Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 32 (2024): 403-436

Dark Deeds, Broken Bodies:                                                 
Medieval Islamic Narratives of Violence against Corpses

Taryn Marashi

Augsburg University

Abstract
In the year 250/864–65, Baghdad’s governor Muḥammad b. ʿAbd Allāh b. Ṭāhir ordered the defilement of a 
prisoner’s corpse and grave site. The prisoner, Isḥāq b. Jināḥ, had been a criminal magistrate serving the rebel 
leader Yaḥyā b. ʿUmar, who had led a failed revolt in Kufa against the Abbasid caliphate (132–650/750–1258). 
According to the fourth/tenth-century historian al-Iṣbahānī, the governor demanded that the deceased Isḥāq b. 
Jināh not receive a funerary prayer, corpse-washing, or a burial shroud. Moreover, he ordered the corpse to be 
immersed in water in a grave and buried at a Jewish ruin. The governor’s intentional neglect of proper Islamic 
funerary rituals is shocking but not entirely surprising. Medieval Islamic political chronicles, biographical 
dictionaries, and social commentaries abound with darkly salacious reports of corpse neglect and even violence, 
shining a light on the efforts of the living to affect the dead. Why would anyone seek to “harm” a corpse? And 
what purpose did medieval Islamic historical narratives of necroaggression serve? This article addresses the 
narrative power of corpse violence in Greater Iraq during the mid-third/ninth and early fourth/tenth centuries, 
investigating the political meanings inscribed on bodies unmade by others. Viewing necroaggression as a type 
of performative political act, the article examines a vibrant polemical discourse that toyed with administrative 
concerns over coercion as well as popular anxieties over possible sensations experienced postmortem.

The desecration of the head of the Zaydī rebel Yaḥyā b. ʿUmar in 250/864–65 by Baghdad’s 
governor Muḥammad b. ʿAbd Allāh b. Ṭāhir repulsed many members of the Muslim Arab 
elite. Struggling to find anyone to perform the grisly task, the governor hired a butcher 
from the local prison to remove the rebel’s brain and stuff the skull with perfumes. The 
governor then sent the skull to the caliph al-Mustaʿīn (r. 248–52/862–66) for public display 
in Samarra.1 The populace, however, did not approve of the governor’s actions. A Ṭālibid 
rebel in Kufa, Yaḥyā b. ʿUmar had amassed a large following among the Zaydiyya and 
Arab tribes, and these erstwhile supporters criticized the flagrant disrespect shown to 
a descendant of ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib (d. 40/661), the fourth caliph and cousin of the Prophet 
Muḥammad.2 Even more alarmingly, Muḥammad b. ʿAbd Allāh b. Ṭāhir’s maltreatment of 
corpses did not end with Yaḥyā.

1.  Miskawayh, Kitāb Tajārib al-umam wa-taʿāqub al-himam, ed. Abū al-Qāsim Imāmī (Tehran: Sirvash, 
2000), 4:329–30; al-Yaʿqūbī, Taʾrīkh, ed. ʿAbd al-Amīr Mihnā, 2nd ed. (Beirut: Muʾassasat al-Aʿlamī li-l-Maṭbūʿāt, 
2010), 462–63; al-Ṭabarī, Taʾrīkh al-rusul wa-l-mulūk, ed. Muḥammad Abū al-Faḍl Ibrāhīm, 2nd ed. (Cairo: Dār 
al-Maʿārif, 1967), 9:266–70; al-Masʿūdī, Murūj al-dhahab wa-maʿādin al-jawhar, ed. Kamāl Ḥasan Marʿī (Beirut: 
al-Maktaba al-ʿAsriyya, 2005), 4:120–21. 

2.  Miskawayh, Tajārib al-umam, 4:327–29. 
© 2024 Taryn Marashi.  This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 
License, which allows users to copy and distribute the material in any medium or format in unadapted form only, for noncommercial purposes only, and 
only so long as attribution is given to the original authors and source.



404  •  Taryn Marashi

Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 32 (2024)

The historian Abū al-Faraj al-Iṣbahānī (d. 356/967) tells us that after the death of Yaḥyā b. 
ʿUmar, the caliph al-Mustaʿīn pardoned all of the rebel’s imprisoned followers except for his 
chief magistrate (ṣāḥib al-shurṭa) Isḥāq b. Jināḥ. Yaḥyā had evidently installed a magistrate 
to help manage his newly forged base in Kufa, revealing a degree of administrative planning 
likely aimed at launching a fight against Abbasid forces. Unfortunately, al-Iṣbahānī does not 
supply any biographical information about Isḥāq, nor does he explain why the caliph did 
not release the imprisoned official. Perhaps the latter’s corruption of Kufan bureaucracy, 
and possibly criminal justice, was too egregious an act for al-Mustaʿīn to forgive. As a result, 
Isḥāq stayed in prison, and after he died, 

Muḥammad b. ʿAbd Allāh b. Ṭāhir issued [an order] to bury the unclean abomination 
Isḥāq b. Jināḥ with the Jews. [The command was] to not inter Isḥāq b. Jināḥ with the 
Muslims and to not pray over him, wash him, or cover him with a shroud. By the grace 
of God, his clothes were removed, and he was wrapped in a garment immersed in water 
[and put] in a grave when they brought him to the site of a ruin. He was thrown under 
the ground with a wall cast around him; may God have mercy on him.3 

The extent of Muḥammad b. ʿAbd Allāh b. Ṭāhir’s defilement of Isḥāq b. Jināḥ’s corpse 
and grave may appear shocking to modern readers, but these actions were entirely in 
keeping with medieval Islamic historical presentations of this notoriously competitive and 
irascible governor. From the perspective of Abū al-Faraj al-Iṣbahānī, this improper burial 
betrayed Muḥammad b. ʿAbd Allāh b. Ṭāhir’s enduring enmity for the rogue official. The 
numerous unconventional and omitted elements in the funerary rites—interment in a 
place of Jewish instead of Muslim burial, the absence of prayer, the replacement of a burial 
shroud with a garment soaked in water (presumably to compound and hasten bodily decay), 
the purposeful neglect of corpse-washing, and the placement of the grave at the site of a 
ruin instead of a cemetery—all serve to emphasize the perceived sinfulness of Isḥāq b. Jināḥ. 
Muḥammad b. ʿAbd Allāh b. Ṭāhir’s thorough and intentional abandonment of Muslim 
funerary rituals prompts the question whether he viewed these measures as necessary to 
humiliate not only Isḥāq’s body but also his spirit. 

Why would anyone seek to “harm” a corpse? By extension, what purpose did medieval 
Islamic historical narratives of postmortem maltreatment serve? To address these unsettling 
questions, this article focuses on three cases of necroaggression recorded in the works of 
al-Ṭabarī (d. 310/923), al-Masʿūdī (d. 345/956), Miskawayh (d. 421/1030), al-Tanūkhī (d. 
384/994), and Ibn al-Jawzī (d. 597/1200), in addition to Abū al-Faraj al-Iṣbahānī’s account 
of Isḥāq b. Jināḥ. I also discuss several second/eighth- to sixth/twelfth-century Islamic 
legal manuals to contextualize these narratives, providing a cross-genre analysis to better 
display broad medieval Muslim attitudes and responses toward corpse defilement. The goal 
of the article is to address acts of postmortem harm carried out by and between members 

3.  Abū al-Faraj al-Iṣbahānī, Kitāb Maqātil al-Ṭālibiyyīn, ed. al-Sayyid Aḥmad Ṣaqr (Beirut: Dār al-Maʿrifa, 
n.d.), 1:510. Al-Iṣbahānī reports this narrative on the authority of Muḥammad b. al-Ḥusayn al-Ashnānī, whom 
he cites multiple times without providing any biographical information. Al-Khaṭīb al-Baghdādī briefly mentions 
this transmitter in Taʾrīkh Baghdād, ed. Bashshār ʿAwwād Maʿrūf (Beirut: Dār al-Gharb al-Islāmī, 2002), 2:543. 
The name Muḥammad b. al-Ḥusayn al-Ashnānī likely refers to the Shīʿī hadith transmitter al-Ashnānī al-Kūfī.



Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 32 (2024)

 Dark Deeds, Broken Bodies •  405

of the Abbasid administration; these manifestations of forceful behavior constitute a form 
of interpersonal antagonism and thus lie outside the realm of more public-facing forms 
of punishment implemented by government authorities. Taking place in Greater Iraq and 
spanning the mid-third/ninth to early fourth/tenth centuries, these three cases reveal 
more than just a salacious literary fascination with the macabre. These narratives of corpse 
violence indicate that medieval Muslims may have viewed the deceased not as inert, 
spiritless vessels of a previous life but as potential sufferers of postmortem injury. 

A political critique filters through the body of narratives about the tormented dead, 
illustrating the potential for the medieval author to wield corpse violence as a literary 
tool to disparage government functionaries. The risks and failures of administrative 
competition, salted with a dash of moralistic reprisal, shape these stories to serve as a form 
of entertainment for a medieval Muslim audience. But they also convey a sober warning 
for political competitors: precisely how a person mishandled the dead mattered. Peeling 
back layers of historical meaning encased in the blood and bones of punished corpses, this 
article exposes a narrative project of postmortem violence that thrived on sensationalizing 
and unmasking political intrigue. Necroaggression was a highly effective political metric 
to display asymmetries in power that manifested either as distasteful acts by an abuser 
or as justifiable acts of retaliation, depending on the conduct of the recently deceased. By 
viewing the bodies of bureaucrats as repositories of political information seen through the 
marks of necroaggression, I show how medieval Islamic narratives pivot corpse violence to 
redefine the political and moral status of both the perpetrator and the dead in a measured, 
performative, and didactic way. Maimed and broken, the bodies of the recently deceased 
bureaucrats can best be seen as dynamic canvases on which were inscribed a range of 
political misbehaviors in the Abbasid administration. 

Historiography on Corpse Violence 

Corpse violence evokes a disrespect for bodily integrity, a degree of unrestrained animosity, 
a level of dehumanization, and a tantalizingly graphic narrative for medieval and modern 
audiences alike. Violence performed on the dead has a rich literary history according to 
Andrew McClellan, who, in his book Abused Bodies, seeks to resurrect the role of the dead 
body as a narrative aspect of Greek and Roman epics.4 McClellan argues that the literary 
convention of depicting scenes of bodily dismemberment and cannibalistic fancy serves as 
a larger marker of social change and decline. Katherine Verdery adds that “corpses lend 
themselves particularly well to politics in times of major upheaval.”5 A manifestation of 
moral and political misbehavior, brutalized corpses embody not only power differentials 
between the perpetrator and the dead but also momentous shifts in the broader political 
landscape. These blood-soaked vignettes appear in the medieval Islamic literary and social 
imagination, fulfilling the crucial role of educating readers on the moralistic lessons to be 
learned from improper care shown toward the deceased.

4.  Andrew M. McClellan, Abused Bodies in Roman Epic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019).
5.  Katherine Verdery, The Political Lives of Dead Bodies: Reburial and Postsocialist Change (New York: 

Columbia University Press, 1999), 31.



406  •  Taryn Marashi

Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 32 (2024)

Narratives of corpse violence pepper medieval Islamic historical chronicles, biographical 
dictionaries, and social commentaries and are often replete with political information as 
much as they are with morbid curiosity. Dark humor threads through these accounts, which 
play with reversals of political fortune: high-ranking administrators balk at the sight of 
the mangled corpse of a former political ally or opponent; junior officials hatch plans to 
corner, kill, and disfigure the bodies of senior officials who threaten their political designs; 
and the torturer becomes the tortured. Corpse violence was a powerful visual for the 
medieval author, actor, and reader, and it remains a potent reminder that certain methods 
of dehumanization can shape the perception of who a person once was and possibly even 
what a person can be. 

Mirroring the robust literary and political depth of this deathscape, several contemporary 
scholarly works have delved into medieval Islamic attitudes toward corpse maltreatment 
and even mutilation.6 Analyzing the interplay between historical meaning and literary 
form in acts of torture and punishment enforced by the caliph al-Muʿtaḍid (r. 279–89/892–
901), Fedwa Malti-Douglas makes note of the diverse presentations of this ruler and 
his treatment of others in different Arabic literary registers—biographical dictionaries, 
historical chronicles, and works of adab (social commentaries and mannered customs). The 
acts of mercy and cruelty expressed in these narratives, Malti-Douglas contends, confront 
one another to produce a more nuanced historical vignette of the caliph and his exercise 
of social justice as well as a deeper impression of the worldview of the medieval author.7 
Though less concerned with the historical subject of postmortem harm, her observations 
on the interrelationship between meaning and form—a discussion launched by the late 
Hayden White—in relation to the torturer and the tortured hold valuable insights for the 
consideration of the multifaceted political meanings found in the disfigured bodies of 
recently deceased government officials. I examine the same literary genres as Malti-Douglas 
does to better understand social and historical presentations of necroaggression. 

Christian Lange’s work on justice and violence likewise offers a fruitful methodological 
approach for juxtaposing medieval Islamic legal texts with diverse Arabic literary genres. In 
particular, his book Justice, Punishment, and the Medieval Muslim Imagination exposes the 
political function of punitive public displays in the Seljuq era (ca. 447–575/1055–1180) and 
demonstrates, on the basis of sixth/twelfth- and seventh/thirteenth-century eschatological 
literature, that the literary fascination with such punishments reveals just as much about the 

6.  See Tilman Seidensticker, “Responses to Crucifixion in the Islamic World (1st–7th/7th–13th Centuries),” 
in Public Violence in Islamic Societies: Power, Discipline, and the Construction of the Public Sphere, 7th–19th 
Centuries CE, ed. Christian Lange and Maribel Fierro, 203–16 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009); 
Maribel Fierro, “Emulating Abraham: The Fāṭimid al-Qāʾim and the Umayyad ʿAbd al-Raḥmān III,” in Lange and 
Fierro, Public Violence in Islamic Societies, 130–55, 139; Maribel Fierro, “Decapitation of Christians and Muslims 
in the Medieval Iberian Peninsula: Narratives, Images, Contemporary Perceptions,” Comparative Literature 
Studies 45, no. 2 (2008): 137–64; Emilie Savage-Smith, “Attitudes toward Dissection in Medieval Islam,” Journal 
of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 50, no. 1 (1995): 67–110. For an analysis of punishment in the 
grave, see Leor Halevi, Muhammad’s Grave: Death Rites and the Making of Islamic Society (New York: Columbia 
University Press, 2007), 197–233.

7.  Fedwa Malti-Douglas, “Texts and Tortures: The Reign of al-Muʿtaḍid and the Construction of Historical 
Meaning,” Arabica 46, no. 3 (1999): 313–36.



Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 32 (2024)

 Dark Deeds, Broken Bodies •  407

medieval Muslim audience as it does about the authors.8 Hellish imaginings enabled Muslim 
believers to observe parallels in their own society and, through this discursive dialectic, 
construct their own interpretations of their lived experiences in lieu of an imminent End. 
Lange’s observations on public punishment as a performative political act carry similar 
analytical weight when applied to the corpse violence presented in diverse medieval Islamic 
historical reports. Both Malti-Douglas and Lange show that the performative nature of 
government-sponsored violence was meant to enhance the aura of the one carrying out the 
act, although this intended message was not necessarily well received if the punishment 
was viewed as too extreme. Despite the richness of these scholarly inquiries dealing with 
punishment and torture, the changing political role of corpses marred and unmade by 
others has received less attention. 

This is in part because investigations into the medieval historical narrative project of 
necroaggression run into several obstacles. What exactly constitutes violence against the 
dead? And by the same token, how should we treat these accounts of violence against the 
dead? Muḥammad b. ʿAbd Allāh b. Ṭāhir’s actions are salient to these interrelated questions, 
since the governor committed multiple different offenses against the bodies of both Yaḥyā 
b. ʿUmar and Isḥāq b. Jināḥ. 

