Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland

THE WORSHIPFUL ACTS t 237
day. Muhammad, who never claimed to be anything other than
mortal (Quran 18:110), and stoutly refused to produce supernatural
signs to verify his claims as a prophet, was soon after his
death credited with marvelous powers, and those gifts and graces
(karamat) bestowed by God on his Prophet were quickly extended
to God’s “friends” (wali; pl. awliya), male and female. The cults of
these friends of God, whether the founder of a Sufi order, a local
holy man, or the Prophet himself, were popularly patronized, and
the devout were richly rewarded with generous “blessings” ranging
from medical cures or fertility to luck in marriage—which
were attached to visitations to the tomb shrines of saints, generally
called qubbas by reason of the distinctive small domed building
over the site. Women in particular, who, as we have seen, were not
encouraged to participate in public prayer, and generally did not
find the mosque to be a welcoming place, often made pilgrimages
to local tomb shrines or cemeteries with petitions for favors or
intercession. All of this combined to make such places and their
rituals a center and focus of Muslim spiritual life, particularly in
the countryside.
These cults did not pass unremarked. The school of jurisprudence
founded by Ahmad ibn Hanbal (d. 855) was particularly
outspoken in its criticism of the cult of saints, particularly at their
tombs. The greatest Hanbalite eminence of the Middle Ages, Ibn
Taymiyya (d. 1328), issued fatwas and wrote broadsides against
them. Though he was not in a position to do much about this
extremely common practice, many of his opinions found an echo
in the preaching of Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab (d. 1791), the
conservative ideologue behind the rise of the House of Saud in
Arabia. In 1813 the Wahhabis emerged from central Arabia to
destroy the tomb shrine of Husayn ibn Ali at Karbala, in Iraq, and
when they took Mecca and Medina early in the nineteenth century
and again, more permanently, in 1926, the zealous Wahhabi
“brethren” destroyed the tombs of many of Islam’s earliest and
most venerated heroes. They did not, however, touch the largest
tomb shrine of them all, that of the Prophet Muhammad at Medina.
Indeed, the Saudis have enlarged and elaborated it.