“The police? Do they want to speak to us alone?”
I knew I had to speak carefully. I didn’t want them to figure out what happened while they were out in the city, away from the rest of the family. “No, no, they want to speak to families in general, make some announcements,” I lied. “But they are waiting until everybody is here so they don’t have to say it twice.”
To calm myself, I made a fist, clenching my thumb between the other fingers. A police officer standing nearby laid her hand on my shoulder.
“Ah, okay, we’re coming back,” Hassan said.
As we waited for them in the locker room, I thought about Hassan and Sibel, and the horror and pain that lay ahead for them. I didn’t know how I would be able to look at them when they walked in. Some of Can’s cousins asked to wait outside. The police, fearing that Can’s parents would see their red eyes and damp faces, advised against it. But the young people insisted.
A few minutes later, one of the cousins returned, shouting, “Come up, hurry, Sibel is screaming and breaking down! She just learned Can is dead!”
We all ran upstairs, where a crowd of anxious people, many also awaiting news of their loved ones, stood watching Sibel and Hassan. Sibel was lying on the ground, pulling her hair. Hassan walked around shouting and screaming Can’s name over and over. Apparently one of the female volunteers had told Sibel “I’m sorry” as she and Hassan climbed off the bus.
“Noooo, noooo, my son is not dead!” she screamed, beating her hands against her head. “Can!” Hassan, meanwhile, screamed and sobbed in his brother’s arms. Sibel began biting herself. “Kill me now,” she said. “Just kill me. Why would somebody take my beautiful son? He hasn’t done anything.”
Hassan just sat there, crying. He tried to hold her. “Don’t touch me!” she yelled. “Just bring me my son.” She begged God to take her life and bring Can back. “Please, you are all lying to me, my son is not dead,” she said. “No, no, my son is not dead. They said he will come on the bus.” She cried and screamed his name again.
This went on for what seemed like an eternity. Then I heard another man and woman screaming nearby and knew that some other family had just learned their own bitter news.
Somehow, we found our way back to Hassan and Sibel’s apartment, where we stared helplessly at pictures of Can hanging on the walls. Sibel was screaming and beating herself. It was as if she were trying to wake herself up from a nightmare. Hassan went into the bedroom, closed the door, and cried.
“Souad, my son is not dead—right, Souad? Can is coming back?” Sibel cried. “Please tell me you all lied to me. Please, Souad.”
I held her. “Sibel, I wish we had lied.” I felt weak and useless as she shouted and screamed. Then we heard shouting from the house next door, whose balcony was only a few feet away. Another father and mother were screaming for their son.
“Who are they?” I asked my aunt.
“They are the parents of Selçuk Kiliç, Can’s best friend. They grew up together.”
I learned that Can and Selçuk, who was fifteen, had been like brothers. Both families were Muslim, but Can was Shia, and Selçuk Sunni. For hours, two families and their friends mourned the loss of boys who’d shared everything. Hassan and Sibel’s apartment filled with relatives and friends. Whenever the doorbell rang, Sibel asked if it was Can coming back.
At 5:00 a.m., I called a taxi and went back to my hotel. I wore my big sunglasses to hide my eyes. I’d told my parents and siblings, as well as my editors, as soon as we’d heard. I had come to cover a story, and now I was crying for a family member. In my hotel room, I called my police source. This time he picked up.
“You saw my message?” I told him in a low, tired voice. “The boy is dead.”
“I can’t tell you how sorry I am. I got a list with the victims’ names around midnight and was on my way to a briefing.”
I held the phone closer to my ear so as not to miss a word.
“When I saw the name Can Leyla, I was in shock,” he said.
I felt tears flood my eyes. “Why? Can you tell me why he killed Can?” I whispered. “I need to know, please.”
We agreed to meet soon. I hung up and pressed my face into the pillow, shouting and sobbing as I hadn’t been able to do while caring for Hassan and Sibel.
