Corpses and Kinship in Islamic Jurisprudence: Relating to the Dead

This paper uses formative and classical Muslim legal sources about who can wash whose corpse to investigate a series of questions about bodies, kinship, and the regulation of sex and gender. Juristic discussions about ghusl al-mayyit, the washing of bodies prior to burial, reveal assumptions about what sort of relationships survive death—for instance, in the question of whether a widower can wash the body of the woman who was, when she lived, his wife. Of the many issues that arise in dealing with the newly dead, the jurists focus only on a small subset. Situating this inquiry within a larger scholarly conversation about how Muslim legal and ethical discourses seek to regulate and manage difference, vulnerability, and hierarchy, I argue that early and classical jurisprudential agreements and disagreements over washing corpses reveal both shared norms and differing priorities between and among jurists about how to relate to the dead.