Vincent Yu/AP

Police officers pick up flowers in front of Al Noor mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, March 17, where one of two mass shootings Friday resulted in the deaths of 50 people who had come to pray. New Zealand’s residents reached out to Muslims in their neighborhoods and around the country on Saturday to show kindness to a community in pain.

Like many Muslims on Friday, as Imam Sohaib Sultan pondered what to say during his sermon at the weekly jummah service that day, he felt a crushing sense of horror at what had happened earlier on the other side of the world.

“It was haunting to go to Friday prayers today, thinking that prayers had already happened where this massacre took place, and just because people wanted to go and worship their Lord,” he says, haltingly. “And it was hard, and, you know, this idea – yes, this idea, you go to pray to God, and then you don’t return.” He pauses. “It’s been a hard day.”

Along with many of his Muslim colleagues, he joined a coalition of advocates and political organizers to speak publicly about the increasing number of attacks against Muslims in the past few years, to convey the worries that so many continue to have about expressing the visible symbols of their faith. And, they note, how the experience of being a small, conspicuous minority in the United States is similar to fellow Muslims in New Zealand, where 50 worshippers were shot and killed by a terrorist espousing a murderous white nationalism.

But the purpose of the khutbah al-jummah, or Friday sermon, is to exhort and instruct fellow believers on the ways of Islam – a wrenching task this day for Imam Sultan, the Muslim chaplain at Princeton University in New Jersey. He, too, was gripped by the news of the suffering of fellow Muslims, and grappling with the singular question, Why?

People were already discussing online how an Afghan man offered the words “Hello, brother” to the armed gunman at the Al Noor mosque in Christchurch, before being among the first to be shot and killed. “As he faced a rifle, his last words were peaceful words of unconditional love,” one Twitter user wrote soon afterward.

Jorge Silva/Reuters

High school students hug Muslims waiting for news of their relatives at a community center following Friday’s terror attack in Christchurch, New Zealand, that killed 50 people at prayer.

Imam Sultan used his Friday sermon to bring up the story of a young man who ran out of the mosque searching for his wife as the shooting began inside the mosque, only to find that she had already been shot and killed outside on the sidewalk.

“As someone who loves every single week coming to jummah with my family, that was really hard to read,” he said, fighting back tears during his sermon at the Muslim Student Association. “Take some time out to feel what has happened. Don’t just move on. Allow it to sink in. Allow empathy to grow within your heart and your soul.”

“Feel that sadness, feel that anger,” he continued. “But don’t allow it to totally rearrange your theology and your sense of belief and who you are and what you’re about.... For many of us, my brothers and sisters, I know that in this heavy moment, we ask, where is God?”

“And I say unto you, my brothers and sisters, Allah Ta’alah [God Almighty] is intimately involved in every single moment that happens, whether it is a moment of great blessing or a moment of great sadness, that Allah Ta’alah is there.”

In the past few years, white supremacist gunmen have specifically targeted worshippers as they gathered to pray. In August 2012, a racist shooter killed six at the Sikh Temple of Wisconsin in Oak Creek as members prepared langar, a communal meal. In June 2015, a teen immersed in white supremacist culture shot and killed nine people at “Mother Emanuel” African Methodist Church in Charleston, South Carolina. In January 2017, a gunman steeped in neo-Nazi ideas walked into a Friday service at the Islamic Cultural Centre of Quebec City in Canada and killed six. Last October, an anti-Semitic gunman killed 11 people on the Sabbath at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh.

And responses to each have included instances of startling and unexpected expressions of faith in the midst of seeming nihilistic hatred – like some of the members of Mother Emanuel, who survived the massacre and then expressed forgiveness for the terrorist. He was subsequently tried and has been sentenced to death.  

Simran Jeet Singh, a scholar of religion at NYU’s Center for Religion and Media in New York, also reflected on his communal moments of prayer with his children, as news of the terror attacks in Christchurch, New Zealand, came in on Friday. Since his brother and sister-in-law were present during the mass shooting at the temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, he again felt the same sense of horror.

“One of the first things that every Sikh child learns – including my own – is that the same divine light exists in everyone equally,” Dr. Singh wrote in a reflection in the Religious News Service. “If we all share that same light, how can we say that anyone is better than anyone else?”

In the traditions of Abrahamic monotheism, including Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, God is understood to be absolutely sovereign over creation, an all powerful, all knowing, and perfectly loving and good God.

