Al-Safa and Al-Marwah: The Complete History of the Sa’y and the Ziyarah Guide to the Two Hills of Masjid al-Haram in Makkah

Inside Masjid al-Haram, running parallel to the courtyard that holds the Ka’bah, there is a long, enclosed, marble-floored gallery a little over two hundred metres of visible length, four storeys tall, lit day and night, filled at every hour with people walking briskly in one direction and returning in the other. Most of the pilgrims moving through it have just finished circling the Ka’bah seven times. They arrive at a small rise of stone at the southern end, climb it, face the black cube of the Ka’bah visible through the arches, and begin to walk. At the far end, some three hundred and ninety metres away, is a second rise of stone. They walk to it, turn, and walk back. Seven times. This is the sa’y — literally “the effort,” “the striving,” “the running” — and it is not a devotional add-on to Hajj or ‘Umrah. It is, by the reckoning of two of the four Sunni schools of law, one of the acts without which the pilgrimage itself is not complete.

The two points at either end are called al-Safa and al-Marwah. They are named in the Qur’an in a single verse — “Indeed, al-Safa and al-Marwah are among the symbols of Allah” (Qur’an 2:158) — and behind that one verse sits a history that few pilgrims walking the corridor today ever hear in full: a pre-Islamic story of stone idols and adulterous lovers turned to rock; a company of new Muslims, the Ansar of Madinah, who hesitated to walk the very route because of what those idols meant to them; a grammatical dispute among the earliest commentators over three words of Arabic that determines whether the whole rite is optional or obligatory; a woman alone in a desert valley with a crying infant, running between two hills seven times because she could see no one to help her and refused to simply wait to die; the last pilgrimage of a Prophet ﷺ who stood on the first of those hills, recited the very verse that describes it, and said, “I begin with what Allah has begun with”; and, in living memory, a construction project that doubled the width of the corridor and set off a dispute among named, credentialed scholars over whether the newly built ground counts as the sacred site at all — a dispute this guide will set out fully and will not resolve, because it has not been resolved.

This is a guide to all of it: the origin of the two hills before Islam, the Qur’anic verse and its asbab al-nuzul, the Prophet’s ﷺ own sa’y at his Farewell Hajj, the fiqh of the ritual across the four schools, the physical transformation of the site across fourteen centuries, the exact, sourced answer to the question every pilgrim eventually asks — is any of the original rock still there, and where — and a full practical guide to walking the corridor today, including its costs, its levels, its wheelchair lanes, and the fabricated devotional material that circulates about it. Where a report is authentic, this guide says so and gives the reference. Where a report is weak, disputed, or could not be verified to a satisfactory standard in preparing this guide, it says that too, plainly, rather than quietly dropping the difficulty or quietly asserting a certainty the sources do not support. This applies equally to a romantic pre-Islamic legend, a scholarly disagreement over the boundaries of a holy site, and a claim about a construction date that only one source could confirm. The subject deserves nothing less, because the sa’y is not a minor stop on the pilgrim’s itinerary. It is, according to a hadith you will meet in full below, older than Islam itself, and it commemorates the single most desperate hour in the life of the woman without whom, by the Qur’an’s own telling, there would be no Ka’bah, no Zamzam, and no Makkah standing where it stands.

Historical Background: Al-Safa and Al-Marwah Before and After Islam

The Two Hills and Their Names

Al-Safa and al-Marwah are two rocky outcrops that once stood as independent hills at the eastern edge of the valley of Makkah, close to but outside the sanctuary that surrounded the Ka’bah. Classical philologists, as recorded by al-Qurtubi in his Qur’anic commentary, traced al-safa to the Arabic word for smooth, exposed rock — safat — and al-marwah to marw, meaning small, hard flint-like stones. Al-Tabari made the same point in his own tafsir: the definite article attached to both names in the Qur’an — “al-Safa,” “al-Marwah,” not “a smooth rock” or “some flint stones” — signals that the verse is naming two specific, known landmarks at Makkah, not describing rock and pebbles as a category.

Geographically, al-Safa sat at the base of a larger mountain called Jabal Abu Qubays, to the south-southeast of the Ka’bah, at a distance most commonly given today as approximately 130 metres, though the Madain Project’s survey gives a figure of up to 150 metres. Al-Marwah was connected to a second, separate rise called Jabal Qaiqan, to the north or northeast of the Ka’bah, at a distance of roughly 300 metres. Between the two hills ran a shallow valley — the crucial detail for everything that follows, because a valley bottom is where water moves fastest and land is hardest to walk, and it is this valley floor, not the hills themselves, that gives the sa’y its distinctive brisk central stretch, discussed fully in the section on fiqh below.

The distance between the two hills is reported with a genuine, and worth-noting, spread across sources. The most frequently cited modern engineering figure, and the one used by Saudipedia, the official reference body for Saudi cultural and religious information, is approximately 394 to 395 metres single-leg. A number of English-language pilgrim guides and the Madain Project instead cite a larger figure of roughly 450 metres. A separate, uncorroborated claim holds that the distance at the time of the Prophet ﷺ was closer to 368 metres, with the modern route lengthened as later construction absorbed parts of the hills’ bases into the corridor — this last figure comes from an infographic without an academic source behind it and should be treated as low-confidence. This guide follows Saudipedia’s figure as the primary citation, since it is most likely to derive from the body responsible for surveying and maintaining the physical infrastructure, while noting plainly that other reputable sources give a higher number. Multiplied across the ritual’s seven traversals, the total walking distance comes to approximately 2,761.5 metres by Saudipedia’s own calculation, or a rounder figure of roughly 3.15 kilometres if the higher 450-metre estimate is used instead — a range of about 2.7 to 3.15 kilometres, rather than one artificially precise number, is the honest way to state it.

Pre-Islamic Sanctity and the Idols Isaf and Na’ila

Long before Islam, the sanctuary at Makkah — the Ka’bah and its immediate surroundings — was already regarded across Arabia as sacred ground, a site of pilgrimage tied to the memory of Ibrahim (Abraham) عليه السلام, even as the meaning of that memory had been buried under centuries of accumulated idol worship. Tradition, recorded by Ibn Hisham and Ibn Ishaq and the specialist compiler of pre-Islamic religion Ibn al-Kalbi, attributes the introduction of organised idolatry at Makkah on a large scale to a chieftain of the Khuza’ah tribe named ‘Amr ibn Luhayy, said to have brought the idol Hubal back from the Levant and installed it in or near the Ka’bah. By the time of the Prophet’s ﷺ conquest of Makkah in 8 AH, tradition places some three hundred and sixty idols in and around the sanctuary.

Among these idols, two are directly relevant to the story of al-Safa and al-Marwah: Isaf and Na’ila. The fullest account comes from Ibn al-Kalbi’s Kitab al-Asnam (“The Book of Idols”), a specialist compilation of pre-Islamic religious practice, transmitted on the authority of Abu Salih from Ibn ‘Abbas. According to this account, Isaf — described as a man from the tribe of Jurhum, in full “Isaf ibn Ya’la” — and Na’ila, a Jurhumite woman said to be the daughter of Zayd, were lovers. They travelled to Makkah on pilgrimage, and finding themselves alone inside the Ka’bah, committed adultery within the sanctuary itself. For this act, the tradition holds, they were transformed into stone — miskhs, petrified or transfigured beings — and their two stone forms were then removed from the Ka’bah and set up in the open, at which point, in Ibn al-Kalbi’s words, “the Khuza’ah and the Quraysh, as well as everyone who came on pilgrimage to the Sacred House, worshipped them.”

A note on authenticity: the Isaf and Na’ila legend is a pre-Islamic historical report (khabar), not a hadith of the Prophet ﷺ and not a Qur’anic statement. It is transmitted with a chain running back to Ibn ‘Abbas via Ibn al-Kalbi and Abu Salih, and classical hadith criticism regards Ibn al-Kalbi himself as an unreliable narrator when it comes to legal hadith. But this report is not functioning as legal hadith — it is functioning as inherited historical and legendary material, the kind of account exegetes such as Ibn Kathir routinely cite as background to a Qur’anic verse without thereby certifying it as authentic prophetic speech. It should be told to readers, because it is the standard explanatory background the classical commentators themselves invoke, but it should be told as legend with a weak chain, not as an established hadith narrative.

Reports differ on exactly where the two stone figures stood. ‘Aisha’s own hadith about the revelation of Qur’an 2:158 — recorded in Sahih Muslim 1277 and examined in full in the Qur’anic Connections section below — describes idols “on the bank of the river” or “shore of the sea” before later being moved. Other accounts, transmitted by the ninth-century Meccan historian al-Azraqi and by Ibn al-Kalbi, hold that Qusayy ibn Kilab — an ancestor of the Prophet ﷺ several generations back — later moved the two stones to a location near the well of Zamzam, and separately, that Isaf came to stand atop al-Safa itself and Na’ila atop al-Marwah. This is the version of the story preserved by the eighth-century scholar al-Sha’bi and cited by Ibn Kathir in his tafsir of 2:158: “Isaf was on al-Safa while Na’ilah was on al-Marwah, and they used to touch (or kiss) them.” A separate, later source recorded in French-language scholarship on the two hills states that as many as thirty-six idols once stood along the path between al-Safa and al-Marwah in pre-Islamic times, with the two principal figures, Isaf and Na’ila, positioned one atop each hill.

Whatever the precise arrangement, the underlying point matters for everything that follows: by the time of the Prophet’s ﷺ mission, the two hills that the Qur’an would later call “symbols of Allah” — sacred markers of an act of worship going back to Ibrahim — had also become, in the intervening centuries of jahiliyyah, sites associated with idol veneration. This double history is the entire reason the Ansar of Madinah hesitated over the sa’y after their conversion, and it is the reason Qur’an 2:158 needed to be revealed at all. A rite Allah had established through Ibrahim had been overlaid with the debris of idolatry, and the Qur’an’s task, in this single verse, was to strip that overlay away and restore the original instruction without leaving any doubt that the walking itself remained commanded.

The Sanctuary Boundary and the Hills’ Place Within It

Al-Safa and al-Marwah lay near the edge of, and by some classical descriptions just inside or just outside, the sacred precinct proper, in the sense that the space between them — the mas’a, from the same root as sa’y — functioned in daily life as an ordinary public thoroughfare and market street for most of Islamic history, discussed fully in the Architecture and Historical Development sections below. This is worth stating clearly at the outset, because it bears directly on the twentieth and twenty-first century history of the site: unlike the Ka’bah itself, which has always stood at the fixed centre of the mosque, al-Safa and al-Marwah were, for most of Islamic history, physically outside the walls of Masjid al-Haram, connected to the mosque only by the open street of the mas’a. They were brought inside the mosque’s own walls — architecturally absorbed into the structure of Masjid al-Haram for the first time — only in the Saudi expansion of 1375 AH / 1955–56 CE. Before that date, a pilgrim performing tawaf around the Ka’bah would leave the mosque courtyard entirely, walk out into the street, and perform the sa’y in the open air of the city.

Importance Before Islam

Before the Qur’anic revelation redefined its meaning, the walking between al-Safa and al-Marwah already existed as a rite among the Arabs of the Hijaz, tied to the wider complex of Hajj rituals that pre-Islamic Arabia had inherited, in corrupted form, from the practice associated with Ibrahim. Al-Tabari’s tafsir records that the early exegete Mujahid understood the Qur’anic term for “symbols” — sha’a’ir, from a root meaning “to notify” or “to make known” — as describing the two hills’ function: they were the physical markers by which Allah made known to His servants a rite He had imposed on them, tracing back to the instructions given to Ibrahim when he asked to be shown the rites of pilgrimage. That the pre-Islamic Arabs, corrupted as their practice of it had become through the idols Isaf and Na’ila, still performed some form of walking between the two hills, is itself evidence that a genuine core of Ibrahim’s original rite had survived, however distorted, into the jahiliyyah.

Importance After Islam

With the revelation of Qur’an 2:158, discussed in full below, the sa’y was confirmed as a rite of the Islamic pilgrimage, its association with the idols permanently severed, and its true origin — Hajar’s search for water and Allah’s mercy upon her, examined in the next section — restored as its governing meaning. From the earliest years of Islam onward, the sa’y between al-Safa and al-Marwah became, alongside tawaf around the Ka’bah, one of the two great processional rites performed inside or adjacent to Masjid al-Haram by every pilgrim who ever performed Hajj or ‘Umrah — a continuous, unbroken practice stretching from the Prophet’s ﷺ own Farewell Hajj in 10 AH to the present day, examined leg by leg in the Prophet ﷺ and This Place section below.

Changes Through History: An Overview

The physical setting of the two hills changed dramatically across Islamic history, in ways this guide treats in full in its Historical Development and Architecture sections. In brief: the hills stood as bare, exposed rock outcrops accessible by stone steps for most of the first thirteen centuries of Islam, with the mas’a between them functioning as an open commercial street. Successive Abbasid-era expansions in the eighth century widened the corridor. The early twentieth-century Saudi state paved and later fully canopied the mas’a. The first Saudi architectural expansion of 1375 AH / 1955–56 CE brought the entire mas’a, and the two hills themselves, inside the structure of Masjid al-Haram for the first time, physically severing al-Safa from Jabal Abu Qubays and al-Marwah from Jabal Qaiqan in the process. A second major expansion under King ‘Abdullah in 2007–2008 CE doubled the width of the corridor from twenty to forty metres and raised the number of levels to four — a project that triggered the genuine and unresolved scholarly dispute this guide treats in full later on. Today, only a small remnant of exposed original rock survives at al-Safa, and markedly less at al-Marwah, a precise question this guide addresses directly rather than leaving vague, because it is one pilgrims ask constantly and deserve a sourced answer to.

The Story Behind the Place: Hajar, Isma’il, and the Search for Water

Setting the Scene

The fullest and most authoritative account of why al-Safa and al-Marwah matter at all — the account that gives the sa’y its entire meaning, prior to and independent of the later Qur’anic legislation and the pre-Islamic idols that intervened in between — is preserved in a single long hadith transmitted by Ibn ‘Abbas and recorded in Sahih al-Bukhari, hadith number 3364, in the Book of Prophets. This is Authentic (sahih), verified in full at sunnah.com, and it is the textual bedrock beneath everything else in this guide.

The narration describes a moment far earlier than the Prophet Muhammad’s ﷺ own lifetime: the story of Ibrahim (Abraham) عليه السلام, his wife Hajar, and their infant son Isma’il (Ishmael) عليه السلام, at a time when the site of Makkah was nothing but a barren valley, with no water, no settlement, and no other human beings anywhere nearby. Ibrahim brought Hajar and the infant Isma’il to this valley and left them there with a container of dates and a water-skin, then turned to depart. This was not abandonment in any careless sense — the wider prophetic tradition, and the Qur’an’s own later references to Ibrahim’s supplications for Makkah, frame it as an act undertaken at Allah’s command, though the Bukhari narration’s own emotional weight falls on Hajar’s side of the story: a mother, alone with her child, watching the man who had brought her there begin to walk away.

Hajar’s Question

The hadith records that Hajar followed after Ibrahim and asked him: “O Ibrahim, where are you going, leaving us in this valley where there is no person whose company we may enjoy, nor is there anything with us to survive on?” She repeated the question several times, and Ibrahim did not turn back to answer her. Finally she asked him a different question, one that changed everything: “Has Allah ordered you to do so?” He said, “Yes.” She said, “Then He will not neglect us,” and returned to sit with her child. This single exchange — a woman refusing to accept abandonment as her fate, and then, upon learning it was a matter of divine instruction rather than human indifference, submitting to it with a declaration of trust rather than despair — is the emotional and theological centre of the entire narrative, and it is worth pausing over before moving to what happened next, because everything the sa’y commemorates flows from this moment of trust, not merely from the desperate run that followed it.

The Water Runs Out

The dates and water eventually ran out. Hajar’s milk dried up, and the infant Isma’il, in the hadith’s own words, began “tossing in agony” from thirst. Unable to bear watching her child suffer and unwilling to simply sit and wait, Hajar left him and went to the nearest of the two hills, al-Safa, and climbed it, looking out across the valley for any sign of a traveller or a settlement. She saw no one. She descended into the valley between the hills, and — in the hadith’s own description — “tucked up her robe” and ran across the valley floor “like a person in distress and trouble,” not walking with composure but moving at a run, driven by the urgency of a mother whose child was dying of thirst in front of her. She crossed to the second hill, al-Marwah, climbed it, and again saw no one. She repeated this back-and-forth run seven times.

