Harvard University

I distinctly remember the moment in my childhood when I stopped playing with fire trucks, the moment when I stopped thinking “maybe I’ll be” and started saying “one day I will.” It was a very late night. I was in the car with my father driving home, at the last red light before my street, when a shooting was mentioned on the radio. Normally, I would have been sleeping, but at that moment I was wide awake and my father noticed. He turned to me and paraphrased a verse from the Qur’an that seared itself into my mind: “Whoever kills a person, it is as if he has killed all of mankind, whoever…