Karāmāt

Karāmāt — literally “favours” — are the miracles attributed to saints. The word is deliberately not the word used for prophets. As the note in the Kashf al-Maḥjūb puts it:

“The name muʿjizat is given to a miracle performed by a prophet, while one performed by a saint is called karámat.”

— Kashf al-Maḥjūb, Notes

The difference is not one of scale. A muʿjizat is evidentiary: it authenticates a prophetic claim. A karāmat proves nothing and is owed to no one. It is a gift, and the vocabulary keeps that straight.

Al-Hujwīrī: saints exist, and are not thereby safe

Al-Hujwīrī affirms sainthood and its charisms without hedging:

“God has saints (awliyá) whom He has specially distinguished by His friendship… and has peculiarly favoured with diverse kinds of miracles (karámát) and has purged of natural corruptions and has delivered from subjection to their lower soul and passion… Such have been in past ages, and are now, and shall be hereafter until the Day of Resurrection.”

— Kashf al-Maḥjūb, Chapter XIV

Then he takes the obvious objection head on. If saints know themselves to be saints, are they not guaranteed salvation? His answer refuses the inference:

“It is absurd to suppose that knowledge of saintship involves security. A believer may have knowledge of his faith and yet not be secure: why should not the same hold good of a saint who has knowledge of his saintship?”

— Kashf al-Maḥjūb, Chapter XIV

Elsewhere he uses the word in a quieter sense entirely, as divine grace rather than wonder-working: among those who emphasise God's kindness (luṭf), “Divine grace (karámat) is the attainment of one's desire.” (Chapter XXIV)

Margaret Smith: what the stories are actually evidence of

Writing in 1928, Margaret Smith gives the most useful modern framing of the material, and she does not pretend the stories are history:

“The saints of Islām, like the saints of Catholic Christendom, were expected to work miracles, as part of their claim to canonization, and their biographers were not slow to attribute to them the power of performing these karāmāt (lit. favours from God). It is hardly necessary to say that most of these miracles rest on no historic foundation and yet, like other legends of the saints, they have their value in throwing light upon the personality of the one to whom these wonderful powers are ascribed.”

— Rabiʿa the Mystic, Chapter IV

That is the scholarly position stated without condescension. The miracle stories are evidence — but of reputation and of what a community valued, not of events. She adds the detail that matters most for reading the sources: the Sufis themselves set little store by such powers.

The stories, and what they are for

Smith retells one of ʿAṭṭār's about Rabiʿa which shows the genre working. Her servant, with no food in the house, offered to ask a neighbour for an onion. Rabiʿa refused:

“Forty years ago I made an oath with God that I would not ask for anything except from Him. I can do without the onion.”

— Rabiʿa the Mystic, Chapter IV

A bird then drops an onion. The miracle is the least interesting part; the refusal is the point, and it is a portrait of tawakkul taken to its limit. Smith's own dry aside elsewhere — that a gift refused meant “either there was a deficiency due to misappropriation or that they were not meant for me” — catches the same temperament.

Why the tradition is wary

The suspicion of charisms follows from the structure of the path. Miracles are conspicuous, and conspicuousness feeds the nafs. A saint impressed by his own karāmāt has acquired precisely the attribute that fanā is supposed to remove. This is why the sources that affirm miracles most confidently are also the quickest to deny that they settle anything.