People denounce the Saudi kingdom at Khashoggi's Istanbul funeral prayers

In the Muslim faith, a funeral should be held soon after someone's passing. In the case of Saudi critic Jamal Khashoggi, funeral prayers were held in several cities, including Mecca, Medina and here in Istanbul, almost six weeks after he was killed in Saudi Arabia's Istanbul consulate.

From a faithful person with good deeds to a sinner with blood on his hands, everyone deserves an Islamic burial, as long as they identify themselves as Muslims in their lifetime. 

But in the case of Khashoggi, he didn't get a burial. At Istanbul's Fatih mosque, where the funeral prayers were held, people gathered around an empty marble slab. As Khashoggi's body is still missing, Turkish investigators say that it has been dismembered by his killers.

Once a palace insider, Khashoggi fell out of favour in Saudi's power circles as he began criticising the policies of the kingdom's de-facto leader, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. The prince is facing intense criticism for his possible role in getting Khashoggi killed inside the consulate.

“Jamal’s last words were ‘I am suffocating,’ but indeed he was the voice of an umma which is suffocating [under oppressive leaders of Middle East]," said Turan Kislakci, one of the closest Turkish friends of Khashoggi, speaking to TRT World at the funeral service.   

Braving heavy rains and cold weather, a large crowd of several hundred people, including Turkish citizens and exiled members of several Arab countries, offered the funeral prayer in the courtyard of the Fatih mosque, right next to the grave of Mehmet II, the Ottoman sultan who conquered Constantinople, the Greek name for today's Istanbul, in 1453. 

Necati Kilicaslan, a 68-year-old resident of Istanbul, was in the crowd of funeral attendees. He wore a traditional robe Muslim Turks wear on their journey to Mecca and Medina, the two holiest places in Islam. Prophet Muhammad was born in Mecca in 571 AD, and he later died in Medina in 632 AD.

“Martyrs are immortal,” Kilicaslan said, adding that Khashoggi was a martyr. He drew an equivalence between the enemies of Prophet Muhammad, who were wealthy idol worshippers in Mecca, and the current Saudi rulers. 

“They [Saudi rulers] have the same mindset as Abu Jahl had,” he said. Jahl was a pagan worshipper from the Quraysh tribe, who is known for opposing Prophet Muhammad's teachings. 

Kilicaslan drew another parallel between the prophet's rivals, who attempted to assassinate him, and the killing of Khashoggi at the hands of Saudi agents. 

“Our brother Khashoggi was a true Muslim, a defender of Islam. He took refuge here [in Turkey] in order to escape from their [Saudi rulers'] malice. But they set a trap to capture him,” he said. 

“The grandsons of Abu Jahl have martyred him.” 

Khashoggi’s grandfather Mohammed Khashoggi – Muhammed Halit Kasikci in Turkish – was of Turkish descent. He was the personal physician of the kingdom’s founder Abdulaziz al Saud. 

Khashoggi entered the Saudi consulate on October 2, seeking a divorce certificate so that he could marry his Turkish fiancee. He never came out of the consulate, a mysterious disappearance that was later described as a brutal killing by Turkish investigators.