Objection Six: Analogizing tawassul by a person’s very being to tawassul by righteous deeds

This is yet another specious argument concocted by some of those innovators, an argument Satan has adorned for them and coached them to repeat. They say: “You yourselves have acknowledged that one of the unanimously accepted, lawful forms of tawassul is to seek nearness to Allah through a righteous deed. If tawassul by means of such a deed is permitted, then tawassul by means of the righteous person who performed that deed is even more deserving of permissibility and legitimacy; it therefore ought not be rejected.”

Our reply has two parts.

First: their claim rests on qiyās (analogy), and analogy in acts of worship is invalid, as was clarified earlier (p.130). The one who advances this argument is like someone who says, “If it is allowed for a supplicant to make tawassul through his own righteous act—which is unquestionably inferior to the deeds of a prophet or a saint—then it must be allowed to make tawassul through the deeds of the Prophet or the saint.” Both this statement and everything that follows from it are false, and whatever is built on falsehood is itself false.

Second: the argument is an obvious sophistry, for we have never said—nor did any of the early generations before us—that a Muslim may seek tawassul through another person’s righteous deed. The tawassul referred to here is solely the tawassul that invokes Allah through the supplicant’s own righteous deed.