English: Pilgrims place their hands and arms in a hole at the foot end of the grave of the fourteenth-century Shafiʿi scholar and hagiographer Ibn Hajar al-ʿAsqalani in Cairo’s al-Qarafa cemetery. The group hailed from France and included French converts to Islam as well as Muslims of Moroccan, Algerian, and Senegalese descent. The pilgrims, who were on a week-long visit to Egypt en route to Mecca to perform ʿumra in Ramadan 2009, said that they would take the grave soil back to France for tabarruk. One pilgrim told me that he would gift it to his parents who were unable to join the pilgrimage due to health and old age. © Fouad Gehad Marei (2009)