The hadith’s precision here matters for what follows in the fiqh sections of this guide: it is Hajar’s own count of seven traversals between these same two named points that fixes the number of circuits every pilgrim performs today, not an independently stated Qur’anic number. The Qur’an calls the two hills “symbols of Allah” and commands the walking between them without specifying a count; the count of seven is established by the Prophet’s ﷺ own practice at his Farewell Hajj, examined below, which itself stands in continuity with this founding account of Hajar.

The Prophet’s ﷺ Own Words on What This Established

The Bukhari narration records the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ commenting directly on Hajar’s run, in words that state plainly and without ambiguity the entire purpose of this guide’s subject:

“The Prophet ﷺ said: ‘This is the source of the tradition of the walking of people between them (i.e., Safa and Marwa).'”

The Arabic of this statement — fa dhalika sa’yu al-nasi baynahuma — uses the same root, sa’y, that names the ritual itself. In the Prophet’s ﷺ own explanation, transmitted through Ibn ‘Abbas, the sa’y performed by every pilgrim at every Hajj and ‘Umrah traces its origin directly and explicitly to this one woman’s desperate movement between these two hills in search of water for her dying child. This is not a later theological gloss added by scholars seeking to explain an otherwise unexplained rite. It is the Prophet’s ﷺ own stated aetiology for the ritual, preserved in one of the two most rigorously authenticated hadith collections in Islamic scholarship.

The Angel and the Spring of Zamzam

The same long narration continues immediately after the seventh traversal. Standing again, or according to the wording of the hadith at the point of her final approach, Hajar heard a voice, though she could see no one. She called out, “You have made me hear your voice; do you have something to help me?” And then, in the hadith’s words, “there she saw an angel at the place of Zamzam, digging the earth with his heel (or wing) until water flowed from that place.” Hajar, in the hadith’s memorable and pointed detail, immediately began scooping the water into her water-skin with her hand, trying to contain and preserve it even as it flowed, “and the water was flowing out after she had scooped some of it.”

The Prophet ﷺ is recorded, later in the same narration, making an observation about this very instinct of hers — an observation with a note of gentle regret built into it: “May Allah bestow Mercy on Isma’il’s mother! Had she let the Zamzam flow without trying to control it (or had she not scooped from it), Zamzam would have been a stream flowing on the surface of the earth.” In other words, the well that exists today as a contained, drawn spring, rather than a naturally flowing surface stream, is — in this same authentic hadith’s own account — a direct consequence of Hajar’s own protective, entirely understandable instinct to gather and preserve every drop for her son rather than let it run freely. It is a detail that humanises the entire narrative: even in the moment of miraculous relief, a frightened, thirsty mother’s first response was not composed gratitude but urgent, practical self-preservation for her child, and the Prophet ﷺ speaks of this not as a fault but with tenderness.

The Arrival of the Jurhum Tribe and the Founding of Makkah

The Bukhari narration continues beyond the immediate crisis to describe the longer-term consequences: the presence of water in an otherwise barren valley attracted a passing group of the tribe of Jurhum, who asked Hajar’s permission to settle nearby, which she granted, and the valley — until then empty desert — became, over time, the settlement that grew into Makkah. Isma’il grew up among the Jurhum, married from among them, and later, according to the wider prophetic tradition (though this specific detail extends beyond the scope of the Safa-Marwah narration itself), Ibrahim returned to the valley and, together with his son Isma’il, built the Ka’bah — the House toward which every Muslim prays and around which every pilgrim circles, standing in the same valley where a mother once ran seven times between two rocky hills because she refused to let her child die without trying everything within her power first.

Why This Story Matters to the Ritual

The theological weight of this narrative, as later tafsir literature makes explicit (examined fully in the Qur’anic Connections section), is that the sa’y is not a historical re-enactment performed for the sake of remembering an old story, still less a piece of folkloric drama. It is, in the framing offered by Ibn Kathir and other classical exegetes, an act of worship — ta’abbud — that commemorates a woman’s trust in Allah under conditions of total desperation, and that invites every pilgrim who walks the same route to bring to mind, in Ibn Kathir’s words, “his meekness, humbleness and need for Allah,” asking for the same providence that was granted to Hajar. The distinction matters, and this guide returns to it directly in the Common Misconceptions section, because a widespread but mistaken framing treats the running between the hills as valuable chiefly for its emotional or narrative resonance — “remembering what Hajar did” — rather than for its status as a divinely legislated rite whose reward and validity rest on its character as worship of Allah, following the pattern He established for Ibrahim’s family specifically.

A Note on Sources and Honesty About the Timeline

A note on authenticity and chronology: the hadith recording Hajar’s run (Bukhari 3364) is fully authentic and verified, and this guide relies on it directly. But it is worth being honest, as the brief for this guide requires, about what kind of historical claim it is. The narrator, Ibn ‘Abbas, was not an eyewitness to these events — he was a cousin of the Prophet ﷺ, born some six centuries after the traditional dating of Ibrahim, and he is transmitting an account that reaches back to him through revelation and prophetic teaching, not personal memory. This does not diminish the hadith’s authenticity as a report of what the Prophet ﷺ said; it does mean readers should understand this as sacred history transmitted through revelation and prophetic narration, in the same category as other Qur’anic and hadith accounts of the earlier prophets, rather than as an eyewitness chronicle in the ordinary historical sense.

The Prophet ﷺ and This Place

An Early, Unverified Report of a First Sa’y

Before turning to the fully verified account of the Prophet’s ﷺ sa’y at his Farewell Hajj, it is worth being transparent about an earlier claim that this guide could not verify to a satisfactory standard. Some secondary accounts, referencing the biographical compiler Ibn Sa’d, place the Prophet’s ﷺ first pilgrimage sa’y in 7 AH (629 CE), during the ‘umrat al-qada’ — the “compensatory ‘umrah” he performed after the treaty of Hudaybiyyah had prevented him from entering Makkah the year before. This is plausible and consistent with the wider seerah, but it was not independently confirmed on sunnah.com or against a primary sirah text in preparing this guide, and it rests on a secondary summary rather than a directly checked source. It is presented here as a probable but unconfirmed episode, not as an established fact with a citation behind it.

The Farewell Hajj: The Fullest Authentic Account

The definitive, fully authenticated account of the Prophet Muhammad’s ﷺ own sa’y comes from his only complete Hajj, performed in 10 AH (632 CE) and known as Hajjat al-Wada’, the Farewell Hajj — his final pilgrimage before his death later that same year. The account is preserved in one of the longest and most carefully transmitted single hadiths in the entire corpus: Sahih Muslim 1218, narrated by Ja’far ibn Muhammad (also known as al-Sadiq) from his father Muhammad al-Baqir, reporting the description given by the companion Jabir ibn ‘Abdullah, who was present throughout. This hadith is graded Authentic (sahih) and is verified in full at sunnah.com. It is, in effect, a minute-by-minute eyewitness record of how the Prophet ﷺ himself performed every stage of Hajj, including tawaf, sa’y, the standing at ‘Arafah, and the Farewell Sermon — and because Islamic pilgrimage ritual is patterned directly on his example, this single hadith functions as the primary practical template for the entire rite as performed today.

From the Ka’bah to Al-Safa

Jabir’s account places the sa’y immediately after the Prophet’s ﷺ tawaf around the Ka’bah. Having completed his seven circuits, the Prophet ﷺ returned to the Black Stone and kissed it, then went out of the mosque through the gate that led toward al-Safa. As he approached the hill, he recited aloud the very verse that names it:

﴿إِنَّ الصَّفَا وَالْمَرْوَةَ مِنْ شَعَائِرِ اللَّهِ﴾

“Al-Safa and al-Marwa are among the signs appointed by Allah.” — Qur’an 2:158

Immediately after reciting this verse, he added his own statement of intent, in words preserved in the same hadith: “I begin with what Allah has commanded me to begin.” This phrase — abda’u bima bada’a Allahu bihi — is not part of the Qur’anic text itself; it is the Prophet’s ﷺ own addition, and it establishes the fixed, universally followed practice of beginning the sa’y at al-Safa and ending it at al-Marwah, never the reverse, a point the classical commentator al-Qurtubi makes explicit in his own tafsir of 2:158, discussed in the Qur’anic Connections section below.

Standing on Al-Safa

The Prophet ﷺ then mounted al-Safa until he could see the House — the Ka’bah — from its summit, and facing the direction of the Qiblah (which, standing at al-Safa, meant facing the Ka’bah directly), he declared the Oneness of Allah and glorified Him, saying, in words the hadith records verbatim:

“There is no god but Allah, One, there is no partner with Him. His is the Sovereignty, to Him praise is due, and He is Powerful over everything. There is no god but Allah alone, Who fulfilled His promise, helped His servant and routed the confederates alone.”

He then made supplication, repeating this same declaration and the supplications that followed it three times in total — a specific, countable detail preserved by Jabir’s careful narration, and one that later scholars and pilgrim guides have taken as establishing the pattern of threefold repetition of the fixed dhikr formula at both hills, on every one of the seven circuits, not merely the first.

Descending Into the Valley: The Run

Having completed his standing and supplication at al-Safa, the Prophet ﷺ descended and began walking toward al-Marwah. The hadith is precise about what happened next, in a phrase whose Arabic preserves the exact topographical detail that gives the men’s brisk-walking portion of sa’y its rationale, examined fully in the Hadith References and fiqh sections below:

“…and when his feet came down in the bottom of the valley (baṭn al-wādī), he ran (sa’ā), and when he began to ascend he walked, till he reached al-Marwa.”

The Arabic original reads: “ثُمَّ نَزَلَ إِلَى الْمَرْوَةِ حَتَّى إِذَا انْصَبَّتْ قَدَمَاهُ فِي بَطْنِ الْوَادِي سَعَى حَتَّى إِذَا صَعِدَتَا مَشَى حَتَّى أَتَى الْمَرْوَةَ فَفَعَلَ عَلَى الْمَرْوَةِ كَمَا فَعَلَ عَلَى الصَّفَا.” The pattern the hadith describes is precise and deliberate: ordinary walking on the raised ground at either end, and a run specifically confined to the low point of the valley floor between them — a physical detail rooted in the terrain itself, not an arbitrary liturgical instruction. Reaching al-Marwah, the Prophet ﷺ “did as he had done at al-Safa” — the same ascent, the same facing of the Qiblah, the same declaration of Allah’s Oneness, the same threefold repetition of supplication.

Seven Circuits, Ending at Al-Marwah

Jabir’s narration, together with the broader consensus of the fiqh literature examined in the dedicated section below, establishes that the Prophet ﷺ completed seven such traversals in total, alternating between the two hills, with the seventh and final leg beginning at al-Safa and ending at al-Marwah — meaning that, unlike tawaf around the Ka’bah, which always returns the worshipper to the same starting point, the sa’y does not end where it began. The precise reasoning behind why the count works out this way, and its practical consequences for pilgrims today, is addressed fully in the fiqh section on the seven circuits.

The Same Hajj: Tawaf, Ramal, and the Wider Farewell Sermon

The same long narration in Sahih Muslim 1218 also records that the Prophet’s ﷺ tawaf around the Ka’bah on this occasion consisted of “seven circuits, running three of them and walking four” — a practice known as ramal, and one that this guide is careful to distinguish clearly from the running performed during sa’y, since the two are frequently and mistakenly conflated by pilgrims, a confusion addressed directly in the fiqh section below. The same hadith records the Prophet’s ﷺ prayer at the Station of Ibrahim (Maqam Ibrahim) after tawaf, and continues into the entirety of the Farewell Sermon — the abolition of blood-revenge and usury from the pre-Islamic era, the enumeration of women’s rights, and the declaration, “I have left among you the Book of Allah; if you hold fast to it, you will never go astray.” The same page of the hadith also records that the companion Muhammad ibn Abi Bakr was born to Asma’ bint ‘Umays during the outward journey to this Hajj, at the way-station of Dhu’l-Hulayfah, and that the Prophet ﷺ instructed her on how to perform the rites of Hajj while in a state of post-partum bleeding — a separate incident from the sa’y itself, but preserved on the same page of the same hadith, and worth noting for readers who go on to read the full narration.

A Companion’s Practice: Ibn ‘Umar’s Personal Du’a

Beyond the Prophet’s ﷺ own fixed formula, there is direct evidence that the earliest generation of Muslims understood the sa’y to permit free, personal supplication as well. The Muwatta of Imam Malik preserves, with what commentary describes as a sound (sahih) chain, a report — Muwatta hadith 848 (1/373), commented on in detail by the hadith scholar Shaikh Zubair Ali Zai — describing ‘Abdullah ibn ‘Umar’s own personal du’a at al-Safa: “O Allah, You have said, ‘Call on Me — I will answer you’… ” This report is significant for the Common Misconceptions section later in this guide, because it demonstrates, from within the earliest generation of the Muslim community, that making du’a in one’s own words at Safa and Marwah — beyond the Prophet’s ﷺ fixed dhikr — was a legitimate and practiced part of the ritual, not a later innovation. It stands in direct contrast to the specific, printed, per-circuit du’as circulated in some modern pilgrim booklets, which this guide addresses and corrects in full later on.

Qur’anic Connections: Surah al-Baqarah 2:158

The Text

﴿إِنَّ الصَّفَا وَالْمَرْوَةَ مِنْ شَعَائِرِ اللَّهِ فَمَنْ حَجَّ الْبَيْتَ أَوِ اعْتَمَرَ فَلَا جُنَاحَ عَلَيْهِ أَنْ يَطَّوَّفَ بِهِمَا وَمَنْ تَطَوَّعَ خَيْرًا فَإِنَّ اللَّهَ شَاكِرٌ عَلِيمٌ﴾

“Indeed, al-Safa and al-Marwah are among the symbols of Allah. So whoever makes Hajj to the House or performs ‘umrah — there is no blame upon him for walking between them. And whoever volunteers good, then indeed, Allah is Appreciative and Knowing.” — Qur’an 2:158

Asbab al-Nuzul: Two Preserved Traditions From ‘Aisha

The circumstances of this verse’s revelation are preserved in hadith, transmitted from ‘Aisha bint Abi Bakr رضي الله عنها along two distinct chains of narration — and it is important, as this guide’s research base insists, to keep these two traditions distinct rather than merging them into a single account, since both are independently authentic and both come from ‘Aisha, but by two different routes.

The first is Sahih al-Bukhari 1643 (Book of Hajj, chapter on the tawaf/sa’y between al-Safa and al-Marwah), narrated by ‘Urwa (ibn al-Zubayr) directly from ‘Aisha, graded Authentic (sahih) and verified at sunnah.com. In this narration, ‘Urwa put a question to ‘Aisha: did the wording of the verse — “there is no blame upon him” — mean that a pilgrim was permitted to omit the sa’y if he chose? ‘Aisha corrected him sharply, and her reply is worth quoting in full, because the grammatical argument embedded in it is the single most important interpretive point in this entire guide’s treatment of the verse: “Had this interpretation of yours been correct, the statement of Allah should have been, ‘It is not harmful for him if he does not perform Tawaf between them.'” She then explained that the verse was revealed specifically about the Ansar of Madinah, who, before their conversion to Islam, used to enter the state of ihram in the name of an idol called Manat, worshipped at a place called al-Mushallal, and who therefore felt, after becoming Muslim, that it would be wrong for them to walk between al-Safa and al-Marwah, since doing so had been bound up with their old devotion to Manat. When they raised this concern with the Prophet ﷺ, the verse was revealed to settle it. ‘Aisha concluded: “Allah’s Messenger ﷺ set the tradition of Tawaf between Safa and Marwa, so nobody is allowed to omit the Tawaf between them.”

