injustices. It uses the atrocities that Islamic terrorists commit to justify the vilification of anybody who is Muslim. It looks upon people of that faith as uniformly backward and misogynistic, when, in fact, people of all faiths — and no faith — can be so.
This, the week that marks the third anniversary of the atrocity, I choose to focus on the resistance to Islamophobia in both nations I call home.
On Jan. 26, the day India celebrates Republic Day, Toronto was the site of another large protest against the new citizenship law in India that in its vulgar dance with a national register of citizens blatantly seeks to make Muslims stateless and crush other vulnerable communities underfoot.
The protesters, who snaked a path from Queen’s Park in Toronto to the Indian Consulate on Bloor Street East, also began a petition to the House of Commons asking it to condemn the citizenship law.
Hindu-Muslim discord in the subcontinent is centuries old and its fault lines often facilitated pathways for European colonizers. The post-colonial partition of the land into India, Pakistan and later Bangladesh further fortified those mutual hostilities. Pakistan was a Muslim state, but India had rejected the idea of a Hindu state and on Jan. 26, 1950, adopted a newly written constitution that would include as equal people of all faiths and identities.
It’s the essential question of that identity — who gets to be Indian? — that is threatened by the new law fuelling months of citizen protests in India and among the diaspora here, and in London and New York among other cities.
Protesters in India have been brutalized physically, imprisoned and in some cases even had their property seized.
The Delhi neighbourhood of Shaheen Bagh is the site of a continuous protest since Dec. 15. It is led not by activists but by ordinary Muslim women, braving one of the coldest winters on record fortified with many cups of chai. This leaderless movement is making the far-right government desperate — and dangerous.
An MP for the ruling BJP campaigning for Delhi state elections trotted out tired old tropes saying the protesters would go into people’s homes and “rape your sisters and daughters and kill them.” Meanwhile, the minister of state for finance, Anurag Thakur, on Monday began his own more vicious “Lock ’em up” chant when he said: “Traitors to this country” and the crowd roared back, “Shoot them all.” It rhymes in Hindi.
The other act of resistance came from the Canadian Council for Muslim Women (CCMW) to counter Islamophobia in Canada with a Digital Anti Racism Education project under the website daretobeaware.ca and the hashtag #DeleteRacism on social media.
According to StatsCan, hate crimes against Muslims in Canada rose 253 per cent between 2012 and 2015.
“Women ages 18-24 are most likely to experience the most severe forms of online abuse including stalking, sexual harassment and physical threats,” Nuzhat Jafri, the executive director of CCMW, said at the DARE project launch last Friday.
The website has a Racism 101 e-learning unit on “Unlearning Racism” and is focused on girls and women of colour. The social media campaign with tools and resources to combat trolling and online hate will be added to the website in March, said Firdaus Ali, who co-ordinated the project.
Fatimah Jackson-Best, a public health researcher, reviewed existing research on Islamophobia faced by Black Muslims and found that more research was needed around a Canadian context that would include Black Muslims from a variety of backgrounds including the Caribbean and South America. The research showed that their “communities experience both Islamophobia from people who aren’t Muslim, and anti-Blackness from people who are Muslim but aren’t Black.
“This layered experience of discrimination is something many Black Muslims have been talking about for a long time,” she said.
While Muslims in Canada are often viewed through a lens of geopolitics in the Middle East, Jackson-Best said, “There is indication through research that Black people were the first Muslims to come to Canada 400 years ago. This is a part of our collective Islamic history.”