Bab al-Salam: History of the Gate of Peace at Masjid al-Haram in Makkah

Walk the eastern arcade of the Grand Mosque today, past the head of the Masa’a gallery, and you will find a modern signboard reading Bab al-Salam — the Gate of Peace. Pilgrims photograph it, kiss its threshold, and step through with the quiet conviction that they are retracing the exact path of the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ into the sanctuary. Almost none of that conviction survives close historical scrutiny, and this article’s purpose is to give you the honest version rather than the comforting one. Note at the outset: there is a second, entirely different Bab al-Salam at Masjid an-Nabawi in Madinah — the oldest and most ornate gate of the Prophet’s Mosque, built under the caliph Umar ibn al-Khattab and associated with the Rawdah. This article is not about that gate. It concerns only the Bab al-Salam of Masjid al-Haram in Makkah, which carries its own separate history, its own older name, and its own set of misunderstandings. If you are looking for the Madinah gate, look elsewhere in this guide; if you are looking for the wider question of how all the Haram’s gates work as a system, this guide’s companion article on the gates of the Haram is the place to start. This piece goes deep on one gate only.

The story of Bab al-Salam in Makkah is really three overlapping stories. The first is the story of a name — Bab Bani Shaybah, the gate of the family who have held the key of the Kaaba since before Islam and still hold it today. The second is the story of a tradition — that the Prophet ﷺ entered the sanctuary through this gate at the conquest of Makkah, a tradition that turns out to rest on a thinner and more contested evidentiary base than most pilgrims are told. The third, and the one that matters most for anyone standing at the modern threshold, is the story of a relocation: the historic arch that pilgrims are told they are walking through was pulled down in 1967, its footprint is now open pavement inside the Mataf, and the gate that carries its name today stands in a different place entirely, serving a different function, built in a different century. Understanding all three stories does not diminish the gate. It replaces a pleasant fiction with something more valuable — a real, traceable, fourteen-century history, told plainly.

Historical Background: Bab al-Salam Before and After Islam

Geography: Where the Gate of Peace Sits

Bab al-Salam belongs to the eastern flank of Masjid al-Haram, in the stretch of the mosque’s perimeter that runs alongside the Masa’a — the gallery in which pilgrims walk between Safa and Marwah. In the modern complex it sits close to the Marwah end of that gallery, near the cluster of gates that serve the eastern courtyard, a short walk from the Zamzam pavilion and from the head of the escalators that lead down into the Mataf. It is not, and has not been for many decades, a doorway that opens directly onto the area around the Kaaba. It is an entrance into the mosque’s eastern precinct, from which pilgrims then proceed inward toward the circumambulation area or onward toward the Masa’a, depending on which stage of their rite they are at.

This matters because the name “Bab al-Salam” is inherited from a much older gate that stood in a completely different relationship to the Kaaba — immediately behind Maqam Ibrahim, only a few paces from the Black Stone, in what is now open floor inside the modern Mataf. The geography changed even though the name did not, and a large share of the confusion around this gate exists because visitors assume the name is a stable pointer to a stable place. It is not. It is a name that has travelled.

The Older Name: Bab Bani Shaybah

Before it was popularly called Bab al-Salam, the gate was known — and in the classical geographical and legal literature is still primarily known — as Bab Bani Shaybah, the Gate of the Sons of Shaybah. This name is older, more precise, and more informative than “Gate of Peace,” and it points directly at the gate’s real historical significance: its association with the family that has held the key of the Kaaba since before the coming of Islam and continues to hold it today. This guide’s own article on the door of the Kaaba covers that custodianship — the line of Shaybah ibn Uthman al-Hajabi, the pre-Islamic history of the key, and the family’s role in the modern cleaning ceremony — in full, and there is no need to repeat that material here. What belongs in this article is the narrower point: why a gate of the mosque came to carry that family’s name.

