This article studies one of the humanitarian challenges caused by the COVID-19 crisis: the dignified handling of the mortal remains of individuals that have died from COVID-19 in Muslim contexts. It illustrates the discussion with examples from Sunni Muslim-majority states when relevant, such as Egypt, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Morocco and Pakistan, and examples from English-speaking non-Muslim majority states such as the United Kingdom, the United States of America, Canada and Australia as well as Sri Lanka. The article finds that the case of the management of dead bodies of people who have died from COVID-19 has shown that the creativity and flexibility enshrined in the Islamic law-making logic and methodology, on the one hand, and the cooperation between Muslim jurists and specialised medical and forensic experts, on the other, have contributed to saving people’s lives and mitigating the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic in Muslim contexts.
, Frenkel set himself to what he terms ‘this sacred endeavor’ (di heylike zakh).12 Frenkel and another Jew, Moshe Buki, Polish Jewish Holocaust victims in yizkor books 41 laboured for two weeks in the fields, locating forty-seven bodies, which were brought to rest in a collective grave – Frenkel calls it a ‘fraternal grave’ (bruder-keyver), probably borrowed from the Russian equivalent (bratskaya mogila), which he would have picked up during his service in the Red Army – in the restored Jewish cemetery.13 They added a memorial headstone, which was unveiled on 7 August
out following the genocide. By the end of the 1990s, many cemeteries were in a poor state. The limited resources available for reburials following the genocide had an impact on the physical stability of the graves. Corruption and the awarding of contracts to the lowest bidder also led to low-quality materials being used. These economic and material problems were compounded by climatic factors, as many collective graves which had been hastily dug in 1994 were subsequently destroyed by landslides during the rainy seasons of the spring of 1995 and that of 1996. The
‘anomalies’ suggest the presence of a grave.59 It is important to remember that corpses and graves of Holocaust victims will survive in different forms depending upon how victims were treated by perpetrators. These different 178 178 Human remains in society conditions will sometimes require different techniques to be used to detect the remains and will offer different possibilities for investigation and discovery. For example, the use of magnetometry may be more appropriate if victims are thought to have been cremated and then reinterred in a collective grave because