I was seeing patients when the breaking news flashed on the TV screen in the waiting room. By the time I walked to my desk, my WhatsApp feed was full of links, videos, and among them the devastating image of the martyring of an American icon. Viewing his final moments – to my physician’s eye – I knew the single bullet was immediately lethal.

Charlie Kirk’s assassination will have more impact on the freedom of speech than the Valentine’s Day Fatwah issued by the Ayatollah of Iran in 1989 on Salman Rushdie.

The death threats that followed the publication of the Satanic Verses, the burnings of books, and booksellers and the murder of a Japanese translator, cemented Islamophobia as both an increasingly powerful political and judicial shield that enables Islamists to evade scrutiny and an increasingly expansive and sinister censor. In the almost 40 years since the Ayatollah’s first decree, the chilling of speech surrounding ideas relating to Islam, Islamism, and Islamic institutions have only expanded.

Soon after Charlie Kirk’s murder, he was labelled as an American Christian martyr. Martyrdom elicits gaping chasms of divides: on one side of the abyss there are those who mourn (as I do) and, on the other side, the unreachable bank of those who relish the rise of the what the Network Contagion Research Institute at Princeton terms Assassination Culture.

This chasm will emerge to be greater than the division that followed the attacks of 9/11. Recall President George W Bush addressing Congress shortly after 9/11 saying to the audience they were either ‘with us or you are with the terrorists’ only for the $ 6.4 trillion-dollar Global War on Terror that followed to unwittingly pit the Western World against the Muslim Majority World. After Charlie Kirk’s death, the divisions threaten to deepen inward.

My unpublished research during my 2010 Templeton-Cambridge Fellowship in Science and Religion examining martyrdom ideology and Islamism confirmed martyrdom seeks always to rent societies apart. Fifteen years later, I recognise here in America the beginning of a similar parting divide which has defined Islamist jihadism for decades. How Americans react to Charlie Kirk’s assassination – where domestic radicalisation fueled domestic terrorism threatens the very fabric of our nation.

Our reaction to this act of terror is also a litmus test – do we grieve or do we celebrate? Americans, myself included, have been horrified to see relish and celebration – a truly grotesque moment to behold. Videos of those celebrating online are a shocking testament to a section of Americans utterly dehumanised and devitalised as to place no value on human life. Worse, the American electorate is so deeply ‘otherised’ from its counterpart, through years of consuming endless streams of images, derogatory speech, and animus on social media, chat rooms and other virtual spaces that nothing, when it comes to ‘the other’ contains any meaning. Compassion is extinct.

Utah Governor Spencer Cox, still raw from the slaying of Charlie Kirk, recognised the defining moment we find ourselves in immediately as he reflected. The Governor observed he was unable to know whether what we decide is to come will be the beginning of a better America or if – as Leonard Cohen once sang – we want it darker.

Our test as a nation, and as a beacon to other nations, is simple: do we truly believe, and are we truly capable of defending, our First Amendment within which the entire universe that has made America so unique is contained? Or will we see it permanently decimated, as so many of America’s enemies seek with a passion.

A single bullet not only extinguished Charlie Kirk, it sought to kill belief in the constitutional guarantee to the freedom of religion, speech, and the freedom to assemble – Charlie Kirk, in his final moment, embodied all three.

In the aftermath of his brutal assassination, like millions of others watching his video clips, I became aware of the dignity and genuine curiosity with which he challenged the minds of our youth. The recognition of how cruelly short his destiny was fated to be left me pondering only of what he might have achieved had he lived another 60 years, magnifying the loss.

Soon after his assassination, some Muslims in America referred to his ‘Islamophobia’ and animus towards Islam and Muslims. Others showed callous indifference, inserting the loss of life in Gaza as comparison. Yet when I saw some clips of his ideas, I found his critique comprehensible, even if lacking nuance and wide insight.

In some clips, he refers to Islam as unable to separate Church (Mosque) from State. This certainly identifies Islamism – the totalitarian imposter of Islam – but fails to correctly explain the monotheism Islam proper. The Quran makes no specification of the structure by which a nation is governed; most of the Quran refers to civil and family law. That is unlike Islamism which mandates Islam can only be realised through a totalitarian statehood of a Caliphate. Such a mandate is antithetical to Islam because of the undeniable freedom of will ‘let there be no compulsion in religion’ (the Quran Chapter 2:256) ascribed to the human being by Islam.

The fundamental principle of Islam which eschews compulsion in belief also dispels Charlie Kirk’s belief that Islam denied the individual a choice in accepting belief – failing to recognise that too many Muslim Majority countries have effectively silenced millions by criminalising blasphemy and apostasy even though the Quran itself issues no punishment for either. And finally, if Muslims disagree with Charlie Kirk’s views, once again, the Quran 25:63 reminds us to eschew disagreement, confrontation, or violence when meeting with a critic and instead act with peaceably: ‘And the servants of (God) the Most Gracious are those who walk in humility and when the ignorant address them say, “Peace.”’

Sadly, while Charlie’s remarks might have been better levelled at Islamism than Islam, would that we might have enjoyed a dialogue together. This loss will also be mine.

As the days have passed since Charlie Kirk was so brutally cut down, I have felt a depth of sadness I hadn’t known was within me. Often, the sadness broke through into my patient consultations. The wound left in his void bores deep into the same generosity of the American public space that enables me to publish, broadcast, speak, and write in defiance of Islamism as an observing Muslim. I speak of the extremist Islamist jihadist groups Al Qaeda, the Taliban, ISIS, Hezbollah, and most recently Hamas, whose murderous handiwork I personally in October 2023. I do so only because of the generous spaces in our public square in the tumult that is America.

This freedom for me is what is most threatened by Charlie’s assassination and the national reaction to it. There is a danger this secured, hugely powerful, and pluralist space in which ideas can thrive only in America can also be silenced and rendered extinct.

As a Muslim woman observant of Islam, Charlie Kirk’s death is a devastating loss of shelter of the America which embraces, examines, rejects, and accepts my ideas without acrimony but with curiosity, without judgment but with openness and without rancour but with good nature.

Like Christians, Muslims too believe in an afterlife judged on our actions. On the loss of a human being Muslims say: ‘Verily we belong to God and truly to Him we shall return.’ And so, just as Erika Kirk, his young widow, speaks of Charlie being in heaven, I too am assured he resides there.

Charlie Kirk’s brief presence here on Earth was colossal, his legacy will be monumental, and his example, while deeply Christian, is hugely resonant to the ideals of America and in many ways to the ideals of Islam. As America readies itself for his funeral service commending him to heaven, it is time to bid Charlie Kirk God Speed and Salam.

Qanta A. A. Ahmed MD, Senior Fellow Independent Women’s Forum; Life Member Council on Foreign Relations @MissDiagnosis