College de Maisonneuve in Montreal on March 12, 2015.Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail
In a corner of Montreal's Collège de Maisonneuve was a former emergency stairwell turned into a space for yoga and prayers.
It was there that the anger, alienation and bitterness of a handful of young Muslims hardened and led 11 of them to try to join jihad last year.
The slide into extremism of that cluster of young Montrealers has been documented in a just-released study that details how the polarizing debate about the place of Muslims in Quebec and the behind-the-scenes influence of "shady charismatic figures" played key roles in their radicalization.
In an 84-page report made public on Friday, the Centre for the Prevention of Radicalization Leading to Violence underlined that those 11 Maisonneuve students, who came from immigrant families, superficially looked well integrated.
Their parents were only moderately religious, they scored good marks in school and had promising futures.
However, their feeling of estrangement, search for identity and even their altruism eventually pushed them toward hard-line views.
The analytical report came at the instigation of Collège de Maisonneuve, where in the past year five students secretly flew to Syria, four more were intercepted at the airport and two others were detained on terrorism charges.
Friends and relatives of the 11 students, along with other students who considered leaving, were interviewed as part of the study.
Security concerns have been acute since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States, but the first wave of Quebeckers left for Syria and Iraq at the end of 2013, the report noted.
One catalyst was the civil war that started in Syria in 2011, but the report also underscores the poisonous social climate in Quebec stemming from the debate on reasonable accommodation and the Charter of Values, a proposed 2013 policy by the Parti Québécois government that would have banned public servants from wearing conspicuous religious signs such as Muslim head veils.
Young Muslim Quebeckers felt that the debate had turned into an attack on their community, the report said, adding that it compounded their personal experiences of being bullied or attacked because of their faith.
Several of the 11 aspired to become doctors or nurses, but that hope also increased their desire to go to Syria, in the belief that they would help war victims.
There were also another key factor: the role of influential figures who feed the malaise of those youth and nudged them toward a purer form of Islam.
Those influential people stoked the anger of the young Maisonneuve students, convincing them that their Muslim identity was not compatible with life in a Western society, the report said.
"They only share their most radical ideas with a chosen few, keeping their true mission hidden in public and displaying a reassuring façade that poses no implicit threat. Like certain sects and fringe groups, they adopt an elitist system in which only a 'privileged' few are permitted to know about the religious interpretations deemed too 'radical' for the group."
The document does not name those influencers, but the PQ lawmaker Agnès Maltais alleged last year in the legislature that one such person is the controversial Muslim teacher Adil Charkaoui.
Mr. Charkaoui was arrested under an immigration security certificate in 2003 but later freed after a long court battle. After his 2009 release, the Morocco-born Mr. Charkaoui obtained his Canadian citizenship.
The report quotes a friend of several young people who left or tried to leave for Syria, who said of one influencer: "I found a lot of articles on him online that said he was a terrorist. But I quickly saw that wasn't true. He is really kind and patient with me. I realized that the media were focusing on him for no reason. If he isn't in prison, it's because he hasn't done anything."
At Maisonneuve, a key location for that radicalization process was a space called La Source, initially earmarked as a prayer area. Without school supervision, the Source became a spot where a handful of hard-liners imposed ideological preachings and opened the space to people outside the school during Friday prayers, the report said.
"Cases of radicalization are neither a coincidence nor a forgone conclusion: They are always the result of a weakness in an individual's personal makeup that is rapidly exploited by propaganda," the report said.
"The jihadist activist movement cannot be combatted with passive tolerance."
Tu Thanh Ha