Muslim bodies in secular European cemeteries

Abstract

Muslims face many difficulties in burial spaces, some of which stem from a long history of secularisation of church cemeteries. While the process of secularisation made it possible for the bodies of Muslims to be placed in the denominational sections of municipal cemeteries in many Western European countries, it also maintained their biases in favor of majority customs, which are de facto places of Christian tradition. In both France and Germany, Muslims increasingly prefer to be buried in places that had been traditionally secularised rather than being returned to their countries of origin. Within this framework, a constant religionization is taking place, which, on the one hand, gives Muslims access to certain rights but, on the other hand, also brings with it the danger of the reification of their traditions and of their increasing public problematisation. I argue that Muslims who choose for themselves or for their relatives to be buried according to Islamic customs in European cemeteries become political as they become part of the public space with their differences visible to all. They commit ‘acts of citizenship’, mostly unconsciously, while claiming their rights for universal citizenship through manifesting their religious/cultural particularities. They enter and modify from within the materiality, affects, and sensibilities of the secular in European deathscapes.

Introduction

Every day, several deceased bodies travel in sealed coffins in the baggage holds of airplanes connecting Europe to Middle Eastern and North African countries ¹ . Although this socioeconomically and politically complex phenomenon of repatriating corpses to their countries of origin is quite widespread, it is not the only mortuary practice adopted by European Muslims. Another practice is to be buried in their country of residence. Burial at the place of death, an ancient practice dating back to the seventh to ninth centuries in the southern regions of what today are Spain and France (Gleize et al., 2016), has risen in importance once again within the last three decades. This appears to be a novel phenomenon among Muslims born and raised in Europe. This generation has a growing desire to rest, after death, in their countries of birth rather than to be repatriated to their grandparents’ countries of birth.

This desire creates practical and political difficulties for the European countries whose modes of administering death have been shaped by Christian or secular traditions. Islamic funerary practices in Europe do not compose a homogeneous custom either. Therefore, the construction of Muslim cemeteries and Muslim-only blocks inside public cemeteries often depends on the historical development of the state-church relations within which they have been established and on the constitution of cultural memories of national belonging. Exclusively Muslim cemeteries are still in the process of being institutionalized in France and Germany. The Strasbourg cemetery is the only Muslim cemetery in France (Ural, 2014), and none exists in Germany as yet.

Muslims who desire to be buried according to their tradition or among their coreligionists are placed in Muslim-only sections (carrés musulmans, muslimische Abteilungen), that is, burial spaces in communal and/or Christian cemeteries that are reserved for deceased Muslims. However, there is not only a severe lack of space for burials in both countries, but also certain rituals cannot usually be conducted, such as the right to perpetuity, burial within 24 hours and without a coffin, or orienting the corpse to face Mecca. Hence, European Muslims claim separate cemeteries reserved exclusively for their religion and demand legislative changes allowing them to conduct their rituals in conformity with their traditions. However, the introduction of Islam in a public secularized Christian sphere creates friction with European countries’ dominant funerary practices and customs. In a pragmatic sense, the integration and continuity of Islamic burials necessitates not only a certain savoir-faire, but also a way of making this savoir-faire public by making oneself heard as a legitimate subject in the process of institutionalizing religious funerary practices. Since this requires transforming physical spaces and sociocultural comprehension across society, Muslims have gained a prominent role as actors in the European public sphere, including with regard to mortuary spaces, that is, cemeteries.

This article traces the emergence and institutionalization of Muslim funeral parlors as agents of transformation from the 1980s in Germany and from the end of the 1990s in France with the dissolution of French state’s monopoly on funeral parlors through the example of immigration from Turkey. These undertakers became active economic players, along with parlors from other Muslim backgrounds, first within the logic of immigration, with the sole aim of repatriating bodies to their countries of origin, and then as part of a discourse on citizenship rights and religious freedom, and claiming spaces for dead Muslim bodies within European cemeteries. While in France, the immigrant (l’immigré) has gradually evolved into an Arab (l’arabe, le rebeu, le beur) and then a Muslim (Hamès, 1986), ² Germany has seen a similar transformation from guest workers (Gastarbeiter) to foreigners (Ausländer) and then Muslims (Yurdakul, 2009). This terminological transformation of the figure of the ‘other’ was widespread not only among the mainstream denominations, but also within the Muslim community itself. It is also reflected in the landscape of Muslim funeral parlors, where there was a growing emphasis on burial in European countries instead of repatriation to the country of origin as part of a broader discourse on recognition and the right to be different. However, the practice of repatriation has thrived until today.

