RELIGIOUS COMMUNITIESlamented, carried in procession to the cemetery, and laid in a grave
that was shored up with brick or wood and was marked by a white
cloth; the mourners then returned for the funeral feast. The adoption
of these customs was eased by the fact that pre-Islamic Arabs had
already engaged in some form of lamentations, processions, and fu-
neral feasts. It is possible to identify Christian Iraqi Arab converts to
Islam as being responsible for introducing the local way of performing
these rituals to the new settlers. To a certain extent, resistance by Arab
Muslims to the adoption of some of these customs was a matter of
their own linear continuity-a preference for maintaining bedouin or
Hijazi traditions in burial as in costume. But there were also objections
for reasons of piety. In the case of illumination, it was the rejection
of a recently imported custom that was openly associated with another
religion. On the other hand, the objections of pious Muslims to os-
tentatious funerals received reinforcement from similar Christian ob-
jections because of the pagan connotations of some of the practices.
Even so, they were not suppressed. So the burial of Muslims was made
distinctly Islamic by washing the body in an Islamic manner, by reciting
Allahu akbar, and by praying over the body, following MUQammad's
own practice.
ASCETICISM
The issues raised in the early development of distinctive forms of
Islamic piety in matters of worship and burial were also raised by
asceticism. The argument over asceticism was common to Magians,
Jews, Christians, and Muslims and involved Indian practices that were
spread by Manichaeans combined with gnostic and neo-Platonic tra-
ditions. This kind of asceticism was an antimaterialistic rejection of
one's own body and of the evil, material, worldly things which cause
sin through self-mortification: by denying the body food, sleep, sex,
or anything else it enjoyed. As a symbol of alienation, asceticism was
related to issues of authority and social conflict.
For Magians, the material world was created for their enjoyment
by the good deity, Ohrmazd. They equated wealth with the virtue and
goodness inherent in the upper classes and poverty with the sin and
evil inherent in the lower classes. Since they were encouraged to have
as many children as possible, they were naturally antiascetic. But al-
ienated members of their own society who rejected the authority of
the priests and the values of material success tended to he attracted