Karamat — The Saints' Deeds
The Teaching
Know that the miracles of the saints are absolutely true and must be acknowledged as genuine. The saints are granted miraculous gifts by God — not as proofs of their sainthood, and not through their own willing or seeking, but as a natural overflow of their nearness to the divine.
The difference between the miracles of the prophets and the deeds of the saints is this: the prophet's miracle is given as a sign, to establish authority. The saint's deed arises from their state. It is not performed. It overflows.
The mark of the true saint is that they pay no attention to these gifts. They arise and pass without the saint placing value on them, for the saint's attention remains fixed on the source from which they flow. — Al-Hujwiri, Kashf al-Mahjub
Commentary
The Islamic concept of karamat — often translated as "miracles of the saints" or "charismatic gifts" — represents the Sufi tradition's careful theological account of extraordinary phenomena arising in the lives of the awliya, the friends of God. The tradition distinguishes carefully between the miracles of the prophets (given as signs of prophethood) and the karamat of the saints (arising spontaneously from their state of nearness to God).
This distinction is crucial and consistent across the Sufi tradition: the saint does not perform karamat. They arise naturally as an overflow of what the saint has become. The wali who seeks these gifts, displays them for effect, or takes pride in them has demonstrated thereby that they have not yet reached the state from which true karamat flow. The mark of the genuine wali, the tradition maintains, is precisely that they treat these extraordinary capacities as irrelevant to the real Work.
This is structurally identical to what Patanjali says about the siddhis: extraordinary capacities arise as byproducts of particular states of consciousness; the wise practitioner ignores them and continues. Different traditions, different vocabularies, the same observation about what happens at a certain level of the alchemical Work — and the same warning against mistaking the side effect for the goal.