Why the Massacre in Kenya is Far Too Close to Home
April 2015
Emily Loughlin
Garissa, Kenya has suffered an all-too common tragedy. In the early morning of April 2, 2015, Garissa University College was the site of a violent and tragic shooting that resulted in the deaths of 148 people, 142 of whom were students at the university. The shooters, who have been identified as members of the Islamic extremist group Al-Shabab (sometimes referred to as Al-Shabaab), had carefully planned this slaughter of young life in a Christian prayer site on the campus, while shouting “God is great.”
Shortly before Garissa College University was attacked, an intelligence report was released, warning that the extremist group Al-Shabab (which claims responsibility for this attack) was planning attacks on institutions in Kenya. These attacks are believed to be retaliation for military action in Somalia in association with an African Union initiative, which has a goal to weaken the extremist group.
With the recent information that Kenya’s government chose not to act on this warning, I think it is understandable to think of how this could have happened anywhere. Governmental security agencies receive reports warning of future violence far more often than these terror events actually occur.
The loss of these people stands out both being a massive loss of life and caused by motives known to be religious, but that are otherwise unspecified. Many people in the US and abroad have tragic memories of loss related to similarly unclear hate crimes. As a New Yorker in her early twenties, stories of extreme violence bring to mind my memory of the day of and days after the World Trade Center attacks in 2001. For many in my generation, childhood was altered in a way that we never expected. Many of my classmates went home to single, or no, parents that night, having lost them in the attacks.
As an Episcopalian and a college senior, it hits close to home to hear of the loss of nearly 150 of my contemporaries. These people died doing something that I, and so many others, do daily: praying, studying, sleeping. On my college’s campus, we have multiple places designated for prayer and religious practice, among them an interfaith chapel, Christian chapel, and a Muslim prayer room. It seems to me to be purely luck that protects my own institution, and any other, from the same fate. I realize that there are many factors that contribute to our safety, but, having seen similar tragedies happen in some of the most privileged areas of the US, I am inclined to think that luck is a major factor.
Nearly all residential colleges have a space for prayer. It serves a special role in the life of a college student, as a sanctuary from familial pressures, homework assignments, friendship and relationship drama, and all the other pressures of impending adulthood.
Such spaces have a long history. The so-called “Right of Asylum” is an ancient concept in which a person was able to seek protection from harm or imprisonment in a church or foreign country. Some nations even extended this right to those accused of a crime. The Council of Orleans in 511, a meeting to reform the Catholic episcopate, granted asylum to murderers, thieves, and adulterers, as long as they sought asylum in a church, chapel, or house of a bishop.
In Kenya, that safe space has been violated.
Even the sanctity of prayer and a house of worship could not protect the innocent last week. It was prayer and worship that was targeted by the terrorists, claiming to act on the will of their God. As has often been the case in religious terrorism in recent years, disagreement between extremist sects of Abrahamic faiths led to this act of murder.
As the shooters took the lives of so many people, they stated that: “God is good.” It is corruption and hatred, centralized in a number of relatively small, but active, groups of religious extremists that has led to many suicide bombings, shootings, and the events of September 11, 2001, among other religious hate crimes.
From where I sit, it appears that, despite being of related faith, I, and many other people, ranging from Islamist scholars to Christian theologians don’t believe in the same God as these murderers. I can’t help but question the motives of an often described as benevolent God that encourages murder, which is condemned in most, if not all, faiths as a sinful act. It is understood by many well-respected Islamic Scholars that intentional murder is punishable by death, according to multiple translations of the Sahih Bukhari, a collection of the Prophet Muhammad’s sayings.
It is also disturbing that there was, in 2012, a shooting at a Wisconsin Sikh gurdwara, or temple. It was reported by Al Jazeera that the shooter involved with this incident may have confused Sikhs for Muslims. Rajdeep Singh, a policy advisor for a Sikh Coalition in the United States told Al Jazeera that, since the September 11 attacks, American Sikhs have experienced “hate crimes and other forms of discrimination.” These hate crimes have been attributed to an incredibly prejudiced stereotype that associates turban wearing individuals with Muslim extremism.
All in all, it feels like the loss of life in Garissa is much closer than a college in a city on a continent that I have never been to. There are so many factors that make Kenya’s loss more poignant and painful here in Massachusetts than one would expect at first.