This makes clear that Satan moves such people along the path of falsehood through numerous stages and varying degrees until he brings them to falsehood’s furthest extreme. The enemy of Allah begins by calling them to venerate the righteous in an innovated manner, such as by building over their graves, making images of them, or doing similar things. Once they do so, he moves them on to something graver: adjuring Allah by them, even though Allah is far too exalted to be adjured or petitioned by means of any created being. Once this becomes established among them, he moves them from that to supplicating to and worshipping the righteous, asking them for intercession apart from Allah, and turning their graves into idols around which people devote themselves. Lamps and curtains are hung over them; people circumambulate, touch, and kiss them, make pilgrimages to them, and offer sacrifices beside them. Once this becomes established among them, he moves them on to calling others to worship these graves and to make them sites of recurring festivity and ritual devotion, believing that this benefits them more in this world and the Hereafter. Once this becomes established among them, he moves them on to warning people against anyone who forbids such practices and describing him as someone who disparages the righteous, diminishes their standing, fails to venerate them, and the like. It is well known that none of this has anything whatsoever to do with veneration; rather, it is manifest calumny, blatant disbelief, and grave misguidance.
When veneration is not governed by the limits of the Sacred Law and kept within the texts of the Book and the Sunnah, it leads a person into many kinds of error and misguidance which he mistakenly imagines to be forms of veneration, though they are not. The purified Sacred Law has prescribed the veneration of the prophets, the allies of Allah, and the righteous within defined limits, without elevating them above the station in which Allah has placed them. Whoever venerates them in any manner other than that defined by the Sacred Law and established by the evidence has instead brought about the very opposite and negation of veneration. This is why the following words were spoken by