Is This Idol Worship?

Mahdawiyyah, Part 30 · The Architecture of Guidance, Part 14 · The House Beside the Grave, Part 6

Last week we told you to go. This week you find out what is said about you for going.

Most of you have had it said to your face. By a cousin, by somebody at work, by a relative at a wedding who had found a video. You pray at graves. You kiss the lattice. You ask the dead for things. You worship them. And most of us did not have an answer — not because we were wrong, but because they had three sentences ready and we had none, and three ready sentences beat an hour of being right every time.

This session is the answer, and it is not an argument. It is four texts — and three of the four come from outside our own tradition.

We put the charge at its full strength first, in the words the people making it actually use, with nothing softened. Then we read the two reports it stands on, both from Sahih Muslim. And then, instead of reaching for a friendly witness, we go to the most serious commentary that tradition possesses on that book — al-Nawawi's — open it at the exact pages where he deals with these two reports, and read what he actually says.

What he says is that the argument is about a hand's width of earth.

Whether the soil over a grave should be raised about a hand-span and left flat, or heaped into a mound. That is the whole of the classical dispute. Al-Shafi'i said flat. Malik said humped. Most of the scholars were with Malik — and not one of them ever suggested the other had left the religion over it.

Then the Qur'an, where the polarity turns out to be the exact reverse of what we were told. And then, in the last third, we stop arguing altogether and simply open the door of one of these buildings and describe what is inside it.

The question underneath it

Harun al-Rashid is buried in the shrine at Mashhad.

Same soil. Same roof. The same marble over both of them — and he was there first; it was his family's ground. He was caliph of the Muslims and the wealthiest man alive in his century.

Twenty million people a year walk through that building, and almost none of them could tell you within fifty feet where he is.

If this were about the building, he would be getting it. He has the better claim. So whatever it is that brings people, it is demonstrably not the masonry — and that is not an argument anybody has to take on trust. It is a fact about a floor plan, and the person accusing you can go and check it himself.

What the evening covers

The charge, said properly, with nothing taken off it. An objection made gentle before it is answered has not been answered — it has been avoided, and everybody in the room can tell. So it is delivered straight and then left standing for four minutes before a single word of reply.

Their own commentator, on the exact pages. Al-Nawawi files this whole question under funeral law and the law of endowments — disliked, forbidden, who owns the ground — and never once under the oneness of God. And three pages earlier he says something stronger still, about the Messenger of God giving his own cloth for a shroud, which reframes everything that follows it.

The one verse in the Qur'an about what to do with a burial place. Two parties stand outside a cave and disagree. One says build over them a structure — which, read properly, means wall them up so that people are cut off from them. The other says we shall take over them a place of prayer. The Qur'an names the first group, and it is not the group you were told.

What we actually built. A courtyard, a kitchen that feeds tens of thousands and asks nobody for money, rooms where travellers sleep, a seminary, and an enormous hall where several thousand people stand in lines five times a day. And somewhere off to one side, a lattice. Everybody in that building is facing Makkah.

A rock nobody could lift. When one of the earliest Muslims died, the Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, his family, and his righteous companions, sent a man for a stone to mark the grave and the man could not carry it — so he stood up, pushed his sleeves back, and carried it himself. The man who reported it did not remember the ruling.

He remembered the whiteness of his forearms.