ABSTRACT
This chapter offers some systematic evidence from an old-established Muslim community in northern Nigeria where deaths on a Friday are both preferred and achieved: the hypothesis is that to die on a preferred day suggests the dying person has some control over the exact timing of his or her death despite cultural taboos that deny it. It argues that there is no elaborate 'culture of death' in Muslim northern Nigeria on the scale there is in Christian Euro-America. Death may not be dramatised, but some times of dying are seen as quietly better than others, and, most surprisingly of all, some people deliberately seem to achieve death at the 'right' time. The issue of 'suicide' can be circumvented for Muslims by suggesting that the dying are making themselves ready to die in such a way that death occurs, but its actual occurrence is still at Allah's will.
