This is the story of Azim Khamisa.

Azim's twenty-year-old son, Tariq, was a San Diego college student earn­ing extra money delivering pizzas in the mid-1990s when he was gunned down by a fourteen-year-old boy in a senseless, gang­ related homicide. Azim, like any parent of a murdered child, experienced severe trauma and grief. Yet over the years he has demonstrated, and experi­enced, forgiveness.

Azim, a devout Muslim, was told by his spiritual adviser that after a certain period of grieving his son, he must turn his grief into good works. Only in that way, he was told, could he see the "wisdom" behind what happened to his son. After all, Muslims believe in a Beneficent, Loving, and a Wise God.

Doing so then became Azim's mission in life: to act in such a way as to help his son even after he had died. He was told that instead of grieving the dead, he must do good, compassionate deeds for the living. Having felt that he had lost all reason to live, Azim came to feel new purpose in life. Channeling his grief into positive, meaningful work would benefit both Tariq and himself.

When Azim first heard that Tariq had been killed, he said it was as if "a nuclear bomb had gone off in my heart." He remem­bers the experience of leaving his body, and his life force left with him, and when the explosion finally subsided, Azim came back into his body. When he returned, he had received a revelation: that there were victims on both sides of the gun.

That realization led Azim to reach out to the grandfather of the boy who killed his son, with whom the boy, Tony, had been living at the time of the murder. The grandfather, Ples Felix, was a Green Beret who had served two tours in Vietnam and had a master's degree in urban development. Tony had gone to live with his grandfather at the age of nine, after suffering frequent violent abuse himself as well as witnessing the murder of his cousin. By the time he was nine, Tony was already racked with anger. Read­ing in the papers about the boy and about his grandfather, Azim felt compassion for their story.

Azim asked the district attorney to introduce him to Ples, and they met in the office of the public defender who was repre­senting Tony. Azim told Ples he felt no animosity toward Tony or his family, and he realized that both families had been trauma­tized by this tragic incident. He was concerned about Tony and all the other children who are trying to cope with such a violent world, in which the average American child has seen 100,000 images of violence on TV, movies, and video games before enter­ing the first grade.

Azim told Ples he had started a foundation in the memory of his son, to help stop children from killing children. Ples said he would do whatever he could to help. As he extended his condo­lences, Ples told Azim that ever since the day of the murder, the Khamisa family had been in his daily prayers and meditations. Azim invited Ples to the second meeting of the foundation a couple of weeks later, where Ples met the entire Khamisa family. Ples spoke passionately about his own experience, saying the foundation was an answer to his prayers. A San Diego television station filmed Tariq's grandfather shaking hands with Tony's grandfather: "Clearly," they reported, "this is a different kind of handshake."

Today, Azim is chairman of the Tariq Khamisa Foundation's board of directors, and Ples is the vice chairman. The men have grown close, and Azim says that if he were to choose ten people who are closest to him in his life, Ples would be one. The foundation has become a personal ministry for both men, and there is a job there waiting for Tony on the day he is released from prison.

salam
Ahmad
P.s. For more information on the Tariq Khamisa Foundation, visit http://www.tkf.org/