Diverse Forms of Postmortem Harm: Comparing the Cases of Yaḥyā b. ʿUmar and Isḥāq b. Jināḥ

The cases of Yaḥyā b. ʿUmar and Isḥāq b. Jināḥ force us to reconsider the potentially wide 
range of types of violation that can constitute acts of necroaggression. The differences 
in the postmortem treatment of Yaḥyā and Isḥāq, with the former’s body mutilated and 
partially redesigned while the latter’s body remained largely intact though deprived of 
Islamic funerary rituals, point to an indeterminate flexibility in administrative handling of 
a criminal’s body. Historians such as Abū al-Faraj al-Iṣbahānī and Miskawayh offer details 
about Yaḥyā’s and Isḥāq’s unmaking, probably to embellish their anecdotal reports as well 
as to critique their death-dealers and death-handlers. Their narratives of postmortem harm 
and neglect can be seen as a representation of the social contexts of both the actors and 
the authors and as a type of commentary layered with social perceptions about political 
offenses, coercive techniques of governance, and Muslim attitudes toward criminal bodies 
and their associations, administrative and familial. Instead of merely trying to discern the 
factual value of these reports, I read them as social reflections—an approach that offers a 
more vibrant view of the contested politics of handling criminal corpses.9 For each broken 
or neglected body represents an easily accessible foil that the historians of the fourth/tenth 
and early fifth/eleventh centuries mobilized to sharpen their critique of Muḥammad b. ʿAbd 
Allāh b. Ṭāhir. 

8.  Christian Lange, Justice, Punishment, and the Medieval Muslim Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge 
University Press, 2008).

9.  For more on reading the historical process as a series of dramas, see Tayeb El-Hibri, Reinterpreting Islamic 
Historiography: Harun al-Rashid and the Narrative of the ʿAbbasid Caliphate (New York: Cambridge University 
Press, 1999), 52–53. For the role of fiction in constructing narrative histories, see Matthias Vogt, Figures de 
califes entre histoire et fiction: Al-Walīd b. Yazīd et al-Amīn dans la représentation d’historiographie arabe de 
l’époque ʿabbāside (Beirut: Ergon, 2006), 22–34. 



408  •  Taryn Marashi

Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 32 (2024)

In addition, an analytical comparison of the cases of Yaḥyā b. ʿUmar and Isḥāq b. Jināḥ 
draws attention to the degree of excessive bodily harm that warranted public intervention 
and subsequent amendment of the administrative protocol for handling criminal bodies. 
In Yaḥyā’s case, modifying his skull and stuffing it with perfumes were acts intended to 
mockingly showcase the rebel’s head as a trophy and thus to generate a more sensational, 
aromatic souvenir for both the Ṭāhirid governor and the caliph. Though Abbasid officials 
often crucified dead rebels and transported parts of their bodies to the caliph, governor, or 
criminal magistrate, many Muslim jurists would have condemned Muḥammad b. ʿAbd Allāh 
b. Ṭāhir’s alteration of Yaḥyā’s head as a form of mutilation.10 Denouncing the governor’s 
actions, several Hāshimites declared, “O commander, indeed you get enjoyment out of 
killing a man. If the messenger of God (peace and blessings upon him) were alive, he would 
have consoled him.”11 The scandalous nature of Muḥammad b. ʿAbd Allāh b. Ṭāhir’s offense 
was also confirmed by the outcry of members of the Samarran populace who, likely not 
unfamiliar with the varied punitive components of a well-choreographed tashhīr ceremony 
(a public procession of scorn), disapproved of the governor’s treatment of the rebel’s body. 
At this point, Muḥammad b. ʿAbd Allāh b. Ṭāhir, under pressure to concede to the will 
of the public, took down the staked head and returned it to the family of the deceased 
Ṭālibid rebel instead of displaying it in Baghdad in accordance with his initial plan. The 
overwhelming popular displeasure demonstrates that there was a perceptible line up to 
which even the bodies of deceased political offenders, however excessive their offenses 
may have been and especially if they were members of the ahl al-bayt (descendants of the 
Prophet Muḥammad), deserved a modicum of respect, and that Muḥammad b. ʿAbd Allāh b. 
Ṭāhir had crossed this line. What is more, medieval Muslim historians such as Miskawayh, 
who records Muḥammad b. ʿAbd Allāh b. Ṭāhir’s grave misdeeds, displays an awareness of 
what constituted acceptable government treatment of criminal bodies, and he routinely 
reproduces the complaints of administrators regarding excessive acts of torture performed 
on political prisoners.12 

Unlike the body of Yaḥyā b. ʿUmar, the corpse of Isḥāq b. Jināḥ did not suffer 
dismemberment or modification. Rather, Muḥammad b. ʿAbd Allāh b. Ṭāhir purposefully 
withheld the Muslim funerary rites, seemingly to damage Isḥāq’s confessional identity 
and the physical integrity of his corpse. In further contrast, Isḥāq was a municipal official 
overseeing law enforcement in Kufa, and though he served a rebel leader, he did not lead 
a rebellion himself. Isḥāq b. Jināḥ’s position as a local functionary who had perhaps been 
corrupted by the rebel Yaḥyā b. ʿUmar may explain why Muḥammad b. ʿAbd Allāh b. Ṭāhir 
refrained from authorizing Muslim funerary services for Isḥāq but made no move to display 

10.  Khaled Abou El Fadl, Rebellion and Violence in Islamic Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 
2001), 154, 160. See also al-Māwardī (d. 450/1058), Kitāb al-Ḥāwī al-kabīr, ed. ʿAlī Muḥammad Muʿawwaḍ and 
ʿĀdil Aḥmad ʿAbd al-Mawjūd (Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, 1999), 13:143.

11.  Miskawayh, Tajārib al-umam, 4:329. Although washing and perfuming a body were components of 
Muslim funerary custom, excavating the head was not. Miskawayh’s narrative impresses upon the reader the 
seriousness of Muḥammad b. ʿAbd Allāh b. Ṭāhir’s perversion of proper corpse treatment. 

12.  For an example, see the report of Muḥammad b. Dāʾūd about the excessive torture of the unfortunate 
calligrapher-vizier Ibn Muqla; Miskawayh, Tajārib al-umam, 5:59–60.



Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 32 (2024)

 Dark Deeds, Broken Bodies •  409

his body publicly as he had tried to do with Yaḥyā. Regardless of the governor’s reasons, 
al-Iṣbahānī presents the calculating actions of Muḥammad b. ʿAbd Allāh b. Ṭāhir and invites 
the medieval (and modern) reader to ponder the likely pitiable state of Isḥāq’s decomposed 
body. Muḥammad b. ʿAbd Allāh b. Ṭāhir’s defilement of Isḥāq’s body can also be read as 
part of al-Iṣbahānī’s larger Shīʿī project in his biographical book Maqātil al-Ṭālibiyyin 
(The Ṭālibid martyrs) to narrate the experiences and unjust deaths of the ahl al-bayt. 
Considering al-Iṣbahānī’s narrative purpose, the demise of Isḥāq b. Jināḥ, a municipal official 
who appears to have died in prison without receiving a trial, was just another travesty 
against the Shīʿī community. Although the corpses of Yaḥyā and Isḥāq signal, quite literally, 
different manifestations of forceful behavior, both serve to put Muḥammad b. ʿAbd Allāh b. 
Ṭāhir’s political misconduct on display. 

The narratives about Yaḥyā’s and Isḥāq’s mishandled bodies remind us that the dead 
may impart more or less information and meaning depending on the nature of the 
violations committed against them. This insight points to the literary power of postmortem 
maltreatment, a motif and weapon that medieval Muslim historians harnessed to 
differentiate good bureaucrats from bad bureaucrats. When read as a type of performative 
political act, to take an analytical cue from Lange and Malti-Douglas, these necroaggressions 
expose an interdependent relationship between the violated dead and the violator that a 
medieval historical author leveraged to offer a more dramatic critique of Abbasid political 
elites. This hostile yet strikingly close connection between corpse and corpse offender 
reveals a political arena that, over time, became increasingly accommodating of the coercive 
excesses of political elites. 

The cases of Isḥāq and Yaḥyā raise certain legal issues connected to the expected 
treatment of criminal bodies. The withholding of funerary rituals such as washing, prayer, 
and proper garments from Isḥāq b. Jināḥ demonstrates a concerted effort to intensify 
the decay of his corpse. The goal of a corpse-washer was to clean the deceased body in 
preparation for burial, a vital step for the fulfillment of social and religious dicta. A corpse-
washer could inadvertently pollute the body of the deceased if certain conditions of ritual 
washing were not properly observed or if the corpse-washer did not meet the gendered, 
social, and religious expectations for the post. The identity of the washer, the time and 
place of the washing, the type of water used, the number of times the corpse was washed, 
and the material condition of the burial shroud mattered for preserving the body and 
satisfying religious norms.13 Ritual impurities could be exacerbated to varying degrees if the 
corpse-washer fulfilled his or her professional duties inadequately. 

This indicates that the deceased was in more danger of being contaminated than of 
being a source of contamination. Leor Halevi, in his probing text Muhammad’s Grave: 
Death Rites and the Making of Islamic Society, affirms that “Islamic law was concerned 
less with the effects of the dead on the living than with the effects of the living on the 

13.  For a description of corpse-washing, see Ibn Rushd, Bidāyat al-mujtahid wa-nihāyat al-muqtaṣid (Cairo: 
Dār al-Ḥadīth, 2004), 1:240–45; Ibn Qudāma, Kitāb al-Mughnī, ed. ʿ Abd al-Qādir ʿ Aṭā et al. (Cairo: National Library, 
1969), 2:337–49, 390–93.



410  •  Taryn Marashi

Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 32 (2024)

dead.”14 Contact with defiled substances posed only limited risk to corpse-washers; a more 
serious concern was the ritual danger for the deceased posed by the washer’s contact with 
the corpse. Marion Katz indicates that the possibility of a corpse being ritually impure 
bothered classical Muslim jurists and theologians, who grappled with the problematic view 
that when a believer transitioned from life to death, the body became polluted.15 This view 
meant that a corpse could possess a degree of inherent pollution that was both personal 
and permanent—a concerning thought indeed. However, as Kevin Reinhart explains, even 
if a corpse contained defiling substances and thus held the potential of ritual impurity, the 
impurity was not necessarily contagious.16 The more dangerous pollutants came not from 
the dead but from the living, who could affect the ritual status of the dead. 

Ritual expectations based on Islamic ideas of purity applied also to funerary prayer 
services. In the case of Isḥāq b. Jināḥ, Muḥammad b. ʿAbd Allāh b. Ṭāhir denied funerary 
rites such as prayer to shame the rogue official publicly, underscore the threat posed by 
offenders like him, and display the religious superiority of the Abbasid regime. But however 
justified the governor may have felt in disregarding proper Muslim funerary care for Isḥāq’s 
body, classical Islamic doctrine insisted that rebels, despite their acts of insurrection, 
nonetheless deserved some type of funerary prayer.17 On the other hand, whether those 
who had committed grave offenses such as rebellion (baghy) or innovation (bidaʿ) deserved 
a Muslim funerary prayer was a question debated by prominent legal scholars.18 Al-Shāfiʿī 
(d. 204/820) emphasized that praying for the dead was an obligatory Islamic act and that 
only God could truly judge the merits of a purported unbeliever.19 Nevertheless, according 
to Saḥnūn (d. 240/855), Mālik b. Anas (d. 179/796) argued that the privilege of the Muslim 

14.  Halevi, Muhammad’s Grave, 75.
15.  Marion Katz, Body of Text: The Emergence of the Sunnī Law of Ritual Purity (Albany: State University of 

New York Press, 2002), 157.
16.  Kevin Reinhart, “Impurity/No Danger,” History of Religions 30, no. 1 (1990): 1–24, at 9–10, 14–15. Reinhart 

notes that “defiling things are merely dirty; they are ritually dangerous but not ritually impure.” S. R. Burge 
observes the difference between ritual and spiritual cleansing, on the one hand, and more mundane cleansing, 
on the other; see Burge, “Impurity/Danger!,” Islamic Law and Society 17, no. 3–4 (2010): 320–49.

17.  See Fierro, “Decapitation of Christians and Muslims,” 158; Halevi, Muhammad’s Grave, 163–64. Certain 
circumstances may also prevent the full performance of funerary rituals. When famine struck Baghdad in the 
fourth/tenth century, a group of people were buried together in one grave without prayer or washing. See 
Ibn al-Jawzī, al-Muntaẓam fī taʾrīkh al-mulūk wa-l-umam, ed. Muḥammad ʿAbd al-Qādir ʿAṭā and Muṣṭafā ʿAbd 
al-Qādir ʿAṭā (Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, 1992), 14:6. Further, despite the general requirement for Islamic 
funerary prayer, certain individuals were not granted such a prayer. An example is ʿĪsā b. Jaʿfar b. Muḥammad 
b. ʿĀṣim (d. 241/855), who, after defaming noble companions and family members of the Prophet Muḥammad, 
was beaten one thousand times and left in the sun to die, and then his body was thrown into the Tigris without 
funerary rituals such as washing or prayer. See al-Ṭabarī, Taʾrīkh, 9:200–201; al-Masʿūdī, Murūj al-dhahab, 
4:283–84; Ibn al-Jawzī, al-Muntaẓam, 11:284. 

18.  Ibn Rushd, Bidāyat al-mujtahid, 1:253; Ibn Qudāma, al-Mughnī, 2:416.
19.  Al-Shāfiʿī, Kitāb al-Umm, ed. Muḥammad Zuhrī al-Najjār, 2nd ed. (Beirut: Dār al-Fikr, 1990), 1:296–97. He 

cites the Qurʾanic verse “Surely the hypocrites shall be in the lowest depth of the fire, and none shall come to 
their help” (4:145). Muhammad Qasim Zaman also notes this in “Death, Funeral Processions, and the Articulation 
of Religious Authority in Early Islam,” Studia Islamica, no. 93 (2001): 27–58, at 30. 



Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 32 (2024)

 Dark Deeds, Broken Bodies •  411

funerary prayer should not be extended to rebels such as the Khawārij.20 Abū Ḥanīfa (d. 
150/767) similarly held that the Muslim funerary prayer should not be performed for rebels.21 
Even a person who committed suicide or a ḥadd (fixed punishment) offense deserved some 
type of funerary prayer according to Mālik b. Anas, though other jurists disagreed.22 Aḥmad 
b. Ḥanbal (d. 241/855), for instance, allowed exceptions to this rule. A fierce opponent of the 
miḥna, the theological campaign launched by the caliph al-Maʿmūn (r. 198–218/813–33) in 
218/833 to enforce belief in the created nature of the Qurʾan, Aḥmad b. Ḥanbal reportedly 
refused to pray over individuals who had believed in the Qurʾan’s createdness.23 

Did withholding funerary prayers serve as a final humiliation or potential harm for 
the deceased? Funerary boycotts were not uncommon, as Muhammad Qasim Zaman 
demonstrates, and they prompted conflicting legal and theological opinions over the reasons 
justifying communal disregard.24 Other practical concerns dictated whether a Muslim 
funerary prayer was to be expected in a given situation. Mālik b. Anas, for example, affirmed 
that prayer should not be performed for a hand, head, or leg if that was all that remained 
of the body.25 Mālik’s opinion is significant in the case of Yaḥyā b. ʿUmar, a rebel whose 
body was taken apart and whose mutilated head was later returned to his family. Moreover, 
some legal authorities, according to the Mālikī jurist Ibn Rushd (d. 595/1198), believed 
that funerary prayers should be withheld from innovators (that is, people who introduced 
what were considered unwarranted religious innovations) because it was a “reprimand 
and punishment for them” (al-zajr wa-l-ʿuqūba lahum).26 Whether this “reprimand and 
punishment” reflected the immediate judgment of God or a final penalty carried out by 
legal authorities is unclear. Ibn Rushd’s comment may reflect the legal and eschatological 

20.  Saḥnūn, Kitāb al-Mudawwana (Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, 1994), 1:258. For more on Mālik’s stance, 
see Abou El Fadl, Rebellion and Violence, 138–40.

21.  Ibn Qudāma, al-Mughnī, 2:417. See also al-Māwardī, al-Ḥāwī, 3:48, 51. For more on the Ḥanafī position, 
see Abou El Fadl, Rebellion and Violence, 146, 175. However, as Halevi observes, jurists “ultimately resolved 
most cases in favor of prayer, evincing a merciful tendency in Islamic law to integrate Muslim outcasts”; Halevi, 
Muhammad’s Grave, 164.

22.  According to the third/ninth-century jurist Saḥnūn, Mālik made a distinction as to whether the imam or 
ordinary believers were obliged to pray for a dead criminal. See Saḥnūn, al-Mudawwana, 1:254. Ibn Rushd notes 
that according to Jābir b. Samura, the Prophet Muḥammad “refused to pray for a man who had killed himself”; 
Ibn Rushd, Bidāyat al-mujtahid, 1:253–54. See also Ibn Qudāma, al-Mughnī, 2:415. 