As part of this transformation of the figure of the temporary migrant, who was seen as destined to return home at the latest upon death, into a fully fledged citizen with rights and duties towards European countries without losing their religious and cultural particularities, the Muslim funerary landscape and Muslim funeral practices have played a decisive role in integrating dead bodies into European cemeteries. Muslim funeral practices were, first and foremost, an economic issue in the broader capitalist market. With the development of Islamic funeral parlors, European Muslims have become economic entrepreneurs and significant actors in this ethnic economy. Despite the presence and activity of Muslims in the funeral-service sector, it is not possible for Muslim organizations to have access to cemeteries or to run them themselves because of strict secularism (laïcité) in France and the lack of political recognition of Islam in Germany.

My fieldwork in and around Muslim funeral parlors run by minorities of Turkish origin in Paris and Berlin (2007–2013) and my research on the legal status of secular cemeteries in both contexts attempt to show how the actors in these businesses paved the way for the transformation of the ethnic immigrant into a religiously marked framework of the funeral landscape. The first part of the article deals with the emergence of the economic sector of funeral parlors marked as Islamic in the two countries in question. Initially, this was closely linked to the dominant practice of repatriation to the country of origin among Muslim minorities of Turkish descent and shifted gradually to burial in Europe. The second part presents the history of European cemeteries as public and secular spaces while at the same time underscoring the precarious judicial status of religious minorities historically, particularly that of Muslims today. My argument is twofold. On the one hand, I argue that the establishment of parlors by Muslim actors leads to a particular economic institutionalization through a homogenized and reified ‘religionization’ of certain funeral practices through an Islamic market (Dreßler, 2019). On the other hand, the increasingly widespread practice of burying Muslim corpses in European cemeteries illustrates an ‘act of citizenship’ (Isin, 2008) that contributes to the public display of citizenship with all its particularities in public spheres as subjects of politics, though not necessarily with any consciousness of citizenship or intentionality. Arana Barbier also takes an in-depth look at the political nature of cemeteries as public spheres. She argues that Muslim cemeteries, like Jewish and Catholic ones, are also part of the politics of representing what it means to be Spanish today and historically, but also of citizenship rights more broadly (see the article by Arana Barbier (2025) in this special issue).

The arrival of the Muslim dead in the capitalist system

The emergence of new Muslim economic actors in the sector of funeral parlors is a consequence of immigration from Muslim countries to Europe that started as early as the 1910s due to France’s colonial history and mainly from Turkey in the 1960s in Germany. Despite focusing primarily on immigration from Turkey as a case study, I am aware that the question of Muslim deaths in Europe concerns every Muslim living in Europe equally, their national origins notwithstanding. It is crucial, however, to stress here that the national and transnational nature of immigration from Turkey had an advantage in the circulation of know-how between Germany and France. Funeral parlors, which were already permitted to be established in the 1980s in Germany, had to wait another two decades until the end of the state monopoly of Les Pompes Funèbres Générales in 1998 and the liberalization of the undertaking sector in France (Trompette, 2008: 85–103). Because of the transnational nature of Turkish-speaking Islamic organizations, they were among the first to open up immediately after the fall of the monopoly in France.

The self-referent term “Muslim” in the enterprises of funeral parlors underscores the importance of Islamic tradition and its openness to the entire community of Muslims in the organization of mortuary businesses without erasing the effects of other familial, regional, and national belongings. These actors were and are central to the way the Islamic denomination, rather than the ethnic denomination, becomes more and more central in the practice of repatriation to the countries of origin and burial in Europe. In this new economy, “the market becomes a channel of expression for a new religiosity … by endowing it with a novel imaginary based on the principles of the culture of enterprise” (Haenni, 2005: 39). The new Islamic products, particularly in mortuary services, represent a redefinition of the religious in a commercial sphere that a priori was considered non-religious, even though the Christian tradition continued to play a significant role in the management of the cemeteries even after their secularization. The appropriation of the rules of the market leads, on the one hand, to public visibility and recognition through economic participation, a recognition that still lacks its equivalent in the political sphere. On the other hand, the transformation of death and religious rituals into consumption products changes the social relations between living individuals, as well as between the living and the deceased.

The bilateral accords regarding labor recruitment in 1961 and 1964 between Germany and Turkey marked the beginning of the massive influx of Gastarbeiter bound for the cities of the Federal Republic of Germany and West Germany (Kastoryano, 1992). Thousands of people were selected from the four corners of Turkey by the Bundesagentur für Arbeit [Federal Recruitment Agency] through health examinations, criminal record checks, and their activities in their native cities or villages. They left – alone, in most cases – for Germany as foreign workers. They gathered in trains and then in the Gastarbeiterwohnheimen (hostels reserved for foreign workers), where they shared a room with several people. Predominantly young males, this uprooted population thought they would be only staying temporarily in Germany (Amiraux, 2001: 29).

