Muhammad's Grave

Death Rites and the Making of Islamic Society

Leor Halevi

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780231511933
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Islamische Theologie

In his probing study of the role of death rites in the making of Islamic society, Leor Halevi imaginatively plays prescriptive texts against material culture and advances new ways of interpreting highly contested sources. His original research reveals that religious scholars of the early Islamic period produced codes of funerary law not only to define the handling of a Muslim corpse but also to transform everyday urban practices. Relying on oral traditions, these scholars established new social patterns in the cities of Arabia, Mesopotamia, and the eastern Mediterranean. They distinguished Islamic rites from Christian, Jewish, and Zoroastrian rites and changed the way men and women interacted publicly and privately.

In each chapter Halevi explores a different layer of human interaction, following the movement of the corpse from the deathbed to the grave. In the process he analyzes the real and imaginary relationships between husbands and wives, prayer leaders and mourners, and even dreamers and the dead. He describes how Muslims wailed for the deceased, prepared corpses for burial, marched in funerary processions, and prayed for the dead, highlighting the specific economic and political factors involved in these rituals as well as key religious and sexual divisions.

Offering a unique perspective on the making of Islamic social and religious ideals during this early period, Halevi forges a fascinating link between the development of funerary rites and the efforts of an emerging religion to carve out its own, distinct identity. Muhammad's Grave is a groundbreaking history of the rise of Islam and the roots of contemporary Muslim attitudes toward the body and society.

CHAPTER ONE

Tombstones
Markers of Social and Religious Change, 650–800

Twenty or so years after the death of the prophet Muḥammad in 632, ‘Abd al-Raḥmān ibn Khayr passed away. His name does not appear in the annals of history and, but for an extraordinary record of his death, memory of his existence would have been altogether lost. His tombstone, once hailed as “the oldest known monument in the Islamic world,” entreats the reader to ask for God’s forgiveness:

In the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate, this grave belongs to ‘Abd al-Raḥmān ibn Khayr al-Ḥajrī.

Forgive him, O God, and make him enter [Paradise] by your mercy, and let us go with him.

Seek forgiveness for him whenever this inscription is read, and say “Amen!”

This inscription was written in Jumādā II of the year 31 [January or February of the year 652 CE].¹

One overly enthusiastic skeptic has questioned the antiquity of this tombstone by suggesting—mistakenly—that “even if the date intended were 131 AH, it would still be the earliest tombstone in Arabic.”² Actually, several tombstones bear dates prior to 131 AH (749 CE), and there is no good reason to doubt the date of 31 AH, written in stone.³ The important objection to consider concerns not the date of ‘Abd al-Raḥmān’s tombstone, but its categorization as an “Islamic” monument. If the objective is to say something meaningful about the making of Islam, we must wonder how justifiable it is to label this tombstone “Islamic.” It refers to Allāh explicitly and to the Hijrī calendar implicitly, but contains no reference to the prophet Muḥammad and no allusion to Muslim scripture. It records the death of a believer in Allah, but otherwise lacks a distinctively Islamic identity. Its plea for divine forgiveness in the afterlife was commonplace in Jewish and Christian tombstones from late antiquity, and it is by no means clear that the inscriber’s intention was to produce a uniquely Islamic—rather than, more generally, a monotheistic—memorial.⁴

Islamic markers, such as prayers for the prophet Muḥammad and quotations from the Qur’ān, emerged in epitaphs in the period between 690 and 720, and it was only by the 790s, as this chapter will show, that a formulaic pattern became established, including a standardized confession of faith. These changes in the tombstone record reflect a gradual process of Islamization. To witness such a process unfolding is an exciting matter for a historian, especially due to the scarcity of datable documents from the first two centuries of the Islamic era. This process of religious change, though widely rooted, became controversial in some circles. Upholders of tradition, pietistic ideologues from the eighth century, began actively to oppose the popular practice of inscribing tombstones. Despite the fact that the epitaphs contained pious religious sentiments, traditionists decried the practice as a blameworthy innovation that violated the customs of Medina, the city in Arabia where God had revealed the new religion to the prophet Muḥammad.

In this chapter, changes in the tombstone record from the first two centuries of Islam will be examined alongside the traditionist literature directed against tombstones. Analyzing this record, which historians of early Islam have largely overlooked, is in and of itself worthwhile for several reasons.⁵ First, tombstones hint at the changing role of the Qur’ān in the religion of early Islam. Qur’ānic quotations are first attested on tombstone inscriptions from the first quarter of the eighth century; by the end of that century, tombstones begin to display fairly elaborate quotations. They reveal a facet of an emerging ritual, that of reciting scripture in a ceremony of intercession for the dead. This is a practice about which early Islamic literature has remarkably little to say. Given how limited our knowledge is about the emergence of a Qur’ānic liturgy in the formative period of Islam, this documentary evidence is significant.

