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How a Near-Death Experience Changed Rais Bhuiyan's Life
Key Excerpts from Article on Website of PBS
Posted: July 18th, 2025
https://www.pbs.org/wnet/exploring-hate/2021/10/29/how-a-nea...
Ten days after 9/11, Rais Bhuiyan was shot at point blank range by a white supremacist. The near-death experience inspired him to set up World Without Hate, dedicated to breaking the cycles of violence. "As a result of the shooting, I ... lost my home, my job, my sense of security and my fiance," [said Bhuiyan]. "I focused on rebuilding my life slowly getting into restaurant working as a waiter. Many kind and caring Americans came forward to help redo my life. Forgiving my attacker was a multiple-step process. I realized by executing him we were simply losing human life without dealing with the root cause. I began to see him as a human being like me, not just as a killer. And I remember what it feels like to be on the brink the death, begging to God for a second chance. I learned about the verse in the Holy Koran chapter 5, verse 32 where it says that saving a life is like saving the entire mankind and taking a life is like taking the life of entire mankind. I was extremely convinced I needed to go the extra mile to save the life of the man. When we launched our global campaign to save the life of my attacker he heard from his lawyer that’s one of his victims was running a campaign to save his life. And he told his lawyer, I do not believe it, I never said sorry, I never apologized and destroyed their lives, especially his life, and now he forgave me and is running a campaign to save my life, he was released to tears, he said I don’t deserve that, I’m someone unforgivable. He wrote a letter to me from death row and in one paragraph this is what he said, that my stepfather taught me some lessons that I should have never learned. So when he learned about our campaign he went to tremendous transformation and talked about world peace, mercy, justice, peace, hate crimes and how he was wrong, what went wrong in his life, and how he ended up killing people. He was in peace before he was executed."
Note: Watch Bhuiyan's powerful 17-min PBS interview. For more, watch our latest 20-min video on what can transform a divided world, where you’ll hear the powerful words and stories from those at the edge of death, leaders who reached across deep divides, and even a former neo-Nazi who left hate. Explore more positive stories like this on human interest stories and near-death experiences.
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