Mourners embrace at a vigil on the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill campus for three Muslim students killed in their home in Chapel Hill, N.C., Feb. 11, 2015.TRAVIS DOVE/The New York Times
It's a 20-minute drive along Route 501 from the University of North Carolina to Duke. The two schools share a history, a geography and one of the great rivalries in American college sports.
About a month ago, a strange controversy broke out at Duke. The university had planned to allow Muslim students to broadcast the call to prayer from the chapel bell tower once a week. After a flood of complaints, threats from donors and security concerns, the school backed down. For some Muslim American students, it was a small but telling indignity – a reminder that a significant portion of their neighbours considered a core portion of their identity, if not malicious, at least alien.
The Duke controversy is one of numerous such indignities and frustrations expressed by Muslims in the United States over the past 14 years – all of which seemed to reach a boiling point on Tuesday after three Muslim students were shot dead in Chapel Hill, near the University of North Carolina. Depending on whose narrative you believe, the killing was the result of a parking-spot dispute or the work of a rabid anti-religion zealot. But the visceral public response by countless American Muslims is about something more, and exposes yet another deep fissure in the country's cultural landscape.
"What this revealed is the deep, existing trauma and pain – and I would say anger – of … Muslim Americans, especially post 9/11," said Wajahat Ali, a writer and co-host of Al Jazeera America's The Stream, and a family friend of one of the victims.
"So many American Muslims feel marginalized into this reductive narrative of us versus them, Islam versus the West. Muslim Americans, even though born in this country and part and parcel of this mosaic, are still seen as other … and their narratives don't matter unless they're framed in a national-security context."
The three students – 23-year-old Deah Shaddy Barakat, his 21-year-old wife, Yusor Mohammad Abu-Salha, and her sister, 19-year-old Razan Mohammad Abu-Salha – were shot dead Tuesday evening in an apartment complex near UNC. The man alleged to have killed them, a 46-year-old self-described "anti-theist" named Craig Hicks, is now in police custody.
According to Chapel Hill police, the killings appear to stem from a dispute between Mr. Hicks and his neighbours over a parking spot. But in the immediate aftermath of the shooting, countless people flooded social networks around the globe with messages calling the shooting a hate crime. Within hours, #MuslimLivesMatter – derived from the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter that was used frequently after the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., last summer – was among the most widely used on Twitter.
Among the millions of posts about the killing, there quickly appeared clear themes. Many users wondered how much more news coverage the killings would have received had it been a Muslim man who'd shot three white students dead. Others asked white Americans to vocally condemn the alleged killer, and make an effort to find out how he became radicalized – a sardonic reversal of something many Muslims complain they are continually asked to do. Many, including some of the victims' family members, rejected the claim that the killing was prompted solely by a dispute over a parking space, calling it an obvious hate crime.
(It is a testament to the perceived consequences of the phrase "hate crime" that the alleged killer's wife held a press conference to assure the public that the murders of which her husband is accused were in fact not motivated by hatred for the victims' religion. In a bit of a non sequitur, she backed this claim by mentioning that many of Mr. Hicks's posts on Facebook were in support of such causes as abortion and gay rights. She did not mention his many anti-religion posts, but their content suggests one tortuous defence may ultimately be that the killings he is alleged to have committed were not hate crimes against his Muslim victims because he hates all religious equally).
In many ways, the volume and tenor of the Muslim American community's reaction to the killing is similar to the outcry that sparked the "Black Lives Matter" movement. Multifaceted, it is nonetheless a response anchored in the belief that injustices, when perpetrated against victims of a particular minority, are simply considered less serious. But whereas the Black Lives Matter movement drew on hundreds of years of examples, the Muslim-American response is focused almost solely on the events of the past 14 years.
Broadly, the grievances of many Muslim Americans exist in one of two categories – the grand geopolitical outrages over two full-scale wars and their myriad repercussions, and the more immediate, day-to-day frustrations to which belong such issues as the Duke prayer controversy, the uproar over the so-called Ground Zero Mosque in New York City and the spike in accusatory harassment that tends to follow every barbarity committed by terror groups half a world away.
The two categories are related, but for most Muslim Americans, the former is relatively abstract – the chances of any American being shipped off to the Guantanamo Bay detention camps today is essentially nil. But the latter complaints – harassment, accusation, a sense of otherness – are not. And, once extrapolated, such concerns reach their sad apex in the prospect of a hateful neighbour at the front door, gun in hand. Like the killing of Mr. Brown in Ferguson last summer, the murder of the three Chapel Hill students is a single rock that, dislodged, triggers a landslide.
At risk of being overshadowed by the broad venting of frustration are the three victims of Tuesday's shootings, who by all accounts led remarkable, albeit tragically brief lives. Razan Abu-Salha was a sophomore at North Carolina State's college of design; her older sister Yusor had recently graduated from the school, and had been accepted into the dentistry program at the University of North Carolina. Yusor's husband, Mr. Barakat, also a dentistry student, was active in both local and international charitable causes. He recently helped with a drive to provide dental supplies to homeless people in Durham, N.C., and was instrumental in a mammoth effort to provide dental care to Syrian refugees – an initiative that will now be re-named in his honour.
Mr. Barakat and Mrs. Abu-Salha had been married less than two months when they were killed.
"I know everyone always says "they were the nicest people" when something like this happens, but in the Muslim community, these were role models," said Dalia Kaakour, a student at the University of North Carolina and a friend of all three victims. "If you asked me to pick, I would pick them."