Hello, and happy Friday. This correspondence is coming to you after a brief hiatus and, unfortunately, at the end of a very grim news week. In the five years that I’ve lived in Britain, nothing—not the culture, the style of government, or even the accents—draws a starker contrast between here and home like a mass shooting. The kind of carnage seen this week in Uvalde, earlier this month in Buffalo, and in hundreds of other American cities this year alone simply doesn’t compute outside of the United States.
It’s not as though school shootings haven’t happened in Britain. The worst took place in 1996 in Dunblane, Scotland. Sixteen children and a teacher were killed. It was a tragedy—one that thankfully hasn’t reoccurred since. Unlike in the United States, where gun violence in schools has been left unchallenged for years, British lawmakers sprung into action and passed a law banning all handguns the following year. Today, American lawmakers are talking about the scourge of unlocked doors.
In fairness, when it comes to guns, Britain and the U.S. are like apples and oranges. The sheer number of firearms in America, not to mention its bizarre gun culture, has no comparison in Britain or other countries. But these factors don’t absolve U.S. lawmakers’ inaction. Doing nothing is a choice, and a deadly one.
I hope that the families and communities affected find peace. Until they decide to act, I hope their leaders find none.
What I’ve written
When the British withdrew from the Indian subcontinent in 1947, paving the way for the independence of the newly partitioned nations of India and Pakistan, the Muslims of the region had a choice. They could resettle in Pakistan, where they would be among a Muslim majority, or remain in India, where they would live as a minority in a majority-Hindu but constitutionally secular state.
Shah Alam Khan’s family opted to stay on the Indian side of the Radcliffe Line. “They didn’t want to go to a theocratic state,” he told me. The promise of a pluralist India, as envisaged by the country’s founders, trumped the warnings of the pro-Partition Muslim League (which went on to become the party of Pakistan’s founders) that a Muslim minority would inevitably be subordinate to the Hindu majority.
Seventy-five years later, those warnings have gained a new prescience. Although India remains a nominally secular state and a multifaith democracy, under the leadership of Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist government, communal violence in the country has surged. Indian Muslims I spoke with described feeling squeezed by discriminatory laws dictating the religious garments they wear, the food they eat, where and how they worship, and even whom they marry. For Indian Christians, 2021 marked the most violent year on record, in which pastors were beaten, churches vandalized, and religious schools attacked.
“They were promised a secular nation,” Khan told me of his family. For them and for the country’s religious minorities today, “the unmaking of secular India is a betrayal.” Keep reading here
What I’ve read
This gut-wrenching interview with a mother whose son was killed at Sandy Hook about losing a child in a school shooting (The Atlantic)
We were asked to write down our child’s name on a list being formed, and what classroom they were in. It was just an interminable wait. There were people crying. I was very quiet; I just shut down. Quite a while later, Governor Dannel Malloy came in. I didn’t even know who he was back then. He was the one who told us that if we were still there waiting, it meant that the person we were waiting for wasn’t coming back.
This must-read report on the faces from China’s Uyghur detention camps (BBC)
The documents provide some of the strongest evidence to date for a policy targeting almost any expression of Uyghur identity, culture or Islamic faith - and of a chain of command running all the way up to the Chinese leader, Xi Jinping.
This amazing tale of how three Hong Kongers fled their city for the prospect of freedom in America (The Atlantic)
Stories such as Tommy’s and Ray’s suggest the U.S. is fulfilling its obligation to Hong Kong’s prodemocracy movement. The means they took to get to the U.S., though, were drastic and almost impossible to replicate. A truer test of American mettle is the countless others like them who remain in limbo, victims of a broken and deeply politicized American immigration system. These people stood up to Beijing’s authoritarian might and, knowing they would likely lose, fought for their freedoms anyway. Yet U.S. lawmakers from both parties who once cheered them seem to have largely moved on.
What I’ve been thinking about
The “good morning to you” gets me every time:
Until next time,
Yasmeen