This chapter examines the work of the two largest and most important Islamic funeral funds in Europe, whose combined membership is nearly 400,000. Administered by longstanding and well-established Turkish Islamic associations, DITIB and IGMG, these funds first emerged in Western Europe in the 1990s with the aging of the first generation of Muslim immigrants in Western Europe and the growing need for culturally and religiously appropriate funerary services. Drawing on interviews with fund administrators and close readings of primary sources such as promotional literature and membership contracts, this chapter elucidates the strategies through which DITIBs and IGMGs funeral funds institutionalize, incentivize, and justify posthumous repatriation for burial.

This chapter highlights the central role that burial grounds play in the construction of diasporic memory and collective identity through a visual ethnography of tombstones located in several Islamic burial grounds across Western Europe. In spite of the long-term settlement of Muslim communities, such spaces are extremely rare and suffused with deep cultural meaning. Displays of belonging through epitaphs, images, and grave design are strategies to demonstrate connections to various collectivities. As places where the physical landscape is symbolically inscribed and signified, Islamic burial grounds in Europe offer insight into the changing contours of membership and identity in contemporary multicultural societies.

Drawing on interviews with a range of individuals with migratory histories, this chapter investigates why families choose to bury their loved ones locally or to reptriate to countries of origin, analyzing the significance that they attribute to these choices. While local burial laws and the limited availability of Islamic cemeteries impact the feasibility of performing religiously appropriate funerary rites, this chapter argues that family ties, ideas about the meaning of national soils, and feelings of social inclusion or exclusion play a larger role in determining burial outcomes and their social significance.

Based on immersive and extensive participant observation across six Islamic funeral homes in Berlin, this chapter focuses on the mediating role that Muslim undertakers play between immigrant families and the German state. As intermediaries, undertakers guide minority families through the cultural, religious, political, and legal landscapes structuring the transitions from life to death. In reconciling competing sets of administrative and cultural norms, they preside not only over end-of-life decisions and their theological implications, but also over pedagogical moments of sociocultural integration in contemporary Germany. Undertakers teach lessons about the state to minoritized citizens but also offer lessons to the state about its own citizenry, often by countering negative stereotypes about Islam and Muslims in Germany.

The conclusion summarizes the main findings of the book and explores the ambivalent nature of national identity in a transnational world. It argues that the burial dilemmas of minority communities offer a window into the complexities of belonging and membership in an international system that is ordered by nation-states. The death of an individual and the commemorative practices accompanying it make visible a dense web of attachments and allegiances to particular communities and places. Through burial practices, individuals signal who they are, what they value, and where they belong.

Dying Abroad starts from the premise that death and its attendant rituals prove an important window into the socioeconomic and political orders and hierarchies that structure human life in the twenty-first century. It argues that states, families, and religious communities all have a vested interest in the fate of dead bodies – including where and how they are disposed of and commemorated – and demonstrates that end-of-life decisions and practices are connected to larger political struggles over the boundaries of nation-states and the place of minoritized groups within them. At a time when a growing chorus of politicians lambast the failures of multiculturalism and call for the fortification of territorial borders, this book elucidates how posthumous practices anchor minority claims for inclusion and challenge hegemonic ideas about the nation.