to whether the saints are known by their closeness
to God or their power, the saints in fact should be
understood to be very special people who com-
bine these two attributes. “Saint,” then, connotes
both friend and protector. One who is a saint is
close to God. God protects the saint and gives the
saint power (baraka). Just as God is the patron of
the saint, dispensing power to him or her, so, too,
the saint has power and acts as a patron.
There is no generally recognized churchlike
structure in Islam to recognize or canonize saints,
which means that the saints emerge relatively
organically from their environments. This does
not mean, however, that one becomes a saint
spontaneously, or without effort. On the contrary,
it is clear that individuals have often striven to be
considered saints, and it is also clear that saints are
made, or at least come to be widely recognized, by
the actions and efforts of their followers.
The great scholar of sUFism, Abu al-Qasim
al-Qushayri (d. 1072), defined the saint as “first,
someone whose affairs are taken over by God, and,
second, as someone whose worship of God is con-
stant without any defect of rebellion” (Hoffman,
109). People may become saints after long years of
discipline and asceticism, or they may reach that
state in an immediate, overwhelming experience
of the divine that takes over the person’s intellect.
At the level of the average believer, however, the
defining characteristic of saints is the ability to
work miracles, known as karamat, through their
blessing power (baraka). This power to work
miracles is a sine qua non for saints, much as it is
in Christianity.
The saints are thus special people, often hidden
or obscured from the attention of others during
their lives, who have a special closeness to God that
allows them to act as intercessors on behalf of the
believers, providing them access to the power and
grace of God. Most often the deceased saint has a
shrine to which people make visitation (ziyara),
and to which people come annually for a local or
regional saint festival (mawlid). This shrine, known
variously as a maqam, qubba, darih, or dargah,
contains the body and relics of the saint. It is also
believed to contain the saint’s baraka.
The reality of saints, and especially their venera-
tion, has been under strenuous attack in the Islamic
world for over a century. reneWal and reForm
movements of the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries
have objected to the practices associated with saint
veneration. The Wahhabis, who emerged in the
Arabian Peninsula in the 18th century, destroyed
all the saints shrines they found, a practice that is
continued by the modern Saudi state through some
of its charitable arms. For them, saint veneration
risked compromising the Islamic belief in the one-
ness of God, thus constituting idolatry, or shirk: the
greatest sin of Islam. In the 19th and 20th centuries,
many Muslim reformers came to see saint veneration
as archaic superstition that had to be eliminated ifPopular religious poster showing an assembly of lead-
ing Chishti saints, shown with their shrines in India
saint 599 J