Fariha Naqvi-Mohamed’s parents arrived in Montreal on Christmas Day 1974 with a few hundreds dollars in their pocket, a 3-month old baby on their lap and dreams of a better life.
It was Pierre Elliott Trudeau who inspired them to come. Naqvi-Mohamed’s father saw Canada’s prime minister on television one day in 1970.
“Just watch me,” Trudeau told journalists when he was asked how far he would go to put down the Front de libération du Québec terrorist group that was targeting federalists and the anglophone minority.
I don’t know who this man is, Feroze Naqvi thought, but I want to raise my family in a country with that type of leader.
They settled in the West Island suburb of Kirkland, where the Pakistani Muslim family “stuck out like a sore thumb,” Naqvi-Mohamed recalls now.
Still, she had a happy childhood, outside of some minor schoolyard bullying and teasing because she was different.
Fariha Naqvi-Mohamed took ownership of the racism directed against her by writing a blog post that went viral. It was titled: “I took my family to the movies and got called a ‘F-ing Terrorist.’ ”
In CEGEP she learned to embrace her uniqueness, to see the advantages diversity gave to her and the world around her. It was then she started wearing a hijab.
She never felt targeted, she said. But things changed when the Parti Québécois government started the Charter of Values debate in 2013, proposing to ban ostentatious religious symbols in public institutions. Then emboldened closet racists began to emerge.
Naqvi-Mohamed was attending a movie matinee for her daughter’s birthday when a woman and her husband called her a “f-cking terrorist” in front of the whole theatre — repeatedly.
She remembers her daughter’s friends wouldn’t even look at her. They kept their eyes straight ahead, on the screen.
“I was publicly humiliated. I never thought that would happen to me,” Naqvi-Mohamed said in an interview. “That changed a lot of things for me.
“It was a shock that this happened to me in my own home. This is my home.”
***
A man walks past a makeshift memorial in front of the Centre Culturel Islamique de Québec in Quebec City after a gunman killed six people while they were praying Jan. 29.
As recently as last fall, politicians like PQ Leader Jean-Francois Lisée and François Legault, head of Coalition Avenir Québec, were not shy about using anti-immigrant rhetoric for political gain.
In the wake of the Jan. 29 Quebec City mosque killings, they were hesitant to draw links between the tragedy and identity debates that have ebbed and flowed in Quebec for more than a decade.
However, for members of the Muslim community — sworn at, told to go back home, struggling to find jobs, reading about women having their veils torn off — the link between Islamophobia and current events is pretty clear.
It is not for nothing, they point out, the shooter chose to target innocent Muslims praying in a mosque.
Now, some politicians, including Premier Philippe Couillard, say it’s time to ease off on the identity rhetoric.
“If we start presenting a foreigner as a threat — a challenge to our identity, something we should steer clear of — that does not advance the idea that we need to try and live together in a Quebec which is really inclusive,” Couillard said.
The victims: (Top row, from left): Azzeddine Soufiane, 57, was a grocer and butcher, and father of three. He had opened one of the first community businesses in Quebec City and had lived in Quebec for the past 30 years. Khaled Belkacemi, 60, was a professor in the food science department at Université Laval. He had left his native country Algeria to give his family a chance to live “far away from horror,” said his son Amir. Belkacemi was married to another professor in the department and had three children. Aboubaker Thabti, 44, worked in a pharmacy and had two young children with his wife. They lived about five minutes from the mosque. (Bottom row, from left): Abdelkrim Hassane, 41, was a father with three daughters and a wife. He worked in information technology for the government. Mamadou Tanou Barry, 42, was a father of two boys and supported not just his family in Quebec, but his extended family in Guinea, Africa. He was very close to another victim (they hailed from the same village in Africa) – Ibrahima Barry. Ibrahima Barry, 39, was a father of four and worked in information technology at the health insurance board of Quebec. Like his fellow Guinean Mamadou Tanou Barry, he also supported both his family in Canada and in Africa.
Quebec is in many ways a model of enlightened multiculturalism, taking in 50,000 immigrants every year, in large part to ensure its economic progress as its population ages and workforce shrinks.
In the Montreal region, 28 per cent of the population is made up of people born abroad. Residents from 120 cultural communities cohabit peacefully for the most part, and the hodgepodge of humanity rubbing shoulders on the métro passes largely unnoticed.
Where the province has faltered is in integrating new arrivals.
A report by Montreal’s Institut de recherche et d’informations socio-économiques found the average unemployment rate for immigrants in Quebec has been nearly twice that of those born in Canada over the last 10 years, despite the fact 43 per cent of immigrants were found to be overqualified for their jobs, vs. 30 per cent of Quebecers.
As well, critics say the province has failed to make its white majority less fearful of new arrivals, and to take threats against the security of newcomers seriously.