The second is Sahih Muslim 1277 (Book of Hajj, in a chapter whose own title states that “Sa’i between al-Safa and al-Marwah is a pillar of Hajj, without which Hajj is not valid”), narrated by Hisham ibn ‘Urwa from his father ‘Urwa from ‘Aisha — a different transmission route from the same original narrator. Graded Authentic (sahih) and verified at sunnah.com, this is the version that names the idols explicitly as Isaf and Na’ila rather than Manat. ‘Aisha states: “Allah does not complete the Hajj of a person or his ‘Umra if he does not observe Sa’i between al-Safa and al-Marwa.” She explains that “the Ansar in the Days of Ignorance pronounced the Talbiya for two idols… fixed on the bank of the river [or shore of the sea] which were called Isaf and Na’ila. The people went there, and then circumambulated between al-Safa and al-Marwa and then got their heads shaved. With the advent of Islam they did not like to circumambulate between them as they used to do during the Days of Ignorance,” so the verse was revealed. The Arabic reads: “أَنَّ الأَنْصَارَ كَانُوا يُهِلُّونَ فِي الْجَاهِلِيَّةِ لِصَنَمَيْنِ عَلَى شَطِّ الْبَحْرِ يُقَالُ لَهُمَا إِسَافٌ وَنَائِلَةٌ.”

A closely parallel report is preserved from a different companion, Anas ibn Malik, in Sahih al-Bukhari 1648 (with a near-identical version at Bukhari 4496, in the Tafsir book), narrated via ‘Asim, both graded Authentic (sahih) and verified at sunnah.com. Here, ‘Asim asked Anas directly: “Did you use to dislike performing Tawaf between Safa and Marwa?” Anas answered: “Yes, as it was of the ceremonies of the days of the Pre-Islamic period of ignorance (jahiliyyah), till Allah revealed [2:158].” This independent companion testimony corroborates the Ansar’s documented pre-Islamic hesitation from a second angle.

These two traditions from ‘Aisha — one naming Manat at al-Mushallal, the other naming Isaf and Na’ila — are not contradictory reports to be resolved in favour of one over the other, and they are not the same hadith with a copying variant. They are two distinct, independently sound transmissions from the same original narrator, preserving what appear to be two different explanatory traditions she herself passed on at different times, through different students. Some popular sources additionally cite a version naming the idol’s location as “Qudaid” rather than “al-Mushallal” — this is simply a manuscript or translation variant of the same Manat tradition, not a third separate report, and should not be presented to readers as an additional distinct hadith.

Classical Tafsir: Al-Tabari

Al-Tabari, in his Jami’ al-Bayan, explains that “al-Safa” functions as the collective or plural-form noun for safat (smooth rock) and “al-Marwah” derives from marw (small stones or flint), with the definite article in both cases indicating that Allah means specifically the two named hills at Makkah, not rock and stone in general. He records Mujahid’s explanation of sha’a’ir as derived from ish’ar, “to notify” — meaning the two hills were made into a marker by which Allah made known to His servants a rite He had instituted, one He had commanded Ibrahim to observe when Ibrahim asked to be shown the rites of pilgrimage. On the phrase “no blame,” al-Tabari cites a report from al-Suddi stating plainly: “there is no sin upon him, but rather he attains reward” — meaning the “no blame” clause should not be read as neutral, indifferent permission, but as affirmatively virtuous and rewarded conduct.

Classical Tafsir: Ibn Kathir

Ibn Kathir opens his commentary on the verse by citing the Bukhari-route report from ‘Urwa and ‘Aisha, and adds a further report from al-Sha’bi describing Isaf atop al-Safa and Na’ila atop al-Marwah, with pilgrims touching them before Islam, and hesitating to walk between them afterward. He cites the hadith “Perform Sa’i, for Allah has prescribed Sa’i on you” as evidence marshalled by the scholars who hold sa’y to be a rukn — a pillar — of Hajj, and he also records the alternative scholarly view that sa’y is wajib rather than rukn, such that a person who omits it, whether by mistake or deliberately, can make up for the omission with a dam, a sacrificial expiation — the very disagreement this guide sets out in full, without adjudicating, in its dedicated fiqh section below. On the closing phrase, “whoever volunteers good,” Ibn Kathir preserves three explanatory possibilities held among the scholars: performing tawaf or sa’y beyond the obligatory seven circuits; performing voluntary Hajj or ‘Umrah beyond what is obligatory; or, an interpretation attributed to al-Hasan al-Basri, volunteering good works of any kind. Ibn Kathir closes his treatment with a devotional exhortation: that whoever performs the sa’y should bring to mind “his meekness, humbleness and need for Allah,” asking Allah for the same providence that was granted to Hajar — the passage this guide has already drawn on in the Story Behind the Place section above, and the clearest classical statement of what the ritual is actually for.

Classical Tafsir: Al-Qurtubi

Al-Qurtubi, in al-Jami’ li Ahkam al-Qur’an, glosses sha’a’ir Allah as “من معالمه ومواضع عباداته” — “from His landmarks and places of His worship” — the plural of sha’irah, describing the ritual markers Allah has indicated (ash’ara) to people, among which he lists the standing at ‘Arafah, the walking between Safa and Marwah, and the sacrifice. On the grammar of junah (“blame”), al-Qurtubi notes that its root sense is junuh, “bending” — the same root that gives jawanih, the ribs, because ribs bend — and that in legal Arabic this expression is ordinarily used to grant permission for an action. He then records, and corrects, exactly the misreading ‘Urwa had initially made: ‘Urwa “mistakenly thought this meant it was permissible to abandon tawaf/sa’y,” and then “he saw that the Shari’ah confirmed the fact that there is no allowance to abandon it.” Al-Qurtubi states the practical consequence plainly: “the correct practice, therefore, according to the people of knowledge, is that you begin with Safa… it is not permitted to begin with Marwah” — directly corroborating the Prophet’s ﷺ own stated practice in Sahih Muslim 1218, above. He also notes explicitly that “scholars disagree about the obligatory nature of sa’y between Safa and Marwah,” flagging the very madhhab dispute this guide addresses in full in its fiqh section.

The Grammatical Discussion: Why “No Blame” Does Not Mean Merely Permitted

This is the single point on which the deepest classical scholarship on this verse converges, and it is a point many popular guides miss entirely, treating “there is no blame upon him” as though it settled the matter in favour of bare permissibility — as though the verse were saying no more than “you may, if you like, walk between these two hills.” The classical exegetes, led by ‘Aisha’s own recorded argument, read the grammar far more carefully than that.

‘Aisha’s argument, preserved independently in both Bukhari 1643 and Muslim 1277, is a grammatical one. If the verse had intended to state that sa’y was merely permitted but not required, its wording would have needed to negate the omission of the act, not its performance — it would have had to read something like “فلا جناح عليه أن لا يطوف بهما,” “there is no blame on him if he does not go around them,” attaching the “no blame” to the failure to walk. Instead, the verse as revealed attaches “no blame” to the act of walking itself — “لا جناح عليه أن يطوف,” “no blame on him that he does go around them.” On the face of the English translation, this distinction can look pedantic. In Arabic legal and exegetical reasoning, it is decisive: a “no blame” clause attached to the performance of an act, rather than to its omission, functions not as a statement of the Shari’ah’s general indifference to whether the act happens, but as a targeted response to a specific, historically-conditioned anxiety — in this case, the Ansar’s fear that walking between the two hills would implicate them in their old devotion to Manat, or to Isaf and Na’ila. The “no blame” is directed at dissolving that specific fear, not at establishing a general legal default of optionality.

Al-Tabari’s citation of al-Suddi — that the person who performs the walking “attains reward,” not merely avoids sin — reinforces this reading from a different angle: a purely neutral permission does not carry a promise of reward attached to its exercise. Al-Qurtubi’s account of ‘Urwa’s own initial misreading, and his correction of it, shows that this was a live interpretive danger recognised and corrected within the earliest generation of Qur’anic scholarship, not a later theological gloss imposed anachronistically onto the text. Taken together, these three lines of classical evidence converge on a single conclusion: the grammatical form of Qur’an 2:158 signals that the walking between al-Safa and al-Marwah is the enjoined norm, addressed to a specific psychological and historical hesitation among early Muslims, not a general statement of bare permissibility — a conclusion each of the four schools of law then builds on in different ways, as the fiqh section below sets out in detail, but which none of them treats as a plain optional permission with no weight behind it at all. This grammatical argument is, in the assessment behind this guide’s research, the single most important interpretive point in the entire tafsir of this verse, and it is the point popular, simplified guides to Umrah rituals most often omit entirely, presenting ‘Aisha’s hadith as a simple correction of a misunderstanding rather than as the site of a substantive grammatical argument about the nature of religious obligation.

A Modern Lesson

The verse’s own closing words — “whoever volunteers good, then indeed, Allah is Appreciative and Knowing” — carry a lesson that extends well beyond the technical fiqh of an obligatory rite. Qur’an 2:158 is, on its surface, a verse about resolving a legal doubt among a group of new converts anxious not to repeat pre-Islamic error. But its deeper shape is a pattern that recurs throughout the Qur’an: Allah does not merely tolerate hesitant, scrupulous believers who worry they might be doing something wrong by continuing an old practice under a new meaning. He answers their scruple directly, corrects their fear, and then invites them past the minimum into voluntary excess — “whoever volunteers good.” The lesson for the pilgrim walking the same corridor today is not simply that the seven circuits are required. It is that anxious, first-hesitant obedience — the Ansars’ fear of doing wrong even as they tried to do right — is precisely the kind of sincerity Allah responds to with clarification, not rebuke, and that having received that clarification, the response modelled by the verse itself is not relief followed by minimalism, but relief followed by a reach for more.

Hadith References: Consolidated and Graded

On the Origin of the Rite

• Sahih al-Bukhari 3364 (Book of Prophets, Chapter 9), narrated by Ibn ‘Abbas. Grade: Authentic (sahih). The full account of Hajar’s search for water, her seven traversals between al-Safa and al-Marwah, the appearance of the angel and the spring of Zamzam, and the Prophet’s ﷺ statement: “This is the source of the tradition of the walking of people between them.” Verified at sunnah.com.

On the Revelation of Qur’an 2:158

• Sahih al-Bukhari 1643 (Book of Hajj, Chapter 80), narrated by ‘Urwa from ‘Aisha. Grade: Authentic (sahih). The Manat/al-Mushallal tradition and ‘Aisha’s grammatical correction of ‘Urwa. Verified at sunnah.com.
• Sahih al-Bukhari 1648 (Book of Hajj, Chapter 80), narrated by ‘Asim from Anas ibn Malik. Grade: Authentic (sahih). Anas confirms the Ansar’s pre-Islamic dislike of the tawaf between the two hills. Verified at sunnah.com.
• Sahih al-Bukhari 4496 (Book of Tafsir), a near-identical parallel to Bukhari 1648. Grade: Authentic (sahih). Verified at sunnah.com.
• Sahih Muslim 1277 (Book of Hajj, Chapter 43), narrated by Hisham ibn ‘Urwa from ‘Urwa from ‘Aisha. Grade: Authentic (sahih). The Isaf and Na’ila tradition, and the chapter’s own heading describing sa’y as a rukn of Hajj. Verified at sunnah.com.

On the Prophet’s ﷺ Own Practice

• Sahih Muslim 1218 (Book of Hajj, Chapter 19), the long Jabir ibn ‘Abdullah narration of the Farewell Hajj. Grade: Authentic (sahih). The ascent of al-Safa, the recitation of 2:158, the facing of the Qiblah, the threefold takbir and tahlil, the descent and run at the bottom of the valley, and the identical practice repeated at al-Marwah. Verified at sunnah.com.
• Muwatta Imam Malik, hadith 848 (1/373), on ‘Abdullah ibn ‘Umar’s personal du’a at al-Safa. Grade: reported with a sound (sahih) chain per the commentary of Shaikh Zubair Ali Zai on hadith 144 of his Sharh Muwatta. A note on authenticity: this specific hadith numbering was not independently re-verified directly against a primary Muwatta database in preparing this guide and should be treated as secondary-sourced, though the underlying report of Ibn ‘Umar’s practice is well attested in the fiqh literature on sa’y.

On the Fiqh of the Ramal/Harwala

• The rationale for the men’s brisk walking in sa’y, as distinct from the ramal of tawaf, is a matter of scholarly opinion rather than a standalone hadith text — see the fiqh section below for the reasoning offered by Ibn ‘Uthaymin and the consensus reports of Ibn al-Mundhir and Ibn Qudamah regarding women’s exemption from it.

On the Absence of Fixed Per-Circuit Supplications

• Shaykh Muhammad ibn al-‘Uthaymin’s fatwa, recorded in his Majmu’ Fatawa (22/336–337) and summarised at IslamQA, answer 109174: “There is no specific supplication (du’aa’) for each circuit of tawaf or lap of sa’i; rather allocating a specific supplication to each circuit is an innovation (bid’ah).” This is Scholarly opinion grounded in the absence of any narration establishing per-circuit supplications, examined fully in the Common Misconceptions section below.

A Note on the Two Distinct ‘Aisha Traditions

A note on authenticity: readers will notice that Bukhari 1643 and Muslim 1277 name two different idols — Manat at al-Mushallal in one, Isaf and Na’ila in the other — despite both being transmitted from ‘Aisha. Both are graded sahih. Both are genuine, independent traditions rather than variant wordings of a single report, transmitted through different chains (‘Urwa directly in one case, Hisham ibn ‘Urwa from ‘Urwa in the other). This guide preserves that distinction throughout rather than collapsing the two accounts into a single narrative, in keeping with the sourcing this guide is built on.

The Fiqh of Sa’y: A Genuine Disagreement Across the Four Schools

Rukn, Wajib, or Sunnah? The Four Schools in Their Own Terms

Whether the sa’y is a rukn (a pillar, without which the Hajj or ‘Umrah is simply invalid), a wajib (an obligatory act whose omission can be compensated by a sacrificial expiation, without invalidating the pilgrimage), or a sunnah (a strongly recommended but non-obligatory act) is a genuine, textbook disagreement among the four Sunni schools of law, and it deserves to be set out with each school’s own evidence rather than presented as though one position were simply correct and the others mistaken.

The Shafi’i school holds that sa’y is a rukn of Hajj and ‘Umrah: without it, the Hajj or ‘Umrah is invalid, and there is no substitute act — such as a sacrificial animal — that can stand in for its omission. The evidence marshalled for this position includes Sahih Muslim’s own chapter heading over hadith 1277, which explicitly states that “Sa’i between al-Safa and al-Marwah is a pillar [rukn] of Hajj, without which Hajj is not valid,” and ‘Aisha’s own hadith in the same chapter: “Allah does not complete the Hajj of a person or his ‘Umra if he does not observe Sa’i between al-Safa and al-Marwa.” It is worth noting, in fairness to the sourcing, that Muslim’s chapter titles reflect the compiler’s own fiqh framing (or that of later commentators on his text) rather than being themselves a hadith text — but the underlying hadith text they summarise is fully authentic, and the Shafi’i school treats it as establishing an unconditional pillar.

The Maliki school reaches the same practical conclusion by a related route, treating sa’y as fard — obligatory in the sense of a pillar — such that Hajj or ‘Umrah performed without it is invalid. Maliki legal method here draws on the same core hadiths cited by the Shafi’is, combined with the principle that the Prophet’s ﷺ own continuous, unvarying practice of the rite, together with his general instruction “take from me your rites of pilgrimage,” establishes it as a binding pillar rather than a merely recommended act.

The Hanafi school takes a different view, holding sa’y to be wajib — obligatory, but distinct in category from a rukn. On this view, a pilgrim who omits the sa’y, whether by mistake or deliberately, does not thereby invalidate the entire Hajj or ‘Umrah outright; instead, a dam, a sacrificial expiation, becomes due as compensation for the omission. The classical Hanafi reasoning behind this distinction rests on a broader principle of Hanafi legal method, which distinguishes obligations established by absolutely certain, overwhelmingly transmitted (mutawatir) texts — which are classified as fard, a pillar in the fullest sense — from obligations established by reports transmitted through single or limited chains (ahad reports), which, however sound, are classified as wajib, binding but of a lesser evidentiary category. Since the instruction to perform sa’y rests on the Prophet’s ﷺ Sunnah as transmitted through such reports, rather than on an explicit, singular Qur’anic command of pillar-level textual weight, Hanafi jurists place it in the wajib category, compensable by a dam rather than invalidating the rite entirely.

