1 Juynboll’s Jāhiliyya Problem: Lamentation in the Hadith

My inspiration for examining lamentation ritual stems from a desire to highlight a key contribution of G.H.A. Juynboll published in 1983, but which hitherto has garnered little discussion outside the field of hadith studies. Juynboll produced a stimulating critical survey of the traditions associated with niyāḥa⁷—a funerary ritual in which a group of women (sometimes professional mourners)⁸ congregate around a grave and commence loud and public wailing, bemoaning the loss and recounting the virtues of the deceased. Juynboll’s research was a challenge to the widely-held belief that niyāḥa was “one of the customs from the Jāhiliyya generally felt to be incompatible with Islam.”⁹ Niyāḥa wailing does appear to exemplify the universe of ideas conventionally associated with al-Jāhiliyya: Juynboll’s predecessors had postulated that al-Jāhiliyya was an era of pre-Islamic Arabian “barbarism”¹⁰ which was replaced by Islam’s “program of moral reformation in Arabia” (i.e. “civilisation”),¹¹ and the spectre of ancient Arabian women clustered around a grave, bearing their hair, wailing and tearing at their breasts seemed a perfect counterpoint to the “civilised,” rational Islam where death’s inevitability was accepted without excessive emotional display. Scholars before Juynboll indeed did conceptualise niyāḥa as a quintessential pagan Arab custom which Muḥammad intended to eradicate,¹² and their view had apparent corroboration in numerous prohibitions of niyāḥa recorded in prophetic hadith where wailing is expressly associated with reprobate pre-Islam:

1. “May the wailer [nāʾiḥa] and he who listens be damned.”¹³

2. “The Prophet prohibited wailing [nawḥ].”¹⁴

3. “Wailing [niyāḥa] at funerals is a practice of al-Jāhiliyya.”¹⁵

4. “There are three practices that survive from al-Jāhiliyya: casting aspersions about genealogy, wailing, and predicting rain via the clouds (anwāʾ)”.¹⁶

5. “We dissociate from those who scratch their cheeks, tear their clothes and mourn with cries of al-Jāhiliyya [daʿwā al-jāhiliyya].”¹⁷

Against the weight of all received opinion, and with his typically astute isnād analysis, Juynboll revealed that despite the many express prohibitions of wailing in the recorded hadith, Muḥammad never actually forbade wailing himself. Juynboll demonstrated that Muslim abhorrence of the practice was far from uniform, and that the absolute prohibition of niyāḥa in fact developed in Iraq during the second half of the second/eighth century.¹⁸ Refuting the long-held view that wailing was widespread in pre-Islamic Arabia and that Muḥammad specifically strove to eradicate it, Juynboll proposed that (i) Muslims only adopted the niyāḥa ritual after contact with indigenous Iraqis following the Conquests, and (ii) second/eighth century Muslim jurists fabricated the above hadith to justify their new prohibition by forging retrospective impressions that the Prophet himself had forbidden niyāḥa.¹⁹

Juynboll’s contribution was seminal inasmuch as it deconstructed a long-trusted exemplar of pre-Islamic Arabian ritual, but it also left subsequent researchers with a major problem. Since the hadith’s adamant claims that niyāḥa was a signature pre-Islamic ritual seem to be a fraud, can any report in the hadith about pre-Islamic Arabia and/or Muḥammad’s original society be trusted? Juynboll’s findings were part of his monograph on the transmission of hadith, and hence the fall-out for Jāhiliyya Studies was outside his purview—he left the historiographical wreckage in his wake and moved on. In what follows here, we endeavour to reassemble the pieces.

2 Jāhiliyya: The ‘Other’ of Early Muslim Identity?

Niyāḥa was the subject of renewed scrutiny in a 2004 paper by Leor Halevi who, apparently independently of Juynboll’s 1983 work,²⁰ reached a similar conclusion that the prohibition of niyāḥa was an invention of early second/eighth century jurists in the prominent Iraqi Muslim town al-Kūfa. Unlike Juynboll, Halevi argues that niyāḥa likely was a real pre-Islamic Arabian practice, but he concurs that Muḥammad (and the early generations of Medinan jurists) never forbade it, and in order to explain the history of niyāḥa’s proscription, Halevi articulates a several-stepped scheme. He posits that the first stage occurred in late first/seventh-century Iraq when pietistic Kufan jurists, keen to reduce the public activities of women, sought to forbid them from participating in funeral processions and wailing at graves. Halevi argues that women nonetheless persisted in their funerary rites, and so the Kufan jurists took a second step of associating niyāḥa with the reprobate pre-Islamic al-Jāhiliyya in order to assert the absolute necessity of abandoning the practice. But the ritual continued nonetheless, so the third step of juridical development occurred when jurists resigned to the reality of continued wailing and so fabricated a new hadith (Hadith (D) cited above) that counted niyāḥa a set of set of three²¹ pre-Islamic customs which they expressed as stubbornly enduring despite the rise of Islam. This final step was thereby a face-saving manoeuvre of the jurists that transformed niyāḥa’s persistence in Iraq’s Muslim towns from a potentially embarrassing reminder of jurists’ failure to control social behaviour, into a prescient sign of Muḥammad’s foreknowledge of the future “dire failure of the civilizing mission of Islam”.²²

Halevi’s niyāḥa analysis takes the specific case of wailing to appraise the broad function of al-Jāhiliyya in early Muslim thought, wherein he proposes that a dialectic relationship existed between pietistic Islam and quotidian practice. He identifies al-Jāhiliyya as “the uncivilized era preceding the rise of Islam”,²³ and attributes the persistence of niyāḥa to the operation of “two divergent modes of religiosity”—a “Jāhilī mode” of spontaneous emotional rituals, and an “Islamic mode” characterised by conformity to dogmatic beliefs.²⁴ Thereby, he observes that

[i]n practice as in theory the two modes coexisted and were in fact interdependent. Jāhilī rituals were not altogether displaced by the new Islamic rituals, but continued to operate side by side. Islamic rituals simply represented the orthodox standard, an idea to which Muslims renewed their commitment after observing or participating in Jāhilī rites. In this sense, Jāhilī rituals have played an integral role in Islamic history, having worked to re-energize Muslims in their commitment to the cause of Islam.²⁵

Underwriting Halevi’s conclusion is the opinion that al-Jāhiliyya was a “construct of Muslim ideologies interested in defining, by opposition, the ideal Islamic ritual.”²⁶ His proposal that al-Jāhiliyya acts as Islam’s foil, creatively crafted by Muslims to help give tangible form to the meaning of Muslim identity, is attractive and was earlier suggested in Hawting’s study of Muslim narratives about idolatry.²⁷ Halevi’s attention to the function of pre-Islam in Muslim discourses and his efforts to identify the drivers behind Muslim rulings on niyāḥa thus probe deeper than Juynboll’s model,²⁸ but the Jāhiliyya-as-other paradigm—howsoever elegantly Foucaultian and with much post-modernist logic to it—does not actually seem to have operated so saliently in early Muslim identity construction.

If Halevi’s binary “modes of religiosity”²⁹ dialectic by which Muslims affirmed their identity through contemplating jāhilī practice is to hold true, then it should follow that Muslims (a) derived a cathartic effect from engagement with pre-Islamic memories and ritual,³⁰ and (b) that they were conscious of the “oppositional” nature between pre-Islamic and Muslim behavioural patterns. As far as I can tell, however, such a hypothesis does not stand to the scrutiny of wider discourses about pre-Islam in Arabic literature. Muslim reading of pre-Islamic poetry, for example, apparently raised issues of piety in some circles, but the defenders of poetry (and all of its pre-modern Muslim-era readers whose opinions I have so far found), make no indication that the indulgence in reading pre-Islamic verse invoked catharsis or guilt:³¹ prophetic hadith were widely circulated as reminders to Muslims that “poetry contains wisdom”;³² another hadith is even more positive:

The Prophet—God’s blessings upon him—would pray Fajr and then sit in his place of prayer until sunrise and his Companions would converse about stories of al-Jāhiliyya and they would recite poetry and they would laugh, and he [the Prophet] would smile.³³

Attempts to forbid poetry cited Qurʾān 26:224–227 which castigates poets, but these verses were, in the main, interpreted so as to permit most poetry composition, and did not curb interest in pre-Islamic verse.³⁴ For our purposes, we can discern that some circles opposed poetry recitation, while poetry’s proponents were the stronger force, and it is key to note that across the arguments about poetry preservation, I have not found its justification on the grounds of pre-Islamic poetry’s cathartic effect or edifying value in revealing the folly of pre-Islam. Pre-Islamic poetry was instead considered as something good in and of itself, a repository of proper Arabic language along with a record of Arab knowledge and virtues. In this vein, consider the comment on the jāhilī nature of pre-Islamic poetry in Ibn Qutayba’s Faḍl al-ʿArab (The Excellence of the Arabs):

Poetry is the summa of Arab knowledge. It is their archive, so study it. And you must learn the poetry of the Hijaz, since it is the poetry of al-Jāhiliyya, and it has been exonerated.³⁵

The quotation’s mention of “exonerated” implies a priori rejection of pre-Islam, but it is ambiguous, since the passage’s intent is to urge the study of poetry as the cornerstone of Arab knowledge, and Ibn Qutayba’s text relies on pre-Islamic lore to build his case of Arab excellence. The rehabilitation of poetry continues in Ibn Qutayba’s next anecdote: an exchange reported between the early hadith specialists Muslim ibn Bashshār (fl. late first/seventh century) and Saʿīd ibn al-Musayyab (d. ca. 94/712–713).

