‘9/11 has made me who I am’ How the attacks changed these Muslim Canadians’ relationship with their faith,
Many embraced Islam as a way of countering ongoing negative rhetoric
The first image that comes to mind when Mariam Khalil Abougouche thinks of Sept. 11, 2001, is not plumes of black smoke or the World Trade Center bursting into flames, but the confused eyes of a nine-yearold boy in the small-town Alberta classroom where she taught.
One day after the attacks, the footage of two Boeing 767s colliding with the north and south towers was broadcasting on every network in the nation.
That’s when a young, rather outspoken boy in her Grade 3 class said: “I bet you’re feeling pretty bad about your religion right now.”
“I asked them, ‘What do you mean?’ And he said ‘Well, Muslims have always been aggressive and violent and now they just proved that you guys are violent,’ ” Abougouche recalls.
She says the words hit her like a punch to the gut. It felt like her insides were on fire, but she had to maintain her professional- ism. She knew the boy wasn’t being malicious, nor trying to make her feel bad; he was telling her what he believed, what he had been told.
“It was really how he saw the world. And what he’s been taught. And I remember just thinking ‘Wow, so does everybody think this of us?’ And that was the beginning of me opening my eyes ... When I think of 9/11, I see that little boy’s face.”
For many in North America, the attacks of 9/11 laid bare a fear perpetuated by the media and Hollywood for years, putting a face to a new bogeyman: one who was bearded, wore a turban and chanted “Death to America.”
For Muslims in the western world, it signalled the start of a new narrative over which they had no control.
And for some, it would gradually become an opportunity to reckon with their faith in a new way — as anti-Muslim sentiment escalated with hate crimes and laws seeming to target those of Muslim faith, leading them to embrace their religion as a way of countering the ongoing negative rhetoric.
According to a report in 2019 by Georgetown and Wilfrid Laurier universities that tracks post-9/11 polls on Islam, Muslims and Islamophobia in Canada, most Canadians acknowledge Islamophobia is a problem here, yet many still hold unfavourable views about Islam and Muslims and are open to policies that would single out Muslims for heightened regulation and monitoring in public spaces.
One 2018 poll found 59 per cent of Canadians believe that “homegrown radical Islamic terrorism” is a “quite serious” or “very serious” threat to Canada, with 41 per cent responding that “they believe there are radicalized individuals living in their communities today.”
In the years since 9/11, there’s also been an uptick in policereported hate crimes targeting the Muslim community — from 45 cases in 2012 to 372 cases in 2019, according to data compiled by Statistics Canada, though the number of incidents fell to 82 last year during the pandemic.
The incidents escalated in 2017, when 27-year-old Alexandre Bissonnette entered the prayer hall of Quebec City’s Centre Culturel Islamique Québec and killed six worshippers.
And just last June, a Muslim family out for a Sunday walk at dusk in London, Ont., were intentionally run down by the driver of a speeding truck who police say targeted the family because of their faith, killing four people.
For many Muslim Canadians, public policies by Ottawa in response to the terror attacks of the Twin Towers — from the Anti-terrorism Act that enables “secret” trials and expands surveillance powers of law enforcement to the “no-fly list” — are partially to blame for spreading anti-Muslim sentiment even though these measures don’t overtly target people of Islamic faith outright.
Some Islamic scholars compare 9/11 to a flashbang: a moment in time that seized the world’s attention and coloured the West’s perception of Muslims with blinding ignorance.
But if the 9/11 attacks were a flashbang, then the reverberations still rumble in the form of Islamophobia, suspicions about Islam and conspiracy theories about Muslims (or even those with partly Muslim ancestry) two decades later.
“It’s not about 9/11,” says Anver M. Emon, Canada Research Chair in Islamic Law and History and director of the University of Toronto’s Institute of Islamic Studies.
“It’s actually about every single day thereafter.”
Abougouche grew up in Lac La Biche, Alta., a small but bustling farming community about two hours north of Edmonton with a rich history of Muslim settlers. Abougouche’s great uncle, Alexander Hamilton — originally named Ali Abouchadi — moved to the area in 1905 and was one of Canada’s first Muslim pioneers.
She describes Lac La Biche as tight-knit and extremely welcoming to immigrants, part of why that little boy’s comments blindsided her. The fallout from the attacks was swift — in the immediate aftermath, Abougouche said several parents moved their children out of her classroom because they were suspicious of Muslims.