The Hanbali position is the least straightforward of the four to state with full confidence, and this guide follows its research dossier in saying so plainly rather than guessing. One report attributes to Imam Ahmad ibn Hanbal himself a view that sa’y is mustahabb — recommended, but not obligatory in either the rukn or wajib sense — reflecting what appears to be a cautious personal assessment of the strength of the available proofs. At the same time, most later Hanbali fiqh manuals are reported to treat sa’y as an obligatory rite functionally comparable to the wajib classification, rather than as a merely recommended act, suggesting that the school’s later, standardised position moved toward treating it as binding even if Imam Ahmad’s own earliest personal view was more cautious. A note on authenticity: this specific point — the precise, standard Hanbali position as recorded in a primary Hanbali fiqh manual such as al-Mughni by Ibn Qudamah — was not independently cross-checked against such a primary text in preparing this guide. Secondary tafsir sources describing Imam Ahmad’s position as “mustahabb” are not fully consistent with how other summaries characterise the settled Hanbali school position, and this discrepancy should be resolved by direct reference to a primary Hanbali manual before being stated with greater confidence than is offered here.

The table below summarises the four positions as set out above, without implying that any one of them is the correct or preferred view:

• Shafi’i: rukn (pillar) — Hajj/’Umrah invalid without it, no substitute permitted.
• Maliki: rukn/fard — Hajj/’Umrah invalid without it.
• Hanafi: wajib — omission does not invalidate the Hajj/’Umrah outright, but requires a dam.
• Hanbali: reported as mustahabb by Imam Ahmad in one report, though most later Hanbali manuals reportedly treat it as functionally obligatory; the precise standard position was not independently verified against a primary Hanbali text in preparing this guide.

Ibn Kathir’s own tafsir of 2:158, discussed in the Qur’anic Connections section above, preserves this same disagreement from within the classical tafsir tradition itself, citing both the hadith evidence used to argue for sa’y as a rukn and the alternative view that it is wajib, compensable by a dam — confirming that this is not a modern simplification of an older consensus, but a disagreement with deep and continuous roots in the earliest fiqh and tafsir literature.

Tahara: Purity and the Sa’y

Unlike tawaf around the Ka’bah, for which ritual purity is treated by most schools — the Shafi’i school in particular — as a stronger requirement, comparable in some respects to the purity required for prayer, the majority position across the schools is that wudu is recommended (mustahabb) for sa’y but not a strict condition (shart) for its validity. A note on authenticity: this specific position was sourced in preparing this guide only for the Shafi’i school, and only via a secondary pilgrim-guide website rather than a primary fiqh text. The corresponding Hanafi, Maliki, and Hanbali positions on tahara as a condition for sa’y specifically were not independently verified in preparing this guide, and a reader seeking the precise position of each of the remaining three schools on this point should consult a primary fiqh manual directly. In practice, the overwhelming majority of pilgrims perform sa’y in a state of wudu as a matter of general good practice and because it typically follows directly upon tawaf, for which purity requirements are firmer — but the absence of wudu is not, on the majority view, understood to invalidate the sa’y itself.

Covering the ‘Awrah During Sa’y

No special dispensation or additional requirement attaches specifically to the sa’y beyond the ordinary rules of modesty that apply to all acts of worship: men in the state of ihram cover from the navel to the knee at minimum, using the customary two-piece unstitched cloth, and women cover the entire body except the face and hands, in keeping with general fiqh consensus. The brisk walking performed by men in the central section of the route, discussed below, does not alter or relax these ordinary requirements.

Seven Circuits, and Why the Count Ends at Al-Marwah

By established scholarly and practical convention, each single traversal between the two hills counts as one shawt, one circuit: al-Safa to al-Marwah is the first circuit, al-Marwah back to al-Safa is the second, and so on, alternating consistently, such that the odd-numbered circuits end at al-Marwah and the even-numbered circuits end at al-Safa. Because seven is an odd number, the seventh and final circuit begins at al-Safa and ends at al-Marwah — meaning the pilgrim does not return to al-Safa after completing the required seven circuits, and correspondingly does not need to walk an eighth leg back to the starting point. This sequencing is explicitly recorded in the commentary of Shaikh Zubair Ali Zai on Muwatta hadith 144: “There are seven circuits (laps)… (1) From Safa to Marwa (2) From Marwa to Safa… (7) From Safa to Marwa. The seventh circuit is the last one. After this the person who is performing Umrah can cut or shave their hair.”

A cautionary ruling from the fatwa body IslamQA, addressing a real case in which a group of pilgrims mistakenly performed fourteen laps instead of seven, confirms the practical fiqh consequence of miscounting: the additional seven laps performed beyond the required count “are not counted, because they were contrary to what is required by Islamic teaching,” though the ‘Umrah of the pilgrims who erred in this way remained valid, since the required seven circuits had, in fact, been completed within the fourteen performed. The fixed number seven itself, as already established in the Story Behind the Place and Prophet ﷺ and This Place sections above, is fixed not by an independent Qur’anic verse stating “seven” explicitly, but by the confluence of Hajar’s own seven traversals in the foundational narrative of Bukhari 3364, and the Prophet’s ﷺ own seven-circuit practice at his Farewell Hajj in Muslim 1218.

The Ramal (Harwala) in the Green-Marked Section — Men Only

The brisk walking or light jogging performed during sa’y — properly termed harwala, and colloquially “the running” — is performed only by men, and only within a specifically marked central section of the mas’a, delineated today by green lights or tubes fixed to the ceiling of the corridor. This is worth distinguishing with precision from a separate and unrelated practice, ramal, which is a Sunnah act performed by men specifically during the first three of the seven circuits of tawaf around the Ka’bah, not during sa’y at all. Multiple pilgrim-guide sources caution that these two terms and practices are frequently and mistakenly conflated, including by pilgrims themselves: “These Sunnah [ramal/idtiba] do not apply during Sa’i… During Sa’i, men have a separate brisk segment (jog) between the green markers, which is a different ritual.”

The rationale behind the men’s harwala, as explained by the contemporary Saudi scholar Shaykh Muhammad ibn al-‘Uthaymin, is rooted directly in the terrain itself, echoing the Prophet’s ﷺ own practice at the bottom of the valley recorded in Muslim 1218: “In this place there was a valley, i.e., a channel for rainwater, and a valley is usually steep and sandy, so it is difficult to walk normally in it, so one has to run.” In other words, the brisk pace of the men’s central section commemorates the specific topographical difficulty of the valley floor — the baṭn al-wadi — that both Hajar, in the foundational narrative, and the Prophet ﷺ himself, at his Farewell Hajj, are recorded as having traversed at speed rather than at an ordinary walking pace.

Women do not perform this brisk walking at any point during sa’y, in any of the seven circuits, and this is a matter of recorded scholarly consensus rather than mere custom. Ibn al-Mundhir’s consensus report, preserved in later fiqh literature, states: “The people of knowledge are in agreement that there is no jogging for the women… between (the green lights of) as-Safa and al-Marwah… because the principle behind [ramal/harwala] is to show stamina and hardiness, and that is not meant for the women, because what is meant for the women is to cover themselves.” Ibn Qudamah similarly reports a scholarly consensus that women are exempted from both ramal (in tawaf) and idtiba’ (the manner of wearing the ihram cloth associated with ramal) specifically “to help them maintain concealment.” This point recurs, and is corrected directly, in the Common Misconceptions section below, because it is one of the most widely circulated points of confusion among pilgrims today.

Sequencing: Sa’y Must Follow Tawaf

All four schools agree that the sa’y must be performed after the tawaf around the Ka’bah, and after the two-rak’ah prayer that follows tawaf in schools or situations where that prayer is treated as wajib. A pilgrim who mistakenly performs sa’y before completing tawaf must return, complete the tawaf properly, and then repeat the sa’y afterward — the earlier attempt does not count. There is no requirement of strict immediate succession (muwalat) between the end of tawaf and the start of sa’y, though an excessive, unnecessary delay between the two is discouraged as a matter of convention rather than strict legal requirement.

Sa’y for the Ill, Wheelchairs, and the Upper Levels

Sa’y performed by a pilgrim who is ill or has a physical disability — including sa’y performed in a manual or electric wheelchair, or while being carried by another person — is valid. The ritual requirement at the heart of the rite is the physical traversal of the route seven times between the two named points, not any particular gait, posture, or degree of physical exertion. This is well attested by analogy with tawaf performed under similar conditions by the sick and elderly, a practice with deep historical roots. A note on authenticity: while it is uncontroversial in practice that sa’y performed while being carried or wheeled is valid, a specific hadith directly addressing sa’y under these conditions — analogous to hadiths describing tawaf performed while riding, such as those concerning Umm Salamah — was not independently re-verified on sunnah.com specifically for sa’y in preparing this guide. The ruling should be understood as a well-established and widely accepted fiqh analogy rather than as independently and directly hadith-sourced for sa’y itself in the research behind this guide. Modern Masjid al-Haram infrastructure today provides dedicated wheelchair lanes within the ground-level mas’a, alongside a separate, upper-floor lane reserved exclusively for electric carts and scooters — the practical detail of how these operate today, including current costs, is addressed in full in the Practical Visitor Guide section below.

May Sa’y Be Paused and Resumed?

The general majority position, reasoning by analogy with the corresponding rulings on interrupting and resuming tawaf, is that sa’y may be paused for a valid reason — to attend an obligatory prayer whose time has come, due to sudden illness, or in cases of urgent necessity — and then resumed from the exact point of interruption, without any requirement to restart the entire seven circuits from the beginning. A note on authenticity: this specific point was not independently verified against a primary classical fiqh text, such as al-Mughni by Ibn Qudamah or Kitab al-Umm by al-Shafi’i, in preparing this guide, and should be checked directly against such a source before being asserted with a specific citation. It is presented here as the general majority position by analogy, not as a directly and specifically sourced ruling.

Historical Development: The Mas’a Through Fourteen Centuries

The Rashidun and Early Umayyad Period

In the earliest decades of Islam, following the pattern established by the Prophet ﷺ at his Farewell Hajj, the mas’a remained substantially as it had been in pre-Islamic times: an open valley path between two exposed rocky hills, outside the walls of the sanctuary around the Ka’bah, with pilgrims performing sa’y in the open air of the city. The Rashidun caliphs undertook expansions of Masjid al-Haram itself — most notably ‘Umar ibn al-Khattab and ‘Uthman ibn ‘Affan both expanded the mosque’s courtyard to accommodate growing numbers of pilgrims — but the available sourcing for this guide did not surface a specific, separately documented expansion of the mas’a corridor itself during this earliest period, as distinct from the mosque’s central precinct.

The Abbasid Expansions

The clearest early record of deliberate work on the mas’a corridor itself comes from the Abbasid period, under the caliph al-Mahdi. Two expansions are recorded, in 160 AH (776–777 CE) and again in 164 AH (780–781 CE). The second of these incorporated a wide area to the west of the mas’a known as al-Rahbah directly into the corridor, widening the space available to pilgrims performing sa’y. These Abbasid-era works represent the first recorded instance of the Muslim state deliberately altering the physical dimensions of the mas’a corridor for the benefit of pilgrims, a pattern of periodic widening that would recur, in far larger form, in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

The Long Middle Period: A Market Street

For most of the intervening centuries — through the later Abbasid caliphate, the Ayyubid and Mamluk periods, and the first centuries of Ottoman rule — the mas’a functioned not merely as a ritual corridor but as a working public street and marketplace, sitting outside the walls of Masjid al-Haram proper. The official Saudi reference source Saudipedia records plainly that before the twentieth-century Saudi rebuilding, the mas’a “was a busy market where grains, meat, dates, ghee, and fruits were sold,” and that “Sa’ee performers used to stumble upon crowds of shoppers and climb Safa and Marwa using stairs to see al-Kaaba al-Musharrafah.” During the reign of the Abbasid caliph Abu Ja’far al-Mansur, pilgrims are recorded as having climbed twelve steps to reach the summit of al-Safa and fifteen steps to reach the summit of al-Marwah — a detail indicating that, even centuries after the Prophet’s ﷺ own lifetime, the two hills retained substantial height and required a genuine, stepped ascent, rather than being the low, largely built-over remnants visible today.

This long period of the mas’a as an active commercial thoroughfare is corroborated by an eyewitness account from the Swiss traveller John Lewis Burckhardt, who visited Makkah in 1814 CE and described the mas’a as a long, commercially bustling street, covered by an Ottoman-style arched roof, lined on both sides with shops. This account is the fullest independent description available of the mas’a’s Ottoman-era physical appearance, though it is worth noting, in the interest of full honesty about the limits of the sourcing behind this guide, that a more detailed, architecturally specific academic study of the Ottoman-period mas’a corridor itself — as opposed to the well-documented Ottoman renovations of the main prayer hall of Masjid al-Haram, carried out under Sultan Selim II in the 1570s (with the chief Ottoman architect Mimar Sinan credited with elements of the wider mosque renovation) and again under Sultan Murad IV in 1629 following flood damage — could not be located in preparing this guide. A dedicated architectural history of the mas’a corridor specifically during Ottoman rule remains, on the evidence available, an under-documented gap, one this guide flags honestly rather than filling with unsupported detail.

The Early Twentieth Century: Paving and Shade

Under the founding Saudi monarch, King ‘Abd al-‘Aziz Al Sa’ud, the mas’a received its first modern Saudi-era improvements. In 1926, the corridor was fully paved and tiled with square-cut stone, intended to protect pilgrims from dust, and the doors along its length were repainted. In 1947, King ‘Abd al-‘Aziz ordered the complete shading of the mas’a from end to end with canopies stretching from al-Safa to al-Marwah, a project commemorated with brass inscription plaques. This canopy was later removed ahead of the much larger structural expansion of the mid-1950s, reinstalled temporarily at a different Makkah street, and eventually removed permanently by 2001.

The First Saudi Expansion: 1375 AH / 1955–1956 CE

The most consequential single transformation in the mas’a’s entire architectural history took place in 1375 AH (1955–1956 CE), under King Sa’ud bin ‘Abd al-‘Aziz. For the first time since the Prophet’s ﷺ own lifetime, the mas’a — together with the two hills of al-Safa and al-Marwah themselves — was architecturally absorbed into the structure of Masjid al-Haram. Existing houses, shops, and market buildings in the surrounding Ajyad and mas’a districts were demolished to make way for the new, roofed corridor. This is the specific historical point at which al-Safa and al-Marwah, which had stood for well over a thousand years as landmarks outside the mosque proper, became structurally part of it — a pilgrim before this date left the mosque courtyard entirely to perform sa’y; a pilgrim after it does not.

This same expansion had a second, physically drastic consequence: it severed al-Safa from the larger mountain mass of Jabal Abu Qubays to which it had originally been attached, and severed al-Marwah in the same way from Jabal Qaiqan, leaving only remnant outcrops of each hill’s original rock exposed within the new structure — the precise fate of that remnant rock, and how much survives today, is the subject of its own dedicated section below. Also under King Sa’ud, construction began on a first and then a second upper floor above the ground-level mas’a, converting the corridor for the first time from a single open-air level into a multi-storey covered gallery.

The Reign of King Fahd

Under King Fahd bin ‘Abd al-‘Aziz (reigned 1982–2005), the al-Safa end of the first floor of the mas’a was expanded by approximately 130 square metres, bringing the total floor area at that end to some 375 square metres, and further buildings surrounding al-Marwah were demolished to make way for new access doors installed on the ground and first floors at the Marwah side.

The Second Major Saudi Expansion: 2007–2008 CE / 1428–1429 AH

The second transformative expansion of the mas’a took place under King ‘Abdullah bin ‘Abd al-‘Aziz, beginning after the Hajj season of 2007 and substantially complete in its first phase by mid-2008, with a second construction phase to follow after the subsequent Hajj. This project doubled the width of the corridor from twenty metres to forty metres, using an additional roughly 43,000 square metres of adjoining mosque land, and increased the mas’a’s levels to four in total — ground floor, first floor, second floor, and a mezzanine — bringing the total built area of the mas’a to approximately 125,000 square metres. The stated purpose was capacity: the expansion raised the corridor’s estimated hourly pilgrim capacity from around 44,000 to some 118,000, a more than two-and-a-half-fold increase, reflecting the enormous and continuing growth in the annual number of pilgrims performing Hajj and ‘Umrah. The project’s cost is reported at approximately SR 2.985 billion.

