An in-law of mine once worked as a pastor at a small Lutheran church in Gwinnett County in suburban Atlanta. Each time I got off the interstate and bent my car toward her home, I seemed to pass more signs with Asian scripts. Asian immigrants have been coming to the United States in huge numbers ever since Congress lifted immigration restrictions in landmark legislation in 1965, and by the 1990s they had clearly discovered Gwinnett County.
The rapid influx of these immigrants into a Southern Baptist stronghold (where not long ago Lutherans were considered eccentric) led to the proverbial white flight. Soon my in-law's parishioners had moved farther out, and her church had closed its doors. The last time I visited the area, I passed a new Islamic center, the Masjid Omar bin Abdul-Aziz, not far from the old church. Although I had been studying America's religious diversity for over a decade, I was surprised that Muslims had come so quickly and in such numbers even to the Bible Belt.
Islam is now widely regarded as one of the fastest growing religions in the United States. Estimates of the number of Muslims in the country vary widely, but those Muslims who are here are building mosques (known in Arabic as "masjids") at a dizzying rate. According to a recent study sponsored by Hartford Seminary's Hartford Institute for Religious Research, there are now over 1,200 mosques in the United States. How many Muslim cemeteries there are in the United States is difficult to determine. But this much is sure: every one of metro Atlanta's estimated 60,000 Muslims is going to die some day, and each one will need a place to be buried.
Currently most of the Muslims who die in Gwinnett County are being laid to rest in the only Muslim cemetery in metro Atlanta, near Lovejoy in Clayton County. Yet that site is filling up fast, prompting the Georgia Islamic Institute of Religious & Social Sciences to propose a 1,500-plot cemetery a few miles from its mosque in Lawrenceville, Georgia. Their proposal was slated for review at a meeting of the Gwinnett County Municipal Planning Commission on September 18, 2001. But terror intervened and, as it is said, everything changed, including zoning procedures in suburban Atlanta. As the nation reeled from the events of 9/11, the September 18 meeting was cancelled, pending a reevaluation of matters as mundane as water pathogens and as sacred as the meaning of Islam.
Over the last few months, as proposed hearings have been scheduled and cancelled again and again (once because of a rare Atlanta snow), residents of Gwinnett County have joined President Bush in discussing Islam. Their particular focus, however, has been Muslim death rites. Like Jews, Muslims typically do not embalm. They bury their dead quickly, within twenty-four hours of death, in a simple shroud and without a coffin or a vault. They then top their graves with modest markers rather than fancy headstones. Given these customs, their cemeteries can look quite different from the typical American memorial park. Open graves are not unusual, given the requirement to bury within a day of death. And because Muslims eschew coffins and vaults, gravesites can sink over time, leaving small impressions in the earth.
Local opponents of the Muslim cemetery did not say they wanted their neighborhood free of the Muslim dead. They argued instead that Muslim burial practices represented a public health hazard and an eyesore: pathogens from unembalmed corpses would leak into the groundwater and imperil their children, and an unkempt cemetery would imperil their property values.
The First Amendment, of course, guarantees the free exercise of religion. At least in the popular imagination, it also erects what Thomas Jefferson famously referred to as "a wall of separation" between church and state. Yet Americans are not free to do absolutely anything they want religiously, and the wall separating church and state resembles a modest picket fence more than the Great Wall of China. To put it another way, the limits of religious exercise are constantly being tested, as are the limits on church-state collaboration.
Most observers of those tests and those limits have trained their sights on Washington, D.C., and the Supreme Court. Like politics, however, religion is local. The pope speaks for Roman Catholicism, but Catholics go to Mass in their local parishes; and while the Dalai Lama speaks for the Buddhist tradition, Buddhism takes place, literally, on the ground at Buddhist temples. Observers of church-state (and mosque-state) relations would do well to listen, therefore, not only to President Bush and Chief Justice Rehnquist but also to local zoning officials and town selectmen. At least as much as presidents and Supreme Court justices, those officials determine what we can and cannot do religiously -- where Buddhist monks can live, whether Sikhs -- can wear ceremonial swords, and even how Muslims bury their dead. The determinations of local officials are in turn influenced by popular opinion, which at least as much as legal precedents shapes interactions between America's Christian majority and its many and varied religious minorities.
As the Muslim cemetery drama played out after September 11, a predictable array of characters emerged. Muslims invoked the First Amendment and reminded local politicians that Islam was not a cult, but, as President Bush had insisted, "a religion of peace." Rednecks equated Atlanta's Muslims with the killers of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. New South politicians mediated between the two camps, looking for an artful compromise.
