“In short, they have left nothing of what the people of the Age of Ignorance used to do with their idols except that they have done the same. To Allah we belong and to Him we shall return.

Yet, in the face of this hideous abomination and monstrous unbelief, we find no one who grows angry for Allah’s sake and burns with zeal for the upright religion—neither scholar nor student, neither emir nor minister nor king.

We have received reports—too numerous and consistent to be doubted—that many, if not most, of these grave-worshippers, when required to take an oath in a dispute with an opponent, will readily swear by Allah and lie. But when they are then told, ‘Swear by your shaykh, by the saint in whom you believe,’ they falter and hesitate; they refuse and finally confess the truth. This is one of the clearest proofs that their shirk has surpassed even the shirk of those who said He is “the second of two” or “the third of three.”

O scholars of the faith! O rulers of the Muslims! What calamity for Islam is graver than disbelief? What affliction is more harmful to this religion than worshipping anyone besides Allah? What disaster can befall the Muslims that equals this disaster? And what evil, whose condemnation people love to proclaim, could be more deserving of denunciation than this manifest shirk?

You would have been heard had you called to one who lives,
But there is no life in those you call.
And were you to blow upon a fire, it would flare and shine—
Yet you are blowing on cold ashes.

Here ends the words of al-Shawkani, may Allah have mercy on him. After his time the ordeal has only grown, becoming far worse than he described. There is no power and no might except with Allah, the Most High, the Most Great.