Sheema Khan, a Muslim hopes for less racist future in Canada, she remembers the first time when she was told to “go back home.” It was after the 1995 Quebec referendum, and Khan was walking with her eight-month-old daughter in a stroller in the Montreal.
“It’s like, this is home,” said Khan, whose parents immigrated to the Montreal from Varanasi, India, when Khan was three-years-old.
It is not the first time she had felt discrimination as a Muslim woman.
A few years before that, having completed her PhD in the chemical physics at Harvard and post-doctoral studies at MIT, she returned to Quebec for a job interview.
“I was asked if I had to wear that thing on my head,” said Khan, referring to her hijab (head scarf). “That’s the first time I’d overtly felt it.”
Khan, who works in intellectual property law in the Ottawa and writes a monthly column in the Globe and Mail, will deliver this year’s Woodrow Lloyd Lecture on Monday evening at the University of Regina. Khan’s topic is “Islamophobia and Muslim Women in Canada,” something she knows a lot about.
“I’ve grown a thick skin,” Khan said with a laugh. “It’s just sort of like, brush past it.”
Khan did not feel so much an outsider in her own country until the last federal election, as the Conservative party “campaign(ed) on fear of Muslims in Canada.”
During her lecture at the University of Regina, Khan will talk about a 2016 Environics survey of 600 Muslims across the Canada, in which 42 per cent of women reported that they had recently experienced discrimination.
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Khan will also talk about the Parliamentary M103 motion, that condemns “Islamophobia and all forms of systemic racism and religious discrimination.”
M103 passed in Parliament on Thursday, even though an Angus Reid poll suggested that most Canadians were not in favour, 31 per cent because they believe that the motion is a threat to Canadians freedom of speech, and 57 per cent believe that the bill would not accomplish anything or have real impact.
By the way of her column, that she began writing shortly after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Khan has heard a lot of commentary over the years.
“I’ve learned so much, especially from those who don’t agree with me. When you have a respectful conversation, you’re more apt to listen to what the other side has to say,” she said.
She sees hope in Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s work for all the cultures, not just for the indigenous people.
Khan speaks on Monday, 7:30 p.m., at the University of Regina Education Auditorium.
Mrudula Duddempudi.
