Source: AlJazeera

New York, US – Ahmet Kargi, 40, rolls up his sleeves, revealing a tattoo on his right arm – a white crescent and star inside a red shield.

“It’s the Turkish flag,” he says. “Makes me feel closer to my roots.”

His keffiyeh blows in the wind as he rides his 2003 Harley Davidson through the quiet streets of Fort Greene, Brooklyn, passing brownstones, Gothic churches and Mexican restaurants.

He stops at the corner of Vanderbilt and DeKalb Avenue, and enters an inconspicuous, burgundy and beige three-storey building. It is the Piro Funeral Home, a neighbourhood fixture since the early 1900s.

Back then it was where the bodies of Italian immigrants who worked in the Navy Yard were prepared before being shipped by boat to Italy for burial. Today, it might be one of a kind: a multireligious funeral home with separate sections for Jews, Christians and Muslims.

Kargi is the president of the Muslim section, called Islamic Funeral Services.

“I never saw myself doing this,” he says. “But things fell into place at a certain point in my life and it just made sense.”

Cleansing the body

Today, Kargi is at the funeral home, handling the final rites of a 48-year-old Iranian man. Ali died in his sleep, and his body has just been released from the medical examiner’s office. His Russian wife, Svetlana, tells Kargi that her husband had been stressed because he had recently been laid off from his job and wasn’t able to send as much money back home as he would have liked.

Svetlana is an Orthodox Christian but wants to ensure that all rituals are performed in accordance with her husband’s Muslim faith.

In Islam, the dead should be buried as soon as possible. The body is first cleansed in lukewarm water, and then wrapped in several layers of plain cotton sheets. Soon after, there is a congregational prayer service called the Janazah, during which mourners pray for the deceased’s soul and ask God to pardon them for their sins. Then the body is buried.

Kargi handles the first part of the process, cleansing Ali’s body. He moves quicker than usual, concerned because it has already been two days since Ali died. The medical examiner had to come in to conduct an autopsy because Ali was in his 40s and seemingly in good health. The burial will be further delayed because Ali’s family plans to fly his body back to Iran, which will take a few days. Svetlana can’t afford to send the body overseas, so Ali’s family in Tehran are making the arrangements.

Shipping bodies overseas is a smooth process for the most part. Countries such as Egypt and Morocco have been known to step in and cover the funeral and shipping costs for their citizens in the US.

In Ali’s case, however, it will be tougher than usual. The Iranian embassy in Washington DC has been closed since the US and Iran severed relations in 1979, and any official work is processed through the Interests Section of the Islamic Republic of Iran in the United States, located inside the Pakistan embassy. Kargi, well versed with the procedures of shipping bodies internationally, will need to make a few additional calls from his funeral home to ensure that Ali’s body gets back to Tehran safely.

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