10 A Thirst for Knowledge

For years, I hadn’t cared much about school, but my interest in education and my determination to succeed academically gradually began to grow. As I engaged more with peers at CAFA and at Harmony in the Halls, I realized that education was the only way for me to escape the sense of confinement that came with not belonging. This is something many first-generation immigrants and their children experience and can understand. When you feel you don’t belong, it feels as if you get cut off from opportunities. People are unwilling to engage with you as a friend and an equal. In racialized communities, you sense the prejudice. As a child, I felt cloistered by this lack of engagement and opportunity. One of the emotional aspects of immigration is grief—grief at the loss of a homeland and also grief at the perceived loss of one’s culture and language. Immigrants deal with these feelings of loss in similar ways to how people deal with death. There is denial, anger, depression, bargaining, and for most immigrants, eventual acceptance of the change. Everyone works through these stages at their own pace, and as I look back at my life, I can see many of these elements of grief in the trajectory of my own family. Though my father was somewhat indifferent about the value of education at the time, my mom pushed me. Her family valued education—her mother’s family were professionals from the city of Yaffa, which is more cosmopolitan than Lydda, my father’s birthplace. Along with my mother, it was Uncle Yazan, my mentor, who encouraged me.

I was sixteen when my parents separated, and my mother moved to Vancouver. My brother Omar and I went to live with my father. It was not an easy time. Dad did not take the separation well. His mental health declined and being on the road for long stretches of time for his work made his sense of loneliness worse. After a year of mostly looking after myself, I decided to make the break and live independently. I found a place near the Coliseum Station and was barely scraping by as I worked to finish high school. I wanted to go to university but was worried that the same level of ostracization and alienation that haunted me at school would follow me there. When I was seventeen, some friends who were already in university told me about the Arab Students’ Association at the University of Alberta. That convinced me that I would find a support community there, so I applied and got accepted.

The only other option I could foresee at the time was for me to work in the family giftware business, which my father had run for over twenty years with my Uncle Faisal, who taught him the ropes when he left the cement factory. I respected what they had done but had no desire to follow in their footsteps. Uncle Faisal was bitter about the fact that he’d had to put aside his education and career to help support the family in the El-Hussein refugee camp in Amman. I also knew how bitter my father was about not being able to continue his pharmacy work in Canada. I decided the wisest choice would be to pursue a university education.

When I was growing up, very few people in my Arab community went to university. When I was contemplating university, Moe Smiley, a Lebanese Canadian acquaintance, asked me, “Why would you go to university? You can work and make much more money. Think about it—you’re seventeen, and if you work for ten years and save a thousand dollars a month, at age twenty-seven you could have $120,000.”

It was appealing.

“I really don’t care about the money,” I replied.

“Are you nuts?” said Moe. “You could have it made, rather than spending a boatload of money to go to school, then have to pay that off, then have to find a job, no guarantees.”

Moe didn’t understand why I had to go to university, but when I began talking about postsecondary education, many people who had known me through high school began to treat me with respect, although they wondered if this was really me.

I chose to study political science because I had grown up in a politicized environment and thought this would be a good direction for someone with my interest in politics. In the first month of classes, I found myself desperately trying just to understand concepts like socialism, communism, and the Canadian parliamentary system, let alone attempt to discuss them at a complex intellectual level. This whole thing was a mistake, I thought.

“You should go into the Faculty of Business,” said my close friend Bashar. “What are you doing in arts? You won’t make any money.”

I listened to Bashar. Even though I’d told Moe Smiley I wasn’t interested in money, I changed course and registered for a Bachelor of Commerce.

I loved the University of Alberta. It was here, among people who understood my difficulties with fitting in, that my sense of being Arab in the world really began to become defined. Even so, I soon noticed differences in our childhood. Many of the other Arab students had not grown up shopping at BiWay. They were clean-cut and much more stylish and academic than my high school friends from the north side. The perception in Edmonton was that the rougher, more troublesome, and more “cultural” Arabs lived in the north end of the city and that they were unlikely to go on to university.

I didn’t know many other Arab Canadians pursuing higher learning, but Statistics Canada had figures that might have shocked people like Constable Case Model: in 2001, 74 percent of Arab Canadians aged fifteen to twenty-four were enrolled in a full-time educational program, compared with 57 percent of all Canadians in that age group. Canadians of Arab origin were twice as likely as other Canadians to have a university degree. In fact, in 2001, 30 percent of Arab Canadians aged fifteen and over had a bachelor’s or postgraduate degree—twice the percentage of the overall adult population. Also, the proportion of Arab Canadians holding either a master’s degree or doctorate (10 percent of adults) was twice as high as that of all Canadian adults.

