Wali
The term wali is most commonly used by Muslims to refer to a saint, or literally a "friend of God".
In the traditional Islamic understanding, a saint is portrayed as someone "marked by divine favor... holiness", and who is specifically "chosen by God and endowed with exceptional gifts, such as the ability to work miracles". The doctrine of saints was articulated by Muslim scholars very early on in Islamic history, and particular verses of the Quran and certain hadith were interpreted by early Muslim thinkers as "documentary evidence" of the existence of saints. Graves of saints around the Muslim world became centers of pilgrimage – especially after 1200 CE – for masses of Muslims seeking their barakah.
File:Ахмад Газали, беседующий с учеником.jpg|thumb|upright=1.15|A 1552 Persian miniature of the saint Ahmad Ghazali talking to a disciple.
Since the first Muslim hagiographies were written during the period when the Islamic mystical trend of Sufism began its rapid expansion, many of the figures who later came to be regarded as the major saints in orthodox Sunni Islam were the early Sufi mystics, like Hasan of Basra, Farqad Sabakhi, Dawud Tai, Rabia of Basra, Maruf Karkhi, and Junayd of Baghdad. From the twelfth to the fourteenth century, "the general veneration of saints, among both people and sovereigns, reached its definitive form with the organization of Sufism... into orders or brotherhoods". In the common expressions of Islamic piety of this period, the saint was understood to be "a contemplative whose state of spiritual perfection... permanent expression in the teaching bequeathed to his disciples". In many prominent Sunni creeds of the time, such as the famous Creed of Tahawi and the Creed of Nasafi, a belief in the existence and miracles of saints was presented as "a requirement" for being an orthodox Muslim believer.
Aside from the Sufis, the preeminent saints in traditional Islamic piety are the Companions of the Prophet, their Successors, and the Successors of the Successors. Additionally, the prophets and messengers in Islam are also believed to be saints by definition, although they are rarely referred to as such, in order to prevent confusion between them and ordinary saints; as the prophets are exalted by Muslims as the greatest of all humanity, it is a general tenet of Sunni belief that a single prophet is greater than all the regular saints put together. In short, it is believed that "every prophet is a saint, but not every saint is a prophet".
In the modern world, traditional Sunni and Shia ideas of saints has been challenged by fundamentalist and revivalist Islamic movements such as the Salafi movement, Wahhabism, and Islamic Modernism, all three of which have, to a greater or lesser degree, "formed a front against the veneration and theory of saints". As has been noted by scholars, the development of these movements has indirectly led to a trend amongst some mainstream Muslims to resist "acknowledging the existence of Muslim saints altogether or... their presence and veneration as unacceptable deviations". However, despite the presence of these opposing streams of thought, the classical doctrine of saint veneration continues to thrive in many parts of the Islamic world today, playing a vital role in daily expressions of piety among vast segments of Muslim populations in Muslim countries like Pakistan, Bangladesh, Egypt, Turkey, Senegal, Iraq, Iran, Algeria, Tunisia, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Morocco, as well as in countries with substantial Islamic populations like India, China, Russia, and the Balkans.
Names
Regarding the rendering of the Arabic walī by the English "saint", prominent scholars such as Gibril Haddad have regarded this as an appropriate translation, with Haddad describing the aversion of some Muslims towards the use of "saint" for walī as "a specious objection... for – like 'Religion', 'Believer', 'prayer', etc. – generic term for holiness and holy persons while there is no confusion, for Muslims, over their specific referents in Islam, namely: the reality of iman with Godwariness and those who possess those qualities." In Persian, which became the second most influential and widely spoken language in the Islamic world after Arabic, the general title for a saint or a spiritual master became pīr. Although the ramifications of this phrase include the connotations of a general "saint," it is often used to specifically signify a spiritual guide of some type.Amongst Indian Muslims, the title pīr baba is commonly used in Hindi to refer to Sufi masters or similarly honored saints. Additionally, saints are also sometimes referred to in the Persian or Urdu vernacular with "Hazrat." In Islamic mysticism, a pīr's role is to guide and instruct his disciples on the mystical path. Hence, the key difference between the use of walī and pīr is that the former does not imply a saint who is also a spiritual master with disciples, while the latter directly does so through its connotations of "elder". Additionally, other Arabic and Persian words that also often have the same connotations as pīr, and hence are also sometimes translated into English as "saint", include murshid, sheikh and sarkar.