And while the attacks of 9/11 never made Abougouche question her faith, it did make her question how other people were interpreting it.
Abougouche describes herself growing up as a “fairly liberal” Muslim; for example, she did not wear the hijab, or head scarf. That fateful day drove her to embark on a spiritual search, studying Islamic scripture in more depth to try and form an understanding of how this could happen.
“I needed to know, is my religion actually promoting this? I actually went into my faith and realized how peaceful it actually is,” she adds. “And I wanted to represent that.”
She decided to start wearing a hijab at age 45. Today she is even more deeply connected to her faith than she was prior to 9/11 and said she’s proud her daughters have followed in her footsteps and choose to pray.
“In a lot of ways, I hate to say this, 9/11 is what took me into this ... these five men or whoever they were cannot define what our faith is; so I had to prove, we have to as a whole nation of Muslims prove what it was,” she says.
It’s a burden many Muslim Canadians carry even two decades later.
Wilfrid Laurier University professor Jasmin Zine, who has studied Islamophobia for more than 20 years, said the seeds of Islamophobia in Canada were planted well before Sept. 11, 2001, and have a long genealogy.
“These sort of catalytic moments usher in new iterations of Islamophobia and 9/11 brought in a lot of things like security policies and a lot of scrutiny and surveillance of Muslims. Since then, we’ve also seen a lot of conspiracy theories that have been circulating by what’s called an Islamophobia industry,” said Zine, whose book “Under Siege: Islamophobia and the 9/11 Generation” is set to be released next year.
“There’s always been negative references that have been attached to Muslims. And it didn’t just activate on 9/11. When there’s catalytic moments like 9/11, then that becomes activated and heightened. So it becomes far more systemic and embedded in policy.”
Born in India, Canadian lawyer and human rights activist Faisal Kutty has seen first-hand how prejudice and discrimination can manifest in the lives of Muslim Canadians. He settled in Canada with his parents in the 1970s when he was six and grew up in Montreal, Ottawa and Toronto. While he experienced racism due to being seen as “the brown kid” among his peers, it didn’t have a specifically Islamophobic tone.
But even before 9/11, media coverage of events such as the Iranian hostage crisis in 1979, in which militarized Iranian college students seized the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, and the death threats against British author Salman Rushdie over his controversial 1988 book “The Satanic Verses,” which some Muslims view as containing blasphemous references to Prophet Muhammad and Islam, painted Muslims as radical, intolerant and violent in the public’s eyes.
During the 1990s, being the son of an imam and a student in law, Kutty said members of the Muslim community would look at him as a leader and come to him, asking for his help with housing, employment and discrimination problems that they felt were related to their faith in Islam.
This voluntary community work slowly evolved into the founding of the Canadian Muslim Civil Liberties Association and CAIR-CAN, the Canadian chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations in 2000.
But nothing he dealt with then compared to the kind of legal issues that Canadian Muslims would have to deal with post9/11 after parliamentarians passed the Anti-terrorism Act in 2001, which greatly extended the powers of government and institutions within the Canadian security regime to respond to the threat of terrorism.
“9/11 has made me who I am, an ambassador for Islam and Muslims whether
I like it or not.”
FAISAL KUTTY
LAWYER AND ACTIVIST
It was followed by the no-fly list and further amendments to allow “preventative” arrests without a warrant and for more personal information to be shared between government departments. Those laws do not explicitly target Muslims, but the community has been disproportionately impacted, he said.
Prime minister Stephen Harper’s Conservative government’s “Zero Tolerance for Barbaric Cultural Practices Act” passed in 2015 to address the issue of forced marriage, and Quebec’s religious symbols ban for many government employees passed in 2019 have made Muslims feel singled out for their faith.
While Islam wasn’t cited as “barbaric” by the Conservatives, references to “child and forced marriage,” “sexual slavery and so-called ‘honour killings’” and “female genital mutilation” — acts that were already illegal in this country — to “stand up for Canadian values” drew association with the party’s other pledge: to ban women from wearing veils while affirming their citizenship.
Quebec’s Bill 21 prevents judges, police officers, teachers and public servants from wearing religious symbols. Although it covers the kippah, turban or hijab, the rule is believed to have disproportionately affected women in the province who wear Islamic head scarves.