These turn-of-the-millennium opportunities available to me in Canada contrasted sharply with the opportunities my father had had when he was growing up. Although even the refugee camps had schools, things got tough after the Six-Day War and the capture of the West Bank, and after the First and Second Intifada. With high birth rates and little land for new buildings and agriculture, overcrowding and rising unemployment became harsh realities for Palestinians. Few college-educated Palestinians in the Middle East could find work related to their degrees.

In some ways, I had it easy in Canada. For one, there was no open war zone. However, I struggled with living alone after I had moved out and my mother had moved with my brothers and sisters to Vancouver. My dad stayed in Edmonton, but he worked out of town for his wholesale business, and I rarely saw him. I felt like a teenage orphan, carrying the awful feeling of family separation with me. This was something I could not solve with fighting. Although divorce is not forbidden in Islam, modern Levantine culture—that is to say, the area covered roughly by Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, and parts of Turkey—stigmatizes those who separate and divorce. Since a large portion of the Edmonton Arab community came from those regions, people looked down on our family. I noticed how my family was no longer invited to other peoples’ homes, or to weddings. Even members of our own family avoided us. There was nothing I could do about my parents’ divorce, but it did not stop me from feeling ashamed. Fortunately, other adults stepped in to support me, like Uncle Faisal and Auntie Khadija, and Uncle Andy (Adnan), a dollar-store pioneer who paid my rent for almost two years while I was at university.

At university, my sense of not belonging began to ease. I still felt lonely at times, but I was also becoming part of a close-knit community. When I worked as a purchasing assistant at Brio Beverages one summer, Umm Marwan, the mother of my co-worker Marwan, would send me food every day with her son. Everyone seemed to want to feed me and keep me going. One night at Thanksgiving, when I had just sat down to watch TV and eat a bit of chicken with Stove Top stuffing, my friend Bashar knocked on the window. He saw me eating alone and started to cry, as if I were in the depths of poverty. “Come on,” he sobbed, “you’re coming home with me.” It was a homemade turkey dinner I will never forget.

A year later, I was living closer to the university with the Fayad brothers, Sami and Talal, from Lac La Biche. We found a place near the university, a few steps away from Grandin Station. Talal and Sami were wonderful people, kind and considerate, and great partners for playing Sega video games with, or for walking all over downtown, or going to the occasional party. They also provided me with a sense of belonging that I had not felt before. The Muslim community in Lac La Biche has roots that go back to the 1940s, and the Fayads were among the early Lebanese settlers there.

I did not think of myself as the most intelligent person in my circle, but I had strong ambition and a drive to succeed and to make something out of myself. I had always pushed out in front, whether starting prayer classes and wearing the keffiyeh in Grade 8 or starting a fight in my high school years. If I had made it this far, I knew, nothing could hold me back from accomplishing whatever I wanted to achieve. I began to get active with the university’s Arab Student Association, which worked to organize students on campus and to plan the annual Arab Awareness Week. I became a social convener, organizing events and meetings in my first and second years. By my third year, I was vice-president of the ASA, and in my fourth year, I became the president.

One night in my second year of university, I was helping to organize an alcohol-free dinner and theatre event at a local burger joint called Red Robin, when one of the first-year students turned to me.

“Mowafa, I am so proud of you,” she said.

“Why?”

“When I was at school, I heard so many bad things about you getting into trouble. But you have proved all those people wrong, and I just wanted to let you know that.”

Her remarks caught me off guard. I had worked hard to become a better person, but no one had told me before that they had noticed the changes in me. It felt good to hear her say such things about me.

In high school, I’d occasionally imagined myself becoming a police officer, despite my troubles with the law at that time. I was tall, strong, and quick to learn. It could be a secure job. Perhaps it was simply a reaction to my experiences with Constable Case Model that had made me want to change the culture of the organization from within, but in the end, I decided to go to university instead. One person in our community did join the police force, and few people I knew respected him. In the northside Edmonton community at the time, police were seen as aggressive, hostile, and racist. While I do think attitudes have changed and that it is more acceptable for members of the Arab community to join the police, at the time, he was treated with suspicion as a sell-out.

“I’m just doing my job,” he would say when people confronted him. This officer was a friend of my cousin Nedal and we visited him once at his house. He struck me as a very decent person. He was very humble and loved being a police officer. He saw his career as an opportunity to do something good, but I had the feeling he was usually alone.

Edmonton is a small city, and when I was studying at the University of Alberta, I ran into a spectre from my past in the washroom in HUB Mall one day. It was Constable Case Model.

