This post is part of the Kluge Center’s 25 for 25, in honor of the Kluge Center’s 25th anniversary, celebrating 25 books that were written thanks to the Kluge Center’s support. Read the introductory post to the series here.
Human beings have been burying and caring for the dead for over thirty thousand years, notes historian Leor Halevi. This activity, he explains, is one that differentiates human beings from animals and has allowed religious communities and cultures to create unique identities. In the seventh through ninth centuries, Muslims in cities throughout Arabia, Mesopotamia, and the eastern Mediterranean sought to create lasting patterns to respond to death in ways that reflected their emerging religion.
How and why Islam developed culturally distinctive rituals surrounding death is the central question of Halevi’s Muhammad’s Grave: Death Rites and the Making of Islamic Society (Columbia University Press, 2007). As the first social history of death rituals in the early Islamic period, the book explores how Muslims in different regions negotiated what it meant to live—and die—as a Muslim.
Key to this process was the Ahl al–‘ilm, or “people of knowledge,” a diverse group of pietists and ideologues, mostly men but some women, revered in their respective communities as possessing religious knowledge. These traditionists and jurists memorized and analyzed oral traditions (Hạdīth) about the Prophet Muhammad and his companions to construct ideals of the proper Islamic Funeral. Each Hạdīth contained a report of an ancient event with a saying of Muhammad (matn), and a chain of authorities that gave credibility to the oral tradition as it moved through generations (isnad), explains Halevi. The Ahl al-‘ilm used these traditions, later compiled into written collections, to formulate Fiqh, or Islamic jurisprudence.
Sometimes, there were competing Hạdīths, explains Halevi. For instance, early accounts of the funeral preparations for the Prophet’s daughter Fāṭima differed: some claimed that her husband was absent during the ritual washing of Fāṭima’s body, while others insisted that he performed it himself. Instead of attempting to tease out which account was more true, Halevi examines how different pietists in different regions worked with these memories to advance “ideological agendas.”
The debates around these various traditions shaped real-world practices, says Halevi. In developing a new religion and its accompanying rituals, pietists saw an opportunity to create a new social order. Rituals expressed faith but also could create and distinguish boundaries between Muslims and non-Muslims, men and women, and religious elites and laypeople. Pietists emphasized oral traditions to enact a vision of society and hierarchy in which religious experts and patriarchs could enforce their will on those they viewed as outside of proper Islamic tradition.
For example, in early Islam, women had dominated mourning practices, expressing their grief through wailing (niyāḥa), a dramatic form of grief in which they would scream an oral lament accompanied by physical expressions like tearing their hair or drawing their blood. Many pietists despised these displays of emotion, interpreting them as remnants of pre-Islamic, barbaric customs (Jāhilī). Wailing went against their ideal of Muslim funerals marked by haste, contemplative silence, restraint, and austerity.
Responses against wailing and other emotional expressions varied across time and in different regions. One of the strongest reactions, says Halevi, was in the city of Kūfa, Iraq. Oral traditions in Kūfa had focused on a story in which the Prophet Muhammad forbade women from accompanying burials. Masruq, a prominent pietist who lived in the 7th century (d. 682), celebrated this particular story. To promote his point of view, he took to throwing dust in the faces of women who tried to participate in burial ceremonies. Others, such as Malik, Medina’s most prominent jurist (d. 795), did not object to women’s participation in burial ceremonies, yet discouraged the practice of wailing.
These kinds of variations reveal that early transmitters of Islamic traditions were not merely preserving neutral memories of the Prophet but actively shaping collective memory and social norms, says Halevi. Once codified in legal texts, these traditions gained authority and sometimes were strictly enforced, for example, as in Kūfa by the official enforcer of public morals (muḥtasib). Halevi suggests that perhaps one reason religious leaders in Kūfa were so concerned about wailing practices was Kufa’s unique geography. Each tribal quarter of the city had its own cemetery (jabbāna), and these sometimes served as gathering spaces for rebels to plan revolts against the Umayyad caliphate, a monarchical government. In this context, wailing women might have been seen as inciting rebellion to avenge the death of those they were mourning.
Islamization was neither uniform nor simply a top-down process, according to Halevi. While religious elites shaped discourse and laws, the everyday practices and labor of ordinary people, such as “impoverished widows, wailers for the dead, shroud weavers, gravediggers, and corpsewashers,” contributed to the creation of early Islamic rituals and society, if in less obvious ways. Guidelines issued by pietists were not always followed, and sometimes practices emerged naturally. These tensions between guidelines and practice are revealed through the wide variety of sources Halevi examines: sociological reports, theological tracts, legal sources, early Arabic poems of lament, obituaries of famous men and women, and material culture.
In the seventh and eighth centuries, reports Halevi, tombstones gained popularity and became increasingly standardized and distinctively Islamic. The earliest monuments from the 650s had no “distinctly Islamic signs.” But beginning in the late eighth century, a limited number of Qur’ānic verses and phrases from oral traditions such as “fill his grave with light” became increasingly popular across the Islamic world on epitaphs. This rapid standardization could be seen as Islamization, but Halevi highlights widespread opposition to tombstones, which some religious leaders referred to as “contemptible innovations.” These leaders feared that tomb markers could encourage grave visitation and the veneration of the dead, and could create distinctions between rich and poor.
Halevi’s research shows how rituals had the power to transform social and religious life. While his study is focused on history, he also highlights how today’s rich and diverse Islamic practices and beliefs are rooted in classical sources and early practices.
Halevi was a Kluge Fellow in International Studies through a partnership with the American Council of Learned Societies in 2003. At the Library, his research for the book drew from the Arabic materials in the Law Library and in the African and Middle Eastern Division. Muhammad’s Grave won the 2006 Albert Hourani Book Award; the 2008 Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion; the 2008 Ralph Waldo Emerson Award; was shortlisted for the 2008 Best First Book award in the history of religions; and longlisted for the 2008 Cundill International Prize.
This post, and others in this series, does not constitute the Library’s endorsement of the views of the individual scholar or an endorsement of the publisher.