Answer
In the Name of Allah, Most Gracious, Most Merciful.
All praise and thanks are due to Allah, and peace and blessings be upon His Messenger.
In this fatwa:
The practice of calling upon saints, dead or alive, is nothing but a form of shirk. No Muslim should ever contemplate such a practice, if he/she is keen on keeping his/her religion intact.
In his response to the question you raised, Sheikh Ahmad Kutty, a senior lecturer and Islamic scholar at the Islamic Institute of Toronto,Ontario, Canada, states:
A number of things should be clear in the mind of every Muslim:
1- In Islam, we must not ask, pray, or supplicate to anyone other than Allah. This is why we repeat several times a day in our prayer, “You alone do we worship, and from You alone we seek assistance.”(Al-Fatihah 1:5)
2- The Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him) told his cousin, Ibn `Abbas, “…if you ask, ask of Allah, if you seek assistance, seek assistance from Allah.” (At-Tirmidhi)
3- In the Qur’an, Allah tells us that He is “closer to us than our own jugular vein”(Qaf 50:16), and that He knows our innermost thoughts, before we even express them.
4- He (Allah) also guarantees that no matter how ugly our sins are, we can always call upon Him directly, without any intermediary. He has also promised to answer us, so long as we turn to Him sincerely.
In the light of what we said above, no Muslim must think that there is any justification in Islam for calling upon anyone other than Allah. To do so would be nothing short of shirk or associating partners with Allah. Such a practice never existed in the best generations of Islam. We are told to follow their example in religion.
Moreover, according to the Qur’an, the pagans of Makkah who called upon deities other than Allah are cited as saying, “we only worship them in order to bring us closer to Allah.” (Az-Zumar 39:3) And “They are our intercessors before Allah.” (Yunus 10:18)
It is, therefore, safe to conclude that the practice of calling upon saints, dead or alive, is nothing but a form of shirk. No Muslim should ever contemplate such a practice, if he/she is keen on keeping his/her religion intact.
Almighty Allah knows best.
Editor’s note: This fatwa is from Ask the Scholar’s archive and was originally published at an earlier date.