Muslim ibn Bashshār said: After hearing Saʿīd ibn al-Musayyab chanting poetry, I asked him, “You recite poetry?” to which he said, “Don’t they recite it among you too?” “No,” I replied. He then said, “Then you follow a non-Arabic piety [nask aʿjamī],” adding that the Prophet of God (God bless him) said: “Non-Arabic piety is the worst form of piety.”³⁶

Ibn Qutayba’s discourse seems intended to rebut claims that pre-Islamic poetry is un-Islamic: the healthy exhortations to recite poetry, placed in the mouths of prominent hadith scholars, down-play negative associations of Jāhiliyya and promote the conception of poetry as a particular virtue of the Arabs which manifestly trumped trepidation.

The poet Muḥammad ibn Munādhir (d. 198/813) explicitly invoked a non-oppositional sense between the Jāhiliyya and Islamic cultural spheres in a poem:

Relate to us some Islamic knowledge (fiqh) transmitted from our Prophet

To nourish our hearts;

Or relate the stories of our Jāhiliyya

For they are wise and glorious.³⁷

Ibn Munādhir’s Jāhiliyya is not ‘othered’ by Islam, but instead both are parts of a sense of Arab identity that has both pre-Islamic and Islamic components and merits. I pursue this function of al-Jāhiliyya elsewhere, demonstrating how third/ninth century Iraqi adab discourses about al-Jāhiliyya articulated by literary scholars such as Ibn al-Kalbī (d. 204/819 or 206/821), Ibn Ḥabīb (d. 245/859) and al-Jāḥiẓ (d. 255/868–869) place substantial emphasis on the continuity of laudable pre-Islamic traditions into the Umayyad and early Abbasid Caliphates.³⁸ This literary Jāhiliyya was constructed as a device by which Muslims could articulate impressions about Arab character and identity, and was not a diatribe against paganism.³⁹ Given that a very sizeable aspect of Jāhiliyya cultural production around Anno 250 focused on praiseworthy Arabness, it is difficult to sustain Halevi’s interpretation that references to Jāhiliyya practices served as an axiomatic trigger of revulsion of pre-Islamic Arabian practice.

3 Al-Jāhiliyya’s Footprint in Early Hadith

The ‘pro-Jāhiliyya’ Iraqi adab litterateurs cited in the previous section could of course have been participating in a separate discourse to that of their contemporary pietistic jurists who narrated the anti-niyāḥa hadith, but analysis of the representation of pre-Islam in the largest extant collection of early hadith—the Kufan Ibn Abī Shayba’s (d. 235/849) al-Muṣannaf indicates otherwise.⁴⁰ In al-Muṣannaf’s compendious collections of hadith on the rules of ethics of Muslim identity and society, it is intriguing that al-Jāhiliyya is not a salient feature of the material’s lexicon. Detailed explication of al-Jāhiliyya in hadith is beyond the scope of this paper,⁴¹ but brief comment is in order to contextualise the hadith about niyāḥa examined by Juynboll and Halevi.

The most salient observation from al-Muṣannaf is the stark absence of reference to al-Jāhiliyya. According to my readings the word appears only 47 times in the collection’s 38,260 hadith—a frequency of 0.12 %.⁴² If jurists were intending to articulate Muslim faith as a moral reform of pre-Islamic Arabian ways, we could expect them to have made pervasive reference to al-Jāhiliyya, but the negligible presence of express Jāhiliyya citation means that the aṣḥāb al-ḥadīth neither articulated Islamic law as a system deliberately reforming pre-Muḥammadic Arabia, nor constructed a historical narrative plotting the emergence of Islam as a replacement of one older order. Whereas al-Muṣannaf does refer to some of the ‘negative’ al-Jāhiliyya stereotypes familiar today,⁴³ those messages are conveyed in less than 20 hadith dispersed throughout the collection, making it illegitimate to conclude that Ibn Abī Shayba sought to present one coherent image of pre-Islam as Islam’s binary opposite. Ibn Abī Shayba in fact narrated a number of hadith condoning practices from al-Jāhiliyya, such as the practice of oaths (al-qasāma) in a blood feud case,⁴⁴ the pre-Islamic fast during ʿĀshūrāʾ,⁴⁵ the upholding of marriages, divorces and vows made in al-Jāhiliyya,⁴⁶ and (pertinently) the permissibility of reciting Arabian lore and poetry.⁴⁷ In these latter hadith, the jurist Ibn Abī Shayba echoes a narrative of Jāhiliyya-Islam continuity similar to that presented in the contemporaneous Arabic adab literature noted above. The very existence of the hadith imply debate over the permissibility of Jāhiliyya continuities into Muslim communities, but since the hadith often affirm them, al-Muṣannaf’s ambivalent treatment of al-Jāhiliyya coupled with the overwhelming scarcity of express reference to al-Jāhiliyya engenders the impression that pre-Islam was not a principal juridical category or legislative device in the early period.

When reconsidering the ways in which al-Muṣannaf attempts to articulate Muslim identity, there is a patent sense of othering, but it does not concern pre-Islamic Arabia, rather it invokes the Iraqi Muslims’ contemporary Zoroastrians (majūs), Christians, Jews, Byzantines (rūm), non-Muslims (al-dhimma) and non-Arabic speakers (aʿājim). In the Kitāb al-Adab (Book of Ethics) section of al-Muṣannaf, for example, the hadith which Ibn Abī Shayba compiled emphasise how members of the Muslim community should interact and communicate with each other in a reciprocal brotherly fashion, suggestive that adab in Ibn Abī Shayba’s conception was an ethical boundary that regulated, delineated and identified the Muslim community. In this vein, Kitāb al-Adab contains manifold exhortations to greet non-Muslims differently, to act differently towards them, and to eschew their customs: Muslims are told to stop listening to Iraqi quṣṣāṣ storytellers,⁴⁸ to stop playing chess and to avoid undue reading from books.⁴⁹ On the flipside, Muslims are positively urged to continue practicing archery,⁵⁰ to carry weapons into the mosque,⁵¹ to speak correct Arabic and to relish stories of the Arab al-Jāhiliyya.⁵² Building on the important attention Kister directed to the importance early Muslims attached to “not assimilating”,⁵³ we can apprehend that jurists were far more concerned about the risks of assimilation in the present than they were about eradicating pre-Islamic legacies from the past.

Pursuing the discourse further, readers will find that Ibn Abī Shayba’s Kitāb al-Adab conveys a consistent message of eschewing Iraqi and preserving Arabian practice. From a narratological angle with the assistance of Bakhtin’s “chronotope”, we could propose that Ibn Abī Shayba represents laudable time-space as embodied in past Arabia in contrast to the fragile, potentially fraught time-space of his Iraqi present. The narrative is concerned with the cultural significance of the time elapsed between pre-Conquest ‘Arabian ways’ and the cosmopolitan Abbasid-era Iraq, and Ibn Abī Shayba invites his contemporaries to culturally travel back in time to shun effects of their assimilating present. As such, the time-space of pre-Islamic Arabia is valued quite differently from modern impressions about of al-Jāhiliyya. Narratives projecting pre-Islamic Arabians as reprobate ‘barbarians’ are necessarily side-lined by Ibn Abī Shayba since he presents the Arabians of Muḥammad’s day as external from contact with the practices and ideas of Iraqis of the second/eighth century in order to proffer them to his audience as a model of the ‘authentic’ culture of the first Muslims. Ironically, therefore, the pre-Islamic past actually had a positive function for early Muslim jurists. The ancient Arabian ways were not practices which Muslims should shun, on the contrary, some pre-Islamic customs helped to delineate the ‘inside’ identity of Muslim community, distinguishing them from their non-Muslim Iraqi contemporaries. Herein, the scope for constructing al-Jāhiliyya as an antithetical pre-Islam is almost nil—reflecting the statistically insignificant citation of the word in al-Muṣannaf.

Ibn Abī Shayba was a hadith collector, and his al-Muṣannaf consequently holds a pastiche of juridical opinions and discourses developed in Islam’s first two centuries, which means that generalising statements about his intentions are difficult to sustain. But while his hadith present several guises of al-Jāhiliyya in different contexts, it is at least clear that a sweeping impression of ‘bad’ pre-Islamic Arabia qua anti-Islam cannot be applied to all (or, indeed, most) of Ibn Abī Shayba’s material. To link these findings with our analysis of niyāḥa, Ibn Abī Shayba does relate one relevant hadith: “those who strike their cheeks, rip their clothes and wail like people of al-Jāhiliyya [ahl al-Jāhiliyya] are apart from us”,⁵⁴ but since Ibn Abī Shayba so infrequently refers to al-Jāhiliyya elsewhere in al-Muṣannaf, the associations drawn between wailing and pre-Islam cannot legitimately be situated within a pervasive pietistic discourse of binary religious modes as Halevi hypothesised. Al-Muṣannaf’s so meagre references to reprobate pre-Islam engender the impression that the now familiar Jāhiliyya/Islam divide only matured somewhat later, and tracking it back into the second/eighth century risks anachronistic reading of Ibn Abī Shayba. The semantics of al-Jāhiliyya were not inert, and texts indicate that a gradual consolidation of its meaning as a negative by-word for “pre-Islamic Arabs” sharpened in the centuries after Ibn Abī Shayba.⁵⁵

Since al-Muṣannaf is manifestly concerned with differentiating Muslims from Christians, Jews and Zoroastrians, Juynboll’s opinion that niyāḥa was learned from non-Muslim Iraqis could, prima facie, be at the root of the hadith’s prohibition. Halevi’s article explores wailing practices in Zoroastrianism, Judaism and Christianity, and finds striking examples of a kind of Jewish niyāḥa practiced in Iraq,⁵⁶ which seem good candidates to support Juynboll’s proposal, but I do not think the case can rest here. If the nawāʾiḥ wailing women were a borrowing from Judaism, the hadith would certainly have castigated the practice by express identification with Jewish-ness, since elsewhere the hadith so readily cite Jews (and other non-Muslim communities) in the context of othering prohibitions. Conversely, for niyāḥa the hadith specifically refer to al-Jāhiliyya, and thus they deposit wailing in a different, and much more niche category of repudiated ritual. Given the overall absence of reference to Jāhiliyya elsewhere in al-Muṣannaf, the placement of niyāḥa in such a special category calls for more specialist analysis, inviting us to pursue our study beyond hadith, interrogating material outside the purview of both Juynboll and Halevi’s studies.

