An Interview with Leor Halevi

In Muhammad’s Grave, Leor Halevi offers 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.nnQuestion: How did Muhammad die? Did he suffer before death, like Jesus?nnLeor Halevi: Muhammad did not die on the cross, though he may have suffered from pleurisy (a painful inflammation in the lungs) in the days before his death. An important early description of his last hour has him at one moment cleaning his teeth with a toothpick and at the next moment dropping dead on his wife’s bosom. I describe this account as “the least inspired in the annals of the deaths of prophets and saints.” There is no passion here. What we have instead is a deliberate attempt to portray Muhammad as a human being who dies an ordinary death. A theological emphasis on Muhammad’s human nature enables jurists to turn the prophet into a model for everyman.nnQ: Your book argues that early Muslims built on Jewish and Christian traditions while seeking to forge a new religion. How did Islamic funerals differ from Jewish and Christian ones?nnLH: At one level, Muslim rituals greatly resembled non-Muslim rituals. Muslims buried the dead, for example, as did Jews and Christians. As a result they referred to burial as a pre-Islamic tradition originating with Adam rather than as an exclusively Islamic tradition originating with Muhammad. But at another level, Muslim rituals came to differ in significant ways from Jewish and Christian rituals. Muslims began to carve a niche in the grave to indicate the direction of the Ka’ba in Mecca—the focal point of prayer for Muslims—and to orient corpses within the grave so that they would face in this direction. Jurists came to insist on the principle that Muslims needed to diverge from non-Muslims in their practices. In my research I also discovered that early Muslim laws differed significantly from Jewish and Christian laws by restricting in new ways women’s traditional ritual roles. These laws sought to prevent women from wailing for the dead, washing the corpses of male strangers, accompanying funeral processions, and attending the burial ceremony at the cemetery. Most of these new restrictions did not arise in Arabia during Muhammad’s lifetime, in the early seventh century. They emerged in the cities of Iraq over the course of the eighth century.nnQ: Scholars of early Islam tend to fall into one of two camps, skeptics who doubt the reliability of Muslim accounts of the origins of Islam and traditionalists who defend the authenticity of these accounts. Where do you stand in this divide?nnLH: I advance a new way of interpreting the contested sources of early Islam. In a nutshell, I take traditions about Muhammad and show their historical relevance to the making of Islam after Muhammad’s death. My main goal is neither to challenge nor presume the historicity of these traditions but rather to use them so as to reconstruct an important historical process.nnQ: In one chapter you analyze the ritual of washing corpses. Why did jurists describe in such detail how to handle a corpse, even including prescriptions on the cleaning of genitalia? As Muslims, were they not deeply worried about modesty and privacy?nnLH: Yes. Ironically, it was a deep anxiety about modesty and privacy that led these jurists to discuss intimate details, which reveals a great deal about early Muslim attitudes toward the body and sexuality. They focused on protecting the private parts of the body from public exposure. And they tried to restrict men from washing female corpses—in particular the corpses of deceased wives and daughters. In addition, they were eager for corpse washers to treat in a special way parts of the body that had acquired special religious significance because of their role in physical acts of worship.nnQ: Your book, supposedly about death, brings to life an obscure and distant world. It’s full of arguments and analysis but also has many descriptions of actions and objects. What was your narrative strategy?nnLH: My sources, though prescriptive in nature, actually describe in surprising detail objects, such as tombstones and shrouds, and events from everyday life. A material reality thus comes into view. I enjoyed researching early Islamic laws on funerary practices because I love delving into abstract thoughts about the very concrete. As for my writing strategy, my main goal was to create a historical narrative that would follow a ritual order. In the book the reader moves with the corpse from the deathbed to the grave while confronting in each chapter social and religious changes that occurred at the rise of Islam.nnQ: Is your work relevant to understanding today’s death rituals and beliefs about the afterlife?nnLH: In the book I maintain a historical focus on the early Islamic period, though often, out of curiosity, I’ve read anthropological accounts to see what survived to the present day. Today, as in those early times, there exists a great deal of variety in beliefs and practices. But many of today’s beliefs and practices are rooted in the classical sources that I analyze in the book. I refer not just to rites and ceremonies, such as washing corpses, wailing, and praying for the dead, but even to beliefs about the afterlife. Belief in the torture of the grave, for instance, has remained and continues to matter to this day, as I recently argued in an op-ed in The International Herald Tribune.nnQ: So, after all has been said and done and a Muslim has been buried facing Mecca, what happens? In the afterlife, I mean.nnLH: Martyrs are immediately resurrected after death in a garden of delights. But most Muslims do not die as martyrs. They must wait inside the tomb until God resurrects them at the end of days. Inside the tomb they suffer terrible torments in a constricting space if they sinned in life. Or they rest in a kind of luxury suite if they died with solid, orthodox beliefs and an impeccable record of good works.