In the Turkish Islamic lands, saints have been referred to by many terms, including the Arabic walī, the Persian s̲h̲āh and pīr, and Turkish alternatives like baba in Anatolia, ata in Central Asia, and eren or ermis̲h̲ or yati̊r in Anatolia. Their tombs, meanwhile, are "denoted by terms of Arabic or Persian origin alluding to the idea of pilgrimage, tomb or domed mausoleum. But such tombs are also denoted by terms usually used for dervish convents, or a particular part of it, or by a quality of the saint."
History
According to various traditional Sufi interpretations of the Quran, the concept of sainthood is clearly described. Some modern scholars, however, assert that the Quran does not explicitly outline a doctrine or theory of saints. In the Quran, the adjective walī is applied to God, in the sense of him being the "friend" of all believers. However, particular Quranic verses were interpreted by early Islamic scholars to refer to a special, exalted group of holy people. These included : "Surely God's friends : no fear shall be on them, neither shall they sorrow," and, which refers to God's love for those who love him. Additionally, some scholars interpreted, "Whosoever obeys God and the Messenger, they are with those unto whom God hath shown favor: the prophets and the ṣidīqīna and the martyrs and the righteous. The best of company are they," to carry a reference to holy people who were not prophets and were ranked below the latter. The word ṣidīqīna in this verse literally connotes "the truthful ones" or "the just ones," and was often interpreted by the early Islamic thinkers in the sense of "saints," with the famous Quran translator Marmaduke Pickthall rendering it as "saints" in their interpretations of the scripture. Furthermore, the Quran referred to the miracles of saintly people who were not prophets like Khidr and the People of the Cave, which also led many early scholars to deduce that a group of venerable people must exist who occupy a rank below the prophets but are nevertheless exalted by God. The references in the corpus of hadith literature to bona fide saints like the pre-Islamic Jurayj̲, only lent further credence to this early understanding of saints.Collected stories about the "lives or vitae of the saints", began to be compiled "and transmitted at an early stage" by many regular Muslim scholars, including Ibn Abi al-Dunya, who wrote a work entitled Kitāb al-Awliyāʾ in the ninth-century, which constitutes "the earliest compilation on the theme of God's friends." Prior to Ibn Abi al-Dunya's work, the stories of the saints were transmitted through oral tradition; but after the composition of his work, many Islamic scholars began writing down the widely circulated accounts, with later scholars like Abū Nuʿaym al-Iṣfahānī making extensive use of Ibn Abi al-Dunya's work in his own Ḥilyat al-awliyāʾ. It is, moreover, evident from the Kitāb al-Kas̲h̲f wa 'l-bayān of the early Baghdadi Sufi mystic Abu Sa'id al-Kharraz that a cohesive understanding of the Muslim saints was already in existence, with al-Kharraz spending ample space distinguishing between the virtues and miracles of the prophets and the saints. The genre of hagiography only became more popular with the passage of time, with numerous prominent Islamic thinkers of the medieval period devoting large works to collecting stories of various saints or to focusing upon "the marvelous aspects of the life, the miracles or at least the prodigies of a Ṣūfī or of a saint believed to have been endowed with miraculous powers."
