The founder's death was told in a deliberately flat, unheroic way, with no drama and no miracle. Stressing that he was fully human let lawmakers hold up his conduct as a pattern any ordinary person could copy. A plain prophet can be imitated in a way a superhuman one cannot.
Jurists came to insist that believers must do things differently from their neighbours of other faiths, even down to how a body faces in the grave. Rituals did more than express faith. They marked lines between insiders and outsiders, men and women, and religious experts and ordinary people.
Religious scholars wrote laws on how to wash, wrap and bury a corpse, but they were aiming at more than the corpse. They used funeral rules to change everyday city life and to set up a new social order. Death rites became a tool for reshaping how ordinary people behaved in public and at home.
Out of anxiety about privacy and the exposed body, new laws barred women from wailing, washing male corpses, joining processions and attending burials. Women had long held these roles, and the curbs arose in later cities, not in the founder's lifetime. Loud grief was recast as an uncivilised leftover and set against an ideal of quick, silent, restrained funerals.