“This massive body of rules, policies, regulations points fingers at these people being dangerous and reinforces in the minds of others that Muslims are this and that,” Kutty said.
“There’s this kind of messaging. Publicly, it’s like, ‘Oh, you know, everybody should be tolerated and Muslims are good people and generally Islam is good.’ But the private messaging and the subconscious messaging is different. That’s what I think the markers are.”
To this day, he said he still often reflects on the tragic loss of lives from the 9/11 attack, response and blowback — how this day changed the world for both good and bad and how the fallout forced him to re-examine his understanding of his faith and propelled him to the forefront of community activism and advocacy.
“9/11 has made me who I am, an ambassador for Islam and Muslims whether I like it or not,” Kutty said.
Post-9/11, he said every Muslim is constantly living in fear; any time there’s a terror attack, they keep their fingers crossed the perpetrator is not a Muslim person.
Yet, many, including Kutty, are also trying to have as much of a visible presence as possible to counter those myths and stereotypes about Muslims and to convince others they are good people.
“When Muslims do something bad, it’s always highlighted. When Muslims do something good, you don’t talk about your religion publicly. Given our situation, when we do good stuff, we need to make sure people know we’re Muslims,” he said.
“I named my child Mohamed. I want them to grow up to be a good kid and a good person. And I want people to see, you know what, my middle name is Mohamed. So when I do something good, something positive and people ask my name in the street, he can say my name is Mohamed.”
Edmonton-based author and journalist Omar Mouallem learned about the attacks in high school and used humour to deal with the initial discomfort. He remembers sitting in his basement with his mostly non-Muslim friends and joking about how his name could secretly be “Omar Bin Laden.”
“The thing that sticks out to me is how quickly I knew this was going to be a part of my identity,” Mouallem said. “And that it was going to be kind of inescapable.”
In the description for his upcoming book about how Islam shaped the Americas, “Praying to the West,” Mouallem says he felt his Muslim identity was imposed on him in his teens. In his early adult years, he rebelled against it.
He didn’t write about religion frequently, but when he did, he says, “I think it was obvious that I had a bit of a disdain for it.
“(The 9/11 attacks) probably had a lot to do with, you know, why I drifted from the faith,” he said. “I needed to put some detachment between myself and the western perspective of Islam.”
But world events, especially in the mid-2010s — the era of Islamic State or ISIS, the rise of Trumpism, Rohingya and Uyghur genocides and more — caused him to contemplate the role of Islam in the world and in his own life. Growing older and becoming a father also played a role.
“In my 30s, I think I realized just how misplaced a lot of that anger and resentment was, and that in fact, a lot of it was internalized racism,” Mouallem said. “I felt complicit in the mainstreaming of anti-Muslim sentiments.”
He also started to experience Islamophobia himself. A frequent traveller, he noticed around 2015 that random checks at the airport became a lot less random.
In 2017, he had an experience with a balloon twister in downtown Edmonton who asked him his name. When he said it was Omar, the man said ‘OK — I’ll make you a balloon terrorist.’ ”
“I was not cool about it at all, even though it’s still the kind of same type of joke I would have made as a teenager ... We were so far past 9/11 and had seen effects in full view of that kind of racism. And so there’s no excuse,” Mouallem said.
“The joke, and even the acceptance of the joke, was long gone.”
For his book, Mouallem documented 13 houses of worship across multiple continents. Based on his research and his own experiences, he believes Islamophobia saw a “tipping point” around the time of Donald Trump’s election as U.S. president. But he acknowledges 9/11 was the start of a new era for Muslims in the western world.
“Almost 20 years later, not only has it not subsided, but it’s just become more intense and closer to home,” he said.
Reflecting back on the years when he disassociated from Islam, he says he now realizes it was much harder to separate himself from how others viewed him.
“People would look at me and think ‘Oh he’s one of the good Muslims, we don’t need to worry about him. We can even talk to him about how we really feel because look, he’s got a beer in his hand,’ ” Mouallem said.
“And my feeling, increasingly, was the people that you hate are still my family.”
This feeling led him to re-embrace Islam, in some ways as a point of revolt, but also from a sober realization that he could not sever himself from the label of “Muslim.”