In the late ninth-century, important thinkers in Sunni Islam officially articulated the previously-oral doctrine of an entire hierarchy of saints, with the first written account of this hierarchy coming from the pen of al-Hakim al-Tirmidhi. With the general consensus of Islamic scholars of the period accepting that the ulema were responsible for maintaining the "exoteric" part of Islamic orthodoxy, including the disciplines of law and jurisprudence, while the Sufis were responsible for articulating the religion's deepest inward truths, later prominent mystics like Ibn Arabi only further reinforced this idea of a saintly hierarchy, and the notion of "types" of saints became a mainstay of Sunni mystical thought, with such types including the ṣiddīqūn and the abdāl, amongst others. Many of these concepts appear in writing far before al-Tirmidhi and Ibn Arabi; the idea of the abdāl, for example, appears as early as the Musnad of Ibn Hanbal, where the word signifies a group of major saints "whose number would remain constant, one always being replaced by some other on his death." It is, in fact, reported that Ibn Hanbal explicitly identified his contemporary, the mystic Maruf Karkhi, as one of the abdal, saying: "He is one of the substitute-saints, and his supplication is answered."
File:Govardhan. A Discourse Between Muslim Sages ca. 1630 LACMA.jpg|thumb|upright|left|A Mughal miniature of A Discourse between Muslim Sages, thought to be executed by the court painter Govārdhan.
From the twelfth to the fourteenth century, "the general veneration of saints, among both people and sovereigns, reached its definitive form with the organization of Sufism—the mysticism of Islam—into orders or brotherhoods." In general Islamic piety of the period, the saint was understood to be "a contemplative whose state of spiritual perfection... permanent expression in the teaching bequeathed to his disciples." It was by virtue of his spiritual wisdom that the saint was accorded veneration in medieval Islam, "and it is this which... his 'canonization,' and not some ecclesiastical institution" as in Christianity. In fact, the latter point represents one of the crucial differences between the Islamic and Christian veneration of saints, for saints are venerated by unanimous consensus or popular acclaim in Islam, in a manner akin to all those Christian saints who began to be venerated prior to the institution of canonization. In fact, a belief in the existence of saints became such an important part of medieval Islam that many of the most important creeds articulated during the time period, like the famous Creed of Tahawi, explicitly declared it a requirement for being an "orthodox" Muslim to believe in the existence and veneration of saints and in the traditional narratives of their lives and miracles. Hence, we find that even medieval critics of the widespread practice of venerating the tombs of saints, like Ibn Taymiyyah, never denied the existence of saints as such, with the Hanbali jurist stating: "The miracles of saints are absolutely true and correct, by the acceptance of all Muslim scholars. And the Qur'an has pointed to it in different places, and the sayings of the Prophet have mentioned it, and whoever denies the miraculous power of saints are only people who are innovators and their followers." In the words of one contemporary academic, practically all Muslims of that era believed that "the lives of saints and their miracles were incontestable."
In the modern world, the traditional idea of saints in Islam has been challenged by the puritanical and revivalist Islamic movements of Salafism and Wahhabism, whose influence has "formed a front against the veneration and theory of saints." For the adherents of Wahhabi ideology, for example, the practice of venerating saints appears as an "abomination", for they see in this a form of idolatry. It is for this reason that the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, which adheres to the Wahhabi creed, "destroyed the tombs of saints wherever... able" during its expansion in the Arabian Peninsula from the eighteenth-century onwards. As has been noted by scholars, the development of these movements have indirectly led to a trend amongst some mainstream Muslims to also resist "acknowledging the existence of Muslim saints altogether or... their presence and veneration as unacceptable deviations." At the same time, the movement of Islamic Modernism has also opposed the traditional veneration of saints, for many proponents of this ideology regard the practice as "being both un-Islamic and backwards... rather than the integral part of Islam which they were for over a millennium." Despite the presence, however, of these opposing streams of thought, the classical doctrine of saint-veneration continues to thrive in many parts of the Islamic world today, playing a vital part in the daily piety of vast portions of Muslim countries like Pakistan, Bangladesh, Egypt, Turkey, Senegal, Iraq, Iran, Algeria, Tunisia, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Morocco, as well as in countries with substantive Islamic populations like India, China, Russia, and the Balkans.