MARCH 15 AND BEYOND

How do you transform a life? Bariz Shah’s journey from hate to love took him from prison to finding purpose in helping others.

“Are we moving towards a better and a safer direction for New Zealand or are we heading backwards and actually harbouring more hate here?”

It’s not easy to return to March 15, 2019. When Bariz Shah recalls the story of that dark day in his book, Beyond Hope, he talks about how he had just finished praying at the musalla or prayer room at Canterbury University when he heard the news. He came out of the men’s side of the musalla, his wife Saba emerged from the women’s side, and suddenly that is what everyone was talking about. There had been a shooting at the Al-noor Mosque.

In Christchurch? It didn’t compute. Shah’s first thought was that “some crazy Muslim” had started killing people. He can see how the image came from years of brainwashing and prejudice about terrorism.

The mosque is only 3km east of the university, a quick drive on a normal day, but not when roads are blocked by police and cleared for ambulances. He left Saba at the university and headed in that direction.

Names started to emerge among the crowds that waited. He heard the name of Talha Naeem who was, like him, an engineering student. Later, at the hospital, he visited Zaid, a Syrian boy he had helped to mentor. Zaid wanted to know if there was news of his brother and father, who had been praying with him.

Shah remembered that his heart “filled with dread for him because I knew they had been martyred, but it was not my place to tell him”.

At a vigil a few days later, Shah was asked to read the names. At that stage there were 50 martyrs, before the death toll rose to 51. He spoke in his role as president of Canterbury’s Muslim Students Association and told those who gathered that “we need to keep going to the mosque, and we need to wear our traditional clothes with pride”.

To reinforce the point, he wore Afghan clothes for the next year, and wanted Muslim women who wore the hijab, and were therefore recognised and targeted, to know “their Muslim brothers were with them”.

Five years later, Shah is living in Auckland with Saba and their two children and working as a site engineer at the airport. He confesses to mixed feelings about the news that his book is appearing so close to the anniversary of the mosque attacks.

It was a time of such trauma and horror.

“A lot of the families just want to move on,” he says by phone during a break at work. “Constantly being reminded every single year just brings the pain back as it was on that day.”

But he can see the other side. Some try to forget but most of us should not forget. The Royal Commission of Inquiry into the attacks produced 44 recommendations. We can’t forget those.

Perhaps it is useful to have “something in place that is a constant reminder, like a checkpoint every year to see where we’re at from when that terrorist attack happened.

“Are we moving towards a better and a safer direction for New Zealand or are we heading backwards and actually harbouring more hate here?”

He says he is a positive person, and therefore his answer may be biased, but he thinks we are going forward. There is more awareness about Islam now, and while there are still groups of people, including some politicians, who take digs at it, “people are understanding the value of Islam and how it can transform your life and make you live a purpose-driven life that is beneficial to others around you.

“There’s been a shift in people’s mindsets and that’s really good to see. It’s really beautiful.”

March 15 and its aftermath is just part of the story Shah tells. The bulk of Beyond Hope concerns the potential for Islam to transform a life, to shift it away from crime in his case.

It is in the subtitle: From an Auckland prison to changing lives in Afghanistan.

But again, there was some reluctance. “Your lack of self-belief tends to deepen when somebody asks you if you want to write a book,” he says.

Did he have enough to say? Was there a story worth telling? Harpercollins gave him time to think about it before he finally said yes.

“I have overcome many challenges in my life,” he adds. “I have proven myself and others wrong. Why not write my story for other young people who are going through similar things that I went through, and for people in general to have a better understanding of what a young person goes through? Not to feel sorry for someone but to