"Out of it We created you. And into it We deposit you. And from it We shall take you out once again."
Necessary arrangements
Mark McDonough’s father was first approached by area Muslims seeking help with funeral arrangements in the early 1980s.
Since then, the Loudoun Funeral Chapel his family owns in Leesburg, Va. has helped the community find burial space for Muslims, starting with the Sterling Cemetery in Sterling, Va.
Other funeral homes in the Washington, D.C. area provide services for Muslims and religious communities. Two exclusively Muslim funeral homes operate in the district and Woodbridge, Va. but are hard pressed to keep up with the demand, McDonough said.
He said a Muslim funeral can cost anywhere between $1,480 and $2,000. The amount is thousands of dollars cheaper than a conventional funeral, because there is no embalming, which in most case is forbidden by Islam, he said.
“It requires less services,” said McDonough, a funeral assistant.
Family members are invited to do all the necessary preparations to the body, which includes ritually cleaning it and wrapping it in a shroud. The funeral home purchases the special burial garments from Egypt, McDonough said.
At both exclusively Muslim cemeteries in Frederick County, Md. and Stafford, Va. concrete liners are used, although religious law encourages the body be placed directly in the ground without a coffin.
Bodies are positioned on their sides to face the Muslim holy city of Mecca.
Naseer Azeez, a volunteer who helped establish the cemetery in Frederick County, said liners without bottoms are used. The opening at the bottom allows the body to be in direct contact with the soil.
In Stafford, Va., Sikander Javed, also a volunteer organizer, said coffins are used because of county health regulations. A large number of houses in the area use wells, and without coffins, there were concerns the bodies would contaminate groundwater, he said.
Muslim burial grounds expand with growing community
December 12, 2008
Story and photos by Adam Behsudi
The simple wooden stakes could easily be mistaken as markers for an underground cable or telephone line. Lined up in rows among scattered straw and recently disturbed earth, they represented something much more significant.
The 10 gravesites were the first in the all-Muslim cemetery northwest of Washington, D.C. Al-Firdaus Memorial Gardens, opened for burials in November.
The cemetery, the second exclusively Islamic burial site to open in the city’s metropolitan area, is located among farmland of rural Frederick County, Md. on the former site of a fruit orchard. Organizers of another Muslim cemetery in Stafford County, Va. have expanded its grounds to accommodate an increasing demand.
For religious leaders and other Muslims, the establishment and growth of both cemeteries has represented a growth in the Muslim population of the Washington, D.C. area. Leaders also say the expanded and new burial sites signify a rooting of Islam in this country as community members grow old, die and choose to be buried in the United States.
“In a way it symbolizes not only integration but a feeling of being at home,” said Imam Yahya Hendi, leader of the Islamic Society of Frederick, whose mosque is one of three Maryland congregations that raised more than $500,000 for the 100-acres of land in Frederick County.
With enough space for 7,000 graves, Hendi said the site is also a guaranteed place to bury under a religious law that encourages a person be interred no more than 24 hours after death.
But more than symbolizing a home for Islam in America, he said the cemetery is a home for the dead of his faith.
“People like being buried among their co-religionists,” Hendi said.
Building a burial ground
Almost nine years ago, members of Islamic communities in Hagerstown, Frederick and Gaithersburg joined together to buy the land and set aside a part of it as a cemetery. The start of the project would not begin until 2006.
Naseer Azeez is a member of the Islamic Waqf of Maryland, a management organization formed by the three mosques to organize the project.
Before the cemetery opened, bodies were buried in sections of other cemeteries or taken to Stafford, Va., the location of the other all-Muslim cemetery in the area, said Azeez, also a member of the Islamic Center of Maryland.
In Stafford about 45 miles south of Washington, D.C., immigrants from the Pakistani community in Alexandria and Fairfax and Arlington counties found land cheap enough to establish a cemetery for burials of all Muslims regardless of nationality.
The All Muslim Association of America formed as a nonprofit in 1990 to raise $36,000 for seven and a half acres, said Sikander Javed, a volunteer who oversees the Stafford cemetery’s operations.
The group has buried about 300 people since they received local government approval for the cemetery in 1996 and accommodate an average of 10 funerals per month, he said.
This past year, another 80 acres of adjoining land was purchased for $540,000. The property was meant for a housing development but went into foreclosure after the developer could not financially support the project, Javed said.
Plots are available for free but families pay $650 for the burial itself including a grave liner and headstone, Javed said.
“We wanted to lessen the burden on poorer people, on immigrants,” he said. “We will not refuse anybody.”
The land for the Frederick County cemetery was paid through contributions and donations, Azeez said.
Burial plots there cost $750, he said.
The 100-acres will not all be used for interments. Ninety percent of it remains undeveloped and may eventually become the site of a school and retreat for area Muslims, Azeez said.
But with a lack of money to fund any additional projects, Azeez said those plans will not happen for a while.
“This is the beginning,” he said.
From mosques to cemeteries
When Muslims started settling the area in larger numbers 30 to 40 years ago, building mosques was the most important priority, said Imam Faizul Khan, leader of the Islamic Society of the Washington Area in Silver Spring, Md. His mosque formed in 1973.
“Now that has been established we have to look beyond that and think about the hereafter,” said Khan, who earlier the same day had arranged for the ritual washing and burial of a community member.
The Muslim community has grown to more than 60 mosques, organizations, associations and schools in the Baltimore/Washington area, according to Harvard University’s Pluralism Project.
The population of Muslims in the Washington, D.C. numbers about 250,000, according to the Council on American-Islamic Relations cited by the Washington Post .
But Khan’s congregation still symbolizes how the community is in flux. The mosque is undergoing renovations and for the past four months the community has met in an Episcopal church activities hall for its congregational Friday prayer.
Despite the temporary displacement of his community, Khan said he is encouraged by the growth of land available for Muslim burials.
“When we depart from this life we'll have somewhere comfortable to rest, that's why these graveyards are important to us,” he said. “It's part of our living to think about our death.”