The Jamarat and the Jamarat Bridge: The Complete History, Ritual and Visitor Guide to the Stoning of the Devil in Mina

At the eastern end of the narrow valley of Mina, where the tent city gives way to open ground before the road climbs toward Makkah, three low concrete walls stand inside a vast, multi-level bridge of ramps, tunnels and escalators. For eleven months of the year this place is quiet, gated, and empty of pilgrims. For a few days around the tenth of Dhu al-Hijjah, it becomes the most crowded few hundred metres on earth: more than a million people converging, in waves, to throw pebbles at three targets that mark a story fifteen centuries deep in the memory of Ibrahim, and a practice the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ performed once, in his final year, before hundreds of thousands of witnesses. This guide is about that place — Jamrat al-Sughra, Jamrat al-Wusta, and Jamrat al-Aqabah, and the bridge built to keep the pilgrims who visit them alive.

The jamarat sit inside Mina, and Mina itself — its geography, its tent city, its role across the days of Hajj — is covered in full in this guide’s companion article on Mina. This article does not repeat that ground. It exists to answer, in real depth, the questions a pilgrim or a curious reader actually has about the three stone walls themselves: what they are, where the ritual comes from, what the Prophet ﷺ actually did and said there, what the schools of Islamic law require and dispute, what has gone wrong at this site historically and how badly, what has been built to stop it going wrong again, and what a Hajj pilgrim — never an Umrah pilgrim, a distinction this guide will make plain — should actually do when they arrive. It is a guide to the history of the Jamarat, a guide to visiting the Jamarat during Hajj, and an honest account of the Islamic heritage and the human cost bound up in this single stretch of road.

Historical Background: The Jamarat Before and After Islam

What “Jamarat” Means and Where They Stand

The Arabic word jamrah (جمرة), plural jamarat (جمرات), is most commonly explained by classical philologists as deriving from a root meaning “small pebble” or “gathering of pebbles” — a jamrah was originally simply a heap of stones. In the vocabulary of Hajj it came to mean the three specific stone markers, and by extension the ritual act performed at them: rami al-jamarat, the throwing of the pebbles. Some later scholars also connected the word to the root meaning “live coal” or “ember,” an association that fed into popular explanations of the ritual as literally striking at the devil, a reading this guide will return to and correct in the section on misconceptions.

The three jamarat lie along a single road through Mina, in a fixed order that has not changed in living memory, even as the ground beneath them has been rebuilt from a bare valley floor into a five-level bridge. Coming from the direction of Muzdalifah and Makkah’s inner districts and travelling toward Makkah itself, a pilgrim encounters them in this sequence:

• Jamrat al-Sughra (“the small jamrah,” also called al-Jamrah al-Ula, “the first”), nearest to Masjid al-Khayf and the tent city of Mina.
• Jamrat al-Wusta (“the middle jamrah”), between the other two.
• Jamrat al-Aqabah (“the jamrah of the mountain pass,” also called al-Jamrah al-Kubra, “the large jamrah”), closest to Makkah, at the far end of Mina where the valley narrows toward a rocky defile — the aqabah that gives it its name.

This is also the order of the rite itself on the days of tashriq: a pilgrim stones the small jamrah first, then the middle, then the large, moving in the direction of Makkah as they go. On the Day of Sacrifice itself, only Jamrat al-Aqabah is stoned, a point this guide covers fully in the sections on the Prophet’s ﷺ practice and the fiqh of the rite.

Reported distances between the three jamarat vary slightly between sources, which is worth being transparent about rather than inventing false precision. The Saudi Ministry of Hajj and Umrah’s own Jamarat Awareness Guide does not publish exact metre figures, and secondary sources differ: some give roughly 150 metres between Jamrat al-Sughra and Jamrat al-Wusta and roughly 225 metres between Jamrat al-Wusta and Jamrat al-Aqabah before the 2004–2007 rebuilding, figures repeated by the Malay-language Wikipedia article on the jamarat and by the French Wikipedia article on the stoning of Satan; other travel and hajj-guide sources give approximately 155 metres between each pair, and still others cite roughly 135 and 225 metres. What can be said with confidence, because it is a fixed physical description rather than a contested measurement, is that the whole complex today sits inside a single bridge structure some 950 metres long and about 80 metres wide, a figure given consistently by the BBC, Arab News, and the engineering consultancy Crowd Dynamics Ltd, which modelled the bridge’s redesign. The three jamarat, in other words, are close enough together that a pilgrim walks the length of a modest city block between each one, but far enough apart that each has its own basin, its own approach ramps, and — since 2004 — its own long wall rather than a single narrow post.

The Site Before Islam

Unlike Makkah’s sanctuary at large, which pre-Islamic Arabia populated with idols and rites of its own long before the Prophet ﷺ purified it, the historical record does not describe the specific spots of the three jamarat as pre-Islamic shrines in their own right. Mina lay on the route of the pre-Islamic Hajj — a pilgrimage the pagan Quraysh and other Arabian tribes already practised, in a corrupted form, around the Ka’bah and its outlying stations — and some form of stone-throwing at these three points appears to predate the specific revelation given to the Prophet ﷺ, since he ﷺ performed it as part of a Hajj whose broad shape (standing at Arafat, passing the night at Muzdalifah, sacrificing in Mina) already existed in Arabia, even though its meaning and correct form had been distorted over centuries. Islam did not invent a stopping-place at Mina; it corrected and re-grounded a rite that already occurred there, tying it explicitly to the story of Ibrahim.

Importance After Islam

With the Prophet’s ﷺ own Hajj in 10 AH (632 CE) — his only Hajj after the Hijra, known as the Farewell Pilgrimage or Hajjat al-Wada’ — the stoning of the three jamarat became a fixed, obligatory rite of Hajj for every Muslim capable of performing it, one of the acts that must be completed, in the view of the overwhelming majority of jurists, for the pilgrimage to be valid or at least free of penalty. Every Hajj performed since has included it. Unlike many of the sites this guide’s companion volume covers — mosques, graves, and battlefields that a visitor may see out of historical interest without any expectation of religious reward for the visit itself — the jamarat are different in kind: they are not a place of optional ziyarah but the location of an actual, obligatory rite of worship, commanded for every physically able pilgrim during the days of Hajj. That distinction matters for how this guide frames the site, and it is addressed directly in the section on common misconceptions.

The Story Behind the Place: Ibrahim, Iblis, and the Three Stations

What the Story Is, Told in Full

The story that Muslims associate with the three jamarat is one of the most widely told in the entire tradition of the Hajj, and it deserves to be told with the same weight it carries in the hearts of pilgrims who walk this road — while being completely honest about where the story is actually recorded.

Ibrahim (Abraham), peace be upon him, had been commanded in a vision to sacrifice his son. The Qur’an itself narrates this core moment with spare, devastating economy. When the boy was old enough to walk and work alongside his father, Ibrahim said to him: “O my dear son, I have seen in a dream that I must sacrifice you, so tell me what you think.” His son answered: “O my dear father, do as you are commanded. Allah willing, you will find me steadfast.” (Surah as-Saffat 37:102) Father and son proceeded together, in full submission, to carry out what each believed Allah had ordered.

It is at this point — on the road toward the place of sacrifice — that the story pilgrims tell at Mina departs from the bare Qur’anic narrative and draws on a much later and much more detailed body of storytelling. According to this tradition, Iblis, the accursed one, appeared to Ibrahim at three distinct points along his path, each time attempting to plant doubt or persuade him to abandon the command — to spare his son, to disobey, to reconsider. Each time, Ibrahim recognised the intruder for what he was and drove him off by throwing seven pebbles at him, and each time Iblis is described as sinking into the earth and vanishing. The first confrontation is placed at the site that becomes Jamrat al-Aqabah, the second at Jamrat al-Wusta, and the third at Jamrat al-Sughra — though which pillar corresponds to which attempted temptation, and in what order, varies between the tellings, some versions instead giving the order beginning with the small jamrah and ending at the large. Some retellings, drawn from later devotional and popular sources rather than the classical texts, extend the story further: that Hajar, Ibrahim’s wife, and even the boy himself were each separately tempted by Iblis and each drove him off with stones of their own, an elaboration found in some modern devotional writing but with a considerably thinner documentary basis than the core account involving Ibrahim.

Being Precise About What This Rests On

This is the point at which honesty to the reader matters more than narrative momentum. The story of Ibrahim stoning Iblis at three points is not established in the Qur’an, which says nothing about an encounter with Satan on the road to the sacrifice. It is also not established, as a connected historical narrative with named companions and clear detail, in the core collections of sahih hadith. Sahih al-Bukhari and Sahih Muslim record in exhaustive detail what the Prophet ﷺ himself did at the jamarat during his own Hajj — the number of pebbles, the takbir, where he stood, what he said — but they do not narrate the story of Ibrahim and Iblis as a Hajj-related event in anything like the vivid, sequential form in which it is popularly told today.

The fullest early source for the connected story is the sira and tafsir literature, principally the History of Makkah compiled by the early historian al-Azraqi (d. c. 222 AH / 837 CE), whose account is often quoted for its vivid detail: that as Ibrahim descended toward al-Aqabah, the devil appeared to him at the “stone-heap of the defile,” that the angel Jibril told him “Pelt him,” that he threw seven stones so that the devil disappeared, and that this repeated at the middle and the small heaps. This narration is preserved and repeated by later historians of Makkah, and it forms the backbone of how the story is now told in almost every popular Hajj guide, including the Saudi Ministry of Hajj and Umrah’s own Jamarat Awareness Guide, which recounts it as the reason given for the ritual, tied to the Qur’anic sacrifice narrative in Surah as-Saffat.

There is a genuine hadith that touches directly on this event, and it deserves to be quoted precisely rather than folded silently into the sira material. It is reported from Ibn Abbas, attributed to the Prophet ﷺ: “When Ibrahim, the intimate friend of Allah, came to perform the rites, Satan appeared to him at the pillar of al-Aqabah, so he stoned him with seven pebbles until he sank into the earth. Then he appeared to him at the second pillar, so he stoned him with seven pebbles until he sank into the earth. Then he appeared to him at the third pillar, so he stoned him with seven pebbles until he sank into the earth.” This narration is recorded in al-Sunan al-Kubra of al-Bayhaqi (hadith 9693), and the modern scholar al-Albani graded it authentic (sahih) within his notes on Sahih al-Targhib. That grading is worth taking seriously — it means the report is not baseless — but it is also worth placing accurately: this is a single narration through a specific chain in a later compiled collection, not a report found with multiple strong chains across the six major sahih collections, and other hadith scholars have not uniformly endorsed every chain by which the story circulates. In short: the Ibrahim-and-Iblis narrative is real, widely accepted, and has at least one report graded authentic by a respected modern critic, but it rests principally on sira, tafsir and a small number of individual hadith reports rather than on the dense, multiply-corroborated sahih material that stands behind, for example, the description of the Prophet’s ﷺ own stoning during his Farewell Hajj. Pilgrims are right to carry this story with them at Mina. They are also entitled to know precisely how firm the ground beneath it is.

