The Living and the Dead in Islam : Studies in Arabic Epitaphs

These studies deal with Arabic epitaphs within the culture, society and intellectual and religious history of Islam on the basis of the edited epigraphic material and literary sources. They aim at filling a gap in a hitherto neglected field in the wider realm of Arabic and Islamic studies and will contribute to a deeper understanding of the Islamic attitudes towards death, afterlife, burial, mortuary cult, memory and the relations between the worlds of the living and the dead. In Volume I it is the epitaphs which are to the fore. Additionally, various literary sources are cited in order to enlarge the basis for research, to determine the phraseological conventions and to elucidate the religious, mental and social background of funerary epigraphy. In some sections, epitaphs written in Hebrew and Turkish have also been taken into account for the sake of comparison with the Arabic material. Volume II deals with the social and material aspects of Islamic burial sites and funerary monuments, which form the wider context of Arabic funerary epigraphy. Moreover, all kinds of literary sources, including the important genre of Arabic visitation and cemetery guides, have been given ample attention. This volume also comprises a catalogue of epitaphs and epitaph-poems cited in Arabic literary sources.