New Pembina Valley cemetery, mosque helping Muslims feel more at home
Morden to become 2nd Manitoba location, after Winnipeg, offering Muslim burials
Morden's growing Muslim community has a new place to come together and pray, and soon they'll also have a final resting place for their loved ones.
The City of Morden and the Pembina Valley Muslim community have arranged to set aside land for a Muslim burial site at Lakeside Cemetery, the southern Manitoba city's newest burial site.
It will become the second location offering these services in Manitoba, after Winnipeg.
"This is very important," Sk Rubaiyat Zaman, a director at Morden's mosque, told CBC News last month.
"Whenever death happens in the family, we have to send them to Winnipeg," he said. "It's a very cumbersome and very lengthy procedure."
The area's Muslim community has grown to nearly 150 families in the last five years — coming from countries including Eritrea, India and Somalia — and many are choosing to stay because they feel safe and welcomed, said Zaman, who arrived from Dhaka, Bangladesh, nearly four years ago.
He says his son was four years old when the family moved during the COVID-19 pandemic, and he wasn't immediately able to experience the community activities and prayer offered by mosques due to public health restrictions at the time.
"I always felt that need — like he didn't see our culture, so that's how it all started," Zaman said.
The addition of a local Muslim cemetery and mosque, which opened in November, will help Muslims "have the necessities for the heart" close by and feel even more rooted, Raman said.
According to Islamic custom, graves are oriented differently than in a traditional Christian cemetery so the deceased can face the Kaaba in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, considered to be the holiest site in Islam. Graves are also separated from non-Muslim burial places.
"If I want to build a generation here … this place is actually helping us do that," Raman said.
Along with the recently incorporated non-profit Pembina Valley Islamic Society, he worked with the city to get everything right.
The first 30 or so sites will be ready this year, Zaman says. Eventually, one corner of the cemetery will hold 78 spots for Muslim burials, along with a designated space for funeral prayers.
Being inclusive was important for the city's director of parks and urban forestry, Shawn Dias.
"It just allows them to have more growth. It allows them to have more connection to the region, and it shows that, you know, [with] open arms, the City of Morden is willing to engage and support these groups," Dias said.
"It's been a really positive experience. It's been a learning experience."
Steve Reynolds, the executive director of Regional Connections Immigrant Services — which works with newcomers in the Pembina Valley area — credits this kind of approach with helping newcomers feel at home.
The area has welcomed people from more than 130 countries, Reynolds says, including many who have stayed for the quality of their children's education and the peaceful, safe and welcoming neighbourhoods.
He points to the approximately 80 to 95 per cent retention rates for permanent residents one year in, "which is really high," to show efforts have largely been successful.
Syed Faizan Nasir, a director of the Pembina Valley Islamic Society, says the new burial site and mosque are already making a difference for the community.
Before mosque organizers rented space in a Morden strip mall, Muslims would pray at home or at work or, if there was time, travel to the mosque in Winkler, about 10 kilometres away, Nasir said.
"It was not very convenient for us, because … three prayers are during the work hours, right, so it is not possible to go."
He says the new facility has kept some newcomers from migrating to larger centres.
"We have a couple of friends who were planning to move from here, and they decided not to move."
Nasir says the Islamic society hopes to become a charitable organization and eventually buy land to build a permanent mosque in Morden.
WATCH | Morden Muslims will soon have a final resting place for their loved ones:
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