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Muhammad's Grave: Death Rites and the Making of Islamic Society. By leor halevi. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. 416 pp. $35.00 (cloth).
In Muhammad's Grave: Death Rites and the Making of Islamic Society, Leor Halevi cogently argues that an examination of the development of specific Islamic funerary practices in the eighth and ninth century can shed light on the Islamification of Arab society as a whole. More controversially, however, Halevi also contends that the development of these practices were not meant to unite the nascent Islamic community but were viewed by religious elites as an opportunity for social construction and a chance to demarcate boundaries between Muslims and non-Muslims while establishing a distinct hierarchy with religious experts at the top.
Theoretically, the earliest Muslims tried to follow the example of the Prophet Muhammad in establishing rituals for burying and mourning the dead. However, as Halevi points out, the memories of these earliest events in Islamic history were contested, even at this early period. Thus, the decisions about what constituted proper praxis were left largely in the hands of the early Islamic jurists who, during the course of the seventh through ninth centuries, developed a corpus of decisions relating to proper funerary practices. Halevi argues that these key decisions on how Islamic society should comport itself in...