Muhammad's Grave: Death Rites and the Making of Islamic Society

Name: Muhammad's Grave: Death Rites and the Making of Islamic Society
Author: Leor Halevi
ISBN: 9780231137430

Leor Halevi

awards won

score

Leor Halevi

awards won

score

#3764 of 3,809 books · #1170 in History

Longlisted for the Cundill History Prize (2008).

In this probing study of death rites, Leor Halevi plays prescriptive texts against material culture, advancing a new way of interpreting the origins of Islam. He shows how religious scholars produced codes of funerary law to create new social patterns in the cities of Arabia, Mesopotamia, and the eastern Mediterranean. They distinguished Islamic from Christian, Jewish and Zoroastrian rites; and they changed the way men and women interacted publicly and privately. Each chapter explores a different layer of human interaction, following the movement of the corpse from the deathbed to the grave. Highlighting economic and political factors, as well as key religious and sexual divisions, Halevi forges a fascinating link between the development of funerary rites and the efforts of an emerging religion to carve its own distinct identity. Muhammad's Grave is a groundbreaking history of the rise of Islam and the roots of contemporary Muslim attitudes toward the body and society.

Buy this book at AmazonAd