Voices of Islam (158 page)

•

Daniel Abdal-Hayy Moore

With blisters the size of Brazil

and headaches the size of Manhattan— why is spiritual pursuit so associated with

physical pain?

Abd al-Qadir Jilani used to

tie his hair to a nail on the wall to snap his head back if he dozed off

reading Qur’an.

Christian mystics endure endless permutations of difficulty, including spontaneously

bleeding from the wounds of Christ.

Sitting in Buddhist meditation on puffy black cushions crosslegged for hours to

focus the mind nearly

drove me up the wall I was facing.

Birth is no picnic. Death often less so. Life in between: a

tough love event.

Yet it all brings us to God. These blisters on feet around

Ka‘ba marble around and around,

the headache that comes from odd short hours of

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sleep in order to

wake up the heart before Allah in the last watches of the night—

the abode of lovers—

is the price to pay for
ma‘rifa
1
— as all creatures of this earth must

crack open the shells on acorns or mussels to get the meat, the

earth splits apart revealing deep fissures of ruby, whole

generations drown and later generations come—a

tear of joy forms in the eye of one who sees
The One Who

Sees!

NOTES

This poem first appeared in Daniel Abdal-Hayy Moore,
Mecca/Medina Time- Warp
. Reprinted here from a Zilzal Press chapbook, by permission from the author.

1. Ma‘rifa
   means ‘‘recognition of the Divine Reality.’’
   

11
‌

D
EATH AND
B
URIAL IN
I
SLAM

•

Rkia Elaroui Cornell

As a young married woman and the mother of a two-year-old daughter, I worked at one of the largest Islamic centers in the United States, the Islamic Center of Southern California in the city of Los Angeles. It was 1980, a time when the Muslim community of Los Angeles was going through significant changes because of their large population growth. This demographic boom warranted an increased need for various religious services to be rendered. This in turn created job opportunities for immigrant Muslims with expertise in Arabic language teaching and Qur’anic studies.

I had just moved to the United States with my husband, who was then a graduate student in Islamic Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. At the Islamic Center I established an Islamic Sunday School program, taught Arabic and the Qur’an, acted as a religious and spiritual advisor for female community members, provided information on Islam for non-Muslims, and assisted new converts and those on the verge of converting to Islam to know more about the religion they were about to embrace. When I was not teaching, advising, developing educational programs, or coordinat- ing some of the Center’s social activities, I acted as an administrative assistant to the Center’s director and its nine trustees. Preparing bodies for burial was not part of my job description. However, when circumstances forced me to take on this responsibility, it turned out to be one of the most challenging and important services that I rendered for the Center and the community.

Although 26 years have passed, I still remember the dreadful phone call that I received in my offi at around ten o’clock on a Monday morning. The voice was that of a young Muslim man from Canada, informing me of the sudden death of his bride in a West Hollywood hotel room. They had been in Los Angeles to celebrate their honeymoon, and the woman’s death had snatched the young man’s wife away from him in the blink of an eye. The police ran their investigation, the autopsy results revealed no foul play, and since embalming is not allowed in Islam, the body had to be cleaned, shrouded, and buried as soon as possible.

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In this case, an autopsy had to be performed because of the woman’s young age and because the cause of death was unknown. In California, the law dictates that such a procedure must take place even if it is objectionable to the religious beliefs of the deceased person’s family. The death certificate is then signed by the Medical Examiner, and the Board of Health approves the body for burial.

Earlier, an elderly woman had passed away, but the cause of her death was unknown too. Her family refused to allow the coroner to perform an autopsy. They appealed to the Islamic Center for help. They asked the Center to explain to the authorities the religious reasons behind their stand. The Center’s response to the coroner’s office was that contemporary Islamic legal scholars were of two views on the matter of autopsies. Some do not object to an autopsy being performed, but others argue against it. Those who argue against autopsies feel that the relationship between the body and the soul continues after death. They believe that the dead person never loses her senses or feelings. According to this belief, the dead person is aware of what is going on around her and suffers because of this. The family’s objection to subjecting the body of their deceased mother to the pain of an autopsy followed this opinion. They were also of the view that the body should not be used for organ donation or for any medical or scientific experimentation. This was because the body has to be intact on the Day of Judgment. In this particular case, the authorities honored the family’s request. Because of the woman’s advanced age, they did not insist on the rigid application of the law and waived the autopsy.

