Human Animals

Photo by William Gullo on Unsplash

I cut ties with my estranged parents when I left home in my early twenties, and I hadn’t spoken to them since. As a second-generation immigrant, I wanted to distance myself from my Muslim roots as much as possible to pursue a career in show business.

Although I had built a significant fan base over the years, I never landed a lead role. With bills piling up, I had to take a part-time job at a downtown funeral home to make ends meet. I wasn’t exactly thrilled about the job, but I was grateful for the steady income it provided.

While the job required me to work long hours, it was the nature of it that left me feeling drained by the end of the day. Washing the corpses and preparing them for their loved ones took a serious toll on my psyche. No amount of soap and water could remove the stench of death that hung in the air for days. It clung to me like a foul, invisible cloak.

During my first week, Mr Ahmad helped me get used to the routine tasks, so we did everything in pairs. As time went on and I settled into my role as a budding autopsy technician, he entrusted me with maintaining the funeral home and handling the deceased.

He treated me as if I were truly his son – even giving me a place to stay when I couldn’t pay rent and got kicked out of my one-room flat. But he had a biological son, one he missed dearly and grieved every waking hour. Whenever Mr Ahmad prayed, he asked me to join him, and together we prayed for Allah to forgive his son’s sins and welcome him into janat – paradise.

His son was one of many who lost their lives in 2023. His death was gruesome – nothing was left of his body. The flames singed his flesh, liquefied his organs and skin, and reduced him to ash in the dead of night at a displacement camp. He was brutally murdered and became one with the twinkling stars, crying blood. That year, the world watched in silence – and some even cheered – as yet another atrocity was etched into history.

Locals buried the dead in shallow graves, hoping for an end to the occupation – but even the dead weren’t allowed to rest in peace. The entire place was bombed into oblivion, razed to the ground, and the few who still fought for freedom were deported to the desert and left to die.

Several weeks passed since the siege that tore through his homeland when Mr Ahmad was finally allowed to enter the country and bring back what was left of his son to the United Kingdom. That poor man begged his occupiers for entry like a dog – a barking dog devoted to its torturers. And for what? Just to enter his country. Or what remained of it.

I couldn’t imagine what that would feel like – to be denied access to the very place your ancestors called home for centuries – by radical forces who twisted scripture to justify the unimaginable, claiming superiority over the very lives they erased. What a joke.

The previous employee said Mr Ahmad’s son left behind a widow and two children, but their whereabouts were unknown. They were most likely murdered – just like all the other women and children in the occupied country, whom the occupiers claimed were human shields.

It’s always the women and children – treated like dirt, denied opportunities, subjected to Islamophobia and racism, and seen as weak and oppressed because of a single cloth on their heads. When was the last time a Muslim woman harmed anyone? When she refused to remove her headscarf to enter a bank or get a job at an airport?

Whenever I thought about what happened in 2023 – and how the world watched – I felt my blood run cold. What sort of people could kill with such cruelty? Leaders with skeletons in their closets, trying to dominate every corner of the Middle East? Power-hungry icons rewriting the truth to suit their image? Artists and moguls backed by shadows we’ll never see? Or people so corrupt they turned the vulnerable into pawns – trading dignity for dominance?

Then again, what else could it be? Nothing else made sense. Only the most twisted minds, consumed by power and greed, could justify the murder of children – children they’d rather destroy without remorse than spare from being used as human shields. Their crimes should be carved into history – not erased – so future generations can marvel at how evil once wore a suit and tie.

Where was I? Ah, yes, now I remember.

Continue.