Musician Darren Hanlon recounts a Muslim Uber driver’s reaction to the Paris terrorist attacks

A MUSLIM Uber driver’s response to the Paris attacks has gone viral, and for good reason. Take a few moments to read it.

Uber driver’s sad terror reaction

FOLK rocker Darren Hanlon has illustrated the heartbreaking impact of the Paris attacks in an account of a Saturday night Uber ride that has gone viral.

Hanlon, a singer and songwriter from Gympie who has toured with Courtney Barnett, is in Sydney ahead of his Wednesday gig at Giant Dwarf Theatre.

Posting on his Facebook page, he told of the emotional outburst by the Muslim driver who picked him up outside a Sydney car dealership after he missed his bus stop.

“I sunk down in the seat and we settled into the usual small talk, his shift hours and workload,” Hanlon wrote.

“I looked over and could see even with him sitting down he was small framed, his chin almost in line with the top of the steering wheel.”

After some lighthearted discussion about the perils and pitfalls of GPS navigation, the conversation shifted to the more grave topic of the terrorist attacks that had rocked the French capital overnight.

“I can’t understand these who go around killing other people ... in cold blood”, Hanlon heard the Indian-born driver say.

“Although it’s been on everyone’s mind today it was still an abrupt shift,” he wrote.

“He’d dovetailed it into the conversation as if he’d been waiting to. I recognised the moment that sometimes happens in the driver/passenger relationship where the banal switches to the deeply personal, the freedom allowed strangers who are trapped in a finite time period together.”

Straightening himself in his seat, Hanlon said, he sat quietly and listened as the driver confessed: “I’m a Muslim ... And this is not what I was taught as a child.”

“The etymology of the word Islam comes from a word that means peace.”

The driver told Hanlon he had spent most of the day praying at the Zetland mosque after hearing of the deadly attacks the killed at least 129 people and left at least 150 wounded.

Hanlon said he emphasised: “These people say they act under the name of Islam. I’ve studied religion, theology. The etymology of the word Islam comes from a word that means Peace.”

A discussion ensued about the ways religious texts, including the Koran, are misconstrued by those who seek to serve their own needs.

“The finance banker will use certain lines to justify his actions, just as the jihadist will do the same,” Hanlon wrote.

“I looked over to see him wipe tears from his eyes.”

He said he queried whether the Koran had a basic law, like that of the Bible’s Ten Commandments, stating “thou shalt not kill”.

“‘Of course!’ he exclaimed, ‘The second highest law says that if you kill a single soul it’s like killing the soul of all humanity. If you save a single soul, you save all humanity.’”

Hanlon said the pair sat in the car continuing to talk after reaching his destination on King St, mourning both the innocent victims in Paris and the young men “whose minds have been brainwashed”, concluding that love was “the only defence” against the terror threat.

“I didn’t wanna write this as some kind of statement,” Hanlon’s post concluded.

“I just want to tell you about my brief random conversation with a sad Muslim Sydney Uber driver, whose religion is being taken from him.”

The Facebook post drew more than 12,000 likes, but some commenters expressed scepticism about whether the story was true.

Hanlon told news.com.au the encounter happened exactly as described, that he jotted it down soon afterwards and had quoted the driver as precisely as possible when recalling the conversation.

[e-mail]

Originally published as Musician Darren Hanlon recounts a Muslim Uber driver’s reaction to the Paris terrorist attacks