Although the first destination of these immigrants from Turkey was Germany, several other European countries, including France, attracted waves of economic immigration following the “Ankara Agreement” (the 1963 treaty of association between Turkey and the European Economic Community). This agreement allowed a few hundred thousand migrants to find jobs in Western European countries (Rigoni, 2005: 325). From the start, Muslim deaths caused problems in both Germany and France. Organizing funerals in conformity with traditional customs (primarily Sunnite or Alevi) proved impossible. Just a few foreign workers could master the language of their country of residence, which immediately created an inequality between members of the group and dependence on those who could communicate with local authorities. The lack of savoir-faire of the state authorities only increased the malaise. The relatives of the deceased were confronted with administrative difficulties in their new environment. In the event of a death, a form of solidarity emerged spontaneously amongst the foreign workers. The question of choosing between repatriation or inhumation in a European country did not seem to arise in these earlier times for the workers; the deceased was almost automatically repatriated to Turkey:

At that time, nobody thought it was possible to stay here. You’ve just arrived at a place. You do not know anyone. Tell me, would you like to be buried in a foreign territory? Your mother and father wait for you. They wish that you make money and support your family. When someone died in diaspora [gurbet], it was a misery for the whole family in Turkey, waiting for this person. Sure, death is always bitter, whatever the age and the place of residence, but for us, death always appeared to be premature, away from the family. Then, it is also a question of economic loss for the family. In any case, if their son dies, they demand that his body rest close to them. ³

This initial phase in the first half of the 1960s evolved without any institutional support. In this context, the self-management regarding the corpses at the time of death emerged as an instantaneous reaction to institutional indifference. This community of guest workers was made fragile by their working conditions, and they were deprived of any social protection, given that they did not benefit from any form of social security, including fees for funerals. They were ignored not only by the German or French authorities but also by the Turkish ones. Hence, immigrant workers had to find a solution in cases of death quickly. Fundraising activities amongst the faithful bestowed a privileged status on the weekly Friday prayers that took place in hostels for the organization and financing of repatriation. In this period, the question of death was linked to religious affairs and issues of private lives and social relations in the diaspora. Repatriation of the deceased by the community of workers to their villages was seen as a matter of honor. Several interviews I conducted with the first generation of Gastarbeiter in Germany and France show that the co-workers or roommates at the factories or hostels of the deceased would generally assume the task of collecting the necessary funds from the community to finance repatriation. These friends would also find a translator to communicate with funeral parlors in Germany or France, as these parlors lacked the savoir-faire and knowledge about Muslim rituals to organize repatriation. The monopoly over the services and the lack of economic competition made the trip expensive for decades.

From the second half of the 1960s onward, several Turkish-origin religious groups began organizing in Germany and France and started to help with funerary practices as an integral part of foreign workers’ social lives. Also, they began to shift the emphasis onto the Islamic framing of services upon a death. It was precisely in this period in 1967 that the Süleymancıs [followers of Süleyman] and Nurcu – Islamische Gemeinschaft Jama’at un-Nur e.V. [Islamic community of Jamaat an-Nur] – created their own associations. A few years later, Milli Görüş [National Vision], “the most important non-governmental organization of the Turkish immigration, was established in Cologne; an association manifesting the political opportunism of a persecuted opposition party” (Amiraux, 2001: 30). The Turkish state did not officially organize the religious and social lives of immigrants until early 1980s when the DİTİB – Diyanet İşleri Türk İslam Birliği [The Turkish-Islamic Union of Cultural Affairs] was founded (Akgönül, 2005: 39).

These religious groups, established at the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s, started to organize in Germany, followed by other European countries, especially France, to provide religious services, especially rituals for marriage, birth and death, and Koran courses for schoolchildren, etc. At this point, mutual funds or cooperatives for the deceased [cenaze fonu] were created by these groups as a way of solving financial problems for the community in the case of death. This emerging economic tool within the economic and associational organizations assembled around national and religious belongings gradually replaced the spontaneous solidarity based on social relations between immigrants. The Milli Görüş and the DİTİB were the first to create a system of death insurance in Germany in the 1980s. Following these two main initiatives, one a private association and the other a Turkish government institution, religious groups such as the Süleymancıs and the Alevis began developing their own death insurance systems in the second half of the 1990s. The death insurance within these organizations was intended to rapidly finance repatriation following the deaths of their members to their country of origin. Later, they expanded their services to all Muslims, regardless of origin, and started covering inhumations in Europe. Organized privately, initially they did not have the objective of making profits. Instead, they relied on contributions from their members, with the choice of monthly or yearly payments and individual or familial insurance policies. This practical and straightforward solution, initially created by religious and non-professional organizations, was professionalized in the late 1980s and 1990s with the emergence of new economic actors, particularly the professionalization of funeral parlors specializing in holding Muslim rituals during repatriation and inhumation.

