Iraq after the Muslim Conquest - Michael G. Morony

MUSLIMS: THE COMMUNITY

tian custom, walking around him with censers and candles or lamps
to the place where he was "buried."98 A similar procession took place
in 622 in the town of Tella on the Euphrates, to which the body of
Jacob Baradaeus was taken. When the bishop, clergy, and people heard
about it "they went to meet it with lights and incense and songs of
praise and carried it round the whole city, accompanying it with spir-
itual odes and chants of the Holy Spirit."99
The change experienced by Muslim Arabs in Iraq was not in having
funeral processions but in the way they were performed. According
to Ibn Rustah, pre-Islamic Arabs had trotted about (on riding animals),
following a body which was being taken to be buried. As Muslims,
however, they walked slowly in procession for the first time at the
funeral of 'Uthman ibn Ab! 1-'As.100 The Jews of Khaybar walked in
a funeral procession in the time of MuQ.ammad.^101 It is possible to
observe how this came to be done by Muslims in Kufa in 660, when
the Christian Arabs of the tribe of 'Ijl who had settled there buried
their shaykh, Abjar ibn Jabir. Although Abjar had died a Christian,
his son, I:Iajjar, became a Muslim. As the funeral procession, which
was composed of Christians and priests reciting the Gospels, passed
through the streets of Kufa, I:Iajjar and some of his friends among the
ashraf walked along beside it. When the procession went past the
district of the Bakr ibn Wa'il, this scene provoked the following mock-
ing verses from Ibn Muljam:

If J:Iajjar ibn Abjar were a Muslim

He would not be associated with the funeral procession of

Abjar

And if J:Iajjar were an unbeliever

Then graves such as this w~>uld not be detestable.^102

People such as 'Amr ibn ShuraQ.bil at Kufa adopted the practice of

walking behind the corpse in the funeral procession as an expression

98 Scher, "Histoire nestorienne," 11(2), 197. Large-scale, nighttime illuminations with

candles or lamps were introduced as a new custom for the last, great pagan festival at

Edessa in 495 (Wright, Joshua the Stylite, pp. 18-21).

99 Brooks, "Lives of the Eastern Saints," p. 272.

100 IbnRustah, A'laq, p. 193.

101 G. Newby, "Observations about an early Judaeo-Arabic," JQR 61 (1970-71),

219.

102 Dinawari, Akhbar at-tiwal, p. 228; Tabari, Ta'rzkh, I, 3460. The point of this

couplet is a play on words between kafir (Ar., unbeliever) and kufur (Ar., graves).