Sufism and the Tariqas — What Is Sound, What Was Added, and How to Tell

One Word, Three Different Things

Few words in Islamic writing carry as much confusion as tasawwuf — Sufism. Ask three Muslims what it means and you may get three unrelated answers: one describes sincerity, fear of Allah, and detachment from the world; another describes an order with a living master, an oath of allegiance, a chain of teachers, and a fixed daily litany; a third describes a shrine with a green dome where people call on a dead saint for children and cures. All three are called Sufism by somebody. They are not the same thing, and no honest assessment can treat them as one.

So this page separates them deliberately. First, the inward work itself — zuhd (detachment), ikhlāṣ (sincerity), iḥsān (worshipping Allah as though you see Him), tazkiyat an-nafs (purification of the soul). Every one of these is Qurʾanic vocabulary and prophetic practice, and no Muslim may reject them; purifying the soul is named as part of the very mission for which the Messenger ﷺ was sent, "to rehearse to them His Signs, to sanctify them, and to instruct them in Scripture and Wisdom" (Sūrat Al-Jumuʿah 62:2). Second, the institutional form the orders later took — the ṭarīqa, its shaykh, its silsila (chain), its bayʿa (pledge), its lodge and its assigned wird (litany). That form is a human arrangement, not a revealed one, and it is judged by what it actually contains. Third, the practices that grew up around some orders and shrines — calling on the dead, vowing to a tomb, chanting a single divine name, dancing as worship, claiming knowledge of the unseen. These are judged by the texts, and where the texts condemn them the fact that a pious-sounding name is attached changes nothing.

The word itself is not found in the Qurʾan or in the hadith. It appears in Muslim usage around the second century after the Hijrah, most often explained as a reference to the coarse wool (ṣūf) worn by some early ascetics. That a term is new is not by itself a fault — fiqh, ʿaqīdah and naḥw also acquired their technical senses later. What matters is what the term is used to carry. This site's method is the method of the way of the salaf: weigh the content, not the label, and weigh it against the Book and the authentic Sunnah as the first three generations understood them.

The Root That Is Sound — Zuhd, Iḥsān, and the Heart

Before there were orders, lodges, chains and cloaks, there was simply a group of Muslims who took the warnings about this world seriously. They were not a sect and they did not have a name for themselves. They fasted often, prayed at night, spoke little, ate less than they could afford, wept in fear of the Fire, and refused the offices and salaries that would have bound them to rulers. The Prophet ﷺ had taught exactly that posture toward the world in a single sentence, delivered with his hand on the shoulder of Ibn ʿUmar:

And when a man asked for one deed that would win him the love of Allah and the love of people at once, the answer was a double detachment — from the world, and from what is in other people's hands:

This is the soil the early ascetic movement grew in, and the names from that period are honoured names: al-Ḥasan al-Baṣrī in Basra, whose sermons on death and accountability shaped a whole generation; Fuḍayl ibn ʿIyāḍ; Ibrāhīm ibn Adham; and ʿAbdullāh ibn al-Mubārak, a scholar of hadith and a fighter on the frontier who wrote one of the first books gathering the reports on renunciation. Read their words and you find no orders, no oaths of allegiance, no chains of masters, no exclusive litanies. You find Qurʾan, hadith, night prayer, fear of Allah, and a refusal to be owned by wealth. That is the part of this whole subject about which there is no argument at all, and the site's chapter on it is Tazkiyah — purification of the soul, with khushūʿ, love, fear and hope, ṣabr and shukr, and tawbah beside it.

