Veneration of saints and their shrines

Closely bound to the honouring of the saints is the veneration of their shrines, the tombs, relics and holy places associated with them, which have drawn pilgrims and prayer across the Christian centuries and beyond. From the early church, the graves of the martyrs became places of gathering, prayer and the celebration of the Eucharist, on the conviction that the saint was especially present and especially ready to intercede where their body or relics lay. Around these holy graves grew the great pilgrimage shrines of Christendom, and the practice of enshrining relics beneath altars, of translating the remains of saints to places of honour, and of seeking healing and blessing at their tombs became a defining feature of medieval and later Catholic and Orthodox devotion.

The veneration of relics and shrines expresses the same theology as the honouring of the saints themselves: the holy person, alive with God, remains linked to their earthly remains and to the places sanctified by their presence, and the pilgrim who comes to pray there seeks their intercession and the grace held to flow through such contact with the holy. The practice is not confined to Christianity, the shrines of Sufi saints across the Muslim world, of Jewish sages, and of holy figures in many traditions draw the same devotion of pilgrimage, prayer and petition, testifying to a widespread religious impulse to seek the sacred at the tombs of the holy. Within Christianity the cult of relics and shrines was among the practices most sharply attacked by the Protestant Reformers as superstition, and it remains a living and characteristic devotion of the Catholic and Orthodox worlds, where the great shrines continue to draw pilgrims in their millions.

The shrine of Muinuddin Chishti at Ajmer in northern India is the clearest working example of what shrine veneration actually looks like at scale. Founded in the twelfth century by a Sufi teacher whose order, the Chishtiyya, became the most widespread in South Asia, the shrine now draws several million visitors a year, Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs among them, and its annual urs, marking the saint's death anniversary and kept as his wedding with God, fills the surrounding town for days with pilgrims, musicians and vendors of flowers and cloth offerings. Indian heads of government and state officials have sent ceremonial chadars, cloth coverings for the grave, to the shrine as a matter of political courtesy for decades, which shows how thoroughly the practice has become woven into regional public life rather than remaining a purely devotional matter.

Salafi and Wahhabi scholarship rejects the entire practice on textual grounds, arguing that seeking a saint's intercession, visiting a grave for blessing, or treating any created being as capable of helping a supplicant constitutes shirk, associating partners with God, and that the Prophet himself warned against turning graves into places of worship. That objection is not merely theoretical: shrines associated with saint veneration have been targets of demolition and bombing by militant groups holding this position, in Pakistan, Mali and elsewhere, which makes the dispute over shrine veneration one of the few theological disagreements inside Islam that has produced sustained physical violence against religious sites themselves.