Second, dated tombstone inscriptions provide an independent record of religious trends, suggesting an alternative standard for periodization to the chronology followed by historians of the early Islamic polity. In the context of political narrative, it makes sense to adopt the year 750, when the ‘Abbasids overthrew the Marwanid dynasty from power, as a revolutionary turning point. But this date has no significance in the tombstone record, which suggests that key changes in the practice of Islam occurred at other times, irrespectively of political developments, around the years 691, 721, and 795. Before proceeding with this alternative chronology, a caveat on the limitations of the evidence must be considered. Dated tombstone inscriptions from this early period come primarily from the lands of Egypt. In recent years, epigraphists have begun collecting inscriptions from various other sites in the eastern Mediterranean world and from the Arabian peninsula, but so far, most of their discoveries date from a later period, beginning circa 850.⁶ As a result, the tombstones to be analyzed reflect primarily changes in the practice of Islam in early Islamic Egypt. In this connection, it is also worth stating the obvious: this history is based on tombstones already discovered. New discoveries may alter in ways minor or significant the chronology to be developed below.

Beyond these two contributions, an examination of the epitaphs in conjunction with the relevant traditionist literature will offer the opportunity to see how traditionists reacted to an emerging popular practice. It could be argued that tombstones and tombstone inscriptions, if prohibitively expensive for the poor and relatively incomprehensible to the illiterate, were part of elite rather than of popular practice. But “popular” in this chapter simply refers to practices that were relatively widespread in social and geographic terms. Traditionists did not uniformly oppose such practices; they readily approved of usages that followed or seemed to follow their prescriptions. Yet they despised any deviation from the customs they sanctioned and, in the name of tradition, decried new practices as contemptible innovations. Accordingly, the focus at the end of this chapter will be on the emergence of a productive tension between traditionism and a popular Muslim practice. This tension led not only to the development of the reactive mentality that came in part to characterize traditionist Islam, but also, and perhaps more importantly, to the formation of an alternative religiosity.⁷

Commemorating the Muslim Fathers

Before proceeding with the process of Islamization as it unfolded in view of dated epitaphs, let us first characterize early Muslim tombstones in light of non-Muslim ones. This examination will serve to highlight a significant social transition toward the commemoration of individuals and their paternal kin. Seventh-and eighth-century Muslims rarely emerge from their tombstones with an individual profile. We learn from these documents the name of a certain Muslim, his or her sex and parentage, and often, the date of death. Occasionally, we can determine the social and economic status of the deceased, when his or her “last name” (i.e., nisba) denotes a professional occupation. But the essential questions that might occur to us about the age reached before death and the cause of death, the main accomplishments of the person, surviving spouses or children, desires fulfilled or unfulfilled, are typically left unanswered, as in ‘Abd al-Raḥmān’s tombstone. Sometimes, a medieval tombstone will boast a geometric design, witticism, or charming poem.⁸ By contrast, the earliest Islamic tombstones express a religion both austere and iconoclastic. Principally, what Muslims cared to commemorate in these monuments was their own personal, confessional affiliation to Islam.

In terms of kinship, early Muslim tombstones record patrilineal descent. We learn the names of fathers, grandfathers, and even great-grandfathers—rarely do we learn of mothers, grandmothers, or other relations.⁹ The seventh-century tombstone of ‘Abd al-Raḥmān ibn Khayr displays only one patrilineal link. (Ibn means “son of.”) Late eighth-century tombstones frequently memorialize three and even four generations of male links, as in the cases of Rabī‘a ibn Maslama ibn Ḥunāṭa al-Ṣadafī (d. 795) and of Ibrāhīm ibn Hishām ibn Bakr ibn Abī ‘Uthmān (d. 799).¹⁰ By emphasizing paternal descent to such a degree, early Muslims distinguished themselves from Jews, from Christians, and from pre-Islamic Arabs.

To illustrate the significance of this commemoration of male ancestors, let us examine selectively several non-Muslim tombstones, beginning with the epitaphs of three Jews who died before the rise of Islam. The tombstone of Arsinoé, a Hellenized Jewish woman, identifies her as the daughter of Theodosios, yet also records that she died at age twenty, that she married, and that she left no descendants. Theophila commissioned the epitaph of her husband, Dosas, dead at age eighteen. The tombstone of Machaon, son of Sabbathaios, tells us the boy died at age five, and that his mother, Philoumene, has become depressed.¹¹ All three monuments memorialize various kinds of family ties, stressing bonds between husband and wife, father and daughter, or mother and son.

Christian Coptic tombstones similarly display ties to various members of the family, n...