Saudi Arabia Welcomes Foreigners To Work in Nation -- but Not to Die
State's Strict Form of Islam
Blocks Burial of 'Infidels'
By YAROSLAV TROFIMOV
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
JEDDAH, Saudi Arabia -- Behind an unmarked wall in the heart of Jeddah's electronics market, Mohammed Younis surveys the rows of small marble plaques covering infidel graves.
"Here, it's nothing -- just baby, baby, baby," says Mr. Younis, the guardian of the only proper cemetery for non-Muslims in Saudi Arabia, the world's most rigorously Islamic state.
Nearly all the tombs here belong to infants, the children of immigrants from countries such as India and the Philippines. The austere plaques record nationalities, names, and dates of birth and death -- often the same.
The children buried at this hidden graveyard are a rare exception. Saudi Arabia, America's crucial ally in the volatile region and the world's biggest oil power, remains deeply hostile to outside influences. Yet it employs 5.4 million foreigners, a quarter of its total population, to keep the economy running. Citing its status as the home of Islam's two holiest shrines, in Mecca and Medina, the kingdom outlaws public worship of any other religion.
This pursuit of religious purity doesn't end in death. Saudi Arabia requires nearly all non-Muslims, once deceased, to be sent abroad for interment, since it fears that burying them in the kingdom would encourage alien faiths.
"You can live in Saudi Arabia, but you can't die in Saudi Arabia," says M.R. Hari, a Jeddah cargo agent who spends much of his time flying out the dead unbelievers. His company averages about 100 of these deliveries a year from the Jeddah region alone -- a small part of a big and complicated business spanning the vast kingdom.
More than one-quarter of Saudi Arabia's foreign work force is non-Muslim: Indian Hindus, Buddhists from Thailand and Nepal, and Christians from countries such as India, the Philippines and Eritrea. The steep cost of shipping a body -- about $3,000, equivalent to many workers' annual wage -- must be paid by Saudi employers, some of whom try to shirk the responsibility. It's common for immigrant remains to be held in Saudi Arabia for as long as six months while the government processes the exit visa on the dead worker's passport, and the employers come up with the money.
The bodies of all immigrants who die are immediately taken to a designated hospital morgue. In cases of unnatural death, the bodies often aren't released until local police complete an investigation. Those aren't rare: Among the 1.4-million strong community of Indian workers here, some 70% of the deaths result from causes such as traffic and industrial accidents, diplomats say.
Members of India's parliament occasionally have to intervene to help constituents' families retrieve bodies from Saudi Arabia, says Syed Akbaruddin, the Indian consul-general in Jeddah. The consulate employs five staffers who spend much of their time dealing with the issue. "We are very keen on dead bodies," Mr. Akbaruddin says. Noting the low-end menial jobs that many Indians hold, he add: "At least in death they should have some respect that they didn't have when alive."
Sifting through a thick folder of "human remains" cases at his office at Kanoo Cargo Services, Mr. Hari pulls out the file of one of the latest shipments -- a 29-year-old Nepalese laborer named Sunil Tamrakar. On the morning of Jan. 16, Mr. Tamrakar was riding in the passenger seat of a Honda Civic when the car collided with a tractor in central Jeddah. He suffered cerebral bleeding and died on the spot.
Mr. Tamrakar, who arrived in Saudi Arabia three years ago, was a Buddhist and therefore ineligible for a local funeral. Luckily, Mr. Hari says, Mr. Tamrakar was employed by a large dairy company that knew how to deal with formalities. Kanoo, one of the country's bigger shipping firms and the general sales agent in Jeddah for carriers such as Air India, Air Lanka and Philippine Airlines, quickly assembled the paperwork and booked the remains on a flight to Katmandu.
Mr. Tamrakar's body was identified with the airline industry's "HUM" code in the cargo-description box on the manifest.
For the company, it's a familiar routine. "Saudi does not have much to send abroad apart from oil in the way of exports," says M.N. Jayaprakash, Kanoo Cargo's regional manager. "So on the export side, for us it's mostly personal belongings … . And we do a lot of this human remains business, unfortunately."
Mr. Tamrakar's personal belongings are neatly described in Kanoo's shipment file. The list is not long even after three years in Saudi Arabia: "Blanket (one); Bag (two); Personal clothes; Photo album (one); 3,700 Saudi Riyals ($990) found in the wallet; Pocket diary (one)." Should a Saudi religious court -- the only kind allowed here -- conclude that the tractor driver was responsible for the accident, the driver will be required to pay Mr. Tamrakar's family 6,666.66 riyals in "blood money" compensation, the lowest possible payment for a male because the victim was considered a heathen.
The blood money for Buddhist or Hindu women is half that amount. Had Mr. Tamrakar been a Christian, the compensation would be 50,000 riyals. Muslim victims are valued at 100,000 riyals. Such different pricing of human life is dictated by Islamic religious law.
