Police swiftly ruled that Nabra’s murder was no hate crime, but the result of road rage, implying that the two cannot coexist. I attended Nabra’s vigil in Reston, Virginia, on June 21, 2017, alongside my close friends Abed Ayoub and Mohammed Maraqa and thousands who came together only blocks away from her home. Her friends were there, as were her parents. Her father echoed what he told investigators and police immediately after he learned about his daughter’s murder: “He killed my daughter because she is Muslim. That’s what I believe.” Every Muslim American at the vigil that day agreed with Nabra’s father, as did millions more who followed her story and mourned her death from afar.

QUESTION: The police ruling treated road rage and hate crime as mutually exclusive — worth examining how such classification choices shape public narratives about bias-motivated violence.

Khaled A. Beydoun, American Islamophobia_ Unde…, loc. 512