A Blessing That Outlives the Person Who Carried It

Barakah names a blessing believed to reside in holy persons and to remain active after them, carried forward in their tombs, their relics, their descendants and even objects they touched or wore. The concept predates Islam, rooted in the religious thought of the pre-Islamic Arab and Berber worlds, and Islam absorbed and reworked it rather than inventing it outright. In its developed devotional form, especially within Sufism, barakah is treated as something that can be sought, transmitted and, in a real sense, accumulated: a living shaykh at the head of a Sufi order is held to carry it, a saint's tomb is held to concentrate it long after death, and visiting such a tomb, touching it or praying near it is undertaken in the belief that some of that blessing can be drawn from the encounter. The word itself is often translated as blessing, but the concept carries more force than that English word suggests; it describes a kind of transmissible spiritual potency rather than only divine favor in the abstract, and it underwrites much of the devotional architecture built up around Sufi saints, their descendants and the shrines that mark their graves across the Muslim world. The idea that blessing can pass by touch or by nearness, rather than only by direct instruction, is what gives the whole devotional system its coherence.