The Pre-Islamic Era and Early Islam

The Sunni legal stance on the issue of graves and funerary structures, and visiting them, has gone through a long evolution. The practice of visiting graves certainly did not emerge only with the rise of Islam: pre-Islamic Arabs were also familiar with the cult of the dead, which suggests that ziyāra was most likely an ancient practice. However, describing the pre-Islamic Bedouin society in general, not to mention its funerary practices in particular, has never been an easy task. The classical literature (be it in the cuneiform, Greek or Latin) provides us with only very limited textual evidence about life in Arabia. The first Western scholar to attempt to describe the old Arabian religion was Edward Pococke. A few more attempts then followed, with varying degrees of success, before the arrival of the first serious scholars, in particular Ignaz Goldziher (1850–1921) and Julius Wellhausen (1844–1918). The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw south Arabian and proto-Arabic epigraphic inscriptions come into use (especially by Ditlef Nielsen, although often in a rather speculative manner). In 1947, Gonzague Ryckmans used the growing corpus of epigraphic material in his Les Religions arabes préislamiques.

Ignaz Goldziher, more than anyone else, described the clashes between ordinary popular practices and religious orthodoxy when it came to funerary rituals and habits. Using a broad range of materials (from the Qurʾan and hadith to pre-Islamic and early Islamic poetry), Goldziher documented how many pagan practices survived under Islam disguised as true piety, despite efforts to put an end to them for their ‘barbaric features’ on the part of the religious establishment, supported by the authorities at the time. In an essay titled ‘On the Veneration of the Dead in Paganism and Islam’, Goldziher deals specifically with the practice of building various objects above graves, spending one's time there or seeking asylum there while being prosecuted, sacrificing people, animals or locks of hair at the graves of esteemed figures, or wailing in an exaggerated manner.