That inward work has a name in the Sunnah itself, and it is worth stating plainly, because one argument frequently offered for the orders is that Islamic learning divided itself into three: fiqh for the outward acts, ʿaqīdah for belief, and tasawwuf for the heart — so a Muslim without a ṭarīqa is missing a third of his religion. The premise is half right and the conclusion does not follow. The inward dimension is real, it is obligatory, and it is not optional. But it was not left to a later discipline to supply. The Prophet ﷺ named it himself, in the hadith in which Jibrīl came in the form of a man and questioned him before the companions:

Iḥsān, in that definition, is not a separate school with its own initiation. It is a quality of the very acts the second answer listed: the same prayer, the same zakat, the same fast, performed with the awareness that Allah sees. And the organ in which the whole religion is won or lost was named just as plainly:

The Qurʾan puts the same weight on the same place. "Truly he succeeds that purifies it, And he fails that corrupts it!" (Sūrat Ash-Shams 91:9–10), and "But those will prosper who purify themselves, And glorify the name of their Guardian-Lord, and (lift their hearts) in prayer" (Sūrat Al-Aʿlā 87:14–15). So the answer to a Muslim who is told he lacks the science of the heart is not to deny that the heart has a science. It is to say that the science of the heart is in the Book and the Sunnah, taught by the Messenger ﷺ to his companions without a lodge or a cloak, and that any programme claiming to supply it must be examined for what it puts into that heart.

Where the Road Forks — from Zuhd to Ṭarīqa

The change from an attitude to an institution took several centuries, and it is worth tracing because it explains why sincere Muslims disagree so sharply about the same word.

Second and third centuries AH. Individual ascetics, writing about the states of the soul: al-Muḥāsibī analysing the tricks of the ego; al-Junayd of Baghdad, whose school was called the sober one because he insisted the whole path was bounded by the Book and the Sunnah and that anyone who contradicted them was to be rejected. Beside them stood the ecstatic tendency, whose members uttered in states of intoxication things no Muslim may say soberly — al-Ḥallāj was executed in Baghdad in 309 AH over such claims, and the scholars of his own age, not later critics, judged him.

Fourth and fifth centuries. The literature is systematised — al-Qushayrī's Risālah, and later al-Ghazālī's Iḥyāʾ ʿUlūm ad-Dīn, which did enormous good in reviving sincerity and did real damage by carrying a mass of unverified narrations into circulation; the hadith scholars who catalogued its weak and baseless reports were not enemies of piety but servants of the same religion. On why that matters, see the sciences of hadith and narrations that are not authentic.

Sixth and seventh centuries. The ṭarīqa proper appears: a named path, traced through a chain of masters, entered by a pledge, marked by the investiture of a cloak, taught in a lodge (zāwiya, khānqāh, ribāṭ), and practised through a litany assigned by the shaykh. In the same period Ibn ʿArabī produced the metaphysics of waḥdat al-wujūd — the unity of existence — which in its plain sense collapses the distinction between the Creator and the creation, and against which stands the Qurʾan's own verdict: "there is nothing whatever like unto Him, and He is the One that hears and sees (all things)" (Sūrat Ash-Shūrā 42:11). See Allah's names and attributes and Tawḥīd.

Later scholarship on this subject is not a simple wall of rejection, and pretending otherwise misinforms the reader. Ibn Taymiyyah, whose criticisms of the innovations were unsparing, also wrote respectfully of the early ascetics and of what was sound in their teaching, and distinguished between the truthful strivers, the mistaken, and those whose doctrine left Islam altogether. That threefold distinction is exactly the method this page follows: judge the practice, not the label.

The Measure That Settles Every Case

If one principle decides this whole subject, it is that acts of worship are established by revelation and not by taste, experience, or the instruction of a teacher however senior. The Prophet ﷺ stated the rule in a form that covers every future case:

Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim carries the same ruling in ʿĀʾishah's narration: "He who innovates things in our affairs for which there is no valid (reason) (commits sin) and these are to be rejected" (Sahih Muslim — site reader no. 4362, graded ṣaḥīḥ in the site's hadith repository). And in the farewell counsel al-ʿIrbāḍ ibn Sāriyah preserved, the Prophet ﷺ named both the thing to cling to and the thing to fear when the community began to differ:

And it was the standing content of his sermons, not a remark made once:

Two clarifications keep this principle from being misused. It concerns acts of worship — new devotions, new formulas, new occasions, new rites — not new tools, new administration, or new means of teaching; nobody sins by using a printing press or a website. And it is applied by knowledge, not by temperament: a practice is judged innovated because no text supports it, not because it is unfamiliar. The pattern to be copied is one person, and the Qurʾan says so: "Ye have indeed in the Messenger of Allah a beautiful pattern (of conduct) for any one whose hope is in Allah and the Final Day" (Sūrat Al-Aḥzāb 33:21). The full treatment is at Bidʿah — innovation in the religion, with Ahl as-Sunnah waʾl-Jamāʿah and the Sunnah of the Prophet ﷺ.

The Major Orders — a Plain Map

Readers meet these names in history books, in travel, and in family arguments, so here they are set out plainly. Naming an order is not endorsing it, and it is not condemning it either; orders differ enormously among themselves, and the same order differs from country to country and from century to century. What follows is description; the assessment of the practices comes in the sections after it.

Qādiriyya — traced to ʿAbd al-Qādir al-Jīlānī (d. 561 AH) of Baghdad, a Ḥanbalī preacher whose own recorded sermons are largely sober exhortation, and around whose memory an enormous body of legend later accumulated. The most widespread order in the world, found from Morocco to Indonesia.

Rifāʿiyya — traced to Aḥmad ar-Rifāʿī (d. 578 AH) in the Iraqi marshes; later branches became known for public displays of skewering, fire-handling and serpent-handling, practices for which there is no basis in the Sunnah and which the sober scholars of the orders themselves criticised.

Suhrawardiyya — organised in Baghdad in the seventh century AH and carried into India, notable for its close relations with rulers and its written manuals of conduct.

Shādhiliyya — from Abū al-Ḥasan ash-Shādhilī (d. 656 AH), spread across North Africa and Egypt; characteristically urban, employed, and opposed to mendicancy — its teaching was that a man earns his living and does his litany, rather than begging.

Chishtiyya — the dominant order of the Indian subcontinent, associated with Ajmer, with mass shrine attendance and devotional music (qawwālī).

Naqshbandiyya — from Bahāʾ ad-Dīn Naqshband (d. 791 AH) of Bukhara, distinctive for silent rather than vocal dhikr, and historically the order most insistent on outward adherence to the Sharīʿah; its later Mujaddidī branch under Aḥmad Sirhindī explicitly attacked waḥdat al-wujūd.

Mevleviyya — the Anatolian order that grew around Jalāl ad-Dīn ar-Rūmī (d. 672 AH), known worldwide for the turning ceremony performed to music.

Bektāshiyya — an Anatolian and Balkan order that absorbed doctrines far outside Sunni Islam, including the veneration of ʿAlī in terms no Muslim may accept and the suspension of ritual obligations for initiates.

Tijāniyya — founded by Aḥmad at-Tijānī (d. 1230 AH) in North Africa and dominant in West Africa; it attaches to its assigned litanies rewards and exclusive claims that no text of the Qurʾan or Sunnah supports, and forbids its members to take a litany from any other order.

Sanūsiyya — a nineteenth-century Libyan order, austere in doctrine and organised around teaching lodges, which led the resistance to colonial occupation.

Qalandariyya — treated separately in the next section, because it is the clearest case of a movement whose defining practices are contradicted by explicit texts.

Beside these stand others a reader may meet: the Kubrāwiyya of Central Asia, the Khalwatiyya of Egypt and Anatolia, the Yasawiyya of the Turkic steppe, the Darqāwiyya of Morocco, and the Malāmatiyya of Nishapur — the last a tendency rather than an order, whose members deliberately courted public blame in order to kill their own appetite for reputation. The Malāmatī impulse, however sincerely meant, is where a good motive turned into a bad rule: attracting people's contempt on purpose is not something the Prophet ﷺ or his companions ever did, and the Qurʾan's instruction against self-congratulation, "Therefore justify not yourselves: He knows best who it is that guards against evil" (Sūrat An-Najm 53:32), is met by hiding one's good deeds, not by staging bad ones.

