By Susan Brinkmann, OCDS
Staff Journalist
Muslim scholars are saying that the controversial burial of Osama bin Laden at sea, which many critics say the Obama Administration ordered out of a desire to appear “politically correct”, was done incorrectly and actually breached sharia law.
Senior US officials told news agencies that the body of bin Laden was disposed of in accordance with Islamic tradition, which involves ritual washing, shrouding and burial within 24 hours. However, several Muslim scholars say there’s more to it than this.
According to a report by The Guardian, basic requirements for Muslim burials involve placing the body in a grave with the head pointed toward the holy city of Mecca. Burial at sea is rare in Islam, though it is permitted in certain circumstances, such as when one dies at sea and the decomposing body poses a health risk to passengers.
Dr Saud al-Fanisan, former dean of the faculty of sharia law in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, said that if a body was buried at sea it should be protected from fish. As described on alislam.org, the proper procedure is to lower the body into the water “in a vessel of clay or with a weight tied to its feet.”
Mohammed al-Qubaisi, Dubai’s grand mufti, said of Bin Laden’s burial: “They can say they buried him at sea, but they cannot say they did it according to Islam. Sea burials are permissible for Muslims in extraordinary circumstances. This is not one of them.”, who preaches at Baghdad’s Abu Hanifa mosque, told The Guardian that “what was done by the Americans is forbidden by Islam and might provoke some Muslims. It is not acceptable and it is almost a crime to throw the body of a Muslim man into the sea. The body of Bin Laden should have been handed over to his family to look for a country to bury him.”
But Mohammed Qudah, a professor of Islamic law at the University of Jordan, told Fox News said burying the Saudi-born bin Laden at sea was not forbidden if there was nobody to receive the body and provide a Muslim burial. “The land and the sea belong to God, who is able to protect and raise the dead at the end of times for Judgment Day,” he said. “It’s neither true nor correct to claim that there was nobody in the Muslim world ready to receive Bin Laden’s body.”
In 2003, when U.S. forces killed Uday and Qusay Hussein, sons of the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, they were not immediately buried according to Islamic custom. Instead, they were embalmed and held for more than 11 days, and photographs of their corpses released to the media. The U.S. military eventually escorted the bodies to a cemetery outside their father’s ancestral village of Owja, where they were handed over to the care of the local sheik.
In bin Laden’s case, U.S. officials said that finding a country willing to accept the remains of the world’s most wanted terrorist would have been difficult, so they decided to bury him at sea. The burial reportedly took place on May 2, the day of his death, from the deck of the aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson in the North Arabian sea.
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