Thursday, Dec 16, 2004
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By Zarar Khan
KARACHI, DEC. 15. Sitting in her apartment, Batool Jaffer, a 70-year-old widow, puts her wrinkled hand on a computer mouse, clicks on a website, then raises her hands in a Muslim gesture of prayer for her husband's departed soul. On the screen is a photo of the grave at the Wadi-e-Hussain cemetery in Karachi where her husband Jaffer Hussain was interred last year — which she can visit online anytime thanks to a simple but novel Internet service used by hundreds of Shia Muslims. "I am too old to go to the graveyard. But I can see the graves of my husband and nephew anytime,"said Ms. Jaffer, who lives about a 90-minute drive from the cemetery on the outskirts of this Pakistani metropolis. Wadi-e-Hussain, or the Valley of Hussaun, was set up in 1999, and started the computerised service in 2001. Named after a revered Muslim cleric and grandson of the Prophet Mohammed, it has about 1,600 graves and plans to expand. Among those buried there are 54 Shia Muslims killed in suicide bombings at two mosques in a surge of sectarian violence in May. Radicals of the Sunni Muslim majority were blamed for the attacks in Karachi, long-plagued by Sunni-Shiite tensions and Islamic militancy. The graveyard is meticulously organised. Each grave is numbered and photographed, with a few personal details, and is uploaded onto the website immediately after burial. Mourners can trace a grave online by entering its number or the name of the dead person or the father of the deceased. The graveyard was set up with donations from Karachi's Shia community and offers a burial plot — and the computer service — for (Pakistani) Rs. 5,000 . Other graveyards in the city charge between Rs. 10,000 and Rs. 12,000 . The graveyard management forbids extra construction around the simple graves, irrespective of the social status and wealth of the dead. Only victims of terrorism are distinguished from others, with a curved top to the rectangular gravestone.
Approved by Islamic clerics
The computer service has the approval of Islamic clerics, who say it offers a legitimate way to pay respects to the dead. Its success also reflects the growing use of the Internet in Pakistan — from just 1,000 computer users and businessmen in 1994 to about 4.8 million of the 150 million population today. "In Shariat [Islamic law] it is allowed that we can recite fateha [prayers] while looking over the Internet... for the happiness of [the] deceased's soul," said the Shia scholar, Shabbar Hussain Zaidi. The graveyard's custodian, Syed Mohammed Alam Zaidi, said the Internet service was set up largely to cater to expatriate Pakistanis who often miss the funerals of relatives and have few opportunities to visit the graveside. Kalbe Abbas, an electrical engineer, who returned two months ago from Canada, missed his father's funeral when he died in 2003, but took solace from seeing his grave on a computer screen. "Definitely there is a difference between paying a personal visit to a graveyard and seeing images of graves on computer, but this website was a blessing for me because I saw my father's grave the day he was buried," he said. — AP
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