The Qalandariyya — Who They Were, and What the Texts Say

The Qalandars (Qalandariyya, Persian qalandar, a wandering dervish) emerged in Khurasan and Syria in the sixth and seventh centuries AH and spread through Anatolia, Iran and India. They were not an order in the ordinary sense — no fixed lodge, little formal structure, often no settled shaykh. They were wanderers. Their mark was a deliberate rejection of every social norm: they travelled in groups, begged their food, carried begging bowls and iron rings, wore sacks or little at all, and performed what became their signature, the chahār ḍarb or four blows — shaving the head, the beard, the moustache and the eyebrows, so that the face itself announced a break with respectable society. Many neglected the prayers and the fast on the argument that the inward state had made the outward form unnecessary; some used intoxicants. Later ages softened the word until qalandar in some regions meant little more than a folk holy man or a village mendicant.

There is no need to argue at length about this movement, because it collides with explicit texts at every point. On the shaving of the beard as a mark of separation, the instruction of the Prophet ﷺ was the opposite of the Qalandarī practice, and was itself framed as a refusal to imitate others:

On begging as a way of life, the Sunnah is blunt. Poverty borne patiently is honoured; asking people for what one does not need is not:

And on the whole architecture of self-imposed homelessness, celibacy and withdrawal, the Qurʾan had already delivered its verdict on an earlier community that took the same road: "But the Monasticism which they invented for themselves, We did not prescribe for them: (We commanded) only the seeking for the Good Pleasure of Allah; but that they did not foster as they should have done" (Sūrat Al-Ḥadīd 57:27). Monasticism is not condemned there for being difficult. It is condemned for being invented — a devotion that Allah did not legislate, imposed by people on themselves, and then not even kept.

The last point is the gravest. A movement that treats the five prayers as a stage the advanced may pass beyond has left the ground of Islam entirely, whatever it calls itself. Prayer is not a beginner's exercise in the acquisition of a state; it is the covenant of every Muslim until death, and no experience, unveiling or rank suspends it. See the five pillars, and on the general danger of hollowing out the Sharīʿah in the name of an inner meaning, the comparative primer on sects and groups.

Dhikr — What Is Legislated, and What Was Added

Remembrance of Allah is among the most beloved acts in Islam, it may be done sitting, standing and lying down, and gathering to do it is a Sunnah with a magnificent reward. This must be said first, because criticism of what was added is often heard as hostility to dhikr itself. It is not. The gathering for remembrance is described in the Sunnah in terms nothing else matches:

What the same Sunnah also supplies is a manner. When the companions raised their voices in takbīr on a journey, the correction they received was about the volume and about what raising the voice implies concerning the One addressed:

The Qurʾan sets the same tone: "Call on your Lord with humility and in private: for Allah loveth not those who trespass beyond bounds" (Sūrat Al-Aʿrāf 7:55). Against that background, several features of the organised dhikr of some orders have no support and several are worse than unsupported:

The single divine name repeated alone. Chanting Allāh, Allāh, or the pronoun Hū, is not a form of dhikr the Prophet ﷺ or his companions ever practised. A noun on its own states nothing — the remembrance taught in the Sunnah is composed of complete sentences of praise, glorification and declaration of oneness, the very phrases the angels reported in the narration above.

Fixed counts with attached guarantees. Assigning a disciple a specified number of repetitions, and promising in return a rank, an opening, or a place in Paradise, adds to the religion what its texts never contained. Where a number is legislated in the Sunnah, keep it exactly; where it is not, adding one is not piety.

