The thirty-third victim of the 2019 New Zealand mosque massacre was a forty-year-old man named Haroon Mahmood. A native of Pakistan, Mr. Mahmood had worked as a banker before moving to New Zealand to become assistant academic director of Canterbury College in Christchurch. Before his murder, he was only two months away from earning a PhD in finance. He was eventually laid to rest in a mass burial along with twenty-five other Muslim victims of the New Zealand attacks. Two months after the Christchurch massacre, Mr. Mahmood’s wife and two children accepted his PhD posthumously from Lincoln University in an emotional graduation ceremony. “It was hard, but it was wonderful to see them come,” Vice Chancellor Bruce McKenzie told Radio New Zealand. “It was very moving. There were a lot of tears.”

Arsalan Iftikhar, Fear of a Muslim Planet_ Gl…, loc. 580