To understand the recent controversies around Muslim cemeteries in the US, we need to look at demographic trends and new patterns of Muslim settlement and integration, as well as rising Islamophobia.

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Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia – usually an oasis of calm and solemnity in honour of America’s armed forces – was unexpectedly at the centre of one of the stormiest exchanges in the recent Presidential campaign. The controversy centred on one grave in particular, that of Army Captain Humayun Khan.

 

Capt. Khan, a Muslim, was on tour in Iraq in 2004 when he was killed by a suicide bomber. His story became headline news following the emotive intervention of his father Khizr Khan at July’s Democratic National Convention, during which Khan Snr. questioned Donald Trump’s fitness for presidential office. Following the vitriolic response from Trump’s team, Capt. Khan’s grave attracted many visitors who wished to honour his sacrifice and that of others in America’s diverse military [link].

And yesterday (29 January) Khan Snr. again invoked Arlington and the Muslims buried there, during his appearance on MSNBC to denounce Trump’s executive order heralding a ‘Muslim ban’ on travel to the US [link].

Yet the controversy doesn’t stop there. Muslim graves in other parts of the country have in recent months been a site of conflict and division, following several very public cases of opposition to the creation of Muslim cemeteries.

While opposition to the building of mosques in America has been frequent since the mid-2000s [link], opposition to cemeteries is a new phenomenon. A search of the archives of some major US news providers ^[1] reveals that the earliest record of opposition to a Muslim cemetery occurred in June 2014, in the town of Murfreesboro, Tennessee [link].

The following year saw two prominent campaigns against the siting of Muslim cemeteries. In Walpole, Massachusetts, local residents created an online Facebook campaign ‘Walpole for Clean Water’, to challenge the plans on environmental grounds due to alleged contamination of aquifers underneath the proposed cemetery site.

Environmental opposition was also prominent in the case of a cemetery at Farmersville, Texas. Here the controversy became an international news story, with coverage from the BBC and Aljazeera among others. Farmersville is about 25 miles from the Dallas suburb of Garland, where two Islamic extremists were shot dead in May 2015 after opening fire at a ‘Muhammad Art Exhibit and Cartoon Contest’. In addition to complaints about contamination of the local water supply, locals voiced fears about ‘the radical element of Islam’ and that the cemetery might be followed by a ‘madrassa training centre’ on the same site [link].

And in 2016 there were no less than five cases nationwide:

• In Newton County, 40 miles south-east of Atlanta, Georgia, a proposal to create a mosque and cemetery on the same site quickly provoked opposition from locals and led the Board of Commissioners responsible for planning to temporarily ban all building permits for religious institutions. As in Farmersville, opponents alleged that the plans were a front for a terrorist training camp [link].
• Also in Georgia, locals in the town of Albany raised familiar concerns about water contamination as well as the impact on property values when the local Islamic Center made an application to build a small cemetery on property the Center owns. Despite aggressive pressure from constituents and threats of a lawsuit, local politicians stuck to the principles of due process and voted in favour of the Center’s application in late September [link].
• In Minnesota, the Chisago County Planning Board approved a proposal for a Muslim cemetery in early December. Yet in the final vote on the matter just before Christmas, the County Board of Commissioners voted 3-2 against the proposal tabled by the Islamic Community of Bosniaks. The board invoked ‘close proximity’ to neighbours, ‘general unsightliness’ and devaluation of property values as reasons to block the cemetery [link]. Yet suspicion remains that commissioners were swayed by the Islamophobic comments made by local residents [link], many of which were reported by the Minneapolis City Pages [link]
• Also in Minnesota, a district judge intervened in February in favour of a local Muslim association which claimed discriminatory treatment when denied a permit to create a Muslim cemetery. Judge David Knutson called the actions of Farmington Township’s Board of Supervisors “arbitrary and capricious”, having initially denied the permit on spurious grounds and then allegedly later changing the town’s zoning regulations so that cemeteries could no longer be located in the area in question [link].
• And in Massachusetts, the Islamic Society of Greater Worcestershire finally had good news on 12 January this year following a year-long legal battle in the town of Dudley over an application to create a cemetery on the site of a former dairy farm [link]. It was only after the threat of a lawsuit in the Massachusetts Land Court and an investigation by the US Attorney’s office that town officials reversed their initial stance to reject the permit [link]. As elsewhere, opposition in Dudley had been couched in environmentalist terms, and the Society had agreed to bury bodies in coffins or in concrete vaults to appease those concerns. Yet according to Jay Talerman, lawyer for the Society, Islamophobia is at the heart of the opposition: “They like to say it under the guise of, ‘Oh, we’re just trying to protect our water supply,’ but it’s thinly veiled.” [link]

Islamophobia certainly seems to be central to the worldview of many cemetery opponents in the above cases. More particularly, across all these cases, local concerns cannot be separated from national politics, and specifically the hostility towards Islam and Muslims expressed by conservative candidates in the recent Presidential campaign. Notable spikes in anti-Muslim violence were observable following vitriolic language to stop the resettlement of Syrian refugees in the US, and subsequent calls to close mosques and ban all Muslim immigration to the US [link].

Yet can Islamophobia alone explain this recent focus on cemeteries as a locus for political conflict? Islamophobes are likely to baulk at any perceived symbolic inscription of space by Muslims. So why protest against cemeteries all of a sudden? For that we need to look at trends in demography and new patterns of settlement and integration by Muslim communities.

Turning to demographics first, although the US Muslim population has an overall youthful age profile due to the recent arrival of most Muslims in the country [link], growing numbers are entering older age. As a natural consequence of this, mortality rates are also on the rise. And this leads to new needs in terms of burial space. For example, in the two Minnesota cases cited above, the state’s existing Muslim cemeteries, at Roseville and Burnsville, are near capacity [link].

Second, it is likely that new trends of settlement and integration help to explain why Muslim cemetery space is now in greater demand, and thus more in the public view. Although no studies or reliable data are available in the US, the experience of Europe’s (longer-established) Muslim communities sets a likely precedent for America’s Muslims.

In Europe repatriation of loved ones to places of origin used to be the norm for Muslim families [link] and in Germany is still very prevalent for Turks. ^[2] Yet as my research in France and Scotland has found [link] increasingly families are opting for burial in places of settlement, as the children and grandchildren of Europe’s post-WWII Muslim migrants put down roots.

We are beginning to see similar trends in the United States. In Brooklyn, as a recent article for New Republic shows, the ratio of Muslim clients opting for burial in the US versus repatriation is now approximately 50:50, according to local funeral director Ahmet Kargi [link].

Nonetheless, the shadow cast by Trump’s election for many American Muslims – not only in Arlington National Cemetery, but in Dudley, Newton County and throughout the country – may prompt some to reconsider whether they really feel at home in the US. As the New Republic article notes, “the whole concept of immigrant corpse repatriation has gained new meaning in the age of Donald Trump.” According to Kargi, “The directions that things are going in, people are very, very, very scared.” [link]

References

[1] Archives for the New York Times, Washington Post and Fox News were consulted. The date range for the search was January 1st 2007 to November 30th 2016.

[2] See Balkan (2015) Till Death do us DEPART: Repatriation, Burial, and the Necropolitical Work of Turkish Funeral Funds in Germany, in Suleiman (ed.) Muslims in the UK and Europe I, Cambridge: Centre of Islamic Studies [downloadable here]