I approached him. “Constable Case Model, how are you doing? What are you doing at the university?” I asked.

He looked confused. “Hi, who are you again?” Before I could answer, he continued. “I’m here as part of a community outreach program to talk to students about our activities.”

I wondered if he remembered telling me I should aspire to do something useful like driving a cab. Instead, I said, “Tell me, Constable Case Model, are you still a racist?”

“No, no, you have it all wrong.” He blushed and quickly washed his hands before walking out.

I stood there with my mouth agape. I wanted to continue the conversation. I wanted to ask him a million questions so that I could understand how he could do community outreach when he’d said so many awful things to us when we were at school. I was obvious that he had not remembered who I was, nor had he shown any awareness of what he had done to me and other friends with his white supremacist remarks when we were in high school. However, in the mirror I could see the look of anger rising in my face. It made me pause. I’d said what I’d most wanted to say to him. Something that had bugged me for years had been fixed. On second thought, nothing was fixed. But I had taken a step towards fixing it—I had named discrimination and challenged it without resorting to physical violence, as I might have done a few years ago.

Reporter and author Zuhair Kashmeri has written dozens of stories about violence, hatred, fear, and interrogation. In The Gulf Within: Canadian Arabs, Racism and the Gulf War, he looks at the work of a Montréal-based Arab Muslim psychiatrist who was working long hours to try to help people, including kids, who were suffering from the stress of being profiled and discriminated against. His examination of the Arab Muslim psyche, even among second- and third-generation Canadians, found that Arab Muslims in Canada were battered and brutalized, physically and emotionally. After the Gulf War, a national monitoring group, Muslim Media Watch, was established to address the negative portrayals of Islam being in the media.

What many people in our targeted community found just as frightening as the actual violence, was the silence. We were either too visible, and a target, or we were invisible, becoming mere shadows, or nothing, when we resisted victimization or needed healing. I know that there must’ve been organizations like CAFA or Al-Rashid Mosque that spoke for us, but it did not feel like we had much support. I will never forget how lonely and helpless I felt when all the people in charge, the ones I had learned to look up to, couldn’t help. And that included police officers like Constable Case Model. Yes, his racist comments had spurred me on to complete ten years of university, to make something of myself, but humiliation is not a nourishing motivator.

In the lush North Saskatchewan River valley, at the Edmonton Heritage Festival in William Hawrelak Park, you can enjoy and get to know dozens of cultures—from the Ukrainian side of my friend Youssef’s family to the Arab culture he and I share, and everything in between. There are many pavilions, performances, crafts, clothes, and food.

In 1996, while volunteering with Uncle Yazan at the Arabic pavilion, I began talking to a passerby. He was an older fellow, maybe in his seventies, and presented white.

“My great-grandfather was Lebanese,” he told me.

“Oh, so you speak Arabic?” I asked.

“No,” he replied. My family has lost touch with our Arab roots. I do remember my grandmother making us kibbeh and labneh when I was young. I would really like to know more about your culture.”

I thought to myself, This is my mother’s worst nightmare for her children—needing to go a stranger to ask about our culture. How humiliating! This man was several generations away from his Arab roots and all he had left was the memory of a few dishes. It was then that I began to understand why my parents had tried to instill these things in me—why they had done some of the things they did. That man in Hawrelak Park was seeking to fill a void, and I vowed that I would not let that happen to me or to my children. In response, I began to explore my cultural roots with renewed interest and began to notice how other Arab Canadians around me were losing their heritage.

In 1997, when I was in my second year of university, Edmonton hosted a national Canadian conference for Arab youth that had been organized by the Canadian Arab Federation. On the first night of the conference, a group of us went out to a restaurant. When the server came to take our drinks order after we sat down, I heard a young Lebanese woman say, “Yes, I’ll have a beer, please.” I stared at her, thinking my eyes and ears were playing tricks on me. I could not recall ever seeing an Arab woman drink alcohol, and most certainly not in public. I was shocked. I had grown up around the mosque, sheltered and supported by protective parents and tradition. For me and my friends, alcohol was completely off limits, and yet here this woman was, ordering a beer as if it was a glass of water. I knew not all Arabs were Muslims, and she may well have been a Christian, but I felt ashamed and embarrassed on her behalf. Slowly, I began to realize that the Arab community in Edmonton was in many ways more conservative and traditional than Arab communities elsewhere in Canada.

