My grief for the victims of the New Zealand mosque attack | 15 March 2019

‘We belong to Allah and to Allah we shall return’. Muslims around the world, including me, are now reciting the verse from the Quran that Muslims say on hearing of the death of a fellow believer. Taking in news of the murder of 49 worshippers at a mosque in sleepy, safe New Zealand at the hands of a white supremacist, this verse came to my lips again and again.

I felt the same grief when I watched the attacks on 9/11 unfolding. In the days afterwards, I also struggled with the reaction of others in Riyadh, where I was living at the time, and their shameful sense of schadenfreude. This was hard to deal with as I struggled to comprehend the attacks on New York, a city I love and call home. Four years later on a steamy July day in London, providence stopped me from boarding the tube to get to work at Newham General Hospital in east London.