Quest for a Muslim cemetery on LI underscores difficulties facing all who choose burial
Nayyar Imam, president of the Muslim Alliance of Long Island, at the Muslim section of the cemetery at Washington Memorial Park in Mount Sinai. Credit: Tom Lambui
When Newsday featured a story in 2011 about Nayyar Imam’s hunt for Long Island acreage to establish a Muslim cemetery, the demand was serious, but not a crisis.
But today that need is still unmet, urgent, and unsurprising.
We lack space to house the living, and it's even harder to find a spot if you're dead. Finding land for cemeteries is only getting more difficult, and less justifiable.
There is no exclusively Muslim cemetery on Long Island, or in New York City. Since the 1980s, a few thousand plots have been set aside at Washington Memorial Park in Mount Sinai for Muslims, but all are nearly exhausted.
Imam, 67, said even burials in a nondenominational cemetery are not in strict accordance with Islamic law, nor are burial delays. The rules call for internment by sundown on the day a Muslim dies, but a nondenominational facility is unlikely to make that happen when the need arises on a Sunday afternoon.
“Islam is a pragmatic religion,” he said. “We do what we can do.”
Imam, a pharmacist who lives in Mt. Sinai, says 20 acres means space for 20,000 bodies, but there are approximately 100,000 Muslims on Long Island, and hundreds of thousands more in New York City. Even Imam’s dreamed-of graveyard is only a short-term fix.
Long term, it’s increasingly difficult to justify burying bodies filled with toxic embalming fluid, lying in caskets encased in concrete vaults. Every religion, as well as the secular, are struggling with cemetery space, increasingly popularizing cremation.
This is a bad system, particularly in a densely populated region with a high water table. Burial law is a scriptural topic, like instructions for the proper treatment of slaves (or women!), that God will likely update when she makes religious-tome revisions.
We've only gotten this far with our current customs thanks to relative newness as a burying nation. Customs have changed where they’ve been putting corpses underground for millennia, in the most densely populated parts of Asia and Europe.
In London, families with ancestors in public cemeteries are now convinced to lease the space to new mourners. New bodies are then added to the plot, and new names to markers. In the last active cemetery in Singapore, bodies are buried for 15 years, and then cremated or relocated in smaller plots.
In the United States, 76 million Americans will turn 78 between 2024 and 2042. Burying those who want plots near cities will and should eventually be all but impossible.
When I pointed out to Imam that even his 20,000 planned plots would quickly fill, he laughed and said, “Yes, but I will be long gone, and it will not be my problem!”
Then he added, “We have to look upstate.”
There is certainly enough land in the United States to bury all who crave it, as long as survivors don’t preach “location location location.” But, Imam said, there is value to visiting graves: “It helps us remember our loved ones, but also that we will die, and should be conscious of that in how we live.”
I’m Jewish, and my religion demands a quick burial and bars cremation, like Imam’s.
But we should channel what a just god would want us to do now, rather than blindly adhering to age-old instructions. We should be open to cremation and other low-impact options, and move away from expensive, environmentally unfriendly customs.
Because while the living increasingly struggle with housing issues, it’s misguided to prioritize convenient placement of the dead.
Columnist Lane Filler's opinions are his own.
Lane Filler is a member of the Newsday editorial board.
