Answer
In the Name of Allah, Most Gracious, Most Merciful.
All praise and thanks are due to Allah, and peace and blessings be upon His Messenger.
In this fatwa:
1- As for visiting graves by women, there is a big controversy among scholars; while some totally forbid it, others are for the view it is allowed.
2- Some other scholars have concluded that women can go to gravesides and cemeteries providing that they fulfill usual requirements in the same way as they, for example, go shopping or visiting friends and neighbors.
In his answer to the question, the late Sheikh Sayyed Ad-Darsh, former Chairman of the UK Shari`ah Council, states:
There are conflicting Hadiths on this subject; while some Hadiths prohibit such practices, others seemingly go the opposite way.
Those people who reject the idea altogether quote the following Hadith in which the Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him) is reported to have said, “Allah has cursed women who often go and visit graves.” (At-Termidhi)
Another Hadith relates an incident in which the Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him) asked his daughter, Fatimah, why she had left her house. She is reported to have replied, “I went to the family of such-and-such a dead person and I prayed to Allah to shower His mercy on the person.” The Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him) is then reported to have asked whether she went to the funeral and she replied, “God forbid, how could I do such a thing when I have heard that you have forbidden this?”
However, those looking for evidence to show that women are allowed to visit graves quote some of the following Hadiths:
According to one tradition, the Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him) is reported – after acknowledging that he had earlier forbade women to visit cemeteries – to have said, “Now you are allowed to go and visit them, for they remind you of the Hereafter.” (Abu Dawud and An-Nasa’i)
In another Hadith reported by Muslim and Al-Bukhari, the Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him) is reported by Umm `Atiyyah Al-Ansareyah to have forbidden women from following funeral prayers, but Umm `Atiyyah added, ‘he did not stress it.’
The question then is: what does the believer conclude form all this? After much deliberation, scholars have concluded that women can go to gravesides and cemeteries providing that they fulfill usual requirements in the same way as they, for example, go shopping or visiting friends and neighbors. This, according to some scholars, is the best method of combining the two sets of Hadiths which may otherwise appear contradictory.
Almighty Allah knows best.
Editor’s note: This fatwa is from Ask the Scholar’s archive and was originally published at an earlier date.