This expansion is, without qualification, the most significant and most publicly disputed development in the mas’a’s modern history, precisely because doubling the width of the corridor raised a genuine question of Islamic law: did the newly added ground, on either side of the historical twenty-metre-wide path, still lie within the boundaries of al-Safa and al-Marwah at all? This guide addresses that dispute in full, and without resolving it, in its own dedicated section within the Architecture chapter below, because it is, in the fullest sense, the central controversy of this entire guide’s subject.

A Note on an Unconfirmed 1995–1996 Change at Al-Marwah

One further, more specific claim requires a direct and honest flag. A reference source called Wikishia — an online Shia reference encyclopedia, cited here with appropriate caution given its more limited standing as a primary or state-verified source — states that in 1995–1996 CE, the last visibly remaining fragment of al-Marwah’s original rock was removed in order to expand pilgrim circulation space, and that a new external-facing door was opened at that end of the mas’a at the same time. This claim could not be independently confirmed against an official Saudi government or heritage-agency source — Saudipedia, the most authoritative Saudi reference source consulted in preparing this guide, does not mention this specific event, and no working citation from the Saudi Heritage Commission or the General Presidency for the Affairs of the Two Holy Mosques could be located to verify it directly. A note on authenticity: this 1995–1996 date and the reason given for it should be treated as an unconfirmed historical claim pending direct verification against a Saudi state source, not as an established fact. It is included here because it bears directly on the present-day condition of al-Marwah’s rock, addressed fully in the next section, and because the brief for this guide requires that flagged uncertainties be carried honestly into the text rather than quietly dropped.

Architecture: The Mas’a, the Two Hills, and What Remains

The Bare Rock: Original Condition of the Two Hills

Both al-Safa and al-Marwah began as bare, exposed outcrops of natural rock, without structure, decoration, or covering of any kind. Al-Safa sat at the base of the larger mountain mass of Jabal Abu Qubays; al-Marwah was connected to Jabal Qaiqan. For most of Islamic history, as detailed in the Historical Development section above, both hills retained enough height that pilgrims needed to climb a genuine stair of stone steps to reach their summits — twelve steps at al-Safa and fifteen at al-Marwah, according to the account preserved from the era of the Abbasid caliph al-Mansur.

Dimensions: Distance, Total Length, and the Genuine Spread in the Sources

As discussed in the Historical Background section above, the single-leg distance between al-Safa and al-Marwah is reported with real variation across otherwise reputable sources: approximately 394 to 395 metres according to Saudipedia and the Arabic-language reference literature, a commonly cited alternative figure of around 450 metres in a number of English-language pilgrim guides and the Madain Project, and a lower, largely uncorroborated figure of 368 metres said to describe the distance at the time of the Prophet ﷺ, before later construction lengthened the route by extending its ends to cover portions of the hills’ original bases. This guide treats the Saudipedia figure of approximately 394 metres, and its corresponding total of 2,761.5 metres for all seven circuits, as the primary citation, since it most plausibly derives from the state body responsible for surveying and maintaining the physical structure — while stating clearly, rather than concealing, that other reputable sources give figures as high as 450 metres per leg and roughly 3.15 kilometres in total. The honest range to give a reader is approximately 2.7 to 3.15 kilometres for the full seven-circuit sa’y, rather than a single misleadingly precise number.

The Ottoman-Era Arcade

The clearest surviving description of the mas’a’s pre-modern architectural character comes from Burckhardt’s 1814 eyewitness account, cited above: a long, arched, Ottoman-style covered street lined with shops, through which pilgrims walked to perform sa’y. As already noted, a more detailed academic study specifically of Ottoman-period mas’a architecture, distinct from the broader and well-documented Ottoman renovation programme applied to the Masjid al-Haram’s main prayer hall under Sultan Selim II and Sultan Murad IV, was not located in preparing this guide, and this remains a flagged gap rather than a filled one.

The 1955–1957 and Later Twentieth-Century Expansions

The 1375 AH (1955–1956 CE) expansion under King Sa’ud, described in full above, is the single most architecturally consequential event in the mas’a’s history: the moment the corridor and the two hills were brought inside the walls of Masjid al-Haram for the first time, and the moment al-Safa was severed from Jabal Abu Qubays and al-Marwah from Jabal Qaiqan. Construction of the first and second upper floors, converting the mas’a from a single ground-level passage into a multi-storey covered gallery, proceeded through the remainder of King Sa’ud’s reign and continued incrementally under King Fahd, whose reign saw the al-Safa-side first floor expanded by roughly 130 square metres and further demolition of buildings around al-Marwah to create new access doors.

The 2007–2008 Expansion: Doubling the Width

The 2007–2008 expansion under King ‘Abdullah, detailed above, doubled the corridor’s width from twenty to forty metres, added a fourth level (a mezzanine, alongside the existing ground, first, and second floors), and raised the mas’a’s total built area to approximately 125,000 square metres, more than doubling its pilgrim-handling capacity. This is the expansion whose religious legitimacy became the subject of genuine, public scholarly dispute — the controversy this guide now sets out in full.

The 2008 Mas’a Widening: The Central Controversy of This Guide’s Subject

When the width of the mas’a corridor was doubled in 2007–2008, using land adjoining the historical twenty-metre-wide path, a substantive and genuinely unresolved question of Islamic law arose: does the newly added ground, on either side of the older corridor, still fall within the historically and ritually recognised boundaries of al-Safa and al-Marwah? This question matters because the validity of the sa’y is tied, by the text of Qur’an 2:158 and by the Prophet’s ﷺ own practice, to walking specifically “between” these two named landmarks — if the widened ground lies genuinely outside that footprint, a pilgrim performing sa’y there would, on the objecting view, not be performing the rite in its legislated location at all.

Named, credentialed scholars took public positions on both sides of this question, and this guide presents them here without adjudicating between them, in keeping with the sourcing behind it.

Scholars and authorities who supported or endorsed the widening as religiously valid:

• Shaykh ‘Abdullah bin Sulayman al-Mani’ supported the permissibility of the widened mas’a, according to a fatwa compilation published by Malaysia’s Department of the Mufti.
• Dr. Wahbah al-Zuhayli, a widely respected contemporary jurist, issued a fatwa on 20 November 2008 at Universiti Sains Islam Malaysia permitting the expansion. His reasoning, as recorded in the same source, was that the length of the route between al-Safa and al-Marwah remained unchanged by the widening; that the location of the corridor was the same, only its width had increased; and that the Qur’an and Sunnah had never textually fixed the width of the mas’a, only the fact of walking its length between the two named hills — so that widening within the historically attested outer footprint of the two hills did not, in his assessment, violate any textual requirement of the rite’s location.
• Shaykh ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Sudais, Imam of the Grand Mosque, publicly urged pilgrims to avoid controversy over the matter, describing the expansion as “blessed” and stating that the responsible authorities had consulted “eminent ‘Ulama from different parts of the world” who “all supported this meritorious endeavor.”
• Egypt’s Dar al-Ifta issued a formal ruling that sa’y performed in the newly widened mas’a is valid and fulfills the obligation, reasoning that Qur’an 2:158 is general in scope, does not specify or restrict a particular width, and that consequently “the entire area between them is a place where the rite may be performed.”
• Proponents additionally invoked established jurisprudential maxims in support of their position, including “li al-ziyadah hukm al-mazid” (an addition takes the ruling of the thing to which it is added), “idha daqa al-amr ittasa’a” (when a matter becomes constrained, it is eased), and “al-dararu yuzal” (harm must be removed) — principles cited in an Indonesian academic thesis examining the dispute.

Scholars and authorities who opposed or expressed reservations about the widening:

• Shaykh Salah al-Luhaidan, at the time Chairman of the Supreme Judicial Council of Saudi Arabia, opposed the expansion in its early stages.
• Shaykh Salih al-Fawzan, a senior member of Saudi Arabia’s Council of Senior Scholars, was among those who opposed it.
• Shaykh ‘Abd al-Rahman Nasir al-Barrak is likewise cited among the opposing scholars.
• The core objection, as recorded in both the Malaysian fatwa compilation and an independent detailed article on the dispute, was that the ritually valid mas’a is strictly bounded by the historical, physically attested width between the two hills, and that widening beyond this boundary — even while preserving the original length of the Safa-to-Marwah axis — takes the pilgrim’s sa’y outside the legally defined site of the rite, since the requirement, on this view, is to walk specifically “between” the two named landmarks as historically bounded, not on adjoining land newly incorporated into the mosque.
• A further proposal reported among the expansion’s critics, recorded in the same Indonesian academic thesis, was that any needed increase in pilgrim capacity should have been achieved by adding further floors or levels above the existing footprint of the mas’a, rather than by widening its ground-level boundary outward.

The engineering and testimonial evidence invoked by proponents: A central argument advanced in favour of the expansion’s validity rested on witness testimony and surveys gathered by the Saudi authorities from individuals who had lived on or near al-Safa and al-Marwah, asserting that the two hills had originally been considerably larger and wider than the narrow strip that had survived into the mid-twentieth century, and that the newly widened mas’a therefore still fell within the true historical footprint of the original hills — their apparent narrowness by the 1950s having been, on this account, an artifact of centuries of quarrying, encroaching construction, and urban growth around them, not evidence of a fixed, narrow original width. The Malaysian fatwa compilation records this argument directly: testimony was given “by those who had lived atop the hills of Safa and Marwah, that the two hills were originally a large hill/hills.”

This guide does not adjudicate between these positions. The Saudi state proceeded with and completed the expansion, and the preponderance of officially consulted scholars, as represented in the Saudi religious establishment’s public statements, endorsed it as valid; at the same time, identifiable senior scholars — including, at the time, a sitting head of Saudi Arabia’s own Supreme Judicial Council — voiced substantive, named objections grounded specifically in the boundary question. Both positions rest on serious jurisprudential reasoning rather than casual preference, and a reader is entitled to know that the disagreement exists, who held which view, and why, without this guide pretending the matter has been settled by consensus.

Symbolism

Architecturally, the mas’a’s transformation from an open, unroofed valley path bounded by two bare hills into a four-storey, climate-controlled interior gallery embedded within the walls of Masjid al-Haram itself mirrors a wider pattern visible across the whole of the Grand Mosque’s modern history: the physical accommodation of pilgrim numbers that would have been unimaginable in earlier centuries, achieved through construction that, in this case more than almost any other site within the Haram, raises a live and substantive question about the relationship between a ritual’s fixed textual and historical location and the practical necessity of expanding that location to serve the pilgrims the rite exists for.

What Was Lost

The clearest, most tangible loss across this architectural history is physical: the two hills themselves, once tall enough to require a stepped ascent of twelve and fifteen steps respectively, have been reduced to small, largely built-over remnants, addressed in full in the next section. The open commercial life of the historical mas’a — the grain, meat, date, and ghee sellers Saudipedia describes, and the Ottoman-arched shop-lined street Burckhardt saw in 1814 — no longer exists in any form; the corridor today is a purely ritual and pedestrian space, sealed off from ordinary city commerce. And, as the controversy above makes clear, a portion of scholarly opinion holds that something less tangible but more consequential may have been lost or altered in 2008: the precise, physically bounded identity of the historical site itself, a question this guide leaves exactly where the scholars who debated it left it — open.

Archaeological Findings

This guide’s research did not surface any published, peer-reviewed archaeological excavation or scientific survey specifically of the al-Safa and al-Marwah site, its subsurface geology, or the remnant rock formations at either end of the mas’a. This is stated plainly rather than papered over: unlike some other sites of Islamic heritage in the Hijaz, where a body of published archaeological literature exists, the sourcing available for this guide did not include a dedicated archaeological study of this particular site. What is documented instead — and it is documented with reasonable specificity, drawing on Saudipedia, the Madain Project, and the more cautiously sourced Wikishia — is architectural and historical record-keeping around the site’s successive expansions and the fate of its exposed rock, treated fully in the Historical Development and Architecture sections above and in the dedicated section on the present-day rock immediately below. Readers looking for controlled excavation reports, radiocarbon dating, or geological surveys of the original hill formations will not find them here, because this guide could not locate any to cite, and it would be dishonest to imply otherwise.

Is Any Original Rock Still Visible Today, and Where?

This is one of the most frequently asked practical questions among pilgrims standing at either end of the mas’a, and it deserves a precise, sourced answer rather than a vague gesture at “ancient stones somewhere nearby.”

Al-Safa: A Small But Genuine Remnant

According to the Madain Project’s dedicated article on al-Safa, “today not much remains of the original hill as it is now covered and part of the Masjid al-Haram, only a few rocks of the tip are visible. This is where the ritual of Sa’i starts.” This is corroborated by the reference source Wikishia, which states that the visible remaining outcrop at al-Safa today stands at approximately eight metres in height. In practical terms: a pilgrim standing at the al-Safa end of the mas’a today is standing beside, and can see, a modest but genuine fragment of the original exposed rock — the same rock, on the traditional identification, that Hajar climbed and that the Prophet ﷺ himself ascended at his Farewell Hajj — incorporated into the modern structure rather than removed from it.

Al-Marwah: Markedly Less Survives

The situation at al-Marwah is different, and less generous to a pilgrim hoping to see original rock. Wikishia states that “a little part of al-Marwa remained, but in 1995–96, it was removed in order to expand the area around which pilgrims walked, and a door was opened to the outside at the end of al-Marwa,” concluding that “today only a trace has remained from al-Marwa.” As already flagged above, this specific 1995–96 date and the stated reason for the removal could not be independently confirmed against an official Saudi government or heritage source in preparing this guide, and should be treated as an unconfirmed claim pending direct verification — but the broader picture it describes, that al-Marwah today retains markedly less visible original rock than al-Safa, is corroborated by a second, separately sourced account describing the aftermath of the 1955–56 expansion: after that expansion severed al-Marwah from Jabal Qaiqan, “some rocks at the end of it” were deliberately kept “as a sign of the location of al-Mash’ar” — the ritual site — with the same preservation done at al-Safa, but noting that because two separate levels of the sanctuary existed on the al-Marwah side, two entrances were created there, one at the level of the hill’s original height and one connecting to its lower, original geological base. An informal, anecdotal online discussion among pilgrims and residents likewise describes the rocks at al-Marwah as “completely demolished,” with long-serving local imams reportedly describing both hills as originally much larger before centuries of foot traffic and construction eroded them — this last account is not an authoritative source and should be read only as a loosely corroborating impression, not as evidence in its own right.

Precise Summary for the Pilgrim

Taken together, the sourced picture is this: at al-Safa, a small amount of the original rock outcrop survives, visible and incorporated into the modern structure at the point where the sa’y begins — roughly eight metres in visible height, described by the Madain Project as “a few rocks of the tip.” At al-Marwah, considerably less survives; what remained through earlier expansions was reportedly removed in the mid-1990s to create additional circulation space and a new external door, leaving, in Wikishia’s own phrase, only “a trace.” A pilgrim wanting to stand beside visible original stone from the two hills named in Qur’an 2:158 has a genuine, if modest, opportunity to do so at al-Safa; at al-Marwah, that opportunity is, on the available sourcing, essentially gone. This is stated here as precisely as the sources allow, because it is a question pilgrims ask constantly, and a vague or evasive answer serves no one.

Stories of the Companions

Jabir ibn ‘Abdullah: The Eyewitness Narrator

Almost everything this guide has been able to state with precision about how the Prophet ﷺ himself performed the sa’y comes from a single companion: Jabir ibn ‘Abdullah, whose long, detailed account of the entire Farewell Hajj is preserved in Sahih Muslim 1218. Jabir was present throughout the Prophet’s ﷺ final pilgrimage — not a later transmitter of a story told to him by someone else, but a direct witness who walked, in effect, the same ground the Prophet ﷺ walked, close enough to see him ascend al-Safa, hear the words of his supplication repeated three times, watch him descend into the valley and run at the bottom of it, and watch him repeat the same sequence at al-Marwah. The degree of physical, almost cinematic detail in his account — the precise moment “his feet came down in the bottom of the valley,” the precise repetition of the supplication three times, the precise sequencing of the seven circuits — reflects the character of an eyewitness narration rather than a secondhand summary, and it is this quality that has made Jabir’s account, transmitted onward through Ja’far ibn Muhammad al-Sadiq and his father Muhammad al-Baqir, the single most important surviving description of the sa’y as the Prophet ﷺ himself performed it.

