Walī and Awliyāʾ

A walī (plural awliyāʾ) is a friend of God, the word usually translated as saint. The classical Sufi sources are cautious about the title and bold about what it implies. Al-Hujwīrī, whose chapter on the doctrines of the different schools gives the fullest account on this site, places the idea at the very base of the tradition:

“You must know that the principle and foundation of Ṣúfiism and knowledge of God rests on saintship, the reality of which is unanimously affirmed by all the Shaykhs, though every one has expressed himself in different language.”

— Kashf al-Maḥjūb, Chapter XIV

He credits Muḥammad b. ʿAlī al-Ḥakīm al-Tirmidhī with the move that made this explicit: “The peculiarity of Muḥammad b. `Alí (al-Ḥakím) lies in the fact that he applied this term to the theory of Ṣúfiism.” Al-Tirmidhī’s doctrine, he says, “was based on saintship (wiláyat), and he used to explain the true nature of saintship and the degrees of the saints.”

Who the saints are

God has saints (awliyá), whom He has chosen out of mankind, and whose thoughts He has withdrawn from worldly ties and delivered from sensual temptations; and He has stationed each of them in a particular degree, and has opened unto them the door of these mysteries.

— Kashf al-Maḥjūb, Chapter XIV

The saints are not only ornaments of the tradition; they have work to do. Al-Hujwīrī:

He has made the Saints the governors of the universe; they have become entirely devoted to His business, and have ceased to follow their sensual affections. Through the blessing of their advent the rain falls from heaven, and through the purity of their lives the plants spring up from the earth, and through their spiritual influence the Moslems gain victories over the unbelievers.

— Kashf al-Maḥjūb, Chapter XIV

The hidden hierarchy

The same chapter gives the best-known statement of the saintly orders. Most of the saints are unseen, even by one another:

Among them there are four thousand who are concealed and do not know one another and are not aware of the excellence of their state, but in all circumstances are hidden from themselves and from mankind.

— Kashf al-Maḥjūb, Chapter XIV

Above them stands a smaller body with real authority, and the offices have names:

But of those who have power to loose and to bind and are the officers of the Divine court there are three hundred, called Akhyár, and forty, called Abdál, and seven, called Abrár, and four, called Awtád, and three, called Nuqabá, and one, called Quṭb or Ghawth. All these know one another and cannot act save by mutual consent.

— Kashf al-Maḥjūb, Chapter XIV

Nicholson, summarising the same scheme in his study of al-Jīlī’s doctrine of the Perfect Man, calls it “a graduated hierarchy, with the Quṭb at their head, forming ‘a saintly board of administration by which the invisible government of the world is carried on.’” (Studies in Islamic Mysticism, Chapter II) He also explains why the figure mattered in ordinary religious life: the walī, he says, “bridges the chasm which the Koran and scholasticism have set between man and an absolutely transcendent God.” The same chapter lists what villagers asked of him: relief for the distressed, health for the sick, children for the childless, food for the hungry, “spiritual guidance to those who entrust their souls to his care.”

Does a saint know he is one?

Al-Hujwīrī raises the question, and reports that the schools split on it. The hidden four thousand, he says, do not admit that a saint can know himself to be such; others hold the opposite. He argues for the second view:

I ask the former party, what loss or evil does a saint suffer by knowing himself? If they allege that he is conceited when he knows himself to be a saint, I answer that Divine protection is a necessary condition of saintship, and one who is protected from evil cannot fall into self-conceit.

— Kashf al-Maḥjūb, Chapter XIV

He is equally clear that knowing is not the same as being safe: “it is absurd to suppose that knowledge of saintship involves security.” Another saying in the book pulls the other way. Of a master who said “The eminent have eminence until they see it, and the saints have saintship until they see it,” al-Hujwīrī explains: “whoever regards his eminence loses its reality, and whoever regards his saintship loses its reality.” (Chapter XI) And in a gentler anecdote, Qushayrī describes visiting the great al-Khurqānī at Khurqān and finding his eloquence gone: “I thought that I had been deposed from my own saintship.” (Chapter XII)

For the matching teaching on the wonders attributed to saints, see Karāmāt; for the prophet-saint distinction in terms of states and stations, see Ḥāl and Maqām; and for the figure at the apex of the scheme, Insān Kāmil. Nicholson’s fifth chapter, Saints and Miracles, is the shortest introduction in English.