My undergraduate years changed me. I had been surprised that I had even been accepted into university and took the chance with my whole being. I really struggled during my first year. I had never really studied much at school and in my first year I struggled to come to terms with the change in culture from my school days. When I started, I still wanted to cause a bit of trouble and get up to mischief, but the other students were less accepting of bad behaviour than my school friends had been. I felt immature compared to them and began to take a close look at my behaviour and my actions. Over the course of that year, I slowly realized that the students around me, those who came from other communities, wanted to talk about science, politics, and religion, and not about who got shot or jumped. That was vastly different from my experience growing up in northeast Edmonton. where these were common topics of conversation. I began to surround myself with Arab youth who never got into trouble, and several of those people remain role models for me.

In my second year, I took my studies more seriously, and it paid off. Other students began to come to me for help. I liked being noticed for the good things I was doing, not for my rebellious past.

I graduated from the University of Alberta with a degree in Commerce, with distinction, specializing in management information systems. One day, a professor, Dr. Mike Carter, came to deliver a talk at the university about a master’s program in health care information systems in the Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering at the University of Toronto. I applied and, to my surprise, got accepted into the program. Both my parents were proud of my achievement, and my mother wished me success in a new city, but my father struggled with the fact that it meant I would be leaving Edmonton. Our family was already broken up by the divorce, and he could not understand why I would want to move away and splinter it even further. But in the end, he realized I had to do what was best for my future.

On 25 August 1999, I packed my things and boarded a plane to Toronto. Except for our stopover on the way to Montréal when I was fifteen, I had never been in Toronto. Though I had moved out of home at age seventeen, this was the first time I had left Alberta on my own to live in another place. It felt like everything was being pulled away from under my feet, everything warm and familiar, even the things that bugged me.

I did not have much money, but I did have some papers that were priceless to me, especially a handwritten note in Arabic from my mother that I had received almost a year after she had moved to Vancouver with my brothers and sister.

Salam Alaikum wa Rahman Allahu wa Barakatu [In the Name of Allah the Most Gracious and Most Merciful]

My Beloved Son, Mowafa,

I am writing this letter because I wanted to let you know that we are doing well in Vancouver. We have moved to the Vancouver suburb of Richmond, and we found a two-bedroom apartment where things are a little cramped, but for now it will suffice until things get better.

Your brother Belal is working part time at Bella Pizza. Omar is still engaging in his mischievous door-to-door chocolate almond sales. Saleh is going to school and Wafa is also doing well in high school and planning to go to Jordan this summer to visit family.

I know reading this letter is hard for you, as you may blame me for the separation of the family. I know that you are angry and upset with me. I just wanted to let you know that I never meant for this to happen. I always wanted our family to be together. I wanted to let you know that I love you and I am so sorry that you have to suffer alone as a result of what has happened.

Please do not worry about us, as Allah will take care of us. We live close to the mosque, and we try to go there as much as we can. I am teaching Arabic at the mosque and trying to register your brothers and sister into the Islamic program.

We are doing fine, and I want you to focus on your studies. I am so proud of you and what you are accomplishing in university. I know it has not been easy living alone, separated from us, but do not worry, we will be together soon. Just focus on your studies and your future for now.

My beloved son, I leave you now and I pray for your success. Remember to keep Allah present in your daily life and do not forget to do your daily prayers that will keep you connected with Allah.

I love you and pray for you …

Mom

I arrived in Toronto in late August with no place to live. A cab driver recommended a hostel. I sat there in a little single room, stunned and unprepared, my future hazy. I cried myself to sleep that first night. I felt alone and abandoned. I had lived alone for a year in Edmonton, but even then, friends and family were close. At university, I had shared accommodation with friends I could talk to. But now, for the first time in my life, I was truly on my own. There was one there to support me or ask me how I was doing. I felt helpless. All the emotions from the past two years—my parents’ separation and my father’s struggles—came crashing down on me.

On my second day in the city, I went to the University of Toronto; I discovered that there were students from over a hundred countries. I found the campus big and spread out, with a great contrast between old castle-like buildings covered in ivy that usually indicated arts and social science programs, and new buildings that generally indicated science and technology.

Waves of homesickness washed over me, and I felt dizzy and nauseated. Apart from those three years in Amman as a child and a few months in Montréal as a teenager, I hadn’t lived anywhere other than Edmonton. I identified strongly with Edmonton’s Castle Downs area—the malls, schools, and the Al-Rashid Mosque. Everything here was strange and unfamiliar. So I went to student housing. “We’re so sorry, but you’ve arrived a little late. I don’t know if there’s anything we can help you with.”

