The Later History of the Prophet's ﷺ Mosque and Grave

Shaykh Yasir Qadhi explains:

The story of the chamber does not end with the Ṣaḥābah, and its later history, through expansions, fires and the building of the dome and lattice we see today, is part of our heritage. What follows is centuries beyond the Sīrah, but worth knowing.

❧The Umayyad expansion, and Saeed's objection

ʿUmar had been the first to enlarge and solidify the masjid. But it was the caliph al-Walīd ibn ʿAbd al-Malik, around 90 AH, who expanded it in all four directions, and expanding east meant absorbing the wives' chambers, which had stood some ninety years, uninhabited (the wives left no biological descendants) and managed by the Ahl al-Bayt. He insisted on buying them at any price and enclosing them in the masjid. Why do such a thing? One view is that he was a typical ruler wanting to leave his mark with a grand mosque, as rulers still do. The other, which the shaykh finds far more persuasive, is political: after Karbalāʾ the Umayyads faced deep hostility and the descendants of the Prophet ﷺ were loved, and ʿAlī Zayn al-ʿĀbidīn, the sole surviving son of Ḥusayn, the sick youth spared in the tent, had returned to Madinah, where people clamoured for him and he would sit and even teach in the house of the Prophet ﷺ, which was his own house, with no barrier between it and the masjid. To remove that platform, the house itself had to go. Power is the greatest fitnah known to man.

Several senior scholars of Madinah objected, foremost Saʿīd ibn al-Musayyib, not, as some later writers claim, on theological grounds against the grave being inside the masjid, but because he wanted the people to keep seeing how rough and simple the Prophet's ﷺ houses were, that it might soften their hearts; for within ninety years wealth and two-storey houses and fine cloth had come to Madinah, and he wished the lesson of that simplicity preserved. The governor of Madinah at the time, carrying out the demolition, was the young ʿUmar ibn ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz, not yet the pious caliph he would become, but a prince currying the ruler's favour.

❧The pentagonal chamber, and the feet of Umar

ʿĀʾishah's house was either preserved within or rebuilt with thick black blocks like those of the Kaʿbah, doorless and sealed; and around it ʿUmar ibn ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz raised a five-sided wall, a pentagon so that no one could face the grave squarely in prayer, and so that no ignorant new Muslim would mistake a cube in Madinah for a second Kaʿbah. It was this pentagonal structure that pilgrims saw for the next four hundred years. During the building, workmen uncovered two feet, perfectly fresh after ninety years, and cried out in fear they were the feet of the Prophet ﷺ, until the scholar Sālim ibn ʿAbdullāh ibn ʿUmar, his own grandson, reassured them: these are the feet of our grandfather ʿUmar.

❧Two great fires, and the dome

In 654 AH a lamp-keeper's oil caught a curtain and the whole masjid burned, its roof collapsing onto the sealed chamber, and in the same disaster the original Muṣḥaf of ʿUthmān was lost. They wrote to the Abbasid caliph al-Mustaʿṣim in Baghdad for guidance and no reply came, for that was the very year Hulagu's Mongols were closing on Baghdad, whose sack the next year the shaykh calls the greatest catastrophe the Ummah has known since the Ridda, the turning-point after which the Ummah fell and Europe began its slow rise. The Mongols were finally halted at ʿAyn Jālūt by Quṭuz, and it was then Sultan Baybars who rebuilt the masjid, in 678 AH raising for the first time a square wall and a wooden dome over the grave, the origin of the enclosure we still see. A second great fire came in 886 AH (1481 CE, before Columbus sailed and while Muslim al-Andalus still stood), when lightning struck the minaret on a stormy night, killed the muʾadhdhin, and burned the masjid again.

❧Samhudi enters, and the green dome

The Mamlūk sultan Qāyitbāy ordered a complete rebuilding, and the greatest scholar then living, al-Samhūdī, who later wrote a celebrated history of Madinah, was chosen to enter the inner chamber, the first in some five centuries. He describes it in the first person, stopping at the very threshold out of respect and going no further: a fragrance unlike any he had ever smelled; standing as long as he could, giving salām to the best of the prophets ﷺ and then to his two companions, and making all the duʿāʾ he could; the chamber floor now settled and flat, the graves sunk to low mounds save one still slightly raised, which he took to be ʿUmar's; and the gravel moist, as if fresh. Qāyitbāy replaced Baybars's wooden dome with a solid one and his square with a metal lattice, and that very lattice of 886 AH is the green grille we see to this day, six centuries old. The dome was bare metal, then painted through the years white and blue, and was first painted green only under Sultan Maḥmūd around 1837 CE; the green colour is barely a hundred and fifty years old and carries no religious meaning.

❧What remains

The inner chamber no one has entered for centuries, there is no door, no key, and none should. From behind the grille the men give their salām, some ten feet and more from the Prophet ﷺ; even those admitted to the outer hallway, the curtain-changers, the vetted scholar-cleaners, visiting heads of state, come no closer than the grille's far side. The practice of draping the walls in embroidered cloth began in early Abbasid times, first by the mother of Hārūn al-Rashīd, and the covering is now made in the same Kiswah workshop as the Kaʿbah's and changed once a decade. And in the old masjid still stand the named pillars where events of the Sīrah occurred, among them the Pillar of Repentance, where Abū Lubābah bound himself. When the Prophet ﷺ was buried he was not disrobed; three garments were laid over his own clothes, and there he remains, given the utmost honour, where he lived and died.