Barakah, from a root meaning to kneel or to be still and by extension to be blessed with abundance, appears throughout the Quran and hadith literature describing divine blessing attached to specific times, places and people: the month of Ramadan, the Night of Power (Laylat al-Qadr), the city of Mecca and the Kaaba, and above all the person of the Prophet Muhammad, whose relics, including hair and clothing, were treasured by early Muslims as carrying his barakah. Sufi tradition extended this concentration of barakah to the awliya, saints or friends of God, holding that spiritual power continues to reside at a saint's tomb after death and can be accessed through ziyarah, visitation, a practice central to shrine culture across the Muslim world from Morocco to Indonesia.
Living shaykhs in Sufi orders, turuq, are likewise described as channels of barakah, transmitted to disciples through initiation, through physical contact, or through consuming food, water or objects the shaykh has blessed, a chain of transmission, silsila, that Sufi orders trace back through their founders to the Prophet himself. Barakah is understood throughout as God's own blessing, not an impersonal cosmic energy independent of divine will, even where its practical description, concentrated in a place or person and transmissible by contact, can sound structurally similar to force-concepts in other traditions.