Muslim men also smile

A few days after the sad anniversary of the Quebec massacre, which took the lives of six men, we wanted to give a voice to Muslim men, in all humanity. They confided in themselves despite the embarrassment, the modesty — and the desire to remain strong and positive, which, in itself, is not surprising. Through free speech, we still detect a great deal of tiredness. Here they tell us.

“I don't regret anything”

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Aymen Derbali could have been the seventh victim of the attack on the Grand Mosque of Quebec. He was shot seven times. “The pain never ends. I embodied the pain, in my back, in my hands, all the time it's electric fields. I am in pain every moment,” he tells us in his living room. Despite the suffering, Aymen invited us to his house by opening his door wide for us. He smiles, doesn't stop joking, and offers us cookies. He does not regret going to prayer on January 29, 2017 at the Islamic Cultural Center in Quebec City. “I don't regret anything, it's destiny,” he says candidly. The night of the attack, he was setting up a new television for his son. “I looked at my watch and it was 7:25 p.m. If I had taken 5 more minutes, I would not have made it in time, because the prayer starts at 7:30 p.m.” He considered praying at home, before changing his mind. “I said to myself, “No, I'm going to go to the mosque.” I said to my wife, “I'm going to say my prayer at the mosque and I'll be back, I'm going to finish setting up the television afterwards.”” Aymen has not returned. In 100 seconds, the killer killed 6 people, 8 injured and 17 orphans. “He was aiming at the heads. The majority were shot in the head,” reports Aymen. “The bullet I got in the hand was when I did Chahada (prayer pronounced by a dying person who raises his index finger to recall the uniqueness of God). As soon as I raised my hand, he aimed at my hand. He was trained, he did not back down. He had 50 bullets, he shot 48 in 100 seconds,” he recalls.

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Were men targeted?

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On the evening of the attack, a Sunday evening, there was only one woman in the mosque. A few children were in the basement for Koranic lessons. “On Sunday evening, there are mostly men at the mosque,” explains Aymen Derbali. You should know that, on the day of the Jummah, the sacred day of the week for Muslims, is Friday. This is the time when there are the most families in the mosque. The killer had done some scouting before he committed the massacre. He had already shown up at the mosque on a Friday to give alms, and on other occasions in the weeks before. Was it targeting Muslim men? It's hard to know. Only one person — the killer — knows the answer. “He didn't choose the time when there were the most women, he chose the time when there were the most men,” says Aymen. In the mosque, men and women are always separated. At the Islamic Cultural Center of Quebec, the women's prayer room is upstairs. The killer stayed downstairs, he didn't shoot up and didn't go upstairs. “Maybe he preferred to kill men, I don't know. But it's obvious that Sunday evening has the most men.”

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The image of the Muslim man

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On January 29, 2017, entire families were affected by the attack. Although men were targeted that evening, Muslim women remain the main victims of Islamophobic acts in Quebec, due to the intersectionality of their issues. “Racism remains gendered, meaning that there is an intersection between race and gender, which creates distinctions and not competition,” explains Leïla Benhadjoudja, an expert in the sociology of racism and assistant professor at the Institute of Studies feminists and gender, at the University of Ottawa. However, she says that the image of the barbaric, violent Muslim man is more pernicious than we think. Especially since very little academic research has looked at the subject. “As Edward Said reminds us, Islam is a trauma for Europe. Nevertheless, there was a Muslim civilization in Europe for several centuries... September 11, 2001, only accentuated this image, which associates Muslim men's bodies with fear, she notes. In the collective imagination, their masculinity is dangerous and they are incapable of tenderness and gentleness.” The Muslim man is thus seen as dangerous for the West, but also for Muslim women. In this context, the Quebec attack in some way offered a rare opportunity for the humanization of Muslim men. “For a rare time, we saw in the media a Muslim man — the victim Azzedine Soufiane, in particular — smiling and honored for his kindness and bravery. Do we have to end up with a massacre to talk about them differently? ”

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The cliché of the angry Muslim

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Aymen Derbali denounces The erroneous report by TVA Nouvelles, broadcast 11 months after the attack, which announced that a mosque in Montreal had asked to exclude women from a nearby construction site on prayer day. “Some media are trying to provoke us to make the population think that we do not accept the norm, that we want to make our own law,” he said. As an example, he cites the discourse presenting the Muslim man as someone who does not let women work, a stereotype that is far from reality. He points to the role of the media in disseminating these representations. “Unfortunately, it is often journalists who convey the cliché of the macho Muslim man, who denigrates women and considers that they have no rights, when this is totally false,” he says. Media coverage of wars in Muslim-majority countries fuels fear. “There are attacks, and the media propagate the cliché of the tough, violent Muslim man who is scary,” laments the father of the family.