But such a view of God has sometimes led to a “problem of evil,” the question, Why? If God is indeed loving, why do human beings grapple with such horrendous experiences?

These were part of the questions that Mohammad Elshinawy reflected upon Friday when he preached. In Islam, God’s absolute sovereignty over every part of reality means that even the experience of evil can be a part of larger good.

“We spoke about the blessing of shattering these lies that we tell ourselves about the nature of life,” says Mr. Elshinawy, a researcher at the Yaqeen Institute in Irving, Texas, in an interview. “This life was never meant to be a paradise. This life is a passageway to test us for the best of our faith and our conduct, the whole of our best to our creator.”

“So when these things, these horrible events, come to pass they shatter for us that that faulty matrix, that good things only happen to good people and bad things are the punishment for bad people – this is not true.”

And the emphasis on God’s sovereignty in Islam includes the gift of free will to human beings, which makes this life indeed a time to be tested and to grow in virtue – which by definition necessitates vice, or choices that violate God’s commands.

“Evil exists for a purpose; not as a theological riddle,” says Imam Sultan in an interview, discussing the traditions of “theodicy,” or a defense of God’s goodness in light of evil, which have been important to Christianity, especially.

“It is in the face of evil and the suffering that evil causes that human beings face the test of character and virtue,” he continues. “Every virtue that is celebrated across human civilizations is a virtue that is manifested in response to evil and suffering. So, as Muslims we are taught to at once struggle against evil and to also grow in virtue in the face of evil.”

That test can be seen from Christchurch to Charleston, where out of the forge of suffering has come extraordinary acts of virtue, from courage to unconditional love.

“Humility with God and deferring to God’s wisdom constitute the highest form of moral good,” says Mr. Elshinawy, citing his writings on theodicy and the problem of evil. “Resigning oneself to the fact that one can only see pixels while God sees the entire picture is a huge test of intellectual humility.”

“Beholding the grandeur of God, admitting to oneself that you are unlike God, and expecting to have ‘blind spots’ that render some evils mysterious,” is as he sees it “the most basic test of faith in the unseen.”

Mystery novelist Radha Vatsal was playing detective.

The Queens resident had recently heard about an upstart young woman who was taking on the district’s longtime Democratic congressman, Joe Crowley. Ms. Vatsal wanted to learn more about her, but couldn’t recall her name.

“I was like, ‘Ocasio something,’” says Ms. Vatsal, who’s lived in the neighborhood for 17 years. “I just remember my experience of googling it and trying all different variations, and nothing would come up.”

That was in April of 2018. Later that month, Ms. Vatsal’s mystery woman would secure four times the number of signatures she needed to get on the ballot in New York’s 14th district. In June, she’d stun political observers by drubbing Mr. Crowley in the Democratic primary. And in November, she’d become the youngest woman ever to be elected to Congress.  

Today, a search of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez turns up countless headlines, videos, and tweets. A recent Gallup survey found that at least 70 percent of Americans now know her name.

The congresswoman’s exploding fame has given her a platform to lead the charge on policy ideas around fighting climate change, expanding health care, and abolishing the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, and made her a darling of the Democratic Party’s left wing.

It’s also made her a lightning rod – the target of constant, cutting criticism focused on her policies as well as her youth and inexperience. Detractors have called her out for opposing Amazon’s plan to build a second headquarters in New York, dismissing her views on economic policy as naive and ill-informed. She saw blowback last month with the rollout of the Green New Deal – the stimulus package meant to address both climate change and economic injustice that’s one of her key policy initiatives – when her office released a fact sheet that didn’t match up with the plan’s legislative text. Since being elected, she’s drawn fire from fact-checkers over statements she’s made about the Pentagon’s budget and the Middle East.

According to Gallup, more Americans nationwide now regard her unfavorably than favorably (although the rise in her unfavorable rating has come mostly from Republicans). 

It’s a lot to take so early in a political tenure. With the 2020 elections on the horizon, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s style strikes even some Democrats as too confrontational, at a time when party brass are working to unite a diverse coalition.

“If I were her consultant, I’d tell her: ‘You’ve got to recognize you’re in this game for the long haul. You have to do all the heavy lifting and the homework that’s required, all the relationship-building and coalition-building in order to be seen as a serious legislator,’ ” says Elizabeth Sherman, who teaches politics at American University in Washington, D.C. “She’s in danger of squandering her credibility.”

