between Adam and Noah, peace be upon them.

Muhammad ibn Jarīr transmitted, with his chain to Sufyān al-Thawrī, from Mūsā ibn Muḥammad ibn Qays, concerning the words “Yaʿūq and Nasr”:

“They were righteous men who lived between Adam and Noah, peace be upon them. They had followers who patterned themselves after them. When those men died, their companions said, ‘If we were to fashion their images, we would feel a stronger longing for devotion whenever we remembered them.’ So they made their likenesses. When that generation passed away and another succeeded them, Satan insinuated himself, saying, ‘Your forebears used to worship these figures, and by means of them they sought rain.’ Thus the later people worshipped them.¹”

Qatādah and others said, “These were the gods worshipped by the people of Noah; afterwards the Arabs adopted them.²”

This very cause for which the Lawgiver issued His prohibition is what has cast many nations into either outright major shirk or into its lesser forms. Souls have fallen into shirk through statues of the righteous, and through other figures they claim are talismans of the stars and the like.

Indeed, committing shirk at the grave of someone believed to be a prophet or a saint is more serious than doing so with a piece of wood or stone carved in his likeness. Hence we find many people pleading at such tombs, humbling themselves, and worshipping with their hearts in a manner they do not display in the mosque—indeed, not even in the pre-dawn hours. Some even prostrate to the grave, and most of them hope for blessings from praying and supplicating there that they do not expect from the mosques to which journeys are made.

It is this evil—the evil of shirk, great or small—that the Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, decisively blocked at its very root, to the extent that he forbade praying in a graveyard altogether, even if one does not intend