A note on authenticity: the report from Ibn Abbas describing Ibrahim stoning Satan at the three jamarat is preserved in al-Sunan al-Kubra li-l-Bayhaqi (9693) and was graded authentic (sahih) by al-Albani. The fuller, more circumstantial version of the story — Jibril’s instruction, the devil sinking into the earth at each of three named locations in that specific order — comes primarily from the early historical writing of al-Azraqi and the broader sira and tafsir tradition rather than from a densely corroborated hadith. Scholars who discuss the ritual’s meaning, such as al-Ghazali in Ihya’ ‘Ulum al-Din, treat the story as the received explanation for the rite without treating every narrative detail as equally well-attested. This guide tells the story in full because it is the story pilgrims are told and the story that gives the ritual its emotional and historical weight, while being clear that its documentary status is not the same as, for instance, the Qur’anic account of the sacrifice itself.

Why the Story Endures

Whatever the precise textual status of each narrative detail, the story’s hold on the Muslim imagination is not an accident of poor sourcing. It survives because it names something every person who has ever tried to do something difficult and right recognises: the moment, repeated three times in the story, when the near occasion of obedience is also the moment temptation is loudest. Iblis does not appear to Ibrahim in comfort. He appears exactly at the hardest point of the command, when a father is walking toward the place where he believes he must give up his son. Imam al-Ghazali, writing centuries later in Ihya’ Ulum al-Din, drew the lesson that pilgrims are told to this day: that the outward act is throwing stones at a wall, but the inward reality is a rehearsal of refusal — training the self to recognise the whisper that would talk it out of obedience, and to answer that whisper the way Ibrahim answered it, without negotiation.

The Prophet ﷺ and the Jamarat: The Farewell Hajj

The Only Hajj He ﷺ Performed After the Hijra

The single most important body of evidence for how the stoning of the jamarat is to be performed is not the Ibrahim narrative at all. It is the detailed, eyewitness account of what the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ himself did, on the ground, at Mina, during the Farewell Pilgrimage of 10 AH (632 CE) — his only Hajj performed as a Muslim leader in Madinah, witnessed by a vast crowd of companions, and preserved in one of the longest and most carefully transmitted hadiths in the entire corpus: the account of Jabir ibn Abdullah, recorded at length in Sahih Muslim 1218.

Jabir’s hadith follows the Prophet ﷺ hour by hour through the entire Hajj — his departure from Madinah, his arrival at Makkah, his standing at Arafat, his night at Muzdalifah — and it is at Muzdalifah, on the morning of the tenth of Dhu al-Hijjah, that the account turns to the jamarat. Jabir narrates that the Prophet ﷺ mounted his camel al-Qaswa, came to al-Mash’ar al-Haram, faced the qiblah, and stood in supplication until daylight was very clear, then set off before sunrise, with al-Fadl ibn Abbas riding behind him. He travelled on “until he came to the jamrah which is near the tree” — a reference to Jamrat al-Aqabah — and there he threw seven small pebbles, “saying Allahu Akbar while throwing every one of them, in the manner in which pebbles are thrown with the fingers,” and he did this “from the bottom of the valley.” (Sahih Muslim 1218) Every detail a pilgrim needs — the pebble size implied by the phrase used for the throw, the takbir with each individual pebble rather than a single takbir for all seven, and the position at the bottom of the valley rather than from an elevated approach — is anchored in this single, extraordinarily well-preserved hadith.

The Sequence and the Timings

On the Day of Sacrifice itself, the tenth of Dhu al-Hijjah, the Prophet ﷺ stoned only Jamrat al-Aqabah, and only with seven pebbles. He did not stone the other two jamarat that day. This detail is affirmed independently in the narrations recorded through Abdullah ibn Mas’ud, who is reported to have stoned the pillar of al-Aqabah “from within the valley, with seven pebbles, saying Allahu Akbar with each pebble,” and who, when told that some people were stoning it from above, replied: “By the One besides whom there is no god, this is the place of the one upon whom Surat al-Baqarah was revealed” — asserting that the low position, at the bottom of the valley, was the position the Prophet ﷺ himself had used, a narration preserved in the hadith literature on this event and echoed in the Bukhari narration in which Abdullah (likely the same companion) describes coming to the largest jamrah with the House on his left and Mina on his right (Sahih al-Bukhari 1748) and Sahih Muslim’s parallel version (Sahih Muslim 1296).

On the eleventh and twelfth of Dhu al-Hijjah — the first two Days of Tashriq — the sequence changes, and this is where the second great body of evidence about the Prophet’s ﷺ practice comes in: not from Jabir’s account of the Farewell Hajj itself, but from the sustained, painstaking description of Abdullah ibn Umar‘s own practice, preserved in Sahih al-Bukhari 1751, explicitly presented by Ibn Umar as an imitation of what he had seen the Prophet ﷺ do. Ibn Umar would stone Jamrat al-Sughra, the jamrah nearest Masjid al-Khayf, with seven small stones, saying the takbir with each one. He would then move forward until he reached level ground, where he would stand facing the qiblah for a long period, raising his hands and supplicating. He would then stone Jamrat al-Wusta, move to the left onto the level ground there, and again stand facing the qiblah for a long period in supplication with raised hands. Finally he would stone Jamrat al-Aqabah from the bottom of the valley — but, critically, “he would not stay by it”; he would simply stone it and leave. Ibn Umar closes the report by saying explicitly, “I saw the Prophet ﷺ doing like this” (Sahih al-Bukhari 1751).

This single hadith is the foundation of one of the most cherished small details of the entire Hajj: that a pilgrim stands and makes free, personal du’a with raised hands after the first jamrah and after the second, but does not linger after the third. Classical and contemporary scholars alike have noted the poignancy of this arrangement without needing to embellish it — the pilgrim’s business at Jamrat al-Aqabah is to complete the act of obedience and move on, not to dwell.

The Pebbles Themselves

The hadith literature is unusually detailed, for a physical ritual object, about what the pebbles used in this rite should look like, and this detail matters enough to Islamic law that it is treated separately in the fiqh section below. Here it is enough to record the core narration: Ibn Abbas relates that on the morning of al-Aqabah, while the Prophet ﷺ stood upon his mount, he said to him, “Pick up (some pebbles) for me.” Ibn Abbas picked up pebbles described in the various narrations as hasa al-khadhf — “pebbles for flinging with the fingers” — and in other wordings as being about the size of a chickpea, a broad bean, or a date-stone. The Prophet ﷺ took them, shook them in his hand, and said: “Throw the like of these,” before adding a warning that reaches far beyond the ritual itself: “O people, beware of immoderation in religion, for those before you were destroyed because of immoderation in religion.” This is recorded, among other places, in Sunan an-Nasa’i 3059 and in Sunan Ibn Majah 3029, and is graded authentic. The warning against extremism was not incidental to the moment. The Prophet ﷺ used the smallness of the pebbles to make a point about the whole of religious practice: bigger is not better, and zeal is not the same as devotion.

The Farewell Address and “Take Your Rites From Me”

It was also during this same Hajj, in the days around the stoning, that the Prophet ﷺ said the words that became the foundation for the entire discipline of Hajj jurisprudence. Jabir reports him saying, while riding and throwing pebbles on the Day of Sacrifice: “Take your rites from me, for I do not know whether I will perform Hajj again after this one” — a hadith recorded by Ahmad, Muslim and al-Nasa’i, and cited by generations of jurists as the reason every gesture of that single Hajj carries such disproportionate legal weight. He did not perform this pilgrimage as a private act of devotion alone. He performed it knowing it would be studied, and he acted accordingly — deliberately modelling each rite so it could be transmitted, precisely, to everyone who came after him.

Qur’anic Connections

The Sacrifice and the Ransom

﴿فَلَمَّا بَلَغَ مَعَهُ ٱلسَّعْىَ قَالَ يَـٰبُنَىَّ إِنِّىٓ أَرَىٰ فِى ٱلْمَنَامِ أَنِّىٓ أَذْبَحُكَ فَٱنظُرْ مَاذَا تَرَىٰ ۚ قَالَ يَـٰٓأَبَتِ ٱفْعَلْ مَا تُؤْمَرُ ۖ سَتَجِدُنِىٓ إِن شَآءَ ٱللَّهُ مِنَ ٱلصَّـٰبِرِينَ﴾

“Then when the boy reached the age to work with him, Abraham said, ‘O my dear son, I have seen in a dream that I must sacrifice you. So tell me what you think.’ He replied, ‘O my dear father, do as you are commanded. Allah willing, you will find me steadfast.'” — Surah as-Saffat 37:102

This is the single verse from which the entire complex of Hajj rites at Mina — the sacrifice, and by extension the stoning that tradition places on the road toward it — ultimately descends. Classical exegetes, including Ibn Kathir in his tafsir of this passage, discuss at length who the son in question was, a question on which the Qur’an itself is silent by name; the majority of early Muslim scholarship, drawing on companion reports, understands the son to be Ismail, while acknowledging that some early authorities, drawing on other lines of transmission, held the view that it was Ishaq (Isaac). The verse itself (Surah as-Saffat 37:102) gives no name. What it gives, with total clarity, is the shape of the test: a command received in a vision, a father who informs his son rather than concealing the command from him, and a son who answers not with fear but with a request to be found among the patient.

The resolution comes a few verses later, when Allah calls out and the sacrifice is redeemed:

“And We called out to him, ‘O Ibrahim, you have fulfilled the vision.’ Indeed, We thus reward the doers of good. That was indeed a manifest trial. And We ransomed him with a great sacrifice.” — Surah as-Saffat 37:104–107

The asbab al-nuzul, so far as the classical commentators discuss it, is not a discrete historical incident triggering revelation in the ordinary sense, since this passage narrates events from the distant prophetic past rather than responding to a contemporary situation in Madinah; its purpose within the surah is to place Ibrahim within a lineage of prophets tested and vindicated. The modern lesson drawn from it by countless Hajj sermons is that the trial was never really about the knife reaching the boy’s throat — it was already complete the moment both father and son had, in their hearts, fully submitted. The physical ransom followed the completed inward surrender.