Anti-Muslim sentiment began to percolate here after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States and ratcheted up during the reasonable-accommodation debates of 2007.
The debates were spurred by overwrought media coverage suggesting Quebec’s cultural identity was under siege after, for example, a local YMCA frosted its windows to accommodate Hasidic Jews, and a cabane à sucre pulled pork from its menu for a spell.
The identity-politics card was used successfully by Mario Dumont to propel his Action démocratique du Québec past the PQ into second place in that year’s elections, a lesson the PQ would remember.
Sure enough, before the 2013 provincial vote, the negativity flared again. A corresponding rise was seen in the growth of right-wing extremist groups, of which Quebec is estimated to have between 20 and 25 — more than any other province.
Now, U.S. President Donald Trump has brought anti-immigration sentiment to the fore, prompting fears that nationalist movements and hate crimes could gather strength here.
On Jan. 27, Trump signed an executive order banning travel to the U.S. from seven Muslim-majority countries. Two days later, a gunman walked into a Quebec mosque with an assault rifle, a pistol and a plan.
***
Prayers are recited during a funeral ceremony at Montreal’s Maurice Richard Arena for three of the victims of the deadly shooting at a mosque in suburban Quebec City.
Bigotry is not necessarily born of ignorance, Université du Québec à Montréal professor Maryse Potvin told La Presse. Potvin has studied the question of racism in Quebec for 20 years. She says it is built up over time, brick by brick, action by action.
“It comes through being constructed. In the way we construct the adversary, transform him into the enemy. It’s the mechanics of differentiation, of making them inferior, of generalisation, of painting oneself as a victim.”
Hate crimes in the province rose by 47 per cent between 2013 and 2015, data from the Quebec Public Safety Department and Montreal police show. There were 112 reported in 2015 in Montreal, roughly an average of one every three days.
A 2016 study by the Canadian Race Relations Foundation found that 49 per cent of Canadians had a positive view of Muslims. Among French Canadians: 24 per cent.
If there is room for hope, it is in the outpouring of support shown this week, in the strong messages of political leaders and the chastened response of those politicians and media personalities who in the past have been accused of fearmongering.
To many Muslims and non-Muslims alike, the massacre is seen as a turning point, a time to deconstruct and rebuild.
“Enough is enough,” Naqvi-Mohamed said. “We all need to speak up. People see now what hate speech can lead to. It shocked even the haters.”
Couillard said the tragedy can serve as a chance to tackle the demons every society battles: xenophobia, racism, exclusion.
It will be an uphill battle. In a recent CROP-La Presse poll, 46 per cent of respondents said they felt there were too many immigrants. That’s up from 35 per cent 15 years ago.
In Quebec, Muslims make up 3.1 per cent of the population.
***
Welcome centre for Syrian refugees in St-Laurent. Hate crimes in the province rose by 47 per cent between 2013 and 2015, data from the Quebec Public Safety Department and Montreal police show. There were 112 reported in 2015 in Montreal, roughly an average of one every three days.
The idea that newcomers might change us is a common refrain, and one felt more deeply in Quebec, said Charles Taylor, the McGill University philosopher who co-chaired Quebec’s 2007 commission on reasonable accommodation.
“Fears are more easily aroused here because the province has been fighting for a few centuries to maintain its identity as a French-speaking society,” Taylor said in an interview. “So then the question is how much do some people want to surf on that kind of thing to get majorities that they wouldn’t otherwise get.”
That was the case with the PQ in 2013 under Pauline Marois, and the Conservatives under Stephen Harper in 2015, Taylor said. “There are certain politicians that are utterly unscrupulous.”
An increase in hate crimes is standard whenever people in authority propose anti-immigration stances, he said, because it gives a sort of “moral cover” to those normally too inhibited to express themselves.
The election of Trump will have an effect here, he added, but it will be limited. Quebecers are an easygoing people, and he sees the identity issue diminishing.
“We are, in Quebec, making slow headway … on that issue with the younger generation,” Taylor said. “Keep it off the agenda for the next 10 years and I think we have it solved.”
Also crucial is the type of inclusive, empathetic leadership shown following Sunday’s tragedy, he said.
“If all our leaders do what Couillard and (Prime Minister Justin) Trudeau did — that’s very Québécois. That’s what it is to be Canadian. That sense grows.”
***
Sadia Virk at her home in Brossard. “The people around us are very open-hearted and educated and tolerant,” she says.
“Go home.”
“You don’t belong here.”
“Take that thing off your head.”
“You’re a terrorist.”
Racists who confront young women in burkas tend to follow a similar script, says Sadia Virk, who has lived it a few times on the streets of Montreal.
The child of Pakistani immigrants, Virk was raised in Notre-Dame-de-Grâce and the West Island as both a strong Muslim and a strong Canadian, and never felt there was a conflict between the two — until 2007.
