A Practice the Majority of Muslims Hold Licit

Against this position stand the great majority of Sufi orders and much of mainstream Sunni and Shia practice, which defend visiting graves and shrines to seek the intercession of the dead as an ordinary and licit part of religious life rather than as the gravest sin in Islamic theology. In the Vicinity of the Righteous: Ziyara and the Veneration of Muslim Saints in Late Medieval Egypt describes the visit to a grave, ziyara, as a normal feature of urban religious life across the medieval Islamic world, undertaken to greet the dead, seek their intercession and mark the anniversary of their passing, a practice its defenders read as asking a living dead person to intercede rather than as worshipping that person in God's place. The Sufi Orders in Islam records that this defense rests on a different reading of the same theological principle both sides claim to honor, that the dead in a state of nearness to God retain the capacity to intercede on a petitioner's behalf, much as a living person might be asked to pray for another, rather than being treated as an independent object of worship in competition with God. The atlas states each school's own account of the dispute and does not adjudicate between them.