Bringing In The Dead

 

There seem to be a lot of people dying in Medinah and Makkah. I say this because Solat Jenazah, the prayer for the dead said when the body is bought into the mosque before being taken for burial, has been said at every prayer bar one that I've attended since arriving in both cities. (The picture above is of the door that the bodies are taken through at al Masjid al Nawabi.)

So this means at least five deaths a day, given the five sets of prayers we pray daily. I'm not sure how this figures in terms of general population size, but I do know that I can count on less than half a hand the number of times I've attended Solat Jenazah while attending Friday Prayers in Singapore and Malaysia. I assume the seemingly high number is due to just the sheer size of the mosques involved and the fact that many Muslims come to these holy cities hoping to die.

Whatever the explanation is it's clear that there's a close acquaintance involved, as it were, with the brutal fact of death and an awareness of such. And I note a kind of paradox here. According to our gnu atheist friends religion functions as a kind of delusional means of avoiding reality, offering false consolation. But in my experience religions are much readier to accept the reality of death and suffering and human vulnerability than what we might term secular ways of thinking, which seem to wish to tidy these realities away. Here you can't escape the fact that people are dying thus around us every day.