Boucher highlights key themes I develop in Dying Abroad while raising questions about its scope and methodology that suggest directions for future comparative research on end-of-life practices in multicultural societies. She also points to issues of legal status, the rise of the far right, and historical racialization processes in Germany. I address each in turn.

Regarding scope and methodology, Boucher asks why my approach was not comparative—encompassing more countries or cities to assess whether some societies better integrate minority practices surrounding death care. This is understandable given her own work’s comparative design, which examined four Western countries with similar industrial relations systems to identify patterns of exploitation. My goals were different. Rather than explaining variation across cases or evaluating integration efforts, I sought to understand processes of meaning making—how my interlocutors made sense of their social and political worlds.

Dying Abroad is a work of interpretivist political science. It offers an ethnographic account of transnational deathways, using burial decisions and end-of-life practices to explore how racialized minorities navigate belonging in contexts where they face structural barriers to full citizenship. Though focused on Muslims of Turkish and Kurdish descent in Germany, “death of out of place” resonates with other minoritized populations in Europe and beyond. Scholars working in varied settings have identified similar dynamics. While no large-scale study yet compares the legal regulations governing minority burial or measures the impact of factors such as burial-space availability or ritual feasibility, the growing scholarship on death and migration provides a foundation for addressing Boucher’s question of whether some countries better accommodate multicultural death.

Boucher also inquires about the impact of legal status and the threats posed by the far right to Muslims and Islamic burial in Germany. Citizenship status does not affect burial eligibility in Germany or Türkiye—anyone who dies in either country may be buried there. Yet, practical barriers remain. Some German states mandate coffin use and 48-hour waiting periods between death and burial. Moreover, fewer than 1% of Germany’s public cemeteries have Muslim sections.

Potential policy remedies are straightforward. First, religious minorities must have access to appropriate spaces to bury their dead with dignity and in accordance with their faith. Second, burial laws should, where feasible, accommodate religious customs. For Muslims and Jews, this includes shroud burial and interment within 24–48 hours after death.

Why has uniform implementation proven difficult? Boucher rightly connects this to the rise of the far right and growing Islamophobia in Europe—developments that have intensified since my fieldwork a decade ago. The far right was less politically potent during my research and I devoted less attention to their projects. Today, these movements clearly threaten pluralism across the continent. Furthermore, historical racialization processes continue to shape Muslim minorities’ experiences in surprising ways, including pressures to perform “memory work”—such as participation in Holocaust education and antisemitism campaigns—to demonstrate belonging and loyalty, as Esra Özyürek has shown.

While Islamic burial rites have drawn less controversy than headscarves, mosque construction, or halal foods in schools, they remain a pressing policy issue. European Muslims can no longer be viewed as temporary migrants. They are permanent members of European societies. Their ability to practice death rituals freely thus serves as an indicator of true inclusion.

In an era of resurgent right-wing movements advancing ethno-nationalist visions rooted in cultural homogeneity and racial purity, defending minority rites and practices is more urgent than ever. Given the universality of death, minority burial practices offer a revealing barometer of democratic inclusion and social recognition. How a society accommodates—or fails to accommodate—the final rights of its minorities exposes the boundaries of national belonging and the lived limits of citizenship.

As I hope readers of Dying Abroad will see, death is not merely a biological event but a deeply political one. For religious and racialized minorities, it embodies the contradictions of inclusion and continuing struggles for recognition in multicultural societies.