Long Island Muslims seek a place to bury their dead

A decadelong search to locate land for a cemetery to serve Long Island’s growing Muslim population has come up empty-handed, and community leaders say they are growing desperate.

They have looked from Nassau County’s western border to the eastern tip of Suffolk County and spoken to numerous officials, but have no sites available, said Nayyar Imam, a leader of the Islamic Association of Long Island mosque in Selden who has spearheaded the search.

The main cemetery where Muslims on Long Island have been burying their dead — Washington Memorial Park Cemetery in Mount Sinai — is nearly out of plots for them. There are no Muslim cemeteries in New York City, so Muslims from as far as Queens and Brooklyn use Washington Memorial. 

“The situation is dire,” Imam said. After more than 10 years of searching, “Here we are again, back to square one, looking for the land.”

The nonsectarian Mount Sinai cemetery has a section set aside for Muslims, who must follow special procedures for burial, including having the person’s face looking toward the Islamic holy city of Mecca in Saudi Arabia, Imam said. There are fewer than 200 lots left.

With the several thousand plots reserved for them nearly gone, Muslims are facing the difficult choice of burying their loved ones in New Jersey, which has two all-Muslim cemeteries.

Ammad Sheikh, a Muslim community leader based in Plainview, said he gets at least two or three calls a month from families frantically looking for a place to bury a deceased loved one on Long Island.

“It’s really heartbreaking because you are speaking to someone at one of the most difficult moments of their life, and they just don’t know what to do,” Sheikh said. “They don’t know who to call. They’re trying to get access to graves and they can’t.”

Even some of the cemeteries in New Jersey where Muslims can be buried are filling up. And spots that are available are expensive, just like at Mount Sinai, he said.

The Islamic faith calls for the deceased to be buried as quickly as possible on the day they die after their bodies are washed in a special ritual, wrapped in a white shroud, and placed in a simple wood coffin.

Mosques in Selden, Bay Shore and Westbury have special facilities where these rituals are conducted.

Cemeteries such as Washington Memorial sometimes close for holidays and weekends, leading to delays in burial, Imam said. A stand-alone Muslim cemetery would avoid that problem, he said.

Long Island is now home to about 100,000 Muslims, according to community leaders, so while more are living here, more are also dying — and cemetery space is needed.

That is hard to find because of a general lack of open land on Long Island, regulations and zoning laws that must be followed, and a reluctance among some officials to create a new cemetery, community leaders said.

At least 20 acres would be needed, Imam said. 

In the Islamic faith, Muslims should be buried in a cemetery with other Muslims, similar to how Catholics and Jewish people operate cemeteries for people of those faiths, he said. 

Burying loved ones in New Jersey places a burden on families because the distance makes it difficult to visit the grave sites, Sheikh said.

“Can you imagine living your entire life on Long Island or Queens, and then you have to bury someone out in southern Jersey?” he said. “How often are you going to be able to see your loved one? It’s very traumatic.”

Isma Chaudhry, co-chair of the board of trustees at the Islamic Center of Long Island in Westbury, said her mosque has been reaching out to elected officials for years to try to locate land the Muslim community could buy for a cemetery.

“At this time we haven’t really heard anything back,” she said. 

“This is a huge issue for the Muslim community,” she added. “The Muslim community is growing very, very rapidly, especially in the suburbs.”

Sheikh said local officials have not been “so receptive” to the proposal. “I don’t think it’s a Muslim issue. I think the local towns don’t want any cemetery.”

Imam said Muslim leaders have focused on sprawling Brookhaven Town because they thought it offered the best possibility of finding land, including in Calverton, but so far it has been fruitless.

Town Supervisor Ed Romaine said, “Brookhaven has been working with members of the Muslim community and is supportive of their efforts to secure property for a cemetery.” 

Marykate Guilfoyle, a spokesperson for Suffolk County Executive Steve Bellone, said in a prepared statement the county “met with leadership in the Muslim Community in order to assist and support in their efforts to locate land for a new cemetery. Following the meeting, the County identified and shared with leadership a number of properties that could potentially suit their needs.”

Imam said he and some other Muslim leaders were unaware of the county meeting.

Some of the obstacles to securing a location also involve groundwater levels, and the Muslim community’s reluctance to buy wooded land and then knock down the trees, Imam said.

“It’s a desperate situation,” he said, “and nobody has a quick fix answer for this problem.”