The Days of Remembrance

﴿وَٱذۡكُرُواْ ٱللَّهَ فِيٓ أَيَّامٖ مَّعۡدُودَٰتٖۚ فَمَن تَعَجَّلَ فِي يَوۡمَيۡنِ فَلَآ إِثۡمَ عَلَيۡهِ وَمَن تَأَخَّرَ فَلَآ إِثۡمَ عَلَيۡهِۖ لِمَنِ ٱتَّقَىٰۗ وَٱتَّقُواْ ٱللَّهَ وَٱعۡلَمُوٓاْ أَنَّكُمۡ إِلَيۡهِ تُحۡشَرُونَ﴾

“And remember Allah during the appointed days. Whoever departs swiftly on the second day is not sinful, neither are those who stay behind till the third, so long as they are mindful of their Lord. And be mindful of Allah, and know that to Him you will all be gathered.” — Surah al-Baqarah 2:203

Classical tafsir identifies “the appointed days” (ayyam ma’dudat) in this verse as the Days of Tashriq — the eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth of Dhu al-Hijjah, the same days on which all three jamarat are stoned in sequence. The verse’s permission to leave after only two of the three days, without sin, is the Qur’anic basis for the entire distinction jurists later built between pilgrims who depart early (al-muta’ajjil) and those who remain for the full three days (al-muta’akhkhir) — a distinction with direct, practical consequences for how many times a pilgrim must walk to the jamarat, discussed fully below.

The Purpose Named Directly

The Prophet ﷺ himself gave the plainest possible statement of what the stoning is actually for, in a hadith reported from Aishah and recorded by Ahmad and Abu Dawud: “Circumambulation of the House, going between Safa and Marwah, and the stoning of the jamarat have been instituted only for the remembrance of Allah” — a hadith cited widely, including in Sunan Abi Dawud 1888 and Jami’ al-Tirmidhi 902. This single line does more to correct a widespread modern misunderstanding than any amount of architectural or historical detail: the rite is not primarily commemorative theatre re-enacting a specific ancient combat, and it is certainly not a literal assault on a being physically present in the wall. It is, in the Prophet’s ﷺ own words, an act whose entire purpose is dhikr — remembrance of Allah, performed with the body.

Hadith References on the Jamarat, Consolidated

On the Prophet’s ﷺ Own Practice

• Authentic (sahih): The long hadith of Jabir ibn Abdullah describing the entire Farewell Hajj, including the approach to Jamrat al-Aqabah, the seven pebbles, the takbir with each one, and the position at the bottom of the valley. Sahih Muslim 1218.
• Authentic (sahih): Abdullah ibn Umar’s detailed description of stoning Jamrat al-Sughra, standing for lengthy du’a facing the qiblah with raised hands, then Jamrat al-Wusta with the same standing, then Jamrat al-Aqabah from the bottom of the valley without stopping afterward, explicitly stated to mirror what he saw the Prophet ﷺ do. Sahih al-Bukhari 1751.
• Authentic (sahih): The report of stoning the largest jamrah with the House on the left and Mina on the right, with the comment that this is how the one on whom Surat al-Baqarah was revealed performed the rite. Sahih al-Bukhari 1748 and Sahih Muslim 1296.
• Authentic (sahih): Ibn Abbas’s account of picking up pebbles for the Prophet ﷺ on the morning of al-Aqabah, described as pebbles for flinging with the fingers, and the Prophet’s instruction to throw the like of these while warning against immoderation in religion. Sunan an-Nasa’i 3059; parallel wording in Sunan Ibn Majah 3029, graded authentic by al-Albani in Sahih Ibn Majah.
• Authentic (sahih): Al-Fadl ibn Abbas’s account of the instruction given in the valley of Muhassir to collect pebbles the size of date-stones or fingertips. Sunan an-Nasa’i 3058.
• Authentic (sahih): Jabir’s account that the Prophet ﷺ threw pebbles like those used for flinging with the fingers, and that he stoned the jamrah on the Day of Sacrifice after sunrise and on the following days after the sun had declined (after zawal). Recorded by Muslim; see the discussion at Sahih Muslim 1299 and its surrounding chapter.
• Authentic (sahih): The report of Sulayman ibn Amr ibn al-Ahwas, from his mother, describing the Prophet ﷺ throwing pebbles from the bottom of the valley while mounted, saying the takbir with each one, and warning the crowding people, “Do not kill one another; when you throw pebbles at the jamrah, throw small pebbles.” Sunan Abi Dawud 1966.
• Authentic (sahih): Ibn Mas’ud’s insistence on stoning Jamrat al-Aqabah from within the valley rather than from above, on the grounds that this was the position of the one to whom Surat al-Baqarah was revealed.

On the Purpose and Meaning of the Rite

• Hasan / widely cited: Aishah’s report that circumambulation of the House, going between Safa and Marwah, and the stoning of the jamarat were instituted only to establish the remembrance of Allah. Recorded by Ahmad and Abu Dawud; see Sunan Abi Dawud 1888 and Jami’ al-Tirmidhi 902.
• Authentic (sahih): “Take your rites from me, for I do not know whether I will perform Hajj again after this one,” said by the Prophet ﷺ while stoning on the Day of Sacrifice, as narrated by Jabir and recorded by Ahmad, Muslim and al-Nasa’i.

On Ibrahim and Iblis

• Authentic (sahih), graded by al-Albani: Ibn Abbas’s report that Satan appeared to Ibrahim at each of the three pillars in turn and was driven off with seven pebbles each time, sinking into the earth. Al-Sunan al-Kubra of al-Bayhaqi, 9693.
• Scholarly opinion / sira material, not a dense hadith chain: The fuller narrative with Jibril’s instruction and the specific order of the three encounters, as preserved by al-Azraqi in his history of Makkah and repeated by subsequent historians and popular Hajj guides, including the Saudi Ministry of Hajj’s own Jamarat Awareness Guide.

On the Size of the Pebbles

• Authentic (sahih): “Throw the like of these, and beware of immoderation in religion” — the core hadith establishing the desirable size of the pebbles, at roughly the size of a chickpea or small bean. Sunan an-Nasa’i 3059; Sunan Ibn Majah 3029.
• Authentic (sahih): “O people, do not kill one another; when you throw pebbles at the jamrah, throw small pebbles.” Sunan Abi Dawud 1966.
• Weak (da’if), according to some critics: A version instructing pilgrims to stone with pebbles “like date-stones or fingertips” is transmitted through more than one chain; while several chains for this description are sound, at least one specific wording is flagged as weak in some critical editions, a reminder that even widely repeated descriptive hadith should be checked chain by chain rather than assumed uniform.

Historical Development of the Jamarat Site

The Rashidun and Umayyad Periods (11–132 AH / 632–750 CE)

In the earliest decades after the Prophet’s ﷺ death, the jamarat remained what they had been in his time: simple markers in open ground, without walls, roofing, or any infrastructure beyond the paths pilgrims wore into the valley floor. The Rashidun caliphs performed Hajj themselves and are reported, along with many companions, to have observed the same sequence and standing described in the hadith of Ibn Umar. There is no record from this period of any structure built at the jamarat themselves; the investment of the early caliphate in Hajj infrastructure went toward wells, roads and security along the pilgrim routes rather than toward the stoning site.

The Abbasid Period (132–656 AH / 750–1258 CE)

Abbasid-era topographers and historians of Makkah, writing centuries after the Prophet’s ﷺ death, are the source of much of the detailed place-name geography still used today — the identification of the jamarat’s exact positions, their relationship to Masjid al-Khayf, and the story of Ibrahim as recorded by al-Azraqi. This period saw increasing numbers of pilgrims arriving from across an expanding Islamic world, and with them, the beginnings of organised crowd movement through Mina, though still without any permanent built structure marking the jamarat beyond stone heaps or low pillars.

The Mamluk and Ottoman Periods (648–1517 CE Mamluk; 1517–1918 CE Ottoman)

Ottoman administration of the Hijaz brought sustained investment in the general infrastructure of Hajj — fortified way-stations, water systems, and periodic renovation of the Haram itself — but published sources consulted for this guide do not describe a specific, dedicated Ottoman-era construction project at the jamarat comparable to their well-documented work elsewhere in Makkah and Madinah. The jamarat through this long period continued to be marked by masonry pillars set in open ground, visited by pilgrim numbers that, while large by the standards of the age, were a small fraction of the numbers who would come in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

The Early Saudi Period and the First Bridge (1373 AH / 1953 CE onward)

The transformation of the jamarat from open-ground stone pillars into an engineered structure began under Saudi administration in the mid-twentieth century, as air travel and rising national wealth across the Muslim world turned Hajj from a pilgrimage numbered in the tens of thousands into one numbered in the hundreds of thousands and then millions. A pedestrian bridge was first built at the site, with sources differing slightly on the exact year — some giving 1963 and Wikipedia’s article on the Jamaraat Bridge describing an original structure from that period, while a Saudi engineering account describes a project beginning in 1395 AH (1975 CE). What is agreed is that this first bridge was a single-tier structure: a ground level for pilgrims who wished to stone at grade, with a single elevated level above it for others, and that it was expanded piecemeal over the following decades as pilgrim numbers grew, without ever being fundamentally redesigned until after the disasters of 2004 and 2006 forced a complete rebuild — the subject of the engineering section of this guide.

Architecture: From Bare Pillars to a Five-Level Bridge

The Old Pillars, Before 2004

For most of Islamic history, and right up until 2004, each of the three jamarat was marked not by a wall but by a single narrow, roughly cylindrical masonry pillar rising from a shallow circular pit or basin. Pilgrims threw pebbles at the pillar itself, aiming to land their stones in the surrounding pit. The design had an obvious and increasingly dangerous flaw as pilgrim numbers grew through the twentieth century: a narrow cylindrical target can only be approached from a limited frontage before the crowd around it becomes denser than the crowd anywhere else nearby, and pebbles thrown at a hard, narrow pillar by hundreds of thousands of people ricochet — a stone that misses a two-metre-wide column does not simply fall into the pit; it can strike the person beside, behind, or opposite the thrower with real force. Contemporary safety analyses of the site, including the retrospective account by crowd-safety engineer Professor Keith Still, identify the combination of a narrow target, a huge crowd, and ricocheting projectiles as a significant and specific contributor to injuries and, at the margin, to the crush dynamics that produced the disasters catalogued later in this guide.

The 2004 Redesign: From Pillars to Walls

Following the fatal crush of February 2004 — detailed fully in the section on crowd disasters below — Saudi authorities undertook a fundamental redesign of the stoning targets themselves. The three narrow cylindrical pillars were demolished and replaced with long, oblong or elliptical concrete walls, dramatically increasing the length of throwing frontage available at each jamrah and correspondingly reducing the crowd density that had built up around the old narrow columns. Wikipedia’s account of the Jamaraat Bridge summarises the change plainly: “the three cylindrical pillars were replaced with longer and taller oblong walls of concrete to enable more pilgrims simultaneous access.” Reporting from Arab News, drawing on interviews with the engineers involved, dates the reshaping of the pillars into elliptical walls to 2005, describing how “the circular walls around the pillars were reshaped, making them elliptical to facilitate the movement of the pilgrims.” The explicit purpose of the change, stated consistently across the engineering and safety literature, was twofold: to reduce the ricochet injuries associated with pilgrims missing a narrow cylindrical target at close range, and to increase the frontage — the linear distance of wall available for pilgrims to approach and throw from — so that the same number of people could be spread across a much larger perimeter rather than compressed into the small arc of open ground around a single narrow post.

