25 years since 9/11, Canada is not further ahead on tackling Islamophobia: advocates

TORONTO – Twenty-five years after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center spurred widespread surveillance and hostility against Muslims around the world, the work of countering Islamophobia in Canada still rests largely on those it targets, a major Islamic organization said in the lead-up to the anniversary.

As Muslims suddenly found their faith wrongly linked with extremist acts in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, many Islamic institutions in Canada responded to the growing fear and suspicion by trying to build bridges with their communities, opening their doors to neighbours and joining vigils for the nearly 3,000 people killed. 

Those efforts were fuelled partly by a feeling of “collective responsibility to push back at somebody trying to hijack our faith,” and partly by the need to ensure ordinary Canadians and policymakers had a real perspective of Islam outside of what they heard on the news, said Safwan Choudhry, spokesperson for the Ahmadiyya Muslim Jama’at Canada, an Islamic organization with dozens of mosques throughout the country. 

“There wasn’t any other platform or narrative available, so you had no choice but to open your homes and open your mosques and send your youth out to blood banks and talk to people and be available wherever the public dialogue was,” Choudhry said, adding that some of those initiatives continue today.

While there are now far more avenues for outreach and public education, in many ways, “it feels as though nothing has changed and we’re not further ahead,” he said.

Much like after 9/11, Choudhry said, “(we) recognize that that responsibility lies with us, that we have to do more. … We have to do much more to try and stop this acceleration towards a much, much more dangerous and a much more destructive condition around the world.”

The anniversary comes as the annual number of hate crimes against Muslims remains higher than it was five years ago — 204 were reported to police forces across Canada in 2025, compared with 142 in 2021 — with some experts and advocates pointing to rising tensions amid the Israel-Hamas war as a key contributor, as well as social media’s role as a powerful vector for harmful rhetoric.

At the same time, some experts say, hard-won progress in addressing anti-Muslim discrimination is being rolled back with the elimination earlier this year of the office of the special representative on combating Islamophobia, a position advocates hailed as historic when it was created three years ago.

The decision to replace the office with a broader advisory council on equality and inclusion signals Islamophobia is no longer on policy agenda for the federal government – a “slap in the face” for Muslims who have consistently been sharing their experiences with discrimination over the last 25 years, said Fahad Ahmad, an assistant professor of criminology at Toronto Metropolitan University.

“There was this hope that … we were turning the corner in terms of addressing Islamophobia, but I do think the (Mark) Carney government has shown that actually we don’t really care about that,” said Ahmad, who co-wrote an op-ed denouncing the office’s elimination with his colleague Asmaa Malik, a journalism professor at the university.

Several new laws quickly enacted by the current Liberal administration, including a hate-crime law that creates new offences for intimidating or obstructing someone outside a religious or cultural institution, suggest a “strengthening of the national security state” and a sidelining of any scrutiny toward these government institutions and their role in perpetuating Islamophobic practices and policies, he said.

A spokesperson for Minister of Canadian Identity and Culture Marc Miller said the new advisory council has a clear mandate to help guide the government’s efforts to combat racism and hate “in all their forms,” including the “distinct and persistent challenges posed by Islamophobia in our communities and institutions.”

As well, Hermine Landry wrote in an email, the Combating Hate Act passed this year “directly addresses hate-motivated violence and the targeting of communities” while significantly strengthening the Criminal Code through the creation of new offences. The work is part of a plan launched two years ago to empower communities and prevent hate including Islamophobia, she said. 

“We will remain steadfast in our commitment to combat all forms of hatred and racism and to build a Canada where everyone can thrive and feel a sense of belonging,” Landry wrote. 

As the United States’ war on terror gripped global politics in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, Canada brought in new security measures at airports and borders and passed controversial anti-terrorism legislation that created several new offences and for years allowed police to detain people they believed were about to commit an act of terror without first obtaining a warrant. 

The government’s security certificate system also allowed it to detain and deport non-Canadians considered a risk to the country based on classified evidence not shared with the accused. The system sparked lengthy legal battles and was struck down by Canada’s top court in 2008 before the government amended the law.

Meanwhile, hate crimes against Muslims spiked, with the Canadian Islamic Congress reporting 173 incidents in the year that followed 9/11, up nearly 1,600 per cent over the 11 incidents the organization recorded the previous year.

“That period, like 2001-2006, was a really heightened dark period where, you know, I think this balance between rights and security was trying to find footing,” Ahmad said, recalling an atmosphere of anxiety that dominated the era.

