October 22, 2016
Yesterday, I helped bury a man whom I’ve never seen before. The man leading the ceremony gave a eulogy listing a multitude of things he had accomplished in Pebane during his lifetime; most notably, he had worked at the local secondary school for nearly 10 years. This man would have been my colleague, had malaria not claimed his 35 year old body first. He left behind a family: a wife, two kids. Had I seen this man on my first day of classes, a small white hat would have adorned the crown of his head. The man I buried’s name was Abdul. He was Muslim.
As a small town boy from Alabama where Islam is not a topic openly (or ever) discussed, this funeral was my first tangible experience with the Islamic faith. The ceremony began at the house of the deceased. The women, seated further away from the house, sang songs in a language I could not understand. The men, seated on straw mats adjacent to the house, were silent.
When I arrived, my host dad ushered me to a spot at the rear of the crowd of somber men. Throughout the next hour, we waited. We waited quietly, solemnly. More community members came, sat down, and joined in the solidarity.
After some time had passed, my host father, a Christian pastor, leaned over to me and whispered in my ear, “para eles, Allah e Deus” loosely translated to mean, “For them, Allah is God.”
I’m not here to confirm or deny anyone’s religious beliefs. And, I’m not even completely sure that my host father meant the connotation that I drew from that sentence. (As I have lamented previously, my Portuguese is still not great yet.) What I can say is that I believe every person deserves the opportunity to live a life that they are comfortable with. A life that they want to live and that brings them happiness. And, to me, my father’s statement was so accepting of that idea. Even though they probably had very different perspectives and beliefs, my host father and other members of the community gathered together to mourn the loss of a beloved secondary school professor, who was valued, first, for his contributions to the community.
Next, several men brought out white cloth and began diligently preparing it. It appeared that they were cutting precise portions of the cloth, and, then, folding those delicate amounts of cloth into a desired pattern. The cloth was taken back into the house. Then, the body wrapped in this prepared white cloth was brought outside and put in the bed of an open back truck. At this point, everyone rose to their feet.
People stood together to respect the organic humanity this ceremony celebrated; to remember that, in the end, this man was a human being who was faced with his own mortality.
For me, it was a beautiful event. I realized that too often the media portrays jaded views of religious intolerance and the incapability of coexistence. Here, in Austral Africa, a small town of roughly 20,000 people showed me that the things that unite us as humans should be much stronger than those which separates us.
At Abdul’s final resting place, each of the men of the community – American, Mozambican, Christian, and Muslim alike – took the shovel, if only for a moment, to help cover the casket of their fallen friend with a little part of the Earth from which he came. A tree was placed where his head was. A few words were said in Arabic, and then there was a moment of silence at his sepulcher. In unison, everyone breathed in one final breath at his grave and departed.
MOZ likely to sunburn 