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Arij Soufi is a 22-year-old Montreal woman who works tirelessly to facilitate the inclusion of Muslims in Quebec society. She recently received the Memorial Prize from the Islamic Cultural Center of Quebec City 2023-2024. The scholarship was established in 2018 by members of the McGill community, in memory of the six men who lost their lives on January 29, 2017 during the attack on the Islamic Cultural Center in Quebec City.
Who is this Montreal woman and how does she perceive Islamophobia in Quebec on the seventh anniversary of the attack on the mosque in Quebec City? Meet this young woman who wants to break stereotypes.
The driver of involvement
Having spent all her life in the Montreal metropolis, Arij is a young woman with many ambitions. “I was born in Tunisia, but I did all my schooling in French until my university studies,” she says, starting the conversation.
If the outside temperature is close to freezing, the room at McGill University where Arij meets us is pleasant and warm. Students are starting to arrive on campus. They are there to study and study, and the atmosphere is still calm since it is a Saturday morning.
“I am finally in my last year of medical school — finally! ” Arij says with a smile of relief. “Even though I am a full-time student, I have other hobbies,” she continues. I really like to read and recently I started making pottery. It's really Nice. I like the feeling of letting off steam without having to pay attention to precision.”
Arij has a busy daily life. In addition to being in the final year of her medical doctorate, she is the co-president of the McGill chapter of the Muslim Medical Association of Canada (MMAC). “When I joined the program five years ago, there was already an association of Muslim students in coordination with the dental program. I remember attending a panel of physicists who explained how they navigated the healthcare system as Muslims,” she recalls.
“I was excited and motivated to get involved in this association because for me it was very important. Unfortunately, the pandemic broke out at that point, and most members graduated and left school,” she recalls. She, who wanted to get involved in order to promote the development of Muslims in the field of health, was saddened by the failed plan of a Muslim association.
“You never get everything you want when you advocate”
“In 2022, a faculty professor wrote an article in a nationally recognized medical journal. In his paper, he said that the Islamic veil was a tool of oppression and that he did not understand the motivation of people to wear it,” she reports. This article was a trigger for Arij. “It really hurt me, especially since he was a teacher that I had already had and that I liked,” she says.
The lack of a support group to deal with comments such as those made by a teacher left Arij — and other students — powerless. “After this incident, I and fellow faculty members started to see if there was a way to do something. We managed to get meetings with the dean, and we explained to him how Islamophobic remarks like those of this professor could be hurtful and unacceptable, both for his colleagues and for his students and patients,” she summarizes.
Following the steps taken, an apology was presented by the professor, who retracted his remarks. While some of the student demands were accepted, others were impossible to achieve — such as her resignation. “You never get everything you want when you advocate,” she finally said.
Working to repair the system
It was during this episode that Arij met several students whose values and demands she shared at the school. “At that moment, I realized that we really had to rebuild the association,” she said.
One of the main motivations of the young citizen was for Muslim students to know that they have a collective, that they have rights and that there is someone or something who is there to advocate for them.
As co-president of MMAC — McGill Chapter, Arij Soufi made dozens and dozens of students feel at home. “We organized networking events between Muslim students from several programs at McGill, such as iftars during the month of Ramadan,” she explains. For her, Muslim students needed to feel comfortable “celebrating their faith.”
In addition to organizing events with students, she has worked on other projects aimed at the integration and inclusion of Muslims. As a member of the McGill Student Association's Equity Committee, she set up a workshop on medical racism. “It happened in the wake of the events that followed the tragic death of Joyce Echaquan,” she explains.
Recall that Joyce Echaquan is an Atikamekw woman who died in 2020 at the Joliette hospital after publishing a shocking video on social networks in which she was the victim of racist insults and abuse by health workers. This drama has renewed calls for action to combat systemic racism in the medical community.
“This workshop is content that we are not really taught in medicine. Yes, in our courses, we learn that racism is one of the determinants of health; we also learn that we have biases as a doctor, but nothing more. In this workshop, you learn more than that. We learn how not to become complicit in a system that is not perfect,” she explains, passionately.
In a different project under way at MMAC, “[we] are also teaching future doctors how to be more culturally sensitive to people of the Muslim faith. How do you treat a patient who is fasting, for example? Or how do you examine a Muslim patient while protecting her dignity? These are questions we are working on,” she lists.
“We also want to offer a more formal mentoring service,” she announces. For the young woman, allowing Muslim students to have people who look like them allows a better representation of them.
One of the other achievements of the club that Arij co-chairs is to have a suitable place of prayer for Muslim students.
“I want to stay here, I want to practice in Quebec”
What makes Arij desperate is the number of Muslim Quebecers who want to leave the province. “I hear a lot of Muslims say that they find it that way. Cool Montreal and Quebec, but who don't see a future here, she says, disheartened. What would be ideal, for me, would be for Muslim youth to be able to project a life in Quebec.”
“Why work in a province that hates me? Who makes laws to stop me from working in the field I want? ” These are the statements that Arij often hears. “I understand people who have concerns, because those concerns are well-founded. Yes, I sincerely believe that there is Islamophobia in Quebec. But I don't want young people to think that there are no opportunities for them here,” she says, in a more optimistic tone.
“I want to stay here, I want to practice here. I love this city so much, I want to fight so that Muslims can want to stay here,” she continues.
Arij is aware that this is a challenge for many, and that not everyone has the capacity to meet it. Nevertheless, she sends a message of hope: “We should not be afraid to open a path that we are the first in our communities to take. It may be scary for a woman like me, who wears a veil, to get involved in an environment composed mostly of Caucasian Quebecers, but I am not afraid to do it! ” she exclaims, smiling.
“It's all well and good to stay in our communities, to surround yourself with people who are like us, but if you really want change, you don't have to be afraid to go where people don't go,” she concludes.