This book has explored the complex significance of relics and tombs within formative Islamic ritual and thought. Rather than rejecting them completely, many Muslims not only venerated material religious objects and spaces, but used them in conceptualising ideas about the Islamic community. These items and locations, and their varied significances, included the footsteps of Abraham in the Maqām Ibrāhīm as a marker of history, prayer and pilgrimage in Mecca; the corpses of unseen prophets sacralising the landscape of the emergent Islamic empire; the Prophet Muḥammad's tomb as a destination for pilgrimage and intercession in Medina; and the places where the Prophet stopped and prayed in the Ḥijāz as sites of communal memory, emulation and visitation. Rather than innovations of later centuries, many rituals and ideas that surrounded these places and objects were practised and discussed by early generations of Muslims, in the seventh, eighth and ninth centuries. The manifold ‘traces’ of the prophets were memorialised, visited, prayed at and debated by Muslims from very early in Islamic history.

At the same time, the avoidance of tomb and relic cult was undeniably a distinct and prominent theme within early Islamic juristic discussions and historical texts. Many figures criticised their fellow Muslims for touching the Maqām Ibrāhīm, for worshipping at the Prophet Muḥammad's tomb, and for visiting and praying at the Prophet's āthār. In no small part, the avoidance of such practices was presented as a rejection of Christian and Jewish tendencies towards the veneration of holy people. Efforts to distinguish Muslims from their near-others cannot totally and comprehensively account for these condemnatory attitudes towards the veneration of tombs and relics. Nonetheless, the enactment of Muslim difference was certainly an important component in the rhetorical framing of Muslim positions on the complex bundle of social, ritual and theological issues provoked by tomb and relic veneration.

Later Muslims would continue to perform rituals with relics and tombs, as well as to contest the validity of such practices. The continuing vitality of this debate is suggested, for example, by contemporary phenomena at the site in Mecca believed to be the place of the Prophet Muḥammad's birth, briefly discussed above.