I stayed in Munich to help out, going to Hassan and Sibel’s house every day to grieve with them and other relatives and friends. A few days later, a police officer from the crisis center called. “We are finished with the autopsy and would like to organize for the family to say good-bye.” He asked if someone would come to see Can and decide where and how he should be buried. They invited a family representative to come to the funeral home where the body was being kept to prepare it for a viewing.
“Do the parents want flowers? Some would like to see their son wearing something special. All this could be taken care of before the parents will see him,” he said, “but somebody will have to come for that.”
Hassan and Sibel’s two-bedroom apartment was still packed with relatives and friends, but everybody seemed overwhelmed. When I told Hassan what the police had said, he begged me to go and see Can’s body. Sibel’s cousin’s roommate Kader, a medical doctor by training, said she would come with me.
I asked Hassan if he wanted Can to wear something special. He requested that Can be dressed in the shirt of his favorite soccer team, Fenerbahçe Istanbul, whose colors were blue and yellow. I took the shirt, and Kader and I drove to the funeral home, stopping on the way to buy two big bouquets of yellow and blue roses. Inside, we saw a white coffin. The undertaker, who happened to be Turkish, said we should let him know when we wanted him to open it. I didn’t say a word and wondered if maybe there had been some misunderstanding, and this might not be Can. I found myself hoping the coffin held someone else.
“Are you all right?” I heard Kader asking. “Are you ready?”
“I am ready.”
It was Can, all right. I looked at his face, the cold, pale skin and long eyelashes. His mouth and eyes were half open, as if he were surprised. “I’m sorry,” I whispered. They’d dressed him in a long white tunic and put a white bow tie around his neck, presumably to hide the incision made there during the autopsy. His feet were bare.
We struggled to lift him, to get the soccer jersey on. He was heavy and stiff-limbed, and I found myself wondering if we might hurt him. They had given me gloves, but I could feel his skin through the plastic. He was very cold. He had grown a lot since I’d last seen him six years earlier, I thought. Our families weren’t especially close. I remembered him as a child, but the body in the coffin belonged to a young man. Kader and I stood still for a few seconds. The last faint hope that there might have been some kind of misunderstanding was gone.
“My God, Can, what has he done to you?” I whispered. I began to pray in Arabic. I remembered all the people I’d interviewed who had lost loved ones in wars or attacks and all the times I’d had to meet with parents who had lost their children. I remembered Anas in Iraq, and being at the family’s home a day after he was shot. I remembered how Nicholas Kulish and I had counted the bodies of dead protesters in Alexandria. But this time I wasn’t covering a story, I didn’t have that wall to protect me. In fact, I wondered if I’d ever really been able to build that wall. As Kader and I climbed the stairs to Hassan and Sibel’s apartment to tell them how their son looked, I felt the pain of all those parents coursing through me.
“How does my boy look?” Sibel asked.
I didn’t know what to say. “He looks very peaceful,” Kader finally answered. We’d been told that his parents should see him alone first, along with his brother, Ferid. We told the rest of the extended family to wait. But Sibel drove with Kader and me, and we got a little lost on the way to the funeral home. By the time we arrived, Hassan and a swarm of uncles and cousins were already inside. Sibel screamed at the sight of Can’s cousins standing over her son, kissing him good-bye. When she reached the coffin, she just stared. �
��Was I a bad mother, that’s why he left me so early?” she asked, touching his skin. “My beautiful son. He’s freezing.” She stroked his eyebrows, recalling that he’d always complained that he didn’t like their shape.
Watching her, I was filled with anger and guilt. Anger because it seemed we hadn’t learned much from the suffering of the past fifteen years. Guilt because it was part of my job to give people clear information that could help dispel racism and fight violence, and I, along with other journalists, had clearly failed. This shooter stood for all those people I’d come across who killed because they had created their own ideologies of hatred and, in their sick minds, a justification for taking other people’s lives.
