Boston Mosque Reportedly Refusing To Bury Tamerlan Tsarnaev
An Aunt of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the Boston Marathon Bombing suspect killed amid a shootout nearly a week ago, says that a local mosque is refusing to conduct a Muslim funeral for the accused bomber:
American authorities have told the family that they can have Tsarnaev’s body, and an uncle approached the mosque to request a burial and funeral but was declined, said the aunt, Patimat Suleimanova.
She said that she did not know the name of the mosque but that it was one the family attended. A mosque in Cambridge, Mass., has said that Tsarnaev attended and occasionally caused disruptions and that mosque leaders threatened to kick him out.
A spokesman for the Cambridge mosque, Yusufi Vali, said the mosque had not heard from the family.
“There were some reports out there that we had rejected his burial, and — or the family had reached out to us, rather. And to our knowledge, you know, the family has not reached out to us,” he said on the MSNBC program “Andrea Mitchell Reports.”
The mosque, run by the Islamic Society of Boston, has also said that congregants have been questioned by the FBI. The mosque did not immediately return a request for comment Wednesday from NBC News.
Earlier this week, Imam Talal Eid of the Islamic Institute of Boston, a separate institution, told The Huffington Post: “I would not be willing to do a funeral for him. This is a person who deliberately killed people. There is no room for him as a Muslim.”
No real comment to add here, I think it speaks for itself.
The official speaking for the mosque is probably quite well aware that his grave would quickly become a public outdoor toilet.
The mother wants him buried in Boston, or the Boston area. Why? As a slap in the face to the people who live here? She and her husband have long since returned to their homeland. Bury him there.
Don’t they have landfills in Boston? He clearly didn’t care about life; why should anyone care about his body?
@mike: Don’t they have landfills in Boston?
Let me rephrase that for you: don’t they have pig farms in Massachusetts?
Good on Imam Talal Eid.
OK, I’ll take the unpopular contrarian side. We don’t have funerals for the dead, they are dead and could care less. We have funerals for the living, in this case his parents, who are surely grieving as much as any other parent who had lost a child, and (the mother at least) are in obvious denial of the horror her son unleashed.
Can we not extend them this small mercy, this touch of empathy?
Did anyone argue against burying Timothy McVeigh, who killed more people?
Ozark is right. Revenge ends at the grave, in a civilized country.
@OzarkHillbilly: I agree, but this is a country where muslims are under constant suspicion. I can’t fault this Imam for not wanting to risk any negative exposure.
@OzarkHillbilly & @Anderson:
It was regular practice for Christian murders to be denied burial in hallowed ground. Wilde points out the practice (and the potential hypocrisy of it) in his poem “The Ballad of Reading Goal [Jail]:”
In Wilde’s poem, if memory serves, the Murderer in question had repented of his crime.
In the cast of Tamerlan, we have — by all accounts — an individual who chose to pervert what his religion was about. In doing so he brought shame and pain to his larger faith community. And given that its unlike he repented for his deed, it’s totally in keeping with the traditions of The Book for him not to be given a proper burial.
And, more broadly, the decision serves as a profound statement about how the community feels about these sorts of acts and the people who commit them. This is as much an act of speaking out against terrorism in the name of Islam as any protest or editorial. Perhaps even more so.
There’s also the fact that if he were buried by the local mosque, I can just imagine what Pam Gellar and her horde of screeching monkeys would sound like….
The mosque is within it’s rights to refuse to bury him I’d say. I’m sure they are ashamed to have had such an evil person in their midst without even knowing it. Good for them as it shows how disgusted they were as people of the Muslim faith at this guys actions.
@Ben Wolf:
I don’t fault him either.
@Caj:
I agree they have the right, I just don’t think it is right. His parents are victims too, doubly so as it appears he perverted his younger brother to a mind set that allowed for such a heinous act.
@matt bernius:
(my emph)
Well, I am an atheist so I have little regard for what is in “books”. That said, to clarify, I am only thinking of the parents who, I feel, should be allowed to grieve howsoever their traditions and religion set forth. I know that puts me at odds with most religions, but it also shows why I have very little sympathy for any religion that puts piety above the very real pain of the people it is supposed to serve.
Here’s one for you Matt, here in the Ozarks there was a long time tradition of burying the “fallen” members of a family on the outside of the graveyard. When ever I come across one of those graves, I always wonder what that person’s sin was?
@OzarkHillbilly: Isn’t it usually suicide? I thought that was the typical reason people ended up not being buried in consecrated ground.
@OzarkHillbilly:
While I appreciate your point, I think you need to look at this more broadly. To some degree or another, these individuals were part of a faith community. And while the hearts of the community might go out to the parents, this isn’t about *making the parents feel better.* It’s about executing the will of the community.
For example, having the brother buried there could have large implications for the feelings of all community members — both in terms of the signal it sends to the broader population of Boston and the US, and, as others above pointed out, the possibility that it might lead to serious real world repercussions.
But beyond all of that, while you might not agree with them, the fact is that for the devoutly religious, religious law has serious implications. And just like secular law doesn’t take people’s feelings into account (i.e. despite how painful this is for the family, we are not going to drop charges on the remaining brother), so to does religious law.
They shall Buried him,He was a human!!
Shame on you!!!