Houston’s Muslim community gathered to offer prayers Sunday at the funeral service for a 17-year-old Pakistani exchange student killed in a mass shooting at her southeast Texas high school.
About 1,000 people, many with Pakistani roots and wearing traditional Muslim dress, converged on an Islamic centre in Stafford to honour Sabika Sheikh, whose body was brought by hearse to the sombre service from Santa Fe, the nearby small rural town where a student murdered 10 people including eight students.
Among the mourners was the late teen’s first cousin who lives in the United States. She said Sheikh’s relatives are completely devastated.
A handful of men carried signs with slogans calling for improved background checks and higher age limits for gun purchases. One sign read simply: “Thou Shall Not Kill.”
Among the throng was a group of about a half-dozen men who said they were streaming the event live via Facetime telephone video to members of the slain girl’s family watching from Karachi, Pakistan.
“It’s a shock we need our entire life to recover from,” the 26-year-old added.
Men lined up in rows offered traditional mourning prayers as Sheikh’s coffin, draped in the green and white flag of Pakistan, was brought into a small, cramped sanctuary.
Sheikh had been due to return home in mere weeks, in time for Eidul Fitr. “It’s a shock, it’s so sad,” said realtor Ike Samad, 67, who was born in Pakistan but has lived in US most of his adult life and raised his children as Americans.
“I came here just like her, as a student,” he recalled. “God forbid that could have happened to me when I was here. As a parent, it is just devastating.”
The attacks were a “tragedy, and tragedy sometimes teaches you life,” he said. “But it also revisits, and in this case very close to here.”
Several Pakistani-American youths also attended the funeral service, including Danyal Zakaria of nearby Sugar Land, Texas.
“This nation is known to be safe,” he said. “If America is not safe, then where is?”
Meanwhile, Aziz Sheikh, father of Sabika, told the media he hoped that the death of his daughter, who wanted to serve her country as a civil servant or diplomat, would help spur gun control in the United States.
Santa Fe High School, southeast of Houston, on Friday joined a grim list of US schools and campuses where students and staff have been gunned down, stoking a divisive US debate about gun laws.
“Sabika’s case should become an example to change the gun laws,” her father, Aziz said.
Aziz Sheikh said the danger of a school shooting had not crossed his mind when he sent Sabika to study in the United States for a year.
Now he wants her death to help spur change. “It has become so common,” he said of school shootings.
“I want this to become a base on which the people over there can stand and pass a law to deal with this. I’ll do whatever I can,” he said.
US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo offered his condolences in a statement on Saturday, saying Sabika was “helping to build ties between the United States and her native Pakistan”.
The US ambassador to Pakistan, David Hale, visited the family in Karachi to offer condolences, the US embassy had said in a statement.
Published in Daily Times, May 22nd 2018.
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