Secular funeral and mourning ceremonies

Abbas Goya

In socialist circles, the funeral ceremonies held for those who perished in revolutionary uprisings have raised a recurring question: Do funeral rites have Islamic or religious origins? In searching for an answer, I arrived at the following conclusions, which are by no means exhaustive or definitive.

According to the website of the National Center for Answering Religious Questions, “many practices that have become entrenched traditions in society lack intrinsic religious significance. One such tradition is the ceremony held under various titles following a person’s death. Some of these practices even contradict religious traditions and rulings.” Islam did not originally establish ceremonies held on the third, seventh, or fortieth days after death; rather, Islamic authorities later formulated religious justifications for these gatherings by incorporating acts such as prayer, fasting, and recitation of the Qur’an.

The symbolic importance of these numbers predates the Abrahamic religions by centuries, if not millennia. While Judaism, Christianity, and Islam later attached religious meaning to them, their roots are far older. In the Torah, for example, God creates the universe in seven days; the Great Flood lasts forty days and forty nights; and Noah brings seven pairs of each animal onto the ark. In the Bible, the numbers three, seven, twelve, and forty appear repeatedly: three is associated with the Trinity, Jesus’s resurrection after three days, his three closest disciples, and Jonah’s three days in the belly of the fish.

A more natural explanation for the prominence of these numbers lies in early human numeracy. Archaeological evidence suggests that numbers began to be used around 5,500 years ago, largely in the context of urbanization and property relations. The number seven, for instance, likely gained significance because seven celestial bodies—the Sun, Moon, Mars, Mercury, Venus, Jupiter, and Saturn—are visible to the naked eye. Similarly, the decimal system is rooted in the fact that humans have ten fingers.

Burial practices and memorial rituals for the dead, however, are far older still. Archaeologists trace them back roughly 300,000 years, to pre-modern humans such as the Neanderthals. Death has always been humanity’s greatest mystery, and attempts to communicate with—or appease—supernatural forces have long accompanied funeral and mourning practices. Death was often perceived as the work of a supernatural power, one that needed to be feared, repelled, or appeased to prevent further loss or, imaginatively, to restore life.

Practices such as wearing masks or painting the body are common in ancient funeral rituals and may date back to the earliest forms of burial ceremonies. Likewise, the belief in an afterlife long predates the Abrahamic religions. Archaeological finds show that tools and personal belongings—items meant to support life beyond death—were buried with the deceased tens of thousands of years ago. The Abrahamic religions, beginning with Judaism, largely sought to reinterpret and reshape these preexisting practices rather than invent them anew.

At the same time, human experience and self-awareness teach us that mourning serves a vital psychological and social function. To cope with the death of loved ones, people need to grieve, to express their emotions, to be given time to heal, and to receive sympathy from others. The combination of these needs has produced mourning traditions with specific timeframes—such as the Iranian custom of sustained communal support during the forty days following a death—in which friends and relatives remain closely present to comfort the bereaved.

I see no inherent problem with traditions that offer sympathy to mourners on the first, third, seventh, fortieth days after a death, or at any point in between, so long as their purpose is to ease suffering and express solidarity. These ceremonies are fundamentally humanitarian: they are expressions of empathy and shared grief. As such, they are valuable traditions—ones that can be preserved while stripping away unnecessary religious embellishments.

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