Islamophobia may finally be getting the attention it needs

I was getting ready to give a keynote at the Living Sky Film Festival at the University of Regina a week ago when the news of the mass shooting at two mosques in New Zealand made its way across the Pacific.

The organizers hovered around me protectively, grateful I showed up at all.

I was to talk about making my first film, BBQ Muslims. In the comedy, two Canadian Muslim brothers are sleeping in their home when the barbecue in the backyard explodes. They are immediately suspected of being Middle Eastern terrorists. Their neighbourhood turns against them, as does the news media and the legal system.

I made the film as a student at the Ontario College of Art and Design University in 1995. I was racking my brain for inspiration when reports of a truck full of explosives blew up in front of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma, killing 168 people and injuring hundreds more. It was the worst act of domestic terror in U.S. history. Initially, some media outlets wondered if Islamic terrorists were behind the attacks.

Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols were eventually convicted for the bombing. McVeigh was white man who had become radicalized after what he believed was his government's mishandling of the Waco siege two years earlier.

BBQ Muslims is almost 25 years old, yet its theme is just as relevant today: powerful stereotypes of Muslims can lead you to ignore a threat that's right in front of you.

The term Islamophobia didn't exist back then. Back then, I thought that making a comedy would help bring attention to this issue.

For most of my life, Islam and terrorism have been synonymous. I belong to a community that's been labelled and reduced to caricatures — greedy, violent and misogynistic stock villains for films and television. Reel Bad Arabs, a book by Prof. Jack Shaheen, counted 1,000 films produced from 1896 to 2000 that had Muslim or Arab characters in them. Only 12 had positive depictions.

I knew that fear of Muslims and terrorism predated the attacks of 9-11. For decades the media had given more attention to attacks by Muslims than attacks by other groups, according to a recent study by researchers at Georgia State University and the University of Alabama.

So, it came as no surprise to me when the Pew Research Center conducted a survey in 2017 and found that people in the U.S. feel "coolest" towards Muslims compared with other religious groups, although that number had improved from a survey a few years prior. We were the enemy that could not be trusted.

Politicians have used the fear of Islam and Muslims to fuel their campaigns and pass laws that disproportionately affect Muslims.

Canada has not been immune.

In 2011, then-prime minister Stephen Harper said "Islamicism" was the biggest security threat to Canada.

Two years later, a Muslim woman living in Mississauga, Ont., challenged the rule that you could not wear a full-face veil, or niqab, during citizenship ceremonies. The Federal Court of Appeal ruled in her favour, only to have the Cabinet, at the time headed by Harper, ask the Supreme Court to review the case. Harper argued the niqab is "rooted in a culture that is anti-women."

He was trotting out the same, tired Islamophobic tropes that had been used for decades.

I was tired. I had given up hope that anything would change.

Then President Donald Trump was elected.

Everything changed.

I was astonished to see how quickly stories about my community disappeared to be replaced with alarm over the rise of hate crimes, from white supremacy movements to neo-Nazis to the KKK.

After Trump's election, it was like a giant rock had been lifted to reveal the dark underbelly of human nature.

But this was nothing new. According to Anti-Defamation League reports, more than 70 per cent of extremist-related killings over the past 10 years were done by right-wing extremists.

So why is the conversation only seeming to shift now? Because for decades we othered and demonized Muslims.

Islamophobia may finally be getting the attention it so desperately needs, and I was emboldened by movements such as Me Too, Black Lives Matter and Idle No More. I felt that we were at least starting to acknowledge the inequalities in our midst.

The prime minister of New Zealand has rightfully said that this shooting doesn't represent the country. But it does represent a growing segment of society that doesn't have borders and is connected via the Internet. In order to defeat it, we have to first acknowledge it. And it's taken us a long time to get here.

After the shooting, I called my 18-year-old son, who is studying in Ontario.

He told me he accidentally saw the video of the Christchurch shootings on Instagram.

"I thought it was a video game at first but then I read the comments about people demanding it be taken offline," he said.

"Now I understand why terror attacks are called 'terror.' I was a little spooked to go the mosque for Friday prayers."

As a mother, I was speechless. How do you tell your child to go to the mosque and that everything will be OK? I did the only thing I knew: I called my mother. She attends the mosque in Oakville, Ont., twice a day.

"We die when God decrees. Everything will be fine," she said. She was completely unfazed.

My parents had survived the partition of India, watching friends and relatives die because of violence. They had lived through refugee camps, forced migration and racism in a new country. Hate was nothing new to them.

"Go back to the mosque. We're Muslims — we only fear God. And God wants us to be good and keep working to make the world a better place."

I did go back. A mother had died in our community. She was only 35 and left two young daughters and a husband behind. Her funeral prayer was being held and many of the non-Muslim people who knew her from work came to offer their respects.

The mosque was over-crowded, so I opened the door to the prayer hall to let in some fresh air. A two-year-old locked eyes with me and I worried he was a flight risk. There was a busy road across the mosque. His mother reassured me.

"He won't run away — the loud noises outside scare him." She patted his head lovingly.

"He knows the mosque is the safest place for him to be in."

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