1000), emerged from the two basic Islamic doctrinal sources of the Quran and the hadith.[2] As the Quran referred to the miracles of non-prophetic saintly people like Khidr (18:65-82), the disciples of Jesus (5:111-115), and the People of the Cave (18:7-26), amongst many others, many prominent early scholars deduced that a group of venerable people must exist who occupy a rank below the prophets but who are nevertheless capable of performing miracles.[4] The references in the corpus of hadith literature to bona fide miracle-working saints like the pre-Islamic Jurayj̲ (seemingly an Arabic form of the Greek Grēgorios),[5][6][7][8] only lent further credence to this early understanding of the miracles of the saints.[4] The fourteenth-century Hanbali scholar Ibn Taymiyyah (d. 1328), in spite of his well-known objections to the visiting of saints' graves, nevertheless stated: "The miracles of saints are absolutely true and correct, by the acceptance of all Muslim scholars. And the Qur'an has pointed to it in different places, and the sayings of the Prophet have mentioned it, and whoever denies the miraculous power of saints are only people who are innovators and their followers."[9] As one contemporary scholar has expressed it, practically all of the major scholars of the classical and medieval eras believed that "the lives of saints and their miracles were incontestable."[10] In the modern world, this doctrine of the miracles of saints has been challenged by certain movements within the branches of Salafism, Wahhabism, and Islamic modernism, as certain followers of some of these movements have come to view the very idea of Muslim saints "as being both un-Islamic and backwards ... rather than the integral part of Islam which they were for over a millennium."[11] Islamic modernists, in particular, have had a tendency to dismiss the traditional idea of miracles of saints as "superstitious" rather than authentically Islamic.[2] Despite the presence, however, of these opposing streams of thought, the classical doctrine continues to thrive in many parts of the Islamic world today, playing a vital role in the daily piety of vast portions of Muslim countries like Pakistan, Egypt, Turkey, Senegal, Iraq, Iran, Algeria, Tunisia, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Morocco,[2] as well as in countries with substantive Islamic populations like India, China, Russia, and the Balkans.[4] See also Tay al-Arz, the saintly power of teleportation Datuk Keramat, local folk religion in Malaysia and Singapore References ↑ Hans Wehr, J. Milton Cowan (1979).