Abbasid Baghdad of the 3rd/9th century enjoyed a wealth of religious culture, intense intellectual as well as artistic curiosity and interest. Political and economic stability was seen as an impetus to the process of consolidating the boundaries of the communal identity. This paper seeks to challenge this assumption. Through the conception of death and afterlife, I seek to show that the boundaries of communal identity are porous. From Abbasid Baghdad, this paper chooses Abu Bakr ‘Abd Allah b. Muhammad b. ‘Ubayd b. Sufyan -Qurashi, well-known as Ibn Abi al-Dunya born in 208/823, in Baghdad and died there in 14th Jumada II, 281/21st August 894. This paper specifically focuses on Kitab al-Qubur (The Book of Graves), a collection of powerful short texts that presents itself as a non-prophetic hadith. The topic of the text corresponds to major questions in prophetic Hadith; the epistemological stance to existentialist questions poetry investigates. The first person narrative voice in these texts, the brevity of each, and the invocation through repetition all call for reading the text as poetry. While primary and secondary sources set up an understanding of the broad context in which Ibn Abi al- Dunya wrote his book, none directly discusses why this bizarre poetry poses itself as Hadith. Through studying the project of Ibn abi al-Dunya, this paper attempts to answer this question through understanding the consolidated communal identity of Abbasid Baghdad as a space of tension where processes of oscillation, backformation and post-production negotiate a configuration within which the community forms unique, identifiable features. The case of Ibn abi al-Dunya exposes the constructed-ness of communal identities and calls for an understanding of their boundaries as loose, porous and negotiable. Ibn abi al-Dunya’s approach, moreover, allows topics intensely covered and debated by scholars of Hadith to be addressed from an epistemologically different position. While the applicability and permissibility of these issues have been the goal of Hadith scholarship, Ibn abi al-dunya chooses to go beyond the immediate definition into an existentialist theorization about death, fear and loneliness.