quality:corruption, structural:reformatting, linguistic:voice_change, information:classification, structural:summarization
Islam

Besides prophets, according to Islam, saints possess blessings (Arabic: بركة, "baraka") and can perform miracles (Arabic: كرامات, Karāmāt). Saints rank lower than prophets, and they do not intercede for people on the Day of Judgment. However, both the tombs of prophets and saints are visited frequently (Ziyarat). People would seek the advice of a saint in their quest for spiritual fulfilment. Unlike saints in Christianity, Muslim saints are usually acknowledged informally by consensus of common people, not by scholars. Unlike prophets, women like Rabia of Basra were accepted as saints.

Saints are recognized as having specific traits they can be identified through. These include: floating lights appearing above their tomb, the body not decaying, a pleasant and miraculous odor coming from the body, appearing in the dreams of others who they pray on behalf of, appearing in two places at once, and having normally impossible knowledge.

Islam has had a rich history of veneration of saints (often called wali, which literally means 'Friend '), which has declined in some parts of the Islamic world in the twentieth century due to the influence of the various streams of Salafism. In Sunni Islam, the veneration of saints became a very common form of devotion early on, and saints came to be defined in the eighth-century as a group of "special people chosen by God and endowed with exceptional gifts, such as the ability to work miracles." The classical Sunni scholars came to recognize and honor these individuals as venerable people who were both "loved by God and developed a close relationship of love to Him." "Belief in the miracles of saints (karāmāt al-awliyāʾ)... requirement in Sunni Islam," with even medieval critics of the ubiquitous practice of grave visitation like Ibn Taymiyyah emphatically declaring: "The miracles of saints are absolutely true and correct, and acknowledged by all Muslim scholars. The Quran has pointed to it in different places, and the sayings of the Prophet have mentioned it, and whoever denies the miraculous power of saints are innovators or following innovators." The vast majority of saints venerated in the classical Sunni world were the Sufis, who were all Sunni mystics who belonged to one of the four orthodox legal schools of Sunni law.

Veneration of saints eventually became one of the most widespread Sunni practices for more than a millennium, before it was opposed in the twentieth century by the Salafi movement, whose various streams regard it as "being both un-Islamic and backwards... rather than the integral part of Islam which they were for over a millennium." In a manner similar to the Protestant Reformation, the specific traditional practices which Salafism has tried to curtail in both Sunni and Shia contexts include those of the veneration of saints, visiting their graves, seeking their intercession, and honoring their relics. As Christopher Taylor has remarked: " a vital dimension of Islamic piety was the veneration of Muslim saints... certain strains of thought within the Islamic tradition itself, particularly pronounced in the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries... Muslims have either resisted acknowledging the existence of Muslim saints altogether or have viewed their presence and veneration as unacceptable deviations."