23.  Zaman, “Death, Funeral Processions,” 35. Aḥmad b. Ḥanbal also affirmed that Muslim prayer should not 
extend to the rawāfiḍ, a pejorative label applied to Imāmīs who rejected the authority of the first three caliphs, 
Abū Bakr (d. 13/634), ʿUmar b. al-Khaṭṭāb (d. 23/644), and ʿUthman b. ʿAffān (d. 35/656); see Ibn Qudāma, 
al-Mughnī, 2:416.

24.  Zaman, “Death, Funeral Processions,” 54.
25.  Saḥnūn, al-Mudawwana, 1:256. Later Muslim legal authorities also took issue with praying over body parts 

and modifying the appearance of the dead. See Abū Bakr Muḥammad b. Muḥammad b. al-Labbād al-Qayrawānī, 
Kitāb al-Radd ʿalā al-Shāfiʿī, ed. ʿAbd al-Majīd b. Ḥamda (Tunis: Dār al-ʿArab li-l-Ṭibāʿa, 1986), 1:80. 

26.  Ibn Rushd, Bidāyat al-mujtahid, 1:253. According to Ibn Rushd, Mālik reportedly held this view, but I 
cannot find any earlier reports that he endorsed withholding prayer as a form of punishment. See Mālik b. 
Anas’s observations as recorded by his student Yaḥyā b. Yaḥyā al-Laythī in al-Muwaṭṭaʾ, ed. Muḥammad Fuʾād 
ʿAbd al-Bāqī (Beirut: Dār Iḥyāʾ al-Turāth al-ʿArabī, 1980), 1:228–30; Saḥnūn, al-Mudawwana, 1:258. 



412  •  Taryn Marashi

Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 32 (2024)

thinking of his time, since earlier Mālikī texts do not seem to associate the withholding 
of funerary prayers with punitive purposes. However, al-Shāfiʿī does consider the legality 
of prohibiting funerary prayers for dead rebels as a form of punishment and ultimately 
condemns such a penalty.27 Even so, for Ibn Rushd, the absence of Muslim funerary prayer 
reflected more than simple disdain for a deceased offender; such neglect could constitute a 
retributive act. Accordingly, for Muḥammad b. ʿAbd Allāh b. Ṭāhir to forbid prayer services 
for Isḥāq b. Jināḥ and to bury the latter’s body at the site of a Jewish ruin as opposed to a 
Muslim cemetery represented targeted measures meant to publicly denigrate the religious 
identity of the prisoner. 

Isḥāq b. Jināḥ’s burial at a Jewish ruin further points to a governmental effort to inter 
individuals believed to be hypocrites, apostates, or rebels in places distinct from the more 
respectable Muslim cemeteries. The presence of a non-Muslim body in a Muslim cemetery 
posed a spatial and spiritual threat to the community of the dead and the living who visited 
them. Such questions as whether a deceased Christian woman who had been impregnated 
by a Muslim man should be interred in a Christian or a Muslim cemetery were topics of 
delicate legal debate.28 A cemetery constitutes an intermediary place connecting the world 
of the living with the world of the dead, and the political, religious, and eschatological 
stakes involved in the selection of a place of interment were consequently high.29 The care 
devoted to the proper placement of bodies according to confessional identity reveals a legal 
and political effort to rigorously preserve the boundaries of Islamic sacred space, and this 
practice may have extended to accused criminals and rebels as well. The sixth/twelfth-
century Sunni preacher and historian Ibn al-Jawzī divulges that a government cemetery 
on the eastern side of Baghdad housed the bodies of dead criminals such as Aḥmad b. Naṣr, 
who had launched an unsuccessful insurrection in the year 231/846.30 Although there was 
no recognizable pattern in the arrangement of burial grounds in the early Islamic period, 
Ibn al-Jawzī’s terse detail may indicate a nascent Abbasid policy to bury perceived criminals 
and rebels in distinct cemeteries.31 The placement of the grave was a further indicator of 
the social status of the deceased; typically, outcasts and criminals were buried in less than 
desirable locations, sometimes with the carcass of an animal, or placed in less than desirable 
positions in the grave itself. 

The governor’s doubts about Isḥāq b. Jināḥ’s membership in the Muslim community 
are apparent from the narrative, as is his attempt to prevent others from rallying around 
the corpse of the official. Al-Iṣbahānī claims that a wall was erected around Isḥāq’s 
grave, presumably to limit the visual field and/or distinguish his burial site from other, 

27.  See al-Māwardī, al-Ḥāwī, 13:143. See also Abou El Fadl, Rebellion and Violence, 154; al-Shāfiʿī, al-Umm, 
4:235. 

28.  Ibn Qudāma, al-Mughnī, 2:420. See also Halevi, Muhammad’s Grave, 190.
29.  See Sepideh Parsapajouh and Mathieu Terrier, “Cimetières et tombes dans les mondes musulmans à la 

croisée des enjeux religieux, politiques et mémoriels: Une introduction,” Revue des mondes musulmans et de 
la Méditerranée 146 (2019): 11–24. Consider also Galila El Kadi and Alain Bonnamy, La cité des morts: Le Caire 
(Paris: Institut de recherche pour le développement, 2001). 

30.  Ibn al-Jawzī, al-Muntaẓam, 11:165–68. 
31.  For more on early Islamic funerary practices, see Halevi, Muhammad’s Grave, 148.



Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 32 (2024)

 Dark Deeds, Broken Bodies •  413

neighboring graves, thus preventing people from gathering around and interacting with the 
grave.32 In addition, Muḥammad b. ʿAbd Allāh b. Ṭāhir had Isḥāq’s corpse wrapped in water-
soaked garments, thereby speeding up the rate of its decomposition. Inundating a burial 
ground with water was not uncommon. The Abbasid caliph al-Mutawakkil (r. 232–47/847–
61) reportedly crushed and flooded the grave site of Ḥusayn b. ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib (d. 61/680), 
the third Shīʿī imam, with water from the Euphrates several times.33 It seems that a single 
inundation proved insufficient to deter Shīʿī pilgrims from visiting the grave of the revered 
ʿAlid. Perhaps water played a more dynamic role at Ḥusayn’s grave than it did at other 
graves; several medieval Shīʿī poets and pilgrims reflect on the sweet fragrance of the soil 
caused by water absorption.34 

How the living should preserve the dead, remove dead matter, perform funerary rites, 
visit the dead, and treat a grave site all carried social implications. After all, the maltreatment 
of a corpse served as a lasting insult to the family and community of the deceased. Although 
Muḥammad b. ʿAbd Allāh b. Ṭāhir’s refusal to perform a full Muslim burial for Isḥāq b. 
Jināḥ serves as a literary device to portray the governor as an unsympathetic and spiteful 
authority figure, the significance of the story rests on a very real fear that eschewing 
the essential rites of burial could, in some small or large measure, blemish the body and 
perhaps the spirit of the dead. 

Just Retaliation: The Case of Ibn al-Zayyāt 

As gruesome as these medieval historical descriptions of necroaggression may seem to 
the modern reader, they convey key information about why certain coercive techniques 
proved more effective in shaping the short-term political alliances and persuasions of 
the bureaucrats who either witnessed, heard about, or perhaps even participated in the 
events described. For instance, soon after al-Mutawakkil became caliph after the death of 
his brother al-Wāthiq (r. 227–32/842–47), he ordered the arrest, interrogation, torture, and 
death of the three-time vizier Muḥammad b. ʿAbd al-Malik al-Zayyāt (d. 233/847), a decision 

32.  This was not the only time an individual was buried near or under a wall; see al-Ṭabarī, Taʾrīkh, 9:77. 
Legal scholars discussed the necessity of a wall as well as its proper placement either near or beside the grave 
site of the deceased; see, for example, the analysis of the sixth/twelfth-century Ḥanafī jurist al-Kāsānī in Kitāb 
Badāʾiʿ al-ṣanāʾiʿ fī tartīb al-sharāʾiʿ, ed. ʿAlī Muḥammad Muʿawwaḍ and ʿĀdil Aḥmad ʿAbd al-Mawjūd (Beirut: 
Dār Kutub- al-ʿIlmiyya, 2003), 1:319.

33.  Al-Ṭabarī, Taʾrīkh, 9:185; al-Masʿūdī, Murūj al-dhahab, 4:110; al-Tanūkhī, Nishwār al-muḥāḍara wa-akhbār 
al-mudhākara, ed. ʿAbbūd al-Shāljī (Beirut: Dār Ṣādir, 1995), 6:321–22; Ibn al-Athīr, Kitāb al-Kāmil fī taʾrīkh, 
ed. ʿUmar ʿAbd al-Salām Tadmurī (Beirut: Dār al-Kitāb al-ʿArabī, 2010), 6:130. Both al-Ṭabarī and Ibn al-Athīr 
specify that al-Mutawakkil sought to prevent people from visiting the grave. He also ordered that anyone who 
attempted to go to the site be arrested and put in Baghdad’s infamous Maṭbaq prison. For further analysis, see 
Khalid Sindawi, “Visit to the Tomb of al-Ḥusayn b. ʿAlī in Shiite Poetry: First to Fifth Centuries AH (8th–11th 
Centuries CE),” Journal of Arabic Literature 37, no. 2 (2006): 230–58, at 236–37. Sindawi claims that al-Mutawakkil 
demolished and flooded the grave four times.

34.  Sindawi, “Visit to the Tomb,” 237. When water flooded the tombs of figures with less spiritual authority, 
the results were not nearly as positive. Ibn Khallikān reports that according to al-Ṭabarī, the grave of the 
notorious Umayyad governor al-Ḥajjāj (d. 95/714) was obliterated by flooding. See Ibn Khallikān, Kitāb Wafayāt 
al-aʿyān wa-anbāʾ abnāʾ al-zamān, ed. Iḥsān ʿAbbās (Beirut: Dār al-Thaqāfa, 1968–72), 2:53.



414  •  Taryn Marashi

Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 32 (2024)

that marked the beginning of a purge in the administration. The late third/ninth-century 
historian al-Ṭabarī, who offers the most detailed description of these events, tells us that 
while languishing in prison, “Ibn al-Zayyāt refused food and would not taste anything. 
He was extremely worried in prison, wept profusely, talked little, and pondered much. 
He remained [this way] for days.”35 Despondent, Ibn al-Zayyāt sat in a cell until he was 
transferred to an iron oven (tannūr), a device that Ibn al-Zayyāt himself had invented and 
used on another government official. According to the testimony of al-Dandānī, an unknown 
figure in al-Ṭabarī’s narrative, for several days Ibn al-Zayyāt sat in the oven with iron spikes 
and experienced various physical and psychological abuses depending on the day.36 “In the 
middle was a wooden board on which the tormented would sit when he wanted respite. 
He would sit on the wooden board for a time, then the overseer would come . . . and they 
would intensify the torture.”37 A central impression conveyed by al-Ṭabarī’s account is the 
comprehensive scope of the torturer’s plan to heighten the suffering of the vizier. 

Reports diverge over the manner of the vizier’s death. After removing Ibn al-Zayyāt 
from the iron oven, the caliph’s agents beat him viciously and, according to one report, 
continued beating him even once he was dead. “He was thrown down and struck on his 
abdomen fifty times with a cudgel, then turned over and likewise struck on his posterior 
until he died under the beating without the torturers knowing.”38 Reportedly unaware that 
Ibn al-Zayyāt had died at some point during the beating, the unnamed torturers continued 
to strike his corpse. Al-Ṭabarī also notes that they forcibly twisted Ibn al-Zayyāt’s neck 
and plucked out his beard when he died. By contrast, a second report states that “he died 
without being beaten.”39 Disregarding this alternative version of the events, many medieval 
Islamic narratives of Ibn al-Zayyāt’s death affirm that he endured immense suffering before 
his death.40

35.  Al-Ṭabarī, Taʾrīkh, 9:159. 
36.  The name al-Dandānī may have been an editorial error. See Joel Kramer’s comment in al-Ṭabarī, The 

History of al-Ṭabarī, vol. 34: Incipient Decline, trans. Joel Kramer (Albany: State University of New York Press, 
1989), 70n245. On the other hand, the name also appears in a much earlier account of the death of the caliph 
al-Amīn (d. 198/813), when al-Ṭabarī indicates that Quraysh al-Dandānī, a non-Arab client of the Abbasid general 
Ṭāhir b. al-Ḥusayn, had been commanded to kill al-Amīn. Unfortunately, the historian does not offer further 
detail about this mawlā nor about the other al-Dandānī hired to oversee Ibn al-Zayyāt’s torture.

37.  Al-Ṭabarī, Taʾrīkh, 9:159. Al-Iṣfahānī, when discussing al-Jāḥiẓ’s reflections on Ibn al-Zayyāt, remarks 
that the vizier’s punishment in the tannūr resembles hellfire. See al-Isfahānī, Kitāb Muḥāḍarat al-udabāʾ 
wa-muḥāwarat al-shuʿarāʾ wa-l-bulaghāʾ (Beirut: Dār al-Arqam, 2009), 1:337. See also the brief mention of Ibn 
al-Zayyāt’s death in al-Khaṭīb al-Baghdādī, Taʾrīkh Baghdād, 3:594–95. According to this account, the high-
ranking commander Itākh, charged with overseeing the torture, delegated the supervision of Ibn al-Zayyāt’s 
daily torment to two officials and guards. But the location of his death is unclear: he remained in a tannūr either 
in Itākh’s palace or in the Hārūnī palace. Itākh was a powerful figure in the administration: he controlled the 
regular army, the Mughāriba (free soldiers from the Islamic West), the Turks, the non-Arab clients (mawāli), the 
postal and intelligence services, the chamberlain’s office, and the guards of the caliphal palace. 

38.  Al-Ṭabarī, Taʾrīkh, 9:159.
39.  Ibid., 9:159–60. 
40.  Al-Yaʿqūbī notes that the caliph al-Mutawakkil punished Ibn al-Zayyāt until he died but does not offer 

further details. See his Taʾrīkh, ed. ʿAbd al-Amīr Muhannā, 2nd ed. (Beirut: Muʾassasat al-Aʿlamī li-l-Maṭbūʿāt, 



Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 32 (2024)

 Dark Deeds, Broken Bodies •  415

Other historical reports add an element of intra-administrative intrigue when discussing 
the demise of Ibn al-Zayyāt. Disliked by many of his colleagues, Ibn al-Zayyāt was, according 
to the historian al-Yaʿqūbī (d. 294/897), “a man of intense severity and little compassion,” 
traits that he manifested in his treatment of people.41 The historian al-Khaṭīb al-Baghdādī 
(d. 463/1071) adds that Ibn al-Zayyāt and Ibn Abī Duʾād (d. 240/854), a chief judge and 
inquisitor during the miḥna controversy whom al-Mutawakkil favored early on in his reign, 
were bitter enemies. Sometime in the year 229/843–44, Ibn al-Zayyāt had conducted an 
investigation of Ibn Abī Duʾād, which later led to the imprisonment of several officials.42 
Aware of the factional discord between the two men, al-Mutawakkil manipulated their 
rivalry: al-Khaṭīb al-Baghdādī tells us that the caliph “goaded him [Ibn Abī Duʾād] until 
he seized Ibn al-Zayyāt and demanded the properties belonging to him.”43 Although Ibn 
al-Zayyāt’s imprisonment was overseen by the Turkish military commander Itākh (d. 
235/849), Ibn Abī Duʾād appears to have been involved in the vizier’s interrogation and was 
easily persuaded to seize the latter’s property. Just before presenting this report, al-Khaṭīb 
al-Baghdādī indicates that Ibn al-Zayyāt had been overcome with love for a singing girl he 
had purchased from a Khurasani man.44 In al-Khaṭīb al-Baghdādī’s portrayal, Ibn al-Zayyāt 
was too preoccupied with his own personal affairs to pay attention to the plots being 
hatched by his rivals. 

