In Muhammad’s Grave: Death Rites and the Making of Islamic Society, scholar and author Leor Halevi examined Islamic death rites from a blend of historical and literary perspectives—an approach he honed as a Ph.D. student at Harvard and tutor in the College’s History & Literature department.

Muhammad's Grave was recently honored by the Phi Beta Kappa Society with the 2008 Ralph Waldo Emerson Award. Halevi is currently an associate professor of history at Vanderbilt University and is also working on a book that focuses on Muslim attitudes towards foreign goods and commerce.

e-CMES: You received your Ph.D. in history and Middle Eastern studies from Harvard, and you were also a tutor in the History and Literature department. How has that experience affected your work?

Leor Halevi: In many ways, but what really trained me well were the small, advanced seminars that we had where we looked very closely at Arabic or Latin sources. They were led by experts in the field … In particular, Roy Mottahedeh, Wolfhart Heinrichs, and Michael McCormick prepared me best to conduct original research on my own.

e-CMES: And as a tutor in History and Literature…?

LH: Combining history and literature — that's very enriching for me. Part of what I try to do as a historian is bring texts to life. But the challenge, in writing Muhammad’s Grave, was dealing with sources that were very difficult to contextualize historically. I’m referring here to oral traditions, eventually transcribed as canonical texts. We don’t usually know when and where they originated. So I had to think long and hard to figure out a new way of interpreting these texts, to turn them into sources for social and cultural history.

As a tutor in the History and Literature Department [at Harvard], I often thought back to my first encounter with Nietzsche. I realized how important it was to create a deliberate narrative, to find a literary form that would that would correspond to the subject matter … I might have written Muhammad’s Grave as a chronological story, beginning with pre-Islamic death rites and then tracing their development for a couple of centuries after the rise of Islam. That would’ve been a traditional way of writing history. Instead, I realized that a really good, novel way of approaching the topic of death is to follow the rituals and time cycles … to follow the movement of society around a corpse, from the moment of death until burial and the afterlife.

e-CMES: What led you to this specifically topic?

LH: I didn’t have a near death experience or anything. [Laughs] I think it was the humanistic appeal of the subject of death.

One of the challenges of writing a scholarly book about the distant past is finding a connection, a human connection, with readers. Death — our own death, the death of loved ones — tends to preoccupy tons of individuals. Focusing on the topic in the early Islamic context allowed me to connect with such readers, who then see how a different culture and society dealt with death. And they find common preoccupations, across societies and times.

On occasion I’ve heard from strangers who have responded to my book on a very personal level because they have seen the topic reflected in their lives.

e-CMES: What have people said?

LH: Readers often tell me about the way they’ve mourned or buried a relative … They tend to find hollow and aseptic modern Western ways of dealing with death. In my book they find alternative ways, which often strike them as emotionally powerful and sometimes more satisfying. They think, for instance, about the benefits of having families rather than funeral parlors prepare bodies for burial.

e-CMES: What are you working on now?

LH: I’ve shifted quite a bit. I’m working on cross-cultural trade, but still focusing to some degree on rituals. I’ve also shifted into the 20th century. I’m looking at trade and religious responses to trade, from the rise of Islam to the present day.