Even if you haven't heard of the poet, you can
learn about his life from the stone marking his death. He lived a rough
life and did not have children. 
University of Michigan-Dearborn political
science professor Ron Stockton is aware of the history that can be
retrieved from cemeteries. To demonstrate the complexity of the Muslim
community, he and his students gathered hundreds of pictures of Muslims'
tombstones in Southeast Michigan. Forty of the photos are displayed in a
gallery at the Henry Ford Centennial Library in Dearborn.
"I'm Ron Stockton and I like graveyards," the professor said in a lecture on the exhibit on Tuesday.
The project kicked off after Stockton started
"Graveyards 101", a one credit hour class on cemeteries. He said the
first time the class was offered, no Muslim students showed up. By the
third and last time, there were five Muslims in the classroom.
"I said we should find every place in Southeast
Michigan where Muslims are buried," Stockton recalled telling his
students. "They thought this was a wonderful idea."
The political science professor and his students
set off locating, visiting and photographing Muslim plots in Metro
Detroit cemeteries.
"A gravestone is not about death; it's about
life," Stockton said. "It is your last chance of telling people who you
were, what was important to you and how you want to be remembered."
The headstones reflect the diversity of Muslims
in Southeast Michigan. The simple photos of tombs can be used as
anthropological means to study the culture, nationality and history of
Muslim individuals who lived and died in Metro Detroit.
Stockton said if you live in southeast Dearborn,
you would think that all Muslims are Arab and mostly Lebanese Shi'a,
but the tombs of Muslims in the area demonstrate a different reality.
The gallery shows that Muslims buried in Metro
Detroit have come from all corners of the globe.
Husein Chao Fong Pai
was a Chinese American Muslim. Jubril Masha was born in Lagos, Nigeria.
Ali Gacaferit came to the United States from Albania in Eastern Europe
and died in 1988 at age 37.
"We counted people from 20 different countries,
and each country, each culture, each religious sub-category has its own
style of graveyard and gravestone," Stockton said.
He added that the differences show that the
tombs are Muslims' graves not Islamic graves, in that religion is not
the defining aspect of the tomb or the person buried in it.
"You find as much variety in the gravestones as
much as you find in individuals," he said. "In the gravestones, you find
art, you find history, you find politics, you find joy, you find
tragedy, you find poetry, you find religion. It's just amazing to go to a
graveyard and look at it systematically."
Some of the graves featured in the exhibit are
modest stone plaques with names and dates. Others are engraved with
elaborate depictions of Islamic monuments, religious figures, logos of
social clubs or portraits of the dead.
The
tombstone of 7-year-old Ali, who died in 1977, features two kneeling
angels, which typically appear on Christian monuments. "Suffer the
little children," reads a line from the Bible at the bottom of the
stone. But in the center, there is an engraving of an open book that
says "Holy Koran."
Stockton explained that Muslim families in the
United States have started borrowing tomb trends and burial traditions
from their Christian neighbors.
Tombs also tell stories of Muslims' service in
the U.S. military. Some headstones show the deceased’s years of service
or feature their portraits in military uniforms. Meriem Semtner's
headstone identify her as a "beloved wife, mother and daughter." She
lived from 1952 to 2000. But before introducing her as a family woman,
the tomb highlights her service in the U.S. Navy right below her name.
Stockton said he is an academic who wrote a book about the Muslim community and lived among Muslims for decades.
"But then I realized there is no such a thing as
the Muslim community," he added. "It's a mosaic of communities. There's
a whole bunch of Muslim communities and they're very different. They
come from different histories."
The Black Sea
peninsula of Crimea made international headlines last year after Russia
annexed it from Ukraine. Several tombs of Muslim Tatars from the
contested peninsula are featured in the exhibit.
Statements on the tombstones vary from messages
to the deceased by his or her family to poetry verses to prayer requests
from the dead to the living.
The gallery features many misspelled names on
gravestones. Stockton suspected that the misspellings are the product of
the poor English of the departed ones’ families.
Stockton said the graves emphasize the place of
origin of dead Muslims because immigrants never get over the fact that
they had to leave their homelands.
He added that even immigrants who
assimilate and identify with this country still feel a sense of loss.
"It's called the silent sorrow of immigration," he said.
Among the photos exhibited at the library is one
of the of graves of Hussein Karoub, the first imam in Metro Detroit. He
died in 1973. Karoub is identified on his headstone as the leader of
Islam in North America.
Mike Karoub, the imam's grandson, said he was surprised to see his grandfather featured in the exhibit.
"I was absolutely delighted to see the contributions of my family noticed," he said.
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