I grabbed a newspaper and found a place to sit on the green space near the huge Robarts Library. I felt dispirited as I started browsing the paper, looking for places to stay. I wanted to be close to the university so that I could engage easily and actively in the student community. I wanted somewhere I could fit in, and preferably a place where I could be among people who shared my faith and my cultural background, but I couldn’t find anything like that.

I was still staying at the hostel, and I knew I needed to find more permanent accommodation before classes started in a few days’ time. Sitting there on the lawn, I could see a large glass door about a hundred metres from the library. They led to a place called Ernescliff College. I did not know the place, but I thought it was worth going to see whether they had any places available. It was locked, but I pressed the doorbell. A gentleman in his forties opened the door and greeted me. I immediately felt better, though my heart was hammering inside my chest.

He introduced himself as the director of the college. His name was José. Sounds like Househ, I thought. José was from Peru. “Do you have any rooms for rent?” I said, my heart still pounding.

He smiled. “Yes, but we are very selective. We only take students with good marks and strong resumes. We want high achievers.”

I told him that I had graduated with distinction from my university and that I had been accepted as a graduate student in engineering. That got me a tour of the place, a beautiful building with clean rooms, a gym, a small library, a meeting room, and even a prayer chapel. I asked him about the chapel. José said: “This is a Christian college, that is part of a Catholic organization, and we have rules for everyone who lives here.”

I asked him what the rules were, wondering if I’d have to do something Christian. I could imagine my mother having fits.

“Good behaviour,” he answered, “with a nightly curfew of 11 p.m. on weekdays and 1 a.m. on weekends, and participation in the nightly get-togethers. We are like a family, a home away from home.”

Residency here included three meals a day, laundry, having your room cleaned three times a week, and even late-night snacks. At $750 a month, it sounded like a deal.

José gave me a form. “Complete this and send me your transcripts and your resume, and we will consider your application.”

I filled out the application form and delivered it and a copy of my transcripts that same day. I was accepted. It was not the Muslim community I had set out to find, but at the time, finding a space in Ernescliff College felt more like an intervention from a higher being than a coincidence. After my night of loneliness, I had found a place that I could call home. In response to my father’s struggles, and my own, I had increasingly explored piety in my own life, and at Ernescliff piety was a cornerstone of daily life. That appealed to me. So did the structured life—something I had not had before.

At Ernescliff, I lived with about fifty students and fifteen adults who worked for the church, as well as a handful of clergy who led worship in the faith of the Christian God. The religious adult staff all held prestigious positions in areas like engineering, music, public relations, and CEO headhunting, while the students were studying engineering, pre-med, English, and history.

The residence was associated with the Opus Dei organization, a controversial part of the Catholic Church. Opus Dei or not, the Ernescliff College residence was, apart from the curfews, one of the best places I had ever lived in. I had thought it would be difficult to adjust to living in such a deeply Christian environment because even though Islam and Christianity are both Abrahamic faiths, and the Islamic faithful share a belief in the same monotheistic God as Christianity and Judaism, the tenets of my faith differ significantly from these religions. Unlike Christians, Muslims do not see Jesus (Issa in Arabic) as the son of God who was sacrificed for humanity, but as a prophet. We regard Muḥammad as God’s final messenger, and his teachings permeate our whole culture and lifestyle—it is everything. Although our faiths share the same roots in the Middle East, the history of our relationship is complicated.

When I arrived at Ernescliff, I was told that we were expected to practice our faith, and the faculty lived by example. Members of Opus Dei follow the Catholic Liturgy of the Hours, which requires the faithful to pray five times a day, much like Islam requires the faithful to observe daily prayers. Even though life at Ernescliff revolved around an expression of Catholic faith, no one ever, directly or indirectly, tried to preach Christianity to me. However, the resident priest, Father Craig, did ask me regularly if I was doing my Muslims prayers, which I confess I was not really doing at the time, with the exception of the Friday prayer.

At Ernescliff we were all here for a specific purpose—to go to school, to work and live together. Every night, we would sit down together as a group, and everyone would talk about what they had done that the day. It was like being part of a family. We were expected to dress for mealtimes, especially Sunday dinners. I remember coming to dinner one Sunday wearing sweats and a T-shirt and being asked to go change into something more appropriate. My mother had brought me up to show respect and self-respect, but Ernescliff worked on a different level, and it was a shock to adapt to this more formal environment.