The poor young Canadian husband was not so lucky. He had no choice but to abide by the law because of his deceased wife’s young age and because he did not want to be incriminated for her death. Having dealt with this harsh reality, he found solace in trying to fulfi the remaining religious obligations allowed to him before putting his wife’s body to rest. He needed a Muslim woman to perform the cleansing of the body (
ghusl
) and a Muslim Imam to perform the funerary prayers (
salat al-janaza
). I informed the Center director of his call. He immediately called his wife and told her that a Muslim woman had died and that the young husband needed our help in preparing the body for burial.

The trip from the director’s house to the funeral home was a long one. It took us nearly two hours to get there because of the lunch-hour traffi . During the trip, there was a minimal exchange of words among us. The sudden death of this young woman had immersed us in deep refl on our own mortality. The fact that I was heading toward an experience that is usually considered taboo for young women in Muslim countries demanded an explanation.

In Islam, preparing bodies for burial is a religious duty that is not incum- bent upon everyone but is only incumbent upon a suffi ent number of people in the community (
fard kifaya
). Those who perform this service

Death and Burial in Islam
153

exempt the rest of the community from this responsibility. However, if no one performs the service, the blame would fall on the entire community. On this occasion, the director’s wife and I were the only women available to perform this task. I could not allow myself to fail the community. However, I had doubts about my commitment because of the stigma that my Moroccan culture attached to young women who perform such a task. As a child, I was taught that if a young woman prepares a body for burial, the food she cooks will lose its taste and flavor. I shuddered at the idea but chose to disregard it as a cultural myth. After all, we were not in Morocco, where plenty of older widows are available to free young women from the burden of preparing bodies for burial. I saw the issue as one of the challenges that Muslim women living in non-Muslim countries have to face. In such circumstances, when a myth competes with a religious rule, the myth should lose and the needs of religion should prevail.

As I rode in the car to the mortuary, I could hear my mother reminding me not to fall into temptation, and not to forget the two angels watching over me at all times—one sitting on my right shoulder recording my good deeds, and the other on my left shoulder recording my bad deeds. These ‘‘Honored Scribes’’ (Qur’an 82:11) record every thought, every decision, and every act of a person in a big book or register and deliver their report on the Day of Judgment. In my religious Moroccan family, accountability to God is what life is all about. Thus, I was duty bound to render a service to the husband of the dead woman and nothing else mattered.

DEALING WITH DEATH

Important and serious thoughts about death came to my mind. Tragic deaths that happened during my childhood began to unfold in my memory. First, I remembered the politically motivated assassination of one of my parents’ neighbors. This happened in the early 1950s. The assassination was carried out by some Berber traitors, who were known to work for the French at a time when Morocco was struggling to gain its independence. Although the assassination happened in the year that I was born, the house where it took place was attached to ours, and the fact that the murdered person was considered a martyr (
shahid,
literally, ‘‘witness’’) made the case very memo- rable.
1
I knew the family of the murdered person and the honor that the community bestowed on them. The second death that I remembered was that of my only brother, who died at the age of 18, along with two of his friends and schoolmates. After taking a swim in a nearby river, they caught a fever and died within 24 hours. Their death was a shock to everyone, and its memory filled me with sadness and grief. My parents could never recover from the loss of the only son they had, but they found consolation in the belief that my brother, along with all who died in their youth, would be

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one of the Grooms of Paradise (
‘ara’is al-janna
). The third death that I remembered was the accidental drowning of my one-year-old nephew, who had fallen into a well. He is still remembered by everybody in the family as one of the Birds of Paradise (
tuyur al-janna
). His parents, my eldest sister and her husband, were told that he would join the other children who had died very young and would bring water to relieve the thirst of the people who stood in line, waiting to be judged for their deeds, on Judgment Day.