In addition, Ibn al-Zayyāt’s familiarity with the iron oven, a device he had used earlier on 
Ibn Asbāṭ al-Miṣrī, an unknown government functionary, disturbed his political competitors. 
According to al-Ṭabarī, Ibn Abī Duʾād claimed that Ibn al-Zayyāt took everything from Ibn 
Asbāṭ al-Miṣrī when torturing the latter in the iron oven.45 Ibn Abī Duʾād’s critique of the 
heavy-handed punishment of Ibn Asbāṭ al-Miṣrī appears immediately after a description of 
Ibn al-Zayyāt’s dark musings and profuse weeping inside the oven, and this juxtaposition 
of the two men conveys a certain retributive kismet: Ibn al-Zayyāt suffered what he 
had made another suffer. Other medieval Muslim historians also use the iron oven as a 

2010), 2:447. For other reports on Ibn al-Zayyāt’s death, see Ibn al-Jawzī, al-Muntaẓam, 11:189; Ibn Khallikān, 
Wafayāt al-ʿayān, 1:478–79; Ibn ʿAbd al-Rabbihi, al-ʿIqd al-farīd (Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, 1983), 2:38; 
Yāqūt al-Ḥamawī, Muʿjam al-udabāʾ, ed. Iḥsān ʿAbbās (Beirut: Dār al-Gharb al-Islāmī, 1993), 5:2102; al-Masʿūdī, 
Murūj al-dhahab, 4:72–73; Khalīl b. Aybak al-Ṣafadī, Kitāb al-Wāfī bi-l-wafayāt, ed. Aḥmad al-Arnaʾūṭ and Turkī 
Muṣṭafā (Beirut: Dār Iḥyāʾ al-Turāth al-ʿArabī, 2000), 4:26; Ibn Ṭiqṭaqā, Kitāb al-Fakhrī fī al-ādāb al-sulṭāniyya 
wa-l-duwal al-islāmiyya, ed. ʿAbd al-Qādir Muḥammad Māyū (Beirut: Dār al-Qalam al-ʿArabī, 1997), 1:233. See 
also D. Sourdel, “Ibn al-Zayyāt,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed., ed. P. J. Bearman et al. (Leiden: Brill, 1954–
2009). 

41.  Al-Yaʿqūbī, Taʾrīkh, 2:447. Al-Jāḥiẓ describes Ibn al-Zayyāt’s cruel nature in Kitāb al-Rasāʾil al-adabiyya 
(Beirut: Dār wa-Maktabat al-Hilāl, 2002), 1:342–43.

42.  For more on this dynamic, see J. P. Turner, “The End of the Miḥna,” Oriens 38 (2010): 89–106, at 90–91.
43.  Al-Khaṭīb al-Baghdādī, Taʾrīkh Baghdād, 3:595. The Damascene hadith scholar and historian al-Dhahabī 

(d. 748/1348) preserves a similar version of al-Khaṭīb al-Baghdādī’s report; see his Taʾrīkh al-islām wa-wafāyat 
al-mashāhīr wa-l-aʿlām, ed. Bashshār ʿAwwād Maʿrūf (Beirut: Dār al-Gharb al-Islāmī, 2003), 5:924. See also 
al-Ṣafadī, al-Wāfī, 4:27. 

44.  Al-Khaṭīb al-Baghdādī, Taʾrīkh Baghdād, 3:594.
45.  Al-Ṭabarī, Taʾrīkh, 9:159. Aḥmad b. Khālid (otherwise referred to as Abū al-Wazīr) also recalled Ibn 

al-Zayyāt’s treatment of Ibn Asbāṭ al-Miṣrī.



416  •  Taryn Marashi

Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 32 (2024)

literary signpost to spotlight intra-administrative hostility. The historian Ibn Khallikān (d. 
681/1282) reports that upon leaving the deathbed of the caliph al-Wāthiq, Jaʿfar b. Muʿtaṣim 
overheard Itākh and Ibn al-Zayyāt hatch a plan to assassinate him. “We will kill him in the 
tannūr,” Ibn al-Zayyāt whispered. “Instead,” Itākh responded, “let’s leave him in cold water 
until he dies, so no one will see the cause of death.”46 In this seemingly private conversation 
between Itākh and Ibn al-Zayyāt, both display their awareness of murder tactics that might 
not leave evidence of intentional bodily harm. More importantly, this narrative offers a 
justification for why Jaʿfar b. Muʿtaṣim (soon-to-be al-Mutawakkil) chose the iron oven 
for Ibn al-Zayyāt’s death, a punishment reciprocal to the method of assassination that the 
latter had intended for Jaʿfar. It may also be significant that the caliph al-Wāthiq himself 
died in an oven, a detail that J. P. Turner speculates may hold literary value in relation 
to Ibn al-Zayyāt’s torture device.47 Apparently foreshadowing Ibn al-Zayyāt’s demise, Ibn 
Khallikān’s report draws on suspense and irony in its depiction of these officials plotting to 
execute Jaʿfar b. Muʿtaṣim, who would become their own executioner. 

Although Ibn al-Zayyāt’s death took place without a large audience, medieval Muslim 
historians give the impression that reports of his torture circulated widely. Reports of 
known but unseen courtly violence conveyed a political and moral lesson for both members 
of the administration and medieval readers. By describing Ibn al-Zayyāt’s anguish, medieval 
Islamic narratives expressed the powerlessness of the vizier coupled with the limitlessness 
of al-Mutawakkil’s vengeance, no doubt generating unease among the caliph’s subordinates. 
The unease was justified, for soon after becoming caliph, al-Mutawakkil captured, 
imprisoned, whipped, and interrogated several high-ranking members of the previous 
administration who were said to have initially favored a different heir after the unexpected 
death of al-Wāthiq.48 Rumors and reports of Ibn al-Zayyāt’s agony in the oven, a fate sealed 
by iron walls and concealed from the semipublic venue of a majlis (council room), were 
powerful historical and literary testaments to the political alliances that the caliph easily 
created and just as easily severed. 

Even after Ibn al-Zayyāt’s death, his buried body suffered maltreatment. Ibn al-Jawzī, 
who relies on al-Ṭabarī’s account, indicates that Ibn al-Zayyāt was placed in “a shallow 
grave,” and at some point “dogs dug him up and ate his flesh.”49 Ibn al-Jawzī uses the passive 

46.  Ibn Khallikān, Wafayāt al-aʿyān, 1:478, citing al-Ṣūlī. Itākh’s suggestion to use “cold water” also conveys 
dramatic irony since he reportedly died of thirst while in prison. See al-Ṭabarī, Taʾrīkh, 9:170. 

47.  Turner, “End of the Miḥna,” 93.
48.  Ibid., 94. For example, the vizier ʿ Umar b. Faraj was detained alongside members of his family, imprisoned, 

and pressured into giving up his numerous properties. See al-Ṭabarī, Taʾrīkh, 9:161. 
49.  Al-Ṭabarī, Taʾrīkh, 9:159–60; Ibn al-Jawzī, al-Muntaẓam, 11:202. Interestingly, there are several accounts 

that mention canine exhumation and consumption of a buried individual. For example, the vizier Fakhr al-Mulk 
met a similar end at the caliph’s hands: “He imprisoned him, then killed him by the foot of the mountains 
near al-Ahwāz on Saturday, saying it was the third day in the third week of the first of the month of Rabīʿ in 
the year 407[/1016]. He was interred there. . . . The dogs unearthed his grave and ate him.” See Ibn Khallikān, 
Wafayāt al-aʿyān, 5:126. In a case involving another animal making off with the body parts of a deceased person, 
al-Khaṭīb al-Baghdādī claims that a rat scampered across al-Wāthiq’s deathbed and removed his eye; Tayeb 
El-Hibri, “The Image of the Caliph al-Wāthiq: A Riddle of Religious and Historical Significance,” Quaderni di 
Studi Arabi 19 (2001): 41–60, at 55–56.



Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 32 (2024)

 Dark Deeds, Broken Bodies •  417

voice and thus does not specify who dug the shallow grave, whereas al-Ṭabarī names Ibn 
al-Zayyāt’s two sons, Sulaymān and ʿUbayd Allāh, as the overseers of their father’s funerary 
care. Referring to their father as a “dissolute sinner,” the sons purposefully dug a grave for 
him that was not deep enough.50 The shallowness of the grave allowed dogs to consume 
Ibn al-Zayyāt’s flesh. This outcome shows a conspicuous disregard for the appropriateness 
of the burial site, which, according to Islamic legal precedent, should have had a ground 
depth permitting the deceased to face Mecca while lying on the right side.51 Ibn al-Zayyāt’s 
postmortem maltreatment—including extreme beating, the plucking out of his beard, the 
forcible twisting of his neck, and the eating of his corpse by dogs—betrays both the caliph 
al-Mutawakkil’s deep animosity toward the vizier and the sons’ shame of their father. The 
brutality of the caliph’s agents and the neglect of Ibn al-Zayyāt’s sons manifest a degree 
of physical and possibly spiritual violation of the integrity of the corpse that was clearly 
intentional. 

Why did al-Mutawakkil impose such torture and necroaggression on Ibn al-Zayyāt? 
According to al-Ṭabarī, when al-Wāthiq died in the year 232/847, Ibn al-Zayyāt favored 
al-Wāthiq’s son Muḥammad as the next caliph instead of al-Wāthiq’s brother Jaʿfar b. 
Muʿtaṣim. Al-Ṭabarī claims that Ibn al-Zayyāt’s choice was what led to his demise.52 But 
several reports also aver that al-Mutawakkil had planned to seize and kill the vizier once 
he ascended to the caliphate in retribution for a humiliating experience he had endured 
just weeks earlier. Ibn al-Zayyāt had made the fateful mistake of insulting Jaʿfar about 
his “effeminate fashion [and] long hair” (zayy al-mukhannathīn lahu shaʿr qafan), which 
prompted the caliph al-Wāthiq to hire a cupper to shear Jaʿfar’s hair and hit him in the face 
with it.53 Although al-Ṭabarī does not elaborate on what made Jaʿfar’s fashion particularly 
“effeminate,” he emphasizes the extremely offensive nature of Ibn al-Zayyāt’s comment. 

Rage over this indignity consumed Jaʿfar, according to the reports of al-Ṭabarī and Ibn 
al-Dāya (d. ca. 330–40/941–51). “Never was I so distressed by anything as I was when my 

50.  Al-Ṭabarī, Taʾrīkh, 9:160.
51.  For more detail on funerary customs, see Halevi, Muhammad’s Grave, 188. The canine consumption 

of corpses placed in shallow graves is also a literary device addressed by scholars of European society and 
folklore; see Paul Barber, “Forensic Pathology and the European Vampire,” Journal of Folklore Research 24, no. 
1 (1987): 1–32. Interestingly, Barber makes the case that the ground itself can reject a corpse if it is buried too 
superficially (p. 13). 

52.  Al-Ṭabarī, Taʾrīkh, 9:157–58. Al-Ṣafadī also mentions that Ibn al-Zayyāt believed in the createdness of the 
Qurʾan in al-Wāfī, 4:27. For Ibn al-Zayyāt’s conduct after the death of al-Wāthiq, see al-Tanūkhī, Kitāb al-Faraj 
baʿd al-shidda, ed. ʿAbbūd al-Shāljī (Beirut: Dār Ṣādir, 1978), 2:259–64.

53.  Al-Ṭabarī, Taʾrīkh, 9:157. Ibn al-Dāya also preserves a missive written by al-Wāthiq to Ibn al-Zayyāt, 
instructing him to “cut the head hair of Jaʿfar, and clean his dress and make him look agreeable!” Jaʿfar “left 
furious, and the agent struck him.” From Ibn al-Dāya’s account, it is unclear how Jaʿfar was struck (and with 
what). Ibn al-Dāya adds that Jaʿfar sat in a confined room (maḥbis) for weeks. See Ibn al-Dāya, Kitāb al-Mukāfaʾa 
wa-ḥusn al-ʿuqbā, ed. Maḥmūd Muḥammad Shākir (Cairo: al-Maktaba al-Tijāriyya al-Kubrā, 1940), 73. For more 
detail on Ibn al-Zayyāt’s death, see al-Masʿūdī, Murūj al-dhahab, 4:72–73; Ibn al-Jawzī, al-Muntaẓam, 11:189; Ibn 
Khallikān, Wafayāt al-aʿyān, 1:477–79; al-Khaṭīb al-Baghdādī, Taʾrīkh Baghdād, 3:144–46. See also Sourdel, “Ibn 
al-Zayyāt.” 



418  •  Taryn Marashi

Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 32 (2024)

hair was sheared on the new black garment.”54 The forcible shearing impacted Jaʿfar deeply, 
al-Ṭabarī explains, because he had worn a special garment intending to curry al-Wāthiq’s 
favor and instead found himself humiliated. Ibn al-Dāya, a municipal official living in Egypt 
who wrote a collection of moralistic tales, similarly uses the topos of undignified shearing to 
explain why Jaʿfar b. Muʿtaṣim harbored such ill will for Ibn al-Zayyāt. Expressing shock over 
Ibn al-Zayyāt’s insult, Jaʿfar defensively declared, “I have been raised with an abundance 
[of hair] that should not be removed from me, for it is well groomed.”55 Ibn al-Dāya adds 
that Jaʿfar reportedly confessed, “I told myself that I would not spare him a moment once 
I attained the caliphate.”56 Al-Yaʿqūbī confirms that once Jaʿfar ascended the throne, he 
waited precisely forty days—the required period of mourning—after al-Wāthiq’s death to 
torture and kill Ibn al-Zayyāt.57 This detail conveys a sense of anticipation on the part of 
al-Mutawakkil, who seemingly delayed the killing of the vizier to accommodate Islamic 
ritual. From Ibn al-Dāya’s perspective, the caliph had several reasons to kill Ibn al-Zayyāt, 
but this hairy incident proved the most decisive. The involuntary shearing to which Jaʿfar 
had been subjected likely explains why several narratives say that Ibn al-Zayyāt had his 
beard plucked out when he died, an act that mirrored the humiliation experienced by Jaʿfar. 
Perhaps al-Mutawakkil sought to restore his dignity by punishing Ibn al-Zayyāt in a way 
that matched the perceived offense. 

Although shaving or shearing head hair constituted a temporary penalty, since hair has 
the benefit of growing back, the forcible removal of another’s head and facial hair was a 
shamefully visible and deliberate injury that carried a great deal of social scorn. “Beware 
of the mutilation of the punishment of shearing the head and the beard,” the Umayyad 
ruler ʿUmar b. ʿAbd al-Azīz (d. 101/720) intoned.58 The judge Ibn Qutayba (d. 276/889), 
who records this report, reminds the reader that involuntary hair removal was a serious 
penalty and not to be taken lightly. Indeed, Ibn Qutayba classifies forcible hair removal as 
a type of mutilation (muthla), and Muslim legal authorities debated whether this form of 
punishment was too extreme to be allowed as a type of taʿzīr (discretionary penalty). The 
Basran litterateur al-Jāḥiẓ (d. 255/868) reportedly said that “there was no worse punishment 
for a civil servant in Baghdad than to have his beard shaved off.”59 To add insult to injury, 

54.  Al-Ṭabarī, Taʾrīkh, 9:157. 
55.  Ibn al-Dāya, al-Mukāfaʾa, 73. Al-Khaṭīb al-Baghdādī quotes the opinions of several administrators about 

the fate of Aḥmad b. Naṣr, a figure killed during the miḥna controversy, and inserts a comment made by 
al-Mutawakkil about Ibn al-Zayyāt. Though al-Mutawakkil agreed that the death of Aḥmad b. Naṣr was unjust, 
he remarked that he would “burn [Ibn] al-Zayyāt with fire.” See al-Khaṭīb al-Baghdādī, Taʾrīkh Baghdād, 6:403. 
For more on the literary style of Ibn al-Dāya, see Arie Schippers, “‘Tales with a Good Ending’ in Arabic Literature: 
Narrative Art and Theory of the Arabic World,” Quaderni di Studi Arabi 4 (1986): 57–70.

