The Life Of Ibn Hanbal by Ibn Al-Jawzi

[Ṣāliḥ:] When my father died the streets filled with mourners. I sent word that I would bring his body out when the afternoon prayer was over. 81.1

Ibn Ṭāhir sent us his chamberlain Muẓaffar with bundles of cloth, perfumes, and a message: “The emir conveys his greetings and says, ‘I am doing what the Commander of the Faithful would do if he were here.’” I said, “Return the greeting and tell him that while Aḥmad was alive, he was exempt from doing anything he detested. I’m not going to inflict anything detestable on him now that he’s dead.” “Wrap him in this cloth,” he replied, “and put something else over it.” I repeated what I had said.

My father’s slave woman had spun a ten-cubit length of cloth worth twenty-eight dirhams to be used to make two shirts. From it we cut two strips to wrap him in.

Taking another strip from Fūrān, we had three layers of cloth to wrap the body.478 We bought the aromatics ourselves. An associate of ours who was a perfumer asked if he could send us some of his but I wouldn’t let him.

Meanwhile, someone had taken a jar of ours and poured water into it. I told them to tell Fūrān to buy a waterskin and fill the jar my father used to drink from, since he would never take anything from our houses.

When the body had been washed we wrapped it in the shrouds with some hundred members of the clan of Hāshim looking on. As soon as we got the body onto the bier they began kissing him on the forehead.

[Al-Marrūdhī:] As I was preparing to wash him, enough tribesmen of Hāshim arrived to fill the house. So we took him into his set of rooms, let down the door curtain, and covered him with a cloth while we worked. No outsiders were present for the washing of the corpse. When that was done, we prepared to shroud him, but the Hāshimīs pushed us aside, weeping, pushing their children forward over the body, and kissing it. Finally we got him onto the bier and bound him to it using strips of turban cloth. Ibn Ṭāhir had sent some shrouds but I sent them back. His uncle told the messenger, “He wouldn’t even let my slave fan him.” Someone else said, “He asked to be shrouded in his own clothes.” 81.2

In the end we shrouded him in a piece of Marawī fabric that he had been planning to make some clothes from. We added another piece to it and so wrapped him in three layers of cloth.