The emergence of Muslim funerary parlors in Europe can be seen within the framework of a larger specific market: the “halal market” (Id Yassine, 2013: 179). Id Yassin describes the insertion of the Islamic reference into the conventional market by paying particular attention to the word halal: “In this new framework, the word ‘halal’ has not only been integrated to market institutions but also impregnated with the mercantilist culture: marketing, management, investment, profitability, performance… – in one word, efficiency” (ibid.). Notions of haram and halal play a central role for pious Muslim actors in the funerary businesses I have interviewed.

The death insurance funds established for Muslims are the first indications of the rapid transformation of funerary practices, a transformation of a traditional service delivered to gain the favor of God and progressing through family and friendly solidarity toward becoming private businesses determined by an economic system. In Germany, mortuary services were already a well-established sector when Muslims arrived as immigrant workers. In France, the monopoly did not allow for the opening of an ethnic market until 1998. The secularization of the Reformation and Enlightenment periods led to lasting changes in the system of Christian funeral parlors and cemeteries, the communalization of which marked the transition from an order of family and religious solidarity to a commercial order in which the internment was taken care of by the providers of a professional service for a fee (Akyel, 2013: 63). Muslims have carved out a place for themselves in this profession by opening up their own enterprises of funeral parlors from the 1980s onward with a Muslim and/or Islamic self-referent. The establishment of these funeral parlors as enterprises completes the economic institutionalization that had already started with the death insurance funds and the organization of funerals originally taken care of by the family and/or the local community.

Nilüfer Göle, in her book Musulmans au quotidien: une enquête européenne sur les controverses autour de l’islam, proposes the notion of “ordinary Muslims,” which she defines as “a profile of believers who are fully invested in social life and actively engaged in this Islamic habitus, without this automatically implying Islamist militancy” (Göle, 2015: 72). ⁴ One can count the founders of the funeral parlors as “ordinary Muslims” to the extent that they strive to become good Muslims in the way they exericise their faith publicly while living as ordinary residents of Europe (Göle, 2015: 72). One of them explains how he combines his work ethic with Islamic ethics and the services he renders to people with his adoration for God and his religious practices (ibadet). He continues as follows:

We do our job to receive the benediction of Allah. We try to apply Sharia law as much as possible to our daily lives. We all belong to Allah. That’s why it is forbidden [haram] to produce, sell, and help with the marketization of anything that is harmful to human beings. We use banks; we have to do so. For example, if I don’t get interest from the bank, God knows for what means they’d use it. Hence, I take this money and donate it to the poor because otherwise the interest would not generate any good. If Sharia law were applied, we wouldn’t have all these miseries all around the world today. It is really difficult to be a Muslim in this world; the Satan never stops. Therefore, we have to be attentive always to the dangers that could seduce us from the right path of Islam. We call this jihad. For us, jihad doesn’t mean warfare; it is the struggle with one’s interior world and desires… In the true Sharia, there is justice for everybody, and everybody is also treated equally in the business. Even if the daughter of the Prophet Muhammed committed a prohibited act, they would punish her without exception. Privileges never existed in Islam. For me, today’s Saudi Arabia doesn’t apply the real Sharia because they have social privileges.

Nizam justifies the ethos of his business, which involves honesty, equal treatment, respect for others, and the adoption of Islamic standards. Like many who work in the ethnic funeral market, being a good Muslim is an integral part of both his work and his beliefs. For some of his clients, his ethnic work might also depend in part on his credibility as a Muslim in performing Islamic rituals correctly because, ultimately, the sold product is the correct Islamic way of dealing with the body of a deceased person. He combines his work within the capitalist system and his devotion as a Muslim into one phenomenon, which is crystallized by the notion of hizmet, ⁵ the services rendered to the community of believers, ibadet, adoration of God, and religious practices.

Pious social actors, who began to create the ‘religious market’ first with death insurance providers and later as Muslim funeral parlors, at first exclusively for repatriation to the country of origin, but gradually more and more for burials in Europe, have contributed to the ‘religionization’ of certain funeral practices. I borrow this term from Markus Dreßler, who, drawing on the work of Talal Asad on secularism and religion, defines it as a “heuristic device for the analysis of the processes through which social structures, practices, and discourses come to be understood as ‘religious’ or ‘religion’” (Dreßler, 2019: 1). Thus specific ways of doing things, like burying a corpse as soon as possible after death, with the face oriented towards Mecca or without a coffin, become exclusively religious, meaning accessible, intelligible and legitimate exclusively under the denomination of ‘Islamic’ or ‘Muslim’, Islam being defined exlusively as a religion. This is in line with the general trend towards the religionization of body practices in groups of Middle Eastern and North African origin from the 1980s onwards, since when they have become ever more exclusively ‘Muslim’. We thus witness a shift in emphasis from the migratory status or ethnic, linguistic, or cultural origin of certain groups to an exclusively religious nature independent of the piousness of the individual (Hamès, 1986; Yurdakul, 2009).

