'We are as much a part of the fabric of this community as anyone. But people didn’t know this. So post-9/11, we opened our doors,' says Hassan, the then-chairman of the London Muslim Mosque.
This profile is part of a series called ‘Living in the shadow of 9/11,’ which looks at how the worlds of five extraordinary people changed, twenty years later.
Hatred cannot be rationalized or reasoned with, Hassan says. By its very nature it is irrational and unreasonable. Islamophobia, on the other hand, is something else altogether. It creeps into society and infects people who are otherwise open-minded and generous. It can, like all structural racisms, evolve into a pernicious feature of our society.
The distinction makes a difference, he says. The key lesson he has learned over the past 20 years is that the vast majority of Canadians are open and accepting of Muslims. The attacks on 9/11 may have triggered fear of Muslims but they also opened up an opportunity for the Muslim community. “We also learned a lesson that day,” says Hassan, who was the chairman of the London Muslim Mosque at the time. “As a community, we realized that pre-9/11 . . . people didn’t know us.
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