4 Mourning Reconsidered: al-Mubarrad’s Kitāb al-Taʿāzī

Perhaps because the hadith so unambiguously prohibit niyāḥa and deride it as a relic of al-Jāhiliyya, modern studies on pre-Islamic mourning practices tend to privilege hadith as the primary source for exploring the interplay between memories of pre-Islamic rituals and Muslim reconstructions of al-Jāhiliyya,⁵⁷ but there is a wealth of lesser-studied Arabic literature, poetry and philology which houses potential to sustain a rethink of the function of niyāḥa in Muslim imaginations. In the wake of Juynboll’s thorough deconstruction of the hadith’s empirical authority on the subject, it becomes essential to integrate such alternative sources into our analysis about how and why second/eighth century hadith seemingly invented the prohibition of niyāḥa.

To reappraise Muslim opinions on funerary rites, analysing a third/ninth-century monograph expressly composed on the topic of lamentation has evident advantages over gathering scattered references to mourning in the hadith, and the Basran litterateur al-Mubarrad’s (d. 287/898) Kitāb al-Taʿāzī wa-l-marāthī (Book of Condolences and Elegies) appears an ideal starting point. It proffers a detailed account of lamentation via extensive citation of poetry (pre-Islamic and Muslim-era) alongside al-Mubarrad’s own editorial comments which help elucidate his intentions. Al-Mubarrad’s home, al-Baṣra, was not the original seat of the second/eighth century anti-niyāḥa hadith which emerged in the more northerly Iraqi centre of al-Kūfa, but by al-Mubarrad’s day in Anno 250, the collections of various hadith scholars such as Aḥmad ibn Ḥanbal and the widely-travelled compilers of the ‘Six Books’ demonstrate the thorough dissemination of hadith prohibiting niyāḥa across the central Islamic lands.⁵⁸ Given the context, al-Taʿāzī plots an intriguing middle ground between weeping and stoicism when confronting death.

Al-Mubarrad’s thesis is express at the outset of al-Taʿāzī. It explains that while we all know that mankind’s existence is fleeting and that permanence is reserved for God, death is nonetheless a shock, and hence good condolences are needed to help the bereaved navigate grief attendant upon the passing of close friends.⁵⁹ A good condolence, in al-Mubarrad’s view, is one that moves the bereaved to cease lamentation, as revealed in al-Mubarrad’s opening anecdote describing how ʿAlī swallowed his sorrow on the death of the prophet Muḥammad by recalling that Muḥammad had prohibited distress (jazʿ) and exhorted fortitude (ṣabr). Al-Mubarrad builds the argument for ṣabr via his second anecdote that relates ʿAbd Allāh ibn Arāka al-Thaqafī’s poem addressed to his excessively weeping bereaved brother. The poem acknowledges that tears will flow, but admonishes with a call for fortitude:

Think on it: if you judge tears can revive the dead

Then cry all your worth for the departed ʿAmr.⁶⁰

Al-Taʿāzī continues with extensive quotations from poetry and prose admonition connected, in the main, to the deaths of important leaders of the early Muslim community. In describing responses to the deaths of ʿAlī’s many descendants (the Ahl al-Bayt), al-Mubarrad explores how tears flowing amongst the early Shiʿa were stemmed by wiser admonition. Great and worthy men had been unjustly killed in the past to the detriment of the whole Muslim community, and because no tears could retrieve them nor save the trajectory of Islam’s history, what justification remains for us to cry over the comparatively insignificant deaths in our families and quotidian circles? But while al-Mubarrad demonstrates how early Muslims overcame tragic loss through fortitude, he does not actually castigate sobbing. For example, al-Mubarrad admires the rational elegy of Mutammim ibn Nuwayra, even though the poet’s tears swelled when he once recited the poem in the presence of the Caliph Abū Bakr,⁶¹ and al-Mubarrad approves of the Umayyad-era nobleman Arṭāt ibn Suhayya al-Murrī who took residence in mourning upon the grave of his son for exactly one year, after which he promptly desisted, quoting the poet Labīd:

For a year I’ll weep, but then I bid you farewell.

One who cries for a year can be excused.⁶²

In an overt theological context, al-Mubarrad also suggests a reason for some lengthy tears in the case of the mourning Mālik ibn Dīnār who lamented his departed brother: “My eyes will not dry until I know whether you’re are in Heaven or Hell; but I won’t know that until we meet again!”⁶³

The uncertainty of salvation thus adds tension to the sadness of bereavement, and al-Mubarrad explains that “Lamentation poetry [al-marāthī] and its stimuli will remain with humanity to the end of time, since the world will never stop inflicting adversity until it itself ceases to exist.”⁶⁴ In sum, al-Mubarrad establishes that crying for the dead is not wrong in itself, but the bereaved have a duty to realise that worse has befallen better people in the past, and that fortitude is therefore the better path. The eventual triumph of fortitude over initial tears is the Muslim way—epitomised in al-Mubarrad’s lengthy treatment of the pious Caliph ʿUmar ibn ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz (r. 99–101/717–720) who found solace following the death of his son in the plague by consoling himself with the knowledge that his son had died a good Muslim and was thus in a suitable state to receive God’s great mercy.⁶⁵

Al-Mubarrad’s stance in al-Taʿāzī thus aligns with both Juynboll’s observations about the Muslim juridical acceptance of crying (bukāʾ) which the jurists considered “definitely different from bewailing (niyāḥa)”, and Halevi’s proposed Islamic mode of religiosity whereby grief is eased by the rational recognition of the impermanence of the world and the mercy of the afterlife.⁶⁶ But in terms of pre-Islamic practice, al-Taʿāzī exhibits greater complexities than Juynboll and Halevi’s Jāhiliyya/Islam dichotomy would anticipate. Far from disparaging pre-Islamic wailing as a jāhilī religious mode, or even associating wailing with pre-Islam, al-Mubarrad expressly praises the pre-Islamic Arabs’ approach to bereavement:

Even though the Arabs of al-Jāhiliyya had neither faith in the afterlife nor fear of eternal damnation, they would urge fortitude [ṣabr] as they knew its merit. They would chastise those who lamented the deceased, and instead urged resolution [ḥazm], equanimity [ḥilm] and virtue [murūʾa] … this is corroborated in their poetry and stories reported about them.⁶⁷

Contrary, therefore, to modern received opinion about al-Jāhiliyya, al-Mubarrad in fact condones pre-Islamic mourning practice, and throughout al-Taʿāzī, he likens pre-Islamic elegy and lamentation practice to Islamic-era examples.⁶⁸ Likewise, al-Mubarrad identifies the literary qualities of a successful elegy that mixes feelings of despair with praise for the deceased in poetry of both eras.⁶⁹ Al-Mubarrad describes pre-Islamic elegiac poetry as “famous, admired and esteemed,”⁷⁰ and he lauds equanimous pre-Islamic Arabs and their practice of enumerating the virtues of the deceased as a way to console loss. Al-Mubarrad also relates an anecdote in which the Caliph Abū Bakr approves of an elegy by the pre-Islamic Zuhayr ibn Abī Sulmā, remarking that the ways in which Zuhayr praised the pre-Islamic leader Harim ibn Sinān would be appropriate words by which to remember the prophet Muḥammad.⁷¹ Al-Mubarrad also adds a further story in which the Caliph ʿUmar ibn al-Khaṭṭāb acclaims an elegy by Mutammim ibn Nuwayra which the poet sung “until tears swelled in his eyes.”⁷²

Across the anecdotes that render al-Mubarrad’s al-Taʿāzī a veritable history of Arab lamentation, there is no emphasis on equating niyāḥa with reprobate pre-Islamic mourning. Reference to wailing via the root n-w-ḥ is very limited, and numerically it is split evenly in al-Taʿāzī’s selections from Muslim-era and pre-Islamic verse.⁷³ A prose letter ascribed to the ‘pious Caliph’ ʿUmar ibn ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz seeks to discourage people from both crying (bukāʾ) and wailing (nawḥ), citing the authority of the Prophet, but, in keeping with the tenor of all anecdotes in al-Mubarrad’s Taʿāzī, the Caliph’s wise admonition is neither cast as a diatribe against pre-Islamic ways nor alludes to excessive wailing practices.⁷⁴ Likewise, a reader finds no reference to corrupt pre-Islamic ethics either: al-Taʿāzī’s anecdotes craft the impression that people mourned the dead similarly before and after Muḥammad, that the wise have always admonished them, and that pre-Islamic Arabs were as successful in eschewing irrational lamentation as Muslims.⁷⁵