As it turned out, David Sonboly wasn’t an Islamist; he was deeply troubled and subscribed to a more familiar ideology. It was no coincidence that the shooting had taken place on July 22, the fifth anniversary of the attack by Anders Behring Breivik, a right-wing Norwegian terrorist who blew up a van in Oslo and then fatally shot sixty-nine participants at a Workers’ Youth League summer camp on a nearby island. Born on Adolf Hitler’s birthday with the name Ali (he’d changed it to David when he turned eighteen), he was a dual citizen of Germany and Iran whose parents had immigrated in the 1990s as asylum seekers. Before he became a mass killer, he was known to the police as a victim of petty crime: he’d been beaten up by other kids, and he’d been a victim of theft. Reportedly bullied at school, he was receiving psychiatric care and taking antidepressants to cope with anxiety and social phobia. In 2015, Sonboly spent two months in a hospital and subsequently attended diagnostic sessions at a youth psychiatric clinic. According to my police source, Sonboly had walked around for fifty minutes inside the McDonald’s before killing Can, Selçuk, and the other young victims. The police believe he was targeting young, handsome “cool kids” of foreign origin, the kind of boys he’d hoped but failed to be himself.
In his room at his parents’ home in a middle-class Munich neighborhood, the police found books and news clippings on school shootings, among them a book called Rampage in the Head: Why Students Kill. Investigators also discovered photographs taken at the school in Winnenden, Germany, where seventeen-year-old Tim Kretschmer killed fifteen people in 2009 before taking his own life. Sonboly had killed his victims with a Glock pistol purchased illegally on the so-called dark web.
They said that Sonboly had struggled for years with psychological problems, but at that moment I didn’t care. He had killed Can and Selçuk, two boys of different sects whose lives had argued powerfully against the set narrative that Sunni and Shia cannot live peacefully together.
Later, I sat alone at a table in my hotel’s rooftop restaurant, surrounded by people enjoying the sunset. Can’s killing brought back memories of terrible violence, and the scars from those old wounds began to hurt again. What happened to him had made it clearer than ever how easy it was to die before you’d led the life you hoped for. I also couldn’t help being haunted by the life Hassan and Sibel had led. They’d found each other and raised a family, but one of their children had been taken from them in this unimaginable way.
I flew to Casablanca two days later and met my parents. For the first time, we traveled together to the area where my grandfather used to have his lands, in al-Haouz and on the road to Khenifra. I also went back to my grandmother’s house in Meknes, to revisit the window where I used to sit and watch people outside. There was the corner where my grandmother and I used to sleep on a blanket. I remembered how I sat at the doorstep with my grandparents listening to my grandfather talk about his past and how much he regretted that he couldn’t read or write. Storytellers are powerful, he told me. They explain the world. They write history.
My parents and I visited my grandparents’ graves and prayed over them. I wondered what they would have said if they could have seen that their granddaughter was now reporting and writing about the world and that she was doing so because of what they had taught her. I wondered what advice they would give me now. Were the pain, the worries, the threats to my family and me worth whatever I was gaining? Was my work making a difference? I missed my grandmother’s loud laughter and her gift for healing and strengthening. I could have used some of that now.
I looked at my parents, the Sunni-Shia couple who had endured so much yet hadn’t let it divide them. They’d decided decades earlier to take a stand for their love and against the hatred. They had worked to plant the seed inside us, their children. Now I could tell they were worried about me. They knew I didn’t tell them much about what I saw and did on my journeys.
I also spent some of the Morocco trip alone at the little hotel in the mountains, thinking about the hatred we’re fighting. I was born with the Arab-Israeli conflict already under way, at a moment when Iran was establishing itself as an Islamic republic, awakening a new competition in the Middle East. In the Middle East, many of those who had sought peace were dead, and the ones still alive were so deeply wounded that they would probably never forgive the other side. They say children inherit the hatred of their parents. My grandfather was bitter, but my grandmother was resilient. I inherited hope from my Moroccan grandparents, along with the will to understand.
Why do they hate us so much? The question that had pushed me all these years to cross borders rang in my ears. Since 9/11, I had scoured the world for answers, hoping that knowledge and understanding would lead people to do what they could to prevent more hatred, more killing.
