Family alleges Texas mosque refused to perform funeral for gay Muslim man
Yasmin Al-Zibdeh was home with her two sisters and mom, waiting for a phone call from their dad to tell them to come down to the mosque. She thought members of the Islamic Society of Greater Houston were already washing and preparing the body of her younger brother, Khaled, who died two days earlier at 33 years old.
But then her youngest sister, Jawaher, received an unexpected call from a cousin. "I saw the horror in her face," Yasmin recalled. "They don't want to wash his body because he's gay," Jawaher said, her sister remembered.
The women drove to the Hamza Mosque in northwest Houston, where they found family and friends crying as they sat around Khaled's casket and their husbands and uncles arguing with mosque officials inside a backroom office. To escape the tension, Yasmin walked her mom back to the car, where they would watch the grieving crowd begin to pray for her brother in the mosque's parking lot without an Islamic holy representative.
Then Yasmin's husband told her about another problem: They could no longer bury Khaled at the cemetery and would have to find another burial site that day.
ISGH is the largest Muslim organization in Texas, which oversees several funeral homes and about two dozen mosques in the Houston metro.
With limited options, the family said they washed and prepared Khaled's body themselves and held the funeral and prayer services in the mosque's parking lot, per court documents. After they were apparently told they could not bury Khaled in the pre-selected cemetery, they were "forced to find and purchase an alternative burial site under enormous time pressure" in another ISGH-operated burial ground, the Medina Burial Charity Cemetery—which they claimed isn't well kept.
"It's painful to know that your loved one can be treated like nothing," Khaled's sister, Summer Al-Zibdeh, recently told Chron.
Over the years, the nonprofit has become lucrative. It collected about $18.9 million in 2023 and about $13.5 million between January and July 2024, according to its latest annual report. Muslim leaders have said that most of that funding comes in during Ramadan.
The ISGH also facilitates funerals, burials and religious rites. It performed 359 burials in 2023 and another 286 burials through July 2024, per the report. The nonprofit collected about $2.18 million for funeral services in the same time frame.
https://www.chron.com/culture/religion/a...393383.php
Yasmin Al-Zibdeh was home with her two sisters and mom, waiting for a phone call from their dad to tell them to come down to the mosque. She thought members of the Islamic Society of Greater Houston were already washing and preparing the body of her younger brother, Khaled, who died two days earlier at 33 years old.
But then her youngest sister, Jawaher, received an unexpected call from a cousin. "I saw the horror in her face," Yasmin recalled. "They don't want to wash his body because he's gay," Jawaher said, her sister remembered.
The women drove to the Hamza Mosque in northwest Houston, where they found family and friends crying as they sat around Khaled's casket and their husbands and uncles arguing with mosque officials inside a backroom office. To escape the tension, Yasmin walked her mom back to the car, where they would watch the grieving crowd begin to pray for her brother in the mosque's parking lot without an Islamic holy representative.
Then Yasmin's husband told her about another problem: They could no longer bury Khaled at the cemetery and would have to find another burial site that day.
ISGH is the largest Muslim organization in Texas, which oversees several funeral homes and about two dozen mosques in the Houston metro.
With limited options, the family said they washed and prepared Khaled's body themselves and held the funeral and prayer services in the mosque's parking lot, per court documents. After they were apparently told they could not bury Khaled in the pre-selected cemetery, they were "forced to find and purchase an alternative burial site under enormous time pressure" in another ISGH-operated burial ground, the Medina Burial Charity Cemetery—which they claimed isn't well kept.
"It's painful to know that your loved one can be treated like nothing," Khaled's sister, Summer Al-Zibdeh, recently told Chron.
Over the years, the nonprofit has become lucrative. It collected about $18.9 million in 2023 and about $13.5 million between January and July 2024, according to its latest annual report. Muslim leaders have said that most of that funding comes in during Ramadan.
The ISGH also facilitates funerals, burials and religious rites. It performed 359 burials in 2023 and another 286 burials through July 2024, per the report. The nonprofit collected about $2.18 million for funeral services in the same time frame.
https://www.chron.com/culture/religion/a...393383.php
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"
