ICC Note: Imagine all the grief and emotions that comes with a family death. Now imagine the local community pitting itself against you and threatening you for not following their preferred burial customs. This was the case for Amar’s family after he died on October 30. The 70-year-old Christian convert was not allowed a Christian burial because the town imam threatened to have the family ostracized for not following Islamic tradition.

11/05/2016 Algeria (WWM): When someone close to us dies, emotions are difficult enough…imagine if then, on top, you couldn’t ‘say goodbye’ in the way that would honour them and bring comfort to the grieving.

That is the situation for many Christians when they are a minority in their own country.

When 70-year-old Amar died last week [30 Oct] after a week in an Algerian hospital, his children gathered to mourn and discussed funeral arrangements with one of their church’s pastors.

The family, from a village outside the northern city of Tizi-Ouzou, the main city in the Kabylie region, decided to give him a Christian funeral.

Two of his sons and one of his daughters had, like their father, become Christians and been baptised in a local church. A high number of conversions has been recorded in Tizi-Ouzou despite Algerian Christians complaining of systematic discrimination.

The Kabylie region is home to most of members of the tiny, but fast-growing Christian minority in Algeria, with more than 20 churches of the 43 affiliated to the Protestant Church of Algeria (EPA), the largest ‘umbrella’ grouping of Christians in the country.

So Amar’s family decided against the Islamic death rites. Usually a vigil takes place in the home of the dead person. People gather to sing and mourn all night, appealing to Allah and Muhammad to welcome their loved one (whose body should also be washed while religious songs are sung) into paradise.

Although Amar’s family had decided to break from Islamic traditions, they still wanted their father’s body to be washed, and a number of Christians volunteered to do so.

The next day, the day of the funeral, the village imam and some of his acolytes, along with an older member of the community, visited the family. The imam threatened ostracism from the rest of the village if they did not reverse their decision, and urged the villagers to put pressure on the family.

The imam said: “We are Muslims, and we will remain so. The funeral of our dead will be as it always was, and we will not compromise our customs and religion. If someone wants to bury his dead in our cemetery, he should do it according to our traditions.”

…

[Full Story]