Barakah is the beneficent power or blessing that, in Islamic usage, God places in persons, places, times and objects, and which is understood to be communicable by contact or proximity. The Qur'an uses the root widely: God blesses the precincts of the farthest mosque (17:1), blesses prophets and their households, and calls the revelation itself a blessed book (38:29). The term therefore begins as a scriptural word for divine favour before it becomes the organising idea of a great deal of everyday piety.
In practice, barakah is sought from the descendants of the Prophet, from teachers standing in a chain of transmission, from the water of the Zamzam well, from relics and manuscripts, and above all from the tombs of saints, where visitors touch, circle or leave petitions. Its transmissibility is what makes it socially powerful: a blessing held by a person can be conveyed to a place, and from the place to a visitor.
That same transmissibility is what makes it contested. Reformist and Salafi scholarship, following Ibn Taymiyya, argues that seeking barakah at graves attributes to creatures what belongs to God alone and shades into shirk. Sufi and traditionalist Sunni scholarship replies that the practice is tawassul, approaching God through means God himself appointed, and that no one supposes the saint to be the source. Anthropologists of North Africa and South Asia have described barakah as one of the most durable features of lived Islam whatever the scholarly verdict on it.