This religionization of Muslims into a homogenous and reified category also coincided with the growing problematization of the Islamic presence and Muslim practices in the European public sphere that came to be described as Islamophobia (Hajjat and Mohammed, 2016; Meer and Modood, 2012), the “Muslim Question” (Amir-Moazami, 2018; Fadil, 2014; Norton, 2013; Parekh, 2008), or the “race-religion constellation” (Topolski, 2018). Certain scholars have argued that this emphasis on religion was a way of concealing the racist character of the discrimination that the Muslims as ‘visible minorities’ were subject to, pointing to their simultaneous racialization (Nye, 2019: 212).

Central to these problematizations were the secular character of European public spaces and politics of spatiality, including public cemeteries, and the historical and genealogical construction of ‘religion’ as a private and internal category. Talal Asad, one of the central figures of what is now called Critical Secular Studies, argued that secularism is ‘an act through which a political medium (the representation of citizenship) redefines and transcends particular and differentiating practices of the self articulated through class, gender and religion’ (Asad, 2003: 5). Following the Asadian path, I consider the secular not as what is left behind when religion is removed or as the opposite of religion, but as part of a broader system of power that produces its own embodiment, sensibility and materiality. I argue that the religionization of specific individuals as Muslims within and through the institutionalization of funerary practices did not just emerge from pious migrants’ claims to religious subjectivity while dying. The secular nature of cemeteries and the organization of mortuaries in France and Germany also contributed to Muslims being increasingly understood as a religious group (usually without official state recognition), even if their religion was always suspected of crossing the boundaries of the private sphere and becoming political, that is, not being a suitable religion for liberal-democratic societies.

To improve understanding of the structural and historical significance of dying and being buried as a Muslim in Europe, we need to remember a history older than the recent immigration from Muslim countries because it is about asserting one’s place in the nation as a citizen belonging to a minority, and also reflects the colonial experience. In this sense, the experiences of Muslims are comparable to those of other religious minorities in France and Germany, particularly Jewish minorities. Therefore, in the next section, I focus on the spatial and symbolic history of Muslim death with particular attention to the Christian and secular development of burial space in Germany and France.

To rest in peace in Europe: A new phenomenon for Muslims

Contrary to the practice of repatriating the deceased, a practice that gained prominence with immigration from Muslim countries to Europe, especially after the 1950s, and that was institutionalized from the 1980s onwards, the question of the burial of Muslims in France and Germany and the sore lack of burial places for Muslims has to do with the secular history of the evolution of cemeteries, as well as the general suspicion of Islam’s legitimacy in the public sphere as a new religion with “different” customs. To elucidate this point, here I examine the current situation of mortuary spaces and the judicial regulations concerning cemeteries in France and Germany. In doing so, I reveal the political stakes and governmentality not only of public cemeteries, but also of Muslim burials, which are currently in the midst of institutionalization in both European countries. I argue that the religionization of funerary practices concerning the repatriation of bodies to their countries of origin has also been encouraged by the secular funerary system of both countries.

Although Germany has no state religion, religion plays a central role in the funerary system, just as it does in many domains of social life. Certain churches are recognized as partners of the state, recognized by their judicial status considered under the public ecclesiastical law [Staatskirchenrecht]. Rules on relations between the state and the churches, their separation as well as their cooperation, are based on three principles guaranteed by the Constitution [Grundgesetz]: the neutrality of the state toward religions (freedom of religion), the parity (equality of religions) and secularization (Wick, 2008: 12). All these principles articulate the separation of church and state, considered by certain circles as a “lame separation” [hinkende Trennung] – that historically constituted the tradition of managing cemeteries not only for Catholics, Protestants and Jews, but also for atheists, for children who died before having been baptized, and, more recently, for Muslims.