Despite what I’d achieved in university to that point in my life, spending so much time among high-achieving students often made me feel like a country hick from Western Canada who had come to the big city not knowing much. While I was happy on many levels at Ernescliff, I struggled to fit in intellectually. Being among all those high-achieving peers made me feel that somehow I had been disadvantaged growing up in an immigrant family in the north side of Edmonton. The other residents at Ernescliff seemed so intelligent and intellectual, and used words I did not understand and had never heard before. I remember we were watching a hockey game one day. When my team, the Edmonton Oilers, scored I would yell things like “Awesome!” or “Amazing!” When the other team scored, their supporters used words I’d never heard before, like “stupendous” and “astonishing” to describe a goal.

I tried to become more intellectual by hanging around them and listening to their conversations, but I longed to learn more about my own culture, too, so I started looking for opportunities to engage more with Arabic culture. Among the confusion of groups at the U of T International Centre, including the Ahmadiyya Muslim Students’ Association and the Twelve Imams Muslim Students’ Association, it was the Muslim Students’ Association (MSA) that sounded the most similar to the group I had been involved in in Edmonton, so I joined.

I encountered many other kinds of groups, too. Secular groups that I had not been aware of, like the Rotary Club. One day, I started talking to a man who was a member of the Rotary Club. He told me they had a grant for students with high marks who were in financial need and encouraged me to apply. Three weeks later, I received a cheque for three thousand dollars. I still wish I could thank him in person. With that money, I was able to pay for a few more months at the Ernescliff College residence and finally felt that I would get by in Toronto.

As I moved deeper into university life, I began to meet more people I could identify with, one of whom was Abdul Razzak Takriti. A second-year undergraduate student in political science and history, he frequently wore the Palestinian keffiyeh, especially during the cold winter months. It was easy to find him in a crowd. He came from a wealthy Jordanian family and was an ambitious young man who was out to change the world. After finishing his master’s degree, he went on to the Oxford University for his PhD.

One night in Toronto, I met with him and another fellow, Muhammad, at one of the university’s restaurant pubs for an Arab Student Association party. I wasn’t used to these kinds of parties. For one thing, they served alcohol, and I found myself staring at men and women partying, drinking, dancing, and talking to each other very freely. Back home in Edmonton, even though the University of Alberta Arab Student Association and the Canadian Arab Friendship Association were seen by the some as liberal, our events never had alcohol. There had always been parents at the larger functions, and girls were chaperoned by their brothers, who took their duty seriously. We might call Islam a religion of peace, but there would be no peace for the guys who went after our sisters. Being at this MSA event in Toronto felt more like being at a nightclub. While I was playing pool, I asked a guy, “Isn’t this kind of strange and different from our culture?”

He aimed the cue, slammed a ball into the pocket, and then grinned and said, “I have no problem with this. It’s normal.” Others agreed and even seemed surprised that I asked. I began to feel like even more of a conservative, constrained Arab redneck from Alberta. I could feel my skin prickle. I asked one guy whose sister was at the party, “Aren’t you worried if someone flirts with her?” He shrugged and said, “Hey, it’s her life and I’m okay with it.”

One day, I was sitting in a Toronto café with my friend Abdul and a few other people. They were getting loud about American intervention in the Middle East and how the United States was a colonial superpower that has caused much more harm than good in the world. I told them what my father had told me about receiving USAID donations in the refugee camp in Amman, Jordan. They all laughed. “Yes, that is fine, and it helped your father and others survive day-to-day but look at the larger picture. America has damaged the world by acting as an intervening power in the world, dictating how every region should be run.”

While feeling like an idiot, I could see the truth in this.

The discussion piqued my curiosity. I wanted to learn more. Abdul suggested that I read a book called Orientalism, by Edward Said, a Palestinian-American scholar and public intellectual. The book describes the subtle but strong Eurocentric prejudice shown towards Arab Islamic people and their cultures, which are often seen as exotic and backwards. Said demonstrates how colonial powers control knowledge production in universities and in media representations. Abdul also recommended other books with similar themes—like Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, which looks at the propaganda, distortion, and corporate sponsorship of major news outlets.

As I was reading these books, I realized how limited my vocabulary was. I was intellectually small, a puny cardamom seed. I bought an Oxford dictionary and proceeded to write down any word I didn’t understand in a notebook. Within a few months, I had collected over two thousand words. I began to read voraciously, going to the dictionary over and over, trying to understand and use more words. Still, my health policy professors, who I looked up to since they advocated for quality in public health care, told me that my writing was under par for a graduate student.

So I bought A Canadian Writer’s Reference and soaked up grammar, basic sentence structure, vocabulary, and referencing styles. I became more confident and wrote articles for newspapers, as well as letters to the editor. It became clear to me how important writing skills are to success in university programs, and though my surname means “confused,” I was determined that my writing wouldn’t reflect that. I was also coming back to the energy I had for writing when I was a kid, before other people’s assumptions got in the way.