Al-Taʿāzī accordingly mirrors other third/ninth century literature (and many of Ibn Abī Shayba’s hadith too) in its construction of pre-Islamic Arabia as the precursor to the meritorious ways of Muslim-era Arabs. Whilst pre-Islamic Arabians are cast as lacking the monotheistic belief of Muḥammad’s community, al-Taʿāzī presents their characters as nonetheless good and embodying key virtues central to proper Muslim ethics.⁷⁶ Al-Taʿāzī thereby contributes to a discourse which, as I have proposed elsewhere, constitutes one of the principal themes of Iraqi literature at Anno 250: the lauding of “original Arabness”—imagined as an ethno-cultural continuity between pre-Islamic and early Muslim-eras—in order to praise Islam’s formative milieu and (in some cases) obliquely critique perceived ills of cosmopolitan Iraqi Muslim urban society.⁷⁷ In this vision of history, pre-Islamic Arabia is lifted out of ‘barbarism’: its practices are redrawn as precursors to the even greater Arab achievements in early Islam, and traces of potentially negative pre-Islamic Arabian irrationality common to our present-day impressions of al-Jāhiliyya are scarcely visible.⁷⁸

From the sources considered so far, therefore, literature from Anno 250 neither supports the now conventional opinions about the putatively outlandish pre-Islamic Arabian niyāḥa ritual, nor theories about the supposed ‘foil’ function of al-Jāhiliyya in Muslim thought. Al-Mubarrad’s narrative confounds impressions that Muslim-era scholars marshalled niyāḥa to chide pre-Islamic Arabs or to define Muslim identity via othering pre-Islam, and moreover, al-Mubarrad’s insistence on the rationality of pre-Islamic elegy calls into question whether professional wailing was ever a central component in pre-Islamic Arabian funerary ritual. In order to pursue the question of al-Jāhiliyya, its Muslim reconstruction and Arabian society at the dawn of Islam, we now need to peel back another layer from Kitāb al-Taʿāzī and evaluate the pre-Islamic poetry corpus itself.

5 Niyāḥa and Arabic Lamentation Poetry

Pre-Islamic elegy (al-rithāʾ/al-marāthī) is preserved in Muslim-era poetry collections, and in order to examine the functions of and the memories recorded about niyāḥa in Arabic elegiac poetry, anthologies entitled al-Ḥamāsa offer germane data. Ḥamāsa collections are celebrations of the lusty heroic and martial values of pre-Islamic Arabians, and Muslim-era collectors gathered selections from what they considered the best verses on the subjects of war and bravery, and also added chapters on other core themes of pre-Islamic poetry, in particular nasīb (opening nostalgic verse), hijāʾ (lampoons), and elegies. The collections were much copied, commented upon and circulated, the kinds of poetry they contain were known to medieval Muslims as Diwān al-ʿArab (the archive of the Arabs), and hence the Ḥamāsa constitute valuable compendiums on what Muslims believed represented the best and first-hand testimony about core “Arab values” from pre-Islam into the early Abbasid era. Here, we shall survey references to niyāḥa and mourning in the earliest extant Ḥamāsa collection, compiled by the third/ninth century Abū Tammām (d. 231/845), and in a seventh/thirteenth century text, al-Ḥamāsa al-Baṣriyya compiled by ʿAlī ibn Abī al-Faraj al-Baṣrī (d. 656/1258).⁷⁹

To a large extent, both collections mirror the impressions imparted in al-Mubarrad’s al-Taʿāzī about the pre-Islamic Arabs’ efforts to remain stoic upon news of death. The poems do commonly reference the public announcement of a death (naʿy), with frequent allusions to crying (bukāʾ and related/derived words)⁸⁰ and tears of the bereaved,⁸¹ but the poems, in the main, shift quickly from tears to praise of the deceased (usually a warrior) with almost all verses dedicated to enumerating the hero’s virtues, while a number also refer to fortitude (ṣabr) as an antidote to tears.⁸²

The stoic poems highlight the virtues of men; there are examples, on the other hand, where women are associated with crying and even are expected to cry on the news of a hero’s death, as the poetess Fāṭima bint al-Aḥjam exhorts herself:

Cry every morning, my eye!

Empty out all your tears for al-Jarrāḥ.⁸³

In another poem, a girl is upbraided for her apparently excessive grief, but she retorts:

They allege I am too anguished,

But is crying ‘Woe is me’ so much?⁸⁴

Interestingly the poetess defended her tears, explaining that she does not feel she weeps so excessively, thereby calling into question the extent to which wailing was an expected female role, while another verse recounts how both men and women are equally moved to tears:

Oh! How much has Watīra ibn Sammāk

Aroused the tears of men and women.⁸⁵

As a rhetorical device, reference to tears of both sexes is a praise for the deceased. The poets intimate that people (especially men) should be stoic upon hearing the news of death, but in the cases of the eulogised hero, the allusion to uncontrolled and/or effusive flow of tears demonstrates how calamitous the death was to the community, and, by extension, how important a man the deceased must have been. This same device continued in Muslim-era verse: consider the line of al-ʿAbbās ibn al-Aḥnaf, where the poet’s expected fortitude (ṣabr) gave way to tears:

After your passing, I called out to fortitude,

But I answered instead to tears.⁸⁶

And the pre-Islamic poet Kaʿb ibn Saʿd al-Ghanawī considers one man’s legacy great enough as to deserve tears of a bākiya female mourner of free-birth (implying that he would chide such public mourning in less deserving circumstances):

I will not blame a free-born women

If she mourns you with tears and sighs.⁸⁷

Crying therefore appears skewed towards female responses to death, but it is not a unique preserve of women, and it would accordingly be hasty to presume from the above verses that a strict gender division was in effect whereby stoic men were surrounded by throngs of irrational, shrieking women at pre-Islamic funerals.⁸⁸ Overall, we find the women’s poetry both stoic and distinctly proud, there are specific references to women not crying⁸⁹ and women poets praise the virtues of ṣabr (patience and fortitude) in styles and imagery akin to men’s poetry. For example, Māwiyya bint al-Aḥatt’s elegy has no tears, and commends her brothers’ ṣabr in the face of death on the battlefield:

They could have been excused in fleeing,

But they saw fortitude the more noble path.⁹⁰

While Māwiyya’s own restraint from weeping in favour of recounting the men’s glory is her form of ṣabr.

Furthermore, and in conformity with the over-arching theme of resilience in the elegies, the paucity of reference to niyāḥa is striking. From the 237 poems in the Rithāʾ chapter of Abū Tammām’s al-Ḥamāsa, there are only four that contain wailing words related to the root n-w-ḥ,⁹¹ and references to related wailing practices such as standing over the grave, “howling” (described by the root ʿ-w-l), bare-headed mourners (ḥawāsir), cheek-scratching and clothes-tearing are equally infrequent, appearing in only six further verses.⁹² Al-Ḥamāsa al-Baṣriyya is similar: of its 184 poems, only nine contain express reference to niyāḥa and other exaggerated wailing practices.⁹³ And outside of the Ḥamāsa genre, I likewise found scant reference to niyāḥa wailing and nawāʾiḥ wailers in surveys of other collections of pre-Islamic poetry. Details and the qualitative aspects of specific examples will be considered presently—from a quantitative perspective, it seems that the specific wailing words (unlike the sobbing vocabulary related to the verb bakā) were not part of the common elegiac lexicon.

Thus, reference to niyāḥa in the hadith far outstrips its allusion in pre-Islamic poetry, which ostensibly bolsters Juynboll’s hunch that wailing was adopted by Muslims after they left Arabia, and that jurists retrospectively fabricated hadith to depict niyāḥa as a pre-Islamic practice, but I would hesitate to settle on this conclusion. The word does exist in the old Arabian poetry, so the practice cannot have been simply ‘invented’ in second/eighth century al-Kūfa. Also, the poetesses cited in the Ḥamāsa collections are freeborn women, hence there may have been a more sizeable class of slave-mourners who wailed but wrote no poetry themselves. The nawāʾiḥ/nāʾiḥāt mourners to whom the poets occasionally refer could be such lowbred professional wailers, but even so, the evidence is intriguing since the few references in the Ḥamāsa collections to the phrase “sending out wailers/nawāʾiḥ” occur only in Muslim-era poems.⁹⁴ When pre-Islamic-era poets describe exaggerated wailing, they often make express reference to freeborn women: Dīk al-Jinn’s line is unambiguous:

I said: the freewoman must wail [iʿwāl]!⁹⁵

And al-Rabīʿ ibn Ziyād al-ʿAbsī engages more detail:

In the light of dawn

Bare-headed women sing his elegies.

They who used to hide their faces

Now expose to on-looking eyes,

Freeborn women beating their faces,

In memory of the fine, gracious young man.⁹⁶

Although neither of these poems uses the word niyāḥa or words from the n-w-ḥ root, both are articulating a ritual of embellished mourning practiced by free-born women. To interpret these pre-Islamic lines, they again can be read as poets’ strategies to express that the particular death they commemorate was so calamitous that even freeborn women must wail, bear-headed and in public, relegating them to a public display usually practiced just by an underclass of professional mourners or slaves. Given these indications, exaggerated wailing emerges as a ritual present in pre-Islam, in contradiction to Juynboll, but it is nonetheless curious that pre-Islamic elegiac poetry makes such infrequent reference to such formal lamentations and very infrequent express mention of niyāḥa. If public wailing was widespread before Islam, we should expect the poets to have invoked it more often as a literary device signifying grief. Into the conundrums and equivocal evidence, we are thus invited to re-scrutinise niyāḥa’s precise meaning and its place in the universe of pre-Islamic and Umayyad-era mourning patterns to determine how exactly we can interpret it as a historical phenomenon.

