The Grave of the Prophet ﷺ and His Two Companions

Shaykh Yasir Qadhi explains:

The Prophet ﷺ was buried where he slept, Abū Bakr had reported that he ﷺ said the prophets are buried where they die, so his bed was lifted and the grave dug in its place, in ʿĀʾishah's chamber.

❧The lahd

His was a laḥd. Of the two grave-forms the Sharīʿah permits, the laḥd is a shaft dug straight down with a niche then cut into its side towards the qiblah, an L-shape into which the body is laid; the opening of the niche is walled with bricks and the earth thrown over that, so that no soil falls on the body itself. The other form, the shaqq, is a trench dug straight down with a slot in its floor for the body, then covered with a slab, which is how it is done in America, where the law requires it. Both are lawful; the majority of the madhāhib hold the laḥd to be the Sunnah, arguing among other things that the Prophet ﷺ was buried in one and that Allah would have chosen only the best for him. That he was buried in a laḥd is agreed by all.

❧Three in the chamber

ʿĀʾishah went on living in the rest of the chamber, the grave to one side. When her father Abū Bakr died she let him be buried beside the Prophet ﷺ, and lived on another ten years. Then, when Abū Luʾluʾah stabbed ʿUmar and the doctors told him the wound was mortal, he sent his son ʿAbdullāh to ʿĀʾishah with a careful message: say "ʿUmar," not "the Commander of the Faithful", that she know this is the request of a man named ʿUmar and not a command of the caliph, asking leave to be buried beside his two companions; and if she hesitates or refuses, withdraw and do not press her, for it is her house and her right. She said she had wanted that place for herself but would give it to no one before ʿUmar, she would sacrifice it for him, for he deserved it. So ʿUmar was buried as the third.

Because ʿUmar was not her maḥram, ʿĀʾishah now hung a curtain within the chamber and lived out her life in the small space that remained. Reflect on it: for years she ate and drank and slept beside the graves of her husband the Prophet ﷺ, her father, and ʿUmar. ʿUthmān, when the fitnah came, was killed and buried outside al-Baqīʿ, not even within it, and ʿAlī died in Kūfah; so the two later caliphs had no share of the chamber, and one space remained. When ʿĀʾishah herself died, in the year 57 in the time of Muʿāwiyah, she asked not to be buried there but with the other wives of the Prophet ﷺ in al-Baqīʿ, perhaps out of modesty before ʿUmar, perhaps to be among the women; we do not know. As for that fourth space, there are reports in the books that ʿĪsā will be buried there when he returns, but none is authentic, so we neither affirm nor deny it.

❧How the graves looked

We know how they appeared. Al-Qāsim, ʿĀʾishah's nephew, asked her to let him see the graves, and she lifted the curtain, as she would for a maḥram, and he saw three graves, neither raised high nor level with the ground, low mounds with reddish gravel upon them. Another who helped rebuild them in a later age said they stood about four fingers above the earth: no stone, no structure, only a little mound over each.