The engineering literature on the redesign is worth citing in some technical detail, because the reasoning behind the elliptical shape specifically, rather than simply a longer straight wall, is a genuine piece of applied crowd science. An academic account of the project published by King Saud University’s engineering faculty explains that because each level of the bridge has different approach directions to Jamrat al-Sughra, and because of the position and size of the pit on the ground level, “an ellipse was chosen to ensure that there was sufficient jamarah perimeter” to match the width of the arriving crowd — in effect, the shape was chosen mathematically to make the target’s edge as long as possible relative to the footprint it occupies, maximising simultaneous throwing positions per square metre of plaza.

Materials, Dimensions and Symbolism

The rebuilt jamarat walls are reported in contemporary press coverage as approximately 26 metres long in the initial 2004–2005 reshaping, growing further with the subsequent bridge construction; other accounts describe the pillars, by the time of the completed multi-level bridge, as rising some 18 to 40 metres in height depending on the source and the specific level referenced, and the ground-level elliptical basin at Jamrat al-Sughra was designed, according to the King Saud University account, to exceed 108 metres in circumference to accommodate peak flow. No source consulted for this guide claims any particular religious symbolism was intended in the elliptical shape itself — unlike, say, the deliberate symbolism sometimes built into mosque architecture — and the shape should be understood as a functional crowd-engineering solution rather than a design carrying doctrinal meaning. What was lost architecturally in the transition is worth naming plainly: the narrow standing pillars that had marked the jamarat in some form for centuries, which many older pilgrims particularly from the pre-2004 generation remember, do not survive in any form at the site today. Nothing of the pre-2004 pillars has been preserved on-site as a historical marker; the entire stoning area is now a modern poured-concrete and steel structure.

Archaeological Findings

This guide’s research did not locate any published, peer-reviewed archaeological excavation specifically of the jamarat site. This is not unusual for a location that has been in continuous ritual use for fourteen centuries and has been rebuilt and re-poured in concrete repeatedly through the twentieth and twenty-first centuries — each redevelopment necessarily disturbs or removes earlier physical evidence rather than preserving it for study, and Saudi authorities have prioritised safety engineering and pilgrim capacity at this site over archaeological preservation, a choice consistent with their general approach to sites of active worship rather than static historical monuments. No inscriptions, foundations, or artefacts specifically tied to the pre-Islamic or early Islamic use of the jamarat have been reported in the sources available for this guide. Readers interested in the archaeology of Mina more broadly, including any findings related to the tent city and the mosque of al-Khayf, should consult this guide’s companion article on Mina, which addresses that site’s own historical and archaeological record separately.

The Fiqh of the Jamarat: What the Schools of Law Actually Require

Few rites of Hajj generate as much detailed jurisprudential discussion as the stoning of the jamarat, precisely because it is a physical, timed, sequential act performed by enormous crowds under real logistical constraint, and because the Prophet ﷺ himself modelled it so precisely that later jurists felt bound to work out every implication of his example. This section sets out the actual positions of the four Sunni madhhabs — Hanafi, Maliki, Shafi’i and Hanbali — on the questions that matter most to a pilgrim standing in Mina, rather than flattening them into a single, false consensus.

The Pebbles: Size, Material and Source

On the desirable size of the pebbles, there is broad agreement across the schools that the guiding hadith establishes a preference, not a strict legal minimum enforced by invalidity. The core evidence is Ibn Abbas’s report that the Prophet ﷺ shook a handful of pebbles and said, “throw the like of these,” pebbles described across the various narrations as the size of a chickpea, a broad bean, or a date-stone (Sunan an-Nasa’i 3059). The most detailed comparative summary available, drawing on the classical fiqh manuals, explains that if a pilgrim throws a stone larger than this recommended size, the majority of jurists — including the Hanafi, Maliki and Shafi’i schools — hold that the stoning is still valid, though disliked; the Hanbali school, represented in this discussion by the position attributed to Ahmad ibn Hanbal, took the stricter view that stoning with an oversized stone does not fulfil the obligation at all and must be repeated with a properly sized pebble, reasoning that the Prophet ﷺ both practised and explicitly prescribed the smaller size, which the Hanbalis treat as a binding description rather than a mere preference (a position discussed in detail in the widely used comparative reference Fiqh-us-Sunnah).

On material, the majority of jurists — Maliki, Shafi’i and Hanbali — require that the projectile actually be a stone or pebble in the ordinary sense: rock of whatever colour or type, including marble, flint or granite according to some formulations, though the Maliki jurist al-Qadi is recorded as excluding certain worked or decorative stones such as marble from validity. The Hanafi school takes a notably more permissive position, holding that anything that comes from the earth and could validly be used for the dry ablution of tayammum — stone, clay, baked brick, unglazed pottery — is acceptable, while still excluding wood, amber, pearls and gemstones as not properly “of the earth” in the relevant sense. This distinction has real modern consequences: Egypt’s Dar al-Ifta and the parallel discussion at IslamQA both address the specific modern question of stoning with fragments of broken concrete, and conclude that, according to the majority position, concrete without any actual stone content is not valid for the rite and must be repeated, whereas the Hanafi position would accept it; a pilgrim who is unsure, the Egyptian fatwa advises, should follow the more cautious majority view.

On where the pebbles must be gathered, this guide can report a clear and consequential finding: it is not obligatory to collect pebbles specifically from Muzdalifah. This is a widespread popular belief, repeated in countless informal Hajj guides, but it is explicitly corrected by contemporary scholarship. Egypt’s Dar al-Ifta states the position plainly: “It is not obligatory to collect the pebbles for stoning from Muzdalifah… rather, it is permissible to collect them from any place the pilgrim chooses, as there is no requirement to collect them from a specific location. The matter is flexible… This is the unanimous opinion of the four schools of jurisprudence,” while noting that some individual scholars within the Hanafi, Shafi’i and Hanbali traditions expressed a mild dislike (karahah) of gathering from certain specific locations for contextual reasons, without this affecting the underlying agreement (Dar al-Ifta, Collecting pebbles from Muzdalifah for stoning the jamarat). IslamQA’s discussion of common errors makes the same point from the other direction, describing the belief that pebbles must come from Muzdalifah as a mistaken idea, “because there is no report that the Prophet ﷺ picked up the pebbles from Muzdalifah, so that we could say this is Sunnah” (Mistakes Made When Stoning the Jamarat). In practice, the great majority of pilgrims do gather at least their first set of seven pebbles while still at Muzdalifah on the night before the Day of Sacrifice, simply because they are already there and it is convenient — a strong custom, not a legal requirement — and most Hajj campaigns today in any case distribute pre-collected, washed pebbles to pilgrims, a practice the Ministry of Hajj’s own Jamarat Awareness Guide explicitly endorses as permissible, while cautioning pilgrims against picking up loose stones from walkways, which risks both injury and picking up other people’s already-used pebbles.

Throwing on Behalf of the Weak, the Sick and the Elderly

This is one of the areas of Hajj fiqh with the most direct bearing on how large numbers of real pilgrims actually experience the jamarat, since Hajj groups in the contemporary era include very large numbers of elderly, disabled, pregnant, and chronically ill pilgrims for whom repeated walks to a bridge under summer heat and dense crowding are a genuine hazard.

The governing principle, restated consistently by contemporary scholars, is that a pilgrim who is physically able to perform the stoning himself or herself is not permitted to delegate someone else to do it on their behalf; having entered the rites of Hajj, a person is obligated to complete them personally wherever able. Shaykh Ibn Baz is quoted stating this without qualification: a healthy pilgrim “does not have the right to appoint someone else to do it on his behalf; rather it is obligatory for him to stone them himself,” reasoning from the Qur’anic command to “perform properly… the Hajj and Umrah for Allah” (al-Baqarah 2:196), which the jurists read as requiring a person who begins the rites to complete them fully. Shaykh Ibn Uthaymeen is recorded taking the identical position with respect to women specifically (IslamQA, Is it permissible for a woman to appoint someone else to stone the jamarat on her behalf?).

Where a pilgrim genuinely cannot perform the stoning — because of illness, extreme old age, disability, or a condition such as advanced pregnancy that makes navigating the crowd dangerous — the near-unanimous position across the schools is that another pilgrim, who has already completed their own stoning, may throw on their behalf, a practice with roots directly in the Prophet’s ﷺ own instructions. He ﷺ is reported to have given permission to the weak members of his own family and household to leave Muzdalifah before the general crowd, precisely so they could complete the rite ahead of the crush — the same principle of accommodation for the physically unable that later jurists extended, by analogy, to permit proxy stoning for those who cannot manage it at all, even with an early departure. This is treated as a matter of near consensus among the four schools for cases of genuine incapacity, differing mainly in the fine detail of what counts as sufficient incapacity to justify delegation, and in whether the person deputised must complete their own stoning first before stoning on behalf of another (the position held by the majority) or may combine the two in whichever order is more practical.

The Time Windows: When Stoning May Begin and End

This is the single most consequential and most genuinely disputed area of jamarat fiqh, and it deserves to be laid out with the specific madhhab positions named, because the practical difference between the views has real effects on crowd density at the bridge to this day.

On the Day of Sacrifice (10 Dhu al-Hijjah), stoning Jamrat al-Aqabah: the Shafi’i and Hanbali schools hold that the permitted time begins after midnight following the night spent at Muzdalifah, a position built on the hadith describing Asma bint Abi Bakr sending pilgrims — women and the weak among them — ahead from Muzdalifah in the middle of the night with the Prophet’s ﷺ own permission, after which they proceeded to stone Jamrat al-Aqabah before dawn, detailed in the fatwa discussion published by Jordan’s Department of Iftaa. The majority default position for the general body of pilgrims, however, is that stoning on the Day of Sacrifice begins from dawn or after sunrise, following the Prophet’s ﷺ own timing as narrated by Jabir, with the permission for the weak to go earlier treated as a specific accommodation rather than the general rule.

On the Days of Tashriq (11th, 12th and, for those who remain, 13th of Dhu al-Hijjah): here the schools genuinely diverge, and this is the disagreement flagged as one of the most consequential in all of Hajj jurisprudence. The majority of scholars — a position attributed broadly across the Shafi’i, Hanbali and Maliki schools and described as the opinion of the majority of Muslim scholars in the Jordanian fatwa cited above — hold that stoning on the Days of Tashriq may not begin until after zawal (the moment the sun passes its zenith, roughly local solar noon) on each of those days, and continues, as an obligatory matter, until sunset, with some scholars extending the permissible window through the night as a matter of make-up (qada) for those unable to stone in daylight. Their central evidence is the hadith of Ibn Abbas, “The Messenger of Allah stoned the jamarat when the sun had passed the zenith” (reported by al-Tirmidhi), and the report of Ibn Umar, asked when the rami should be performed, answering: “We used to wait till the sun declined, and then we would do the rami” (recorded in Sahih al-Bukhari).

