MUSLIMS: THE COMMUNITY... the thought of the rapidly approaching terrible hour of the
dissolution of this world does not rise in men's hearts, and that they
are about to stand before the terrible judgment seat of God, saying,
"It is a great absurdity that we hear of the pit of fire, and the abysses
of flame, and the darkness, and the rest of the torments." And we
do not lay it to heart and ask mercy while we have the opportunity
as a means of escaping from these things.^89The most famous exponent of this attitude in Islamic piety was al-
I:Iasan al-Ba~ri (642~728), the son of Christian Persians who were
captured in Iraq. He was famous for his fear of God and of Hell, his
self-mortification, and his sadness. He was strict in his ritual observ-
ances and avoided laughter; although he believed that both fear and
hope were necessary motivations for piety, he felt that fear had to be
greater than hope in order to be successful,9°
The configuration of devotional practices which appeared among
pious Muslims in Iraq combined the ~aliit with nightly vigils, liturgical
recitation, weeping, and seclusion. These practices were sanctioned by
the Qur'an and by early piety at Makka, and in combination were
closest to the practices of contemporary Christian monks in Iraq. There
is some evidence that Muslim converts with a Christian or Magian
background were responsible for introducing or elaborating the local
forms of such practices in an Islamic context, which may have been
eased by their basic similarity. In the process, the arguments against
and the justification for some of these practices continued among
Muslims.
BURIAL
The same is true of Islamic burial, which tended to combine certain
Arab customs that were sanctioned by Islam with local customs being
practiced in Iraq. Much of the evidence for the adoption of local
customs occurs in the objections they provoked, and Muslims provided
distinctive details to identify their form of burial as Islamic. For in-
stance there was nothing new about washing a corpse, but Muslims
did it in an Islamic manner. One of the most explicit descriptions of
89 Brooks, "Lives of the Eastern Saints," pp. 554-55.
90 Ibn Khallikan, Biographical Dictionary, I, 370-73; Ibn Sa'd, Tabaqiit, VII(1), 118,
124; H. H. Schaeder, "l:fasan al-Ba~ri," Der Islam 14 (1925), 42-72; Smith, Riibi'a,
pp. 13-14: Tabari, Ta'rlkh, I, 2029; von Grunebaum, Medieval Islam, pp. 125-26.