The long costs of Islamophobia
There are moments that define a lifetime, days that engrave themselves on our psyches as the dividing line between Before and After. Like the fiery transformation of raw iron ore into steel, the change is deep and irrevocable. For my generation, 9/11 was such a day; for Muslims of my generation who grew up in white majority countries, especially so. It was the day we discovered that, actually, we were the enemy.
June 7, 2021 was another such day, a bloody line between a joyfully ordinary life and one forever altered by grief and trauma. In London, Ontario, a man carelessly murdered three generations of a single family with one swipe of his car: Salman Afzaal, 46, Madiha Salman, 44, Yumna Afzaal, 15, and Talat Afzaal, 74. Only 9-year-old Fayez survived. We know that the killer targeted them for their faith.
We have had too many of these days. Our communities have had too many of these days. I don’t think it’s exaggerating that this news broke many of us who were simply watching as outsiders, our only connection to the Afzaal family our common faith or heritage — how much worse for the surviving family, for the community now dealing with the aftermath. Unfortunately it’s not something that I have to struggle hard to imagine; my own local community in North Carolina was changed forever by the brutal killing of Our Three Winners in Chapel Hill six years ago.
As heartbreaking as it is whenever we hear news like this, I admit that my first reaction was a feeling of numb inevitability. A sort of frozen recognition that I’ve been expecting something like this to happen all along. And it was a sentiment I saw echoed by many other Muslims, friends and strangers, especially hijabis. For years we have walked the streets carefully, always looking over our shoulders when we cross asphalt, always with a prickling between our shoulder blades when we’re alone in a busy area with lots of cars whizzing by.
I’ve spent roughly half the years since 9/11 in Canada and half in the US; I’m a citizen of both countries, and each is my home in certain ways. Whether I walked the streets of Georgetown, Ontario, where the Ku Klux Klan marched in white hoods in 1993, or in the small liberal suburb in North Carolina where I live now, I’d regularly have the sudden thought — in a resigned, blank sort of way — that anyone could twist their steering wheel to the right and kill me at any time. Moments when it felt like walking along the street was taking my life into my hands. And then I would tell myself that the images this conjured in my head were ridiculous, that I was being paranoid. After all, who can sustain such fear and dread for years without losing their grip on reality? This is how we live. We walk in the world knowing that neither the state nor our neighbors truly value our lives. We don’t think too hard about it, because we still have to get up in the morning, feed our families, go to school and work, hopefully even do a little something to make the world a better place.
And every day, we see the evidence of Muslims being killed, at home and all over the world, often using our tax dollars. The vast majority of humanity turns their eyes away at best, and revels in the murder of people who look and pray and celebrate like us at worst. Racism against Muslims and those mistaken for us — and Islamophobia is racism, make no mistake — is a state-sanctioned campaign of terror with roots hundreds of years deep. Orientalism, the elaborate system of othering that facilitated the brutal machineries of colonialism, has mutated and lives on today as a new type of imperialism. We are still the enemy, whether inside or outside the nation; we are still suspect, still viewed as violent and savage and unworthy of the basic human dignities taken for granted by others. Or by the white Christian majority at least; Black and Indigenous and Latinx and Asian people are unjustly bearing their own crosses of white supremacy. Many of them are also Muslim (or racialized as Muslim), and/or carry other marginalized identities as well.
Canadians like to smugly point south of their border in any conversation about racism, but this isn’t just an American problem. It’s a problem born in and sustained by the white supremacist colonial apparatuses embedded in the very structure of every “Western” nation-state. South Africa’s apartheid regime was partially inspired by Canada’s cruel treatment of First Nations people. Canada still bleeds from the open wounds left by residential schools; many of us are still reeling from the discovery of 215 bodies of Indigenous children in an unmarked mass grave a few days ago. Americans often talk about enslaved people using the Underground Railroad to escape to Canada and freedom, but the story always ends at the border (a common theme in any American story).
What we don’t discuss on either side of that settler colonial border is that the first race riot on Turtle Island occurred in Canada, due to white resentment of Black Nova Scotians. Or the story of Africville, a community founded in 1848 that the provincial government denied key infrastructure like clean water and sewage, and eventually demolished summarily in the 1960s. Many of us, especially those who have faced the blunt end of American state violence, decry the PATRIOT Act and the formation of the Department of Homeland Security (even those who now deny anyone could have guessed the Iraq War was a bad idea in a convenient historical revisionism).