56.  Ibn al-Dāya, al-Mukāfaʾa, 73. 
57.  Al-Yaʿqūbī, Taʾrīkh, 2:447.
58.  Abū Muḥammad ʿAbd Allāh b. Qutayba al-Dīnawarī, Kitāb ʿUyūn al-akhbār (Beirut: Dār al-Kutub 

al-ʿIlmiyya, 1997), 1:141.
59.  See Petra M. Sijpesteijn, “Shaving Hair and Beards in Early Islamic Egypt: An Arab Innovation?,” Al-Masāq 

30, no. 1 (2018): 9–25, at 24. In medieval Arab Islamic culture, head and beard hair were social representations 
of virility, manliness, and religiosity. A tangible reflection of the individual, hair served as an effective and 



Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 32 (2024)

 Dark Deeds, Broken Bodies •  419

Jaʿfar b. Muʿtaṣim was a member of the Abbasid imperial elite, not a low-ranking municipal 
servant; thus, the forcible removal of his hair may have had a more severe impact on his 
reputation at the Abbasid court. The shearing of Jaʿfar and, in response, the plucking of Ibn 
al-Zayyāt’s beard after he died demonstrate that involuntary hair removal was viewed and 
feared as a type of bodily injury. 

The connection between the forcible shearing of Jaʿfar’s hair and Ibn al-Zayyāt’s 
postmortem beard plucking also evokes a sense of just retaliation. In his narrative of the 
torture of Ibn al-Zayyāt, al-Ṭabarī does not condemn al-Mutawakkil’s actions. Rather, he 
offers a personal justification for the caliph’s behavior and then transitions to discuss how 
al-Mutawakkil dealt with other viziers. From this angle, the demise of Ibn al-Zayyāt can 
be read as an event that betrayed more about the caliph’s character than it did about his 
vizier’s. Al-Masʿūdī’s narrative likewise presents al-Mutawakkil’s anger over Ibn al-Zayyāt 
as fully warranted, for the latter had attained too much authority during the reigns of 
al-Muʿtaṣim (r. 218–27/833-842) and al-Wāthiq and had even harmed the populace (though 
al-Masʿūdī does not elaborate further on this detail).60 Both historians stress that Ibn 
al-Zayyāt had been the first to use the tannūr on other administrators.61 Their reports 
indicate that the caliph had no choice but to subdue a powerful official who had taken 
advantage of his political position.

While al-Ṭabarī and al-Masʿūdī present the death of Ibn al-Zayyāt as a justifiable act of 
retaliation by the caliph, at other times violence against a corpse spelled certain political 
disaster. For example, when the Abbasid caliph Hārūn al-Rashīd (r. 169–93/786–809) killed 
one of his most trusted advisers, Jaʿfar b. Yaḥyā b. Khālid b. Barmak (d. 187/803), he hung 

immediate way of distinguishing between different social, cultural, and religious groups. The health and 
condition of a beard could also indicate sociopolitical status. Reflecting on the inefficient work of the Baghdadi 
administrator Ibn Shīrzād, the Buyid prince Muʿizz al-Dawla (r. 334–56/945–67) reportedly said, “When I saw his 
beard, I said [to myself]: This man is better suited to be a cloth merchant than a clerk.” See Miskawayh, Tajārib 
al-umam, 6:120. Whether self-imposed or forced, the removal of head hair could mark changed social status, 
exclusion from or inclusion in a different religious community, the engendering of the body, ritualized acts, 
and personal tastes. The beard was a symbolic feature of the face, the person, and perhaps, in certain Islamic 
contexts, even the spirit. For more literature on removing facial hair, see Chase F. Robinson, “Neck-Sealing in 
Early Islam,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 48, no. 3 (2005): 401–41, at 410. Robinson 
includes an early account of a man named Abraha who, when threatened by another, shaves his hair to present 
himself as enslaved. Robinson also describes the punitive measure of cutting off the forelocks of non-Arabs who 
failed to make jizya payments. See also Christian Bromberger, “Hair: From the West to the Middle East through 
the Mediterranean (the 2007 AFS Mediterranean Studies Section Address),” Journal of American Folklore 121, 
no. 482 (2008): 379–99; Simonetta Calderini, “Two Radical Hair-Cuts in Medieval Egypt: Gendering Politics in 
Times of Trouble,” Al-Masāq 20, no. 1 (2008): 17–28; Ingrid Pfluger-Schindeck, “On the Symbolism of Hair in 
Islamic Societies: An Analysis of Approaches,” Anthropology of the Middle East 1, no. 2 (2006): 72–88; Robert 
Bartlett, “Symbolic Meanings of Hair in the Middle Ages,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 4 (1994): 
43–60; Marion Katz, “The Shearing of Forelocks as a Penitential Rite,” in The Heritage of Arabo-Islamic Learning: 
Studies Presented to Wadad Kadi, ed. Maurice Pomerantz and Aram A. Shahin, 191–206 (Leiden: Brill, 2016); 
Lloyd Ridgeon, “Shaggy or Shaved? The Symbolism of Hair among Persian Qalandar Sufis,” Iran & the Caucasus 
14, no. 2 (2010): 233–63; Geert Jan van Gelder, “Rebarbative Beards in Classical Arabic Literature,” Al-Masāq 30, 
no. 1 (2018): 56–70. 

60.  Al-Masʿūdī, Murūj al-dhahab, 4:72–73. 
61.  Al-Ṭabarī, Taʾrīkh, 9:159; al-Masʿūdī, Murūj al-dhahab, 4:72.



420  •  Taryn Marashi

Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 32 (2024)

the latter’s dismembered body on a bridge in Baghdad.62 This act of excessive violence 
against the dead cost the caliph dearly: according to the historian Balʿamī (d. 363/974), 
it tarnished his honor and triggered political unrest.63 Examining historical narratives of 
the meteoric rise and fall of the Barmakid family, Julie Scott Meisami acknowledges this 
motif and, though less concerned with the subject of postmortem harm, illustrates the 
lasting damage caused to the caliph’s reputation by his disrespectful abuse of the body 
of an official. More importantly, these accounts reveal a somewhat simplistic tendency 
among some medieval Muslim historians to attribute dramatic political change to a singular 
transgression committed by members of the Abbasid ruling elite. 

Thus, when a similar fate seemingly befell Ibn al-Zayyāt, he likened his political downfall 
to what had happened to the Barmakids. The fourth/tenth-century judge-historian 
al-Tanūkhī informs us that just before his death, Ibn al-Zayyāt sat inside the iron oven and 
bemoaned his fate to a jailer: “Do you see me doing more than what the Barmakids did? How 
useful were they, when they fell into the same situation as me, for Islam of the age and the 
injustice of the ruler?”64 However unlikely its actual occurrence,65 the reported conversation 
conveys an overt critique of al-Mutawakkil’s decision to punish Ibn al-Zayyāt. Ibn al-Zayyāt 
presents himself as the victim and warns the jailer of the injustice of al-Mutawakkil’s reign, 
insinuating a declining moral ethos in the caliph’s administration. This warning carries 
political clout given that al-Mutawakkil had attained the caliphate just weeks before Ibn 
al-Zayyāt’s imprisonment. Caliphs often replaced officials of the previous administration 
with individuals loyal to them at the start of their reigns, but for al-Mutawakkil to begin 
his rule with the torture and killing of Ibn al-Zayyāt, a high-ranking vizier who had served 
two earlier caliphs, was a bold political decision. Al-Tanūkhī gives voice to Ibn al-Zayyāt’s 
sense of unfair treatment and, in doing so, criticizes the abuses ordered by the caliph. It 
may also be reasonably assumed that al-Tanūkhī recounts this anecdote as a lesson for 
other administrators, for the report about Ibn al-Zayyāt’s complaint is placed between 
two stories about the generosity of the Barmakids, one from ʿUbayd Allāh b. Yaḥyā b. 
Khāqān (d. 262/876), a minister who worked for both al-Mutawakkil and al-Muʿtamid (r. 

62.  Al-Ṭabarī, Taʾrīkh, 8:296.
63.  Julie Scott Meisami, “Masʿūdī on Love and the Fall of the Barmakids,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic 

Society of Great Britain and Ireland 121, no. 2 (1989): 252–77, at 260–61. For more on the relationship between 
Hārūn al-Rashīd and Jaʿfar b. Yaḥyā, notably the death of the latter and the consequences of his death, see 
al-Jahshiyārī, al-Wuzarāʾ wa-l-kuttāb, ed. Muṣṭafā al-Saqā, Ibrāhīm al-Ibyārī, and ʿAbd al-Ḥafīẓ al-Shalabī (Cairo: 
Muṣṭafā al-Bābī al-Ḥalabī, 1938), 233–35, 237–38, 241. On the role of fiction in the story of the Barmakids’ fall, see 
Philip Kennedy, “The Fall of the Barmakids in Historiography and Fiction: Recognition and Disclosure,” Journal 
of Abbasid Studies 3 (2016): 167–238. Balʿamī was not the only historian to critique the caliph’s execution of 
the Barmakid family. For more on literary depictions of their fall, see A. Hámori, “Going Down in Style: The 
Pseudo-Ibn Qutayba’s Story of the Fall of the Barmakīs,” Princeton Papers in Near Eastern Studies, no. 3 (1994): 
89–125. 

64.  Al-Tanūkhī, Nishwār al-muḥāḍara, 1:17. 
65.  Although the conversation recounted by al-Tanūkhī is improbable, other historians preserve similar 

material—namely, a few lines of poetry reportedly recited by Ibn al-Zayyāt while he was inside the iron oven. 
See al-Khaṭīb al-Baghdādī, Taʾrīkh Baghdād, 3:595–96. 



Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 32 (2024)

 Dark Deeds, Broken Bodies •  421

256–79/870–92), and the other from Abū Makhlad ʿAbd Allāh b. Yaḥyā Ṭabarī, a commander 
under the Buyid prince Muʿizz al-Dawla (d. 356/967).66 Read with the benefit of hindsight, 
these accounts amplify the kindness of the Barmakids and convey a crucial message about 
their undue fate. By intertwining the fall of the Barmakids with the demise of Ibn al-Zayyāt, 
al-Tanūkhī reminds the reader of the endemic risk of having too much political ambition, 
the importance of rivalries and alliances within the administration, and the abruptness 
with which one’s fortunes can irrevocably change. 

Ibn al-Zayyāt purportedly compared his fall to that of the Barmakids, but his death and 
postmortem fate did not completely parallel those of Jaʿfar b. Yaḥyā. Several reports claim 
that Jaʿfar was dismembered, although al-Tanūkhī contends that the corpse was instead set 
on fire.67 Despite the fact that cremation was prohibited in Islam (except, according to the 
Qurʾan, if the deceased was a sorcerer), Abbasid authorities used it to dispose of the bodies of 
rebels, murderers, heretics, and other criminals.68 Thus, incinerating the body of a member 
of the political elite served to stress the seriousness of the victim’s bureaucratic missteps 
and to convey a warning to their peers.69 Cremation prevented the full performance of 
Muslim funerary rituals, which undermined the social reputation and political status of 
the family of the deceased. The rise of the Abbasid dynasty, which rested on the charred 
remains of the disinterred corpses of earlier Umayyad caliphs such as Sulaymān b. ʿAbd 
al-Malik (r. 96–99/715–17) and Hishām b. ʿAbd al-Malik (r. 105–25/724–43), points to an 
Abbasid proclivity for fire as a method of postmortem harm and even expulsion from the 
Muslim community.70 What is more, in the case of Hishām b. ʿAbd al-Malik, the individuals 
hired to exhume the corpse of the Umayyad caliph also struck it eighty times before setting 
it ablaze.71 Al-Masʿūdī adds anatomical details about the beaten and burned remains of the 
Umayyad caliph’s unearthed body, lending this report an air of verisimilitude. 

66.  Al-Tanūkhī, Nishwār al-muḥāḍara, 1:15–16, 18–19.
67.  Ibid., 8:196. Al-Tanūkhī implies that the wealth of the Barmakids attracted the caliph’s attention. 

Al-Jahshiyārī similarly records that the caliph burned Jaʿfar b. Yaḥyā’s corpse after it was displayed on a bridge 
in Baghdad; al-Jahshiyārī, Al-wuzarāʾ, 237.

68.  Q. 20:74, 20:79. 
69.  In the case of Jaʿfar b. Yaḥyā, several factors (acquisition of wealth, release of an ʿ Alid prisoner, arrogance, 

intrigue with the sister of Hārūn al-Rashīd, and more) seemingly contributed to his death. See Meisami, “Masʿūdī 
on Love,” 252–57. Consider the similar case of the governor Afshīn Khaydar (d. 226/841), who, after being 
charged with conspiracy and heresy, was killed by caliphal agents. Afshīn made the mistake of challenging 
the authority of Muḥammad b. ʿAbd Allāh b. Ṭāhir, who set up a tribunal against him and managed to recover 
evidence of his “heretical affiliations.” After he died, his body was set on fire, and his ashes were then thrown 
into the Tigris. See al-Yaʿqūbī, Taʾrīkh, 2:439; al-Ṭabarī, Taʾrīkh, 9:114; Miskawayh, Tajārib al-umam, 4:272. 

70.  Al-Masʿūdī, Murūj al-dhahab, 3:171–72; Ibn Khallikān, Wafayāt al-aʿyān, 6:108–9. 
71.  Al-Masʿūdī, Murūj al-dhahab, 3:171–72. “We passed by the grave of Hishām b. ʿAbd al-Malik, and we 

removed him completely—[that is,] what was left of him except for his nasal septum. Then ʿ Abd Allāh struck him 
eighty times and burned him. Then we removed Sulaymān b. ʿAbd al-Malik from the ground in Dābiq [in Syria]. 
We did not find a thing on him except his spinal column, ribs, and skull. We burned him, and we did so with 
others beside the two Banū Umayya. Their graves were in Qinnasrīn [a province in northern Syria].” 



422  •  Taryn Marashi

Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 32 (2024)

Perhaps unsurprisingly, such irreverence for the dead or, in the case of Ibn al-Zayyāt, 
soon-to-be-dead was not an unusual feature in medieval Islamic narratives addressing the 
capital punishment of political offenders. A morbid intrigue dances through these medieval 
Islamic narratives, intended to excite and warn the reader of the ways in which the ruling 
authorities harmed others. Ibn al-Zayyāt’s torture underscores the peril of administrators 
making the fatal mistake of offending those who will soon outrank them and reveals a 
political arena in which bodily debasement was both stimulating and didactic. Beaten 
and consumed, the corpse of Ibn al-Zayyāt accrued political meaning with each act of 
necroaggression.72 The postmortem violations of Ibn al-Zayyāt’s body convey a macabre 
sense of dramatic irony and a message that punitive retaliation for perceived wrongs can 
continue even after an individual has died. The reports of Ibn al-Zayyāt’s political rivalries, 
as recounted by al-Yaʿqūbī and al-Khaṭīb al-Baghdādī, present the vizier as a despised 
aggressor who deserved his demise. The narratives of al-Ṭabarī and al-Masʿūdī also provide 
a legitimate explanation for al-Mutawakkil’s ire and suggest that Ibn al-Zayyāt’s death was 
not necessarily undeserved. Conversely, Ibn al-Zayyāt’s introspective confession while 
inside the iron oven, reported by al-Tanūkhī, paints the vizier as a hapless target of both the 
unreasonable anger of al-Mutawakkil and the inscrutable vagaries of political fate. 

When read together, these contrasting depictions of al-Mutawakkil and Ibn al-Zayyāt 
yield several key insights about the descriptive function of necroaggression. Although 
gratuitous damage to the body of the deceased did not necessarily injure the social reputation 
of the perpetrator, it could hurt the political legacy of both. But making an example of 
Ibn al-Zayyāt, a prominent figure who held immense sway among leading bureaucrats in 
Samarra and who had initially preferred a different heir after al-Wāthiq’s untimely death, 
helped al-Mutawakkil tackle the difficult challenge of controlling the various political 
factions emerging at the Abbasid court, most notably within the Turkish military elite.73 
As an offense committed against the sanctity of the body of the deceased, necroaggression 
constitutes an overt polemical tool for a performative show of force and a visceral transfer 
of power. Indeed, necroaggressions performed between differently ranked political actors 
were inextricably tied to the transfer of power, and medieval Muslim historians such as 
al-Ṭabarī, who offers the most detailed account of the violations of Ibn al-Zayyāt’s corpse, 
recognized the destructive and productive potential of this descriptive device. 

72.  Because individuals and groups give meaning to death, a body can also manifest a society’s collective 
values. Loren D. Lybarger fleshes out the role of death and burial in the narrative of Adam found in qiṣāṣ 
al-anbiyāʾ (stories of the prophets) literature, relying on Verdery’s discussion of the political role of dead bodies 
as a kind of symbolic capital highly effective in connecting existential and transcendent concerns. Although 
Lybarger’s analysis of Adam does not consider corpse desecration, his use of Verdery’s analytical frame enriches 
discussions of corpse violence in the Abbasid administration. See Lybarger, “The Demise of Adam in the ‘Qiṣāṣ 
al-Anbiyāʾ’: The Symbolic Politics of Death and Re-burial in the Islamic ‘Stories of the Prophets,’” Numen 55, no. 
5 (2008): 497–535.

