I was standing at the Muslim cemetery located in a remote corner of a cemetery in Burnsville as we were mourning the death of one our friends. In the United States, unlike in European Muslim "ghettos", the members of the integrated Muslim-American community are very much free to choose where they want to live, and actually do live just about everywhere in the state of Minnesota; however, with our dead ones, we only have one choice. The Muslim "ghetto" grave is usually located inside a remote section of an existing Christian cemetery.

I never understood the religious proximity taboo between the Muslim and Christian dead, and no amount of interfaith dialogue could bring the dead ones together; it is hard to argue that much when you are dead. I couldn't help to reflect back more than 40 years, remembering the one Coptic-Christian family grave in the heart of my primarily Muslim village cemetery in Meet Swaid, Egypt. We never questioned it, and we never thought of it as something peculiar or unusual. So what is the story of this Coptic family? How did they live as a minority in my small village? As a hyphenated Muslim-American living in the US, I wondered what it was like to be a Christian living in a majority Muslim village. After all the years since I left my village, I decided to go back to find out more about the history of this Christian family and why my village was immune from the rift between Coptic and Muslims that periodically surfaced on the Egyptian scene, especially in Upper Egypt. I took my camera and decided to go.  

 

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