Reorientating Sacred Timescape: Turkish Migration and Considerations of Death in Exile

Muslims who experience forced migration face difficult decisions as they contemplate death. Many Muslim immigrants wish to be returned to their homeland for burial, but what if exile precludes that option? This paper examines this quandary from the perspective of Turkish Muslim exiles in the U.S. The experience of the spatial dislocation of exile has led some immigrants to reimagine their positions and trajectory in a sacred timescape. Some look to sacred history to the Prophet, who suffered exile and was buried in the land of migration. Some look to the Sufi idea that human existence in the physical world is itself a form of exile, since separation from the divine is an endemic aspect of life, one that will be soothed in (future) death. That is, the immigrants reinterpret the sacred past and future to make sense of their experience of exile and death in a foreign land.