73.  For more on this political arena, see Matthew S. Gordon, The Breaking of a Thousand Swords: A History 
of the Turkish Military of Samarra (A.H. 200–275/815–889 C.E.) (Albany: State University of New York Press, 
2001), 75–85.



Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 32 (2024)

 Dark Deeds, Broken Bodies •  423

Intra-Administrative Harm and Objectification: The Case of Mūsā b. Khalaf 

How a body was handled from the moment of death to the burial mattered, since elements 
of the spirit could survive in the corpse. Certain perils confronted a sinner’s spirit and body 
before and after death, for punishment did not end with life and could continue in the 
grave. Fear of punishment in the grave (ʿadhāb al-qabr) inspired an Islamic eschatological 
discourse centered on the retributive sufferings that could harm the dead.74 Drawing on the 
Qurʾan, several eschatological traditions specify that to return to God, the soul must pass 
through the throat, which is where it resides at the moment of death.75 But the soul’s precise 
location after the moment of death—whether trapped in a different realm, being judged by 
God, or waiting somewhere (such as in al-barzakh)—was unknown.76 The indeterminate 
location of the spirit was a matter of intense theological contestation and concern. Since 
the spirit of the individual could conceivably linger in the dead body, might postmortem 
violence affect the deceased or the deceased’s spirit?

The early fifth/eleventh-century bureaucrat-historian Miskawayh records an act of 
corpse brutality that followed the death of Mūsā b. Khalaf after intense interrogation 
in the year 306/918–19. Depicted as an old man, Mūsā b. Khalaf was a loyal client of the 
influential fiscal adviser Ibn al-Furāt (d. 312/924). According to the admiring description 
of the bureaucrat Hilāl al-Ṣābiʾ (d. 448/1056), Mūsā was “trustworthy with keeping Ibn 
al-Furāt’s secrets.”77 He was subjected to increasingly harsh interrogation by the secretary 
Abū Aḥmad Ibn Ḥammād (d. 311/923–24) and the vizier Ḥāmid b. al-ʿAbbās (d. 311/923), 
who sought to force him to reveal the location of Ibn al-Furāt’s riches. This type of extortion 
(known as muṣādara) was common practice.78 Miskawayh, himself a bureaucrat at the 

74.  See Halevi, Muhammad’s Grave, 31. See also al-Shāfiʿī, al-Umm, 1:316–17. Even the narrowness of the 
grave, which could harm the deceased interred inside, was a matter of discussion. Al-Shāfiʿī also discusses the 
“spirit in the grave.” For more on the spirit in the grave, see also the questions and responses recorded in Aḥmad 
b. Ḥanbal, Kitāb Masāʾil Aḥmad b. Ḥanbal, ed. Zuhayr al-Shāwīsh (Beirut: al-Maktab al-Islāmī, 1981), 1:84, no. 
298. See also al-Bayhaqī, Ithbāt ʿadhāb al-qabr, ed. Sharaf Muḥammad al-Quḍāt (Amman: Dār al-Furqān, 1983). 

75.  Q. 56:83. See the analysis by Fernando Rodríguez Mediano in “Justice, Crime, and Punishment in 
10th/16th-Century Morocco,” in Lange and Fierro, Public Violence in Islamic Societies, 179–200, at, 191, 200.

76.  See Halevi, Muhammad’s Grave, 208; Leah Kinberg, “Interaction between This World and the Afterworld 
in Early Islamic Tradition,” Oriens 29/30 (1986): 285–308. Al-Barzakh was imagined as a realm between the world 
and the hereafter in which spirits lingered. But it was deemed a matter that could only be truly known by God, 
who alone has the power “to make the dead live” (Q. 75:40). Aḥmad b. Ḥanbal cites a report about the spirits of 
the dead residing in the stomachs of birds that transport them to paradise in Masāʾil Aḥmad b. Ḥanbal, 1:145–46, 
no. 546. For early analysis, see Thomas O’Shaughnessy, Muhammad’s Thoughts on Death: A Thematic Study of 
the Qurʾanic Data (Leiden: Brill, 1969); Alford T. Welch, “Death and Dying in the Qurʾān,” in Religious Encounters 
with Death: Insights from the History and Anthropology of Religions, ed. Frank E. Reynolds and Earle H. Waugh, 
183–99 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1977). For more on barzakh, see Tommaso Tesei, 
“The Barzakh and the Intermediate State of the Dead in the Quran,” in Locating Hell in Islamic Traditions, ed. 
Christian Lange, 31–55 (Leiden: Brill, 2016).

77.  Hilāl b. Muḥassin al-Ṣābiʾ, Kitāb Tuḥfat al-umarāʾ fī taʾrīkh al-wuzarāʾ, ed. ʿAbd al-Sattār Aḥmad Farrāj 
(Cairo: Maktabat al-Aʿyān, n.d.), 262.

78.  Whether or not the Abbasid authorities viewed torture for this purpose justified, they clearly engaged 
in it, for the administrative usefulness of this tactic outweighed the hadith reports opposing coercion and 



424  •  Taryn Marashi

Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 32 (2024)

Abbasid-Buyid court, uses the example of Mūsā b. Khalaf to underscore the need for greater 
checks on administrators who blur the lines between acceptable and unacceptable forms of 
interrogating lower-ranking government functionaries. 

Mūsā b. Khalaf was nearly ninety years old and afflicted with an illness. He could 
not survive physical coercion (makrūh), so Ibn Ḥammād scolded him. After this, Ibn 
Ḥammād repeated his cross-examination of the companions of Ibn al-Furāt, but this 
did not yield anything. He had Muḥassin [the son of Ibn al-Furāt] suspended from a 
curtain rope, but he did not verify anything from him either. When Ibn Ḥammād saw 
this, he asked to be excused from them and was dismissed. Then Ḥāmid [b. al-ʿAbbās] 
summoned Mūsā b. Khalaf and commanded him to reveal the properties of Ibn al-Furāt. 
“You know of them; do not make us apply coercion that will be your downfall.” The old 
man replied, “I swear by any oath that I do not know a thing about his deposits.” Ḥāmid 
ordered him to be slapped, which continued until ʿAlī b. ʿĪsā [Ḥāmid’s de facto superior] 
intervened and beckoned the male servant [to stop] with the hand.79

Miskawayh’s attention to Mūsā b. Khalaf’s advanced age, failing health, and devotion to 
his patron in this first part of the anecdote conveys discernible sympathy for the wizened 
official as well as a censure of his maltreatment. Ibn Ḥammād’s decision to scold Mūsā 
rather than beat him reveals his awareness of the need to match the level of coercive force 
to the victim’s physical condition. Such attention to bodily limits indicates a degree of 
thoughtfulness on the part of the inquisitor, who must inflict ever so precisely the proper 
amount of physical and psychological harm to injure but not kill the accused. 

Miskawayh goes on to report that the exasperated vizier Ḥāmid b. al-ʿAbbās had no such 
scruples: after several unsuccessful attempts to gain information, he subjected Mūsā b. 
Khalaf to beatings, which proved fatal. 

Ḥāmid repeated the torture, and one night he summoned the old man and beat him 
in his presence until he died under the beating. Ḥāmid was told, “Indeed, the old man 
has died,” but Ḥāmid forced the servants to beat him seventeen more times after he 
died. When Ḥāmid was sure of the old man’s death, he ordered him to be dragged by 
the foot, but his ear caught on the hinge of the door and was pulled off. He was carried 
to his home dead. The loyalty of Mūsā b. Khalaf was exemplary, for he knew of the 
monies that his patron had deposited with a group of people. He did not confess to it 
but instead chose death.80

humiliation as measures to procure confessions as well as Sunni jurists’ view that judicial torture was an 
unreliable and illegitimate way to gain information. See Baber Johansen, “Signs as Evidence: The Doctrine of 
Ibn Taymiyya (1263–1328) and Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya (d. 1352) on Proof,” Islamic Law and Society 9, no. 2 
(2002): 168–93, at 170. See also Mohammed Allehbi, “‘It is Permitted for the Amīr but not the Qāḍī’: The Military-
Administrative Genealogy of Coercion in Abbasid Criminal Justice,” Islamic Law and Society 30, no. 1–2 (2022): 
65–95.

79.  Miskawayh, Tajārib al-umam, 5:118–19. 
80.  Ibid., 5:119.



Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 32 (2024)

 Dark Deeds, Broken Bodies •  425

This account presents Ḥāmid b. al-ʿAbbās as a cruel, unprincipled individual who ordered 
the beating to continue even after Mūsā’s death and then commanded his underlings to 
drag the corpse in an irreverent manner that ultimately caused Mūsā’s ear to be torn off. 
The subject becomes an object here, as Mūsā’s body is transformed into a material, voiceless 
thing. Like Yaḥyā b. ʿUmar’s excavated and perfumed head, discussed at the beginning of 
the article, Mūsā b. Khalaf’s body loses its humanity in this transformation. By prolonging 
the scene beyond the moment of death, Miskawayh reveals the degradation of the deceased 
and forces the reader to witness Ḥāmid’s abuse of Mūsā’s body. 

The inadvertent postmortem amputation of Mūsā’s ear constitutes an act of bodily 
violation that Muslim legal scholars condemned. Classical Muslim jurists affirmed the 
inviolability of specific parts of the body—the head, the face, and the sexual organs—and 
decreed that any damage inflicted on these body parts could warrant financial compensation 
(diyya). Even if an individual deserved corporal punishment for a crime, these body parts 
should not be injured in retribution.81 The Abbasid administrator Qudāma b. Jaʿfar (d. 
337/948), a contemporary of Mūsā b. Khalaf, confirmed that mutilation or beating of a 
person’s ears constituted a type of injury that merited financial redress.82 Qudāma was 
admittedly referring to such treatment of a living person, not a dead one, but people under 
arrest were supposed to be granted certain rights and protections, which included no 
unnecessary physical maltreatment.83 Legal scholars also considered the possibility of 
inordinate harm or even accidental death caused by authorities in the course of meting out 
a lawful punishment. 

The Shāfiʿī jurist Ibn al-Qāṣṣ (d. 335/946) contemplates this scenario in his Adab al-qāḍī 
(Judicial protocols) in a section addressing liability and compensation for judicial errors. 
He reports that according to al-Shāfiʿī, “if the imam [ruler] struck a man forty times with 
a sandal on the borders of [his] clothing for the crime of drinking wine and the man died, 
his blood was spilled in vain”;84 that is, the death was unfortunate but justified, since the 
man expired while receiving a lawful beating. However, if the man was struck forty-one 

81.  “Punish according to the crime but spare the face.”; see Christian Lange, “‘On That Day When Faces 
Will Be White or Black’ (Q3:106): Towards a Semiology of the Face in Arabo-Islamic Tradition,” Journal of the 
American Oriental Society 127, no. 4 (2007): 429–45, at 439n85. See also Ibn Wahb al-Kātib, Kitāb al-Burhān fī 
wujūh al-bayān, ed. Ḥifnī Muḥammad Sharaf (Cairo: Maṭbaʿat al-Risāla, 1969), 1:100–101; Ibn Qudāma, al-Mughnī, 
8:466. 

82.  Qudāma b. Jaʿfar, Kitāb al-Kharāj wa-ṣināʿat al-kitāba (Baghdad: Dār al-Rashīd, 1981), 1:69. See also 
Saḥnūn, al-Mudawwana, 4:560–61. Drawing on al-Shāfiʿī’s views, the jurisconsult Ibn Qudāma similarly holds 
that injury to a person’s appearance may warrant financial compensation. See Ibn Qudāma, al-Mughnī, 8:467, 
481, 484–85. 

83.  See the section on criminal law enforcement in the anonymous fourth/tenth-century manual Siyāsat 
al-mulūk; J. D. Sadan, “‘Siyasat al-Muluk’: A New Source of the Buyid Period,” Israel Oriental Studies 9 (1979): 
355–76, at 367–72. Even if a prisoner fell sick, he was entitled to proper care and treatment according to al-Ṣadr 
al-Shahīd (d. 536/1141–42), Sharḥ Adab al-qāḍī al-Khaṣṣāf, ed. Muḥyī Hilāl al-Sarḥān (Baghdad: Maṭbaʿat 
al-Irshād, 1977), 2:374–75.

84.  Ibn al-Qāṣṣ, Kitāb Adab al-qāḍī, ed. Ḥusayn Khalaf al-Jabūrī (Taʾif: Maktabat al-Ṣadīq, 1989), 2:392. Ibn 
al-Qāṣṣ also considers a similar scenario in the case of a thief who, after receiving the prescribed punishment 
(limb amputation), died an infidel (2:391–92). 



426  •  Taryn Marashi

Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 32 (2024)

times and then died, financial compensation would be merited, because he was subjected to 
lashes beyond the number warranted by his sentence. In addition, the mention of sandals 
and clothing suggests that both the type of device used to apply the penalty and the part 
of the body on which it was inflicted were factors relevant to the legal assessment of diyya. 
Ibn al-Qāṣṣ adds that if the disciplinarian had used a whip, financial compensation would be 
obligatory.85 Ibn al-Qāṣṣ notes differences of opinion between al-Shāfiʿī and Abū Ḥanīfa over 
the number of lashes required for the offense of imbibing as well as the obligatoriness of 
diyya for judicial error, but he does not question the intentions of the disciplinarian.86 Moral 
probity was a characteristic expected of someone authorized to carry out a punishment, 
although this trait is notably absent in Ḥāmid b. al-ʿAbbās, as depicted in Miskawayh’s 
anecdotal report. Legal discourses on the sanctity of the body and the acceptable degree 
of force to be used on individuals who deserved punishment highlight the unwarranted 
brutality of Ḥāmid b. al-ʿAbbās’s abuse of Mūsā b. Khalaf’s body and convey important 
information about the seriousness of Ḥāmid’s misconduct.

In addition to constituting a legal violation, Ḥāmid’s disrespect of Mūsā’s bodily integrity 
was an overt moral offense. Al-Shāfiʿī, for example, explicitly condemns the separation 
of parts of a corpse. He cites a hadith narrated by ʿĀʾisha, a beloved wife of the Prophet 
Muḥammad, who reportedly said, “Breaking the bones of the dead is like breaking the 
bones of the living.”87 Al-Shāfiʿī explains that the wrongdoing denounced in this hadith was 
the detachment of body parts in the course of exhuming a grave (nabsh al-qubūr), which 
is an illicit act since “it constitutes a sin if bones were removed from a dead [individual]. I 
would prefer that the bones be returned and buried.”88 Al-Shāfiʿī concentrates on the moral 
dangers of disturbing a body, buried or otherwise, however long the person in question has 
been deceased. Medieval Muslim exegetes and eschatological writers shared his concern 
with preserving a cadaver intact. Their insistence raised the issue of the potential self-
awareness and even sentience of the deceased. Prohibitions against whitewashing graves 
(tajṣīṣ al-qubūr), for instance, demonstrate a perceived fear that environmental threats 
such as the heat of the sun might injure the buried body. Early pietists weighing in on 
the practice of wailing as a funerary ritual considered how the actions of the living could 
spiritually impact the dead.89 Beyond the physical harm that could affect a corpse, jurists 

85.  Ibid., 2:392. 
86.  Ibid. Ibn al-Qāṣṣ also includes the legal opinion of Abū Ḥanīfa, who prescribed eighty lashes for the crime 

of drinking wine and for whom a death after the eighty-first strike would make diyya obligatory. Al-Kāsānī 
adds that if an official intended to punish a criminal by striking lightly, but the latter died under the beating, 
the death would “resemble” an intentional act but would not be categorized as an accidental homicide; see 
al-Kāsānī, Badāʾiʿ al-ṣanāʾiʿ, 7:233. 

