The Consensus on Tawaswswul

بِسۡمِ ٱللهِ ٱلرَّحۡمَـٰنِ ٱلرَّحِيمِ

Imam Yusuf ibn Hashim ar-Rifa’i (q.s.) said, “I here want to convey the position, attested to by compelling legal evidence, of the orthodox majority of Sunni Muslims on the subject of supplicating Allah through an intermediary, and so I say that since there is no disagreement among scholars that supplicating Allah through an intermediary is in principle legally valid, the discussion of its details merely concerns derived rulings that involve interschool differences, unrelated to questions of belief or unbelief, monotheism or associating partners with Allah; the sphere of the question being limited to permissibility or impermissibility, and its ruling being that it is either lawful or unlawful.  There is no difference among groups of Muslims in their consensus on the permissibility of three types of supplicating Allah through an intermediary: Tawaswswul through a living righteous person to Allah (s.w.t.), as in the hadits of the blind man with the Prophet (s.a.w.) as we shall explain; the tawaswswul of a living person to Allah (s.w.t.) through his own good deeds, as in the hadits of the three people trapped in a cave by a great stone, a hadits related by Imam al-Bukhari in his Swahih; and the tawaswswul of a person to Allah (s.w.t.) through His Dzat, Names, Attributes, and so forth. 

Since the legality of these types is agreed upon, there is no reason to set forth the evidence for them.  The only area of disagreement is supplicating Allah (s.w.t.) through a righteous dead person.  The majority of the orthodox Sunni community hold that it is lawful, and have supporting hadits evidence, of which we will content ourselves with the Hadits of the Blind Man, since it is the central pivot upon which the discussion turns.”