6 Niyāḥa: Origins and Evolution between al-Jāhiliyya and Islam

Although niyāḥa is infrequent in pre-Islamic poetry, it is certainly present in poems composed around the time of Muḥammad’s prophecy (as enumerated shortly), and there are reasoned philological theories about the root n-w-ḥ that suggest that the word does have pre-Islamic Arabian origins. Most pre-modern Arabic dictionaries derive niyāḥa from the verb tanāwaḥa (to congregate at a place). Although it is somewhat unusual to derive a first-form noun from a tafāʿala verb, semantically, the derivation has merit: the verb tanāwaḥa is quite common in pre-Islamic poetry (especially in an onomatopoeic connotation for wind swirling about a place), and since the verb appears much more frequently than the niyāḥa wailing noun, there is logic that the noun for lamentation was a borrowing from the earlier established verb.⁹⁷ Whilst Ibn Manẓūr’s (d. 711/1311) dictionary, Lisān al-ʿArab reports the ‘wind’ definition after his discussion of niyāḥa ‘wailing,’ suggesting that wailing is the root n-w-ḥ’s primary meaning,⁹⁸ earlier dictionaries state the that the semantic development went the opposite way: they report that noun for wailer (nāʾiḥa) originated from the verb to congregate (tanāwaḥa).⁹⁹ Aḥmad ibn Fāris’ (d. 375/985) Maqāyīs al-lugha, a dictionary specifically focused on elucidating the root connotation of Arabic words, likewise explains that the n-w-ḥ root means “close meeting” (muqābala), either for adjacent mountains, swirling winds, or gathered wailers.¹⁰⁰ The corpus of pre-Islamic poetry, where the ‘wind’ connotation outnumbers the instances where n-w-ḥ connotes wailing, suggests the early Arabic lexicographers were correct in deriving the ‘wailer’ noun from the ‘congregate’ verb.

The ‘gathering’ root is sensible because wailers naturally ‘gather’ around a tomb to perform their commemoration, and the Arabic dictionaries adduce a related noun manāḥa (lit. a place of congregation) as connoting a grave. The grave-monuments may have originated in sacred spaces, if a verse reported in Ibn Durayd’s (d. 321/933) dictionary Jamharat al-lugha which describes horsemen gathered (tanāwaḥa) in the “best part of a wadi” (sarārat al-wādī) does extend, as Ibn Durayd suggests, to a legitimately ancient practice associating choice land with ritual acts.¹⁰¹

When people (men and women) congregated at the (sacred) manāḥa, we are told that they would extol the virtues of the departed,¹⁰² and in this sense the verb nāḥa shares meaning with the verb nadaba to connote a eulogising praise ritual, and this tallies with the preserved pre-Islamic poetry, since the verses are focused in recounting the departed’s glories in life. As such, any public performance of most of the elegiac rithāʾ poetry could be called niyāḥa, and the word might then trace its origins to gatherings for communal ritual commemorations at particular tombs.

Much rithāʾ poetry also contains explicit invocations for the heavens to water the grave with abundant rain,¹⁰³ and herein mourners’ tears might have symbolised a man-made water offering, inviting the clouds to follow suit. The divine importance of water is attested across Mesopotamian cultural production and it has natural resonance for desert-domiciled peoples, and hence it is quite plausible that niyāḥa as a collective poetic ritual involving (a) praise of the deceased’s virtues, and (b) the offer of tears-cum-water would have been an appropriate ceremony for pre-Islamic Arabians. Nowhere, however, is excessive wailing and loud lamentation implied in the philological derivation, nor in the ritual that may originally have been connected to it, and the hadith’s association of niyāḥa with such exaggerated practice is therefore curious.

Into this challenge, a verb nāḥa is also attested in pre-Islamic poetry and some dictionaries to describe the cooing of doves.¹⁰⁴ The late sixth century poet al-Nābigha al-Dhubyānī connected cooing with lamentation in a verse describing a crow’s reaction to the death of its chick:

A crow, high on a soaring peak

Spied its dead chick, and cried (nāḥā).¹⁰⁵

If the connotation of cooing birds was derived from human funerary lamentation, then the verb originally would have meant to congregate, and as it became synonymous with congregation at a burial, crying was added to its semantic universe. But even if this tentative chronology is correct, the infrequency of reference to niyāḥa coupled with the fact that none of the verbs related to n-w-ḥ connote excessive or loud wailing as implied by the technical term niyāḥa in the hadith, means that it is still unclear why hadith collectors so scorned niyāḥa and depicted elaborate wailing as a quintessential practice of the pre-Islamic al-Jāhiliyya.

To propose a resolution, it is worthwhile to re-examine the chronology and connotation of poems in which niyāḥa and related exaggerated wailing practices appear. Chronologically, the verb nāḥa with a meaning of “loud wailing” is very rare in early pre-Islamic poetry. The compilers of Arabic dictionaries (who usually mustered poetic evidence to help define words) cite the poetry of Labīd and the Hudhalī poet Abū Dhuʾayb in their definitions of niyāḥa:¹⁰⁶ both are mukhaḍram poets—their lifespans crossed the period of Muḥammad’s prophecy, and some of their poetry was therefore composed in the environment of expanding Islam in Arabia. Likewise, the poetess al-Khansāʾ who occasionally (but not in the majority of her poems) describes niyāḥa and other wailing terms was also mukhaḍrama. And, as alluded above, the majority of references to niyāḥa in my readings occur in Muslim-era poetry. Poets such as the Umayyad al-Farazdaq and Asjaʿ ibn ʿAmr al-Sulamī,¹⁰⁷ and the Umayyad/Abbasid Abū ʿAṭā al-Sindī¹⁰⁸ included the motif of “sending out wailers” to emphasise the status of figures they praised. Consider also the Abbasid-era poet Muslim ibn al-Walīd (d. 208/823), who says in his elegy of al-Faḍl ibn Sahl:

When I found no relief from burning sadness

And tears were the only cure for grief,

I sent out wailers [anwāḥ] for your memory

Shaking wailers [nawāʾiḥ] recounting your glories.¹⁰⁹

On the basis of the frequency of citation, niyāḥa wailers appear as more an Islamic-era phenomenon than pre-Islamic, and to add further complexity, a number of pre-Islamic poems which do mention excessive public acts of crying or bare-headed crying women which we might think qualify as niyāḥa do not actually use the word.¹¹⁰ From a chronological perspective, therefore, the term niyāḥa emerges in a miniscule number of ancient verses, obtains a more visible footprint in poems composed around Muḥammad’s lifetime (either shortly before or after his prophecy), and then becomes better established in the lexicon of Muslim-era elegy.

In terms of signification, the instances of exaggerated wailing ascribed to the poets in the generations before the prophet Muḥammad are connected with mourning the death of very high-status men. During the wars known as Dāḥis and al-Ghabrāʾ, the death of the tribal leader Mālik ibn Zuhayr ibn al-Rawwāḥa occasioned pertinent verses:¹¹¹

For the likes of him women go out bareheaded (ḥawāsir)

And stand moaning (muʿwila) into the dawn.

Another variant of the poem is narrated:

Bareheaded women recount his virtues (yandabnahu)

Beating their faces into the dawn.

They scratch their cheeks over the fallen brave

An upright man whose merits travelled far.¹¹²

Ṭarafa ibn al-ʿAbd, the pre-Islamic eastern Arabian poet of distinguished lineage likewise does not mention niyāḥa expressly, but makes a request for similar exaggerated lamentation upon his own death:

Should I die, then announce my death in the way I deserve—

Tear at your clothes, Daughter of Maʿbad!

Do not treat me like you would an insignificant man

You shall find none to replace me.¹¹³

The above poems engender the impression that exaggerated wailing was an act that could accompany the burial of a high-status individual, and in this context, the demand for freeborn women to bear their heads, beat themselves and wail audibly plays to a symbolic affirmation of the deceased’s status. The ritual asserts that the male leader, when alive, was capable of defending his group’s women, and now, upon his passing, the women express ‘respect’ via exaggerated display of grief representing their perception of present defencelessness. The women thereby humiliate themselves in mimesis of the humiliation they now risk as falling captive, since they have none to defend them.¹¹⁴ The ritual of self-humiliation of freeborn women attested in pre-Islamic poetry underlines the relative rarity of events that could trigger niyāḥa: if niyāḥa was commonplace, it would loose its symbolic effect, and hence logic can imagine that actual displays of exaggerated mourning in reality were restricted to very high-status deaths. In poetry, the men’s requests that they receive such wailing thereby act as a form of self-praise: the men seek to secure their memory as elite warriors by asserting themselves as deserving of exaggerated niyāḥa. Such an explanation would help explain why the word is so infrequent in the surviving poetry, as we could now propose that wailing was known and associated with pre-Islamic communal congregations about the graves of leaders, but the number of aspirational men who wished to be wailed-upon after their death exceeded the number who actually received such an honour. Modern impressions that niyāḥa was a commonplace practice of al-Jāhiliyya have misread the significance of the poetry’s intent: it describes a ritual associated with particular shock and communal grief, not a commonplace personal expression of everyday loss. Pre-Islamic Arabia was accordingly not a theatre of excessive irrational wailing, rather such practice was synonymous with the highest-class form of funerary rite, and poets summon the wailing vocabulary as a rhetorical means to express their own aspirations to be remembered as heroic leaders.

The theory mirrors the story connected to a reference to niyāḥa at the dawn of Islam when the leader ʿĀmir ibn al-Ṭufayl reportedly asked the poet Labīd: “If something happens to your uncle [i.e. ʿĀmir means himself], what will you say?” And Labīd recited a poem, opening it with

Rise and stand with the wailers (anwāḥ)

In a ritual in the early morn.

