Cemeteries and tombs in the Muslim worlds at the crossroads of religious, political and memorial issues: an introduction

While men’s attitudes toward death have profoundly evolved in all human societies (Aries, 1977, Godelier, 2015), burial practices, wherever present, appear as a social fact. Indeed, burial practices set the whole of society and its institutions in motion. It mobilizes a society’s cultural dimensions (economic, technological, political, artistic, religious), it gathers individuals into social groups and defines and reflects the changing forms of their daily lives, their collective memories an...