But supporters in her district – and she won 78 percent of the vote in the general – say she models exactly the kind of leadership that underrepresented communities desperately need in this nationalized, hyperpartisan era. It’s more than the fact that she’s a young woman of color with savvy social media skills in an institution still dominated by older white men. There’s real value, they say, in having a representative who balances national attention with local needs. She faces down criticism without blinking and makes a point of voicing her constituents’ ideals at the highest levels, even when those ideals go against the party line. And she still shows up to a neighborhood library event on a Saturday afternoon.

“What she’s doing is kind of reframing the conversation,” Ms. Vatsal says. “She’s put an anchor here. We may end up in a different position, but at least someone has staked our ground.”

The right flavor of liberal

Ms. Ocasio-Cortez is a Bronx native, but a lot of the support she saw in the primary came from Queens – specifically, Jackson Heights.

Bordered on the north by LaGuardia Airport and the south by the 7 train as it rumbles down Roosevelt Avenue, the community is a blend of the working class and the well-educated, native-born millennials and immigrant families. Restaurants bear signs in multiple languages. Collectively, Jackson Heights residents speak more than 160.

For years, Mr. Crowley and the Queens County Democratic Party faced little opposition here. The neighborhood, like the district, is mostly liberal, and the former congressman did what good liberals are supposed to do: oppose the National Rifle Association (NRA), support the Affordable Care Act, and call for immigration reform. By 2016, his 10th consecutive term, Mr. Crowley was the fourth most powerful Democrat in the House.

Then Donald Trump won the presidential election.

Suddenly, being a good liberal wasn’t enough, says Jacob Neiheisel, a political scientist at the University at Buffalo. “You had to be the right flavor of liberal.”

Ms. Ocasio-Cortez – or A.O.C., as she’s called these days – has that flavor in spades, and she worked it during the campaign. Through social media, she won over young people like David Lee, a Queens resident who a year ago was in his second bachelor’s program at Columbia University. Mr. Lee was especially taken with a video of her talking about “Medicare for All,” swearing off corporate PAC money, and promoting a renewable energy economy.

“Her message instantaneously resonated with me,” says Mr. Lee, the son of South Korean immigrants. He signed on to Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s campaign in April 2018 and soon dropped out of school to volunteer for her full time.

Jessica Mendoza/The Christian Science Monitor

David Lee became an instant supporter of Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez after seeing a video of the New Yorker, then running for office, talking about bold progressive policy ideas. He joined her campaign in April 2018 and has remained politically active since. 'Her victory has transformed the political and social culture in such a way that now there is hope for communities to self-determine their own future,' he says.

Others she convinced with her ground game. Longtime Jackson Heights resident Nuala O’Doherty was at first skeptical that anyone could beat Mr. Crowley, much less an untried 28-year-old. But Ms. Ocasio-Cortez and her team were unrelenting, says Ms. O’Doherty, a mother of five who runs the Jackson Heights Beautification Group. The then-candidate went to living rooms and libraries, talked to superintendents and students. “Literally, she showed up to events where there were seven people,” Ms. O’Doherty says. “And she wouldn’t leave.”

By the time Ms. Ocasio-Cortez was elected in November – one of a record number of women who entered Congress and helped flip the House to Democratic control – there was little doubt about her ability to commandeer the spotlight.  

A question of leadership

What critics now are questioning is her leadership. Since taking office in January, nearly every decision she’s made has come under scrutiny, both from the right and the left. Conservatives love to hate her – for her clothes, her dancing, even her staff, which has faced accusations of obscuring PAC money during the campaign. Some have said outright that she’s economically illiterate, though she majored in economics and international relations at Boston University. Last week, after the deadly mass shootings at two mosques in New Zealand, she drew criticism for tweeting that the NRA uses the phrase “thoughts and prayers” to deflect attention from proposed policy changes in the aftermath of gun tragedies.  

Even at home, support for Ms. Ocasio-Cortez is by no means universal. Though she beat Mr. Crowley by 15 points, estimated turnout in that primary was between 11 and 13 percent, suggesting it was a vocal, energized minority that won her the nomination. Some voice concerns around her approach, which they worry could alienate potential allies in Congress.

Others squirm over the fact that she’s a vocal member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). At an Irish pub in the Queens neighborhood of Woodside, attempts to ask about the congresswoman were met with a salty “You mean the socialist in the SUV?” No one cared to comment further.