The historian Muhammad Tahir al-Kurdi, in his al-Tarikh al-Qawim, explains the connection plainly. Before Islam, the Quraysh had built their houses in a ring around the Kaaba, leaving narrow lanes between adjoining houses through which people could reach the sacred precinct. One of those lanes ran beside the house of Shaybah ibn Uthman al-Hajabi, the keeper of the Kaaba’s key, and the archway marking the mouth of that lane came to be known by his family’s name — Bab Bani Shaybah. When the Abbasid caliph al-Mahdi enlarged the mosque in 164 AH (780 CE), Shaybah’s house itself was absorbed into the expansion and disappeared, but the name of the gate survived and was reapplied to whichever opening in the mosque’s perimeter occupied roughly that position. The alternative name “Gate of Peace,” by contrast, is described in the sources as being of comparable antiquity — some accounts trace “Bab al-Salam” to the pre-Islamic period as well — but it is the Bani Shaybah name that carries the documented genealogical link to the Kaaba’s key-holding family, and it is the name that appears more consistently across the classical topographers, including al-Azraqi in his Akhbar Makkah, the principal early source for the mosque’s historical topology.

Because the Bani Shaybah family’s connection to the Kaaba’s door long predates the mosque’s later expansions, the gate named for them carries a kind of institutional memory that no other gate at the Haram quite matches: it is named after the people who, to this day, unlock the House of Allah, rather than after a ruler, a companion, or a place. It is worth pausing on how unusual that is. Almost every other gate in the modern numbering system honours a caliph, a Saudi king, a companion, or a geographic feature. Bab Bani Shaybah honours an ongoing function — custodianship — that has continued unbroken from the Prophet’s own lifetime into the present.

The Pre-Islamic and Early Islamic Mosque

In the era before any enclosing wall existed, the sanctuary around the Kaaba was not a building with doors in the modern sense. Al-Azraqi records that in the time of the Prophet ﷺ and of Abu Bakr, the mosque had no perimeter wall at all — the houses of Quraysh simply ringed the open space around the Kaaba, and people passed between them through the narrow lanes already described. The number of such passages recognised as gates in the Prophet’s time and that of the early caliphs is given in several sources as seven, of which Bab Bani Shaybah was reckoned the first and the most significant. It was only under Umar ibn al-Khattab and Uthman ibn Affan that a wall was built around the mataf and formal gates were opened in it, a process that continued and hardened under the Abbasids. Bab Bani Shaybah’s status as the premier gate of the sanctuary — the one associated with rulers’ ceremonial entries, with the Prophet’s own comings and goings, and with the correct etiquette of approach — dates from this same early period and persisted for well over a thousand years afterward.

The Story Behind the Gate: From Lane to Landmark to Vanished Arch

The physical object that pilgrims for centuries knew as Bab Bani Shaybah, or Bab al-Salam, was not a wall opening with a door leaf. It was a free-standing stone arch — never enclosed, never fitted with a door that closed — standing on two square or later marble columns immediately behind Maqam Ibrahim, on the side of the Kaaba facing its door, a few paces east of the Black Stone. Ibrahim Rif’at Pasha, in his early-twentieth-century survey of the two sanctuaries, describes it standing just north of the Zamzam well with an arch raised on two marble pillars, gilded inscriptions on its crown, and the names of God and of the Prophet ﷺ inscribed facing the Kaaba. The nineteenth-century European travellers Johann Ludwig Burckhardt and Richard Francis Burton both recorded seeing it; Burton, in his account of the pilgrimage, compared it to a Roman triumphal arch cut in stone, noting its isolation in the open mataf.

Historically the arch was rebuilt and refaced many times without ever moving far from this spot. Arabic sources record a renewal under the Ottoman sultan Suleiman the Magnificent — Suleiman Khan — in 931 AH (roughly 1525 CE), part of the broader Ottoman programme of rebuilding minarets, gates, and porticos at the Haram in that century. Later Ottoman and Mamluk-era repairs are attested as well, and photographs from the Yildiz albums commissioned under Sultan Abdulhamid II in the late nineteenth century show a gilded finial crowning the arch. Through all of this, the arch kept its position: directly east of the Kaaba, behind the Station of Ibrahim, unenclosed, a threshold rather than a doorway.

That continuity ended in the twentieth century. As the Saudi state undertook the second phase of the first Saudi expansion of the Haram, covering the years 1381–1389 AH (1962–1969 CE), planners needed to clear the mataf of every above-ground obstruction — the four madhhab prayer stations, the old minbar, and the Bani Shaybah arch among them — to give a rapidly growing number of pilgrims room to circle the Kaaba without obstruction. The arch was demolished on Saturday, 18 Rajab 1387 AH, corresponding to 22 October 1967 CE (one widely repeated popular account gives the date as 11 Rajab; the fuller institutional and academic sources converge on 18 Rajab, and this article follows that dating while flagging the discrepancy). A slab of black marble was set into the mataf floor to mark where the arch had stood. In the subsequent phases of resurfacing the mataf — as the flooring was replaced and the circumambulation area enlarged again to cope with ever-larger crowds — even that marker disappeared. Today there is no signage, no marble inlay, no plaque anywhere in the mataf indicating where Bab Bani Shaybah once stood. A pilgrim circling the Kaaba today walks directly over the site without any way of knowing it.