The freeborn women scratch their fair cheeks,

Wearing black clothes of coarse hair.¹¹⁵

The poet’s graphic image of exaggerating wailing responds directly to his patron’s request with the usual hyperbolic exaggeration of praise poetry. And in another poem, Labīd cites niyāḥa wailing to describe lightning:

Thunder on high, groaning like she-camels separated from their calves

Or moaning like wailers (anwāḥ) in their torn garments.¹¹⁶

Contemporary with Labīd, the poet Abū Dhuʾayb al-Hudhalī also cited niyāḥa metaphorically in the description of a bull,¹¹⁷ and such metaphorical employment of niyāḥa to conjure meanings of respect and grandeur further suggests that niyāḥa was indeed a practice reserved for special occasions of weighty significance. But the metaphor could only achieve its rhetorical effect of signifying greatness if the practice was reasonably well known, and herein, the express reference to niyāḥa in poetry from the early seventh century AD, i.e. the period of Muḥammad’s Prophecy, offers relevant indications.

Labīd,¹¹⁸ Abū Dhuʾayb al-Hudhalī, al-Khansāʾ, Ṣakhr al-Ghayy, the Christian Abū Zubayd al-Ṭāʾī¹¹⁹ and several lesser-known poets¹²⁰ offer us the first chronological concentration of niyāḥa allusion in Arabic poetry, suggestive of a poetic-composition environment at the outset of the seventh century where the term was gaining currency to describe a funeral rite. Moreover, as noted above, it was in the generations that followed, when Umayyad and early Abbasid poets made relatively frequent use of the term, and Muṭarrif al-Hujaymī, an elegiac poet of the Numayr settled in the Eastern Iranian city of Merv, even acquired the sobriquet Abū al-Anwāḥ (the Father of Wailers). It was also in the Muslim-era that a poem referencing niyāḥa was fabricated and ascribed to the pre-Islamic al-Nābigha al-Dhubyānī, again an indication of a novel broad application of wailing terminology in early Islam.¹²¹

If the uptick in poetic reference to niyāḥa just before the dawn of Islam indicates a newfound popularity for the practice in the wider society of Muḥammad’s milieu, the poetry of the Hudhayl collected in the Muslim-era by the third/ninth-century poetry specialist al-Sukkarī could help our understanding of the ritual’s early popular spread. Al-Sukkarī’s Hudhalī Dīwān collects the poetry of a range of poets, most of whom lived during or shortly before Muḥammad’s prophecy, and it is—according to my reading—the most concentrated single collection of wailing terminology derived from the n-w-ḥ root. Abū Dhuʾayb references wailing for a high status individual (nawḥ al-karīm); in another poem he promises to dispatch “bear-headed female wailers” (nawḥ … ḥawāsir) whom he also promises to accompany in the funerary commemoration.¹²² Abū Dhuʾayb’s younger contemporary, Ṣakhr al-Ghayy laments his son, Talīd:

My sobbing for Talīd reminds me

Of a dove, cooed to by its kin.

And it responds in kind to them,

Like a wailer (nāʾiḥa) joining the standing lament.¹²³

Ṣakhr al-Ghayy begins another lament for Talīd with express reference to the wailer:

The sound of the wailer by night,

At Sablal, she does not slumber with the sleepers.¹²⁴

Al-Muntakhil’s elegy to his son Athīla recounts the deceased’s virtues and ends with a promise to dispatch loud wailers (nawḥ … zajal) for him.¹²⁵ Sāʿida ibn Juʾayya twice uses the verb nāḥa to describe a grieving woman;¹²⁶ the earlier pre-Islamic Hudhalī poet ʿAbd Manāf ibn Ribʿ al-Jurabī describes a funeral, including

The two girls accompany the wailing

Lashing themselves with beats of their sandals.¹²⁷

Al-Jurabī’s verse refers to a specific kind of sandal (sibt) apparently made from cow leather and which appears with unusual frequency in poetry of the Hudhayl to describe the implement with which women severely beat themselves during the niyāḥa ritual (the beating with the sibt sandal is accompanied by the verb laʿaja—to inflict burning pain).¹²⁸ Such specialised vocabulary of niyāḥa and the sibt concentrated in the Hudhayl’s poetry points to a rather unique speciality of the group’s funerary rituals, prompting new inferences regarding the wider citation of wailing which we find in subsequent Muslim-era verse.

The frequency of niyāḥa reference in the Hudhayl tribal poems composed around the time of Muḥammad can help bridge the dearth of reference to niyāḥa in pre-Islamic poetry compared to the frequency of citation and familiarity with the practice noted in Muslim-era verse. From the poetic evidence, niyāḥa first musters in the poetry of the Hudhayl who resided in the central al-Ḥijāz adjacent to Mecca, and it diffuses across the wider gamut of Arabic poetry in the precise period when the Meccans and other Ḥijāzīs spread themselves across the Middle East in the Muslim Conquests. The Hudhayl’s poems intimate that the practice of niyāḥa was becoming popular in Ḥijāzī regional circles around the dawn of Islam, and so it would follow that Ḥijāzīs then spread the practice across the wider Middle East when they settled the conquered lands. Instead of thinking niyāḥa was a pan-Arabian Jāhiliyya practice, therefore, we could narrow the ritual to a burgeoning late sixth/early-seventh-century fad of central al-Ḥijāz that gained a disproportionate footprint in subsequent literature thanks to the spread of Ḥijāzīs under the flag of the religio-political system of the Caliphate. The evidence therefore invites us to read the dawn of Islam as a key factor in the spread of niyāḥa—not as part of the religious creed, but as a cultural practice of those people who played a central role in Islam’s political spread.

Niyāḥa wailing thus appears as yet another example of the variegated cultural map of pre-Islam whereby ritual and practice exhibited considerable regional variation. Though third/ninth century writers stressed that niyāḥa was a pan-Arabian ritual; Juynboll’s careful scholarship revealed this to be false, and there is no need for us to perpetuate errors of third/ninth century writing by imagining niyāḥa was a signature ritual of all pre-Islamic Arabians. While the presence of niyāḥa in poetry of the early seventh century AD is a decisive corrective to Juynboll’s argument that Muslims only adopted the practice after they left Arabia, Juynboll was likely correct when he argued that Muḥammad never strictly forbade niyāḥa, and I suggest (following the lead of extant poetry) that peoples in other corners of Arabia were not engaged in its frequent practice.

Herein, analysis of niyāḥa is instructive for methods of studying pre-Islamic Arabia in general. There is a tendency to subsume pre-Islamic Arabia’s population into one more or less culturally homogenous community which extrapolates any localised practices attested in Arabic lore into phenomena imagined as common to a whole pan-Arabian society.¹²⁹ But the region was never politically unified before Islam and there is little reason to assume that it was culturally and ethnically uniform either. In support of the fragmented pre-Islamic Arabia model I have argued elsewhere,¹³⁰ it emerges from the foregoing that pre-Islamic funerary practices were likewise not homogenised and that reference to a ritual in one poem does not impute a continuity of practice across the whole ‘Arabian Jāhiliyya.’ Poetry taken in the round indicates that niyāḥa’s wide manifestation was relatively late, and we should therefore eschew the generalising tendency inherited from late Muslim writers to unify pre-Islamic verse into archetypal models, since the poetry itself contains sufficient variation to indicate that practices evolved between periods and locales.

7 Muslim niyāḥa and Its Conversion into a ‘Pre-Islamic’ Ritual

To conclude this essay, we should like to investigate why niyāḥa, given its scant pre-Islamic footprint, became one of the archetypal attributes of ‘bad’ Arabian Jāhiliyya as conventionally understood today. The straightforward answer would posit that Muslims rejected wailing as incompatible with Islam, and hence projected their abhorrence onto an imagined pre-Islamic Arab past, thereby inventing the spectre of a wailing Jāhiliyya. But the foregoing demonstrates that this is very unlikely: Muslims did not have such a universally and thoroughly negative opinion of pre-Islam, and the practice of niyāḥa actually appears wider-spread in Islamic times than in pre-Islam. We are therefore invited to weigh other factors, and, considering the usual development of intellectual discourses and historical reconstructions in other contexts, it seems imprudent to presume prima facie that one over-arching agenda prompted all Muslims to develop a ‘canonical’ opinion about niyāḥa. Arabic literature is not a uniform corpus created by a single cadre of litterateurs: texts were generated from manifold angles and interests of cultural production, and this section will suggest an array of possibilities which together may have constituted a critical mass of opinion which eventually enabled a wholesale rewriting of pre-Islamic history into the current, familiar stereotype where wailing stands as a quintessence of irrational Jāhiliyya. Our investigation begins by questioning why the Qurʾān and Muḥammad himself were silent on niyāḥa, and how the subsequent unfurling of Muslim peoples across the Middle East added new ingredients that reshaped niyāḥa’s significance and connotations.

Niyāḥa and its emotive emphasis on bemoaning past glories of the deceased does clash with a general thrust of Muḥammad’s message to navigate bereavement with fortitude and hope for the better future so expressly promised in the Qurʾān, but if our analysis of the poetry is correct in identifying niyāḥa as a ritual particular to nomads in al-Ḥijāz, we can venture an explanation as to why Muḥammad did not take pains to prohibit it himself (and why later jurists therefore had to retrospectively castigate the practice). Muḥammad’s prophecy was focused in urban settlements, and the Muslims’ nomadic allies were, in most respects, outside the ambit of strict adherence to Muḥammad’s rulings: nomads (aʿrāb) were largely castigated as outsiders unless they performed a hijra (immigration) to Muslim centres.¹³¹ Hijra was the central act for perfecting faith in the opinion of early Muslim communities,¹³² and hence the law was directed towards settled communities, entailing that Muḥammad’s concern for rituals of nomadic groups outside the boundaries of his Medinan hijra community was limited—after all, much of Islamic communal legal regulation was not binding on aʿrāb groups. Niyāḥa performing aʿrāb were thus not the principal subjects of nascent Islamic law, and the relatively niche mourning ritual of nomadic groups could consequently elude Muḥammad’s juridical priorities and the authentic memories of his hadith.