Although there have been discussions and attempts regarding the construction of an exclusively Muslim cemetery in Germany, until now it has not been possible to establish one because of the non-recognition of Islam as an official state religion, which is the requirement to gain the status of a public trusteeship [Trägerschaft]. The only space reserved exclusively for Muslim graves is in the garden of the Şehitlik Mosque in Berlin, which belongs to Turkey’s Minister of Defense. This plot contains about two hundred graves and cannot receive new corpses because of its limited space. By the 1960s, it was full and has not been modified since. Having lost its function as an active cemetery, today, it represents a symbolic space of memory for the diaspora. This resonates very much with the idea of a multicultural memory developed by Becker, Suárez Collado and Arana Barbier in their analysis of the cemeteries as spaces of memory that leave their trace even when the societies change throughout centuries (see the contribution to this special issue by Becker et al., 2025). Although it is not possible to have cemeteries for Muslims dedicated to their faith exclusively, it is still possible to create a section of regrouped tombs reserved for Muslims [muslimische Grabfelder], mainly within the municipal cemeteries [kommunaler Friedhöfe]. In Germany, there are around 330 of these Muslim burial sections; only around 4% are in Christian cemeteries; the others are in municipal cemeteries (Lemmen and Uludağ 2023: 7).

Muslims in Germany are mostly buried in reserved sections within existing communal cemeteries, except in the case of a few Christian cemeteries. The first Muslim section, the “Iranian-Islamic cemetery” [Iranisch-islamische Friedhof], was created in 1941 in the graveyard of Ohlsdorf in Hamburg (Kuhnen, 2012: 16). The arrangement of Muslim sections has continued since, with an intensification in the 1990s (Kuhnen, 2012: 16). In his article on the burial of Muslims in Germany, Karakaş (1996: 87) mentions several types of burial grounds [Gräberfelder] in several cities in Rhineland-North-Westphalia, the first of which was installed in 1972 in the cemetery of Hallo [Hallo-Friedhof] in Essen. In the special sections in Aachen, Bonn, Cologne, Essen, and Mönchengladbach, the Muslims are always buried in accordance with the principles of orientation toward Mecca and being accompanied by an imam. However, these applications were not based on solid regulations but on a sort of “tolerance” [Duldung] (Karakaş, 1996: 87; underlined in the original).

The question of cemeteries and burials is regulated at the level of federal states [Länder] in Germany under the law of inhumation [Bestattungsgesetz]. Under federal law, the tombs in the Muslim sectors within the municipal cemeteries can be allocated for a determined duration, which varies from one federal state [Land] to the other. In Cologne, for instance, the duration is fixed at 25 years, and some tombs can be extended to 30 years (Karakaş, 1996: 89), whereas in Berlin it is 20 years, and most cannot be extended. During my interviews with the families of the deceased, one of the issues that came up was the removal of graves once the grave’s duration comes to an end. This poses a problem; as in the Jewish tradition, the Muslim tradition also holds that the dead body should remain undisturbed in its eternal place of rest. Jewish cemeteries benefit from the right to eternity [Ewigkeitsrecht] if they buy the field on which a cemetery is to be built. However, this law, from which Jewish people benefit, cannot be applied to Muslim tombs, as one needs to be entitled to the status of a public trusteeship to be able to buy a burial plot to establish a cemetery. The state only recognizes religious and philosophical communities [Religions- und Weltanschauungsgemeinschaft] as corporations that can create and manage a cemetery [Friedhofsträger] under administrative law [Körperschaften des öffentlichen Rechts]. Rhineland-North-Westphalia constitutes the only exception in attributing the right to administer a cemetery to an entity not recognized by administrative law. With this judicial opening, some Muslim organizations have attempted to establish their own cemetery in the city of Wuppertal since 2009. Lack of recognition also means deprivation of any public funding from the federal state or local governments; therefore, Muslims have to finance the construction of their cemetery themselves. In 2019 the organizer of the initiative for the Muslim cemetery in Wuppertal filed a demand for financial aid to the Land of the Rhineland-North-Westphalia due to the insufficient number of donations. ⁶

Other judicial changes are underway that enable the application of certain Islamic funerary practices. In the 2010s, following the recurrent demands of Muslim associations, the judicial obligation to bury the deceased in a coffin was removed in several Bundesländer in Germany. Today, in almost all of the federal states, except for Saxony-Anhalt and Saxony, burial with a coffin is no longer an obligation (Lemmen and Uludağ, 2023: 7). Since 2020, the actual implementation of coffinless burials has also begun. The abolition of the so-called ‘coffin obligation’ [Sargpflicht] is not restricted to Muslims; anyone can request a coffinless burial in those federal states that legally allow it, as well as in cemeteries where the know-how exists regarding placing bodies in a burial site without a coffin. Another change came when certain states now allow quicker burials, reducing the requirement to wait 48 to 24 hours until the death is announced by the health authorities. However, post-death documentation and obtaining permits take so long that most Muslims are not buried until the third or fourth day after death (Lemmen and Uludağ, 2023: 19). It is also possible to respect the tradition of building tombs so that the face faces Mecca, a rule applied in almost all Muslim burial sites. However, because the federal system is dispersed, and cemeteries are governed by state law, the rights of Muslims who wish to be buried according to Islamic rules vary from state to state.