A note on sourcing for this section: the details of the arch’s inscriptions, dimensions, and demolition date are drawn from a convergence of the Saudi state-linked encyclopedic reference Saudipedia’s entry on Masjid al-Haram, the descriptive architectural survey at Madain Project’s entry on Bab Bani Shaiba, and Muhammad Tahir al-Kurdi’s history as summarised in Arabic-language heritage journalism. These are credible but not peer-reviewed academic sources, and where they disagree on a specific date this article says so rather than silently picking one.

What Stands There Now

The area directly behind Maqam Ibrahim today is open mataf pavement, part of the smooth white marble expanse across which pilgrims circle the Kaaba. There is no structure, no inscription, no distinguishing mark. If you want to stand approximately where the historic arch stood, you would look to the ground a short distance behind — on the side away from the Kaaba — from the Station of Ibrahim, in the direction of what is now the Zamzam area of the mataf level. No official marker exists to confirm the precise spot to the metre, because the successive resurfacing of the mataf across the later twentieth century removed the one marker that had been placed there. This is the single most important thing this article can tell you, and it will be repeated in the practical guide below: the gate you walk through today under the name Bab al-Salam is not, and cannot be, the structure the Prophet ﷺ is remembered to have used. That structure no longer exists in any form, in any location.

The Prophet ﷺ and This Gate: What the Evidence Actually Supports

This is the section that most accounts of Bab al-Salam handle carelessly, so it deserves to be handled with unusual care here. Two separate claims circulate about the Prophet ﷺ and this gate, and they rest on very different evidentiary foundations. They are often blended together in popular retellings until they sound like a single, solid tradition. They are not.

Claim One: The Prophet ﷺ Entered Makkah From the Upper Side at the Conquest

This claim is on the strongest possible footing. It is reported by Aisha رضي الله عنها in Sahih al-Bukhari 4290: “During the year of the Conquest, the Prophet ﷺ entered Makkah through Kada, which was at the upper part of Makkah” (Sahih al-Bukhari 4290). The same report, transmitted through Hisham ibn Urwah from his father, appears with corroborating chains from Abu Usamah and Wuhayb, as the hadith itself notes. Ibn Umar’s version of the same event, found in Bukhari’s chapter on the Prophet’s entry from the upper part of Makkah, adds that he arrived riding, with Usamah ibn Zayd behind him, accompanied by Bilal and by Uthman ibn Talha of the Bani Shaybah’s own custodial line, and that he halted in the mosque before sending for the key of the Kaaba. This is Authentic (sahih): it is preserved in Bukhari’s own chapter, corroborated by multiple companions, and accepted by the entire tradition of hadith criticism, including Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani’s commentary in Fath al-Bari, which explicitly affirms that the Prophet ﷺ entered Makkah from its upper side at the conquest.

But notice precisely what this hadith establishes and what it does not. It tells you which direction the Prophet ﷺ entered the city of Makkah from — the pass called Kada, at the upper, northern end of the town, as opposed to the lower pass called Kuda through which Khalid ibn al-Walid’s column entered. It says nothing at all, in this wording, about which gate of the mosque he then walked through once he reached the sanctuary. The classical commentators who worked through this hadith, including the discussion preserved in Islamweb’s presentation of Fath al-Bari, distinguish clearly between the topic of the city-entry hadith (the pass of Kada) and the separate question of the mosque-gate through which he then proceeded — because these are two different points in his route on the same morning, evidenced by two different sets of reports.

Claim Two: The Prophet ﷺ Then Entered the Mosque Specifically Through Bab Bani Shaybah

This is the claim that pilgrims are usually told is simply established fact, and it deserves more caution than that. The most frequently cited textual support is a report attributed to Ibn Umar: “The Messenger of Allah ﷺ entered, and we entered with him, through Bab Bani Abd Manaf, which people call Bab Bani Shaybah, and we went out toward Madinah through Bab al-Hazwarah, which is Bab al-Hannatin” — transmitted, according to the sources that quote it, by al-Tabarani through the route of Abdullah ibn Nafi’. A parallel and better-known report comes through Jabir ibn Abdullah and is preserved in Sahih Muslim, describing how the Prophet ﷺ, arriving in the forenoon, halted his mount at Bab Bani Shaybah before entering the mosque — this is the report cited in the Hanbali fiqh manual Kashshaf al-Qina’ as the textual basis (dalil) for the recommendation to enter by this gate, and it is treated there as sufficiently solid to found a ruling.

