This paper asks how the socio-legal precedents in early Islam pertaining to female mourning and participation in funerals have been interpreted in the contemporary period by Muslims in diaspora. Specifically, it examines the practices of participation of women, primarily of South Asian and North African heritage, at Muslim funerals in Britain and France. Doctrinal sources established in early Islam recommend that women do not participate in burial rites at the cemetery, as ‘emotional’ manifestations of grief at the graveside may disturb the deceased. Instead, women have traditionally engaged in practices of mourning centred on the home of the deceased prior to burial, as documented in ethnographic research in the two regions of origin studied here, rural areas of South Asia and North Africa. However, in a migration context, traditional home-based female mourning practices are disrupted, due to new living arrangements and hygiene regulations which tend to sequester bodies. This has led some Muslim women to demand the right to participate in burials at the cemetery. At stake is the tension between facilitating a ‘good death’ for the deceased and, conversely, enabling the living to grieve, as revealed in data from around 40 interviews with male and female Muslim undertakers, imams, male and female members of mosque boards, and cemetery managers, in Britain and France. I argue that Muslim women confront two paradigms of ‘good death’, a Western secular version and an orthodox Islamic version, both of which serve to constrain the forms and spaces in which female grief can manifest.