But Canada also sent soldiers to fight in an unjust war in Afghanistan; it also bloodied its hands with the detention, torture and silencing of people whose only crimes were to be brown-skinned and Muslim and descended from a country on an arbitrary list. Canada is the site of the two most deadly massacres of Muslims that North America has ever seen; London is the second of them, after the Quebec mosque shooting in 2017. Quebec has the most anti-Muslim laws in the entire continent. Perhaps Quebecois fear they’ll be left behind their even more hateful French cousins, who somehow managed to uphold a niqab ban even while requiring that citizens wear face masks.
Just in April of this year, a Canadian court upheld Quebec’s infamous 2019 law that prevents people in public sector jobs from wearing religious symbols — it affects many groups, but Muslim women are the primary target given Quebec’s continuous attempts to ban niqab since 2010. Not to mention that from 2011 to 2015, new Canadians were not allowed to wear niqab during their citizenship ceremonies.
We’re heartbroken, and have been heartbroken, but more than that we’re exhausted. And we’re angry. Every time something like this happens — once enough people report on it that the mainstream media can no longer afford to ignore it — there are statements of condolence, of regret, of shock. “How could this have happened,” and “This is not who we are.” It reminds me of the weak thoughts-and-prayers platitudes that follow every American mass shooting; of mealy-mouthed statements from politicians after police kill yet another Black person for daring to exist.
The truth is that violence rooted in hate is always both absurd and devastating. The unique verbal gymnastics used to try to justify racism are always intertwined with the brutality of these actions, whether taken by the state or an individual. You become used to the feeling of being gaslit by someone so unskilled that their lies are transparent, yet so powerful that they don’t need to bother trying for credulity. It’s the same with Palestinians facing the almost cartoonish justifications of the Israeli regime, which are no less murderous for their ridiculousness. Or the baffling statements of the man who killed eight Asian women and then blamed them for his own actions in Georgia.
It’s a particularly vicious tactic deliberately used by those who enact racist violence on others, because it victimizes their targets twice. Once with actual violence; once by erasing their humanity, twisting around reality, and denying them the full dignity of having their pain acknowledged with dignity and truth. So you have your life stolen from you, and then you have your story stolen from you. Just consider the claim of a “parking dispute” by the Chapel Hill police department in the immediate aftermath of the murder of Deah, Yusor and Razan in 2015. That was the narrative that caught fire and spread to every corner of the media ecosystem. The police promised to make a clarifying statement, but none came until the police chief apologized years later, after the murderer was convicted, when no one was listening anymore except the people who already knew exactly what had happened.
The anger we feel is never even given space in such narratives. And God forbid any of us say that we saw this coming. We can be sad; we can be shocked. In fact, public expressions of sorrow are encouraged and uplifted, because there’s beauty and comfort in seeing masses of people crying and holding candles, united in grief. There is healing in such gatherings for those who attend; many of us need to be in collective space with our communities after tragedies like this, especially after over a year of no community at all.
But in some ways the media and wider society feed on such public displays of grief, like vampires using our emotions to fuel their stories and their sense of moral righteousness. Politicians show up at these vigils with prepared statements that may be sincere but also ring hollow when we consider that there is never action to back up any of these words. Article after article about the killer’s life and motives reduce the problem to a single bad man, rather than holding up a mirror to the ugly impulses of a society that allows things like this to happen again and again. All of this serves the deliberate creation of a narrative of blamelessness on the part of white people, of elected officials, of law enforcement, of the media. As though they just discovered this morning that racism exists and sometimes even hurts people.
So I feel a slow-burning anger that has been coiling in my gut for the greater part of twenty years. It’s an anger I’ve learned to live with; and anger I’ve redirected towards my work, my advocacy, my writing. An anger that I don’t often talk about other than with my Muslim friends and family who feel exactly the same way. It’s an anger not only directed at those who enact this violence, but at those who maintain their innocence with expressions of shock and horror. It’s a helpless anger, because what purpose can it serve in the face of the many-headed monster that continues to dehumanize and detain us, to kill and mock us, to strip away our civil rights and dole out a hundred tiny humiliations to us every day? It’s hard not to feel like a broken record. Once again, as after the Christchurch massacre, it seems as though something we long feared and expected has come to pass.
