“He was upset with the Muslims and swore at me before hitting me with a soda can,” he said. “The police failed to find him.”
“Driving cab in the U.S. was not easy either. Following several incidents of hostilities I decided to quit and move to Canada.”
Sajid moved to Surrey, British Columbia – a thriving, multicultural metropolis and the second largest city in the province – to rebuild his dream of a happy and prosperous life for his family. And they were content – until his twin daughters were accosted on their way home from school, subjected to obscenities, called terrorists, and blamed for the recent attacks on Mumbai.
Sajid has filed a report with police, and his daughters remain traumatized.
Tarik Kiani, a member of the Pakistan Canada Association and a community activist, disclosed that his organization has also received complaints of post-Mumbai harassment toward local Pakistanis.
“We have formed a committee to confirm these incidents and will act accordingly after establishing the truth,” he told the South Asian Post.
Muslim sisters Ayesha and Nida say they were walking home from their school in Surrey last week when several Indo-Canadian youngsters in a silver car began to follow them, hurling racial slurs through the vehicle’s open windows.
Between other obscenities, the youths called the 14-year-old girls terrorists and blamed them for the recent terror attacks on Mumbai that left at least 172 people dead, including two Canadians, in India’s financial capital.
The India government has blamed the attack on Pakistan-based Islamic extremists. With the war of words escalating between the two neighbouring countries, the aftershocks of the Mumbai attack are now being felt in Metro Vancouver, where Canadians of both Indian and Pakistani origin have long lived in relative harmony.
Since the two sisters wear the hijab, a scarf that some Muslim women wear to cover their heads, they were an easy target for what their Pakistani father, Sajid Hameed, believes was a hateful, ignorant reaction to the madness in Mumbai.
Inside the car were four to five youngsters, including some girls, according to Ayesha.

“They called us terrorists and shouted you are the ones who attacked Mumbai. They also made some scary noises,” she told the South Asian Post.
Ayesha believes all of the youngsters were Indo Canadians.
“We couldn’t see their full faces, as they had opened their car windows half way,” she recalled.
While Ayesha provided details of the incident, frightened Nida sat quietly in the presence of her parents.
“As soon as our mother reached us to pick us up in her car, those people fled from the scene,” says Ayesha, of the alarming incident last Wednesday.
The Tamanawis Secondary School Grade 9 students, who live with their father and their stepmother Uzma, are known as Taylor (Ayesha) and Tera (Nida) amongst their high school friends.
Influenced by step mom Uzma, a practicing Muslim, both sisters wear the hijab and traditional clothing. Their five-year-old stepbrother and year-old stepsister are also being raised in the Muslim tradition.
The family has suffered for its customs and beliefs, first being forced to flee the U.S. and now being victimized in multicultural Canada for events that occurred on the other side of the globe.
The incident involving his young daughters has shocked Sajid, who drives taxi for a Burnaby cab company.
“Never before has this kind of incident happened with my daughters, who keep their heads covered,” Sajid told the South Asian Post.
“We are absolutely concerned about the safety of our students,” said Tamanawis high school principal, Margaux Molson. “We have reported this incident to the RCMP. We have a very few details of this incident, but I believe from what we have been told that the people in the car were not in their early teens.”
Sajid claims that similar isolated incidents have happened with other local Muslim families too, but nobody is willing to come forward for fear of being further harassed.

His wife Uzma said that a Muslim woman she met at her daughter’s school has advised her own girls to stop wearing the hijab to avoid such incidents.
Tarik Kiani attributes these incidents to inflammatory and “biased reporting” by sections of the Indian and the Western media.
“Pakistan itself has become a victim of terrorism,” he said.
The India-born leader of the South Asian Network for Secularism and Democracy, former Simon Fraser University professor Hari Shrama, appealed to Indo-Canadian youth to maintain their cool.
“Not every Muslim is a terrorist,” he said. “The Mumbai attackers happened to be born in Pakistan but that does not mean that all Pakistanis support Islamic terrorism.’’
Sajid moved with his family from the U.S. to Canada in 2003 to escape racism. Ironically, he now finds himself protecting his daughters from the same sorts of targeted abuse he brought them to Canada to avoid.
“It’s unfortunate that we had to face such hate once again this time from the people of our own race,” he lamented.
Sajid remembers that his grandparents often talked about their Indian roots. India and Pakistan were one before the partition of 1947 that brought a Muslim Pakistan into being. Like many Muslims in northern India, Sajid’s grandparents shifted to Pakistan following the division.
Sajid says that he has “many good Sikh friends.” He even mastered Punjabi from them in California, where he played regularly for a Sikh hockey club.
“I still believe that this was a small incident and the Canadians and the Indians are largely peaceful people,” he said. “Our youngsters should not get carried away by the hostilities back home.”