Azzi: America: Where no one shall make us afraid

As Ramadan was coming to a close this week I found myself thinking of people who have touched my life, including some whom I did not personally know but whose experiences may have intersected with mine.

I remembered Nabra Hassanen, a 17-year-old girl from Reston, Virginia who, during Ramadan in 2017, was walking with 15 teenage friends near the All Dulles Area Muslim Mosque when - allegedly over a road rage incident - she was abducted, raped and murdered.

Though prosecutors declined to pursue hate crime charges, her assailant, Darwin Martinez Torres, was tried, convicted and sentenced to eight consecutive life sentences without the possibility of parole.

This weekend, as I celebrate - along with over 1.5 billion Muslims around the world - the joyous feast of Eid al Fitr which marks the end of Ramadan, I will remember Nabra among so many other children, not just because it was a tragic and hateful loss of life but because such losses seem to be multiplying.

I love Ramadan and annually I look forward to its arrival and challenge.

Ramadan, one of the five pillars of Islam, is an obligatory month of fasting for Muslims able to fulfill its obligations. It is meant to be spent in contemplation and prayer. It's a time to turn inward in reflection, upward toward God, outward toward all others. It’s a time to heal relationships, to re-establish paths to goodness and hospitality and this past month has been a wonderful contemplation and journey of worship and wonder.

Ramadan is a time to affirm that we will resist those who deliberately target the vulnerable, the weak, the homeless; resist those who believe that one color, or one religion - theirs - is deserving of more privilege than others.

This week, though, as I prepare to celebrate, my enthusiasm to embrace the Eid is weighted by memories too profound to ignore, too recent to forget.

I will remember that this week is the anniversary of the 1993 siege of Waco which resulted in the deaths of 86 Branch Davidian cultists, including 24 children.

I'll also remember the anniversary of the 1995 terrorist bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City which killed 168 on the second anniversary of the end of the Waco siege.

I will remember, too, the anniversary this week of the 1999 Columbine Massacre where 12 students and one teacher were murdered.

I remember, too, this week's anniversary of the 2013 Boston Marathon terrorist bombing by the Tsarnaev brothers.

I remember them all because such depredations continue, ad nauseam, and I fear that to forget the victims is to let the perpetrators - and those complicit with violence - off the hook.

I might not have thought of Nabra this week if I had not learned of sixteen-year-old Ralph Yarl being seriously injured in a shooting in Kansas City, Mo. after he rang the wrong doorbell while picking up younger siblings from a play date.

I might not have thought of Nabra if I had not learned of Kaylin Gillis being shot dead in Hebron, New York while a passenger in a car that had pulled into a wrong driveway.

I might not have thought of Nabra if I had not learned of cheerleader Peyton Washington being shot and critically injured after mistakenly trying to enter the wrong car in Elgin, Texas.

Today I think of Nabra as I think of my friends and their children, as I think of America's future eagerly going off to learn in our nation's schools and being returned to loved ones, sadly, in body bags.

I think of the senseless and irreplaceable loss being visited upon loved ones and communities.

I mourn for the victims of the gratuitous violence being tolerated by too many Americans.

“Verily we belong to God, and truly to God shall we return."

I remember being disquieted after Waco, Oklahoma City, Columbine, and the Boston Marathon. I remember that after 9/11 I feared the rise of xenophobia, jingoism and wars of choice, of American hubris and untempered responses.

I remember being alarmed about promises of Muslim bans and Mexican rapists; alarmed at racists and antisemites being embraced in the Public Square.

In what kind of world do we continue to tolerate the death of Americans whose cardinal sin, it appears, is that they were non-white? In whose name, I wonder, will the memories of Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice, Ahmaud Arbery, Sandra Bland, Philando Castile and their brothers and sisters persist?

One of my favorite verses in the Qur'an is "We have created you all out of a male and a female, and have made you into nations and tribes, so that you might come to know one another...."> (Q 49:13.Asad)

I love it because it's mirrored, I believe, in America's foundational beliefs, that all peoples, regardless of origin and caste, regardless of color and belief, are equal, and are gathered together in pursuit of Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.

I love it because it is mirrored in George Washington's 1790 letter to the Jews of Truro Synagogue where he speaks of a nation where we shall all sit under our own vines and fig trees and no one shall make us afraid.

Where no one shall make us afraid.

This article originally appeared on Portsmouth Herald: Azzi: America: Where no one shall make us afraid