The Doctrine Reformists Built Their Movement Against

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.