Although progress has been made in the legal consideration of Muslim tradition in predominantly communal cemeteries, the issue is still shaped by the idea of tolerance rather than legal certainty or citizens’ ineligible religious rights, a phenomenon that is still prevalent as it was almost 30 years ago (Karakaş, 1996).

Unlike the German case, cemeteries in France fall under the jurisdiction of communal public services. Therefore, “a cemetery can belong to a public establishment of cooperation, especially to an urban authority” (Viel, 1999: 213). The nationalization of cemeteries in France is based on the notion of neutrality that constitutes the foundation of the Republic and the concept of laïcité. These two closely intertwined components determine, to a large extent, the mortuary landscape in France today, both directly and indirectly. Another difference between France and Germany becomes apparent when looking at centralized judicial regulations, as the general law is applied in all French territories, though with some exceptions. ⁷ Nonetheless, in France, the centralization of the law does not mean that local authorities do not influence the management of cemeteries. On the contrary, local mayors have decisive power on issues that are not mentioned or explained in the law, and they can opt for or against the establishement of a confessional burial section in their municipal cemeteries within their jurisdiction.

Apart from the public Muslim cemetery in Strasbourg, the management method of Muslim cemeteries, which are de facto present on French soil, and their judicial status are pretty ambivalent. Muslim cemeteries are illegal, and all kinds of confessional cemeteries were banned by the 14 November 1881 law, titled the Law on the Neutrality of Cemeteries. ⁸ Given the neutrality of French cemeteries since 1881, which initially “introduced … a strong principle of non-discrimination in the spaces of sepulchers” (Petit, 2006: 99), Jewish cemeteries, which were the only non-Catholic ones at the time, apart from the Protestants, lost their judicial recognition. Although they exist de facto as separate cemeteries, de jure they have no confessional existence. Inspired by a desire to liberate burials from the services of religion following this abrogation, multi-confessional cemeteries outside a town gradually became widespread and even the norm, at least in the metropolis, at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century (Hidiroglou, 1990: 192). Despite this secular regulation, which was adopted for reasons of neutrality and public hygiene, the sections called carrés [squares] reserved for different religions within the cemeteries were placed under the control of the municipalities and continued to multiply. It was thus entirely dependent on the willingness of mayors and municipal actors new sections could be built within communal cemeteries. However, specific provisions from 1975, 1991, and 2008 issued by the Ministry of Interior strongly encouraged the municipalities to create sections for minorities. Yet, even though these practices have been tolerated or encouraged by public officials for decades, in the absence of legal modifications, the status of confessional sections remains legally fragile (Guillaumon, 2008). The Muslim sections, which thus exist solely de facto and not de jure (as is the case for all other confessional carrés in France), are therefore the only possible way to get buried if one wishes to be buried with other Muslims.

As in Germany, where it is still quite challenging to apply Islamic customs to the internment, though change is on its way, there are also attempts to modify the jurisdiction to allow Muslims to practice their own funerary traditions. Despite its distrustful attitude towards religion, France has witnessed transformations with laws on funerary practices that directly affect Muslim mortuary practices. Usually, there is a waiting time of 48 hours for every burial. This means Muslims find it more difficult to respect their tradition of burying their dead as quickly as possible (Petit, 2006: 105). This time limit has since been reduced to 24 hours under a new decree issued in 2010. ⁹ However, burying corpses without a coffin is still impossible for hygienic reasons. ¹⁰ Concerning the duration of concessions, the regulations are similar to those implemented in Germany. However, in France, the right to a perpetual concession on religious grounds has not existed since the legislation of 1881, and in practice those that existed earlier continue to prevail. Apart from the time of the concession, which creates problems for Muslims, the exhumation and re-inhumation of remains in common graves at the end of concessions deeply disturb their traditional practices.

What is interesting in both contexts is the emphasis on tolerance concerning the burial of Muslim bodies in German and French cemeteries without legal recognition or the protection of denominational divisions. The secular development of cemeteries and their spatial separation from church cemeteries in Western Europe made it possible to accommodate heretics, freethinkers, and atheists, who are given a dignified burial there without any ecclesiastical control. Muslims are also accommodated in these communal cemeteries, which were established after the secularization of cemeteries. Nevertheless, secular communal cemeteries have to some extent retained the imprint of the Christian customs and traditions of their surroundings, as the processes of secularization (as a historical process) and of secularism (as a political doctrine) have privileged the majority religious culture and its sensibilities in one way or another (Mahmood, 2009: 857). In Germany, a chapel was almost always erected in communal cemeteries, while under French ‘catho-laïcité’, cemeteries were exempted from the famous separation law of 1905 on the public display of religious signs.

