Barakah: Blessing Flows Through the Saints and Their Tombs

Barakah names a blessing believed to reside in holy persons and to remain active after them, carried forward in their tombs, their relics, their descendants and even objects they touched or wore. The concept predates Islam, rooted in the religious thought of the pre-Islamic Arab and Berber worlds, and Islam absorbed and reworked it rather than inventing it outright. In its developed devotional form, especially within Sufism, barakah is treated as something that can be sought, transmitted and, in a real sense, accumulated: a living shaykh at the head of a Sufi order is held to carry it, a saint's tomb is held to concentrate it long after death, and visiting such a tomb, touching it or praying near it is undertaken in the belief that some of that blessing can be drawn from the encounter. The word itself is often translated as blessing, but the concept carries more force than that English word suggests; it describes a kind of transmissible spiritual potency rather than only divine favor in the abstract, and it underwrites much of the devotional architecture built up around Sufi saints, their descendants and the shrines that mark their graves across the Muslim world. The idea that blessing can pass by touch or by nearness, rather than only by direct instruction, is what gives the whole devotional system its coherence.

Barakah is also precisely the doctrine that Islamic reformist movements have most consistently targeted, because visiting a tomb to draw blessing from it reads, to a reformist eye, as treating a created being rather than God as the source of help, the sin the Quran calls shirk. Muhammad ibn Abd al Wahhab, the eighteenth century founder of the movement that became Wahhabism, preached directly against the veneration of saints and pilgrimage to their tombs on these grounds, and where his followers gained political control they acted on the teaching physically rather than only rhetorically. Wahhabi forces destroyed shrine domes across Mecca in 1803 and swept through Medina in 1806, and after the Saudi conquest of the Hejaz in the 1920s the historic Jannat al Baqi cemetery in Medina, resting place of several of the Prophet's own family, was leveled along with its domed tombs. The demolition drew condemnation from Sunni Muslims well outside the reformist camp, for whom visiting such graves remained an accepted, long-standing devotional practice rather than a corruption of it. The dispute over barakah is accordingly not a minor devotional disagreement; it marks one of the sharpest fault lines running through modern Sunni Islam, between traditions that hold the practice as inherited piety and a reformist current that regards it as the very idolatry Islam was sent to abolish.