Against this stands the Hanafi position, attributed to Abu Hanifah himself and to early authorities including Ibn Abbas in some reports, Tawus, and Ata: that while stoning after zawal is preferable and follows the Prophet’s ﷺ general practice, stoning before zawal on the second and third Days of Tashriq is nonetheless valid if performed after dawn — a position summarised in the Jordanian fatwa as: “it is better for the pilgrim to stone the jamarat on the second and third days of tashriq after zawal, but if he throws before zawal, then it is permissible” (citing the Hanafi manual Bada’i al-Sana’i). The evidentiary basis cited for this more flexible Hanafi position is the general hadith in which the Prophet ﷺ, asked repeatedly on the Day of Sacrifice about rites performed out of their usual order — shaving before sacrificing, sacrificing before stoning — answered each time, “there is no harm, go and do it,” a hadith recorded in both Bukhari and Muslim and treated by Hanafi jurists as evidence of a general principle of flexibility in the sequencing of Hajj rites under hardship.

In the contemporary era, this classical disagreement has taken on urgent practical significance. Saudi authorities and the great majority of contemporary muftis, citing the specific, severe modern problem of overcrowding at the jamarat, permit pilgrims to make use of the Hanafi allowance and stone before zawal on the Days of Tashriq specifically in order to relieve pressure on the bridge and to accommodate pilgrims with a fixed departure schedule — a pragmatic, crowd-safety-driven adoption of what was historically a minority position, discussed explicitly in the Jordanian Iftaa’s ruling, which states that “if the pilgrim wanted to avoid harm and hardship due to crowdedness and the great number of pilgrims, or was bound by a certain time of departure… he is permitted to stone the jamarat before zawal,” while adding the caution that “the accredited opinions of the scholars contain no exemption that allows a pilgrim to start stoning the jamarat of the second Day of Tashriq after the midnight of the first Day of Tashriq” — in other words, the flexibility extends to throwing earlier within a given day, not to collapsing two days’ stoning into one continuous overnight session. Egypt’s Dar al-Ifta reaches a similar practical conclusion from a different angle, describing the position that stoning is permissible before midday on all the Days of Tashriq as “the established opinion for fatwa,” citing the reports of Ibn Abbas on the Prophet’s ﷺ general tolerance for rites performed out of sequence (Dar al-Ifta, The ruling for stoning before midday).

This guide presents both positions as the genuine, named disagreement that they are. A pilgrim following a Hanafi-oriented fatwa, or acting on the modern accommodation many Saudi authorities now permit for crowd safety, is not abandoning the sunnah by stoning before zawal on the later days; a pilgrim who insists on waiting until after zawal, in the tradition of the majority position, is following the more textually cautious and more widely held classical view. Neither is being reckless with their Hajj, and this guide does not adjudicate between them.

The Fidyah for Missed Stoning

Because stoning the jamarat is treated by the majority of jurists as an obligatory act of Hajj (wajib) rather than a pillar (rukn) whose omission invalidates the Hajj entirely, the consequence of missing it — whether one jamrah on one day, or the whole rite across all three days — is not that the Hajj is void, but that a specific expiation (fidyah) becomes due. The Jordanian Iftaa ruling summarises the standard position: a pilgrim who fails to stone on any one of the Days of Tashriq is obliged to slaughter a sheep and distribute its meat among the poor of the Haram area; and critically, if a pilgrim misses the stoning entirely across all three Days of Tashriq, the obligation is still only a single sheep, because “the three days are considered as one day according to the famous opinion of the scholars,” a position drawn from the classical Shafi’i manual al-Muhazzab. This means the penalty does not multiply per missed jamrah or per missed day in the way some pilgrims fear; it is a single act of expiation covering the whole missed obligation, payable by the pilgrim personally or, if unaffordable, waived in cases of genuine incapacity to pay, according to the general principle that fidyah obligations follow a person’s actual capacity.

Stories of the Companions at the Jamarat

The companions who feature most directly in the record of this specific rite are, understandably, the ones who either performed the Farewell Hajj alongside the Prophet ﷺ or who later described his practice in detail to the generation that followed them. Jabir ibn Abdullah stands first among them: his testimony in Sahih Muslim 1218 is not a secondhand report but the account of a man who walked the ground himself, watched the Prophet ﷺ mount and dismount, and later dictated the sequence in such careful detail that it remains the single most-cited source for the entire Hajj ritual, not only the jamarat. Abdullah ibn Abbas, still a boy or young man at the time of the Farewell Hajj, is the companion the Prophet ﷺ personally asked to gather pebbles for him — a small, human detail (a great teacher asking a promising young relative to fetch something for him) that later became one of the load-bearing hadiths of the entire fiqh of pebble size. Al-Fadl ibn Abbas, Ibn Abbas’s older brother, rode behind the Prophet ﷺ on his camel during the approach from Muzdalifah and is named directly in Jabir’s narration as the one shading him; al-Fadl’s own reports about the instruction to gather pebbles the size of date-stones in the valley of Muhassir are preserved independently in Sunan an-Nasa’i.

Abdullah ibn Umar, though a companion rather than a direct source for the Farewell Hajj narrative itself, is the single most important transmitter of the detailed choreography of the rite for the years after the Prophet’s ﷺ death — the standing for du’a after the first two jamarat, the omission of standing after the third — precisely because he made a point, later in life, of performing the rite exactly as he had watched the Prophet ﷺ perform it and saying so explicitly, a mark of the scrupulous care many companions took to transmit practice rather than opinion. Abdullah ibn Mas’ud, likewise, is recorded insisting on stoning Jamrat al-Aqabah from the low position within the valley rather than from an elevated approach that some pilgrims of his own era had begun to adopt, framing his insistence explicitly around fidelity to the position used by the Prophet ﷺ to whom Surat al-Baqarah had been revealed — an early example of a companion correcting an emerging practice by returning directly to the Prophet’s ﷺ own example.

Aishah, the Prophet’s ﷺ wife, is the source for the hadith naming the deeper purpose of the rite — remembrance of Allah — and is also, separately, recorded in some accounts as having been sent ahead from Muzdalifah before dawn to complete her stoning before the crowd built, an early instance of exactly the accommodation for women and the physically vulnerable that later jurists formalised into the fiqh of early departure and proxy stoning discussed above.

Stories of the Great Islamic Scholars and the Jamarat

Because the jamarat generate such a dense, technical body of ritual law, the great jurists of Islamic history engaged with this site not primarily through narrative or visitation, in the way they engaged with battlefields or graves, but through the patient, detailed work of extracting rulings from the hadith corpus — work that shaped exactly the fiqh laid out in the section above.

Imam Malik ibn Anas (d. 179 AH / 795 CE), writing and teaching in Madinah within living memory of the companions’ own generation, transmitted and relied upon several of the core hadith on pebble size and the prohibition of throwing all seven pebbles as a single handful rather than one at a time, positions that became foundational to the Maliki school’s requirement that each of the seven throws be a discrete, separately intentioned act.

Imam Abu Hanifah (d. 150 AH / 767 CE) is the source of the most distinctively flexible positions discussed in the fiqh section above: the permission to use any earth-derived material for the stoning, not only stone in the narrow sense, and — transmitted through his students and later codified in manuals such as Bada’i al-Sana’i — the permission to stone before zawal on the later Days of Tashriq if necessary, a position that four-teen centuries later became the basis for the modern crowd-safety accommodation permitting early throwing to relieve pressure on the Jamarat Bridge.

Imam al-Shafi’i (d. 204 AH / 820 CE) and the school that bears his name held to the more textually cautious position on timing — stoning after zawal on the Days of Tashriq as the required window — while also contributing, through later Shafi’i jurists such as al-Khatib al-Shirbini in his commentary Mughni al-Muhtaj, the precise articulation of when the permissible window for stoning on each day of tashriq closes: at sunset, with the outer limit of permissibility for the whole rite extending to sunset on the final Day of Tashriq.

Imam Ahmad ibn Hanbal (d. 241 AH / 855 CE) held the strictest position among the four schools on pebble size, requiring that an oversized stone be replaced and the throw repeated rather than simply disliked, reflecting the Hanbali school’s characteristic tendency to treat the Prophet’s ﷺ described practice as binding in its particulars rather than merely exemplary.

Ibn Kathir (d. 774 AH / 1373 CE), in his tafsir of Surah as-Saffat, is a primary source for the classical discussion of the identity of Ibrahim’s son in the sacrifice narrative, weighing the reports that favour Ismail against the minority view favouring Ishaq, and situating the whole passage within the wider Qur’anic presentation of Ibrahim as the model of submission that the rites of Hajj, including the stoning, are built to commemorate.

Al-Ghazali (d. 505 AH / 1111 CE), in Ihya’ Ulum al-Din, gave the single most influential spiritual commentary on the meaning of the stoning specifically, urging the pilgrim to intend by it both pure submission to a command whose wisdom need not be independently apparent to the intellect, and conscious imitation of Ibrahim’s own example in driving off the whisper of doubt — language that continues to be quoted in sermons delivered to pilgrims at Mina today.

Crowd Disasters at the Jamarat: A Factual Record

No honest account of the Jamarat can avoid the fact that this small stretch of road in Mina has been the site of some of the deadliest crowd disasters in modern history. The reasons are structural rather than accidental: several million people, drawn from across the world with widely varying levels of mobility, health and familiarity with crowd behaviour, are required by the rites of Hajj to pass through the same narrow stretch of ground at almost exactly the same times on the same three days each year, a concentration of human movement that has few parallels anywhere else on earth. What follows is a factual chronology, disaster by disaster, reporting the tolls given by the sources available and, where official and independent counts diverge, presenting both rather than choosing between them.

3 July 1990: The al-Ma’aisim Tunnel

The deadliest of the pre-bridge disasters did not occur at the jamarat pillars themselves but in a pedestrian tunnel connecting Mina to Makkah, through which pilgrims passed on their way to and from the stoning. A ventilation failure combined with a sudden power cut is reported to have triggered panic in the packed, poorly ventilated tunnel, causing a crush in which pilgrims were suffocated and trampled. Saudi Arabia’s Interior Minister, Prince Nayef, announced an official toll of 1,426 dead two days after the disaster, a figure reported at the time by international wire services including UPI and by the Los Angeles Times, and it remains the figure most commonly cited in later historical summaries. The scale of the tragedy, however, generated significant contemporaneous doubt about whether the official count captured the full toll: a record of proceedings in the British House of Commons from October 1990 notes that “it is common knowledge that over 3,000 people died” and that investigators had examined more than 3,500 photographs in the course of identifying victims, language reflecting a widely held view among diplomats and journalists at the time that the true toll likely exceeded the official figure substantially. This guide reports both figures without resolving the discrepancy: the official Saudi toll of 1,426, and the substantially higher unofficial estimates, running to 3,000 or more, that circulated among foreign governments and press at the time.

