When Intercession Became Less Accepted in Sunni Islam — Ali Shukri Amin
First published on my writing site: www.aliamin.info/2026/05/when-intercession-became-less-accepted-in-sunni-islam/
By Ali Shukri Amin. I first wrote this as a comment on r/AcademicQuran, in the thread “At what point in history did intercession become a "less accepted" practice in Sunnism and why?”, copied here as written.
The issues of tawassul & istighātha became somewhat of a settled issue within the four madhāhib before the 14th century. That does mean unanimity within any of the schools or unanimity over time. While it’s clear that some of the practices which later became a part of orthodoxy were certainly the kinds of things reproached in the Quran, some of the practices are far more ambiguous. That being said, by the 14th century, istighatha & tawassul were discussed moreso as issues of jurisprudence than theology.
There were voices before that time that found the practitioners of the cult of saints to be heretical or even tantamount to associative polytheism (shirk). Ibn Rajab, al-Qarafi, and others spoke in scandalizing terms about these practices. Yet, none of them waged a campaign against these practices. They saw them as part of a wider theological decay and ongoing corruption of Islamic practice (bid’ah).
That was until the iconoclastic Damascene scholar ibn Taymiyyah. Ibn Taymiyyah is famous for quite a few things, including his idiosyncratic reformulation of Islamic theology. As part of his reformation, he conceptualized unicity as twofold: Rubbubiyyah & Uluhiyyah (Lordship & Deification). Jon Hoover writes about this extensively.
He saw the widespread practices of tawassul cum istighātha as constituting violations of Uluhiyyah, being kinds of worship.
This issue was so contentious that it lead to his final incarceration in which he died.
That being said, the practice went more or less undisturbed until the rise of several reformist movements, including that of Mohammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab. It should be noted that the kind of istighatha/tawassul discussed in legal manuals was a far cry from the popular practice, which even the most liberal Asharite scholars sometimes expressed discomfort for in their writings.
If the early Najdi scholars are to be believed, istighatha had reached a fever pitch by the time of ibn Abd al-Wah’hab’s mission, including people outright worshipping lunatics or believing holy trees could impart miracles.
While Uthman Dan Fodio, Shah WaliAllah, and others also opposed these practices; ibn Abd al-Wahhab made it a central point of his entire theological system. Jalal Abulrab & Cole Bunzel discusses this extensively in their respective books on Wahhabism. To ibn Abd al-Wahhab, not just the practice, but simply the doctrine of permissibility pertaining to some of these practices rendered a person an apostate.
Despite the vehement opposition much of the Islamic world had and has to Wahhabism, it is undeniable that Wahhabism has totally altered the discourse around tawassul/istighatha. Outside of the most diehard adherents, the practice has been reduced dramatically among Sunnis. In fact, it is difficult to find scholarly justifications that are not couched in some kind of equivocation about what kind of istighatha does actually constitute shirk nowadays. This is even among Barelwi scholars (such as Asrar Rashid).
We live in a post-Wahhabi theological landscape. Even neotraditionalists that justify the practice are in response to ibn Abd al-Wahhab.
Posted May 3, 2026. Read it on Reddit.
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