Ziyarat

The Arabic term Ziyara (Arabic زيارة, DMG Ziyara, visit ') referred to as a religious technical term in Islam to visit a holy place, which is not identical to the Holy Mosque in Mecca. If for longer distances to be covered, we can speak of a pilgrimage. Often the Ziyara places are also in the immediate vicinity of the persons concerned, so that they have to take any journey. The aim of this pious visits are mostly graves, so the custom in the Arab scholarly literature is usually dealt with under the heading زيارة القبور / Ziyarat al - Qubūr /, visit graves ', but in some cases the worship is also caves, mountains or trees or places to be visited regularly by Khidr. The visitors of these places usually bring with votive offerings; conversely, they try to get their baraka ( blessing power ) of the exploration of these places.

The locations and buildings themselves that are the subject of Ziyara visits are often called Ziyara (pers. Ziyarat, Turkish Ziyaret ). Accordingly, the term in Islamic countries also frequently encountered in toponyms.

History

Customs of the visit of graves have first emerged in Shia Islam. The visit of Husayn's grave in Karbala is occupied ever since the seventh century. After they had found in the late 8th century ʿ Ali's grave in Najaf, was also this place to a Shiite pilgrimage destination. In the early 11th century, the Shiite Fatimids in Egypt erected over the graves of members of the Prophet's family (eg Sayyida Nafisa and Sayyida Ruqayyah in the south of Cairo ) mausoleums, which here also developed Ziyara - customs.

From the 11th century the custom of the graves visit spread increasingly in the area of Sunni Islam, it was common for example, to connect the Hajj to Mecca with a Ziyara tomb of the Prophet in Medina. Sunni rulers also went on to build the tombs of personalities of Sunni Islam to mausoleums, such as those of Imam Abu Hanifa in Baghdad and al- Shafi ʿ ī in Cairo, so that there were also out - Ziyara customs. Even scholars began to now, pilgrimage guides specifically for Sunni believers who wanted to visit graves should be used. The most famous is the "Book of pointers to the knowledge of the places of pilgrimage " ( Kitaab al - Išārāt ila ma ʿ rifat al- Ziyarat ) of ʿ Alī ibn Abī Bakr al - Harawi (d. 1215), the full the territory of Syria and Palestine as a sacred landscape places of pilgrimage describes. In the 13th and 14th centuries the veneration of saints in Sunni Islam pilgrimage sites created in the course of the flowering in several places of national importance, the grave shrine of the miraculous Sufi Ahmad al - Badawi (d. 1276) in Tanta, the grave shrine of Mu ʿ īn ad - Dīn Tschischtī (d. 1230) in Ajmer and the Mausoleum of Ahmed Yesevi (d. 1166 ) in Turkestan.

Criticism of the Ziyara - customs came early as the 10th and 11th centuries by various members of the Hanbali Lehrrrichtung, such as al- ʿ Aqil and Ibn Barbahārī. Particularly sharp Ibn Taymiyya and Ibn Qayyim al - be students Dschauziya criticized these customs. They said that most of them were an unauthorized innovation, or should be regarded as shirk. Referring back to this teaching tradition later condemned the Deobandis, Wahhabis and other supporters of the Salafist these customs.

See: Imam Birgivi