One of those is Ibn Sīnā, together with the people who followed his path, such as the author of the so-called “Guarded Books” and others.

These adherents visit graves with an intention that turns the visit into the very practice the Law has forbidden. The lawful visitation resembles the funeral prayer: its purpose is to greet the deceased and to ask Allah to forgive him and show him mercy. The innovated visitation—akin to the practice of the polytheists—aims at obtaining benefits from the dead or the absent: either the visitor asks the deceased directly, or asks him to request the need from Allah, or swears an oath upon Allah by means of that creature. Many of them will then claim that the one invoked presents the need to Allah, or that Allah fulfils it by His will and choice because of the oath sworn by that created being. The philosophers under discussion go even further: they maintain that the mere act of turning toward that spirit makes an influence flow down upon the supplicant from the spirit itself—just as rays pour forth from the sun—without the spirit intending to meet anyone’s need and without Allah, according to their corrupt doctrine, knowing anything of the matter.

It thus becomes clear that the polytheism and unbelief of these people are more severe than the polytheism and unbelief of the Arab idolaters, and that taking such intercessors—through whom they associate partners with Allah—is a graver form of disbelief than the intercessors adopted by the former.

Human mediation, in the view of the Ḥunafāʾ, is nothing like the mediation of the celestial beings posited by the philosophers.

For that reason, many of the debates that speculative theologians conducted with them were inadequate: those theologians did not apprehend the reality of what Allah sent His messengers with, what He revealed in His books, and what He censured of shirk. Hence they failed to uncover—by the light of prophethood—the error embedded in the philosophers’ claims. Al-Shahrastānī, however, in his work al-Milal wa-al-Nihal, recorded a debate between the Ḥunafāʾ and the polytheist Sabeans: the Ḥunafāʾ affirmed human mediation, whereas the Sabeans upheld mediation through celestial beings, so he proceeded to show that affirming human mediation…