“We, Canadian Muslims, were being framed as a threat to Quebec culture and identity,” she said. “Members of the Muslim society now felt we were on the defensive, that we had to justify our Quebec values, despite the fact this is our home and our culture and we have just as much of a legitimate right to be here. And now others are deciding if we belong.”
For the first time, she and other Muslims were questioning whether they wanted to stay, or move to Ottawa or Calgary or Vancouver, particularly out of fear for the future of their children.
“I want to raise them here as proud Quebecers and proud Muslims, but if they feel marginalized and put down, and they don’t grow up with that sense of belonging, that was very scary for me,” said Virk, a mother of a 3-year-old, with another child on the way.
The fears were exacerbated by her encounters with burka-inflamed racists. They were quelled, she says, by the fact that during every loud racist encounter, strangers came to her defence.
“’You can’t say this,’ they said. ‘You’re being racist and hateful and it’s not right.’”
“In general I don’t think those incidents are reflective of the general population,” Virk said. “The people around us are very open-hearted and educated and tolerant. I don’t believe we live in a society that is full of bigots.”
***
Salam Elmenyawi, president of the Muslim Council of Montreal, says hate crime legislation needs to be revised so threats are taken more seriously and handled more quickly by police.
It is the outpouring of spontaneous emotion and support that is most heartening to the Muslim community, said Salam Elmenyawi, president of the Muslim Council of Montreal.
“It showed that we are all Quebecers, that we all shed tears for those victims,” he said. “I think those common actions by themselves will lead us to think twice before we hurt someone.
“Because this did not come overnight. We did not care about the hurting of feelings and the insults, so slowly it moved to action. First it was damaging properties, then it became human beings as well.”
Hate crime legislation needs to be revised so threats are taken more seriously and handled more quickly by police, Elmenyawi said.
Quebec’s propensity for lengthy debates as opposed to quick, ill-fated actions or the creation of far-right parties is a far healthier approach than that seen in much of the world, said Chedly Belkhodja, principal of the School of Community and Public Affairs at Concordia University and a specialist on the integration of cultural communities.
Mourners arrive for the Montreal funeral service for three of the six victims of the Quebec mosque shooting.
“The reality of Muslims living in Rimouski or Saguenay or Quebec City is that in their daily lives they are quite happy to be in Quebec,” he said. “They have families, they have their own beliefs and rituals, and Quebec has been adapting to a more diverse environment.”
But the province needs to do more to provide new arrivals the tools to succeed, Belkhodja said.
“What needs to be updated are provincial programs to integrate immigrants into society, to think of the social and economic needs of immigrants and the inequalities they face. This is the role of leaders from all levels of government.”
At the same time, he said, communities must work on creating micro-connections in neighbourhoods that help foster relationships and sever the isolation that is at the heart of tragedies like the mosque shooting.
“Individualism and isolation, when we create these conditions, the jihadist decides to go to Syria, or the white supremacist becomes more radicalized,” Belkhodja said. “We need to be aware we live in societies.
“There’s always a sense that individuals are coming out of nowhere doing this horrible crime. There’s a social problem with individuals getting disconnected from the world.”
* **
Sadia Virk and her husband, Naved Bakali, with their 3-year-old son, Yusuf.
There is hope as well to be found in the attitudes of the new generation of immigrants and their children.
Sadia Virk’s husband, Naved Bakali, is a high school teacher who did his PhD in the experiences of young Muslims since 9/11 and the issues of Islamophobia. In general, he says, research shows young Muslims have a positive view of the society they live in.
“They don’t feel victimized, they still feel like they have the authority to make a difference,” Bakali said. “It’s not a defeatist mentality. They feel they can talk about these issues, and they have a platform where they can be heard.”
New generations, he says, are being raised by individuals with a strong sense that they have just as much right to their homeland as anyone else.
Fariha Naqvi-Mohamed took ownership of the racism directed against her, writing about her experience for her blog site “CanadianMomEh” in a piece titled “I took my family to the movies and got called a ‘F-ing Terrorist.’ ”
The post went viral globally and led to numerous TV interviews. The outpouring of support shown then, and this week, are signs that goodness will prevail, she said in an interview.
“Love trumps hate. And I’m choosing my words carefully.”
***
On Thursday, a mosque in Point St-Charles was vandalized. A window was broken; eggs were thrown at walls.
During the week, at mosques all across the province and country, including the one in Brossard where Sadia Virk and her husband Naved worship, the steps and entranceways were covered with flowers and cards and teddy bears left by strangers.
Related
Allison Hanes: We need to be concerned about casual hate
Final three victims remembered at funeral
Analysis: Hate crimes too often ignored in Quebec, some say
Mourners gathered for funeral of three victims in Montreal
Tap here for complete coverage of the Quebec mosque shooting
rbruemmer@montrealgazette.com
twitter.com/renebruemmer