I buried a man who died a decade before I was born
- Haris T
- Dec 30, 2024
- 2 min read
July 11th 2024 - A day that cannot be forgotten. I buried the body of a man who I never knew, nor who ever knew me. In fact, when he died, I had not even existed.
Omic Asim, a name I can't forget. A soul that was 29 years old but a body that was almost 60.
One of 8,372 Muslims that were slaughtered like cattle in the East Bosnian city of Srebrenica. The year was 1995. No mercy was shown. They were rounded up, humiliated, mocked, then tortured to death. Their bodies dumped into mass graves, some even hidden in secondary and tertiary graves to erase any trace of the Serb Chetnik crimes.
He never knew me, I never knew him. Yet there I was, standing out amongst the crowd of Bosniaks gathering around his final resting place. Mothers, friends and relatives of the diseased. I did not belong there, statistically speaking. A British born 21 year old, Asian heritage. I was a long way from home. Wherever that is. But it was my obligation to be there. To observe and remind myself the personal dimensions of genocide. To be a secondary witness for the martyrdom of this soul. To come before my Lord on judgement day to testify against those that killed Asim. This was no ordinary funeral.
With the sun's heat bearing down on those tirelessly digging, I suddenly find myself at the front of the crowd, as if propelled by destiny, with a shovel in hand, laying the soil over Asim's soul one final time. A soul buried before in violence, but today in dignity.
As I whispered the remembrance of Allah, the words heavy on my lips, I felt the immense responsibility to honour and make up for the last time he was buried with brutality.
As I dig deep into the soil with all my energy and obligation to this soul and as my arms sore, I begin to envisage how he was killed. The pain he suffered in his final moments. How his body was left to rot. How he may have been tortured, begged for mercy from the desensitized creatures that took his soul away. Away from his mother, his family and away from our Ummah. In that moment, I saw it for what it was. I was watching before me, the burial of a victim of genocide. A genocide which although was recent, was older than I.
The moment so perfectly aligned. Qadr of Allah. There I was burying a martyr who's body had been forgotten for 29 years.
Imagine: a person born almost a decade after your death would one day be preparing your grave, three decades later. They wouldn't be Bosnian, never lived in the country, nor have strong family ties there—yet they would be bound to you through emaan.
Imagine how many things had to happen in such a perfect and precise manner for me to be in that situation, at that time. The crowd was big, I could have been lost in the back. Yet I found myself at the front holding a shovel, seeing off my brother.
My words are futile in explaining the magnitude of this.
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