How did Islamic funerals differ from Jewish and Christian ones?
LH: 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, acco
