20 years after 9/11, some Manitoba Muslims say they're still dealing with the aftermath

It's been 20 years, but Seema Uddin still remembers Sept. 11, 2001, vividly, including how quickly people made judgments about her religion.

"My teacher pulled out a TV at the time, rolled it into the classroom and said, 'Look, look what the Muslims are doing to the Twin Towers right now,'" she said. 

Uddin was in Grade 9 at the time. A Muslim woman living in Winnipeg, she says she still gets choked up thinking about it. 

"That moment made me feel like garbage and moving forward, there's always been this kind of … instilled feeling or like this piece in me that constantly feels like I'm not good enough or that I don't belong here. It's painful."

The 2001 attacks were carried out by the Islamist extremist group al-Qaeda, who rammed hijacked commercial airliners into the World Trade Center towers in New York and the Pentagon. A fourth hijacked jet crashed in Pennsylvania that day.

Nearly 3,000 people, including 24 Canadians, were killed as a result. 

Some Muslim Manitobans say they felt like outsiders overnight, attacked and questioned about their religion because of its association with the tragic event. 

Twenty years later, they say Islamophobia is still a reality in their day-to-day lives, and wonder when, or if, it will ever get better. 

Life afterward 

Tasneem Vali was living in Chicago with her husband and son, who was just a year old, when the attacks happened. 

"I did actually see the towers falling [on television] and I thought, oh, it went to a movie channel or something, or they're playing a clip from a movie," she said. 

"And it took me a while, maybe 15 minutes, before I realized that it was live."

Not long after that, she remembers going for lunch with a co-worker at the same diner they visited almost daily. A man started shouting at her, telling her to go back to her country. 

"And what really disappointed me was the owner — who knew us very well, who knew where we worked because we were there every day for the past year — said nothing," she said. 

The realization that people would not stand up for her, even when they knew her, was disheartening, Vali said. 

In the months that followed, she was motivated to learn as much about her religion as possible — not only to strengthen her own understanding but also so that she could answer other people's questions, and make it clear that the attacks were not in any way condoned by her faith, she said. 

Vali said she even started wearing a hijab to become more identifiable as a Muslim woman, so that people could come to her with their questions rather than be misinformed. 

"I had a lot of interesting conversations because of that hijab, and that has become a very important part of me."

Absar Islamullah was 12 and living in India when the attacks happened. Attitudes toward Muslim people there changed almost immediately, he says.

"It made me very aware of my identity, more than I wanted.… People were asking questions I had no answer to," he said. 

"And so I had to become mature really fast. I have to grow up really fast and understand that my innocence of teenage years is gone just because I'm a Muslim."

To this day, Islamullah says he still feels like his religion is wrongly associated with terrorism because of the attacks. 

"It has gone away in some way, but it has not gone away. We still have to justify a lot of things," he said. 

"Sometimes you want to lead a normal life, but you get reminded one way or another that you share this identity, which is linked in some way to this tragic event, and it's never going to go away."

'Guilt by association'

Shahina Siddiqui has likely spent more time than anyone in Manitoba answering questions about Islam and the Muslim community in the last two decades. 

The longtime executive director of Islamic Social Services Association Inc. in Winnipeg, Siddiqui did more than 70 interviews in the 48 hours following the attacks. 

"The first question I was asked, interestingly, was 'Why did they do it?'" she said. 

"And I'm sitting here thinking, well, they didn't consult with me. So it was this guilt by association. That hit me right away and I thought, OK, now I know what's coming."

Siddiqui said she felt like overnight, she became dangerous in the eyes of many, just because of her religion. 

"I say, on the 10th, I went to sleep as a Canadian, a Muslim in Canada, my home, and on the 12th, I was the 'other,'" she said. 

"It was extremely painful, and that was an experience for many, many of us. I was being interviewed and spoken to as if … I was an alien, and seen as a threat."

Twenty years later, she said it's disheartening to see Islamophobia still so pervasive, with attacks on Muslims still happening, like the one that killed several members of a Muslim family in London, Ont., this spring. 

Attacks still happening

Uddin says just a few days ago, she was verbally attacked by a taxi passenger while wearing her hijab. 

"And I've had encounters with people rolling down their window … while I'm driving, [saying] 'Oh, it's nice to see you guys are driving now,'" she said.

"I'm like, I've had my licence since I was … 17. So these kinds of things are still occurring."

Meanwhile, Islamullah says he's already weighing how to explain Islamophobia to his four-year-old daughter.

"It just makes me sad that I have to actually think about how I'm going to handle that," he said. 

But Vali says it's her kids who give her hope. She's encouraged by seeing how people from the younger generation embrace each other's cultures and beliefs, and wishes others could do the same. 

"It's very interesting how younger people are very tolerant, very understanding of each other," she said. 

"And I feel people who lived through 9/11 — who I feel should have learned that we need dialogue, we need communication, we need action, we need openness — have kind of disappointed me."