I had already come a long way since Edmonton. Reading books and meeting with people who knew more than I did constantly reminded me that I could have been born a struggling Palestinian in a camp, and this encouraged me to work harder.

In Toronto, my hunger for learning more about Islam, Arab culture, and the history of my people continued to grow. I began to attend various lectures outside of the university classes I was taking. Uncle Yazan had told me about some of the people I head about in these talks, like the great twelfth-century Muslim leader Saladin. I began to look for more. On eBay, along with some old Arabic coins, I found two books that I came to treasure—one by Abu l-Walid Muhammad bin Ahmad bin Rushd, also known as Ibn Rushd or Averroes, and one by the great Muslim philosopher, Ibn Khaldun.

Reading these books about two exceptional Muslims who helped shape European thinking, I could not help but think, Why wasn’t I ever taught about them in school? Averroes was a great twelfth-century Muslim scholar who wrote more than sixty-seven original works—twenty thousand pages covering a variety of subjects, including early Islamic philosophy, logic in Islamic philosophy, Arabic medicine, mathematics, astronomy, grammar, Islamic theology, Sharia (Islamic law), Fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence), and grammar, as well as commentaries on most of Aristotle’s works and on Plato’s Republic.

I found myself shutting out the world and disappearing into this new world of knowledge I had discovered. Over a thousand years ago, I learned, the city of Baghdad contained Bayt al-Hikma (The House of Wisdom), which was considered the top intellectual establishment of the time. It held one of the greatest collections of knowledge in the world, with books on every subject and in many languages. There were so many scholars that this library had to keep building and expanding to contain all that world knowledge. I kept going back to things like the pharmacy section, thinking, Yaba, what an ancient and honourable profession you chose.

There was so much I had never been exposed to in high school and university. It was if Muslims, Islam, and the Arabs had been wiped out of the whole curriculum. I was taught about the Jewish Holocaust but not the tragedy of the Nakba; about the persecution of Jews during the Spanish Inquisition, but not about the persecution of Muslims and the push to expel them from the Spanish mainland. And so it continued from my backyard in Edmonton to the West Bank: I could see attempt after attempt to destroy Arabic peoples and cultures, but nothing that would acknowledge the many contributions Muslims had made to Western culture.

What I was hearing now, as an Arab Muslim in Canada, was “You are a threat to us” or “You are at the bottom of the ladder, below the first rung, in the dirt,” like in the Israeli-occupied territories of Palestine. So many questions arose within me and the need to find answers grew stronger.

During the summer of 2000, I left Ernescliff and found a place to stay in a mixed dormitory in Trinity College. After living in a men’s only environment, I found it difficult to adjust. I was shocked, for instance, to see women walking around in their underwear, and even more so by the fact that it did not seem to bother a friend of mine who came from Jordan. One night, I locked myself out of my dormitory and had to sleep on the couch. It was clear other students had had a party and had not cleaned up, for there were beer bottles everywhere. In the morning, one of the nuns walked in and saw me lying there in the midst of all these bottles. She accused me of irresponsible behaviour even though she knew I did not drink. Then she left and came back with signs that said DRINK IN MODERATION, which she put up all over the place. It hurt to see how easily she had made assumptions and put the blame on me.

One night towards the end of my graduate studies, I watched the movie Malcolm X with some of the other people in my dormitory. It affected me deeply, and the very next day I went out to buy Alex Haley’s The Autobiography of Malcolm X. I read passages from the book over and over. Halfway through the book, I started to really understand what Malcolm X meant about the struggle against white people. There were not many whom he found good in his life; instead, they used Black people as they saw fit—exploiting and destroying them.

In school, Malcolm X was told he might become a carpenter if he was lucky—certainly not a lawyer, which he longed to be. This brought to mind Uncle Faisal, who had to leave school to help support his family in the Palestine refugee camp and become a carpenter. Whether it was history, philosophy, African languages, law, the Muslim faith, or any other subject you could imagine, Malcolm X was determined to study it, to raise himself above what white people told him he could be. To me, one of the best statements in his autobiography is this: “I would just like to study. I mean ranging study, because I have a wide-open mind. I’m interested in almost any subject you can mention.”

That was what I felt in Toronto. I cry inside for those who have education denied to them. Education and being able to read is a weapon and a path towards healing. I can only imagine how students at the schools in Gaza and other terrorized zones feel when their buildings and classrooms are bombed and annihilated, ending up a heap of brick and glass, littered with charred scraps of paper. Like a flaming blockade of tires rolled into the streets, I was spinning, with questions burning inside me.