Later, as prosecutions under the new terror laws began, “essentially, terrorism became analogous with Muslims and Islam,” Ahmad said. The vast majority of terror trials have involved ideology related to international groups such as al-Qaida or the Islamic State, even as security officials increasingly recognize the threat of right-wing extremism and white supremacy.

For years, Muslim community leaders sought to engage with Ottawa but were met with resistance, Ahmad said. The 2015 federal election that propelled Justin Trudeau to power brought “a bit of a shift,” more of an openness to engage on Islamophobia, he said. 

Then, two mass killings of Canadian Muslims sent shock waves through the country and set many on edge amid renewed fears for their safety.

A gunman opened fire at a mosque in a Quebec City suburb in January 2017, killing six men and critically injuring five others in a matter of minutes. Though Trudeau denounced the killings as a terrorist attack, the gunman wasn’t charged with terrorism offences and pleaded guilty to six counts of first-degree murder and six counts of attempted murder. 

More than four years later, a self-described white nationalist mowed down a Muslim family in London, Ont., with his truck, killing four of them and injuring another. The murder of the Afzaal family as they were on an evening stroll in June 2021 scarred the southwestern Ontario community and left some Muslims afraid to go outside in traditional clothes. 

A judge later deemed the attack terrorism — the first case to recognize terrorism on grounds of white supremacist ideology. Nathaniel Veltman, the man convicted of first-degree murder in the family’s deaths, was a “voracious consumer of extremist right wing internet content” who wanted to intimidate the Muslim community, the judge found.

At the time, Amira Elghawaby, then Canada’s special representative on combating Islamophobia, said the terrorism finding would have “profound reverberations across Canada” as she called for urgent efforts to tackle the proliferation of online hate. 

“It wasn’t until this massacre at a place of worship (in 2017), the first and hopefully last massacre at a place of worship in our country, happened that Canadians really, finally, I think, began to understand the degree in which the hatred of Muslims was proliferating online, as well as in public discourse,” she said in a recent interview. 

“And then it actually took the attack on the Afzaal family … for there to be fuller consensus across political lines that Islamophobia needed to be addressed in our country,” said Elghawaby, a former journalist and human rights advocate.

More recently, more than 21 violent incidents against Muslims have been documented over four months, including one in which a mosque in Winnipeg was shot with a pellet gun while worshippers and children were inside, she said. 

“I often think to myself, thank goodness that we didn’t have the same online climate (in 2001) that we have today because there was an ability to actually create sort of local connection and reconnection and allyship in our communities after 9/11, which was so valuable and helped to stem the hate,” she said.

“We were hoping that 25 years on … our kids wouldn’t have to deal with the stigma, with the suspicion, with all that we had to do at that time,” said Elghawaby, who was working at the CBC when the twin towers fell. 

In the last few years, and particularly since the Oct. 7, 2023 attacks on Israel that marked the beginning of the Israel-Hamas war, “we have seen this re-emergence of scapegoating entire communities, of looking at our communities within a framework of supporting terrorism simply for speaking up for Palestinian human rights and international law,” she said.

During her tenure as Canada’s first and only special representative on combating Islamophobia, Elghawaby’s office accomplished “historic” work, including the publication of a comprehensive guide on understanding and fighting Islamophobia, she said. Canada, which led the G7 in terms of hate-motivated killings of Muslims, was seen as having taken a leadership role in addressing the issue, she said.

Another report commissioned by her office examined how Muslim charities continued to face disproportionate scrutiny under anti-terrorism and anti-money laundering frameworks, she said.

Asked about the government’s decision to scrap the office in favour of an advisory council, Elghawaby said there were “valuable efforts” to promote inclusion and combat hate within the federal government, including the anti-racism strategy and the anti-hate action plan. 

For Asmaa Malik, the TMU journalism professor, getting rid of the office marks “a really huge step towards even dismantling the concept of Islamophobia,” she said.

Malik, who is researching media coverage of hate crimes against Muslims with Ahmad, said it contributes to what sociologist Jasmin Zine has dubbed Canada’s “national amnesia” regarding Islamophobia.

“As long as there’s no one to actually help account for this and you don’t name these patterns, then the work of white supremacy is happening,” she said in a recent interview.

Choudhry, the spokesperson for Ahmadiyya Muslim Jama’at Canada, said that while offices and institutions play an important role in tackling hate, they will never be enough to solve the issue altogether.

“We understood early on that combating Islamophobia could not be left to the government or even policymakers, the ultimate responsibility rests with Muslims,” he said.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 10, 2026.