Matters changed significantly in the generation after Muḥammad by virtue of the Conquests which spread both urban Muslims and their Bedouin allies across the Middle East, and fundamentally transformed senses of status both across the region and inside Conqueror communities. Prior to the Conquests, Arabian communities had their own social stratifications and boundaries demarcating nobility within groups alongside inter-group status rankings, and these were delineated and constrained by the confines of Arabian resources, territory and the boundaries of surrounding empires. When the Conquests dismantled the Byzantine and Sasanian hegemons and spread the small Arabian groups across an unprecedentedly vast and rich territory, Arabians-qua-Muslims constituted a new pan-Middle Eastern elite in their proprietary towns (the amṣār) with monopolies over resources that allowed previously subaltern Arabian groups to sense novel high status and power as the main beneficiaries of tax revenues and power-brokers in the early Caliphate. Given that niyāḥa had been a ritual associated with men of high status amongst the nomadic groups who constituted the backbone of Conquest armies, the numbers of men considering themselves worthy of elite-niyāḥa following the Conquests would have been vastly greater than at any time before, and, as the poetry demonstrates, larger numbers of Arabian warriors perpetuated niyāḥa practice in the new cities of the Caliphate.

Umayyad-era niyāḥa was accordingly not a means for ex-nomadic Muslims to remember some Jāhiliyya practices as a counterpoint-foil to help them understand Islam, rather niyāḥa spread as a consequence of Islam’s rising star: the more important Muslims felt their personal status was, the more they demanded wailing at their funerals. And herein, in the context of an environment with an expanded class of nouveau-elites exaggerating their lamentation rituals, jurists—who were usually not from the same warrior elite class—might be expected to have taken offence. From their perspective, a practice theologically out of kilter with their interpretation of Islamic ethics was spreading amongst the Muslim elite as a result of Islam’s success, and niyāḥa’s growing presence in Muslim society thereby attracted a limelight which had not been so evident to Muḥammad and the very first layer of Muslim juridical thinking. The anti-niyāḥa hadith thus represent the efforts of the non-Arabian jurists to curb (and perhaps exert pressure on) the military elites.

The jurists’ dim view of niyāḥa can therefore be explained both via socio-political and theological factors. The former constituted a friction between different classes of Muslim society, the second represented different normative conceptions of Islam. Precisely why the jurists castigated niyāḥa in terms of Jāhiliyya, however, remains unaccounted for, since voicing prohibitions in terms of Jāhiliyya was not the jurists’ most usual tactic to express opprobrium. Other factors need be brought into our consideration.

Niyāḥa’s Jāhiliyya connection appears to have intersections with apocalyptic eschatological beliefs which were widespread, but much under-studied, in Islam’s first two centuries.¹³³ Muslims embraced apocalyptic eschatology from the very beginning of Islam, and the frequent fighting over the Caliphate between Muslim groups (the fitna, pl. fitan) over the 200 years after Muḥammad fed apocalyptic discourses, embedding holy fear and violence into the social fabric of early Islam.¹³⁴ Into this rich field of Muslim apocalyptic, Juynboll observed that n-w-ḥ-wailing terminology was used in reference to the impending fitna and Judgment Day:

Woe to the Arabs for evil is near … Woe to the Arabs after Year 125 … when the wailing weeping women will rise [taqūm al-nāʾiḥāt al-bākiyāt].

Juynboll reasoned that the hadith indicated a “vaticinatio post eventum” to date the emergence of niyāḥa wailing amongst Iraqi Muslims;¹³⁵ but we have seen that niyāḥa was a pre-Islamic practice of at least some Arabians, and the reference to nāʾiḥāt/wailers in apocalyptic contexts connected to the fall of cities and eschatological predictions of war and doom is moreover wider spread than the one example Juynboll identified from the juridical hadith collections.

Al-Marwazī’s (d. 229/844) Kitāb al-Fitan, the largest extant text devoted to Muslim apocalyptic material, narrates five detailed and portentous apocalyptic warnings in which wailers appear. Two are expansions of the hadith Juynboll cites, warning of disaster that will befall in the year 125 (742–743), two others refer to the capture of Egypt by “People of the West” (ahl al-maghrib),¹³⁶ and another predicts the entrance of the Sufyānī (an eschatological figure of several guises) into Egypt:

When the Sufyānī enters Egypt, he will remain there four months, killing and enslaving its people. On that day, the wailers (nāʾiḥāt) will rise, the female mourners (bākiyāt) will bewail their rape, the killing of their children; they will mourn the passing of their might into humiliation; they will mourn, wishing they were already in their graves.¹³⁷

The five apocalypses mentioning wailers are roughly contemporaneous. The first must have been written around the year 125/742–743 when the Umayyad house was teetering towards collapse and disorder was widespread. The genesis of the predicted invasions of the “People of the West” and the Sufyānī appear connected to the immediate aftermath of the Abbasid takeover in 132/750 when a large body of apocalyptic material emerged that purported to connect the Abbasid rise to a chain of events that proved the immanence of Judgment Day.¹³⁸ Pro-Abbasid armies had taken the Caliphate from the East, hence the creators of our material presumed that the next takeover must originate in the West, followed by a resurrection of the Umayyads (the Sufyānī) which would be followed quickly by the Messiah and the End of Days.

In order to evaluate why niyāḥa established itself as one of the tropes of apocalyptic discourses about the fall of cities and spread of disorder in the late Umayyad and early Abbasid periods, it would be useful to look deeper into the material from which Muslims derived this eschatology. Whilst political turmoil within the Muslim community offered the main inspiration for Muslim apocalyptic, Muslims borrowed ideas from the contemporaneously burgeoning Judeo-Christian apocalyptic too. Late Antique Judeo-Christian texts possessed a well-established trope of “wailing” that described the panic and worries of the damned upon impending Divine Judgment. The sentiment “wailing and gnashing of teeth” occurs eight times in the Gospels, particularly in Matthew, for example in the parable in Matt 24:50–51:

the master of that slave will come on a day when he does not expect [him] and at an hour which he does not know, and will cut him in pieces and assign him a place with the hypocrites; in that place there will be weeping [κλαυθμὸς] and gnashing of teeth.¹³⁹

The Greek tradition uses the word κλαυθμὸς, connoting wailing and lamentation, and a related verb κλαίω (weeping aloud, expressing uncontainable, audible grief) appears in Revelation 18:9 in the Lament over Babylon. Moreover, Revelation 1:7 adduces wailing upfront in its first reference to the Coming of Christ:

Behold, He is coming with the clouds, and every eye will see Him—even those who pierced Him. And all the tribes of the earth will mourn [κόπτω] because of Him. So shall it be! Amen.

Κόπτω is particularly expressive: it means to cut or smite, and, in the context intended by Revelation 1:7, to beat one’s breast or head in lamentation.¹⁴⁰ The same verb appears in Matthew 24:30’s allusions to the coming of Christ, and the sentiment is repeated in the Hebrew Bible too, for example in the context of Zechariah 12:9–10’s account of Jerusalem’s final deliverance:

And in that day I will set about to destroy all the nations that come against Jerusalem. I will pour out on the house of David and on the inhabitants of Jerusalem, the Spirit of grace and of supplication, so that they will look on Me whom they have pierced; and they will mourn [saphad]¹⁴¹ for Him, as one mourns for an only son, and they will weep bitterly over Him like the bitter weeping over a firstborn.

Hence the public act of wailing lament had cast a footprint in Judeo-Christian apocalyptic feeling about the End of Days,¹⁴² and with the opportunity Muslims possessed to employ these Judeo-Christian stories to articulate Muslim apocalyptic, Muslims faced the challenge of translating the material into Arabic. Juynboll’s observation from the hadith and the additional eschatological texts from al-Marwazī’s Kitāb al-Fitan reveal that niyāḥa stood-in as an Arabic lexical choice to communicate the meaning of loud lamentation expressed in the Biblical uncontrolled wailing κλαυθμὸς/κόπτω.

The intersection of niyāḥa with eschatology brings us to a crucial aspect of the Jāhiliyya conceptual universe which also has been overlooked in modern scholarship. Contrary our current assumptions that Muslims equated al-Jāhiliyya with pre-Islamic Arabia, the richest source of early Arabic references to al-Jāhiliyya was in fact forward looking: al-Jāhiliyya was most frequently marshalled in hadith to describe the apocalyptic future and its violence and terror preceding the appearance of the future Messiah. The singular importance of this ‘future Jāhiliyya’ in Muslim thought is quantifiable in Ibn Abī Shayba’s al-Muṣannaf: as noted above, al-Muṣannaf invokes al-Jāhiliyya with extreme infrequency, but the one exception is the book’s chapter on apocalyptic hadith, the Kitāb al-Fitan, which contains nine references to al-Jāhiliyya to articulate the disorganised state of violence, profligacy and horror of the impending Apocalypse. Al-Jāhiliyya’s 2.6 % frequency in Kitāb al-Fitan’s section on the warnings about future communal peril,¹⁴³ compared to the 0.1 % in the rest of al-Muṣannaf is striking: numerically, the association of al-Jāhiliyya with the future is twenty-five times more common in the fitna texts than its association with an Arabian past. The forward-looking Kitāb al-Fitan possesses a uniquely concentrated array of jāhiliyya compared to the rest of Ibn Abī Shayba’s compendium.

