Editor’s Note: Khaled A. Beydoun is the author of “American Islamophobia: Understanding the Roots and Rise of Fear” and a law professor at the University of Arkansas-Fayetteville School of Law. The views expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion on CNN.
It has been four days since a white supremacist allegedly carried out a massacre in Christchurch, and I still do not know his name.
However, in the days and hours since the ungodly attacks inside the Al Noor and Linwood mosques, I have made it my commitment to memorize the names, become familiar with the stories and celebrate the lives of the 50 victims. Doing so enables me – and potentially many others – to absorb the extent of the tragedy and the importance of preventing similar massacres from occurring again.
It was Friday morning when I learned about the deadliest attack in New Zealand’s history. Four hours before I, too, planned on attending mosque – which halfway around the world became the site of the massacre that claimed the lives of the victims that shared my faith. That familiar rush of adrenaline mixed with fear that follows every terror attack drove me toward the television, where news anchors fixated on the shooter.
His age, his origins, his inspirations, his white supremacist ideology and vision, the particulars about his weaponry, his scowling image and his name were plastered across the screen.
The Muslim victims, on the other hand, were mentioned in vague and faceless terms. While difficult to provide specifics about the victims in the immediate aftermath, there’s a deep history of slighting the stories of Muslim victims of backlash, war and terrorism. This has perpetuated the idea that Muslims are a monolithic and faceless flock, when occupying the role of the villain and, even more commonly, the victims.
I stopped and turned away. Shifting my attention away from the terrorist and entirely toward the victims.
I made a decision that Friday afternoon – first, to intentionally ignore the profile and name of the terrorist, and, second, to honor and pay tribute to the 50 victims. I began researching various sources – local news outlets and first-person testimonies from Christchurch – to learn about the fallen Muslims, and carefully pieced together profiles of the first identified victims on my Instagram account, and later, as part of an ongoing thread on Twitter.
My objective was simple: to humanize those reduced to statistics in the wake of the massacre and to flesh out their stories for readers across the world. For far too long, American audiences have been largely unsympathetic to slain Muslims, and Muslim victimhood at large, and hide them from plain sight.
Saying their names, and telling their stories as best I could, would erode that apathy – and help erode the Islamophobia being trumpeted at the very top of our government – in the form of “Islam hates us” rhetoric from the then-president candidate Donald Trump and a standing travel ban upheld by the Supreme Court, which in its first formation only targeted Muslim majority countries.
The process of immersing myself in learning about people, who were killed for adhering to my very faith was an emotional journey like no other. The first profile I sketched was Naeem Rashid – the 50-year-old father who rushed at the terrorist, with his bare hands, after witnessing his son Talha, 21, gunned down feet away from him. Both father and son were killed.
I told the story of 3-year-old Mucad Ibrahim, the youngest of the Christchurch victims. The wide-eyed and playful Mucad attended Friday prayer with his older brother Abdi, whose parents fled Somalia to make a better life for their children. Yet New Zealand was no safe haven and the Al-Noor mosque no safe space for young Mucad.
After profiling the first identified victims, I learned that my effort to counter Islamophobia, which caricatures Muslims and denies Muslim humanity in both life and in death, and which I have documented in my book, was far more personal and more emotionally penetrating than I could ever anticipate.
I felt an affinity with the victims that superseded shared religion. I saw my nieces and mother, cousins and friends, in the still portraits of the victims I posted on social media. They evolved into multidimensional beings, real people with families and jobs, hobbies and dreams.
The connections I developed with the victims, through writing their profiles, was precisely what I wanted for the audiences reading them on social media. If people knew some of who Rashid and Ibrahim were, or learned about how Husna Ahmed jumped in front of her husband Farid, bound to a wheelchair, while the terrorist aimed in his direction and sacrificed her life to save his – people would care.
Regardless of what religion she or her husband adhered to, people would care if they could match faces, names and stories to both the heroism and hell that unfolded in Christchurch.
I kept going, penning profiles of victim after victim, paying tribute to the murdered Muslims that the mainstream media reduced into statistics. The thread evolved into a tapestry of narratives that highlighted the racial and ethnic diversity of the Christchurch Muslim community, comprised of gradual updates from various news sites and intimate details provided by family members and friends of the victims who contacted me.
The profiles of the victims, which I called #50Lives, were shared hundreds of thousands of times. And, just today, Prime Minister of New Zealand Jacinda Ardern echoed the motive of the thread, “He is a terrorist, he is a criminal, he is an extremist, but he will, when I speak, be nameless, and to others I implore you: Speak the names of those who were lost rather than the name of the man who took them. He may have sought notoriety, but we in New Zealand will give him nothing – not even his name.”
What started off as an attempt to humanize Muslim victims in the aftermath of tragedy developed into something far more: a glimpse of what our media can one day become, if it takes the time to meticulously examine and humanize Muslim victims with the same care it dedicates to the terrorists who gunned them down.