87.  Al-Shāfiʿī, al-Umm, 1:316.
88.  Ibid. 
89.  See Halevi, Muhammad’s Grave, 125. See also Leor Halevi, “Wailing for the Dead: The Role of Women 

in Early Islamic Funerals,” Past & Present, no. 183 (2004): 3–39. For theological arguments against wailing, see 
Muslim b. al-Ḥajjāj, Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim, ed. Muḥammad Fuʾād ʿAbd al-Bāqī (Beirut: Dār al-Turāth al-ʿArabī, 1955), 
2:644, no. 934: “If the wailing woman does not repent before she dies, she will be made to stand on the Day of 
Resurrection wearing a garment of pitch and a chemise of mange.” 



Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 32 (2024)

 Dark Deeds, Broken Bodies •  427

expressed a distaste for treading, sitting, or reclining on a grave.90 These anxieties convey 
a continued exegetical, legal, and moral preoccupation with defining the boundaries of 
what constituted acceptable Islamic funerary practices given popular apprehension of 
punishment in the grave. 

Fear of unknown sensations potentially experienced after death compelled social 
commentators such as Ibn Abī al-Dunyā (d. 281/894) to expound on the remarkable 
phenomena that may occur in a cemetery, a liminal site at which the mysteries between life 
and death materialize.91 Addressing popular uncertainties about deathly encounters, Ibn Abī 
al-Dunyā’s moralistic anecdotes are cautionary reminders to remain alert and open to the 
possibility of continued interaction between this world and the next.92 To be sure, God could 
command the body of the dead to come back to life, for “God brings the dead to life and 
shows His signs so that you may understand.”93 Did the Muslim community of the third/
ninth and fourth/tenth centuries, as represented by Ibn Abī al-Dunyā, believe that a dead 
body could sense and experience mistreatment? Leah Kinberg argues that the deeds of the 
living, such as grave visitation and prayer, were thought to have the power of lightening 
the suffering of the dead in the grave.94 But if the living could assuage the agony of the 
dead, then a transgression against the body of the dead could heighten the punishment of 
the deceased in the grave. While Muslim jurists sought to stamp out such innovations as 
whitewashing and wailing, which were considered pre-Islamic practices, the unknowns of 
corpse sensation inspired writers such as Ibn Abī al-Dunyā to explore potential excitement 
and dread experienced in the grave. 

90.  Al-Shāfiʿī, al-Umm, 1:316: “I consider treading, sitting, and reclining on a grave hateful.” He goes on to 
cite a report from Abū Hurayra, who likens sitting on a grave to sitting on coals. See Aḥmad b. Ḥanbal, Masāʾil 
Aḥmad b. Ḥanbal, 1:144, no. 536. He adds that even reading on a grave is an innovation (1:145, no. 544). Aḥmad 
b. Ḥanbal reportedly sprinkled water on graves (1:144, no. 539), a disputed practice that could indicate a desire 
either to cool the deceased or—more acceptably—to prevent the dispersal of soil after burial has unsettled it. 
Unfortunately, he does not explain his rationale. Ibn Qudāma also preserves a report about Aḥmad b. Ḥanbal’s 
views on praying at grave sites; see Ibn Qudāma, al-Mughnī, 2:422. But there are also other ways to disrespect a 
grave site; al-Tanūkhī, for instance, offers a satirical report about a man peeing on another’s grave in al-Faraj, 
2:28.

91.  See Ibn Abī al-Dunyā, Kitāb al-Qubūr, ed. Ṭāriq Muḥammad Suklūʿ al-ʿAmūdī (Medina: Maktabat 
al-Ghurabāʾ al-Athariyya, 2000), 1:47, 51–52, 55, 99. 

92.  Kinberg, “Interaction.” Jane I. Smith argues that sleep was perceived of as a type of communion with 
the spirits of the dead, who could talk to, reprimand, and reveal knowledge to sleepers. See Smith, “Concourse 
between the Living and the Dead in Islamic Eschatological Literature,” History of Religions 19, no. 3 (1980): 
224–36.

93.  Q. 2:73. This is the story of Moses and the cow. Consider another Qurʾanic verse (23:35): “He warns you 
when you have died and become dust and bones that you will emerge once again.” For narratives about the 
“punishment in the grave,” see various reports by the fifth/eleventh-century judge Ibn Abī Yaʿlā al-Farrāʾ in 
Ṭabaqāt al-Ḥanābila, ed. Muḥammad Ḥāmid al-Fiqī (Cairo: Maṭbaʿat al-Sunna al-Muḥammadiyya, 2016), 1:19, 55, 
242, 312, 330. 

94.  Kinberg, “Interaction.”



428  •  Taryn Marashi

Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 32 (2024)

How does the popular anxiety surrounding both punishment in the grave and the 
possibility of postmortem experience help us understand the death and corpse violation of 
Mūsā b. Khalaf? His beating “seventeen more times after he died” and the dislocation of his 
ear after he was “dragged by the foot” were transgressions against the sanctity of Mūsā’s 
body that, even after the moment of death, could have affected his soul. According to a late 
antique view that is not unlike the literary and eschatological worldview of third/ninth-
century writers such as Ibn Abī al-Dunyā, the soul may still be entwined with the body after 
death.95 Another important takeaway is that the offense committed against Mūsā b. Khalaf 
was seen as an unlawful and immoral act that was becoming dangerously typical of the 
intra-administrative intrigues of the Abbasid court. Just as Miskawayh articulates a larger 
critique of the punitive excesses carried out by bureaucrats against bureaucrats, other 
historians also observe this development in relation to the story of Mūsā b. Khalaf. 

According to ʿArīb b. Saʿd (d. ca. 370/980), after Ḥāmid b. al-ʿAbbās seized both Mūsā b. 
Khalaf and the son of Ibn al-Furāt, Muḥassin, he “demanded their property and exceeded 
all bounds by slapping them, beating them, and abusing them.”96 Mūsā reportedly cried out, 
“Do not act in this manner against the sons of the vizierate, for they are your sons!”97 His 
reproach infuriated Ḥāmid, who intensified the torture until Mūsā expired. Afterward, the 
caliph al-Muqtadir (r. 295–320/908–32) ordered Muḥassin’s release. ʿArīb b. Saʿd accentuates 
Ḥāmid’s lack of restraint and wanton disregard for his peers.98 In his narrative, in contrast 
to Miskawayh’s, Mūsā b. Khalaf openly chastises Ḥāmid for his unwarranted aggression. 
Although ʿArīb b. Saʿd does not mention any postmortem maltreatment of Mūsā’s corpse, he 
claims to preserve the latter’s voice and plea for some measure of decorum, even during a 
heated interrogation. 

The violations committed against Mūsā b. Khalaf’s body in Miskawayh’s report 
adumbrate the dangers of corpse violence, appealing to the anxieties of other government 
functionaries who might have worried about the seemingly expanding repertoire of 
aggressive tactics used during interrogations. Despite enjoying governmental sanction, 
Mūsā’s lengthy interrogation reveals that there was a point at which torture became 
needless. For Miskawayh, drawing attention to the collapse of Mūsā’s body likely had as 
much to do with the physicality of the violation as it did with historical criticism of the harsh 
treatment. Ḥāmid b. al-ʿAbbās had served as a tax farmer in Fars and Wasit before being 
offered the post of vizier in Baghdad—a position for which he did not have the necessary 
qualifications, according to several sources.99 Having been an affluent businessman before 

95.  Miskawayh, Tajārib al-umam, 5:119. For more on the close connection between the body and the soul, 
see Halevi, Muhammad’s Grave, 81; Adam Bursi, Traces of the Prophets: Relics and Sacred Spaces in Early Islam 
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2024), 133–34. 

96.  ʿArīb b. Saʿd, Ṣilat Taʾrīkh al-Ṭabarī, ed. Muḥammad Abū al-Faḍl Ibrāhīm, 2nd ed. (Cairo: Dār al-Maʿārif, 
1967), 69.

97.  Ibid. 
98.  Ibid.
99.  Hugh Kennedy, “The Reign of al-Muqtadir (295–320/908–32): A History,” in Crisis and Continuity at the 

Abbasid Court: Formal and Informal Politics in the Caliphate of al-Muqtadir (295–320/908–32), ed. Maaike van 
Berkel et al., 13–47 (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 29.



Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 32 (2024)

 Dark Deeds, Broken Bodies •  429

his appointment, he was able to flex a great deal of wealth, which probably factored into 
his political appointment. According to Hugh Kennedy, Ḥāmid resented his inability to sway 
political affairs and the fact that his nominal deputy, ʿAlī b. ʿĪsā, wielded a greater degree of 
authority in the administration.100 Ḥāmid b. al-ʿAbbās had also gained a reputation for poor 
court etiquette and was subsequently dismissed from office. A high-ranking eunuch named 
al-Mufliḥ subsequently convinced the caliph al-Muqtadir and his mother, al-Sayyida, to 
permit the torture of Ḥāmid. He was beaten in 311/923 in the presence of none other than 
Ibn al-Furāt, Mūsā b. Khalaf’s patron.101 

According to ʿArīb b. Saʿd, both al-Muqtadir and his imposing mother recognized that 
Ḥāmid b. al-ʿAbbās had exceeded the bounds of administrative propriety. They allowed Ibn 
al-Furāt to oversee Ḥāmid’s interrogation and Ibn al-Furāt’s son Muḥassin to perform the 
torture.102 Money also factored into al-Muqtadir’s decision to allow Muḥassin to torture 
Ḥāmid: the caliph was eager to amass more wealth, and he was willing to employ the 
common administrative practice of muṣādara to remedy financial loss in the imperial 
treasury. An unmistakable sense of vengeance and dramatic irony permeates ʿArīb b. Saʿd’s 
account, since Muḥassin, who had been questioned and brutally beaten by Ḥāmid, became 
the latter’s torturer. Ḥāmid’s actions and resulting punishment reflect more than just petty 
interpersonal rivalries between Abbasid administrators. His maltreatment of Mūsā b. Khalaf, 
as shown in Miskawayh’s account, speaks to the narrative power of bodily debasement as a 
strategy to critique excessive administrative force and to the ways in which humiliation and 
harm can be inscribed on the body, dead or alive.103 

Conclusion

Postmortem neglect and harm, as depicted in these examples, represent an embodied 
political expression laced with significations of just reprisal, objectification, and moral 
decay in Abbasid administrative relations in the mid-third/ninth to early fourth/tenth 
centuries. Drawing on a range of medieval Arabic literary sources, this article has shown 
how historians such as al-Ṭabarī, al-Masʿūdī, al-Khaṭīb al-Baghdādī, Miskawayh, and Ibn 
al-Jawzī used necroaggression as a descriptive tool for political polemic. To provide a more 
nuanced view of corpse defilement, the article identifies intersections between these literary 
depictions and legal texts that address juristic and judicial judgments about funerary care 
and corpse treatment. This cross-genre analysis gives us a broader understanding of the 
political values and meanings attached to bodies violated or unmade by others. The cases of 
Yaḥyā b. ʿUmar, Isḥāq b. Jināḥ, and Mūsā b. Khalaf draw attention to lapses of judgment on 
the part of administrators who, seeking to maintain their position on or ascend the political 

100.  Ibid.
101.  ʿArīb b. Saʿd, Ṣilat Taʾrīkh al-Ṭabarī, 98. 
102.  Ibid. According to Miskawayh, Ibn al-Furāt’s son reportedly poisoned Ḥāmid. 
103.  Visible marks on the body served as a yardstick for measuring whether torture had been excessive, 

and the dismantling of the corpse of Mūsā b. Khalaf represented an extreme dishonor. By the mid-third/ninth 
century, the medical community of Baghdad was reportedly performing autopsies and even placing bodies on 
ice to delay the process of decomposition. See Emilie Savage-Smith, “Attitudes toward Dissection.”



430  •  Taryn Marashi

Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 32 (2024)

ladder, harmed the bodies of the recently deceased and thus contravened a self-imposed 
code of appropriate administrative conduct. As a result, the reputations of Muḥammad b. 
ʿAbd Allāh b. Ṭāhir and Ḥāmid b. al-ʿAbbās suffered. In contrast to these cases, the torture, 
death, and postmortem harming of Ibn al-Zayyāt appear measured and even justifiable. 
This difference tells us that certain acts of necroaggression performed in a retaliatory and 
calculated way had productive potential to educate those involved—whether that included 
active or passive participants or spectators—and to empower the perpetrator, in this case 
al-Mutawakkil. A common thread that runs through all the examples is the descriptive 
function of postmortem harm as a performative political device that dramatically pivots the 
rise and fall of officials for a medieval Muslim audience. 

These anecdotal accounts track a discernible decline in Abbasid political affairs and 
thus identify necroaggression as a symptom of administrators’ inability to perform their 
professional duties adequately. Accounts of postmortem harm represent a sardonic literary 
push to simplify political opposition, deriding the ineptitude of some members of the 
Abbasid administrative elite by showing the broader social consequences of their political 
and moral failings. These dead bodies unmade by others also marked the interpersonal 
antagonisms of members of the administration who added necroaggression to the expanding 
arsenal of coercive tactics that could be used to terrorize rivals. 

Acknowledgments

The writing of this article would not have been possible without the support of my 
colleagues at Augsburg University. Much of the material discussed in the article comes 
from my dissertation research, conducted at Vanderbilt University under the tutelage of 
Professors Leor Halevi, David Wasserstein, William Caferro, and Richard McGregor, who 
offered invaluable support and feedback. In addition, I presented a version of this paper 
at the International Congress of Medieval Studies in May 2024, and I thank the attendees 
who offered insightful questions and comments. I would also like to thank my colleague 
Mohammed Allehbi for his helpful feedback during the revision process as well as the 
reviewers and editors who provided thoughtful and constructive criticism.

Bibliography

Primary Sources

Abū Yaʿlā al-Farrāʾ. Ṭabaqāt al-Ḥanābila. Edited by Muḥammad Ḥāmid al-Fiqī. Cairo: Maṭbaʿat 
al-Sunna al-Muḥammadiyya, 2016.

ʿArīb b. Saʿd. Ṣilat Taʾrīkh al-Ṭabarī. Edited by Muḥammad Abū al-Faḍl Ibrāhīm. 2nd ed. Cairo: 
Dār al-Maʿārif, 1967.

al-Bayhaqī, Abū Bakr Aḥmad b. al-Ḥusayn. Ithbāt ʿ adhāb al-qabr. Edited by Sharaf Muḥammad 
al-Quḍāt. Amman: Dār al-Furqān, 1983. 



Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 32 (2024)

 Dark Deeds, Broken Bodies •  431

al-Dhahabī. Taʾrīkh al-islām wa-wafāyat al-mashāhīr wa-l-aʿlām. Edited by Bashshār ʿAwwād 
Maʿrūf. Beirut: Dār al-Gharb al-Islāmī, 2003.

Ibn ʿAbd al-Rabbihi al-Andalusī. Al-ʿIqd al-farīd. Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, 1983.

Ibn Abī al-Dunyā. Kitāb al-Qubūr. Edited by Ṭāriq Muḥammad Suklūʿ al-ʿAmūdī. Medina: 
Maktabat al-Ghurabāʾ al-Athariyya, 2000. 

Ibn al-Athīr. Kitāb al-Kāmil fī taʾrīkh. Edited by ʿUmar ʿAbd al-Salām Tadmurī. Beirut: Dār 
al-Kitāb al-ʿArabī, 2010. 

Ibn al-Dāya. Kitāb al-Mukāfaʾa wa-ḥusn al-ʿuqbā. Edited by Maḥmūd Muḥammad Shākir. 
Cairo: al-Maktaba al-Tijāriyya al-Kubrā, 1940.

Ibn Ḥanbal, Aḥmad. Kitāb Masāʾil Aḥmad b. Ḥanbal. Edited by Zuhayr al-Shāwīsh. Beirut: 
al-Maktab al-Islāmī, 1981. 

Ibn al-Jawzī. Al-Muntaẓam fī taʾrīkh al-mulūk wa-l-umam. Edited by Muḥammad ʿ Abd al-Qādir 
ʿAṭā and Muṣṭafā ʿAbd al-Qādir ʿAṭā. Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, 1992.

Ibn Khallikān. Kitāb Wafayāt al-aʿyān wa-anbāʾ abnāʾ al-zamān. Edited by Iḥsān ʿ Abbās. Beirut: 
Dār al-Thaqāfa, 1968–72.

Ibn al-Qāṣṣ. Kitāb Adab al-qāḍī. Edited by Ḥusayn Khalaf al-Jabūrī. Taʾif: Maktabat al-Ṣadīq, 
1989.

Ibn Qudāma. Kitāb al-Mughnī. Edited by ʿAbd al-Qādir ʿAṭā et al. Cairo: National Library, 1969.

