JOURNAL OF ARABIC AND ISLAMIC STUDIES

JAIS
ONLINE
Andrew Marsham
relevant in Iraq as in Syria or Egypt). First, it is notable that burning had
a good Judaeo-Christian heritage: it was used against the worst offenders
in Judaic law and maintained a similar position in the Christian Roman
Empire. 81 Given the importance of the corpse of the deceased to the
Judaeo-Christians in the late antique Mediterranean, 82 the near-complete
destruction of the body by fire was a terrible penalty, with possible
implications at the Resurrection. As the ḥadīth reserving the punishment
for God indicates, it also recalled the image of Hell itself as a place of
fiery torment. 83
The other late antique context is the veneration of martyrs’ relics. 84
Fire destroys the corpse of the executed person and so makes veneration
123
of their corpse as a relic difficult or even impossible. In this connection,
it is very notable that many of the better-attested instances of immolation
and the burning of corpses were carried out by Umayyads against Alid
and Hashimite rebels in the late 730s and early 740s (39, 41, 44). In two
cases, the ashes were said to have been scattered in the Euphrates (41,
44), leaving no tomb. Here the context appears to be growing Alid and
Hashimite feeling in Iraq, perhaps including veneration for ‘proto-
Shiʿite’ martyrs. The connection between burning and ideas about the
bodily resurrection in late antiquity and early Islam deserves further
investigation.
Conclusions
Examination of the Umayyads’ own claims about capital punishment
allows us to move beyond the contrasting interpretations of the anecdotal
evidence presented by Abou El Fadl and Hawting. The choice is not
between, on the one hand, a somewhat teleological interpretation of the
Umayyads as co-opting early ‘classical’ ideas about the ḥirāba verse
and, on the other, a view of the Umayyads as acting in an ‘arbitrary’
fashion, unfettered by ‘Quranic’ or ‘Islamic’ prescriptions. Rather, we
should consider the Umayyads as part of what has recently been
described as ‘Islamic late antiquity’. 85 Read with accounts of Roman
81 See above, 117–8.
82 On burial practices in the Middle East in late antiquity, see L. Halevi,
Muhammad’s Grave: Death Rites and the Making of Islamic Society (New York,
2007), 76–7, 80–1.
83 See Appendix, no. 4, and note.
84 Halevi, Muhammad’s Tomb, 81.
85 T. Sizgorich, ‘Narrative and Community in Islamic Late Antiquity’, Past and
Present 185 (2004), 9–42.