Her biggest clash with establishment members of the party came over Amazon’s plan to build a second headquarters in Long Island City, a Queens neighborhood adjacent to her district. Ms. Ocasio-Cortez was among the most prominent politicians opposing the deal, which had been brokered by state party leaders. When it fell through, the brunt of criticism – that the state had lost 25,000 jobs thanks to ignorance and bullheadedness – landed on her.  

But the congresswoman’s core constituents say all this is exactly what they elected her to do. To them, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez shows a keen understanding of what the community needs, and doesn’t hesitate to use her national status to bring attention to it. That’s what her opposition to the Amazon deal was, they say: a plea that leaders deal with the community’s challenges – like overcrowded schools and crumbling infrastructure – rather than looking to a major corporation to supply Manhattanites with jobs and real estate moguls with high-end projects.

Jessica Mendoza/The Christian Science Monitor

Julissa Bisono (l.) stands with fellow community organizers Mireya Solis and Flaviana Linares at the offices of Make the Road New York in Queens. The three women are thrilled that they have in Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez a congresswoman who they say speaks to their issues on a national platform. 'We need someone like Alexandria, who is going to step up and call it out when it needs to be called out,' Ms. Bisono says. 'We're super grateful to have a Latina woman progressive ... elevating our issues.'

“We don’t care about the big real estate developers,” says Mr. Lee, who’s also a member of the DSA. “We care so strongly about the working class communities of color being able to live a decent life in this city. That’s what matters to us.”

Political scientists say it’s too soon to definitively cast Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s emergence as part of a broader trend. But it is worth looking at the style of leadership she’s modeling in an evolving Democratic Party.  

“At a time when we value institutions less, does that outsider perspective carry more weight?” asks Sally Friedman, a professor at the University of Albany who focuses on political representation. “It’s an interesting question about Congress and what kind of Congress we’re going to have. Where do the institutional parts of it fit, and what’s from the outside?”

For now, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez seems to have the kind of support at home that can withstand the battery of invectives flung her way. Her defenders talk about things like opportunity and changing the system. They say she’s showing that young people, women, communities of color, can take power into their own hands. That a healthy, vibrant democracy means giving a voice to those who’ve been told for decades to wait their turn. 

“Folks are feeling more engaged because … with Ocasio, they feel like they’re being heard,” says Julissa Bisono, a Latina activist who works with the Queens contingent of Make the Road New York, a nationwide community organization. “She’s bringing all of our local issues to a big platform. We needed that.”

Ms. Vatsal, the novelist, says that although she has more than a decade on Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, she’s found plenty to admire in the younger woman. “As a woman of color, I always thought I was strong and outspoken. But seeing her … how she steadily stood her ground, it was really instructive,” Ms. Vatsal says. “She’s representative of a real – and we see that across the country – wave of women at high levels and low levels speaking up for themselves.”

Toby Melville/Reuters

Members of the Independent Group depart following their first meeting in London on Feb. 25.

Nursing a cup of Earl Grey tea, Joan Ryan glances at the TV monitor in her parliamentary office. It’s mid-afternoon on another long day of Brexit debate, and the chamber’s green leather benches are mostly empty, including the backbench whence Ms. Ryan has just returned after supporting an amendment calling for a second referendum to be held.

The amendment was the latest move in the three-dimensional chess game of Brexit – Britain’s fitful path out of the European Union – that is lurching forward again this week. Prime Minister Theresa May is seeking to build support for a twice-rejected Brexit withdrawal agreement ahead of an EU summit at which the United Kingdom will be asking to extend its departure date past March 29.

Ms. Ryan spent 17 years as a Labour member of Parliament. But she no longer sits on its opposition benches. The amendment that she has just put forward was proposed by an independent group of MPs who defected last month from the two main parties, united by their opposition to Brexit and frustration with Parliament’s febrile, polarized politics.

“Politics is broken. Both major parties are consumed, one [Conservatives] by hard-right ideology and one [Labour] with the hard left. Neither of them are addressing the people. The people tend to be much more around the center ground,” she says.

By breaking away, these pro-EU independent MPs are betting on a bigger shake-up to come. Early polling has shown a measure of support for The Independent Group, or TIG, which with 11 MPs is tied as the fourth-largest group in the 650-seat House of Commons.