23 May 1994

A stampede during the stoning rites killed at least 270 pilgrims, according to the historical summary compiled in the Wikipedia article on the Jamaraat Bridge. As with several of the incidents in this decade, the underlying structure at the time was the older, narrow-pillar design with limited approach frontage, a design later identified as a contributing structural factor across multiple disasters.

9 April 1998

A stampede, again during the stoning at Jamrat al-Aqabah, killed at least 118 pilgrims and injured at least 180 more, according to the same historical summary. Reports from this period consistently identify overcrowding around the narrow pillar and the compression of the crowd trying to reach it as the immediate cause.

5 March 2001

A further stampede killed 35 pilgrims. Though smaller in scale than the other disasters in this list, it added to a pattern, by the start of the twenty-first century, of recurring fatal incidents specifically clustered around the jamarat during the peak stoning hours of the Days of Tashriq.

1 February 2004

A stampede at Jamrat al-Aqabah killed 251 pilgrims and injured 244 more. This disaster proved to be the direct catalyst for the first major structural change to the jamarat in their modern history: within roughly a year, Saudi authorities had replaced the narrow cylindrical pillars with the longer, oblong walls described in the architecture section of this guide, explicitly in order to reduce the crowd compression and ricochet injuries associated with the old narrow-target design.

12 January 2006

Despite the 2004–2005 reshaping of the pillars into walls, a further and even deadlier stampede occurred at Jamrat al-Aqabah, killing at least 346 pilgrims and injuring 289 or more. This second major disaster in two years made clear that reshaping the stoning targets alone had not solved the underlying problem of crowd density on the approach paths and the single-level bridge structure feeding them. It was this disaster, more than any single event before it, that triggered the complete demolition of the old bridge and the construction of the multi-level replacement described in the engineering section of this guide, with the first new level opening in time for the 2006 Hajj season and the remaining levels completed by December 2007.

24 September 2015: The Mina Crowd Crush

The deadliest disaster in the history of the Hajj occurred not on the Jamarat Bridge itself but on Street 204 in Mina, on one of the routes feeding pilgrims toward the jamarat for the stoning on the Day of Sacrifice, when two large pilgrim columns converged at an intersection, reportedly after one column was redirected, producing a crush from which large numbers of pilgrims could not escape. The scale of this disaster, and the scale of the disagreement over its true toll, sets it apart from every earlier incident on this list, and it deserves to be reported with particular care.

The Saudi government’s official toll, announced by the Ministry of Health two days after the event and never revised upward since, stands at 769 dead and 934 injured, a figure confirmed in contemporaneous reporting by Al Jazeera and Deutsche Welle. A medical research article published in the journal Trauma Monthly and archived on the National Center for Biotechnology Information notes that Saudi Arabia’s own Ministry of Health briefly published a substantially higher figure of 4,173 fatalities on its website on 29 September 2015, a figure that was removed within approximately three hours and never repeated in any subsequent official communication — a documented episode worth recording precisely because it appeared, however briefly, on an official government platform, even though it was withdrawn and has no standing as an official figure today.

Independent counts compiled by international news organisations, based on adding together death tolls announced separately by the national governments of the many countries whose citizens had died, rose steadily in the weeks after the disaster as more countries reported their nationals missing or confirmed dead. The Associated Press’s running count moved from roughly 1,399 in early October, to 1,470 within days, to 2,110 by 19 October according to contemporaneous BBC reporting, and reached a final tally of 2,411 by 10 December 2015, as reported by Religion News Service. Reuters’s independent count, compiled on a similar country-by-country basis, arrived at approximately 2,070, while Agence France-Presse’s count reached approximately 2,236. Wikipedia’s article on the 2015 Mina crowd crush compiles the individual national tolls reported by dozens of governments into a table showing a combined total of at least 2,431 confirmed dead by nationality, with Iran reporting the largest single national toll at 464 to 465 of its citizens, followed by Mali with as many as 305, Nigeria with as many as 274, Egypt with as many as 192, Bangladesh with 137, and India and Indonesia each with more than 100.

Iran’s government rejected all of the above figures as too low, with the country’s Supreme Leader publicly accusing Saudi authorities of mishandling the crisis and Iranian officials suggesting the true toll could run as high as 4,700 to 7,500, a claim reported by Daily Sabah alongside the observation that Iran’s higher estimate has not been independently corroborated by the same country-by-country reporting method used to reach the AP, Reuters and AFP figures.

This guide does not attempt to adjudicate between these figures. What can be stated plainly is this: the Saudi government’s official toll of 769 has not been revised since September 2015; multiple independent international news organisations, using a consistent and transparent country-by-country counting method, arrived at figures ranging from roughly 2,070 to 2,431, more than double the official number; and Iran’s own claim of a toll several times higher than even the independent press counts has not been substantiated by the same method and remains a minority position advanced primarily by Iranian officials. The precise cause of the crush — whether a security-related road closure, a convergence of scheduled and unscheduled pilgrim movements, or some combination — likewise remains a matter of public dispute rather than settled fact, and this guide reports that dispute rather than resolving it.

What Changed After 2015

In the years following the 2015 disaster, Saudi authorities introduced an electronic Hajj permit and tracking system intended to control the total number of pilgrims present in Mina at any one time and to manage the timing of different national groups’ movement toward the jamarat, alongside continued refinement of the crowd-flow design of the Jamarat Bridge itself. Later Hajj seasons have not seen a repeat of a disaster on the scale of 1990 or 2015, though this guide makes no claim that the underlying risk has been eliminated altogether, only that the specific engineering and crowd-management responses catalogued in this article followed directly from the sequence of disasters recorded here.

The Modern Jamarat Bridge: Engineering for Millions

Design and Construction

The multi-level bridge that stands at Mina today was designed by the engineering firm Dar Al-Handasah and built by the Saudi Binladin Group, replacing the single-tier structure that had stood, in various expanded forms, since the mid-twentieth century. Construction followed directly from the January 2006 disaster: the old bridge was demolished, and a ground level plus a first elevated level were rebuilt and made ready in time for the 2006 Hajj season, with the remaining upper levels completed by December 2007, in time for that year’s Hajj, according to the historical account in the Wikipedia article on the Jamaraat Bridge. The bridge as completed runs approximately 950 metres long and 80 metres wide, a footprint reported consistently across sources including the BBC and Arab News, and today comprises five vehicle- and pedestrian-accessible levels above a service basement, connecting to the elliptical stoning platforms at each of the three jamarat.

The redesign was not simply an architectural exercise; it was informed directly by academic crowd-dynamics research. British crowd-safety engineer Professor G. Keith Still, whose consultancy Crowd Dynamics Ltd modelled the 2004–2005 reshaping of the pillars into elliptical walls, has published a detailed retrospective of the project on his own site, gkstill.com. The subsequent multi-level bridge redesign is separately reported to have been developed in consultation with Professor Dirk Helbing of the Dresden University of Technology, a leading academic authority on pedestrian and crowd dynamics, according to a technical account of the project. An academic paper produced by engineering faculty at King Saud University presents detailed mathematical crowd-flow modelling behind the redesign, including a target design capacity of approximately 125,000 pilgrims per hour at peak demand across the roughly five-and-a-half-hour stoning period on the Day of Sacrifice, and computes the minimum ellipse perimeter — over 108 metres at ground level — needed to sustain that throughput without the platform itself becoming the bottleneck.

Capacity and Flow

The figure most consistently cited by Saudi authorities and international press for the completed bridge’s overall throughput is approximately 300,000 pilgrims per hour, a figure repeated across sources including Arab News and the Saudi encyclopaedic reference Saudipedia, with each of the bridge’s main levels individually cited as capable of handling roughly 120,000 pilgrims per hour. This represents a substantial increase over the single-level bridge’s pre-2006 capacity, commonly cited at around 200,000 pilgrims per hour for the whole structure before the multi-level rebuild. Some sources, including Professor Still’s own account, cite more ambitious theoretical maximum figures in the range of 500,000 to 600,000 pilgrims per hour for the completed design, though these appear to represent engineered upper-bound capacity under ideal flow conditions rather than the sustained operating figures quoted by Saudi authorities, and this guide reports both figures with that distinction made explicit rather than treating them as interchangeable. Saudi authorities have also stated publicly that the bridge’s foundations were engineered with substantial reserve capacity, reportedly sufficient to support future expansion to as many as twelve levels and a stated eventual capacity of up to five million pilgrims, a widely repeated but explicitly forward-looking and as-yet-unbuilt figure rather than a description of the bridge as it exists today.

Movement through the bridge follows an engineered one-way flow in normal operation: pilgrims enter from designated approach roads and are channelled through a single direction of travel across each level toward the jamarat platforms and onward to designated exits, a design intended to prevent the two-directional crowd collisions identified as a major contributing factor in several of the disasters catalogued above, including the 2015 Mina crush, which is widely attributed in part to the convergence of oppositely moving pilgrim columns. Reported entrance and exit counts vary somewhat by source and by Hajj season, with figures ranging from eleven entrances and twelve exits in the Ministry of Hajj’s own descriptive materials to reports of twelve entrances distributed across four compass directions in more recent Arab News coverage — a discrepancy this guide attributes to genuine year-to-year reconfiguration of the access points by Saudi crowd-management authorities rather than to any error in either source.

Vertical Movement, Helipads and Emergency Design

To move the very large volumes of pilgrims between the bridge’s five levels without relying solely on ramps, the structure incorporates a very large number of escalators: figures reported include 308 escalators across the main eleven-tower structure (at 28 per tower) plus a further 20 escalators on two external pedestrian link bridges, for a combined total of roughly 338 escalator units, according to a detailed account published by the engineering-news outlet Highways Today; the Ministry of Hajj’s own guide cites a similar figure of 328 escalators. The same account records six passenger elevators, two dedicated ambulance elevators, and two elevators serving the rooftop helipads, while ArchDaily’s account of the design gives a slightly different figure of ten passenger elevators alongside the same two ambulance and two helipad elevators — again a minor discrepancy across sources rather than a resolved single count.