At the same time, this ‘goodwill’ or ‘tolerance’ to accept Muslim bodies as Muslims may depend on the general atmosphere of perception of the ‘other’. As the example of French laïcité makes clear, the application of secular principles depends very much on context and interpretation. J-B Debost, the historian of immigration and colonialism, recalls that French Muslim buildings such as the Great Mosque of Paris (1925), the Avicenne hospital (1935) and the Bobigny cemetery (1937) were built in the first half of the 20th century (Debost, 2011). These buildings were erected after the cemetery laws of the 1880s and the Partition of 1905 by officials of the colonial and secular French Republic to honor Muslim subjects who had fought and died for the Republic. The applicability of the rites and the issue of willingness thus depends on the context and feelings of the secular (Pellegrini, 2009), asking questions about who properly belongs to “us” and the nation state.

Muslims face many difficulties in securing burial spaces, some of which stem from a long history of the secularisation of church cemeteries. While the process of secularisation made it possible for the bodies of Muslims to be placed in the denominational sections of municipal cemeteries, it also maintained biases in favour of majority customs, which are de facto places of Christian tradition. In both France and Germany, Muslims increasingly prefer to be buried in places that had been traditionally secularised rather than being returned to their countries of origin. Within the community and the majority societies, a constant process of religionization is taking place, which on the one hand gives Muslims access to certain rights while on the other hand also bringing with it the danger of the reification of their traditions and of their increasing public problematisation. I argue that Muslims who choose for themselves or for their relatives to be buried according to Islamic customs in European cemeteries become political by becoming part of the public space, their differences being visible to all. They commit ‘acts of citizenship’ (Isin, 2008), mostly unconsciously, while claiming their rights for universal citizenship through manifesting their religious/cultural particularities. They are entering and modifying from within the materiality, effects, and sensibilities of the secular in European deathscapes.

Conclusion

Today, more and more Muslims are buried in France and Germany, a practice that represents a rupture from the norm of repatriation to the country of origin. For Muslims, the problems of inhumation in European cemeteries are related to the fact that they affirm an Islamic subjectivity during and after death and that they demand to follow their own religious traditions. Nevertheless, their access to religious funeral services in the mortuary space, whose historical development was first Christian and then secular, remains limited. In France, the organizational mode of the laïque state prevails in cemeteries that are considered part of the public sphere. Despite the inherent ambiguity of this space, where private and public spheres become entangled, the law poses significant difficulties for the instauration of Muslim practices. In the case of Germany, often defined as a secular state, none of the Länder recognizes the status of Islam as a religion as yet, while the Evangelical and Catholic Churches, as well as Judaism, benefit from this privilege.

The inequalities within the judicial treatment of funeral practices and persons of different beliefs in Europe can be explained by the non-recognition of certain groups in the name of laïcité in France or by a sort of intentional ‘negligence’ in Germany. These inequalities engender paradoxical circumstances and different practices within the same political space in both cases. While the number of Muslim dead bodies that are buried within special mortuary sections increase day by day, their legal status remain ambiguous and in most cases even unlawful.

Given the history of colonization and decolonization, as well as the growing numbers of Muslim minorities in European territory within the two specific contexts of Germany and France, the spatiality and temporality of cemeteries are continually (re)shaped through negotiations between the state apparatus and Muslim groups. The latter do not seem to intend to stay passive or to follow submissively the norms decreed by public policies; they instead wish to be the ‘actors’ of their own death or, more precisely, the arrangers of the modalities with regard to their passage to the afterlife, even if this means having to imagine a reconfiguration of the European public sphere. When it comes to affirming and observing their funerary customs, Muslim minorities find themselves on the one hand in an obscure field of illegality – that is to say, a domain outside of the law or not acknowledged by the law – and on the other under the shadow of semi-governmental institutions which seek to facilitate the legal recognition of their practices.

In the current situation, Muslim minorities who decide that their remains should rest in European territory after death are developing specific strategies allowing them to observe their traditions regardless, for example, by partially avoiding law-imposed restrictions. These tactics and techniques of accommodation do not yet enter into the definition of political and organized action. However, the maneuvers around Muslim corpses that must navigate between state laws and ‘religious’ prescriptions represent an opportunity to introduce new forms of life and death that modify, at the margins, the way the European public sphere functions. The de facto existence of Muslim graves with their cultural, ethnic and religious differences is material proof of their ‘having-been’ [Da-gewesen] (Ruin, 2019) and claims their legitimate membership of the social ‘we’, which is made up of the living, but also of ‘our’ dead.