A Home After Death

Humans have been burying their dead for millennia, laying them to rest in ancestral graveyards close to home. Being buried among family is a universal desire, but it is also increasingly difficult in an age of global mobility and mass migration, when people may die thousands of miles from the place they consider “home.”

“I started thinking about what happens when you die in a country that’s not your own,” says Osman Balkan, GR’16, a political science doctoral candidate. “This seemed like a good way to get at larger questions affecting immigrants, like assimilating into a dominant culture and maintaining connections with countries of origin.”

His recent study, "Between Civil Society and the State: Bureaucratic Competence and Cultural Mediation Among Muslim Undertakers in Berlin,” opens a new window into Germany’s longstanding Turkish community. It also helps illuminate the challenges facing Muslim immigrants to Europe and their integration into that society. The article was published in the Journal of Intercultural Studies last April.

Over the course of a four-month period between 2013 and 2014, Balkan shadowed several Muslim undertakers and conducted 40 interviews with Turkish and Kurdish families, cemetery personnel, religious leaders, government officials, and health-care professionals, among others. He is of Turkish descent and his familiarity with that language and culture was invaluable for his research.

“I was born in the United States and grew up here, but my parents are from Istanbul so I had the language skills and cultural know-how to navigate my way through Berlin’s Turkish community,” Balkan says.

He focused his research on Muslim undertakers and saw that they play a vital role in helping to bridge the gap between the immigrant community and the state.

“Muslim undertakers have to navigate a Kafkaesque bureaucracy in Germany,” Balkan says. “They are cultural brokers who help immigrant families survive. They are surrounded by death so they are viewed as an almost religious authority, an imam. The community relies on them and respects them.”

One particular hurdle these immigrants face is the wait time between death and burial, Balkan explains. Islam decrees that bodies be interred as soon as possible after death; however, German legal custom mandates a 48-hour waiting period between death and burial. Another cultural conflict is that many districts in Germany mandate coffins for burial and Muslims are traditionally buried in a shroud only.

“Families are blindsided by how long it can take to clear a local burial,” Balkan says. “Another issue is finding space in a Muslim cemetery. There are a total of 250 burial spaces for Muslims in all of Germany—this represents just one percent of all burial space. And the requirements are specific. The bodies and graves must face Mecca.”

The issue of burial is not as visible as some of the other cultural issues, such as the building of mosques or the wearing of the veil by Muslim women, but there is already a debate about burial space in anti-immigrant parties opposed to the “Islamization” of European culture. Creating more Muslim burial spaces will be just one of many policy challenges that European leaders will need to surmount as they try to successfully absorb the stream of immigrants pouring into their countries.

His research helps illuminate the importance of establishing communication channels between the state and the Muslims who have been streaming into Europe during the past 18 months, fleeing war-torn regions in the Middle East. By 2030 they are projected to comprise about eight percent of Europe’s population. Faced with this new population, leaders will have to update old policies and create new ones. Understanding how to broker linguistic and cultural barriers will be important to their process.

“Burial brings up both practical and existential questions for emigres,” says Balkan, “On a practical level you have to figure how and where to bury a body. But on a deeper level you ask yourselves as a people, ‘Who are we? Where is home?’”