‘Aisha bint Abi Bakr: Narrator of the Asbab al-Nuzul

‘Aisha رضي الله عنها occupies a double role in the story of this site. She was present at the Farewell Hajj herself, alongside the Prophet ﷺ and the wider community of pilgrims. But her more consequential role in the history of this guide’s subject is as the primary narrator — transmitted through two separate chains, via ‘Urwa directly and via his son Hisham ibn ‘Urwa — of the asbab al-nuzul behind Qur’anic 2:158: the account of the Ansar’s pre-Islamic hesitation, the idols of Manat and of Isaf and Na’ila, and, most importantly for the argument this guide has emphasised throughout its Qur’anic Connections section, her own sharp grammatical correction of ‘Urwa’s initial misreading of the verse. Without ‘Aisha’s preserved testimony, the entire interpretive foundation of how classical scholarship understands “there is no blame upon him” would be considerably thinner. She is, in a very real sense, the source through whom the correct understanding of this verse’s grammar reaches every later generation of Muslim scholarship.

Anas ibn Malik: An Independent Corroborating Witness

Anas ibn Malik, narrating through ‘Asim in Sahih al-Bukhari 1648 (and its close parallel at Bukhari 4496), provides an independent companion confirmation of the Ansar’s pre-Islamic reluctance to perform the tawaf between al-Safa and al-Marwah, corroborating ‘Aisha’s account from a second angle and a different narrator entirely. When asked directly whether he had once disliked performing this tawaf, Anas answered without hesitation: “Yes, as it was of the ceremonies of the days of the Pre-Islamic period of ignorance (jahiliyyah), till Allah revealed [2:158].” This is a small but valuable piece of testimony, because it comes from someone who, unlike ‘Aisha in her account of the Ansar generally, is himself speaking in the first person about his own remembered hesitation — a personal admission rather than a report about others.

Asma’ bint ‘Umays: A Companion at the Edge of the Story

Asma’ bint ‘Umays appears on the same page of Sahih Muslim’s Farewell Hajj narration as the sa’y account itself, though her own recorded incident — giving birth to her son Muhammad ibn Abi Bakr at the way-station of Dhu’l-Hulayfah during the outward journey, and receiving the Prophet’s ﷺ instruction on how to proceed with the rites of Hajj despite post-partum bleeding — took place before the sa’y and is a distinct episode from it. It is included here for completeness and because readers who go on to read the fuller Jabir narration in Sahih Muslim 1218 will encounter it on the same page and may reasonably wonder how it connects; the honest answer is that it sits alongside the sa’y narration in the same long hadith, but is not part of the sa’y story itself.

‘Ali ibn Abi Talib: Present, But Not at the Sa’y Itself

‘Ali ibn Abi Talib is recorded in the same Muslim 1218 narration as having arrived from Yemen during the Farewell Hajj with sacrificial animals to join the Prophet’s ﷺ own sacrifice. He was present at the wider pilgrimage. The verified text of the hadith, however, does not place him specifically at the sa’y ritual in the way it places Jabir there as narrator; his recorded role in the narration concerns the sacrificial animals, not the walking between al-Safa and al-Marwah, and this guide is careful not to imply a more specific presence at the sa’y itself than the source actually supports.

‘Abdullah ibn ‘Umar: A Companion’s Own Personal Practice

‘Abdullah ibn ‘Umar’s personal du’a at al-Safa, preserved with what is reported as a sound chain in the Muwatta of Imam Malik (hadith 848), demonstrates something distinct from the other companion accounts gathered here: not a report about the origin of the rite or the revelation of the verse, but a living example, from within the first generation after the Prophet ﷺ, of how a companion actually prayed at the site beyond the Prophet’s ﷺ own fixed formula. His example is the clearest available evidence that free, personal supplication in one’s own words — not confined to a single memorised text — was understood by the earliest generation of Muslims to be a legitimate part of standing at al-Safa and al-Marwah, a point this guide returns to directly when correcting the misconception of fabricated, per-circuit du’as later on.

Ibn ‘Abbas: An Honest Note on What Kind of Witness He Was

Ibn ‘Abbas is the narrator of the single most important hadith in this entire guide — Sahih al-Bukhari 3364, the account of Hajar, Isma’il, the search for water, and the Prophet’s ﷺ own explanation that this is the origin of the sa’y. It would be easy to read past this attribution without asking what kind of witness Ibn ‘Abbas actually was to the events he describes, and the honest answer, required by the standard this guide holds itself to, is: not an eyewitness at all. Ibn ‘Abbas was a cousin of the Prophet ﷺ, born in the early seventh century CE — many centuries after the traditional dating of Ibrahim, Hajar, and the infant Isma’il, and long after the era in which the events of this narration are set. He is not reporting something he saw. He is transmitting an account that reached him through revelation and prophetic teaching, in the same category as other Qur’anic and hadith accounts of the earlier prophets and their families. This does not diminish the hadith’s authenticity as a report of what the Prophet ﷺ said and taught — Bukhari’s chain for this narration is sound, and its status as sahih is not in question. But readers deserve to understand precisely what is being claimed: a fully authentic transmission of sacred history taught by the Prophet ﷺ, not an eyewitness chronicle in the ordinary sense, and not a claim that Ibn ‘Abbas himself witnessed Hajar’s run.

Stories of Great Islamic Scholars

Imam Malik ibn Anas

Imam Malik, founder of the Maliki school, holds — as set out in full in the fiqh section above — that sa’y is a rukn, a pillar of Hajj and ‘Umrah, without which the pilgrimage is invalid and for which no substitute compensation is possible. His school’s ruling rests on the same core hadiths examined throughout this guide, combined with the broader Maliki legal principle that the Prophet’s ﷺ own continuous, unvarying practice at every pilgrimage he performed, together with his general instruction to “take from me your rites of pilgrimage,” establishes an act as a binding pillar of the rite rather than a merely recommended one. Malik’s own Muwatta additionally preserves, at hadith 848, the report of ‘Abdullah ibn ‘Umar’s personal du’a at al-Safa — meaning that the same collection carrying Malik’s ruling on the obligatory character of the rite also preserves the earliest surviving evidence for the freedom of personal supplication within it.

Imam Abu Hanifah

Abu Hanifah, and the wider Hanafi school built on his legal method, reaches a different classification for the same rite: sa’y as wajib rather than rukn, meaning that its omission — while a serious matter requiring compensation by a dam — does not by itself invalidate the entire Hajj or ‘Umrah. This distinction, examined fully in the fiqh section above, reflects a broader and distinctively Hanafi methodological principle distinguishing obligations established by texts of the highest, most certain evidentiary weight (fard) from those established by sound but more limited chains of transmission (wajib). The practical consequence for a pilgrim following Hanafi fiqh is significant: a person who, through genuine error, omits the sa’y is not told their entire pilgrimage must be repeated from the beginning, but is instead directed to a specific, bounded act of expiation.

Imam al-Shafi’i

Al-Shafi’i’s school, alongside the Maliki school, holds sa’y to be a rukn — and it is worth noting that this is the position reflected directly in the chapter heading Imam Muslim himself (or the tradition of commentary on his text) placed over hadith 1277: “Clarifying that Sa’i between al-Safa and al-Marwah is a pillar [rukn] of Hajj, without which Hajj is not valid.” Al-Shafi’i’s legal reasoning treats the specific, emphatic language of ‘Aisha’s hadiths — “Allah does not complete the Hajj of a person… if he does not observe Sa’i” — as establishing an unconditional requirement, consistent with the grammatical argument this guide has examined at length in its Qur’anic Connections section: that the “no blame” of 2:158 answers a specific historical anxiety rather than establishing bare, general permissibility.

Imam Ahmad ibn Hanbal

As discussed candidly in the fiqh section above, Imam Ahmad’s own personal position on sa’y is reported, in at least one secondary account, as mustahabb — recommended rather than strictly obligatory — a notably more cautious classification than any of the other three founding imams reached. This guide does not paper over the uncertainty in how this position is characterised across different secondary sources, nor claim a false precision about the standard, later Hanbali school position, which appears in most later manuals to have moved toward treating the rite as functionally obligatory regardless of Ahmad’s own most cautious personal formulation. This is flagged rather than resolved, in keeping with the sourcing standard this guide has followed throughout.

Ibn Kathir

Ibn Kathir’s tafsir of Qur’an 2:158, examined in detail in the Qur’anic Connections section above, is the single richest classical source this guide draws on for understanding both the pre-Islamic background of the two idols Isaf and Na’ila and the range of scholarly opinion on the obligatory status of sa’y. He preserves the hadith evidence used by scholars arguing for the rukn position and the alternative wajib-with-dam position side by side, without forcing a resolution between them within his own commentary — a model, in miniature, of exactly the kind of honest, unresolved presentation of scholarly disagreement this guide has tried to follow at greater length regarding the 2008 mas’a expansion. His closing devotional passage on 2:158, urging the pilgrim performing sa’y to recall “his meekness, humbleness and need for Allah” and to ask for the same providence granted to Hajar, remains the clearest classical statement of the rite’s spiritual purpose available in the sources consulted for this guide.

Al-Tabari

Al-Tabari’s tafsir, examined above, supplies the philological foundation for understanding both the names of the two hills and the grammatical structure of the “no blame” clause, via his citation of al-Suddi’s report that the person performing sa’y “attains reward” rather than merely avoiding sin. His methodical habit of citing multiple transmitted reports on a given point of interpretation, rather than selecting a single preferred reading and discarding the rest, is part of why his tafsir remains an indispensable primary source for the asbab al-nuzul of 2:158 examined throughout this guide.

Al-Qurtubi

Al-Qurtubi’s tafsir, also examined above, is distinguished by its explicit attention to the legal-Arabic sense of the word junah and by its direct correction of ‘Urwa’s own initial misunderstanding of the verse — a correction al-Qurtubi draws directly from the hadith material rather than constructing independently. His plain statement that “scholars disagree about the obligatory nature of sa’y between Safa and Marwah” is itself a piece of honest scholarly method worth learning from: a major classical exegete naming a live disagreement rather than concealing it behind an assertion of settled consensus.

Ibn Hajar al-‘Asqalani, al-Nawawi, and the Hadith Commentators

Although this guide’s research dossier does not preserve a specific, extended passage from Ibn Hajar al-‘Asqalani’s Fath al-Bari or al-Nawawi’s al-Minhaj devoted specifically to the sa’y hadiths at length, both stand behind the transmission and grading of every Bukhari and Muslim hadith cited throughout this guide, as the two foremost classical commentators on those two collections respectively. Their broader methodological legacy — reconciling apparently divergent narrations (such as the two distinct ‘Aisha traditions naming different idols, examined in the Qur’anic Connections section above) rather than assuming one must be mistaken — is the same method this guide has tried to apply in presenting those two traditions as genuinely distinct rather than collapsing them into a single account.

Contemporary Scholarship: Ibn Baz, Ibn ‘Uthaymin, and the 2008 Dispute

Two of the most significant contemporary Saudi scholars connected to this guide’s subject are Shaykh ‘Abd al-‘Aziz ibn Baz and Shaykh Muhammad ibn al-‘Uthaymin, both cited extensively in the Common Misconceptions section below for their rulings against tabarruk (seeking blessing) by touching stones or walls at Islamic holy sites, and, in Ibn ‘Uthaymin’s case, for his direct ruling against the practice of assigning a unique, fixed du’a to each of the seven circuits of sa’y — a ruling this guide treats as one of the most practically useful corrections it can offer a pilgrim. Alongside them, the named scholars examined in the Architecture section’s account of the 2008 mas’a expansion — al-Mani’, al-Zuhayli, and al-Sudais on one side; al-Luhaidan, al-Fawzan, and al-Barrak on the other — represent contemporary scholarship actively grappling with a live question about this specific site, in real time, within living memory, rather than settled classical doctrine handed down without dispute. This guide has presented both sides of that dispute without adjudicating between them, and it does the same here in naming the scholars involved.

Spiritual Reflection: Standing at Al-Safa and Al-Marwah

You arrive at al-Safa having just finished seven circuits around the Ka’bah, and before you have caught your breath, you are asked to climb a small rise of stone and begin again — this time not in a circle, but back and forth, along a straight line, toward a second point you cannot always see clearly through the crowd ahead of you. It is worth asking yourself, standing at that first rise, what exactly you are about to do, and why.

You are not reenacting a story for its own sake. You have read, in this guide, the account of a woman standing on this same ground — or as close to it as fourteen centuries of expansion and construction allow — with a dying child and no one in sight to help her. She did not sit and wait for a miracle. She climbed the higher ground and searched. She found nothing, and she went down and searched again from the other side. She did this seven times before water came. When you walk the same route today, in an air-conditioned gallery under electric light, with water fountains every few dozen metres and marshals directing the crowd, you are asked to bring her situation to mind — not as sentiment, but as a lived example of what trust in Allah looks like when it has nothing else to stand on.

Ask yourself, as you walk: what is it, in your own life, that you have searched for without finding, more than once, in more than one direction? What have you kept doing anyway, not because you were certain of the outcome, but because stopping felt like the greater failure? Hajar’s question to Ibrahim — “Has Allah ordered you to do so?” — and her answer to her own question — “Then He will not neglect us” — is not a formula for feeling better about hardship. It is closer to a description of what submission actually requires: acting fully, searching fully, refusing passivity, and yet trusting the outcome to Allah rather than to your own effort alone.

When you reach the brisk central section, if you are a man, and you quicken your pace along with the crowd around you, remember what you are quickening across: not an arbitrary marked lane, but the low ground of an ancient valley, the exact terrain that made ordinary walking difficult for a woman running in fear for her child’s life, and that made the Prophet ﷺ himself, centuries later, break from his own dignified walking pace into a run at the same point. If you are a woman, and you walk that same central stretch at an ordinary pace while the men around you move faster, know that this is not a lesser participation in the rite. It is the form the same worship takes for you, upheld by a recorded scholarly consensus stretching back through Ibn Qudamah and Ibn al-Mundhir, not an accommodation invented in modern times.

At each end, facing the Ka’bah, ask what it means that the Prophet ﷺ chose, at this exact point, to recite a single verse of Qur’an before saying anything else in his own words — “I begin with what Allah has commanded me to begin.” There is a discipline in that ordering: revelation first, personal intention second. You might carry the same discipline into whatever you say in your own words for the remainder of each circuit, following the example of Ibn ‘Umar rather than reaching for a memorised phrase from a printed booklet whose origin you cannot trace and whose specific attachment to “this circuit” or “that circuit” has no basis in anything the Prophet ﷺ said or did.

By the time you reach al-Marwah for the seventh and final time, you will likely be tired, and this is not incidental to the rite. Effort — sa’y, the very word this ritual is named after, means effort, striving, exertion — is built into its structure, not smoothed away by it. You are not meant to glide through this corridor untouched. You are meant to feel, in some proportionate and modern way, a fragment of what it costs to keep searching when the outcome is not yet visible, and to end that searching not in despair but in gratitude, because for you, unlike for Hajar in the moment of her run, the outcome — the completion of the rite, the mercy that follows valid worship — is not in doubt.

Practical Visitor Guide: Performing Sa’y Today

Getting There

The mas’a is fully enclosed within the structure of Masjid al-Haram, accessible from the mosque’s interior rather than as a separate destination requiring its own journey. Pilgrims typically move directly from the tawaf area around the Ka’bah toward the al-Safa end of the mas’a, entering through gates in the vicinity of Bab al-Safa (the Safa Gate) at the southern, starting end of the corridor. Additional access comes via gates near King ‘Abdul ‘Aziz Gate and Ajyad Gate, both of which feed toward the Safa/Marwah corridor from elsewhere in the mosque. A note on authenticity: this guide could not confirm a complete, current, and officially published gate-numbering map for the mas’a specifically. Gate numbers cited in informal pilgrim guides and videos — for instance, references to “Gate 72,” “Gate 74,” or “Ajyad Gate no. 5” — were not independently cross-checked against an official Saudi government map or the Nusuk app in preparing this guide, and gate numbering is known to change as renovation work continues. Readers should verify current gate numbers directly via the Nusuk app or on-site signage before relying on any specific gate number found in an older guide, including this one.

What You Will See

The mas’a today is a long, fully enclosed, air-conditioned marble gallery spanning four levels — ground floor, first floor, second floor, and a mezzanine — with a total width of up to forty metres following the 2007–2008 expansion. At the al-Safa end, a modest rise of stone, incorporated into the surrounding structure, marks the start of the route; a small amount of the original exposed rock, described in the Architecture section above as roughly eight metres in visible height, remains visible there. At the al-Marwah end, considerably less of the original rock survives, per the sourcing discussed above. The corridor is divided into multiple one-way marked lanes: general walking lanes running in both directions, a brisk-walking or jogging zone marked by green lights on the ceiling reserved for men in the central section of the route, and dedicated inner lanes reserved for elderly and disabled pilgrims. A third floor is designated exclusively for electric carts and mobility scooters, kept entirely separate from pedestrian and wheelchair traffic on the lower levels.

Where to Stand

At al-Safa, pilgrims typically pause at the base of the small stone rise, facing the direction of the Ka’bah — visible, depending on the level and the crowd, through the arched openings of the corridor — before beginning the walk toward al-Marwah, mirroring the Prophet’s ﷺ own practice of ascending the hill and facing the Qiblah before beginning his supplication. The same is repeated at al-Marwah at the end of each circuit. Given the density of modern crowds, few pilgrims are able to physically ascend the small remnant of rock itself in the way the Prophet ﷺ ascended a considerably taller hill in his own era; standing at its base facing the Ka’bah’s direction, and reciting Qur’an 2:158 upon this first approach to al-Safa, fulfils the same essential act.

Best Time to Perform Sa’y

General pilgrim consensus, reflected across multiple guide sources, is that the late night and pre-dawn hours, and the period immediately following Fajr prayer, tend to be markedly less crowded than midday and the hours following Maghrib and ‘Isha prayers, particularly during Ramadan and the Hajj season, broadly mirroring the crowd patterns of Masjid al-Haram as a whole. A note on authenticity: no single authoritative, dated, official source specifically documenting crowd-density patterns for the mas’a corridor, as distinct from the mosque generally, was directly consulted in preparing this guide. This guidance reflects general pilgrim-guide consensus rather than official, time-stamped crowd data, and readers planning a visit during a peak season should check the Nusuk app or current Saudi Ministry of Hajj and Umrah guidance for more precise, current information.

Realistic Duration

Given the total walking distance of the full seven circuits — approximately 2.7 to 3.15 kilometres, depending on which single-leg distance figure is used, as discussed in the Historical Background and Architecture sections above — an able-bodied adult walking at an unhurried pace, pausing for du’a at each end of every circuit, can reasonably expect the full sa’y to take somewhere between forty-five minutes and an hour and a half. A note on authenticity: this estimate is a reasonable extrapolation from the known distance and a typical walking pace with pauses, not a figure drawn from a single authoritative timed source. No official Ministry of Hajj and Umrah or Nusuk-published average-duration statistic for the mas’a specifically was located in preparing this guide, and the true figure will vary considerably with crowd density, physical ability, and how much time is spent in extended personal du’a at each end. Elderly pilgrims, those with mobility difficulties, and larger family groups moving together should expect to take longer, particularly if using the ground-level wheelchair lanes during a busy period.

Wheelchair and Mobility Access

Free manual wheelchairs are provided by the General Authority for the Care of the Two Holy Mosques at a number of designated gates, including King ‘Abdul ‘Aziz Gate, Gate 74, Ajyad Gate, and points near the start of the sa’y route, generally without any requirement for advance booking; pilgrims are typically asked to register an identifying document, such as a passport, as a form of deposit. Free wheelchairs and golf carts are additionally made available for pilgrims with a verified disability certificate and for children under six years of age, and a fifty percent discount on paid cart services applies to pilgrims aged sixty-five and above.

Paid electric scooter and cart services, historically booked through the Tanaqol or Nusuk mobile applications, have been reported at the following approximate rates in guides dated through 2025: a single-seat scooter for tawaf only at SAR 57.50; a single-seat scooter for sa’y only at SAR 57.50; a single-seat scooter for a full Umrah covering both tawaf and sa’y at SAR 115; and corresponding double-seat rates of SAR 115, SAR 115, and SAR 230 respectively. A note on authenticity: more recent reporting, dated into 2026, describes a significant shift toward attendant-operated “smart golf carts” replacing electric scooters, alongside a marked rise in prices — one 2026-dated report states that the official golf cart rate for a complete Umrah rose from approximately SR 100 to SR 300 per person within roughly a year, that manual wheelchairs with an attendant (“captain”) cost approximately SR 200 for a full Umrah, that electric scooters were reported as no longer available inside the Haram at the time of that report, and that payment for cart bookings had shifted to a card-only system with no cash accepted. A separate, privately operated weekly electric wheelchair rental — self-directed, without an attendant — is advertised at SAR 100 per day with a minimum seven-day hire, totalling SAR 700, though this is a private service rather than an official Haram-operated rate. Given this genuine volatility — prices that have reportedly tripled within about a year, and conflicting reports about whether scooters remain available at all — this guide recommends treating any specific price quoted here, including the figures above, as illustrative and subject to change, and booking exclusively through the official Tanaqol or Nusuk applications rather than through unofficial vendors, ideally at least a day in advance during Ramadan or Hajj season. Common pickup and booking points cited across multiple sources include Plaza Point at the Al-Shubaika Bridge (Gate 64), the Ajyad Bridge near Gate 4 opposite the Al-Safwa Towers, Al-Qshashiyah Point, and a counter located on the third floor at the sa’y starting point.

Etiquette

Maintain your lane discipline: the corridor’s one-way system exists because of the sheer density of pilgrims moving through it at any given time, and stepping against the flow of traffic, even briefly, creates a bottleneck that can affect hundreds of people behind you. Keep the brisk central lane clear for the men performing harwala if you are not doing so yourself, whether because you are a woman, because you are walking with a group at a slower pace, or because you are using a wheelchair lane. Lower your voice during personal du’a; the corridor is not silent, but it does not need to be louder than the number of people in it already makes it.

Do and Do Not

• Do recite Qur’an 2:158 upon your first approach to al-Safa, followed by the Prophet’s ﷺ own words, “I begin with what Allah has commanded me to begin,” before starting your first circuit.
• Do face the direction of the Ka’bah at both al-Safa and al-Marwah at the end of each circuit, and repeat the takbir and tahlil formula preserved in Sahih Muslim 1218 three times, as the Prophet ﷺ did.
• Do make free, personal du’a in your own words for the remainder of each circuit, following the example of Ibn ‘Umar rather than a fixed, printed text.
• Do not walk against the flow of the one-way lanes, even to take a photograph or rejoin a family member.
• Do not touch the remnant rock at al-Safa or al-Marwah, or any wall, door, or structure within the mas’a, seeking blessing by physical contact — this practice has no basis in the Sunnah, as the Common Misconceptions section below sets out in full.
• If you are a woman, do not enter the green-marked brisk-walking lane at any point in any circuit — this is reserved for men, and women walking in it are not performing a fuller or more complete version of the rite by doing so.
• Do not rely on printed booklets or phone applications that assign a different, specific du’a to each of the seven circuits — this practice has no basis in the Sunnah, and the correction is set out in full below.

Photography

Photography within the mas’a is generally tolerated at a personal level but should never come at the cost of blocking the flow of pedestrian traffic, particularly in the brisk central lane. Pilgrims should be mindful that the corridor, at almost any hour outside the very early morning, is operating at or near its practical crowd capacity, and stopping to compose a photograph creates a physical obstruction in a way that would not be true in an open plaza.

Accessibility

Beyond the wheelchair and electric cart provisions detailed above, the mas’a’s ground-level dedicated lanes for elderly and disabled pilgrims, and the entirely separate third-floor electric-vehicle-only level, represent a purpose-built accessibility infrastructure that did not exist in the corridor’s pre-twentieth-century, open-air form. A pilgrim unable to complete the sa’y on foot, whether due to age, illness, injury, or permanent disability, can complete the full and valid rite by wheelchair, cart, or by being carried, as set out in the fiqh section above — the validity of the rite rests on the physical traversal of the route seven times, not on any specific manner of doing so.

Visiting With Children

Young children old enough to walk the route can participate directly, though the crowd density and the length of the corridor — up to 3.15 kilometres across all seven circuits — make it a genuinely demanding walk for a small child, and parents should plan for rest, hydration, and the real possibility of needing to carry a tired child for some portion of the route. Children under six are eligible for free wheelchair or cart access alongside a parent or guardian, per the provisions described above. It is worth using the walk itself as an occasion to explain, in age-appropriate terms, the story of Hajar and Isma’il that gives the rite its entire meaning — a story that, unlike much of Islamic history, centres a mother and a small child, and one that most children find immediately graspable and moving once it is told to them plainly.

Common Mistakes

The most frequent practical mistake is miscounting the seven circuits, particularly in a crowded or emotionally intense moment — the IslamQA ruling discussed in the fiqh section above, addressing a group of pilgrims who performed fourteen laps by mistake, is not a hypothetical scenario but a documented real case. Counting deliberately, out loud or on the fingers, at the moment of turning at each hill, is a simple and effective safeguard. A second common mistake is beginning at al-Marwah rather than al-Safa, whether due to disorientation in a crowded corridor or simple unfamiliarity with the correct sequence — al-Qurtubi’s own tafsir, cited above, states plainly that beginning at Marwah is not permitted, and a pilgrim who does so by mistake should return to al-Safa and begin the count again from there. A third is treating the green-lit central lane as open to all pilgrims regardless of sex, addressed in full in the next section.

Common Misconceptions

“The Running Is a Re-Enactment Performed for Its Own Sake”

A widespread but mistaken framing treats the entire sa’y, and particularly its more dramatic elements — the run at the bottom of the valley, the story of Hajar’s search — as a piece of historical theatre, valuable chiefly for its emotional or narrative power: a way of “remembering what Hajar did.” This is not how the classical sources present the rite. The Qur’an itself does not describe the sa’y as a re-enactment; it describes the two hills as being “among the symbols (sha’a’ir) of Allah,” a term the classical exegetes — al-Tabari in particular, examined above — gloss as ritual markers of worship legislated by Allah, tracing back to instructions given to Ibrahim himself, not as a folkloric commemoration whose primary value lies in its storytelling. Ibn Kathir’s own devotional exhortation on this verse, quoted at length in the Qur’anic Connections section, frames the correct internal state during sa’y as recollection of “meekness, humbleness and need for Allah” — an act of worship modelled on Hajar’s example, not a dramatization of her story performed for its sentimental value. The correction for a pilgrim to carry into the corridor: the reward and validity of sa’y rest on its character as divinely ordained worship, following the pattern established for Ibrahim’s family, not on how vividly or emotionally one manages to imagine Hajar’s original run while performing it.

“Women Must Run in the Green Zone”

This is incorrect, and it is incorrect not as a matter of modern convenience but as a matter of explicit, recorded scholarly consensus. As detailed in the fiqh section above, Ibn al-Mundhir records ijma’ — consensus — that women do not jog or run at any point during sa’y, including within the green-lit zone, specifically in order to preserve modesty and avoid the bodily exposure and movement that harwala, brisk jogging, can cause. Ibn Qudamah reports the same consensus regarding both ramal in tawaf and idtiba’, explaining the exemption as existing “to help them maintain concealment.” A pilgrim guide’s practical instruction to visitors states the correction plainly: “Don’t Walk in the Jogging Lane (Women): Women should not jog between the green lights. Stay in the walking lanes.” This misconception likely arises from a simple observational confusion — pilgrims see the green-lit lane exists and is actively used by men, and infer, incorrectly, that it represents an obligation applying to every pilgrim regardless of sex, rather than a specifically male-only element of the rite.

Rock-Touching for Blessing

There is no basis in the Sunnah for touching the remaining exposed rock at al-Safa or al-Marwah, or any wall, door, or window of the mosque structure, in order to seek blessing (tabarruk) through physical contact. A specific Arabic-language fatwa addressing this exact point states directly: “nothing has been reported in the Sunnah indicating the legitimacy of seeking blessing by touching the Black Stone or any of the stones of the Ka’bah” — and, by clear extension, any other stones within the sanctuary — describing the practice as “an introduced innovation which must be warned against.” Shaykh Ibn ‘Uthaymin, addressing an analogous question about touching Mount ‘Arafah for blessing, states the underlying principle with equal clarity: “everyone who worships Allah in a manner that has not been prescribed by Allah is an innovator… there is nothing special about this mountain” beyond the specific, textually established Sunnah of standing there for the rite Allah has actually legislated — reasoning that applies with equal force to touching the rock of al-Safa or al-Marwah outside the prescribed rite of walking, reciting, and supplicating. Shaykh ‘Abd al-‘Aziz ibn Baz rules, in the same vein, that touching the doors, walls, or windows of Masjid al-Haram or Masjid an-Nabawi for blessing “is a bid’ah for which there is no basis… acts of worship are tawqifiy [bound by revealed text] and it is not permissible to do any act of worship except those approved by the Shari’ah.”

A note on authenticity: at least one apologetic or comparative source cites Qur’an 2:158 itself — “Safa and Marwa are among the symbols of Allah” — as evidence that tabarruk in general is permissible in Islam, reasoning that the two hills being called “symbols” implies a form of sanctioned blessing attached to them. This is a minority, apologetic line of argument rather than an established fiqh ruling permitting the specific physical act of touching the rock for personal blessing, and it should not be read as scholarly endorsement of rock-touching. The mainstream fiqh position represented by Ibn Baz, Ibn ‘Uthaymin, and the fatwa cited above distinguishes clearly between the legislated ritual acts of the rite itself — walking, reciting, supplicating — and an invented, non-legislated physical gesture of touching stone for barakah, and treats only the former as valid worship.

Fabricated Du’as Circulated for Specific Circuits

This is, in the assessment behind this guide, one of the most widespread and most usefully corrected misconceptions connected to the entire site. There is no authentic, specific supplication fixed by the Prophet ﷺ for each individual circuit of sa’y — nor, for that matter, of tawaf. Shaykh Ibn ‘Uthaymin’s fatwa on this exact point could not be stated more directly: “There is no specific supplication (du’aa’) for each circuit of tawaf or lap of sa’i; rather allocating a specific supplication to each circuit is an innovation (bid’ah), because that was not narrated from the Prophet ﷺ. The most that was narrated is to say takbeer when touching the Black Stone and to say ‘Our Lord, give us in this world that which is good…’ [Qur’an 2:201] between the Yemeni Corner and the Black Stone [during tawaf]. As for the rest, it is dhikr in general and Qur’an and du’a, and there is nothing that is specifically to be recited in one circuit and not another.”

And yet printed pilgrim booklets, mobile applications, and popular pamphlets in wide circulation today routinely assign a different, fixed Arabic du’a to each of the seven laps of sa’y — a “du’a for the first round,” a distinct “du’a for the second round,” and so on — a practice that has no basis whatsoever in the authentic Sunnah and that a specialist fatwa has explicitly identified by name as an innovation. The only elements of the sa’y that are textually fixed by the Prophet’s ﷺ own recorded practice are: first, the recitation of Qur’an 2:158 upon the first approach to al-Safa, together with the statement “I begin with what Allah has commanded me to begin”; second, the takbir and tahlil formula recited three times at both al-Safa and al-Marwah, repeated identically on every one of the seven circuits rather than varying by circuit number; and third, free, personal du’a and dhikr in one’s own words for the remainder of the walk, a practice directly attested by ‘Abdullah ibn ‘Umar’s own example, preserved in the Muwatta, which the commentary on that hadith explicitly notes shows “that making other duas at Safa and Marwa is allowed” — not restricted to a single fixed text, and certainly not restricted to seven different fixed texts assigned one per circuit.

The practical correction for a pilgrim standing in the mas’a today, holding a printed booklet or a phone application: if that material assigns a unique, different, memorized Arabic supplication to “round one,” “round two,” and so on through “round seven,” it is following a widely circulated but baseless innovation, not an authentic prophetic practice. The only fixed liturgical elements are the Qur’anic recitation at the very first approach to al-Safa and the repeated takbir and tahlil formula at both ends on every circuit; everything beyond that is legitimately open, personal du’a, to be made in whatever words carry the pilgrim’s own need before Allah.

Lesser-Known Facts

The mas’a corridor functioned as a working public marketplace — selling grain, meat, dates, ghee, and fruit — for most of Islamic history, right up until the twentieth-century Saudi rebuilding; pilgrims performing sa’y in earlier centuries were, quite literally, weaving between shoppers and market stalls on their way between the two hills, a far cry from the sealed, purpose-built ritual gallery that exists today.