To probe the chronologically-intriguing future al-Jāhiliyya, one hadith is particularly revealing: it states that the Arabs came from a Jāhiliyya, that they were rescued by Muḥammad, and that they will enter another Jāhiliyya before the elect are saved by the Messiah.¹⁴⁴ This hadith dovetails precisely with the first extant definition of al-Jāhiliyya in al-Khalīl ibn Aḥmad’s (d. 175/791) Kitāb al-ʿAyn, the earliest surviving Arabic dictionary written when apocalyptic eschatology was in vogue in Muslim intellectual circles.¹⁴⁵ Al-ʿAyn defines jāhiliyya as a period of al-fatra—al-fatra being defined as a period of time between two prophets.¹⁴⁶ Al-ʿAyn’s definition thus decouples al-Jāhiliyya from the time-space of pre-Islamic Arabia, and plots instead an open-ended theological notion of al-Jāhiliyya as the situation of prophecy’s absence. Such Jāhiliyya-as-fatra model has ramifications from the perspective of Muslim historiography, for it outlines a cyclical model of history rather than linear. Linear history would posit al-Jāhiliyya as a past state eradicated by Muḥammad, whereas a cyclical history of prophets alternating with fatras means that there was not one al-Jāhiliyya of pre-Islamic Arabia, and instead that there were multiple Jāhiliyyas of dark and violent times¹⁴⁷ in each of the gaps between the many prophets of the past.

When eschatological hadith in al-Muṣannaf refer to the future Jāhiliyya, they intend that Muslims following the death of Muḥammad will face one final period of confusion before the Messiah shall rescue the ‘proper Muslims’. Here eschatology and politics blend: the identities of the saved elect of ‘proper Muslims’ are linked to the various camps competing over the theological/political leadership of the Caliphal system (al-Imāma), and the inter-Muslim warring across the Umayyad Caliphate was thereby interpreted as the onset of the final Jāhiliyya. The multiple references to fighting (haraj) and female decadence (tabarruj) in these future Jāhiliyya hadith are the parameters of violence and moral decay imagined to be immanent, and Juynboll’s hadith mentioning niyāḥa adds Biblical wailing into Muslim apocalyptic discourse to further populate their impressions of the terrible future with more tropes of anguish. In this vein, the reference to niyāḥa is not specifically referencing the niyāḥa ritual of pre-Islamic Arabian women mourning high-status men: there is no indication that funerary niyāḥa will get out of hand and bring society down, rather, the reference to niyāḥa hearkens the onset of the momentous event of the End of Days, making it an Arabic approximation for the Biblical terminology of how people will all lament and wail as Judgment draws near. Once wailing was associated with the world of al-Jāhiliyya, however there was natural cross-over, enabling jurists to add the terror of apocalyptic niyāḥa to their critiques of the actual practice of everyday niyāḥa at funerals. Hence the semantic universe of the word niyāḥā had two separate geneses—funerary and apocalyptic lamentation—but in the minds of jurists, both of these were self-evidently bad, and hence wailing and al-Jāhiliyya converged.

What is particularly intriguing for the story of niyāḥa’s association with al-Jāhiliyya is a change in Arabic historiographical discourses around Anno 250. It has been proposed that the apocalyptic eschatology of early generations of Muslims lost popular favour after the Abbasid Caliphs returned from Samarra,¹⁴⁸ and the ideas of future al-Jāhiliyya do diminish in the literature, as al-Jāhiliyya became increasingly associated with the single historical period of past, pagan Arabia before Muḥammad.¹⁴⁹ Third/ninth century writing essentially forgot the future Jāhiliyya in favour of associating the word as the signifier for pre-Muḥammadic Arabia. In the process of the discursive shift, the semiotic signifieds of terrifying futurity conjured by the sign ‘al-Jāhiliyya’ were thereby transported backwards in time in Muslim imaginations to be settled exclusively in pre-Islamic Arabia. This enabled Muslims of the fourth/tenth century and later to imagine the Arabs before Muḥammad in ways that their forebears had apprehensively looked into the terrifying future, and hence killing, profligacy and niyāḥa came to stand as stereotypes of how Muslims came to imagine pre-Islamic Arabs. The shift may be best epitomised as a function of a conceptual switch from an “eschatological Jāhiliyya” to a “cultural Jāhiliyya”—the former constructed images of future apocalyptic confusion, the latter constituted a historic idea about pre-Islamic Arab identity. In the case of niyāḥa, the fusing of apocalyptic sentiments onto a cultural construction of pan-Arabian Bedouin lamentation practice converged into a novel way of chiding pre-Islamic Arabs, and spawned the perceived prevalence of pre-Islamic Arabian niyāḥa in Muslim imaginations to a level that far outstripped the prevalence of niyāḥa in pre-Islamic poetry itself.

Lastly, Juynboll and Halevi’s observations that the most cutting prohibitions of niyāḥa and its association with al-Jāhiliyya issued from al-Kūfa can be further contextualised with reference to specifically Kufan communal concerns of the second/eighth century. Al-Kūfa was a formative ground in which proto-Shiʿa groups developed their beliefs, and one important aspect of Shiʿa practice involved the commemoration of the death of their Imams. Early Shiʿa were drawn to ritual mourning and they discussed the proper rites that could be observed, gravitating towards public memorials of lamentation and standing about the Imam’s shrines.¹⁵⁰ As such, Shiʿa Imam-veneration shared various rituals with funerary niyāḥa, and perhaps even borrowed from niyāḥa to reflect the high-status reverence that the proto-Shiʿa communities had for their Imams. As divides between Shiʿa and Sunna adherents became more pronounced in the second/eighth century and beyond, the aṣḥāb al-ḥadīth jurists grew increasingly aware of the needs to (a) distinguish themselves from the Shiʿa and (b) censure Shiʿa practices in order to bolster their own ostensible orthodoxy. The opportunity to equate Shiʿa commemoration with the apocalyptic, un-Islamic practice and with al-Jāhiliyya is self-evidently valuable for Kufan hadith scholars, and their claims for niyāḥa’s prohibition can be fruitfully read as backhanded slurs against early Shiʿa, too.

The proposal that the express prohibitions of niyāḥa were aggravated on account of proto-Sunni anti-Shʾia agendas moreover corresponds with the two phenomena noted by Juynboll that anti-niyāḥa hadith are (a) less frequent before the second/eighth century; and (b) initially absent in other centres of Islamic law, notably Egypt. This parallels the development of Shiʿism, since Imam-mourning was also a second/eighth century Iraqi phenomenon, apparently beginning near al-Kūfa with ritual public mourning of al-Ḥusayn at Karbala in 65/684, becoming a more central ritual over the course of the second/eighth century, and thereby presenting contemporary Kufan proto-Sunni jurists with uniquely pressing reasons to reject niyāḥa, and to associate it with al-Jāhiliyya in order to bolster their own agendas.

Alongside the spread of Shiʿism, the development of Muslim communities after Anno 250 also brought new demographic changes. The formerly rigorous distinction between Arabian Conqueror and local conquered blurred in the cosmopolitan centres of the Caliphate, and the status of the Arabian Conqueror groups gradually decreased to virtual insignificance by the end of the third/ninth century.¹⁵¹ In such an environment, when most of the now extant literature was written, niyāḥa was inevitably associated with a sense of pastness: the earlier trappings of Arabian customs were disappearing in contemporary society as the military and the ranks of court nobility dissociated from earlier tribal blocs and discarded some of the trappings of the old Arab elite identity.¹⁵² In this context, values of the earlier Muslim military elite, like their penchant for niyāḥa, may have seemed antiquated, especially given (i) the contemporaneous rise of anti-Shiʿa discourses, (ii) niyāḥa’s theoretical dissonance with Islamic views on death, and (iii) niyāḥa’s association with al-Jāhiliyya. In the generations following Anno 250, the seminal shifts in thinking from an eschatological-apocalyptic Jāhiliyya to a historic-cultural Arabian al-Jāhiliyya could further and firmly associate niyāḥa with perceptions of a past, antiquated and repudiated Jāhiliyya of pre-Islamic Arabness. And consequently, a broad array of social and intellectual forces swelled a negative opinion of lamentation practice and encased it within a repudiated air of past Arabian folly.

In conclusion, Juynboll’s impression of niyāḥa needs an amendment: the form of lamentation was not adopted by Muslims during the Islamic period de novo, rather the conceptual path of ideas connected to niyāḥa during the course of Islam’s first three centuries navigated an array of novel issues and associations which clustered around niyāḥa and eventually prompted a back-tracking of the practice that inserted it into memories of pre-Islamic Arabica. Pre-Islamic poetry itself is not particularly rich in describing niyāḥa, but we have offered explanations for the ways in which Muslims gradually re-conceptualised pre-Islam, inflating the perceived salience of niyāḥa as a quintessential ‘Jāhiliyya trait’ in the process. Given the presence of niyāḥa in pre-Islamic poetry, we can discern that Muslim writers did not strictly invent the past, but their particular motivations and interests wrapped their present concerns into different guises that helped them shape impressions about Arabia before Muḥammad. Memories about the institution of niyāḥa wailing were accordingly embellished for reasons quite separate from the realities of pre-Islamic Arabia, and we cannot therefore take the word of third/ninth and fourth/tenth century Arabic writings about al-Jāhiliyya at face value, but likewise, the reasons for the promotion of niyāḥa as emblematic of al-Jāhiliyya had very particular drivers which may not have been operative in Muslim reconstructions of different aspects of pre-Islam.

The differing significations and functions between the eschatological-apocalyptic and cultural-historical jāhiliyyas appear worthy of further evaluation, and this paper’s arguments accordingly cannot explain all aspects of al-Jāhiliyya in the Muslim imaginary. We operated upon the massive edifice with the smallest of tools to explore the contours of just one ritual and its memorialisation, yet in so doing, we uncovered intriguing results, and the path ahead will hopefully benefit from more studies targeted at other specific icons of al-Jāhiliyya, eventually laying bare for us the manifold pathways by which Muslims have constructed their imagined pre-Islamic Arab.