Soon, the Muslim community in the Pembina Valley will have an option for burial that accommodates its faith.
For the City of Morden, the move is one that strives to meet the necessities of all its citizens.
The potential of a new project
Shawn Dias, director of Parks & Urban Forestry with the City of Morden, says the opportunity has arisen as the department looks to create a new graveyard with a few different features.
“Constructing a new municipal cemetery kind of gave us a clean slate to investigate all different user types and accommodate different needs at the site,” he says.
Because the project is new, Dias says it allowed Parks & Urban Forestry “some flexibility to do some different things,” including incorporating an ash scattering area, a green burial site, and connecting with the Pembina Valley Islamic Society (PVIS) about Islamic burial.
“We welcomed [the conversation, and] they were fantastic to work with,” he says of PVIS. “They gave us a lot of really good information to go on in terms of their requirements.”
Working ‘back and forth’
The process to design and develop the Islamic portion of the cemetery has been marked by collaboration.
“We were able to work with them kind of back and forth in terms of sharing initial design, orientation of plots, and separation from [other] burial sites, and then they were able to share that with their community, get some feedback, and kind of come back to us,” says Dias.
“It's been a great working relationship, I think.”
'The next step’
For Dias, the new cemetery, which will be the only one in the province outside of Winnipeg, is a logical progression as the Muslim community in the Pembina Valley continues to flourish.
“We obviously see Islamic community numbers growing [with] the creation of a mosque,” he says. “Now that they have a place of prayer in the community, just having that access to burial sites nearby, I think, is the next step.”
‘From the beginning, they have supported us’
For Syed Faizan Nasir, the president of PVIS, developing the new Muslim cemetery is another step in the city's already strong support of the organization.
“Since we got the approval of the mosque, the City Council and Mayor Nancy Penner have supported us. From the beginning, they have supported us,” he says.
The new graveyard will be at Lakeside Cemetery in Morden. Nasir says the city has allotted space with enough room for approximately 78 graves with the option for future expansion.
One important feature of an Islamic cemetery
One might ask what makes a grave Islamic. Nasir says that one important feature is qibla, or the direction people put to rest should face in the Islamic faith. The direction always leads toward the Sacred Mosque in Mecca, toward which Muslim prayer is also directed.
The importance of qibla is one of the unique requirements of cemeteries in the Islamic faith.
“Other cemeteries have no such restriction, ... so our graves are usually in a different direction,” says Nasir. “This was an important part [of our cemetery], and we coordinated with Shawn [to] set those directions.”
The importance to the community
For Nasir, having the cemetery is one important aspect that will help encourage Muslim families to stay in the area. He says that before the establishment of Morden’s mosque, there was talk in some circles of leaving the region for others that boast the necessities of the Islamic faith.
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Now that the mosque is up and running in the community and plans for a cemetery have been drawn up, the conversation has changed.
“They say ... in the mosque that [they] have cancelled that plan [to leave],” he says. “Having a graveyard means that now, people can stay here for a very long period of time.”
Nasir says that attracting people to the region benefits the whole community in the end.
‘The cemetery is beautiful’
As for the cemetery itself, Nasir is thrilled about its location.
“We visited just a couple of days ago, and it's a beautiful place,” he says, adding that given the progress of the mosque and now the cemetery, it’s a dream come true.
“We were not even thinking that this would be so easily doable when we started it,” he says.
Dias says construction for the Islamic cemetery will begin this year. The city is hoping to have plots available for sale by the middle of summer.
With files from Robyn Wiebe