Ibn Qutayba al-Dīnawarī, Abū Muḥammad ʿAbd Allāh. Kitāb ʿUyūn al-akhbār. Beirut: Dār 
al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, 1997.

Ibn Rushd. Bidāyat al-mujtahid wa-nihāyat al-muqtaṣid. Cairo: Dār al-Ḥadīth, 2004.

Ibn Ṭiqṭaqā. Kitāb al-Fakhrī fī al-ādāb al-sulṭāniyya wa-l-duwal al-islāmiyya. Edited by ʿAbd 
al-Qādir Muḥammad Māyū. Beirut: Dār al-Qalam al-ʿArabī, 1997.

Ibn Wahb al-Kātib. Kitāb al-Burhān fī wujūh al-bayān. Edited by Ḥifnī Muḥammad Sharaf. 
Cairo: Maṭbaʿat al-Risāla, 1969.

al-Iṣbahānī, Abū al-Faraj. Kitāb Maqātil al-Ṭālibiyyīn. Edited by al-Sayyid Aḥmad Ṣaqr. Beirut: 
Dār al-Maʿrifa, n.d. 

al-Iṣfahānī. Kitāb Muḥāḍarat al-udabāʾ wa-muḥāwarat al-shuʿarāʾ wa-l-bulaghāʾ. Beirut: Dār 
al-Arqam, 2009.

al-Jāḥiẓ. Kitāb al-Rasāʾil al-adabiyya. Beirut: Dār wa-Maktabat al-Hilāl, 2002.

al-Jahshiyārī. Al-Wuzarāʾ wa-l-kuttāb. Edited by Muṣṭafā al-Saqā, Ibrāhīm al-Ibyārī, and ʿAbd 
al-Ḥafīẓ al-Shalabī. Cairo: Muṣṭafā al-Bābī al-Ḥalabī, 1938.



432  •  Taryn Marashi

Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 32 (2024)

al-Kāsānī. Kitāb Badāʾiʿ al-ṣanāʾiʿ fī tartīb al-sharāʾiʿ. Edited by ʿAlī Muḥammad Muʿawwaḍ 
and ʿĀdil Aḥmad ʿAbd al-Mawjūd. Beirut: Dār Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, 2003.

al-Khaṭīb al-Baghdādī. Taʾrīkh Baghdād. Edited by Bashshār ʿAwwād Maʿrūf. Beirut: Dār 
al-Gharb al-Islāmī, 2002.

Mālik b. Anas. Al-Muwaṭṭaʾ. Edited by Muḥammad Fuʾād ʿAbd al-Bāqī. Beirut: Dār Iḥyā 
al-Turāth al-ʿArabī, 1980.

al-Masʿūdī. Murūj al-dhahab wa-maʿādin al-jawhar. Edited by Kamāl Ḥasan Marʿī. Beirut: 
al-Maktaba al-ʿAsriyya, 2005.

al-Māwardī. Kitāb al-Ḥāwī al-kabīr. Edited by ʿAlī Muḥammad Muʿawwaḍ and ʿĀdil Aḥmad 
ʿAbd al-Mawjūd. Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, 1999.

Miskawayh. Kitāb Tajārib al-umam wa-taʿāqub wa-l-himam. Edited by Abū al-Qāsim Imāmī. 
Tehran: Sirvash, 2000.

Muslim b. al-Ḥajjāj. Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim. Edited by Muḥammad Fuʾād ʿAbd al-Bāqī. Beirut: Dār 
al-Turāth al-ʿArabī, 1955.

al-Qayrawānī, Abū Bakr Muḥammad b. Muḥammad b. al-Labbād. Kitāb al-Radd ʿalā al-Shāfiʿī. 
Edited by ʿAbd al-Majīd b. Ḥamda. Tunis: Dār al-ʿArab li-l-Ṭibāʿa, 1986.

Qudāma b. Jaʿfar. Kitāb al-Kharāj wa-ṣināʿat al-kitāba. Baghdad: Dār al-Rashīd, 1981.

al-Ṣābiʾ, Hilāl b. Muḥassin. Kitāb Tuḥfat al-umarāʾ fī taʾrīkh al-wuzarāʾ. Edited by ʿ Abd al-Sattār 
Aḥmad Farrāj. Cairo: Maktabat al-Aʿyān, n.d.

al-Ṣadr al-Shahīd. Sharḥ Adab al-qāḍī al-Khaṣṣāf. Edited by Muḥyī Hilāl al-Sarḥān. Baghdad: 
Maṭbaʿat al-Irshād, 1977.

al-Ṣafadī, Khalīl b. Aybak. Kitāb al-Wāfī bi-l-wafayāt. Edited by Aḥmad al-Arnaʾūṭ and Turkī 
Muṣṭafā. Beirut: Dār Iḥyāʾ al-Turāth al-ʿArabī, 2000.

Saḥnūn. Kitāb al-Mudawwana. Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, 1994.

al-Shāfiʿī. Kitāb al-Umm. Edited by Muḥammad Zuhrī al-Najjār. 2nd ed. Beirut: Dār al-Fikr, 
1990. 

al-Ṭabarī. The History of al-Ṭabarī. Vol. 34: Incipient Decline. Translated by Joel Kramer. 
Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989.

– – –. Taʾrīkh al-rusul wa-l-mulūk. Edited by Muḥammad Abū al-Faḍl Ibrāhīm. 2nd ed. Cairo: 
Dār al-Maʿārif, 1967.

al-Tanūkhī, al-Muḥassin b. ʿAlī. Kitāb al-Faraj baʿd al-shidda. Edited by ʿAbbūd al-Shāljī. 
Beirut: Dār Ṣādir, 1978.

– – –. Nishwār al-muḥāḍara wa-akhbār al-mudhākara. Edited by ʿAbbūd al-Shāljī. Beirut: Dār 
Ṣādir, 1995. 



Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 32 (2024)

 Dark Deeds, Broken Bodies •  433

al-Yaʿqūbī. Taʾrīkh. Edited by ʿAbd al-Amīr Muhannā. 2nd ed. Beirut: Muʾassasat al-Aʿlamī 
li-l-Maṭbūʿāt, 2010. 

Yāqūt al-Ḥamawī. Kitāb Muʿjam al-udabāʾ. Edited by Iḥsān ʿAbbās. Beirut: Dār al-Gharb 
al-Islāmī, 1993.

Secondary Sources

Abou El Fadl, Khaled. Rebellion and Violence in Islamic Law. Cambridge: Cambridge University 
Press, 2001.

Allehbi, Mohammed. “‘It is Permitted for the Amīr but not the Qāḍī’: The Military 
Administrative Genealogy of Coercion in Abbasid Criminal Justice.” Islamic Law and 
Society 30, no. 1–2 (2022): 65–95.

Bartlett, Robert. “Symbolic Meanings of Hair in the Middle Ages.” Transactions of the Royal 
Historical Society 4 (1994): 43–60.

Bromberger, Christian. “Hair: From the West to the Middle East through the Mediterranean 
(the 2007 AFS Mediterranean Studies Section Address).” Journal of American Folklore 
121, no. 482 (2008): 379–99. 

Burge, S. R. “Impurity/Danger!” Islamic Law and Society 17, no. 3–4 (2010): 320–49.

Bursi, Adam. Traces of the Prophets: Relics and Sacred Spaces in Early Islam. Edinburgh: 
Edinburgh University Press, 2024.

Calderini, Simonetta. “Two Radical Hair-Cuts in Medieval Egypt: Gendering Politics in Times 
of Trouble.” Al-Masāq 20, no. 1 (2008): 17–28.

El-Hibri, Tayeb. “The Image of the Caliph al-Wāthiq: A Riddle of Religious and Historical 
Significance.” Quaderni di Studi Arabi 19 (2001): 41–60.

– – –. Reinterpreting Islamic Historiography: Harun al-Rashid and the Narrative of the ʿ Abbasid 
Caliphate. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999. 

El Kadi, Galila, and Alain Bonnamy. La cité des morts: Le Caire. Paris: Institut de recherche 
pour le développement, 2001.

Euben, Roxanne L. “Humiliation and the Political Mobilization of Masculinity.” Political 
Theory 43, no. 4 (2015): 513–22. 

Fierro, Maribel. “Decapitation of Christians and Muslims in the Medieval Iberian Peninsula: 
Narratives, Images, Contemporary Perceptions.” Comparative Literature Studies 45, no. 
2 (2008): 137–64.



434  •  Taryn Marashi

Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 32 (2024)

– – –. “Emulating Abraham: The Fāṭimid al-Qāʾim and the Umayyad ʿAbd al-Raḥmān III.” 
In Public Violence in Islamic Societies: Power, Discipline, and the Construction of the 
Public Sphere, 7th–19th Centuries CE, edited by Christian Lange and Maribel Fierro, 
130–55. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009. 

Gordon, Matthew S. The Breaking of a Thousand Swords: A History of the Turkish Military of 
Samarra (A.H. 200–275/815–889 C.E.). Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001.

Halevi, Leor. Muhammad’s Grave: Death Rites and the Making of Islamic Society. New York: 
Columbia University Press, 2007.

– – –. “Wailing for the Dead: The Role of Women in Early Islamic Funerals.” Past & Present, 
no. 183 (2004): 3–39. 

Hámori, A. “Going Down in Style: The Pseudo-Ibn Qutayba’s Story of the Fall of the Barmakīs.” 
Princeton Papers in Near Eastern Studies, no. 3 (1994): 89–125. 

Johansen, Baber. “Signs as Evidence: The Doctrine of Ibn Taymiyya (1263–1328) and Ibn 
Qayyim al-Jawziyya (d. 1352) on Proof.” Islamic Law and Society 9, no. 2 (2002): 168–93. 

Katz, Marion. Body of Text: The Emergence of the Sunnī Law of Ritual Purity. Albany: State 
University of New York Press, 2002.

– – –. “The Shearing of Forelocks as a Penitential Rite.” In The Heritage of Arabo-Islamic 
Learning: Studies Presented to Wadad Kadi, edited by Maurice Pomerantz and Aram A. 
Shahin, 191–206. Leiden: Brill, 2016.

Kennedy, Hugh. “The Reign of al-Muqtadir (295–320/908–32): A History.” In Crisis and 
Continuity at the Abbasid Court: Formal and Informal Politics in the Caliphate of 
al-Muqtadir (295–320/908–32), edited by Maaike van Berkel, Nadia Maria El Cheikh, 
Hugh Kennedy, and Letizia Osti, 13–47. Leiden: Brill, 2013.

Kennedy, Philip. “The Fall of the Barmakids in Historiography and Fiction: Recognition and 
Disclosure.” Journal of Abbasid Studies 3 (2016): 167–238.

Kinberg, Leah. “Interaction between This World and the Afterworld in Early Islamic Tradition.” 
Oriens 29/30 (1986): 285–308. 

Lange, Christian. Justice, Punishment, and the Medieval Muslim Imagination. Cambridge: 
Cambridge University Press, 2008.

– – –. “‘On That Day When Faces Will Be White or Black’ (Q3:106): Towards a Semiology of the 
Face in Arabo-Islamic Tradition.” Journal of the American Oriental Society 127, no. 4 
(2007): 429–45. 

Lybarger, Loren D. “The Demise of Adam in the ‘Qiṣāṣ al-Anbiyāʾ’: The Symbolic Politics of 
Death and Re-burial in the Islamic ‘Stories of the Prophets.’” Numen 55, no. 5 (2008): 
497–535. 



Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 32 (2024)

 Dark Deeds, Broken Bodies •  435

Malti-Douglas, Fedwa. “Texts and Tortures: The Reign of al-Muʿtaḍid and the Construction of 
Historical Meaning.” Arabica 46, no. 3 (1999): 313–36.

Meisami, Julie Scott. “Masʿūdī on Love and the Fall of the Barmakids.” Journal of the Royal 
Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland 121, no. 2 (1989): 252–77. 

McClellan, Andrew M. Abused Bodies in Roman Epic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 
2019.

O’Shaughnessy, Thomas. Muhammad’s Thoughts on Death: A Thematic Study of the Qurʾanic 
Data. Leiden: Brill, 1969.

Parsapajouh, Sepideh, and Mathieu Terrier. “Cimetières et tombes dans les mondes musulmans 
à la croisée des enjeux religieux, politiques et mémoriels: Une introduction.” Revue des 
mondes musulmans et de la Méditerranée 146 (2019): 11–24. 

Pfluger-Schindeck, Ingrid. “On the Symbolism of Hair in Islamic Societies: An Analysis of 
Approaches.” Anthropology of the Middle East 1, no. 2 (2006): 72–88.

Reinhart, Kevin. “Impurity/No Danger.” History of Religions 30, no. 1 (1990): 1–24. 

Ridgeon, Lloyd. “Shaggy or Shaved? The Symbolism of Hair among Persian Qalandar Sufis.” 
Iran & the Caucasus 14, no. 2 (2010): 233–63.

Robinson, Chase F. “Neck-Sealing in Early Islam.” Journal of the Economic and Social History 
of the Orient 48, no. 3 (2005): 401–41.

Rodríguez Mediano, Fernando. “Justice, Crime, and Punishment in 10th/16th-Century 
Morocco.” In Public Violence in Islamic Societies: Power, Discipline, and the Construction 
of the Public Sphere, 7th–19th Centuries CE, edited by Christian Lange and Maribel 
Fierro, 179–200. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009. 

Sadan, J. D. “‘Siyasat al-Muluk’: A New Source of the Buyid Period.” Israel Oriental Studies 9 
(1979): 355–76. 

Savage-Smith, Emilie. “Attitudes toward Dissection in Medieval Islam.” Journal of the History 
of Medicine and Allied Sciences 50, no. 1 (1995): 67–110. 

Schippers, Arie. “‘Tales with a Good Ending’ in Arabic Literature: Narrative Art and Theory 
of the Arabic World.” Quaderni di Studi Arabi 4 (1986): 57–70.

Seidensticker, Tilman. “Responses to Crucifixion in the Islamic World (1st–7th/7th–
13th Centuries).” In Public Violence in Islamic Societies: Power, Discipline, and the 
Construction of the Public Sphere, 7th–19th Centuries CE, edited by Christian Lange 
and Maribel Fierro, 203–16. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009. 

Sijpesteijn, Petra M. “Shaving Hair and Beards in Early Islamic Egypt: An Arab Innovation?” 
Al-Masāq 30, no. 1 (2018): 9–25. 



436  •  Taryn Marashi

Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 32 (2024)

Sindawi, Khalid. “Visit to the Tomb of al-Ḥusayn b. ʿ Alī in Shiite Poetry: First to Fifth Centuries 
AH (8th–11th Centuries CE).” Journal of Arabic Literature 37, no. 2 (2006): 230–58. 

Smith, Jane I. “Concourse between the Living and the Dead in Islamic Eschatological 
Literature.” History of Religions 19, no. 3 (1980): 224–36.

Sourdel, D. “Ibn al-Zayyāt.” In Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed., edited by P. J. Bearman, Th. 
Bianquis, C. E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel, and W. P. Heinrichs. Leiden: Brill, 1954–2009. 

Tesei, Tommaso. “The Barzakh and the Intermediate State of the Dead in the Quran.” In 
Locating Hell in Islamic Traditions, edited by Christian Lange, 31–55. Leiden: Brill, 2016.

Turner, J. P. “The End of the Miḥna.” Oriens 38 (2010): 89–106.

van Gelder, Geert Jan. “Rebarbative Beards in Classical Arabic Literature.” Al-Masāq 30, no. 
1 (2018): 56–70. 

Verdery, Katherine. The Political Lives of Dead Bodies: Reburial and Postsocialist Change. 
New York: Columbia University Press, 1999.

Vogt, Matthias. Figures de califes entre histoire et fiction: Al-Walīd b. Yazīd et al-Amīn dans 
la représentation d’historiographie arabe de l’époque ʿabbāside. Beirut: Ergon, 2006. 

Welch, Alford T. “Death and Dying in the Qurʾān.” In Religious Encounters with Death: Insights 
from the History and Anthropology of Religions, edited by Frank E. Reynolds and Earle 
H. Waugh, 183–99. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1977.

Zaman, Muhammad Qasim. “Death, Funeral Processions, and the Articulation of Religious 
Authority in Early Islam.” Studia Islamica, no. 93 (2001): 27–58.