LHC rejects woman's plea to relocate sons' graves

The Lahore High Court (LHC) has dismissed a petition filed by a woman seeking permission to relocate the graves of her two sons, ruling that graves cannot be transferred merely due to personal hardship or emotional distress linked to their location in an adversaries' area.

The case was initiated by petitioner Shehnaz Bibi, who informed the court that her sons, Muhammad Nasir and Muhammad Rashid, were killed in a police encounter and later buried in a graveyard in Chichawatni, District Sahiwal. She stated that subsequent hostility with local rivals, who implicated her other sons Atif and Kashif in a murder case, made it unsafe for her family to visit the burial site.

She argued that visiting the graves had become nearly impossible, depriving her family of fulfilling a religious duty.

Her plea had earlier been dismissed by a magisterial court on the grounds that it lacked jurisdiction under Section 176 of the Code of Criminal Procedure. She then approached the LHC Multan Bench.

Justice Tariq Saleem Sheikh, who heard the petition, observed that Islamic law does not permit the relocation of graves except in extraordinary circumstances. While the petitioner's counsel argued that visiting specific graves was a religious obligation under a prophetic directive, the court disagreed.

Justice Sheikh noted that the Hadith encouraging grave visitation is general in nature and directed at the Muslim community as a whole, not at visiting a particular grave or obligating a specific individual to do so.

"The benefit of grave visitation primarily accrues to the living, and prayers for the deceased may be offered from any location without the necessity of physical presence at the burial site," the judge observed.

The court also sought input from Islamic scholars including Mufti Abdul Hakeem of Jamia Khairul Madaris Multan, Sahibzada Farooq Ahmad Sayedi of Jamia Islamia Arabia Anwar-ul-Aloom Multan, and Agha Ghazanfar Haideri of Jamia-tul-Abbas Multan. All three unanimously declared that relocating graves was impermissible in Islam except under strictly defined circumstances, which were not applicable in this case.