For Italy’s Muslims, few mosques to pray and fewer places to bury COVID-19 dead

BERGAMO, Italy — In an entrance hall to Azzano San Paolo, Bergamo’s only Islamic cemetery, hang the names of 43 Muslim community members who died during this northern Italian city’s disastrous and dispiriting experience with the COVID-19 pandemic. Among those remembered are Jawad El Mehdi’s grandparents, Ahmad and Malika Jawad.

“They were the pillars of the Jawads,” said El Mehdi, a 21-year-old Italian who was born and raised in Bergamo. His grandparents emigrated from Casablanca, Morocco, in 1990. They are among the more than 16,800 people in Lombardy who died of complications related to COVID-19 since February.

While Jawad’s family was unable to provide his grandparents with a traditional Islamic funeral due to Italy’s lockdown measures, they had the rare luxury, for Italian Muslims, to be buried in an Islamic cemetery. Before the pandemic struck, fewer than 60 of Italy’s 7,903 municipalities had a dedicated Islamic cemetery, in a country that is home to more than 2 million Muslims.