The notion of intermediaries in Islam and Sufism

By Nabil Humeau · October 27, 2026 · 7 min read

Few notions are more debated, or more contested, than that of the intermediary: does it have any real basis in Islam, and in Sufism?

In a number of religions, the relationship with God is administered by a category, sometimes a caste, of human beings we call the clergy. The arrangement rests on a principle: religion holds mysteries, and the transmission of religious teaching is reserved for those who know. The mass of believers remains ignorant of the subtleties of these mysteries, and sometimes even of the sacred texts themselves, written as they are in languages closed to ordinary mortals.

Islam, it is often said, has no clergy, and therefore no intermediaries. (We are concerned here with Sunni Islam alone, in which no specific body answers to the name of clergy or its equivalent.) No clergy, no intermediary. Let us look at this more closely.

No clergy, but forms of mediation

Yet once we stop narrowing the intermediary down to a caste of ‘administrators of the sacred’, as certain sociologists call them, mediation between God and the human being turns out to be very much present in Islam:

• First, the mediation of the Prophets: God does not reveal Himself directly to every human being; He entrusts His revelations to a Prophet, or more precisely to a Messenger;
• Then the mediation of the Angel Gabriel: even the Messenger received the Revelation through an intermediary, the Angel Gabriel (Jibril in Arabic), as was the case for the Prophet Muhammad;
• Consider also the ulama: not constituted intermediaries exactly, but a body of religious scholars whose authority rests on a knowledge that sets them apart. A Muslim will consult a scholar, a jurist, for an opinion on the right course of action in this or that circumstance; here again, a form of mediation;
• And the imams: not intermediaries in the strict sense either (they simply stand before the congregation in prayer), yet a body of men normally trained and recognised as fit to lead the prayer and to counsel the believers. Some training is usually required to become an imam; not just anyone may be the imam of a khatib mosque, one where the Friday congregational prayer is held. Believers also turn to imams for advice on religious, ritual or social matters;
• Finally, two further categories deserve mention, being particularly important in Sufism:
  • the saints, with the notion of intercession (tawassul);
  • the shuyukh: the spiritual masters, the guides of souls.

The intercession of Prophets and saints

Let us start with the Qur’an itself. In the sura Ta Ha we read:

‘On that day, no intercession shall avail save that of one whom the All-Merciful has authorised and whose word He has approved.’ (Qur’an XX, 109)

On this verse alone, the Islamic tradition founds the notion of tawassul, the Arabic term for the seeking of intercession.

Tawassul means addressing one’s supplications to God while imploring the favour, the intercession of the Prophet and of the saints, living or dead; in the certainty, of course, that it is Allah alone who gives and withholds.

What do the legal schools (madhhab) of Sunni Islam say on the subject?

In the Maliki school, Qadi ’Iyad’s Kitab al-Shifa reports the following:

The Abbasid Caliph al-Mansur asked Imam Malik, during the pilgrimage, on the occasion of the visit to the Prophet’s grave: ‘Should I turn towards the Qibla to supplicate God, or may I turn towards the Prophet?’ Imam Malik answered: ‘Why should you not turn your face towards him, since he is your intermediary (wasita) and the intermediary of your father Adam? Turn to him, then, and ask his intercession; God will grant it to him.’

Imam Ahmad Ibn Hanbal, founder of the Hanbali school, recommended for his part that the believer practise tawassul through the Prophet in every du’a, every prayer of petition, with these words:

‘O Allah, I turn towards You with Your Prophet, the Prophet of Mercy (…). O Muhammad! I turn with you towards my Lord for the satisfaction of my needs.’ (reported by Abu Bakr al-Marwazi in his Mansak)

To this same Abu Bakr al-Marwazi, Imam Ibn Hanbal also said: ‘Take the Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, as a wasila, a means, in your supplications.’

‘Ala’ al-Din al-Mardawi, in his work on the Hanbali school, writes: ‘The correct position of the Hanbali school is that it is permissible, in a du’a, to invoke Allah through the intermediary of a pious person; it is even strongly recommended.’

Imam Shafi’i, from whom the Shafi’i school takes its name, said for his part: ‘I seek blessing (tabarruk) through Imam Abu Hanifa and visit his grave every day. When I have a request to make, I perform two rak’at and go to his grave to lay my request before Allah, in the presence of Imam Abu Hanifa’s tomb; before I have had time to step away, God has granted it.’

The intercession of saints, however, is fiercely contested by the literalist currents of Islam, for whom it amounts to a cult of saints. We shall not enter into that debate here, nor into the question of whether seeking intercession is itself a cult, or whether certain excesses of the practice may have led to that association, that confusion.

Seeking intercession, then, and with it the recourse to mediation to carry a request to God, is not proscribed in Islam: such is the position of the founders of the principal Sunni legal schools. We have cited only three schools, but all four agree on this point.

The mediation of the spiritual masters

We come now to the mediation of the spiritual masters: the teaching masters, the shuyukh al-tarbiyya.

Once again, the Qur’an. In the sura al-Ma’ida, The Table Spread, we find a verse in which the Sufis read an allusion to the spiritual master:

‘O you who believe! Fear God, and seek the means (al-wasila) of approach to Him.’ (Qur’an V, 35)

For Sufism, the spiritual master is precisely this means of drawing near to God. The journey towards spiritual realisation, the opening of the heart to divine realities, the struggle against the ego (an-nafs in Arabic), the transformation of the being for the acquisition of prophetic qualities: all of this calls for the guidance of a teaching master duly authorised for the task.

There is a saying that ‘he who journeys alone journeys with Satan’ (or, as another version puts it, with his own ego for company).

Nor is the master, strictly speaking, an intermediary: he does not perform the rites on the believer’s behalf. What he does is orient the believers in spiritual practices whose effect is to bring the aspirant nearer to his Lord.

And yet one can speak of a form of mediation here: the master is a living means who places his spiritual influx and his knowledge of subtle realities at the service of the aspirant, guiding and accompanying him on God’s path. As a rule, no one attains realisation in God without the intervention of a spiritual guide; it is in this sense that mediation applies. The master, then, is more exactly a mediator, a wasita. This is the very vocation of the masters of the Tariqa Qadiriya Boutchichiya, a path in which this educative guidance is lived to this day.

Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406), statesman, jurist and an eminent author of works of social science, among them the Kitab al-’Ibar and the Muqaddima, tells us in his treatise on Sufism, published in French as La voie et la loi ou le maître et le juriste, that the master is indispensable for the struggle he calls the removal of the veil, that veil which separates us from divine Reality. After the combat of piety and the combat of rectitude, he describes the highest of them in these words:

‘There remains the struggle of the removal of the veil (kashf) and of contemplation (mushahada), which proposes as its aim the lifting of the veil and the apprehension of the spiritual world and of the Kingdom of the heavens and the earth. It needs a teacher-educator (al-mu’allim al-murabbi) who goes by the name of Shaykh, a need that has the character of an obligation and a necessity for anyone who undertakes it; without this Shaykh, the enterprise cannot, as a rule, come to pass.’

In the remainder of the work he sets out the reasons.

The vocation of the spiritual master, then, is to turn the disciple’s heart towards the divine Presence, which the disciple cannot do alone. We touch here on a notion central to Sufism, one that sits at the very heart of the master-disciple relationship: a notion often misunderstood because it is so difficult to spell out, so subtle is it. I am speaking of orientation, tawajjuh in Arabic.

We shall return to this notion in a future contribution.

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