Al-Khaṭīb al-Baghdādī (in Tārīkh Baghdad) and Tāj al-Dīn Al-Subkī (in Ṭabaqāt al-Shāfiʿiyya al-kubra) list countless examples of the reverence enjoyed by religious scholars in the Middle Ages. The latter writes that when a religious scholar visited Khorasan once, the entire population, including women and children, came out to touch his robes and collect the dust off his shoes to use it as medicine to heal themselves. Merchants brought out their goods of sweets, fruit, garments and furs, scattering them above people's heads. The Sufiwomen of that town threw their rosaries at him, hoping these would touch him and that they would therefore receive his barakāt (blessings).

Ibn al-Jawzī describes the crowd attending Aḥad Ibn Ḥanbal's funeral, saying:

A thousand thousand [i.e., a million] people gathered, the likes of which had never been seen before, neither in Jahiliyya nor in Islam. They estimated that about sixty thousand women gathered next to the wall. Some people spent the night by the tomb. There was no household untouched by grief, except the houses of evil. The day he died, twenty thousand Jews, Christians and Magi converted to Islam.

Centuries later, Ahmad Amin wrote in his autobiography Ḥayātī (My Life) that when he sought marriage: