4. THE DEVELOPMENT OF GRAVE WORSHIP
Throughout much of human history, honoring the dead through elaborate burial rites, ornate tombs and decorated graves, along with festivals of commemoration and adoration has led to great confusion and misguidance in religion. As a result, much of mankind has become involved in some form of grave worship. In fact, the religion of most Chinese, who represent between a quarter and a third of mankind, is ancestor worship. Most of their religious rites are connected with graves and the worship of representations of their ancestors. The graves of holy or saintly men among Hindus, Buddhists and Christians, have become shrines where rites of worship like prayer, sacrifice and pilgrimage are performed on a large scale. With the passage of time, Muslim rulers and the masses strayed away from the fundamental principles of the Islamic creed and began to imitate the pagan practices of the non-Islamic nations around them. Huge edifices were built over the grave of companions of the Prophet (like ‘Alee, major jurists like Imaam Abu Haneefah and Imaam ash-Shaafi‘ee, and those designated as Sufi “saints” like Junayd and ‘Abdul-Qaadir Al-Jeelaanee. In more recent times this practice of building shrines included even the graves of leaders of social movements like Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, and Muhammad Ahmed, the so-called Mahdi of the Sudan.
Today many ignorant Muslims travel vast distances in order to perform religious rites of tawaaf around these tombs. Some even make prayer inside and outside of them, and others ‘piously’ bring sacrificial animals to these cursed sites in order to perform the rites of dhabh (ritual sacrifice)there. Most of those who perform rites of worship at graves hold the false belief that the righteous among these dead people are so close to Allah that all acts of worship done in their vicinity will more likely be accepted by Allah than if they were done elsewhere. That is, since these dead individuals were blessed, all that is near them must also be blessed. Their tombs and even the land on which they are built must be permeated with the overflow of their surplus blessing. Because of this belief, grave-worshippers often wipe the walls of graves, then wipe it on themselves in order to collect extra blessings. Often they collect the earth in the vicinity of the graves, in the vain belief that the earth has special healing powers due to the effect of the blessings manifest in those buried there. Many among certain branches of the Shi‘ites collect clay from Karbala, where Imaam Hussain was martyred, and bake them to make small tablets on which they prostrate during their salaah (prayer).
By Bilal Philips
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