(no subject)

[tagryn]

I've been reading a book I got out of the library titled Pentagon 9/11 about the terrorist attack on the Pentagon. Its interesting, in part because most of the books about 9/11 tend to focus on the World Trade Center part of it, but the Pentagon was every bit a part of that day as well. Parts of it are hard to get through, I'll admit, the authors do a good job of giving a lot of detail which should be useful historically but also brings back a lot of memories of that day.

One thing I did get curious about as I've been reading it was that human remains of the hijackers were recovered, but the book never gets into what (if anything) happened to them after they were identified. As it turns out, nothing has; the remains are still in the hands of the FBI, and no individual or group has come forward to ask for custody. No one is really sure what to do with them. Personally, I find appealing doing what the Israelis did with Eichmann's remains: cremation, followed by scattering at sea so that there's no burial site for future jihadists to commemorate them at.

Comments

[foomf.livejournal.com]

While Islamic law prohibits cremation, as far as I can discover, there is no particular explicit reason for the general prohibition on cremation. There is a general requirement that the remains be buried in the community where the death occurred, as soon as is reasonably possible.

It would be considered a religious atrocity to cremate the remains, because it would be seen as a deliberate act of contempt for the religion.
This would be yet more grist in the mill of America As The Great Satan.

It would be much better to quietly bury the bodies (with identification medallions) in an anonymous grave, and to state publicly that this has been done in order to honor the beliefs of American Muslims, and to prevent the creation of a shrine to murderers.

[tagryn]

My snarky side says "well, they decided to cremate themselves, didn't they?"

I'm OK with digging a hole down in Guantanamo and dumping them in, or sinking the bones at sea. I probably wouldn't bother stating anything publicly when its done; as the news article said, its not like anyone's asking about them, except for reporters every once in a while, and the propaganda backlash just wouldn't be worth it. Among those who still consider them heroes, or even good Muslims, there's nothing we can do with the remains that would be considered acceptable; even holding on to them as long as we have is a violation of Islamic law AFAIK.

[foomf.livejournal.com]

It isn't a violation YET, but anything other than burial would be, and in the community where they died.

My concern in this is to do the right thing politically and ethically, which should be our goal no matter how vile the enemy, no matter how foul the criminal. This is something which has been missing from our government, and from our society, for far too long.

[tagryn]

Although it raises another question: is allowing them full Islamic rites giving de facto status to them as still being good Muslims? And, therefore, by extension, that suicide attacks against U.S. civilians are legitimate under Islamic law? A bad precedent to set.

The status of suicide bombers is one that Muslim scholars have struggled with, given the Qur'anic prohibitions against suicide, and I'm not surprised that the U.S. Muslim communities which might weigh in on this probably wouldn't want to touch this particular case with a 10-foot pole if they were asked (which they haven't been, as far as I know).

Given all the complexities, the "right thing" by our lights might be an obscenity by standards we aren't even aware of, and vice-versa; as the article says, the 9/11 survivors would look very poorly on any kind of honor being given to the hijackers postmortem. I figure this is why their grave is likely to be an FBI locker for a long time to come.

[foomf.livejournal.com]

It is not at all difficult to google islamic law regarding disposal of corpses. The sources I found were quite straightforward: there is no special requirement other than burial in the ground within a reasonable time (as quickly as possible, but legalities are allowed to supercede, including required autopsy and identification of the corpse.)

There aren't really any special rites at death, either, except to encourage the dying to make the declaration of faith, and I'm sure they were making that prayer when they murdered themselves and the other passengers and the people in the building.

So, the difficulty here is that they want to make sure they don't create a shrine to these murderers, nor to make the disposal of their corpses into a matter for further blasphemous jihad-spew, and to prevent that by doing the minimally right thing. In this case it is dead simple, but it would require the people who have the corpses to behave in a reasonable way, and that's not really been the standard to which the current regime has adhered.

[donnafair.livejournal.com]

Surely there is a potter's field somewhere for the remains to be disposed of quietly and properly.