Corpses and Kinship in Islamic Jurisprudence: Relating to the Dead

Corpses and Kinship in Islamic Jurisprudence: Relating to the Dead

Nothing is more embodied than a corpse. Relieved of soul, reduced to matter, only the body remains when someone dies. Are they—is it—still a person? If so, in what ways? How do those who used to be related to the person, when they were a person, stand in relationship to the remains that remain? 

This paper uses formative and classical Muslim legal sources about who can wash whose corpse to investigate a series of questions about bodies, kinship, and the regulation of sex and gender in the liminal moment where the person is dead but the body remains present, calling forth action on the part of other believers. Juristic discussions about ghusl al-mayyit, the washing of bodies prior to burial, reveal assumptions and disagreements about what sort of relationships survive death—for instance, in the question of whether a widower can wash the body of the woman who was, when she lived, his wife. Gendered asymmetries prevail in some legal schools, while in others what’s good for the widow is good for the widower.

Death, funerals, and mourning in Islam’s formative centuries have been investigated by scholars including Leor Halevi (Muhammad’s Grave [2012]) and Nadia Maria El Cheikh (Women, Islam, and Abbasid Identity [2015]). As they have shown, behaviors surrounding death illuminate individuals’ morality, piety, and stature. Who held the Prophet Muhammad as he died? Who was last to emerge from the grave? Whose pious stoicism in the face of a child’s death illustrates appropriate deference to the divine will? Whose excessive weeping or wailing demonstrates the opposite? Should new cloth be used for shrouds? What sorts of status should be communicated, how, and by whom?

We get another perspective, more quotidian and more sharply focused, from the way Sunni legal texts from the Muwatta’ of Malik through the Hidaya of Marghinani attend to questions about who should and shouldn’t wash which dead. Although the Muslim jurisprudential literature does not transparently reflect daily life, it nonetheless provides some clues about what is normal and expected. Death, including dealing with corpses, is presented in these texts a regular presence in people’s lives. There is every reason to assume this was the case. As Candi Cann notes about European and North American societies “just a couple of hundred years ago … caring for both the sick and the dying and for the dead body itself was an expected part of one’s everyday experience.” (Virtual Afterlives, 3) But only a few facets of that experience are reflected in works such as Shafi‘i's Umm and the works of Abu Hanifa’s disciple Muhammad al-Shaybani. What is striking, and worthy of investigation, is the way the jurists both presume certain kinds of care by kin of kin and intervene, either to prohibit what they assume will be transgressive practices, such as a man touching the corpse of a woman to whom he was, prior to her death, married, or to address situations in which there seems to be no good solution.

For instance, the Muwatta’ gives Malik’s account of how people of knowledge dealt with the thorny problem of “when a woman dies and there are no women with her to wash her and no man who has the right by blood ties to take charge of that for her and no husband to take charge of it for her.” The answer, as for “when a man dies and there are only women with him” is that a dry ablution should be performed, “wiping her face and hands with earth.” (Bewley translation) We see here an attempt to navigate a logistical problem while respecting gendered logics as well as kin and marital ties.

Jurists are, of course, never the sole authorities in any given situation (Marion Katz, Wives and Work [2023]), and in the juxtaposition of legal texts, sira works, chronicles, and compilations of hadith, we see that of the many issues that arise in dealing with the newly dead, the jurists focus only on a small subset, intent on regulating and reinscribing certain ways of dealing with bodies that, in death as in life, retain sex/gender as well as kin relationships by blood and, maybe, marriage. Situating this inquiry within a larger scholarly conversation about how Muslim legal and ethical discourses seek to regulate and manage difference, vulnerability, and hierarchy, I argue that early and classical jurisprudential agreements and disagreements over washing corpses reveal both shared norms and differing priorities between and among jurists about how to relate to the dead.

Cann, Candi K. Virtual Afterlives: Grieving the Dead in the Twenty-First Century. Louisville: University Press of Kentucky, 2014.

El Cheikh, Nadia Maria Women, Islam, and Abbasid Identity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015.

Halevi, Leor. Muhammad’s Grave: Death and the Making of Islam (???)

Katz, Marion. Wives and Work: Islamic Law and Ethics Before Modernity. New York: Columbia, 2023.