JEDDAH, 7 November 2004 — The storm brewing over where Yasser Arafat should be laid to rest, in case he passes away anytime soon, shows that while dying may be hard for some leaders, getting buried could be even harder.
History is full of instances of corpses denied burial, bodies snatched away by mysterious hands, and the dead who have had to wait years, at times decades, to find their final abode.
Broadly speaking one could divide ancient civilizations into two categories: Those that made a big fuss over a dead leader, and those who left him to the care of the hereafter.
The ancient Egyptians were big fuss-makers, as evidenced by the pyramids they built to bury their Pharaohs, not knowing that these will, in time, turn into hide-outs for grave-diggers, thieves and, eventually, Western antique smugglers.
The ancient Persians were the opposite: A king who was gone was gone. His corpse would be exposed on top of a tower known as Daxmeh and left to be devoured by the birds of prey. The idea was that dead bodies should not pollute the earth. Another favorite method was to disappear in a snowstorm in the heart of Mount Damavand. This is what Kay-Khosrow did when he felt that time had come to exit the stage. He invited the Persian elite and walked with them up Damavand. Then he told them to stop at a point as he continued his march, burying his sins, some of them black, in the whiteness of virgin snow.
Contrary to what Israeli ministers seem to believe, the Jews, too, belonged to civilizations that were cool about burial. Nothing is known about the burial place of the numerous kings and prophets mentioned in the Pentateuch. And the few places that are designated as such have been the subject of controversy for centuries, with no serious evidence to back the claim. The Prophet Daniel’s body is supposed to have been snatched away at night from Babylon and brought to Susa, southwest Iran, where he is supposed to be resting under a fine conic cupola.
The Jews, militant monotheists, frowned upon shrine building as an affront to the One and The Only.
Alexander died in Gedrosia, present-day Balochistan, presumably of dysentery, but his generals kept his death a secret until they reached Babylon where he was buried. A few years later, however, as the generals fought among themselves, his tomb was reopened and his body snatched away.
Since then we have had more than two-dozen places from Central Asia to the Mediterranean with claims of being Alexander’s final abode. Each time claims that Alexander’s corpse was around helped produce a real estate boom in the locality concerned.
The Chinese also made great fuss about burial. Kublai Khan built a glittering mausoleum within his famous Xanadu. Sadly, however, China’s history was so turbulent that even the dead could not rest in peace. One of the first acts of every new despot was to disinter the previous one and use the mausoleum for his own future burial.
Over the years, the Chinese found out that virtual reality is more important than reality itself. So, they took the ultimate step and abolished reality, and along with the passion for building monuments to the dead. It was not until the communists had seized power that the tradition of fussing over the dead was revived in China.
The great Indian civilizations should be grouped among non-fuss makers. The dead would be cremated and their ashes scattered over the Ganges. This is why most mausoleums and shrines one finds in India belong to foreign invaders and conquerors.
Sometimes the same person could be buried in two different places, at least in people’s imagination. This is the case of Ali ibn Abi-Talib, the fourth Caliph who has two presumed places of burial, one in Najaf, Iraq, the other in Mazar-e-Sharif, Afghanistan.
One notorious body snatcher was Ivan The Terrible who destroyed the Muslim Tatar kingdom, sacked their capital Kazan, and brought their chiefs to Moscow for execution. The nine cupolas of Saint Basil’s Church in Moscow represent the severed heads of the nine Tatar chiefs captured by Ivan.
More recently, British and Russian intrigues prevented the burial of Napoleon, who had died a captive on the island of Saint Helena, at Les Invalides in Paris, as he had willed. After the Bolshevik Revolution, Lenin order the mass execution of Czar Nicholas II and his entire family but kept their burial place a secret. It was not until, seven decades later that, with communism buried by the Russian people, the secret place was discovered and the Czar and his family reburied with full honors.
Ahmad Shah, the last of the Qajar kings of Persia died in exile in France. His mortal remains were shipped to Iran for burial. But the ship had to turn back from halfway as the new Pahlavi dynasty indicated it would not allow the deposed king to return to Iran even as a corpse.
Two decades later, it was the turn of Reza Shah, the founder of the Pahlavis, to be exiled and to die in South Africa. He, too, was initially refused burial in Iran and remained temporarily interred in Cairo for four years before his remains could be buried in Tehran. But his rest, too, was disturbed three decades later, when the revolutionary mullas, led by Khomeini attacked his mausoleum, disinterred his corpse and took it to an unknown destination.
Reza Shah’s son and heir, Muhammad Reza Shah, was also dethroned and died in exile. In 1981, after Khomeini refused to allow the ex-Shah burial in his homeland, his mortal remains were temporarily buried in Cairo — temporarily, meaning 24 years so far.
Khomeini, too, did not get the burial place he had dreamed of. His hope had been to be laid to rest in Najaf. But when he died in Tehran in 1989, his arch-foe Saddam Hussein controlled Najaf. So he was buried in a jerrybuilt mausoleum with an ersatz dome.
Other deposed kings to die in exile included Umberto of Italy, Farouq of Egypt, Jamshid of Zanzibar, and Said ibn Teymur of Oman. Leka of Albania was luckier. He lived long enough to be able to die and be buried in his homeland. It was not until last year that Italy and Greece lifted the ban on the burial of their exiled royals.
The Argentine dictator Juan Peron also had to wait, temporarily buried in Spain, before his second wife Isabelita, by then president of the republic, could take his mortal remains back home for final burial. Well, final, so far. The Philippines dictator Ferdinand Marcos is still awaiting burial at home, if one assumes that a dead man can await anything.
The 18th century English writer, Sir Thomas Brown wrote a whole book to prove that every man, or for that matter woman, will be buried where he or she is meant to rest. And the best place, he argued, is the smallest, something the size of an urn that could be put on the mantelpiece next to a vase of fresh flowers.