Wali

Wali comes from a root cluster in Arabic meaning nearness, allegiance and protection, and the same root gives the words for a guardian, a legal next of kin and a governor. Applied to a person in relation to God it means one who is close to God and under God's protection, and the phrase awliya Allah, the friends of God, is scriptural: a verse of the Quran states that the friends of God have neither fear nor grief. Almost every later argument on the subject begins from that verse and from the question of who qualifies.

The classical Sufi literature answered it with a description rather than a procedure. There is no examination, no tribunal and no register. A person is a wali by the judgement of those who knew him, by the reputation that survives him, and very often by a chain of transmission: a Sufi order traces its teaching backwards from master to master, and the founders in that chain are its friends of God. Where wonders are attributed to such a person, the technical vocabulary is careful to keep them in a lower class than prophecy. A prophet's miracle, mujiza, authenticates a message; the wonder granted to a friend of God, karama, authenticates nothing and proves no doctrine. It is a favour, and the writers repeatedly warn that attachment to it is a distraction.

Because there is no court, the map of who counts is regional and plural. A figure of enormous standing in one country may be unheard of in the next, and the orders themselves disagree.

What fixes the friend of God in the landscape is not a document but a tomb. The visit to a grave or shrine, ziyara, is the ordinary form the relationship takes: people travel, greet the dead, ask for intercession, tie cloth, leave petitions, and return on the anniversary. Christopher Taylor's study of late medieval Egypt shows the practice as a normal part of urban religious life rather than a fringe of it, with cemeteries functioning as places of resort. Josef Meri's work on medieval Syria shows the same shrines drawing both Muslim and Jewish visitors, and the same graves claimed by more than one community.

This is also the sharpest internal dispute in the subject, and it should not be presented as a complication to be smoothed over. Ibn Taymiyya, who died in 1328, argued at length against travelling to graves for intercession, against building over them, and against the class of practices that had grown up around them, holding that they compromised the exclusive claim God has on worship. That line of argument was taken up by the eighteenth century movement associated with Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab in Arabia and by the Salafi currents that followed, and it has had material consequences: shrines and domed tombs have been demolished in several countries during the last two centuries, most systematically in the Arabian peninsula.

Against that stand the great majority of Sufi orders and much of mainstream Sunni and Shia practice, which defend visitation as seeking the intercession of the living dead rather than worshipping them. The atlas records the dispute rather than settling it.