Follow-up to my post #15081.
Re: Take the burial issue for instance. Only one or two Belgian graveyards provide for proper Muslim burials whereas Jews have for long been granted their own kosher cemeteries... Hence North African immigrants rely on funerary shuttle companies to repatriate the corpses back to the graveyard of their native village (in Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria,...) The corpse of the raped 5-year-old Lubna Benaissa was buried in her family's Moroccan village, not in Brussels.
Muslims in Western Europe
Dim drums throbbing in the hills half heard
Aug 8th 2002
From The Economist print edition
economist.com
Excerpt:
Certainly, some Islamic practices seem jarring to Europeans. The ritual slaughter of tens of thousands of sheep at the annual feast known as Aid al-Adha draws a shocked response each year in France. Less upsetting but still awkward are Islamic burial requirements, some of which (the ban on coffins) conflict with public-health laws. Since exhumation is also strictly forbidden under Islam, and bodies must be buried as soon as possible, 90% of Germany's Muslims are flown home to be buried once they die. France has only one Muslim cemetery, at Bobigny, and Germany none, though land at Tempelhof in Berlin may yet be used. In Le Val Fourré [France], the bodies of older Muslims are also sent home, though the young are usually buried in the Catholic cemetery.
Such practices serve to perpetuate the links with the homeland. So does the reluctance of many states to grant citizenship to their immigrants, sometimes even to the children of immigrants born in Europe.
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