The exclusive litany. A wird that may only be received from an authorised shaykh, that binds the one who takes it, and that is withheld from Muslims outside the order, turns remembrance of Allah into membership of an organisation. Nothing in the Book or the Sunnah puts a gate between a Muslim and the words of his Lord's praise.

Coordinated movement, swaying and dancing. Performing worship as a choreography — rhythmic collective swaying, the turning ceremony, the ecstatic ḥaḍra — is a form of devotion the first generations did not know. Where musical instruments accompany it, a further problem arises, since the Prophet ﷺ warned about a time when his followers would treat several forbidden things as lawful together:

The practical conclusion is not to remember Allah less but to remember Him as He taught. The authenticated morning and evening remembrances, the words after each prayer, and the supplications for waking, eating, travelling and sleeping are gathered at Morning and Evening Adhkār and Duʿās and Dhikr; the broader question of instruments and listening is treated at music, images and entertainment.

Tawassul — the Means That Is Legislated, and the Means That Is Not

Allah commands the believer to seek a means of nearness to Him: "O ye who believe! Do your duty to Allah, seek the means of approach unto Him, and strive with might and main in his cause: that ye may prosper" (Sūrat Al-Māʾidah 5:35). The dispute is never about whether to seek a means. It is about which means the texts supply.

Three forms are established. By Allah's names and attributes — asking Him by His mercy, His generosity, His face. By one's own righteous deeds — as the three men trapped in the cave each asked Allah by a deed done sincerely for Him, and the rock was moved (Sahih al-Bukhari 2215, graded ṣaḥīḥ in the site's hadith repository). By the supplication of a living, present, righteous person — asking a believer to pray for you, which the companions practised openly. The clearest proof of the third is also the clearest proof of its limit. After the Prophet's ﷺ death, ʿUmar did not go to his grave and ask him; he turned to a living man:

The reasoning is unmistakable. If asking the Prophet ﷺ after his death were possible or superior, no companion would have gone to his uncle instead. What was sought was a living man's duʿāʾ, because duʿāʾ is an act the living perform. And duʿāʾ is not a small matter to misdirect, for it is itself worship:

From this the ruling on the disputed forms follows. Calling upon a dead saint, a shaykh, or a prophet — asking him for a child, a cure, or forgiveness — is not tawassul at all; it is directing worship to other than Allah. The Qurʾan describes the practice and answers the exact excuse offered for it: "But those who take for protectors other than Allah (say): 'We only serve them in order that they may bring us nearer to Allah'" (Sūrat Az-Zumar 39:3). The pagans of Makkah did not believe their idols created anything; they believed they brought them closer. That defence was recorded in revelation in order to be refuted. And on the capacity of the called-upon: "If ye invoke them, they will not listen to your call, and if they were to listen, they cannot answer your (prayer)" (Sūrat Fāṭir 35:14), and "And who is more astray than one who invokes besides Allah, such as will not answer him to the Day of Judgment, and who (in fact) are unconscious of their call (to them)?" (Sūrat Al-Aḥqāf 46:5).

Swearing by the status of a creature, or making that status the ground of a request — asking Allah by the right of a particular saint — is likewise without a text, and the majority of the jurists disallowed it long before any modern dispute. The permitted forms are set out with their evidences in the site's answer on tawassul in duʿāʾ — the permissible forms, and the whole question of who may intercede and when is treated at seeking intercession at graves and ash-shafāʿah — intercession. The reassurance the Qurʾan gives is that no intermediary was ever needed: "When My servants ask thee concerning Me, I am indeed close (to them): I listen to the prayer of every suppliant when he calleth on Me" (Sūrat Al-Baqarah 2:186).

