The power of forgiveness

A drunk driver put Farid Ahmed in a wheelchair, then his adored wife died in the Christchurch mosque tragedy, but nothing has shaken his extraordinary ability to forgive. He tells Emma Clifton about finding a way forward after March 15.

- Emma Clifton

“Those walls there will potentially be turned into security doors,” a man says, gesturing towards the back of the Al Noor Mosque, the holy space where 44 people were killed last March. The Australian Women’s Weekly is inside the mosque just weeks before the one-year anniversary of the tragedy and it feels like both the mosque, and those within it, are existing somewhere in a new reality between the traumatic past and the present. There are pairs of hexagonal windows on many of the wall panels, looking out into a car park, the street and a flourishing little garden. The original windows are lined with an intricate pattern in the holy green that dominates much of the mosque’s interior, but they are at odds with the replacement windows that now sit below them, where desperate people smashed and crawled their way to safety when the shooting began during Friday prayer on March 15.

The noticeboards inside the mosque also represent this limbo state. Flyers for charities and prayer days supporting those affected by more recent tragedies like the Australian bushfires and the Whakaari volcanic eruption sit alongside identification posters of those who still pose a potential threat: “Call the police if you see these men.” It is a very sacred place, filled with copies of the Koran, busy prayer rooms; the sense of quiet reverence such areas always have. But, for some, it is also a very scared place. A door slams, and all heads immediately whip around at the burst of noise. When I ask one regular how long it took for the mosque to feel normal again, he shakes his head warily. Most members of the community returned when it re-opened at the end of March 2019, but a few are still unable to. For him, it is still very fresh. “My friend died close to where you are standing now,” he says, gesturing at my feet.