But the group faces numerous obstacles to becoming a real player in British politics, ranging from Labour’s and the Conservatives’ near duopolistic control of the system to TIG’s precarious electoral position and its limited media influence.

Finding a middle ground

While one recent poll found 18 percent support for TIG, compared to 23 percent for Labour and 36 percent for Conservative, this was only after respondents were reminded of its existence. Without such a prompt, support drops to 6 percent.

Moreover, the center ground in British politics is already contested by a national party that is strongly anti-Brexit and socially liberal. “The space they’re occupying is not empty. It’s the same space that the Liberal Democrats are occupying,” says John Curtice, a politics professor at Strathclyde University in Glasgow, Scotland.

For any new party, the challenge is to scale up and contest elections. Some TIG members are in swing seats and will struggle to replace the party machinery and brand recognition that helped them into power, say analysts. Ms. Ryan’s seat changed hands in 2010; she won it back in 2015 and increased her majority to more than 10,000 in the last election in 2017.

However, the Liberal Democrats have also demonstrated that U.K. centrists can succeed. In 2010, the party won nearly a quarter of votes cast in an election that yielded a coalition government in which the Liberal Democrats shared power with the Conservatives led by David Cameron.

This day’s amendment on Brexit is an early test for TIG. And it’s not looking good: Labour has told its MPs to abstain, even though its leader, Jeremy Corbyn, has said that he supports a second referendum. “They should be voting for this today,” sighs Ms. Ryan. “It absolutely demonstrates how disingenuous Jeremy Corbyn’s position is. He wants Brexit.” (Labour officials would defend their stance as a tactical one that didn’t preclude future votes.)

Ms. Ryan is one of eight Labour MPs who quit the party in February to set up TIG. The other three are former Conservatives opposed to Brexit. As MPs, they aren’t obliged to step down and run again for their seats, though they have faced calls to do so from local party activists.

For Ms. Ryan, who represents a district in north London which narrowly voted Remain in the 2016 referendum, quitting her party was a hard choice – she compares the feeling to “a bereavement” – that was not about just Brexit. “It’s the heart of your identity. It’s your politics, your values, your beliefs, your social life,” she says. (Her husband is a national trade union official.)

What forced her hand, she says, was Labour’s handling of anti-Semitism in its ranks, a problem that has surged under Mr. Corbyn’s leadership. Ms. Ryan isn’t Jewish, but she received death and rape threats as chair of the party’s Friends of Israel group. Other TIG members who are Jewish have accused Labour of being “institutionally anti-Semitic.”

“If it was just Brexit, I might have been able to stay longer and argued the case on a policy level … [but] anti-Semitism is non-negotiable,” she says.

‘This is a long way from done’

The nearest parallel for British politics is the formation in 1981 by four leading Labour moderates of the Social Democratic Party. Then, as now, Labour had a strongly left-wing platform. But the centrist SDP struggled to break tribal loyalties to Labour and wound up being absorbed into the Liberal Democrats in 1988.

Compared to the Labour heavy hitters who defected in 1981, TIG lacks high-caliber national politicians, says Anand Menon, a professor of European politics at King’s College London and director of its UK in a Changing Europe initiative. TIG’s de facto leader, Chuka Umunna, has been a prominent advocate for a second referendum and a telegenic critic of Mr. Corbyn, but as a “maverick backbencher” he will find himself less in demand from TV bookers.

“People are not interested in Chuka’s opinion on Brexit. People were interested because of the split in the Labour ranks,” Mr. Menon warns.

Those splits continue: Labour deputy leader Tom Watson has set up a center-left policy group of MPs that is widely seen as a counterweight to Corbyn’s leftist orthodoxy.

Ms. Ryan argues that her group’s walkout last month gave cover for Mr. Watson to act. “We’ve changed the weather. It remains to be seen if we can change the political landscape. I think we can. This is a long way from done,” she says.

She added that she didn’t see how Mr. Watson could wrest back control of “our party.” When prompted that she had said “our party,” she grimaced. “Yeah. The party.”

When TIG’s amendment is called at the end of Thursday’s debate, its defeat seems preordained. Conservatives line up to oppose it while Labour MPs stay on their benches; it fails by 334 to 85. But not all Labour MPs stay seated: 24 rebel against the leadership, mostly in support of a second referendum. And the main motion, on whether or not to seek an extension to Brexit, divides the Conservatives and prompts fresh speculation of a government walkout.