Two helipads sit atop the bridge structure, connected by their own dedicated elevators, allowing critically injured or ill pilgrims to be evacuated by air directly from the site rather than through the crowded roads below — a direct engineering response to the difficulty, demonstrated repeatedly in the disasters of the 1990s and 2000s, of getting ambulances through a crowd of hundreds of thousands of people on foot. The design also incorporates dedicated evacuation ramps built directly alongside the jamarat platforms themselves, intended to allow rapid clearing of the immediate stoning area in the event of a crush beginning to form, along with wide, column-free interior spans engineered specifically to eliminate the pinch-points and blind corners identified as contributing factors in earlier crowd disasters. Reports describe a network of emergency evacuation towers connecting the bridge levels to the ground and to nearby open ground suitable for further evacuation, and Saudi authorities have reported operating as many as seventeen emergency medical centres in and around the jamarat complex during recent Hajj seasons.

Climate Control

Given that the Hajj rotates through the Islamic lunar calendar and periodically falls during the peak of the Arabian summer, when Mina’s daytime temperatures can exceed 45 degrees Celsius, the bridge incorporates a desert air-conditioning and water-misting system engineered to bring the ambient temperature on the bridge down to approximately 29 degrees Celsius, a figure cited consistently across the Ministry of Hajj’s own materials and independent engineering accounts of the structure. Large fixed canopies shade the stoning platforms at the top level specifically, providing additional relief from direct sun during the hours immediately after zawal when, per the timing rules discussed in the fiqh section above, the majority of pilgrims are attempting to stone on the Days of Tashriq.

Cost and Scale

The multi-level bridge project is reported to have cost approximately 4.2 billion Saudi riyals, equivalent to roughly 1.1 billion US dollars at the time, according to Arab News’s engineering retrospective — a scale of investment that reflects both the severity of the disasters that preceded the rebuild and the sheer size of the annual crowd the structure is engineered to serve.

Visiting the Jamarat: A Practical Guide for Hajj Pilgrims

This guide must begin its practical section with the single most important fact for anyone reading it who is not currently performing Hajj: you cannot visit the Jamarat as a place of general ziyarah. Unlike the Kaaba, the Prophet’s ﷺ Mosque, or many of the historical sites covered elsewhere in this guide, the Jamarat complex is not open to casual visitors, umrah pilgrims, or tourists at any point in the year. The site sits inside Mina, an area whose access is tightly controlled by Saudi authorities specifically because it is designed to be used at extreme capacity for a few concentrated days each year and is otherwise a functional, largely unused stretch of road and bridge infrastructure. If you are performing Umrah outside the Hajj season, you will not pass through Mina at all as part of your rites, and the Jamarat Bridge will not be part of your itinerary in any form. This is worth stating plainly because a genuine number of Umrah pilgrims, aware that the stoning of the devil is one of the most famous images associated with Hajj, ask whether they can see the site anyway; the honest answer is that they cannot, and that the site’s entire design and purpose is bound to the specific days of Hajj itself.

For pilgrims who are performing Hajj, a few points of practical guidance follow from everything documented above. You will typically approach the Jamarat from your camp in Mina, along one of the designated pedestrian routes assigned to your Hajj group’s camp zone; these routes and the specific entrance you are directed to use are determined by Saudi crowd-management authorities and communicated through your Hajj mission or campaign organiser rather than chosen freely on the day, precisely because uncoordinated route choice by individual pilgrims was a contributing factor in several of the disasters recorded in this guide. You will be assigned, in most cases, to a specific level of the five-level bridge appropriate to your group’s scheduled time slot; there is ordinarily no particular religious merit attached to stoning from one level rather than another; the rite is fulfilled equally at ground level or from the uppermost level, since what the pillar-basins receive is the same regardless of height, and pilgrims should follow their group’s assigned level rather than trying to reach the ground level in the belief that it is somehow more authentic or more valid — a belief with no basis in the fiqh described above.

On timing, recall the two windows discussed in the fiqh section: on the Day of Sacrifice, the majority default is to stone Jamrat al-Aqabah only, from after sunrise; on the Days of Tashriq, the classical majority position requires waiting until after zawal, while the Hanafi-derived accommodation, now widely permitted for crowd-safety reasons, allows stoning after dawn on the later days if your group’s schedule requires it. Follow whichever your Hajj mission and its scholars direct you to, and do not feel that an early departure time assigned by your campaign is itself a departure from valid practice. Carry only the pebbles you actually need — seven for each jamrah you are stoning that day — collected from Mina itself or provided by your campaign; there is no requirement, as the fiqh section establishes, to gather them specifically at Muzdalifah, and there is no benefit to carrying excess pebbles “just in case.” Move with your group, follow the one-way flow of the bridge rather than attempting to cut against the crowd to reach a particular jamrah first, and treat any instruction from Saudi crowd-safety personnel on the bridge as binding rather than optional, given the documented history recorded in this guide of what happens when large numbers of individual pilgrims each make their own routing decisions simultaneously.

Spiritual Reflection: What You Are Actually Doing

Stand for a moment, if you have made this walk or ever will, with what the hadith actually tells you the rite is for. It is not, in the words the Prophet ﷺ used according to Aishah’s report, a re-enactment staged for its own sake, but an act “instituted only for the remembrance of Allah” (Sunan Abi Dawud 1888). You are not trying to strike a devil who is physically present in the concrete wall in front of you. You are repeating, with your own body, in the same place, an act of refusal that a friend of God once performed when he was tempted to abandon an unbearable command. The story tells you Ibrahim was afraid, or at least that he was tested at the precise moment his obedience was hardest to sustain — on the road to sacrifice his own son — and that his response to temptation was not an argument but a physical, immediate act of rejection: pick up a stone, throw it, keep walking.

That is what you are asked to imitate. Every pebble is a small, physical renewal of that same refusal, repeated seven times at each of three points, on the days when your own obedience is also being asked of you in less dramatic but real ways — heat, crowding, exhaustion, the temptation to cut a corner in the rites because no one would notice. Al-Ghazali’s reading of the rite, drawn from his discussion in the Ihya, is that its value lies precisely in its resistance to being fully rationalised: you throw the stones because you have been commanded to, in a specific number, in a specific sequence, at a specific place, and the discipline of doing exactly that without needing an independent justification is itself the spiritual exercise. You are not required to feel that a devil is present. You are required to act, in that moment, the way a person acts when they have decided, finally and physically, to have nothing further to do with a temptation — which is exactly what tradition says Ibrahim did.

Consider, too, what it means that this is one of the only rites of Hajj performed at a fixed, shared physical target rather than a personal, internal act. The tawaf circles a house; the stand at Arafat is a vigil across an open plain; the stoning is aimed, precisely, at a wall, in a basin, seven times. There is something in that specificity — throw here, this many times, this size of stone — that resists abstraction, and that is, if the hadith on its purpose is taken seriously, exactly the point: dhikr is meant to be performed with the body, not only contemplated with the mind.

Common Misconceptions About the Jamarat

“The Pebbles Strike a Literal Devil Present in the Wall”

This is the most widespread misunderstanding of the rite, and it is worth correcting directly: nothing in the Qur’an or in sound hadith states that Satan is physically present at Mina during Hajj, waiting to be struck. The hadith establishing the rite’s purpose is explicit that it was instituted for the remembrance of Allah (Sunan Abi Dawud 1888), not for physical combat with a being present at the site. The ritual commemorates Ibrahim’s refusal of temptation at these locations; it does not require, and the classical scholarship does not teach, a belief that a devil inhabits the modern concrete walls that have replaced the old pillars.

“A Bigger Stone Shows Greater Devotion”

The opposite is closer to the truth of the hadith evidence. The Prophet ﷺ specifically warned against throwing oversized stones, instructing pilgrims to use pebbles no larger than a chickpea or small bean and adding the caution, “beware of immoderation in religion, for those who came before you were destroyed by immoderation in religion” (Sunan an-Nasa’i 3059). Some pilgrims, believing that a larger or heavier stone demonstrates greater sincerity or force of rejection, throw rocks, gravel fragments, or stones considerably larger than the recommended size; this is a direct contradiction of the explicit prophetic instruction, and several schools of law, as detailed in the fiqh section of this guide, either discourage it strongly or, in the Hanbali view, do not consider the stoning valid at all if the stone used is markedly oversized.

“Throwing Sandals, Bottles or Other Objects Is Also Acceptable, or Even More Forceful”

This is not a matter of scholarly disagreement; it is simply outside the bounds of the rite altogether. The Prophet’s ﷺ described practice, and the unanimous position of the schools of law, is that the object thrown must be a pebble or stone, not a sandal, bottle, umbrella, or any other object some pilgrims have historically thrown in a mistaken belief that greater symbolic force equals greater religious merit. IslamQA’s detailed catalogue of stoning errors addresses this directly, and Saudi authorities have for years run public information campaigns specifically warning against the practice, given the injury risk such objects pose to other pilgrims and staff at the site (Mistakes Made When Stoning the Jamarat).

“The Pebble Must Strike the Wall Itself”

This is a subtler but genuinely common error. As IslamQA’s discussion of stoning mistakes explains plainly, the wall or pillar standing at each jamrah is a marker, not the object that must be struck; what is actually required is that the pebble land within the surrounding pit or basin (hawd), and a throw that lands correctly in the basin is valid even if the pebble does not touch the wall at all, while a stone that strikes the wall but bounces out of the basin entirely is generally not considered sufficient. Pilgrims who push and shove dangerously to get close enough to physically strike the wall itself are, in a real sense, making the rite harder and more dangerous for themselves and everyone around them in pursuit of a standard the fiqh does not actually require.

Pebbles Must Come From Muzdalifah

As detailed at length in the fiqh section above, this is a widespread but incorrect belief. Egypt’s Dar al-Ifta states explicitly that collecting pebbles from Muzdalifah specifically is not obligatory and that the unanimous position of the four schools of law permits gathering pebbles from any location, including Mina itself (Dar al-Ifta). The custom of collecting at Muzdalifah is extremely widespread and practical, since most pilgrims are already there the night before, but it is a custom rather than a requirement.

Treating the Pebbles or the Site Itself as Objects of Blessing

A related caution, distinct from the questions above but worth naming here, concerns the broader Islamic principle governing how physical objects and locations connected to acts of worship should be treated. Scholars including Ibn Taymiyyah and, in the modern era, Ibn Baz and Ibn Uthaymeen have written extensively, in the context of other historical and ritual sites across the Hijaz, against the practice of attributing independent blessing (barakah) to physical objects, stones, or locations beyond what has been specifically established by revelation — a body of scholarship most fully collected in the discussion at IslamQA on visiting historical sites, which addresses ziyarah destinations in Madinah specifically but rests on a principle of wider relevance: that acts such as touching, rubbing, or collecting fragments of a ritual site in the belief that the physical material itself carries blessing beyond the act of worship performed there have no basis in the practice of the Prophet ﷺ or his companions. The Jamarat are a place of an obligatory, prescribed ritual rather than a ziyarah destination visited for its own sake, and pilgrims are not at risk of confusing the two in the way a tourist might at a historical site; the relevant caution here is narrower and more practical — some pilgrims keep used pebbles as souvenirs or believe particular blessing attaches to stones thrown at the jamarat, a practice with no support in the hadith describing the rite, which frames the entire act as remembrance performed through obedience, not as the acquisition of a blessed object.

