God’s Waiting Room
Diverse Islamic traditions are being adapted to meet the changing times and places in which Muslims live. This article looks at the Muslim way of death.
Some of the best jokes I’ve ever heard were at the end of my much loved mother-in-law’s funeral in Lahore some years ago, and the many moments of dark humour in God’s Waiting Room reminded me of that event. This fly-on-the-wall documentary follows Mr Ghulam Taslim, Director of East London’s Taslim Funerals, one of only two commercial Muslim funeral services in the country.
Community affairs
Although Muslim funerals, like any others, are sombre affairs, the firm Muslim belief in the immortality of the soul and the existence of an afterlife perhaps lends a lesser finality to death and greater acceptance of the end of life as a natural transition. For Muslims, mourning is a collective and public process as well as a collective obligation; a Muslim who dies without known relatives will be buried by the community. The funeral prayers are the shortest of all Muslim prayers and are performed standing, but the mourning process often stretches over three or more days, with children encouraged to be there and people dropping in as their schedules allow. The family and friends of the person who has died are supported towards a gradual return to normal life.
But Muslim funerals are also chaotic, high-stress events, as God’s Waiting Room illustrates. The main reason for this is the very strong desire to follow the Prophet Muhammed’s practice of burying the dead as quickly as possible, preferably within 24 hours of death, lest the departed become abhorrent to their loved ones due to decomposition. Embalming is not practised unless the body is to be sent abroad.
The British system
This poses interesting challenges in the British context, where different burial practices dominate and the bureaucracy is complex. What should be done when a Muslim dies just before the weekend? Will registrars, coroners and graveyards be open for business? How can people follow the Muslim practice which requires the deceased to be buried pointing towards Mecca when the rest of the graveyard faces a different direction? Can a Muslim be buried in a shroud, according to their own tradition, or must they be buried in a coffin as required by law?
Some local authorities as well as individual sympathetic officials are increasingly making allowances. Areas with sizeable Muslim populations like Leicester and Dewsbury lead the way. They have set up a rota for weekend registrars and coroners, set aside special areas for Muslim graves, allowed families to dig graves themselves and to bury the dead without coffins. And some have left themselves open to accusations of discrimination, for example by charging higher amounts for weekend services.
The National Health Service is the British institution which has probably had the most dealings with the Muslim way of death. As a result, it has developed considerable information resources about Muslim practices, aimed mainly at reducing the distress of Muslim families and ensuring cultural sensitivity. As with many policies framed by multiculturalism, though, what mainstream institutions see as ‘Islamic’ can often be a limited vision.
Diverse traditions
Muslims agree on a number of practices. These include:
- an abhorrence of cremation and postmortems due to a belief that the body will be resurrected
- wearing white (not black) and plain clothing at funerals
- the practice of ritual washing and shrouding of the dead (except for martyrs who are presumed ritually pure).
But, like many aspects of Islam, there’s plenty of diversity too. Moona Taslim, the multi-talented daughter-manager of Taslim Funerals, neatly sidesteps a theological discussion on whether a ‘double-decker’ burial of a deceased couple (thereby taking up less space) is permissible in Islam.
- In general, Muslim women do not accompany the body to the burial, but in conflict-ridden Karachi in the mid-1990s, when it was too dangerous for men who were operating ‘underground’ to bury murdered political activists, the women buried them instead.
- In some Middle Eastern cultures women are discouraged from visiting graves, while in Tajikistan, for example, entire families visit family graves first thing on Eid-ul-Fitr at the end of Ramadan.
- The more puritanical Saudi interpretation requires graves to remain largely unmarked and strictly no flowers, while in the Indian Sub-Continent an entire mausoleum may be built to commemorate the deceased and be decked with strings of marigolds and rose petals.
- Some say there should be no weeping and keening, but anyone who has seen a Palestinian funeral will know how far that is observed.
A friend whose mother recently died faced a dilemma: half the family was Sunni and half Shia. Were the funeral prayers to be Sunni-style or Shia? In the end they were both, with a sort of echo system between the two imams. More on Sunni and Shia traditions.
Creative ideas
God’s Waiting Room shows how Muslims are adapting their diverse traditions to the time and place in which they live. There’s hearse made from a converted Harley Davidson motorcycle – good for beating the traffic. And even in Pakistan, families are now using coffins. Meanwhile, an increasing problem confronting health authorities in Britain is what to do with deceased Muslims who have converted from another faith, when there is a tussle among family and friends over burial practices.
Some things need to change, such as the practice among some Afghan tribes of burying a woman murdered for adultery in a shallow hillside grave so her body becomes exposed to the elements.
And some things will remain the same as they have for centuries, such as ensuring that the dying person recites the kalima, the Muslim declaration of faith, and that the last word is given to God.
Article by Cassandra Balchin for Channel 4.
