Defiant spirits in sea of thousands
The call to prayer drifts across the park.
Close your eyes and cast yourself a world away, one with spiralling onion-shaped minarets, whitewash walls, and warm morning sunshine.
Imam Latif ’s haunting, rhythmical cries urge his brothers and sisters forward.
From all corners of Hagley Park, they come. Crisp white thawbs, headscarved mums pushing buggies with big brown-eyed babies. Crossing the beautiful, tree-lined inner city haven gifted to the people 150 years ago, “reserved forever as a public park, and open for the recreation and enjoyment of the public”.
They are us.
One week on, Gamal Fouda the fearless imam of Al Noor Mosque, its golden dome shining over his right shoulder, stands before a sea of thousands.
“We are broken-hearted but we are not broken,” Fouda tells the crowd, which responds with an applause that spreads like a cresting wave. Sad white faces enshrined in hijab look to the women in their separate area of the open-air makeshift mosque.
They are us.
Within hours of last Friday’s unprecedented terror attack, a friend told me: “We’ll never get over this.”
I hoped he was wrong. One week on, I still don’t know.
It’s been a strange, awful, sickening seven days in the Garden City. Dozens of graves dug into the rich Canterbury soil.
Funerals and memorials and enough tears to flow down the Avon.
Stretching flowers walls, the antithesis of Trump’s wall: unifying not dividing. Floral bloom fuelling a florists’ boom. Little children holding parents’ hands as they place flowers at police cordons.
Mums and dads crouching down to explain that this is a very sad place, perhaps saying this was where the very bad man hurt all those poor people.
Baristas and petrol station attendants seem especially friendly. Subtle though, quiet lingering looks that seemed to scan your face: Are you okay?
Long handshakes. Group hugs. Half laughs halted by grief. Nervous glances when joggers rush past.
And while there’s a subdued sadness, a cohesive spirit, strangers nodding “As-Salaam-Alaikum” and smiling, there’s also been a simmering anger.
Monday night there was a spike in domestic violence callouts for police, about double a normal night. A shoulder barge in the courthouse foyer, a social basketball team out to pick a fight. Some off “jokes”.
From all corners of Hagley Park, they come. Crisp white thawbs, headscarved mums pushing buggies with big brown-eyed babies.
All is not well.
The 2010/11 earthquakes left physical scars on New Zealand’s secondlargest city, as well as subterranean human ones. The mosque massacres sent a similar jolt, with shockwaves that will reverberate for years.
But it would be wrong to let the extremists think they have won.
For as Imam Fouda told the masses yesterday: “Last Friday I stood in this mosque and saw hatred and rage in the eyes of the terrorist who killed and martyred 50 innocent people, wounded 42, and broke the hearts of millions around the world . . . The terrorist tried to tear the nation apart with evil ideology but instead we have shown that New Zealand is unbreakable.”
They are us.