Lesser-Known Facts About the Jamarat

• The three jamarat have specific classical Arabic names beyond the common “small, middle, large” description: Jamrat al-Ula (the first, i.e. al-Sughra), Jamrat al-Wusta, and Jamrat al-Aqabah or al-Kubra, and the order in which they are stoned on the Days of Tashriq — starting from the smallest and finishing at the largest — is itself part of the sunnah pattern recorded in the hadith of Ibn Umar, reversing the order used on the Day of Sacrifice itself, when only Jamrat al-Aqabah is stoned.
• The bridge’s foundations were reportedly engineered with capacity for as many as twelve levels in total, far beyond the five currently built, reflecting a deliberate design decision to allow for future expansion without demolishing the existing structure.
• The elliptical shape chosen for each stoning platform after the 2004–2005 redesign was not an aesthetic decision but a mathematically derived solution: engineers calculated the minimum perimeter needed to give the approaching crowd enough simultaneous throwing frontage, and an ellipse provided more usable edge length per square metre of platform than either a circle or a rectangle of comparable footprint, according to the technical account published by King Saud University’s engineering faculty.
• Saudi authorities banned sleeping or camping anywhere on the Jamarat Bridge or its connecting pedestrian paths, a rule repeatedly stated by officials and recorded in Professor Keith Still’s retrospective account of the site, precisely because pilgrims resting on walkways had historically created the kind of static obstruction that turns a flowing crowd into a dangerous, compressed one.
• The rite’s timing rules mean that, in years when Hajj falls in the height of the Arabian summer, the busiest and hottest hours on the bridge are concentrated in the early afternoon on the Days of Tashriq, precisely the hours immediately after zawal when the majority fiqh position requires stoning to begin — a scheduling reality that is a major part of why the bridge’s cooling and shading systems were engineered to the specifications described in this guide.
• Contrary to a common assumption, throwing all seven pebbles at once, as a single handful, is not equivalent to throwing them individually; the majority of jurists hold that a handful thrown together counts as only one valid throw of the seven required, meaning a pilgrim who does this must still throw six more individual pebbles to complete the rite correctly.

Timeline of the Jamarat

• Pre-Islamic era: The valley of Mina and its three marked points along the route to Makkah are already significant in the religious geography associated with the story of Ibrahim, according to the sira and tafsir tradition, though this predates any documentary record contemporary with the events themselves.
• 10 AH / 632 CE: The Prophet ﷺ performs his only Hajj after the Hijra, the Farewell Hajj, stoning Jamrat al-Aqabah alone on the Day of Sacrifice and all three jamarat on the subsequent Days of Tashriq, in the sequence and manner recorded by Jabir ibn Abdullah (Sahih Muslim 1218) and Abdullah ibn Umar (Sahih al-Bukhari 1751).
• 1st century AH / 7th century CE onward: The Rashidun caliphs and the companions perform Hajj themselves, maintaining the practice at the jamarat as simple, unwalled markers in open ground.
• 3rd century AH / 9th century CE: Al-Azraqi compiles his History of Makkah, preserving the fullest early narrative account of the Ibrahim-and-Iblis story as it is popularly told today.
• Mid-20th century CE (1373–1395 AH): The first engineered pedestrian bridge is constructed at the jamarat under Saudi administration, replacing open-ground pillars with a raised structure to help manage growing pilgrim numbers, with sources giving construction dates variously in the 1960s and 1970s.
• 3 July 1990 / 10 Dhu al-Hijjah 1410 AH: The al-Ma’aisim tunnel disaster kills an officially reported 1,426 pilgrims, with unofficial estimates running considerably higher.
• 23 May 1994: A stampede kills at least 270 pilgrims.
• 9 April 1998: A stampede kills at least 118 pilgrims.
• 5 March 2001: A stampede kills 35 pilgrims.
• 1 February 2004 / 9 Dhu al-Hijjah 1424 AH: A stampede at Jamrat al-Aqabah kills 251 pilgrims, directly triggering the redesign of the jamarat pillars into elliptical walls.
• 2005 CE: The three cylindrical pillars are reshaped into oblong, elliptical concrete walls.
• 12 January 2006 / 12 Dhu al-Hijjah 1426 AH: A further stampede kills at least 346 pilgrims, triggering the full demolition of the old bridge.
• 2006–2007 CE / 1427–1428 AH: The new multi-level Jamarat Bridge is constructed in phases, with the ground and first levels opening for the 2006 Hajj and the remaining levels completed by December 2007.
• 24 September 2015 / 10 Dhu al-Hijjah 1436 AH: The Mina crowd crush, the deadliest disaster in Hajj history, occurs on a route feeding the jamarat; the official Saudi toll stands at 769, while independent international counts range from approximately 2,070 to 2,431 or higher.
• 2016 CE onward: Saudi authorities introduce electronic Hajj permits and enhanced crowd-tracking systems intended to prevent a recurrence of the 2015 disaster.

Key Lessons

Historical

The physical history of the jamarat is a history of scaling under pressure: from simple stone markers to a single pedestrian bridge to a five-level, purpose-engineered structure costing over a billion dollars, each major redesign was a direct, documented response to a specific, named disaster rather than a proactive modernisation. The historical record here is not a story of steady progress but of repeated, costly lessons — 2004 produced the wall redesign; 2006 produced the multi-level bridge — and it is worth pilgrims knowing that the safety of the structure they walk across today was purchased, in a very literal sense, by the deaths recorded in this guide.

Spiritual

The rite’s own stated purpose — remembrance of Allah, per the hadith of Aishah — sits in a specific and instructive tension with the vivid narrative of Ibrahim and Iblis: pilgrims are given both a story that makes the ritual emotionally vivid and a hadith that makes clear the ritual’s ultimate object is not combat with a devil but obedience to God. Holding both together, rather than collapsing the rite into either pure legend or pure abstraction, is itself part of what the classical scholars, particularly al-Ghazali, asked pilgrims to do.

Personal

The pebble-sized stone the Prophet ﷺ insisted upon, against the instinct to throw something larger and more forceful, is a small but genuine lesson in proportion: the rite does not reward excess or intensity for its own sake, and neither, by extension, does sincerity in worship more broadly. Restraint, performed exactly as instructed, is presented here as the harder and more meritorious discipline, not the easier one.

Practical

For any pilgrim actually walking the bridge, the single most consequential practical lesson of this guide’s research is that so many of the deaths recorded here were connected not to the ritual itself but to crowd movement around it — timing, routing, and the interaction of large groups moving in different directions at once. Following your Hajj mission’s assigned route, level and time slot exactly, rather than exercising individual initiative to reach a jamrah faster or more directly, is not merely a matter of convenience; it is the specific, engineered response to a documented history of what happens when large numbers of pilgrims do not.

Authentic Sources

Primary Islamic Sources

The hadith collections cited throughout this guide are drawn from the two most rigorously authenticated compilations in Sunni Islam, Sahih al-Bukhari and Sahih Muslim, supplemented by the four Sunan collections (Abu Dawud, al-Tirmidhi, al-Nasa’i and Ibn Majah), all accessed and verified via sunnah.com. Qur’anic citations are verified against Quran.com. A caution is warranted regarding the early historical and biographical material referenced in the section on the Ibrahim-and-Iblis narrative: sources such as al-Azraqi’s History of Makkah belong to the broader sira and tafsir tradition rather than to the sahih hadith corpus, and classical hadith critics did not evaluate this material by the same chain-authentication standards applied to the six canonical hadith collections. This guide has, wherever possible, distinguished explicitly between material resting on authenticated hadith and material resting on this earlier historical and exegetical literature, and readers should carry that distinction with them rather than treating every narrative detail in this article as equally well-attested.

Classical Scholars

This guide draws on recorded positions attributed to Imam Malik ibn Anas, Imam Abu Hanifah, Imam al-Shafi’i, and Imam Ahmad ibn Hanbal, as preserved and summarised in later classical fiqh manuals including al-Khatib al-Shirbini’s Mughni al-Muhtaj and the Shafi’i reference al-Muhazzab, both cited via the contemporary fatwa discussion at Jordan’s Department of Iftaa, as well as the Hanafi manual Bada’i al-Sana’i cited in the same source. Ibn Kathir’s tafsir of Surah as-Saffat and al-Ghazali’s Ihya’ Ulum al-Din inform the sections on the Qur’anic narrative and the spiritual meaning of the rite respectively, with al-Ghazali’s specific discussion accessed via the compiled hadith and commentary resource at Daily Hadith Online.

Modern Academic and Reference Sources

Contemporary fiqh rulings cited in this guide are drawn from the published fatwa archives of Egypt’s Dar al-Ifta, Jordan’s Department of Iftaa, and IslamQA, the latter presenting rulings associated with Shaykh Ibn Uthaymeen and the Permanent Committee for Islamic Research and Ifta. The comparative fiqh reference Fiqh-us-Sunnah by Sayyid Sabiq was used to cross-check madhhab positions on pebble size and material. The historical and engineering account of the Jamarat Bridge draws on the Wikipedia articles for the Jamaraat Bridge and the 2015 Mina crowd crush, contemporaneous press coverage from the BBC, Arab News, Al Jazeera, Deutsche Welle, the UPI and Los Angeles Times archives, Daily Sabah, the PBS NewsHour, the BBC’s later coverage, and Religion News Service. The 1990 disaster’s contemporaneous parliamentary record is drawn from the UK’s Historic Hansard archive, and the 2015 Ministry of Health data episode is documented in a peer-reviewed article archived by the National Center for Biotechnology Information. Engineering detail on the modern bridge draws on the retrospective account by crowd-safety engineer Professor G. Keith Still, the technical paper published by King Saud University’s engineering faculty, Highways Today, ArchDaily, and the Saudi reference encyclopaedia Saudipedia. Official guidance for pilgrims is drawn from the Saudi Ministry of Hajj and Umrah’s own Jamarat Awareness Guide.

A note on method: this guide has attempted, throughout, to keep three categories of claim visibly distinct from one another: what is established in the Qur’an and sahih hadith; what rests on sira, tafsir and classical historical writing that is widely accepted but does not carry the same chain-based authentication; and what is a matter of ongoing scholarly disagreement, engineering estimate, or disputed public record, particularly regarding casualty figures from the crowd disasters catalogued here. Where sources conflict — on distances between the jamarat, on bridge capacity figures, or on death tolls from the 2015 Mina disaster in particular — this guide has reported the conflicting figures with their sources rather than silently choosing one, in the belief that a pilgrim or reader is better served by an honest account of what is disputed than by a false impression of certainty.