Shakoor, Amira Mustafa, President of MSA, texted in the WhatsApp group used by the organization’s board members. What’s this qiyam thing?
Shakoor Afzal, Community Service Chair, texted back a moment later: a general body member had asked if the organization could host one, and so immediately he’d dropped a message in all of MSA’s multiple GroupMe chats. Given the date, a qiyam – a late-night congregational prayer that Muslims hold during hard times – was the perfect idea.
She wanted to do a qiyam tonight in honor of [Our Three Winners] and I said yeah, he wrote. Sorry, I shoulda brought this up to y’all [before] I said anything.
Nah, it’s chill, Amira wrote. And it was better than that. It felt like the least MSA could do.
_*_
February 10 of 2020 had been an insignificant day to most people at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. It was cold, it was cloudy, it was peak midterm season – just as it had been on that same day five years ago. A normal, insignificant day – until 5:15 that evening, when the tragedy that followed shocked a community of 1.8 billion people worldwide.
Every member of the school’s Muslim Students Association knows the names Deah Barakat, Yusor Abu-Salha, and Razan Abu-Salha. Every Muslim in the country knows how they were shot by their neighbor, Craig Hicks, in their Chapel Hill apartment. How last year, Hicks was sentenced, but not charged with a hate crime, as the community had been hoping for.
In the years since the three students were killed, there have been countless words and images and projects devoted to their memory. The Raleigh-based Light House Project took Deah’s name and inspiration from his, Yusor’s, and Razan’s legacies to be a nonprofit incubator for youth-driven projects. There’s an ongoing initiative to build a mosque in their memory. Their funeral prayer, known as janazah, was attended by thousands. They were dubbed “Our Three Winners” by Farris Barakat, Deah’s older brother.
“I think that a lot of students remember them, not just on Our Three Winners day, but all year, every year,” says Rawan Abbasi, MSA’s Publicity Chair. But on a university level, she feels that February 10 usually slips by unnoticed, and it bothers her.
“We as an MSA have a responsibility to do what we can to remember them,” she says. “But the university also has a responsibility to let minority students know that they are heard, and that they care.”
_*_
That night at 11 p.m., 20 students – most from UNC, a couple from Duke University – trekked out from their dorms and their study spaces to Union Room 2510, also known as MSA’s main prayer room. They lined up in rows on the carpet, shoulder to shoulder, foot to foot.
Shakoor led the prayer, reciting out loud from the Quran. Heads bowed to the floor, the students prayed – for the victims, for their communities, and for themselves to be brave.
_*_
Rawan had been hoping for an official statement by the university, or at least an email. But that didn’t come, and so within the MSA board, she brought up the idea to submit an open letter to the university.
We were disappointed, read the letter published in the Daily Tar Heel, by the fact that there was no official statement from the University on the fifth anniversary of the murders of Deah Barakat, Yusor Abu-Salha and Razan Abu-Salha, also known as Our Three Winners.
For a university committed to diversity and inclusion, the University fell quite short in representing the students it serves.
“It’s important to remember them,” Rawan says, “because they were people just like you and me. They were college students just like any of us. But more than that, they were exceptional, and they were examples for us as leaders in the community, as people who served the community with their hearts. Their tragedy was all of our tragedy.”
Between the qiyam and the open letter, she hoped that it would show that Muslim students on campus would never let go of their memories, or what Our Three Winners had stood for.
_*_
The final act of remembrance for that month came from Farris Barakat himself. He’d texted Amira, asking if MSA could host a screening of the documentary that had just been released on the shootings. He’d organized several viewings of the Marshall Project’s “Anatomy of Hate” already – at mosques, at other schools – and he wanted to do one more here, in Chapel Hill.
The date was set for the 18th, in Room 103 of Bingham Hall. Folding seats in the auditorium-style classroom creaked as dozens of students trickled in. Farris sat at the front of the room behind the instructor’s desk. In the Triangle Muslim community, he’s known as the guy anyone can talk to, who has a curly-haired dog called AJ, who grills Beyond Burgers and lights his backyard fire pit so college kids can come over and roast marshmallows.
That day, he was a bit more subdued. Before he began the video, he smiled, greeted the students, and went through trigger warnings.
The 911 call made about the murders is in here.
Craig Hicks gets interviewed, and he’s kind of laughing and smiling about what he’s done.
There’s audio of the moments just before the shootings, taken from a video found on Deah’s phone.
He didn’t stay in the classroom to watch the documentary – he’d already seen it several times before now – but he promised he’d be back after it finished for a discussion.
Within the first five minutes – as pictures of the three students’ smiling faces crossed the screen, as the camera panned across the somber expressions of Suzanne Barakat and Yousef Abu-Salha at the trial, as Craig Hicks chuckled from a holding cell about the state of parking in Chapel Hill – people’s eyes were already filling with tears.
_*_
Not everyone has forgotten.
North Carolina State University, where Razan had studied design, tweeted in remembrance of Our Three Winners and shared a video about the scholarship established in their name. The UNC School of Dentistry closed for its own holiday of “DEAH DAY” (Directing Efforts And Honoring Deah And Yusor), meant as a day of service.
And in that classroom in Bingham Hall, 30 students sat in silence for a long moment after the projector screen faded to black. People were still sniffling. One girl took the hand of another and squeezed comfortingly. A person in the back took his glasses off to rub his eyes.
When asked for their thoughts, the discussion started off on a despondent note. A freshman pointed out that the documentary seemed to skirt around issues of Islamophobia. A sophomore girl’s voice broke as she talked about how she and her roommates were always careful around their apartment neighbors, never turning up their music too high.
But as other voices chimed in, the tone become more hopeful.
Don’t be afraid to live your life.
Be bold. Be brave.
We can remember Our Three Winners by living to the fullest: both for others, and for ourselves.