Given these divisions, TIG may see more defections, bolstering its case for a rethink of a party system based on adversarial majoritarianism. “If they hold our values, from whatever part of Parliament, come and join us,” says Ms. Ryan.

Scott Peterson/Getty Images/The Christian Science Monitor

Afghans view exhibits showcasing the memories and objects belonging to victims of 40 years of war – in this case a mound of clothes, phones, shoes, and other personal belongings shredded in suicide bombing attacks – at the opening of the Afghanistan Center for Memory and Dialogue in Kabul, Feb. 14.

A veteran of Afghanistan’s endless wars, Kabal Shah can only wipe away his tears when he frees his hand from one of his crutches, holding the metal support steady with the stump of his amputated leg.

Wearing a thick beard on his grizzled face and a wool shawl over his shoulder to ward off the late winter cold, Mr. Shah is part of the emotional outpouring at the opening of the Afghanistan Center for Memory and Dialogue – the first repository of four decades of victims’ memories to be systematically collected in the country.

The center is a project of the Afghan Human Rights and Democracy Organization (AHRDO), which since 2009 has sought to foster interethnic and intercommunity peace through cultural and artistic initiatives such as traveling theater productions and memory workshops.

Mr. Shah has propped himself for mourning beside a glass case full of the mementos of his youngest brother, Adel Shah, an uneducated hairdresser killed by chance by a Taliban suicide bomb near the U.S. Embassy in Kabul in April 2016.

It is the memory of his brother’s shoes that triggers the tears, says Mr. Shah, amid the collected remembrances of so many civilian casualties in a nation now defined by more than a generation of war. The ambulance driver who brought the body asked Mr. Shah if he could have his brother’s new shoes, and out of gratitude, Mr. Shah acquiesced.

“Thousands of people are like my brother, who are victimized,” says Mr. Shah. “When I saw the photos here, I thought I should share my deep condolences with all these people. After this, I really need peace.”

Scott Peterson/Getty Images/The Christian Science Monitor

An Afghan staffer is consoled at the opening of the Afghanistan Center for Memory and Dialogue in Kabul, Feb. 14, 2019.

The cumulative cost of Afghanistan’s wars borne by Mr. Shah’s family is typical of that paid by their fellow citizens. Two other family members were killed in a mine explosion, and a rocket landed on the family house in the early 1990s, killing nine more and taking Mr. Shah’s leg. In total, the family counts 15 victims.

“This is shameful for jihadi leaders, and for those officials who are still involved in the killing process,” says Mr. Shah. “All those people who have done such crimes … one day they should come to justice.”

The focus on war victims could not be more timely or relevant, as the United States conducts the first direct peace talks with the Islamist Taliban, which since 2001 have embroiled the American military in the longest war of its history.

Yet while U.S. officials and Taliban chiefs make positive sounds about peace, the Afghan government has yet to be officially included in the process, and the scale of bloodshed for decades here – amply demonstrated by the exhibits at this new center – attests to the challenges of reconciliation that lie ahead.

Starkly prominent amid the names and faces of victims, and the grim testimonies that crowd the walls and display cases, is a six-foot-tall mound of blood-stained, shredded clothes collected at the sites of different suicide bombings.

Piled among them are also shoes, torn from their owners, and other everyday items: broken eyeglasses, mobile phones pierced by shrapnel, crushed watches – even a digital watch stuck at 9:44 a.m., the seconds on the readout still blinking.

Preserving memory

The center counts more than 2 million Afghan civilians killed from 1978 to 2001, and some 70,000 more dead and injured since 2009. It adds that civilian casualties “remained undocumented” from 2001 to 2009 – the first years after the U.S. toppling of the Taliban and start of the current insurgency.

Explanations on the wall note how the center aims to avoid a “double catastrophe,” in which the first is the initial loss of life, and the second is “erasing” those deaths from Afghanistan’s “collective memory.”

The team so far has collected more than 4,000 personal objects and stories during eight years of work to “salvage, protect and share memories” of war victims and “provide a safe space for truth-telling.” The emotive weight of the center on visitors – despite being modestly situated in the basement of a rented house – is heavy with significance.

“It’s a healing process for both sides,” says Sima Samar, chair of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission and a former minister of women’s affairs, who officially opened the center last month.

