A Muslim youth group, Association for Reducing Poverty in our Society (ARPOS), is calling on the larger Muslim populace to consider the establishment of Muslim mortuaries.

The group made the call at the end of a workshop at the Imam Abass Mosque at Accra New Town, to educate a cross section of people within its catchment area on how to bathe, shroud and bury the dead according to Islamic tenets.

The group identified Muslim mortuaries as the solution to the unislamic ambience that Muslim corpses are put through at the public mortuaries coupled with the back and forth that Muslims experience at mortuaries when they go to claim their dead for burial.

“For years now, Muslim corpses have been humiliated at these morgues relative to the way they are stripped naked, thrown on the floor, both sexes are mixed in one location and the whole lack of privacy thing leaves much to be desired,” president of ARPOS, Ustaz Yusif lamented.

“We are of the opinion that our leaders of today – at the spiritual, social and political levels – must as a matter of urgency look beyond whatever differences between them and to stand up to this challenge,” he added.

The group makes the point that they are in principle not against autopsy and by that were calling for a morgue where their corpses could be released to the respective family quickly for burial as per Islamic guidelines.

ARPOS’s difficulty however is the unusually long periods, sometimes weeks that it takes for autopsies to be done; “we are by this position not against pathological tests but for us the lengthy period it takes brings discomfort to many a Muslim,” ARPOS president stated.

ARPOS proposed alongside the morgue, for Muslim medical students to be encouraged to study pathology and be assigned to the Islamic morgue in order to undertake pathology along Islamic lines and timely to afford corpses to be given fitting burial.

ARPOS is also not bemused especially at the mixing of male and female corpses, positing that Islam protected the privacy of a person right from his birth till death, but that situation is woefully compromised within the current dispensation.

The workshop was led by Sudan trained Ustaz Abdul Wahab Mahama, a key member of ARPOS, who took participants through the processes involved in dealing with the dying Muslim, how to treat a dead Muslim, and demonstrated how to bath and shroud the Muslim.

Although the act of preparing, praying for and burying the Muslim dead is considered a responsibility of the group (Muslims), it was important to know how it was done in case a person is called upon to do it at anytime.

“The Quran states clearly that every soul shall taste death, consequently everyone of us must make it a point to lead a God conscious life in order to meet Allah when we are amongst the faithful, death would come but would we be prepared?” he asked rhetorically.

Participants who sat through the session were grateful to the organizers, lauding them for the initiative and urging ARPOS to replicate the program in other places and to educate them on other Islamic topics of importance.

By: Abdur Rahman Shaban Alfa (The New Crusading GUIDE)