Shrines, Domes, and Vows at Tombs

Nowhere does the ṭarīqa question become more concrete than at the tomb of a shaykh. Across the Muslim world one finds the same architecture: a dome, a chamber, a cloth-covered cenotaph, a box for money, circumambulation, kissing, and people addressing the occupant. The Prophet ﷺ spoke about this exact development in the last days of his life, with the urgency of a man closing a door before he leaves:

Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim preserves the same warning delivered five days before his death, with the prohibition stated in the first person: "Beware of those who preceded you and used to take the graves of their prophets and righteous men as places of worship, but you must not take graves as mosques; I forbid you to do that" (Sahih Muslim — site reader no. 1090, graded ṣaḥīḥ in the site's hadith repository). And when his wives described a church they had seen in Abyssinia, he explained the mechanism by which a righteous man's memory becomes an object of worship:

Note what is being described: not idolaters, but people who loved a righteous man and honoured him. That is precisely how shrine devotion begins among Muslims too, which is why the warning was given to Muslims. He refused the same treatment for his own grave:

The mawlid or ʿurs of a shaykh — an annual festival at his tomb, with travel undertaken for it, food distributed in his name and vows fulfilled there — falls under that prohibition and under a second one. Vows and sacrifices are acts of worship, and where they are performed matters, as the Prophet's ﷺ questioning of a man who had vowed to slaughter at a particular place shows:

He did not simply permit the vow; he first established that the site carried no history of worship or festival. A vow made to a shaykh, or fulfilled at his tomb because it is his tomb, does not survive those questions. Related to shrine culture is the trade in charms, threads and written talismans sold as protection, about which the warning is severe:

None of this forbids visiting graves. Visiting them is a Sunnah, and its purpose is stated: to remember death and to pray for the dead, not to them. The etiquette, the wording of the greeting, and the differences over women visiting are all set out at Visiting Graves, with the answers on whether visiting graves is permissible, the etiquette of visiting, and building and plastering over graves. For lawful treatment of illness and the evil eye by Qurʾanic recitation rather than by charms, see Ruqyah; for the law of vows, oaths and vows.

The Shaykh, the Bayʿa, and the Limits of Obedience

Islam honours teachers and expects students to keep their company, serve them and learn manners from them as well as knowledge. The companionship of a righteous man is one of the great means of improvement, described in an image nobody forgets:

The problem is not having a teacher. It is the doctrine attached to the shaykh in parts of the ṭarīqa tradition: that the disciple must be in his master's hands as a corpse in the hands of the washer; that he must never object even to what appears to be a sin, because the shaykh sees what the disciple cannot; that his own advancement depends on binding his heart to the shaykh's image and on the pledge he has given. That is not discipleship. It is the transfer of a Muslim's conscience to another creature, and the Sunnah forbids it in terms that were tested on exactly this point — a commander who ordered his men into a fire, and was obeyed by some:

If a commander appointed by the Prophet ﷺ himself is not obeyed in disobedience to Allah, no shaykh is. And the second protection is against the other error that surrounds revered figures — raising them above their rank. The Prophet ﷺ shut that door on his own person first:

The Qurʾan addresses the same disease at its historical source: "O People of the Book! Commit no excesses in your religion: Nor say of Allah aught but the truth" (Sūrat An-Nisāʾ 4:171). Excess in religion has a pattern — it begins with love for a righteous man, passes into stories about him, then into titles, then into requests made to him. A believer who notices the first steps in himself has been given a mercy. On how knowledge is properly sought, from whom, and with what manners, see Seeking Knowledge and the great scholars of Islam.

Karāmāt, the Unseen, and Claims of Hidden Knowledge

Ahl as-Sunnah affirm the karāmāt of the awliyāʾ — the honours Allah grants to His righteous servants, such as an answered prayer, a provision from where none was expected, or a protection at the moment of need. To deny them is to contradict the Qurʾan, which records such gifts for Maryam and for the sleepers of the cave. But two things are settled alongside that affirmation, and both are routinely lost in shrine culture.

