By Mark LaFlamme,Staff Writer

LEWISTON – Officials announced Monday that an agreement has been reached to provide local Muslims with a burial ground in Auburn.

Muslims Abdi Sheikh and Imam Nuh Isse, along with Assistant City Administrator Phil Nadeau, announced that the local Somali community has secured an agreement with Gracelawn Memorial Park. The new location will allow Muslims to erect burial monuments in keeping with their faith. It will also accommodate the alternative means of burying a dead person without a coffin.

“It is important that there is nothing between the body and the sand,” Omar Ahmed, a Somali man who lives in Lewiston, said while the search for cemetery space was under way. “The way we bury a person is different.”

The customs of burial are specific to Islam. The body is first washed by family members and wrapped in a white sheet. After a reading from the Quran, the body is lowered into the ground with no casket. Burial stones are engraved with lines from the Quran.

Since waves of Somali immigrants began coming to the Twin Cities, the deceased had to be taken to a section of a Portland cemetery reserved for Muslims.

Nadeau said that over the last several years, he had been working with various Somali representatives in trying to address their cemetery needs. Much of the initial focus was on owning and developing their own cemetery. But the cost of developing a new cemetery was prohibitive for the Somali community and not an option they could pursue, Nadeau said.

The difficulty in finding a local cemetery to meet the specific Muslim burial requirements was made more problematic given that there were no municipally-owned cemeteries with space to develop in either Lewiston or Auburn.

Nadeau contacted several privately owned cemeteries to explore what might be done locally and recently arranged for a meeting with the owners of Gracelawn and Sheikh to discuss the issue. That meeting resulted in a commitment by Gracelawn owner Dan Fuller to work with Sheikh and other Muslim community representatives to develop an area that could provide up to 320 cemetery plots for local Muslim burial needs, Nadeau said.

The development of the cemetery plots will be jointly managed by the L/A Islamic Center and Gracelawn Memorial Park, funded by the Muslim community, and will receive no government financing.

Having addressed the long-term cemetery needs of the community, Sheikh also reported that the L/A Islamic center is now in the process of buying a building that will better accommodate the Muslim community’s needs in L/A area. Plans for the future location will feature both a mosque and other space that will accommodate multiple activities within the same structure.

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