I would like to offer a few words of great respect and love for a man of Masjid Al Noor in Christchurch who passed from this life in December 2022. But I must take care in this and offer relatively little detail for here was a man who wanted no publicity, who avoided cameras and media requests, and who carried himself with great dignity and patience with the wounds he sustained on 15 March 2019. His family continue to protect that desire for privacy.

And yet this dignity that so many of us were witness to over four years and, insha Allah (God willing), will be able to be witness to on the Day of Judgement invites us to a reflection. There are media headlines that can imply that Muslims are different in some troubling way; that we may even be unfeeling. Such notions do not hold.

One year after the mosque attacks in March 2019 a headline appeared “Muslims don’t want memorials” like a statement of fact, a seeming general truth for all who fit that label.

It may have originated from other places as well, but a journalist in Dunedin telephoned Masjid Al Noor and questioned the then women’s coordinator, who tried to explain. It was not our practice to have “memorial ceremonies”, she said, but we recognised that this was something that had a national significance. Still, the story went ahead, perhaps in a shape intended.

At a press conference on the day in March 2020 that the National Remembrance Ceremony was cancelled, I described it as “a headline in search of a story”. Headlines can do great mischief – they can fail to touch nuance and reach the human; fail to see, as here, that there are other ways of holding memory.

Abu Fadi Al-Seenawi was a Palestinian. His whakapapa – let’s use that word because it points to a notion of dignity in which all have a place of belonging – was to Nablus in the West Bank.

On that day in March 2019 he was shot twice and his left leg suffered great damage. Many times in the months and years after, people said to him, “Brother, you can sit while you are praying.” But he always made the full prostration (sujud in Arabic). Others were in worse situations, he felt.

If many of those wounded in the mosque and feeling the closeness of death were making their shahadah – their declaration of faith and witness – Abu Fadi told me that he was reciting to himself the first verses of Surah Al Mulk (Chapter 67 of the Quran).

In English translation, it says, “Hallowed be He in whose hand all dominion rests, since He has the power to will anything: He who has created death as well as life, so that He might put you to a test [and thus show] which of you is best in conduct, and [make you realise that] He alone is Almighty, truly Forgiving.” For me, this was humbling.

In December he succumbed to what is called a terminal illness though it’s often overlooked that life itself is “terminal wellness” – it has its term.

At his janazah funeral prayer the numbers were such that I confess it felt like a Friday prayer congregation. From all we knew of Abu Fadi, from all we witnessed, there are many of us who were there and at his burial who prayed, and pray, that he will be accepted by Allah as a Shaheed (martyr).

In a talk in Kuala Lumpur some years back, Sheikh Hamza Yusuf mildly reprimanded his audience to put away their cellphone cameras, saying, “I remember my teachers in my heart.”