First, who a walī actually is. The Qurʾan defines the friends of Allah without any reference to lineage, cloak, chain or marvel: "Behold! verily on the friends of Allah there is no fear, nor shall they grieve; Those who believe and (constantly) guard against evil" (Sūrat Yūnus 10:62–63). Faith and taqwā — that is the whole definition. And the qualification for Allah's love and nearness is described in the most famous of the sacred narrations in exactly the same terms, obligations first and then voluntary worship:

Read the order carefully, because it is the answer to a great deal of confusion. The road to Allah's love begins with what He made obligatory, and continues with voluntary worship of the kind He legislated. It does not begin with an initiation and it does not pass around the Sharīʿah. Nor does the narration make the servant into a partner in Allah's attributes; the classical commentators explain it as Allah's guidance and support of the limbs of the one He loves, and the walī remains a servant who eats, sleeps, errs and dies. The full doctrine of Allah's names and attributes, and the error of collapsing Creator into creation, is at al-Asmāʾ waʾṣ-Ṣifāt.

Second, the unseen is not opened by spiritual rank. Some tariqa literature claims that the shaykh knows the states of his disciples at a distance, sees what is written for them, or is informed directly of rulings by unveiling (kashf) — with the story of Mūsā and the servant of Allah in Sūrat Al-Kahf offered as proof, since Allah says of him that He "had taught knowledge from Our own Presence" (18:65). That narrative is about a specific man in a specific age receiving specific knowledge from Allah, in a time when revelation was still descending. It legislates nothing for anyone after the final Messenger ﷺ. The general rule stands unqualified: "With Him are the keys of the unseen, the treasures that none knoweth but He" (Sūrat Al-Anʿām 6:59), and "Say: None in the heavens or on earth, except Allah, knows what is hidden" (Sūrat An-Naml 27:65). A claim to know the unseen is not a higher station; it is a claim against a verse. On the closely related trade in fortune-telling and its ruling, see Shirk — the greatest sin, and for the sound understanding of the miraculous within belief, Aqeedah.

Neither Excess nor Neglect — and How to Judge Fairly

There is a reason the ascetic impulse keeps producing both saints and errors, and it is that religion practised without a measure runs to extremes in either direction. The Prophet ﷺ gave the measure directly:

When three men proposed to outdo his worship by praying all night, fasting every day and refusing marriage, he did not praise their zeal:

And the deed Allah loves is not the spectacular one but the small one kept up:

The Qurʾan closes the same door on self-imposed prohibition: "O ye who believe! make not unlawful the good things which Allah hath made lawful for you, but commit no excess: for Allah loveth not those given to excess" (Sūrat Al-Māʾidah 5:87).

How, then, should a Muslim speak and act about all this? Judge practices, not people, and never by label. A man who calls himself a Sufi may be praying his prayers, earning lawfully, remembering Allah with the words of the Sunnah and wronging nobody; a man who calls himself a follower of the salaf may be arrogant, harsh and ignorant. The scale is fixed and it is not a name: "Verily the most honoured of you in the sight of Allah is (he who is) the most righteous of you" (Sūrat Al-Ḥujurāt 49:13). Do not pronounce a Muslim outside Islam. Takfīr is a ruling of the courts of knowledge, not a weapon for arguments; a practice may be shirk in itself while the individual doing it is ignorant, misinformed, or has never had the evidence explained to him, and calling him to the truth gently is the obligation, not expelling him. Correct with evidence, in private first, and in the person's own language. Most people at a shrine are not philosophers of unity; they are grieving, frightened or hoping for a child, and they have been told this is how Muslims do it. Show them Sūrat Al-Baqarah 2:186 and watch what happens.

And for the person examining his own practice, the questions are short. Did the Prophet ﷺ or his companions do this act of worship? Is my request being addressed to anyone but Allah? Does my attachment to a teacher stop at learning, or has it reached my conscience? Is the number I am repeating, or the reward I expect, found in a text? Would I be content to die on this? Whatever survives those questions is yours to keep; whatever does not was never part of the religion to begin with.

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