I didn't believe in fairy tales, in charming princes rescuing damsels in distress from unfortunate circumstances. I have never been that naïve. I also had trouble believing that there is good in the world, until somebody sent me an angel to save me. My name is Aradhana Christina Sharif, and I came into the world on February 4, 1989. I was born in the City of Turbat, within the Balochistan province of Pakistan. My parents, Joseph Sharif and Pooja Bukkhari-Sharif moved to Ontario, Canada, in the summer of 2002. We're a Pakistani Christian family and life wasn't always kind to us as religious minorities in a mostly Muslim county.
When I first set foot in Ontario, Canada, I was full of hope. Finally, we had a new place to live where we wouldn't be persecuted for our Christian faith! We tried getting into the United States of America but couldn't because the country developed a strong distrust of immigrants, especially the ones from Muslim nations, after the events of 9/11. Given what they endured at the hands of Saudi terrorists, I couldn't blame them one bit but I wish they wouldn't put all foreigners in the same boat. There are peaceful Muslims living in Western countries, and there are non-white and non-Muslim immigrants coming into Western nations with the best of intentions. Don't paint all of us with the same brush. We're not all the same!
Sadly, that's exactly what they did. It didn't matter to American immigrant officials that my family and I were pious Christians. They saw the word Pakistan in our papers and jumped to all sorts of conclusions. Since we looked like the Arabs, the Persians, the North Africans and the South Asians, the reviled "international terrorist type" they coldly turned us away. The fact that we suffered for our Christian faith and our belief in democracy back in Pakistan didn't matter to them. We came to Canada because, well, the only alternative was to return to Pakistan, where Muslim men who rape Christian girls and Hindu women got a pat on the back from the police. Thanks but no thanks.
My mother Pooja Bukkhari-Sharif once told me about how she almost got raped by a Pakistani Muslim security guard at the University of Balochistan in the town of Quetta. This incident is from when she was much younger. The security guy, whom she referred to as Tariq the creep, pursued her endlessly. There aren't a lot of Christians in the province of Balochistan and Tariq found my mother intriguing because she went around with her head uncovered, like many Christian women and Hindu women do in Pakistan. A lot of liberated Pakistani Muslim women go about unveiled too but their families usually bug them about it. Pakistani Muslim men are a chauvinist bunch, and they haven't taken too keenly to the advent of women's rights in the country, and Pakistani Christian women have been at the forefront of that movement. If it weren't for the timely intervention of my father, who was one of mom's classmates at the time, the unthinkable would have happened. My mom would have been another statistic thanks to Tariq. Another Pakistani Christian woman victimized with impunity by a Pakistani Muslim male. My dad beat the living daylights out of Tariq, and the fool got the message. Thanks to this harrowing encounter, my parents met, and became inseparable.
My mom makes light of the event, though I can tell it still haunts her when I look into her eyes as she talks of it. If it weren't for that brute your Baba ( father) the shyest man in the world never would have spoken to me, she laughed. Dad would shrug and smile when she said that. My father Joseph Sharif has always been a man of few words. He's six-foot-one, somewhat chubby, with light bronze skin, curly black hair and dark eyes. He and mama are complete opposites. My mother is tall and slender, with dark bronze skin, curly black hair and light brown eyes. She's darker-skinned than my father or myself, and when we visited the Republic of India back in the summer of 1998, people often asked her if she was from Tamil Nadu.
From what I hear, the darker-skinned men and women of Indian society still get treated like shit, thanks to a mentality that harkens to the days of the Caste System, even though India touts itself the world's largest democratic nation. In some ways, Pakistan is more progressive than India. If you're dark-skinned and Muslim in Pakistan, you're treated better than the most light-skinned Christian member of Pakistani society. They're obsessed with religion down there, not race, unlike the rest of the world. It's only in Western societies that people seem to think religion doesn't matter. I can't think of anything that matters more, actually.
I sometimes wish I could shake some sense about this fact into the naïve minds of my Western friends. There's a growing Muslim minority in places like the provinces of Quebec and Ontario, Canada, and the state of Michigan, USA. What the Americans and Canadians don't realize is that Muslims play nice until they have the necessary population numbers, then they make war upon non-Muslims with a fervor and fury that's terrifying to behold. Instead of promoting Judeo-Christian values and democracy worldwide, Americans and Canadians continue to turn a blind eye to the hidden powers that are attacking their society from within and without. Western Muslims support non-Western Muslims in every way but Western Christians don't support Christian minorities living in places like Pakistan, Afghanistan, Syria, Egypt, Lebanon and so on. I mean, I've met crucifix-wearing white female university students who date Muslim male students from Egypt and have no idea that the persecution of Coptic Christians in Egypt is supported by Islamist clerics in their homeland. Crazy, right?
Anyhow, enough about politics. My parents and I tried our best to adjust to our new lives in Ontario. Canadian culture and society were quite confusing to us at first. Canada is a mostly Christian country where the people prefer to keep religion out of public life. A multicultural country where anti-immigrant sentiment and virulent racism are openly and unapologetically expressed most of the time. I've gotten called a "Paki bitch" while walking around with friends in the City of Toronto, Ontario. A white guy called me "Muslim scum" on the bus. If the fool had paid attention he'd notice that I wore a crucifix around my neck, the same one my mother had given me in Pakistan when I was younger. My faith in Jesus Christ has gotten me through many trials and tribulations, but Canadian racism truly tested me.
