The House of the Prophet ﷺ

Shaykh Yasir Qadhi explains:

The grave of the Prophet ﷺ is the most honoured spot on earth, and it is part of our heritage to know its story, which begins with his house. Throughout the Sīrah we have spoken of the chambers of the Prophet ﷺ beside the masjid; from what the sources let us glean, and from the careful models the heritage authority of Madinah has built, we can picture it fairly well.

❧The chambers by the masjid

When the Prophet ﷺ first came to Madinah the qiblah faced Jerusalem, and he built his houses along the side of the masjid that then lay behind the worshippers. He had at that time two wives, Sawdah and ʿĀʾishah, ʿĀʾishah's marriage consummated soon after the Hijrah, and Ḥafṣah very shortly after; so the first chambers raised were Sawdah's and ʿĀʾishah's, then Ḥafṣah's. He also married his daughter Fāṭimah to ʿAlī about then and built them a house in the same vicinity, right behind ʿĀʾishah's, for ʿAlī kept two houses, one here and one out in Qubāʾ. When the qiblah was changed to face the Kaʿbah, the direction of prayer reversed, and the chambers that had stood behind now stood in front, along the new qiblah wall.

Of all the wives' chambers, only ʿĀʾishah's opened directly onto the masjid, its doorway was one and the same; the others' doors onto the masjid were eventually closed. There is a small, untroubling difference of view over whether a narrow alley ran between her wall and the masjid or the two shared a single wall. A ḥadīth in Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim has the Prophet ﷺ ask ʿĀʾishah to hand him his prayer-mat from the masjid; she says she is in her menses and cannot go in; he tells her her menses is not in her hand, and to reach it out to him, she need only put out her arm, without entering, which some read as favouring the shared wall. It is a trivial matter; Allah knows best.

❧Ten feet by twelve

The room itself was about three by three-and-a-half metres, roughly ten feet by twelve, the size of a rug one lays on a living-room floor, or smaller. That single room was the whole dwelling: sleeping, cooking, storage, everything, for these were not the multi-room structures of later ages but one room apiece, in utter simplicity. Around the whole cluster of chambers there was most likely a wall of dried clay giving the wives their privacy, this seems to be what Allah refers to in الَّذِينَ يُنَادُونَكَ مِن وَرَاءِ الْحُجُرَاتِ, those who call you from behind the chambers, so that the Prophet ﷺ could pass between his wives' houses without leaving the enclosure. The chamber doorways themselves were closed only by curtains, not solid doors, which is itself an argument that an outer wall must have stood, for how else would a curtain suffice on a room open to the street? It was the curtain of ʿĀʾishah's chamber that the Prophet ﷺ lifted, on the last day of his life, when the people saw his face for the last time.

❧The roof, and the bed

For the whole of his life the roof over him ﷺ was never of solid material, only of interwoven date-palm leaves, not watertight, so the rain came through, and not proof against the cold; and the cold of Madinah is severe. Only in the time of ʿUmar, after his death, were the roofs of the wives' houses made solid. His bed was a mattress stuffed with date-palm leaves over a frame of palm bark and branches; over the years it wore thin, and when some sought to give him a better one he refused and asked for his old one back. The room was cluttered, with the cooking things, the water-jugs hung high on the walls out of reach of vermin, the sword and shield on the wall, ʿĀʾishah's hand-mill for grinding barley, so cluttered that when he rose for tahajjud there was no room to prostrate until he gently moved ʿĀʾishah's feet, as the ḥadīth records. There was no latrine within: with so little food, they relieved themselves only once in two or three days, going outside the city for it. This is how the best of creation ﷺ lived.