214 Claudia Preckel
from al-Shawkānī, who had incorporated Ibn Taymiyya’s most impor-
tant teachings in his own works.
Al-Shawkānī wrote extensively on the subject of ikhlāṣ al-tawḥīd
in his Kitāb al-Durr al-naḍīḍ fī ikhlāṣ kalimat al-tawḥīd (The Book
of the Well-Strung Pearls on the Sincere Devotion to the Word of the
Unity of God).^164 The book focuses on condemning the practice of
veneration of dead saints at their graves (qubūr). To al-Shawkānī (fol-
lowing Ibn Taymiyya), this practice was a form of polytheism (shirk).
He accused the “believers in the dead” (qubūriyyūn, muqabbirūn) of
constantly violating the principles of purifying the tawḥīd by worship-
ping someone other than God. He explained that the dead lived in the
world between this world (dunyā) and the other world (al-ākhira),
which is called barzakh (“barrier” or “separation”), in the sense of lim-
bo.^165 According to Ibn Taymiyya, al-Shawkānī and the Ahl-i Ḥadith,
the dead cannot hear the prayers and requests for intercession of the
living while in the barzakh. So it is of no avail to ask them for help in
worldly or other matters. According to al-Shawkānī, it was also useless
- and even forbidden – to pray to the Prophet Muḥammad for aid on
the Day of Judgement (yawm al-qiyāma). This was because the knowl-
edge of the unseen (ʿilm al-ghayb) is God’s alone. Devotion to tawḥīd
was one of the central subjects of the Ahl-i Ḥadīth. Ṣiddīq Ḥasan Khān
wrote three treatises on tawḥīd: the Persian work Murād al-murīd fī
ikhlāṣ al-tawḥīd (Desire of the Disciple of Devotion to the Oneness
of God), the Urdu work Diʿāyat al-īmān ilā tawḥīd al-raḥmān (Call
to the Right Belief in the Oneness of God) and the Urdu work Ikhlāṣ
al-tawḥīd lil-ḥamīd al-majīd (Dedication to the Oneness of God for
the Praiseworthy and Glorious).^166 These writings were not available
to the author of this article, so it remains to be checked whether they
are compilations or abridgements of al-Shawkānī’s works, which might
contain many more quotations from Ibn Taymiyya.
6.6. Veneration of GravesIn Bhopal, it was not Ṣiddīq Ḥasan Khān alone who was concerned
about the veneration of (dead) saints in India and beyond and about vis-
164 Haykel, Revival and Reform, pp. 127–129.
165 On this, see the article by Y. Tzvi Langermann in the present volume.
166 All three works have not been printed. Information on them were only given
by Nawshahrawī, Tarājim, pp. 251, 253, 254.
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