After Christchurch, Muslims ask: Are we safe in the West?

For Amira Elghawaby, it was the carpet.

Ms. Elghawaby lives in Ottawa. But when she watched video of Friday’s Christchurch mosque massacre, she was struck by the green prayer carpet on which the victims lay, which was just like the carpets at so many of the mosques where she has prayed.

“It just felt so close,” she says.

The New Zealand attack, which left 50 worshipers dead, has shaken Muslim communities across the globe. It has also steeled them against the possibility of more such atrocities.

As anti-Muslim sentiment rises, a similar assault could happen anywhere, worries Raja Iqbal, CEO of an artificial intelligence start-up, leaving his mosque in Redmond, Washington, last Friday. “I don’t think it’s purely Islamophobia,” he says. “There’s a growing nationalism around the world, a growing xenophobia.”

And it is that mood, felt in the United States and Canada as well as in Europe and further afield, that set the scene for the savagery

‘Always in the back of my mind’Continental attitudes‘The perfect storm’The view from the Middle East