A place in history

When a historic event occurs it seems we all want to remember what we were doing on that day. It's like attending a wake. We reminisce about the past, the good memories and our place in its history.

I wasn’t born when JFK was shot nor do I remember any of the other assassinations in America during the 60's revolution. I do remember, though, the riots in Detroit.

It was a topic at our dinner table because Mum – a Canadian American – worked in the States like she had done for years before marrying my father. During the Detriot riots, my sisters tell me that Dad used to bring them to Windsor’s waterfront to see the fire and smoke and hear the gun shots during the heat of the riots.

The only time I remember being brought to the waterfront to witness something historic was the passing of the Edmund Fitzgerald. My father always had an innate quality to know what was historically important before it was historically important.

As for 9-11-01? Need I ask?

My normal day usually started out with a cup of coffee and I would check my inbox for my morning email link to the New York Times and CBC news alerts. By 7:30 a.m., I would watch the morning news on television until it was time to leave for school although at this time, I wasn’t in school but waiting for my course to start the following week so I kept my routine of waking up at 6 a.m.

This day was different. Instead of turning on the television to watch the news I decided to clean out my in-box of unwanted emails. I remember lingering over one email. It was from a Saudi named ‘Ahmed’. Ahmed and I met in a chat room over the Internet and added each other to our chat programs.

I lingered on this email because of our conversations that brought concern only months before.

‘Ahmed’ and I used to speak about mundane things, mostly about his import company – construction vehicles, or Islam or on one occasion, Osama bin Laden. We spoke about him because he was a topic within the Salafist community in London Ontario where I lived at the time. He told me how he knew ObL’s brothers who lived in Saudi Arabia.

Even though ObL was a topic of discussion, I couldn’t tell if the local Salafists were supporters of ObL or not. I knew they didn’t support American troops in Saudi Arabia because it was ‘sacred ground’ and there was apparently a hadith suggesting that no foreigner should be on this sacred land.

I knew the local Salafists didn’t support the Saudi royal family because they were squandering the country’s oil wealth while the gap between the rich and the poor in Saudi Arabia was deepening. ‘Ahmed’ confirmed this fact in our discussions.

I knew that the local Salafists didn’t support the bombing of the pharmaceutical factory in Sudan. It was a common belief that Clinton ordered the bombings to distract the Americans away from his affair with Monica Lewinski – it was quite the joke.

But did all that mean the local Salafists supported ObL’s jihad? I knew there were people who supported jihad in the Sudan if one where to be declared in a fatwah – but that was because most of every one I knew had a husband who was Sudanese or were close to marrying one.

As for Ahmed, he seemed to know ObL because he told me he was a ‘simple’ man. Till this day I don’t know what he meant by ‘simple’. Did it mean that ObL wasn’t complicated in his thinking? Did it mean he wasn’t materialistic? Did it mean the Americans gave him too much credit as a protagonist?

It didn’t concern me at the time speaking about this subject. ObL was a common subject and I agreed with all of my other Salafist friends that the Americans were ‘demonizing’ him (although I really was only parroting what I was learning because I didn’t know tit from tat about American foreign policy).

What was important about this conversation between Ahmed and I was about a hadith that I was having trouble with. I wanted some context to a hadith I found on a website and that hadith was about ‘killing Jews’. I didn't know my teacher had some radical ideas about it.

Months before, I had gone to a lecture by a doctor at the University of Western Ontario given on certain evenings to learn about Islam. On a ride home I took with the doctor and his wife, he counseled me to go to a particular website. I was looking up something totally unrelated when my search came up with a hadith I found very troubling.

It was troubling because when I had converted to Islam I qualified my conversion only if I was not going to be taught to hate any particular group - I would then deny my own Canadian identity of pluralism and multiculturalism. If Muslims preached they were the religion of Peace – then there should be absolutely no preaching of hatred against any group if Allah wanted my soul.

But when I read this hadith that told Muslims to “kill Jews wherever you find them, behind trees or under rocks”, it seemed pretty crazy and out of line so it was my duty, I felt, to find out what this was and to learn the context of it. So, in keeping with my personality, I started asking questions.

Many of them.

Little did I know that this hadith was the catalyst to my leaving the religious community months later.

After having my questions answered – not by the Imams because they just ignored them, I found out that that hadith was referring to a war. Some highly educated and well-positioned Muslims in Ontario explained the hadith to be interpreted as “enemies” not “Jews”in this war. But this translation is not accepted by the majority of Muslims I spoke to. The commonly accepted translation is “Jews” in this widely believed hadith, which I found out is a Sahih Bukhari hadith – which means ‘highly credible’.

Next, the hadith was put into context for me. It was explained that it was in the context of a war at the time when Muslims would follow a dajjal or false prophet. ‘Ahmed’ explained to me that this hadith was about this war and that the war would involve Israel. In this war, Israel would be taken over by Muslims who followed this dajjal. Other countries in Europe would be over thrown - right up to Italy. He explained to me that hadith was to support that war that would be just like the holocaust for the Jews.

Ok, so I got rhetoric and propaganda. This is when I started to put on the breaks and start to wonder if this guy is for real or not. How can anyone talk like this? Who is this guy and why am I speaking to a person who says he’s from Saudi Arabia?