The center serves as “a reminder of the lack of justice for these people, and that the lack of accountability for the crimes of the past will fuel impunity, which we still see with the continuation of the conflict and the killing,” says Ms. Samar. The center, she adds, also aims to “remind the perpetrators and the criminals that they have done something wrong, and to encourage them to come and confess, and to ask for an apology.”

Scott Peterson/Getty Images/The Christian Science Monitor

The chains, manacles, and whips that one victim of torture used to tell his story at the Afghanistan Center for Memory and Dialogue in Kabul.

Such collective memories should inform future generations, Ms. Samar says, noting that two of her four family members who perished in wars are not yet listed. And she says she hopes the Afghan government and Western donors will support the center so it can expand beyond the basement into a dedicated museum space.

“If we don’t try to heal the wounds of the people, we will not be able to stop the cycle of violence,” says Ms. Samar. “We all need peace, but peace without respect for human rights and justice will not be a sustainable peace.”

Sitting alone in a corner of one room, clearly distraught, Zahra Hussaini is consoled by a colleague who puts an arm around her back. As a program officer with AHRDO, she helped curate the center and gather its memories.

“None of my family are here, but I imagine all these people who are in these photos are my family,” says Ms. Hussaini.

History as motivator

Each regime that ruled modern Afghanistan “did their dark thing to the nation,” she says. “So as you survey this room, this is the least number [of victims]. If we count every family in Afghanistan, they gave victims directly, or their colleagues or extended family did.”

Relatives of victims were reluctant to share their stories at first, she says, but opened up when the historical import was explained.

“If we spoke to them about the future, about the new generation, finally they became happy … because they want to show all the world what is happening in Afghanistan,” says Ms. Hussaini.

“In this exhibit we reflect that all of us sacrificed, not only one person,” she says. “Here are people from all Afghanistan, from every [ethnic] nation, from every tribe.”

Salim Rajabi, the senior program manager for AHRDO, says the work to collect personal objects and testimonies about civilians who were killed began in 2011. The original idea was to keep them in wooden ammunition boxes, he says, to transform those tools of war into the keepers of the memories.

Gathering the ammunition boxes proved impractical, so some families make and paint similar wood and metal boxes themselves, and use games and exercises to give self-confidence and create a form of closure.

“We are trying to change their personal stories into collective stories, to show them that here is a safe place for them to talk, where everyone is respecting each other,” says Mr. Rajabi. The families of victims themselves pushed for the permanent exhibit, so that everyone “would know their pain.”

Four sons

While he speaks, an older Afghan woman from Laghman province, missing many teeth, screams as she gets to the case that immortalizes the memory of her sons – four of whom she lost.

Zia Gul’s sons were lost in different incidents: One was murdered during the war-torn reign of President Najibullah, who ruled with Soviet backing until 1992; one was still a child when a rocket landed on the tiny kiosk where he sold cigarettes during the mujahideen era of the mid-1990s; yet another was a soldier killed by a Taliban rocket while he visited a cucumber patch.

Citing poor memory, Ms. Gul can’t recall the circumstances of her lost fourth son.

“The only thing keeping me alive is my faith and my trust in God’s justice,” she says, when sharing her memory for the center. She wanted to tell her story so no one would forget that “war cannot be uglier than losing four young sons and at the end a mother having to live and suffer on her own.”

Ms. Gul pulls away from the glass case and is beside herself.

“My four sons have been killed,” she cries. “I am alone now.”

Since Friday, when poet and translator W.S. Merwin died at his home in Maui, Hawaii, I’ve been thinking about the phone interview he gave me in 2003.  

“Poetry can’t be done as an act of will. You can’t say, ‘I will now write a poem,’” he noted early in our conversation. Yet every morning he sat down to write on scrap paper. “It has to be a piece of paper that is worthless. The idea of taking a blank sheet would be very intimidating.”  

I was surprised by that humble admission, given that Mr. Merwin published more than 50 books in his lifetime. Like many poets, he often began with a sound, “some phrase or sentence that suddenly seems to be very much alive, but I don’t know where it is going. I find out by listening.”

Over time, that listening led Mr. Merwin, the son of a Presbyterian minister, to evolve from writing tight, image-driven poems to longer, experimental work, and from classical subjects to political and ecological concerns and, later, to metaphysical inquiries. It also helped him become one of our most decorated poets, beginning with his first book, “The Mask of Janus,” which was chosen by W.H. Auden for the Yale Younger Series in 1951. Mr. Merwin won his first Pulitzer Prize for ​“The Carrier of Ladders” (1971); the National Book Award for “Migration: New and Selected Poems” (2007); and his second Pulitzer for “The Shadow of Sirius” (2009). He also served as the nation’s 17th Poet Laureate Consultant of the United States in 2010-11.