But some people in Western countries don’t see the hazards of setting standards for others, as if our way is the right way and the only way. This is the same argument ISIS makes. Meanwhile, in our democracies, secret detention centers, torture, and mass government surveillance have violated what we call our core values. Our governments have faced no consequences for these transgressions. People such as Khaled el-Masri are too weak to hold the United States accountable for ruining their lives.
Is democracy really what we want, or do we instead seek to promote the values we hold dear: the equality of men and women, the rights of minorities to survive and thrive, the freedom to speak our minds and practice whatever faith we choose? Instead of talking about the need for a voting system, we should seek to adhere to a code of universal values.
At the same time, a dialogue is overdue within Islam, and within Muslim societies, about what can and cannot be justified by our faith. Religion doesn’t radicalize people; people radicalize religion. In Mecca, where I recently made the umra pilgrimage, women are not supposed to cover their faces, and there is no separation of the sexes. How can we argue that a woman should cover her face and be separated from men when it doesn’t even happen in the holiest place in Islam? Opportunists have created their own ideology within Islam, and this is profoundly dangerous. If no one is willing to speak up for what the religion actually requires, anyone can use it for his own ends.
Way back in 1979, the year after I was born, the ruling family in Saudi Arabia allowed religious leaders to blackmail them because the monarchs needed those clerics’ support before sending in armed soldiers to end the siege of Mecca and guarantee loyalty to the crown. The clash between secular power and faith radicalized many Muslims in Saudi Arabia and beyond. My generation had to grapple with the consequences of leaders in the West, Arab countries, and Asia who believed they could fight their enemies—the Soviets in the Cold War—by encouraging “jihad” against them. It was a failed strategy.
If Middle Eastern leaders got their act together and stopped fueling a senseless sectarian conflict—always in the name of a religion whose true character is apparently impossible to agree upon—the next generation in that region would have a chance to grow up learning about history, medicine, and mathematics instead of running from bullets and bombs, fleeing their homes, and living in refugee camps or on the street.
Iran and Saudi Arabia, in particular, must stop their quiet war, and along with it the radicalization of their youth in the name of hollow ideologies. Western politicians sold the Iran nuclear de
al as a big achievement, saying it would support the reformists within the country. But Iran is a state with many different players. My colleague Jason Rezaian at the Washington Post became a victim of what some call “the deep state.” While Iranian officials claim they want to coexist peacefully with their neighbors, increasing Iranian interference in Arab countries is no longer a secret. Iranian-sponsored Shia militias in Iraq and Syria are only one example.
I’ve often asked preachers or imams who abuse religion for their political ambitions why they do it. Many have told me they believe it’s what Islam requires. Others said they know what’s best for the ummah. Most people argue this is how the Prophet Muhammad would have wanted it to be. But they’re talking about one of my forefathers. Why should they be the ones to decide what Muhammad wanted or how he saw the world?
While I’ve carried the pain of the discrimination I faced as the daughter of Muslim guest workers in Germany, I’m still very grateful for the chance I had to get a good education, and thankful for the wonderful people who pushed me and convinced me not to give up. Yet when I visit countries in the Middle East, I feel the pain of laborers from Southeast Asia or the Philippines. No matter if their employers are Sunni, Shia, or of some other religious background, these workers are often treated badly and barely have any rights. The fact is that many Arab states harbor some version of entrenched racism.
The rise of groups such as Al Qaeda and ISIS is not the problem of any one specific country or group. It is the result of many mistakes. There are the political leaders who too often look for short-term solutions. There is the “enemy of my enemy is my friend” thinking that has led to arming more militias in Syria and Iraq. But the history of Western involvement in Afghanistan and Pakistan should have taught us all that the one you train and arm today may turn against you tomorrow. Empowering militias can lead to the destruction of nation-states as we know them today. I grew up among different religions and in different worlds, and in the spirit that civilized people don’t clash, even if they have different opinions or orientations. The world is full of those who offer easy answers in challenging times. They know how to play with the fear and hopelessness of the disenfranchised. In a paradoxical way, all those who preach hatred against the possibility of peaceful coexistence are benefiting from each other.
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