Aymen Derbali has experienced this cliché in his professional life. He sometimes had the impression that he could not live his Islamism normally. In 2005, he took an English immersion course at Bishop's University and had a long beard. A discussion about immigration takes place in a course on multiculturalism. A Quebec student says that immigrants come to Canada because their countries are poor, and Aymen rebukes her, telling her that this claim is unfounded. The student answers by asking why he is not going back to his country. “I got angry and said: “Mind your business!” ”, he recalls. A few days later, a classmate warned him by saying, “Be careful, she said she was afraid that you would put a bomb on the university.” For Aymen, this experience clearly shows the prejudice that a disgruntled Muslim man is a potential terrorist. “There are people who think that, if a Muslim gets angry, he is going to put a bomb, he is going to commit a terrorist act. He is a human being like everyone else, who screams and who also gets angry! ” he exclaims. It is this type of cliché that, according to him, contributed to the attack in Quebec. Aymen Derbali was an information technology consultant. He worked for large companies and for some provincial and municipal bodies. In 2014, he was working in a government agency when the Shooting on Canadian Parliament Hill has taken place. The next day, the head of the internal department started to ignore her. “She didn't answer when I said hello to her. A month later, the director requested that I be replaced and transferred to another department. I asked for the reasons, they didn't give me any.”

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Taking back control

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“It's rare that you get the chance to empty your heart. Muslim women suffer a lot, and it is normal to offer them listens and opinions. But men also struggle, and often in silence,” says Munir hesitantly, who arrived from Pakistan nearly 20 years ago. Obviously, racism and Islamophobia did not date back to January 29, 2017. Where many Muslim men feel it the most is in the job market. If violence in a professional context often comes up in exchanges, it is because it is in this context that they most often feel vulnerable. This is where their pride and honor are touched. “The rest of the time, you manage to ignore it, to live with it. But when you have to feed your family, the challenge changes. You feel trapped, you are suffocating”, illustrates Munir, who works in the restaurant industry. For him, the feeling of powerlessness is the worst. “Most of the time, I find myself in situations where I don't have to say anything to avoid losing my job. I always have to smile and trivialize the situation. It's getting heavy.” Jamal now refuses to make false smiles. He also no longer censors himself during debates, at the risk of “appearing aggressive.” “How do I deal with Islamophobia and racism? It's going to seem intense, but I'm making the choice to no longer work for Quebec employers,” says Jamal, an engineer and father who has lived in Montreal for more than 10 years. It is, in a way, his way of counteracting the powerlessness mentioned by Munir.

If he came to this radical choice, it is because microaggressions, especially in the labor market, have brought him to the end of his rope. He especially remembers his beginnings. Despite a solid experience in his field, the hundreds of resumes he sent remained a dead letter. One day, by chance, he meets a young friend from Morocco, who works for the company he is trying to enter and for which he is perfectly qualified. The company that still posts jobs, but never calls him back, despite his numerous calls. “He told me that the secretary had a very particular strategy for filtering resumes: she simply put aside resumes whose names she couldn't pronounce easily.” Since that day, Jamal has changed her last name composed, to simplify it. Over time, the engineer gained enough experience so that he no longer had to send a resume. In fact, the opposite is happening now: he is wanted for his expertise. He now has options. “Since I had the choice, I no longer work for local employers. I live in Quebec, but my clients are Ontarians and Americans. And, yes, I feel a difference in racism,” he says bluntly.

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How to fight effectively?

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But are the changes happening too slowly? Aymen thinks so. “We don't speak out loudly. There are incidents, and the police are more involved than before, sometimes. But people don't understand the limit or the difference between free speech and hate speech,” he believes. He wants far-right groups to be classified and judged as terrorist organizations. Five years later, Aymen is still living in Quebec City. Many of the survivors and survivors of the Muslim community in Sainte-Foy have left the national capital for Ontario. Aymen wants us to now look at the reasons and consequences of the attack on January 29. “If there is no political will on the part of the provincial government, all the efforts that can be made to combat Islamophobia will not have significant effects,” believes the survivor. He feels he should take action for the six men, six brothers, who fell next to him five years ago. “My blood was mixed with theirs on the carpet. I have a duty to honor their memory: to fight, to get involved in the fight against Islamophobia and all kinds of discrimination — whether against Blacks, against Indigenous people, against any community that suffers from it. Because they fell because of Islamophobia. Until we fight effectively, the danger is there. He's going to be watching us all the time.”