They maintained that the Prophet’s—peace and blessings be upon him—choice of one of these positions is itself a legal prescription and therefore indicates a fixed rule. Those who held this view split into two groups: one group relied on the ḥadīth of Samurah ibn Jundub—whose authenticity is unanimously accepted—and concluded that the ruling is the same for both women and men, for the default is that their legal status is identical unless a sound sharʿī distinction is established. The second group, having authenticated the ḥadīth of Ibn Ghalib, argued that it contains an additional detail absent from Samurah’s report; accordingly, it must be adopted, and in fact there is no contradiction between the two narrations at all.

As for the opinion ascribed to Ibn al-Qāsim and Abū Ḥanīfah, I know of no transmitted proof for it except what has been reported from Ibn Masʿūd.

Issue Five: The Order of Men’s and Women’s Biers When They Are Brought Together for the Funeral Prayer

The majority state that the biers of the men should be placed closest to the imām, while the women’s biers should be closer to the qiblah. A second group held the reverse—that the women’s biers are nearest the imām and the men’s nearest the qiblah. A third opinion says each is to be prayed over separately, the men by themselves and the women by themselves.

The cause of this disagreement is the prevailing assumption—based on general Sharīʿah considerations—that there ought to be a defined ruling for such a situation, even though no binding text has reached us. For that reason many scholars have concluded that there is in fact no specific legal ruling here, and that, had one existed, it would have been made clear.

The majority adopted the arrangement of placing the men first because of what Mālik relates in the Muwaṭṭaʾ: that ʿUthmān ibn ʿAffān, ʿAbd Allāh ibn ʿUmar, and Abū Hurayrah used to lead the funeral prayers in Madīnah when men and women were present together; they would position the men’s biers nearest the imām and the women’s nearer the qiblah. ʿAbd al-Razzaq likewise reports from Ibn Jurayj, from Nāfiʿ, from Ibn ʿUmar, that he prayed in this manner over a bier that included Ibn ʿAbbās, Abū Hurayrah, Abū Saʿīd al-Khudrī, and Abū Qatādah, with Saʿīd ibn al-ʿĀṣ acting as imām that day. He—or someone at his instruction—asked them about this arrangement, and they replied, “It is the Sunnah.” In their view this counts as a supported precedent (musnad).

Those who prefer the men to stand foremost may have drawn an analogy between their position in front of the imām here and their position behind him in the congregational prayer, and they cite the Prophet’s—peace and blessings be upon him—statement: “Keep them back to the place where Allah has kept them back.”

As for those who put the women ahead of the men, it appears they thought that the first bier in the row is, by definition, the foremost, without considering proximity to the imām as the criterion of precedence.

Those who insisted on separating the two did so out of caution, lest they permit something that might be prohibited. Since no Sunnah text explicitly allows combining the biers, it remains possible that doing so is merely permissible by default—or that it is in fact disallowed by law. Where such uncertainty exists, one must withhold judgement whenever that is feasible.