Sunday 15 April 2007

A Burning Issue



Whenever I attend a funeral these days it tends to be at a crematorium. I like the idea of cremating the dead: it's clean and saves on valuable real estate. If you've ever been to a truly large cemetery you may appreciate what I mean. I've visited Highgate Cemetery in London and it's huge and a tourist venue in its own right. What it represents in land values boggles the mind. In Sydney there's a cemetery that's so large it has its own postcode! (Why the dead need their own postcode raises some interesting questions...)

A while ago I returned to work after a funeral and had been thinking about the whole cremation "biz" on the way. My neighbour in the cubicle farm at work is a devout Muslim so I asked him if it was still the case that Muslims didn't cremate their dead.

He replied that it was and when I asked why, he started talking about keeping the corporeal self intact for Judgement Day and the Resurrection and such things. He pretty much anticipated my next question and said that no, suicide bombers were largely exempt, as would be the victim of such an event as a shark attack. Pretty neat, huh? Work then got in the way (don't you hate that?) so we didn't continue the conversation at that point.

The notion of cremation rattled around in my mind for the next hour or so and then suddenly I made a logical connection. A quick check of Wikipedia more or less confirmed my realisation: cremation tends to be proscribed by the religions that originated in arid regions where fuel for burning is scarce - for example: Zoroastrianism, Judaism and Islam.
"Sorry, guys, there aren't enough trees around here for you to burn your dead. We need it for cooking food to keep everyone else alive."
It's too difficult to explain to a grieving family stuck with a corpse that they can't waste valuable resources by burning it. Just tell 'em "God says you mustn't." and the economics takes care of itself.

It's quite simply too expensive and uneconomic to waste valuable firewood on a dead body, and I'm not sure that camel dung burns hot enough to do the job effectively. What's more, in a dry climate the corpse will dessiccate and mummify quickly enough that it doesn't pose much of a health hazard. There also tends to be a lot of unused land in arid regions - ideal locations for a necropolis or three.

Religions in other geographies - mostly temperate - were all for cremation, and where they weren't it appears to have been a temporary philosophical objection that quickly reverted as fashions changed. Tropical areas aren't quite as big on cremation, admittedly, but that's probably because rainforest material doesn't burn that well and anything left out in the jungle returns to the biosphere that much quicker anyway.

Armed with this I revisited the subject with my Muslim colleague. "I've figured it out." I said, to which he retorted "There you go on another one of your flights of fancy about religion."

Irony is a wondrous thing.