Episode: 48 · Guest: Houda Mzioudet · Full Episode #48
Houda Mzioudet, a Black Tunisian researcher who has lived in seven or more countries, made a comparison that inverts the usual hierarchy of safety: she felt more secure conducting fieldwork in post-conflict Libya than she did living as a visibly Muslim woman in Quebec.
The statement is not rhetorical provocation. Houda conducted research in Tawergha — a predominantly Black Libyan town whose residents had been displaced en masse in 2011 by Misrata-based militias in what has been widely documented as racially motivated collective punishment. During her fieldwork, she removed her hijab to appear "African American" rather than local, reducing the risk of being identified as a researcher working on a politically sensitive subject. The dangers were real, specific, and navigable. She knew what they were and could plan around them.
In Quebec, the threat was different. The islamophobia she encountered was ambient, institutional, and daily. It was not concentrated in a single armed group or a specific geographic zone. It was distributed across interactions — in public spaces, in institutions, in the texture of daily life. Quebec's secularism laws, which restrict the wearing of religious symbols by public employees, created a legal and social environment in which Houda's hijab marked her as a problem to be managed rather than a person to be accommodated.
The comparison does not argue that Libya is safe. Libya is not safe. The comparison argues that the quality of danger matters. In Libya, the risks were legible — she could identify who posed a threat, assess the level of danger, and make decisions accordingly. In Quebec, the hostility was diffuse and deniable. There was no single source to avoid, no specific zone to exit. The danger was everywhere and nowhere, which made it, in Houda's experience, more psychologically corrosive than the overt risks of a conflict zone.