“…‘They worship, apart from Allah, that which possesses for them no power of provision from the heavens or the earth in the least, nor are such beings able to do so. So do not coin likenesses for Allah; surely Allah knows, whereas you do not know.’ 1

In the same vein He, exalted be He, has denied any resemblance between Himself and any of His creatures, saying, ‘Nothing is like Him, and He is the All-Hearing, the All-Seeing.’ 2

The worst form of comparison, however, is for someone to liken Him to the wicked, the corrupt and the dissolute among rulers, all the while imagining that he is acting virtuously! This is what drives certain scholars and researchers to take an especially rigorous stance against tawassul (seeking Allah’s favour) by the very persons of the prophets, pronouncing it shirk. In our assessment it is not, in and of itself, shirk, yet it is feared that it may lead to shirk—and it has in fact done so among those who excuse their tawassul by means of the afore-mentioned analogy, which is sheer disbelief if only they realised.

Hence it becomes clear that the statement voiced today by some Islamic activists in the fifteenth of their twenty principles—“When supplication is coupled with tawassul to Allah through one of His creatures, it is a subsidiary difference concerning the manner of supplication, not a question of creed”—cannot be accepted without reservation. You now know that observable reality testifies to a fundamental divergence here, for it contains explicit shirk, as has been shown. Perhaps such a remark, which makes light of this deviation, is among the reasons that deter many people from investigating the issue and establishing the correct view, a neglect that ultimately allows innovators to persist in their innovations and their danger to spread among the community. For that reason Imam al-ʿIzz ibn ʿAbd al-Salam, in his treatise al-Wasīṭah (The Intermediary), said