Burying teeth – is it a widespread Islamic tradition?

ABSTRACT

Cultural practices for disposing of extracted teeth vary around the world. Australia is a multicultural society and many different ways of disposing of extracted and exfoliated teeth are part of everyday life. These different practices may be purely of academic interest to dental practitioners. However, to the forensic community they may be an important part of their knowledge base. On Christmas Island and the Cocos (Keeling) Islands there are sizable Muslim populations. On both islands there is a frequent need to remove teeth. In the Muslim community, when teeth are removed or exfoliated, a family will often refer to the Quran for instruction on what to do with the teeth and some families will have a special area of their garden to bury teeth. In the event of a natural disaster affecting an area where many Muslim people are living, it may be important to know about this practice. The possibility of a special burial area may need to be taken into consideration in the process of identifying individuals. This study was undertaken to gain knowledge about the cultural practice of burying teeth and to inform the forensic community of this cultural practice. Forensically significant or just an interesting cultural practice?

KEYWORDS:

• Christmas
• Cocos
• Muslim
• teeth
• cultural
• burial

Acknowledgements

Yakin Capstan, Senior Health Worker, Darling Elat, Community Liaison Officer, CKI; Afika Abdul Razak, Senior Dental Assistant, Zuraidah Mohamed, Administrative Assistant, CI; Sonya Priest Cazaly, Dental Assistant, CI and CKI for providing language help, writing assistance and proofreading.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

Indian Ocean Territories Health Service provided financial support for the conduct of the research and study leave to attend and present at the Australian & New Zealand Forensic Science Society’s 24th International Symposium on the Forensic Sciences.