Worshipping anything other than God—shirk—is Islam’s gravest sin, so mainstream Sunni Islam frowns on visiting graves as an act of religious devotion. For a scripturalist Muslim like the Sheikh, it was not permissible to travel simply to visit a grave, even the Prophet’s. Making pilgrimages to graves and shrines was a superstition of unlettered village Muslims or Sufi mystics. The Prophet’s grave was an exception: one could visit it, say “salaam” to it, but only if one happened to be in Medina anyway.