When he asked me if I believed this explanation, I wrote back ‘NO’. His response was hostile. He told me that “I should watch what I say”. I took this as a threat and I became nervous since he, by now, had my email address. I wrote to an Imam to explain what had happened. He told me this guy was wrong. The only thing that kept me from being frightened was that the guy was very far away - in Saudi Arabia.

But by the end of that summer - the summer of 2001 - I was arguing with another Muslim man – an Egyptian that had taken over a position at the University from a friend of mine. He was refusing to post services for Muslim women in the Mosque’s newsletter because of his bigoted attitude towards non-Muslim women. I told him that I was taking my hijab off in protest. He wrote to me from his Western email account telling me “I should watch what I say”.

I would give anything to have a copy of my responding email - but that was a long time and many computer operating systems ago.

By this time the threat was closer to home. The same words were reiterated as those of ‘Ahmed’ and underscored that an extreme ideology was at play and put to rest any concerns that the Saudi was a fictitious character.

So, on September 11, 2001 probably about an hour and a half after I started housekeeping my email account, I rested on Ahmed’s email. I told myself not to delete it – that I might need it in case something happens.

I didn’t think that happening would be so huge.

It was about 9:30 a.m., and I finally turned on the ABC morning news about 2 hours late of my routine. I settled in my lazy boy with my coffee and saw the first pictures of the twin towers smoking. The newscasters were confused. I’m sure my face was contorted. There was speculation that it was a terrorist attack. The next shots were the Pentagon and then a smoking field.

What the hell is going on I thought?

I got on the phone to call my friend to see if she had the answers. When she answered the phone she was crying. Her husband was expected to arrive in New York at 8:30 that morning from a flight from Egypt. We held the phone to our ears, crying as we stared at the TV. We watched and cried as the first tower went down. She wanted to get off the phone to leave it open in case her husband called. I wanted to call C.S.I.S.

There were too many red flags thrown in front of me on two-year Islamic journey.

My first reaction to seeing the targets was that the acts were committed by American terrorists. Who could have executed something so spectacular with such precision other than Americans?

My next thought was that it very well could have been Muslims because I knew from the targets that they were, for one, a good example of “higher buildings” from a hadith explaining portents of ‘The Hour’. As explained by Mohammed to a follower: “When the shepherds of black camels start competing with others in the construction of higher buildings. And the Hour is one of the five things which nobody knows except Allah.”

There are many hadith about ‘The Hour’, those Nostrodamus like prophecies - Islamic style. Those towers were indicative of America’s competitive national attitude, that which instigates competition throughout the world asking questions of architectural or engineering firms, who is able to build the highest building in the world?

Tall buildings were symbols for what we Muslims learned to be a portent of the Hour. The Hour for those who believe would also be called the end of the world, as we know it. As for the portent hadith, they are Sahih Bukhari, can be found in the Book of Belief and are widely believed by Muslims.

I also knew how high the possibility was for Islamists to have flown the planes into the WTCs just because they were the World Trade Centre towers. World Trade was also indicative of tourism, which to the Salafists was not an acceptable Islamic practice because that meant that more Westerners would be flooding the Islamic world and influence Muslims with Western thought and philosophies. This meant that tourism would cause Muslims to loose their religion because they couldn’t isolate themselves from outsiders or their influence.

This is why it made sense for Islamists to use planes as weapons because any fears that it created by doing so would also cause a reduction in the tourism industry – less people would want to fly to any parts of the world let alone Islamic ones. The fear of being caught in a terrorist act while flying was necessary to put in the minds of the Western psyche because as these Islamists see it, Westerners are afraid to die as they haven’t the religion to give them succor and prepare them for the afterlife.

What confirmed it for me that Islamists were involved was the November 2000 federal election.

For just as soon as those planes torpedoed into the towers, doctors and engineers within the Muslim community were busy disinforming those in the Muslim community who wanted to believe that it was a Zionist and Israeli conspiracy to fly planes into the towers. If this information came from Muslim doctors or engineers – 'professionals' – the chances were greater that this lie would be believed.

I was working on the campaign trail for the local NDP candidate. I had wanted to attend the London Mosque’s meeting that was being held to determine their position for the election, what questions they were going to ask the candidates and whom they were going to support. There was anger in the community against the Reform Party and John Renolds for his comments towards the Muslim community’s right to ask Stockwell Day to step down.

By this time I was very irritated because I wasn’t allowed to attend the meeting – apparently only men were allowed to attend. A double slap in the face was that a City of London counselor – an elected official - was the person doing the disallowing. I had pamphlets I wanted to hand out for the NDP but because the Mosque board didn’t like the NDP’s position on abortion and gay rights, they weren’t going to allow their voice to be heard in the Mosque.

Instead, I left pamphlets on the NDP’s position against the World Trade Organization. The stance at that time was anti-WTO because globalization was seen to undermine the traditional social-democratic position of labor and unions thus threatening the NDP’s main supporters – the patriarchy of big labor unions. I put those pamphlets on a common table for information at the Mosque. By evening prayer all the pamphlets were gone.

In 11 months after the Canadian federal election, planes used as missiles would fly into the World Trade Towers - the microcosmic symbol of world trade - and the underlying fear of those who are afraid of losing their religion.