When a Muslim dies

I use Facebook for personal reasons. Unlike other social media platforms which showcase my work, Facebook is more for connecting with my family and joining groups related to my life or my children. So, it came as a surprise when I saw a Facebook post by the newspaper The Mirror. It showed a smiling Muslim teenager in a white topi, beneath the headline: “‘Exceptional’ schoolboy killed in crash while cycling home from mosque”. Muhammed Ismail Alum, 16, had been struck by a car as he cycled home from fajr prayers at the Green Lane Masjid in Birmingham.

 The post attracted over 2,500 comments. Most were gloating, some outright celebrating the boy’s death. A sample: “Ah well glad it’s the weekend!” “One less to fund.” “One less to feed.” “Should of [sic] used his magic carpet”, in reference to his bike. And a classic concern about the boy’s death dressed in outright mockery: “If we closed all the mosques, he wouldn’t of [sic] gone to the mosque and would still be alive. Another reason to close all mosques”. Scattered among them were a handful of comments expressing condolences, and a few asking why comments were even enabled on posts like this, given how reliably they draw racist abuse. To accompany the vile comments, of the 2600 reactions the post received, over 300 were laughing emojis. In comparison, another story posted by The Mirror was of a 12-year-old boy, Eoin Doyle, killed when a train hit the car he was travelling. Every comment was of condolences. There was no mockery, no laughter, no debate about whether he deserved to die. The only difference was that Muhammed was Muslim.

The mockery of Muslim death is now strangely familiar. In August, three Palestinian Muslim family members drowned at Shoreham-by-Sea, after getting into difficulties when swimming. Their names were Hussam El-Khawas (55), Zeina Alayan (37) and Sara, who was 14 years old. Three days later, Saja El-Khawas also died after being in critical condition following the accident. She was only six years old. The family, who were from the Rashidieh refugee camp, established a home in north-west London. A Facebook page called ‘UK’s Top Scammer’s’ posted the story with house music accompanying the post. Most of the reactions to the post were laughing emojis, with comments including ‘good news’, ‘the women were probably dragged down by the weight of their clothing’ and ‘It’s called karma. They didn’t have to come here. And they couldn’t be rescued. Because the RNLI were out bringing their friends and family here lol’. The callousness in these comments is only representative of the broader anti-migrant, anti-Muslim sentiment sweeping Britain’s landscape, where Muslim lives should never be accepted. Only a few days ago, masked ‘protestors’ marched towards the Port of Dover and Portsmouth to stop migrant boats, if anything as a performative gesture to harden their own convictions. These are the same masked protestors who would happily ban the niqab, in defence of everyone needing to show their face.

Even babies are not spared. When The Sun, infamously known for its negative coverage of Muslims and migrants, and of course their hideous coverage of Hillsborough, posted a story of a Muslim newborn baby who died in hospital, we saw the same pattern emerge. As expected, some of the comments were as follows: ‘Why is she in our hospitals. Detain, deport!’, ‘Should of [sic] stayed in her country instead of draining NHS resources’, and ‘Then don’t come here, it’s simple your baby would be alive if you didn’t came [sic] by boat’. Muslim death then, it seems, can only be read through the lens of anti-migrant hostility. If even a newborn cannot escape the wrath of the digital sphere in death, then what chance was it given to thrive?

The genocide in Gaza, which livestreamed death and horror on our screens, made Muslim death an inescapable daily reality. Muslim death was almost a daily expectation, huge in its numbers. As written here by Maura Finkelstein, we in the West have become so accustomed to Muslims being slaughtered. I share these sentiments and would go further in saying that Muslim death in any way is now considered fair game in the face of rising fascism.  

What, then, is our responsibility to each other? With technofascism here to stay for the foreseeable future, and platforms rewarding outrage and indifference to cruelty, the reactions to these posts are not a fringe phenomenon, but a measure of where we stand as a society. As migrants and non-white communities are vilified both online and in physical space, we see, in death, how this unfolds.

And so, I ask again. What do we owe each other in life and in death?