“Muhammad's Grave: Death Rites and the Making of Islamic Society” by Leor Halevi
Published in TLS, 2009
I have watched veiled widows gather in a medieval cemetery filled with the whitewashed tombs of saints. I have observed how Tunisian villagers in their formal red scull-caps will take turns in shouldering a funeral bier which will be carried to the burial ground at a trot in total silence. I have heard the ulullation of mountain women calling-out for vengeance for spilt blood and I have inhaled the over-powering scent of camphor surrounding a corpse being ‘rolled’ in a dark room beside a desert mosque. I have listened to ghoulish Moroccan tales about the misuse of dead men's hands and cryptic popular jokes told in Cairo about the likely punishments of dead politicians in the grave. In each case, I have found that none of these actions have any direct Koranic precedent - yet at the same time realise that knowledge of the graveyard is a requirement for understanding many of the above-ground activities of any Muslim society. For one of the enduring fascinations of studying Islamic societies is in the difference between the practice of faith and the actual authority of the Koran.
In Leor Halevi's book, Muhammad's Grave, I have at last found a reliable guide to what on earth is going on. For he has sympathetically and rigorously examined a whole system of belief while at the same time chronicling the formation of a canon from the accretion of three hundred years of traditions. It is a truly impressive display of textual scholarship fused with historical anthropology and lit up by enthusiasm.
Halevi chronicles how, in the absence of any scriptural directions, the oral traditions of early Islamic society became the vital first source from which generations of pious legislators would later create a law code. They were especially curious about how the Prophet Muhammad buried his own daughter Fatimah, which happened just before his own death. But even this example, once examined in detail, should have been seen as an insecure foundation for any doctrinal authority. For although it was remembered that Fatimah had been washed before burial, it was disputed if this happened three or five times or ‘maybe more than this'. This may have been at the direction of her father, though others remembered that it had been performed by the loving hands of her grief-stricken husband, Ali. It was recalled that her hair had been braided three times and that the ground leaves of the lotus tree (indigenous to western Arabia) had been used to anoint her body as well as camphor oil imported from the East. Others recalled that she herself (gifted with insight from her father) had carefully bathed and arranged herself on her couch facing Mecca, so that she had effectively prepared her own body for the grave.
About the Prophet's own burial, the traditional sources are even more tantalising vague, for he is believed to have died in the arms of either his wife Aisha or leaning on the shoulder of his son-in-law Ali, though all acknowledge that he was buried (somewhat mysteriously) in the floor of his wife's hut beneath her bed, not in the burial ground of Al-Baqi which had been used for practically all other believers in Medina. The shroud used was variously remembered to have been three white lengths of Yemeni cotton, or those woven in a seaport in Oman, while others remember it was a ‘red mantle', or two luxurious clothes given by the Christian weavers of Najran, or a striped woollen clothe of red and white, or one that had been heavily embroidered in Bahrain. Some said three shrouds were used, others claimed seven, though all agreed that if you had to make a personal choice odd was better than even.
The legislators could be highly selective when it suited them, They might quibble over unknowable details into eternity while completely ignoring inconvenient well-known historical examples. Such as the burial of Muhammad's widow Aisha who was carried to the grave in the darkness of a Ramadan night on the Prophet's own bed by thousands of Muslim men and women. The vast crowd (encompassing the last generation of true Companions) escorted her shrouded figure through the palm orchards and oasis gardens of Medina equipped with oil-drenched palm torches, so that her cortege was like the Milky Way reflected upon this earth.
The ritual of pronouncing the graveside prayer of ‘Allah Akhbar' was traced back to an inspiring event, when the Prophet had formally honoured the death of the Negus (the Emperor of Christian Ethiopia) with public prayer. Though once again the experts disagreed whether it had been said 4, 5, 7 or 11 times. It was a matter of faith that a Muslim should be buried facing towards Mecca, but no one knew if that meant that the face of a believer should be directed towards the Kaaba or should it be the top of their head?
From these tenuous trails of historical memory, a whole rigid belief system would however be created by literate, male scholars to gradually strangle the freedom of a living, inspirational religion with the chains of clerical authority and a scarcely credible mythology. So that three centuries after the burial of the Prophet Muhammad in the floor of his wife's bedroom, it was decreed that women must not be washed by men, even their loving husbands (for death was believed to severe the contract of marriage), that women must stay at home rather than honour the dead by attending a burial and how the tears they shed tortured the dead. It became an item of faith that the dead will be questioned in their grave by two inquisitor angels, Munkar and Nakir, and that the dead will be punished in their graves twice a day (but not on Fridays) for their sins. It was also explained how the soul will be separated from the body and how the chastisement of the grave will only end with the Last Judgement and the greater punishments of Hell. Even more bizarre was the doctrine that martyrs and saints were believed to have the power to intercede for forty of their neighbours in the cemetery (or members of their family). This rich accumulation of belief is still honoured by most Muslims, even though it might stand on the tottering foundations of the most dubious traditions.
For there is only one verse in the Koran that makes any reference to the Prophet's death (there are none concerned with his burial or what should become of his corpse). This warns the believers that "other prophets have already passed away before him, so if he dies or is slain, will you turn on your heels?" It was this verse which the first Caliph, Abu Bakr recited to calm the hysterical crowd when they first heard that their Prophet had died.
“From these tenuous trails of historical memory, a whole rigid belief system would however be created by literate, male scholars to gradually strangle the freedom of a living, inspirational religion with the chains of clerical authority and a scarcely credible mythology.”