What remained consistent throughout his career was his willingness to follow where the work led, and his commitment to preserving the natural world.

During our conversation, he mentioned that after he finished writing, he would plant a few palm trees on his 19-acre home in Maui, Hawaii, slowly reclaiming land that almost had been ruined when it was used to raise pineapples in the 1930s.

What was so appealing about palm trees, I wondered.

Audrey McAvoy/AP/File

Poet W.S. Merwin speaks to the Hawaii Conservation Conference in Honolulu on Aug. 2, 2011. He was an ardent conservationist who celebrated nature in his poetry.

“You can fall in love with palms because they’re incredibly ancient. They go back at least 60 million years, yet they’re still evolving,” he explained. Also, “Palms can be grown quite close to each other, and when they grow up they make a canopy, but they work out their relationships with each other very well.”

Mr. Merwin, who began studying Buddhism in 1970, worked through many essential questions in his writing. As the poet Edward Hirsch has written, “W. S. Merwin is one of the greatest poets of our age. He is a rare spiritual presence in American life and letters (the Thoreau of our era).”  

His metaphysical approach shaped even short poems in his later work, as with the lovely “Rain at Daybreak,” published in his final book, “Garden Time” (2016):

One at a time the drops find their own leaves
then others follow as the story spreads
they arrive unseen among the waking doves
who answer from the sleep of the valley
there is no other voice or other time

His contribution to American poetry is profound. When I think about how his work has impacted me and many other writers, the opening lines of “The Wings of Daylight,” another poem from his final collection, immediately come to mind:

Brightness appears showing us everything
it reveals the splendors it calls everything
but shows it to each of us alone
and only once and only to look at
not to touch or hold in our shadows

Poems used by permission of Copper Canyon Press.

Elizabeth Lund writes about poetry for The Christian Science Monitor and The Washington Post.

Reuters

The cockpit of a Boeing 737 MAX 8 aircraft.

The recent crashes of two Boeing 737 Max 8 airliners provide a reminder of the difficult choices the world faces as it moves even faster toward “intelligent” transportation systems. Though the exact causes of the air crashes are still to be determined, the inability to make a successful shift from automated control to pilot control seems to be a common factor. That should be a useful lesson for almost all forms of transport being built to reduce the high costs of tragedies caused by human error.

Whether in the air, on highways and railways, or on the water, the transportation industry is undergoing a revolutionary transition in the use of artificial intelligence. Fully autonomous vehicles are already being tested on roads. A year ago, a pedestrian in Tempe, Arizona, was killed by a self-driving Uber car undergoing such a test. Despite the questions that the tragedy raised, Tesla founder Elon Musk said recently he was certain his “autopilot” cars would soon be able to fully operate hands-free.

Such confidence is up against widespread fear. More than 70 percent of American drivers would be afraid to ride in a self-driving vehicle, according to an AAA poll. Despite those sentiments, the truth is that technology is constantly making travel safer and bringing down the death toll of decades past. The Canadian Pacific Railway says it will soon become the first rail line to use electromagnetic sensors to detect tiny cracks in rail car wheels that can lead to fractures and derailments. Partial automation is already in newer automobiles, often equipped with features such as lane-change warnings and controls that keep a certain distance from a vehicle ahead. Half of the cars sold in the United States today are equipped with automatic emergency braking that requires no foot on the pedal. Such equipment is expected to be on virtually every new car by 2022.

In general, air travel is safer than ever because of constant innovation and better pilot training. But the consequences of any lapses in safety are so profound that eternal vigilance is requisite. It’s likely that the cause of the two recent crashes will lead quickly to corrective measures.

Today’s most innovative transport relies heavily on automation during crucial moments. Problems arise when operators take too long to regain control after a system fails. Long stretches of inactivity can produce what is called “passive fatigue,” which may lengthen their response times. Ironically, as planes and road vehicles become more automated, pilots and drivers will have less and less “practice” controlling their machines.

The next leap in such technologies will be to leave humans out of the equation altogether and avoid the tricky handoffs in the human-machine interface. Despite the recent troubling setbacks, “leave the driving to us” will probably be the motto of the machines that convey us in the future.