Canada: Toronto women join #JeSuisHijabi campaign to dispel misconceptions

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“Sometimes the way some people look at you, I feel like if I don’t open my mouth first they will presume I don’t even speak English.”

Social media campaign #jesuishijabi gives visible Muslim women a chance
to speak about their identities as "empowered Canadian women."
Hena Malik, spokeswoman for the Ahmaddiya Muslim Community

Ahmadiyya Times | News Watch | US Desk
Source/Credit: Metro News
By Gilbert Ngabo | December 2, 2015

Participants say they want to be seen for who they are, not just what they're wearing.

Saadia Mahdi would like to be seen as who she really is: an IT consultant whose family firm, Maplenet Solutions Inc., provides technology services across the GTA.

Instead, she says, many people see her through the lens of what she’s wearing – feeding into misconceptions she is not fully integrated into Canadian society.

“I don’t really understand it,” said Mahdi, an active Member of the Muslim community in Vaughan. The mere fact of wearing a hijab makes people think of her as un-Canadian, she said.

“Sometimes the way some people look at you, I feel like if I don’t open my mouth first they will presume I don’t even speak English,” she said.

Mahdi and dozens of other Muslim women across the country are out to change that perception. In a campaign they called #JeSuisHijabi, they are determined to let Canadians know Muslim women “work hard to build cities and the country,” said Mahdi.

“We are working, volunteering, studying in universities and totally invested in Canada,” she said. “But somehow people continue to see us as having roots somewhere else.”

The campaign will look to open a dialogue in communities to dispel false impressions about Islam as a religion and the wearing of a hijab. There will be organized events at mosques and community centres, welcoming anyone. Some university groups are even organizing the “try on a hijab booths”

The campaign follows a series of recent incidents in Toronto and across the country, in which women were verbally and physically abused in apparent acts of Islamophobia.

These attacks were committed in a way that “screams us versus them,” said Mahdi, giving the example of a Toronto woman who was attacked at a local school.

“She was just picking up her kids from school, like any other parent,” she said. “The only difference was the hijab she was wearing.”

Read original post here: Two-nation theory, Raj mindset behind minorities’ alienation: expert


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