During the era of the Abbasid caliph Abu Ja’far al-Mansur, reaching the summit of either hill required a genuine climb: twelve stone steps at al-Safa and fifteen at al-Marwah, indicating both hills retained substantial height — considerably more than the modest remnant visible today — for centuries after the Prophet’s ﷺ own lifetime.

Before the 1955–56 Saudi expansion physically separated them, al-Safa was not an independent hill at all in the fullest geological sense: it was the exposed base of a much larger mountain mass, Jabal Abu Qubays, and al-Marwah was similarly attached to a separate mass called Jabal Qaiqan. The two familiar “hills” pilgrims picture today are, geologically speaking, severed fragments of two larger mountains that once stood at the edge of the sanctuary.

The precise distance between the two hills is not settled in the available sources, with figures ranging from roughly 368 metres (a low-confidence claim describing the distance said to exist at the time of the Prophet ﷺ) to 394–395 metres (the figure used by the official Saudi reference source Saudipedia) to as much as 450 metres in a number of English-language pilgrim guides — a genuine, unresolved spread rather than a single settled number, worth knowing before repeating any one figure as though it were beyond dispute.

The word mas’a, the name of the corridor itself, and sa’y, the name of the ritual, share the same Arabic root — the corridor is named directly after the act performed within it, rather than after either of the two hills it connects.

The brisk walking performed by men in the central section of the route is not, technically, called ramal — a term properly reserved for the men’s brisk walking during the first three circuits of tawaf around the Ka’bah. The sa’y version of brisk walking has its own distinct name, harwala, and pilgrim guides note this distinction is one of the most commonly confused points of terminology in the entire ritual vocabulary of Hajj and ‘Umrah.

A 2007–2008 construction project that, on its surface, looks like a straightforward capacity upgrade — doubling a corridor’s width to handle more foot traffic — in fact triggered a genuine dispute among named, senior Islamic scholars, including a sitting head of Saudi Arabia’s Supreme Judicial Council, over whether the very ground being added was religiously part of the site being expanded at all. Few, if any, other modern construction projects connected to Islamic ritual practice have generated a comparably serious and public juristic controversy.

Two separate, independently sound hadith traditions — both traced back to ‘Aisha, but through two different transmission routes — name two different idols as the reason behind the Ansar’s pre-Islamic hesitation over the sa’y: one names Manat, worshipped at al-Mushallal; the other names Isaf and Na’ila. Both are authentic. Neither is a mistaken variant of the other.

Timeline

• Traditional, pre-historical dating: Ibrahim عليه السلام leaves Hajar and the infant Isma’il عليه السلام near the future site of the Ka’bah; Hajar runs seven times between al-Safa and al-Marwah searching for water; the spring of Zamzam appears through an angel’s intervention (Sahih al-Bukhari 3364).
• Pre-Islamic period (jahiliyyah), undated: the idols Isaf and Na’ila, according to Ibn al-Kalbi’s Kitab al-Asnam and al-Sha’bi’s report cited by Ibn Kathir, are venerated and said to stand atop al-Safa and al-Marwah respectively; separately, the Ansar’s practice of entering ihram in the name of the idol Manat at al-Mushallal or Qudaid creates the specific hesitation later addressed by Qur’an 2:158.
• 629 CE / 7 AH: a secondary account, referencing Ibn Sa’d, places the Prophet’s ﷺ first pilgrimage sa’y during the ‘umrat al-qada’ following the treaty of Hudaybiyyah. Not independently verified on sunnah.com or against a primary sirah source in preparing this guide; treated as probable but unconfirmed.
• Undated, early Madinan period: Qur’an 2:158 is revealed, addressing the Ansar’s hesitation. The exact year within the Madinan revelation period was not pinned down by any source consulted in preparing this guide.
• 632 CE / 10 AH: the Prophet’s ﷺ Farewell Hajj (Hajjat al-Wada’); his own sa’y is performed and narrated in full by Jabir ibn ‘Abdullah (Sahih Muslim 1218).
• 160 AH / 776–777 CE: first Abbasid-era expansion of the mas’a under Caliph al-Mahdi.
• 164 AH / 780–781 CE: second Abbasid-era expansion, incorporating the area known as al-Rahbah into the mas’a.
• 1570s CE: Ottoman renovation of Masjid al-Haram under Sultan Selim II, with the chief architect Mimar Sinan credited in the wider mosque renovation programme; not specifically documented as a mas’a-corridor project in the sources consulted.
• 1629 CE: Ottoman renovation under Sultan Murad IV following flood damage, adding a new stone arcade to the mosque generally.
• 1814 CE: the Swiss traveller John Lewis Burckhardt records an eyewitness description of the mas’a as an open, Ottoman-arched, shop-lined commercial street.
• 1926 CE: paving and tiling of the mas’a with square-cut stone, completed under King ‘Abd al-‘Aziz.
• 1947 CE: complete shading and canopy installation across the length of the mas’a, under King ‘Abd al-‘Aziz.
• 1375 AH / 1955–1956 CE: the first Saudi expansion. The mas’a and the two hills are architecturally integrated into Masjid al-Haram for the first time; multi-storey construction of the first and second floors begins under King Sa’ud; al-Safa is physically severed from Jabal Abu Qubays, al-Marwah from Jabal Qaiqan.
• Reign of King Fahd (1982–2005): the al-Safa-side first floor is expanded by approximately 130 square metres, to a total of 375 square metres; buildings surrounding al-Marwah are demolished to allow new access doors.
• 1995–1996 CE: a reported removal of the last visible original rock remnant at al-Marwah, to expand pilgrim circulation space, with a new external door opened at that end. Sourced only to Wikishia; flagged as needing independent confirmation against an official Saudi source.
• 2007–2008 CE / 1428–1429 AH: the second major Saudi expansion, under King ‘Abdullah. The mas’a’s width is doubled from twenty to forty metres; the number of levels increases to four, including a mezzanine; pilgrim capacity rises from an estimated 44,000 to approximately 118,000 per hour; the cost is reported at approximately SR 2.985 billion. This is the expansion whose religious legitimacy became the subject of the named scholarly dispute set out in full in the Architecture section above.
• 2025–2026 CE: the mas’a operates today across four levels, with dedicated wheelchair and electric-cart lanes, app-based booking through Tanaqol and Nusuk for mobility services, and continually adjusted pricing for cart and wheelchair services, detailed in full in the Practical Visitor Guide section above.

Key Lessons

Historical

The history of al-Safa and al-Marwah is a history of a rite surviving, and repeatedly outlasting, the physical structures built around it. The hills themselves have been quarried down to fragments, severed from the mountains that once anchored them, absorbed into a building they long stood outside of, and doubled in surrounding width in a project that some of the very scholars entrusted with judging its validity opposed. Through every one of these changes, the seven circuits between two named points, walked in the sequence the Prophet ﷺ established, have continued. The lesson is not that physical continuity does not matter — this guide has taken pains throughout to answer, as precisely as the sources allow, exactly how much of the original rock survives and where. It is that the rite’s authority does not depend on the survival of the rock alone; it depends on unbroken practice tracing back through the Prophet’s ﷺ own Farewell Hajj to Hajar’s original run.

Spiritual

Sa’y commemorates a woman’s response to an apparently hopeless situation: not despair, and not passive waiting, but repeated, physical, visible effort, undertaken in trust that Allah would not neglect her because she had been placed in that valley by His command rather than by chance or by human cruelty. The lesson available to every pilgrim who performs the same seven circuits today is that trust in Allah is not the opposite of effort. It is what makes effort bearable when its outcome cannot yet be seen.

Personal

‘Aisha’s grammatical correction of ‘Urwa is a lesson in intellectual honesty that has nothing to do with pilgrimage rites specifically: a plausible-sounding reading of a text, arrived at quickly and without checking it against the fuller context, can be confidently wrong even when advanced by a serious and careful person. The corrective was not shame but patient explanation, and ‘Urwa’s willingness to be corrected, rather than to defend his first reading out of pride, is itself part of why his transmission of the corrected account survives as reliably as it does.

Practical

The most common practical failures at this site are not failures of devotion but failures of attention: losing count of the seven circuits in a crowded corridor, beginning at the wrong hill, assuming a fixed du’a from a printed booklet carries the same authority as the Prophet’s ﷺ own words, or assuming a rule that applies to one sex applies equally to both. None of these require deep scholarship to avoid. They require the pilgrim to walk into the mas’a already knowing, in plain terms, what is fixed by the Sunnah and what is not — which is the single most practically useful thing this guide has tried to supply.

Authentic Sources

Primary Islamic Sources

• The Noble Qur’an — Surah al-Baqarah 2:158, together with its surrounding verses on Hajj in Surah al-Baqarah 2:196–203.
• Sahih al-Bukhari 1643 — sunnah.com/bukhari:1643 — ‘Urwa’s report from ‘Aisha on the revelation of 2:158 and the idol Manat.
• Sahih al-Bukhari 1648 — sunnah.com/bukhari:1648 — Anas ibn Malik’s confirmation of the Ansar’s pre-Islamic reluctance.
• Sahih al-Bukhari 4496 — sunnah.com/bukhari:4496 — near-identical parallel to Bukhari 1648, in the Book of Tafsir.
• Sahih al-Bukhari 3364 — sunnah.com/bukhari:3364 — Ibn ‘Abbas’s account of Hajar, Isma’il, the seven traversals, and the origin of the sa’y.
• Sahih Muslim 1277 — sunnah.com/muslim:1277 — Hisham ibn ‘Urwa’s report from ‘Urwa from ‘Aisha, naming Isaf and Na’ila.
• Sahih Muslim 1218 — sunnah.com/muslim:1218 — Jabir ibn ‘Abdullah’s long narration of the Farewell Hajj, including the Prophet’s ﷺ own sa’y.
• Muwatta Imam Malik, hadith 848 (1/373) — ‘Abdullah ibn ‘Umar’s personal du’a at al-Safa, commented on in Shaikh Zubair Ali Zai’s Sharh Muwatta Imam Malik, hadith 144 — salafiri.com.

Caution on primary sirah sources: this guide draws, in places, on secondary summaries referencing Ibn Sa’d’s al-Tabaqat al-Kubra for the dating of the Prophet’s ﷺ first pilgrimage sa’y, and on the historical, non-hadith material of Ibn al-Kalbi’s Kitab al-Asnam for the pre-Islamic legend of Isaf and Na’ila. These are historical and biographical sources rather than hadith collections subject to the same isnad-grading standard as Bukhari and Muslim; Ibn al-Kalbi in particular is regarded by hadith critics as an unreliable narrator for legal hadith, though his historical reports on pre-Islamic religion are conventionally cited by exegetes as background material rather than as proof-texts. Where this guide relies on such sources, it has said so explicitly rather than presenting them with the same evidentiary weight as a hadith graded sahih by Bukhari or Muslim.

Classical Scholars

• Ibn al-Kalbi, Kitab al-Asnam (“The Book of Idols”) — archive.org.
• Al-Tabari, Jami’ al-Bayan ‘an Ta’wil Ay al-Qur’an — tafseerquran.com; Arabic text at quran.ksu.edu.sa.
• Ibn Kathir, Tafsir al-Qur’an al-‘Azim — surahquran.com; quran.com.
• Al-Qurtubi, al-Jami’ li Ahkam al-Qur’an — archive.org; cross-referenced at Islam Stack Exchange.
• Ma’ariful Qur’an, tafsir of 2:158 — quran.com.
• Sayyid Sabiq, Fiqh al-Sunnah, Volume 5, chapter on Sa’i — islamicstudies.info.
• Muhammad Jawad Mughniyya, The Five Schools of Islamic Law, comparative madhhab material on sa’y — al-islam.org.
• Ibn Qudamah’s and Ibn al-Mundhir’s reported consensus on women’s exemption from ramal/harwala — cited in islamweb.net and alimanlight.com.
• Shaykh Muhammad ibn al-‘Uthaymin, Majmu’ Fatawa, 22/336–337, on the absence of a specific du’a per circuit — IslamQA 109174; on the rationale for the men’s harwala — IslamQA 175579.
• Shaykh ‘Abd al-‘Aziz ibn Baz, ruling against tabarruk by touching mosque walls and doors — abdurrahman.org (PDF).

Modern Academic and Reference Sources

• Saudipedia, “Safa and Marwa” — saudipedia.com.
• Saudipedia, “What Is al-Masa’a?” — saudipedia.com.
• Madain Project, “al-Safa” — madainproject.com; “al-Masa’a” — madainproject.com.
• Wikipedia, “Safa and Marwa” — en.wikipedia.org; “Isaf and Na’ila” — en.wikipedia.org; “Religion in pre-Islamic Arabia” — en.wikipedia.org; “Masjid al-Haram” — en.wikipedia.org.
• Arabic Wikipedia, “الصفا والمروة” — ar.wikipedia.org.
• Wikishia, “Sa’y” — en.wikishia.net (used cautiously for the Marwah rock-removal claim, flagged for independent verification throughout this guide).
• Fatwa and scholarly-dispute documentation on the 2008 mas’a expansion: Malaysian Department of the Mufti — muftiwp.gov.my; meshhoor.com — meshhoor.com; Dar al-Ifta al-Misriyyah — dar-alifta.org; construction progress reporting — twocircles.net; Shaykh al-Sudais’s public statement — twocircles.net; academic thesis, UIN Malang — etheses.uin-malang.ac.id (PDF).
• Practical and current visitor information: Wego Travel Blog, “Wheelchair Hajj Guide 2026” — blog.wego.com; prayertimesksa.com, on booking electric scooters — prayertimesksa.com; Assist Haramain, on electric wheelchair rental — assist.haramain.com; Saudi Tourism News, on rising mobility costs — sauditourismnews.com; theislamicinformation.com, on cart pricing and locations — theislamicinformation.com.
• IslamQA, on the fourteen-lap miscounting case — IslamQA 137928.
• Islamweb.net, Arabic-language fatwa on tabarruk by touching stones — islamweb.net; IslamQA, on visiting Mount ‘Arafah — IslamQA 32846.

A Note on Method

This guide has tried, throughout, to distinguish clearly between what is authentic and verified against a primary hadith database (the material of Bukhari, Muslim, and the Muwatta cited above), what is classical tafsir and fiqh built on that authentic material but representing scholarly interpretation and genuine disagreement rather than a single settled ruling (the fiqh of the four madhhabs, and the classical tafsir of al-Tabari, Ibn Kathir, and al-Qurtubi), what is historical or legendary material transmitted with a weaker or non-hadith chain (the pre-Islamic legend of Isaf and Na’ila, sourced to Ibn al-Kalbi), what is a live and unresolved contemporary scholarly dispute involving named, credentialed scholars on both sides (the 2008 mas’a widening), and what could not be verified to this guide’s own standard in the time available, and is therefore flagged rather than asserted (the precise Hanbali fiqh position, the 1995–96 Marwah rock removal, the exact gate numbers, the average duration of the rite, and the other points marked throughout with a note on authenticity). Readers who take one thing from this closing note should take this: where this guide expresses confidence, that confidence is tied to a specific, named, checkable source; and where the sources available did not support confidence, this guide has said so, because a guide to a place this sacred owes its readers precision over the appearance of completeness.

Frequently asked questions

How far is the distance between Safa and Marwa?

About 450 metres one way. Sai consists of seven laps, beginning at Safa and ending at Marwa, for a total walk of roughly 3.15 kilometres inside the air-conditioned Masaa gallery.

How long does Sai take?

Typically 45 to 90 minutes, depending on crowds and walking pace. Wheelchairs and electric carts are available, with dedicated lanes on the upper levels for elderly and disabled pilgrims.

Can you still see the original hills?

Yes. The exposed rock of both summits is preserved at either end of the Masaa, so pilgrims stand on the same hills where Hajar stood nearly four millennia ago, now enclosed within the Grand Mosque.

Why do men jog part of the way?

Between the two green-lit markers, men lightly jog to commemorate Hajar's hurried crossing of the valley floor, where she lost sight of her son. Women walk at a normal pace for the entire distance.

Is Sai required for Umrah?

Yes. Sai is an essential rite of both Umrah and Hajj, performed after tawaf of the Kaaba. The Quran affirms in verse 2:158 that Safa and Marwa are among the symbols of Allah.