I had finally found positive motivation from the late Edward Said. Three of his many books—Orientalism; Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World; and his autobiography, Out of Place—were especially influential for me. In addition to the brilliance of his writing and debating, I appreciated him for his ability to live in two worlds, English and Arabic, all the while being an advocate for the Palestinian cause.

Before he passed away, I had the opportunity to see Said speak in Toronto and was inspired by how he connected his struggles with identity and language to his practice as an academic. He told the audience that universities are part of the system of elite knowledge production that constructs a Western understanding of the East to further the goals of imperialism. He encouraged us to work from both inside and outside universities to decode the discrimination that has become accepted as curriculum. As I listened to him speak, and let his writing sink into my life, I became aware of how I had been mocked for the way I spoke English, for my faith and for my culture. I realized how these things made me an outsider in Canada despite my status as a citizen, and how those at the centre of power used my position as an immigrant as a sword against me. I began to realize that language could be used as a gate to keep certain groups excluded or stereotyped as “uncivilized” foreigners or as immigrants who have not contributed to humanity’s collective knowledge, or to their adopted homes.

Through Said and Malcom X, I began to see myself differently and to have a faith in my abilities that I did not have before. I felt both comforted and upset by Said’s insights, which helped me to understand the injustice that lay at the root of my family’s past, present, and future experiences.

In 2013, Najla Said, Edward Said’s daughter and a renowned academic, playwright, actor, and activist in her own right, published a memoir. Though her background, gender, and religion are different from mine, her book, Looking for Palestine: Growing Up Confused in an Arab-American Family, made me shake with understanding: Yes! That’s exactly how it is! I know what she means! With such books, how can we forget a culture, or pretend it does not exist, in all its diverse transnational forms? Feeling such a deep connection with literature and the life stories of people like me helped me continue to pursue my own career as a researcher and teacher.

In December 1999, I returned to Edmonton for a visit. I joined Talal, the Lebanese Ukrainian who was my old roommate at the University of Alberta, and his cousin Youssef at a local twenty-four-hour diner on the northside of Edmonton. On that particular night, it was packed, and we were enjoying our burgers, minding our own business, when a man at a table across from ours suddenly stood up and said in a loud voice, “I’m a gonna go to Bosnia and kill you Muslims.”

We stopped eating. The whole restaurant paused and looked at the spectacle that was unfolding. One of the other people at his table looked embarrassed. “Sorry about that,” he said to us. “My soldier friend is drunk.”

Youssef was upset. He wanted to say something, but Talal and I stopped him. Then I did exactly what I’d just cautioned Youssef not to do. I spoke up.

“You know what?” I said to the soldier, “I don’t blame you for speaking like that because your father probably spoke in the same manner. Please sit down, thank you very much.” Part of me wanted to add, “My friend here is part Ukrainian, as many of you are, too!” But it didn’t feel like that would translate.

His friend pulled him back into his seat, but the man stood up again and repeated his words: “I’m gonna to go to Bosnia to kill you Muslims.”

Again the restaurant went quiet. Still no one in the entire restaurant said a word. The man’s friend, the one who had apologized earlier, apologized once more for his friend. Then the soldier yelled out for a third time. The tension at our table was palpable. What hurt most was the quiet complicity of all those who were watching the sequence of events. Youssef was ready to explode. “One more time, and I’m going to beat him up,” he muttered.

I asked the server to call someone, the police perhaps, but she shot back that the man was drunk and not hurting anyone. A few minutes later, the man made another obscene outburst about Muslims. This time Youssef jumped up.

“If you want to start killing Muslims, why don’t you start with me? Let’s go outside.”

Almost everyone in the restaurant spoke up.

“Let him be.”

“Leave him alone, he’s drunk.”

These people had all been silent when he was threatening to kill Muslims. You could say it was because of the innate Canadian sense of politeness, but they were quite ready to speak up in his defence when the target of man’s racial abuse stood up to respond. Just like that, Youssef had become the bad guy.

Youssef and the other man stormed outside to fight, but Talal and I stayed behind. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the waitress speaking on the phone. She had called the police. I knew how this would end. I’d seen it happen many times before. I knew if the police came and saw a “Leb” apparently bashing a white man, they would put him in jail. And us, too, if we were anywhere near them. Talal and I stood up and went outside. Youssef and the other guy were pushing each other around. We dragged Youssef away before the police came.

We may not have ended up in prison that night, but it certainly felt like we might as well have escaped from one if the derisive looks people gave us on the way out of the restaurant was anything to go by.