It is the same Islamic law that makes Saudi Arabia the only Muslim nation to forbid the public practice of other faiths, Saudi religious officials say. "Prophet Muhammed -- peace be upon him -- said it himself that there should be no other religion except Islam on the Arabian peninsula," explains Abdulrahman S. al-Mafrodi, Saudi Arabia's deputy minister of Islamic affairs. "This is something that can never be changed."
None of the other six countries on the Arabian peninsula, all of them majority Muslim, agree. Even Qatar, the only Gulf state that shares Saudi Arabia's puritan strain of Islam created by 18th-century preacher Mohammed ibn Abdel Wahhab, recently authorized building Christian churches. Bahrain has a Jewish synagogue, Oman a Hindu temple.
In the Muslim world, only Afghanistan's Taliban regime, destroyed by U.S. bombing last fall, imposed a version of Islam stricter than Saudi Arabia's. Even neighboring Iran is a land of relative tolerance: It allows churches and synagogues, and, unlike Saudi Arabia, permits women to drive.
Islamic law doesn't specifically ban burying infidels in Saudi Arabia's hallowed ground, says Saudi Justice Minister Abdullah Mohammed al-Shaikh, a descendant of Abdel Wahhab. But the country's total prohibition on non-Muslim worship in public makes such funerals impossible, he says. "The burial of Muslims and non-Muslims alike involves religious practices," Mr. al-Shaikh warns. "And if we allow the non-Muslims to be buried here, this will be followed by the practicing of their religion."
Such practice is actively suppressed in the kingdom. The Committee to Propagate Virtue and Prevent Vice, Saudi Arabia's religious police, normally treats Westerners with kid gloves. But the religious cops, who cruise around in white sport-utility vehicles, routinely arrest Third World non-Muslims for holding group prayers. Those found guilty face jail terms and deportation. At the border, Saudi customs officials usually confiscate Christian Bibles and other non-Muslim religious materials.
Many Saudis are upset by suggestions that their country is less than tolerant of non-Muslim foreigners. They point out that the kingdom is doing these non-Muslim job seekers a favor by letting them in the country in the first place. "This is a way of helping the developing countries. These expatriates are trained here, and they send their salaries home," says Mohammed al-Hulwah, a member of the foreign-affairs committee of Majlis al-Shura, the kingdom's appointed legislature. "True, some extremists say that we should only employ Muslims in this country. But neither the government nor the people are listening. In fact, I have three maids in my household, and two of them are Christian," he says.
While few Saudis question the treatment of live foreigners, the costly requirement to ship out non-Muslim bodies is beginning to generate some mild protests -- especially as the kingdom's living standards decline. In an open letter to Interior Minister Prince Naif published by Al Riyadh newspaper in March, columnist Abdulaziz al-Thukair described how his friend had to visit eight separate government departments to ship an employee's body home. He also wondered what happens if the employer is a woman, since women are barred from dealing directly with Saudi government departments. "Why shouldn't we allow the burial of expatriates in the kingdom, and why should sponsors endure such a time-consuming process?" Mr. al-Thukair asked the minister.
This is already happening on occasion. "There are so many non-Muslim foreigners here that we just can't fly out all of their bodies," says Mr. al-Shaikh, the minister of justice. So, he says, many are interred at what he describes as "unofficial" burial sites around the country. That's the case, for example, with the dozens of foreigners beheaded for crimes such as murder, rape or sorcery every year, and with bodies that are too mangled to ship. Such sites are off-limits to visitors.
And then there is the infant cemetery in Jeddah. Established in the late 19th century, well before the Saud dynasty and its Wahhabi troops conquered this part of the country in the mid-1920s, it was initially meant for adult European seamen and traders. The cemetery still contains two 1912 tombstones of Jewish merchants, complete with Hebrew lettering, and graves with cruder inscriptions such as the one that says simply "Arm of Italian Workar." The site is absent from maps, and few Saudis even know it exists. "I've been here 30 years, so I know what that is, but nobody else around here does," says Omar Baghazi as he points to the cemetery wall through the window of his electric-goods store. One of the store clerks asks incredulously: "What, a non-Muslim cemetery here, in Jeddah?"
Italy is currently in charge of the property, a duty that rotates among some 20 foreign consulates in Jeddah. The consulates are trying to move the cemetery, which holds about 500 bodies, from its tiny plot in the heart of the city to a bigger area outside Jeddah. That would allow burying infant newcomers -- there are about 30 burials a year -- alongside each other, rather than on top of old graves. All these contacts, however, are strictly unofficial. "Formally, the non-Muslim cemetery does not exist, for obvious reasons," says the Italian consul-general in Jeddah, Antimo Campanile. "Nothing non-Muslim can exist in Saudi Arabia."
Non-Muslim prayers are not allowed at the site, flanked on one side by a highway overpass and dominated by the minaret of a nearby mosque. Very few of the recent tombstones bear a cross or any other religious symbol.
"The marble masters are too afraid to carve a cross," explains Mr. Younis, the guardian. "And even when they do it, it's very very small."
Write to Yaroslav Trofimov at yaroslav.trofimov@wsj.com
Updated April 9, 2002 |