Here the honest position is that these two supporting reports sit at different evidentiary levels, and neither is a flawless sahih chain naming this gate at the moment of the conquest specifically. The Tabarani route through Abdullah ibn Nafi’ is graded by later critics, including al-Sulaymani as cited in the Arabic sources reviewed for this article, with the phrase “fihi nazar” — “there is something to be examined in it” — a standard formula in the science of hadith for a narrator whose reliability is in question, which places that particular chain closer to weak (da’if) than to sahih, even though its narrators are otherwise mostly acceptable. The Jabir report used by the Hanbali school, cited by Fiqh scholars as reported by Muslim, more plausibly describes the Prophet’s practice around his final pilgrimage or general custom of arriving in Makkah rather than pinning down the single, specific moment of the conquest of 8 AH — and even where it is accepted, it establishes a general practice of entering by this gate rather than a dated, singular conquest-day event with an unbroken sahih chain naming the gate. The stronger, undisputed sahih material about the conquest — Bukhari’s reports from Aisha and Ibn Umar — is silent on the specific gate. The gate-specific claim rests on reports that are, at best, acceptable evidence for a general custom, and at worst weak chains that later writers repeated because the story was beautiful and the gate was already famous, not because the chain was strong.

A note on authenticity: this is a case where a beloved detail of the seerah — that the Prophet ﷺ walked into the mosque through this exact archway at the moment of victory — is worth telling, because it has circulated in Islamic scholarship for over a thousand years and shaped real religious practice, including the customs of Makkan governors and caliphs entering by this gate in ceremonial processions. But the strict evidentiary chain naming this gate as the conquest-day entrance is not on the same footing as the sahih material establishing that he entered Makkah from its upper side. Readers should hold the general practice — that the Prophet ﷺ was known to use this gate, including on the occasion described by Jabir — as reasonably well attested, while treating the more specific, cinematic version of the story — that this precise arch was the doorway of the conquest itself — as resting on weaker and less specific transmission than popular retellings imply.

Other Traditions Attached to the Gate

Beyond the conquest narrative, later sources attach two further claims to this gate, both worth stating plainly rather than silently endorsing. First, that the Prophet ﷺ regularly went out from this gate toward the house of his wife Khadijah رضي الله عنها, which stood nearby in the alley known as Zuqaq al-Suq, and that this is the origin of an alternative name for the gate, Bab al-Nabi — attributed by al-Azraqi. Second, that he passed through it during the Farewell Pilgrimage. Both are reported in the biographical and topographical literature as historical custom rather than as hadith with named, gradable chains in the collections this article can verify, and they should be understood as part of the accumulated memory the classical topographers preserved about the gate rather than as independently authenticated sahih reports in their own right.

The Fiqh Question: Is Entering Through Bab al-Salam Sunnah, Mustahabb, or Custom?

Given the mixed evidentiary picture above, it should not surprise you that the schools of Islamic law do not treat entering the Haram through this specific gate as an obligation, and most treat it as a recommended courtesy rather than a strict sunnah resting on an unimpeachable chain.

The General Rule First

Islam Question and Answer, drawing on the ruling of the Standing Committee for Academic Research and Issuing Fatwas (Fatawa al-Lajnah al-Da’imah, 11/299), states the matter without ambiguity: “It is not obligatory for the one who has bid farewell to exit through the gate mentioned, Bab al-Wada’; and it is not obligatory for the one who is coming to enter through Bab al-Salam” (Islam Question and Answer, answer 109317). A separate, earlier answer from the same site addresses the misconception directly: some people believe it is essential to enter through a specific gate — Bab al-Umrah for those performing Umrah, Bab al-Salam for general entry — and that using any other gate is sinful or disliked. The verdict: “There is no basis for this. The pilgrim doing Hajj or Umrah may enter through any gate” (Islam Question and Answer, answer 34869), citing the general hadith narrated by Muslim (Sahih Muslim 713) about the etiquette of entering any mosque.

The Madhhab Positions, Named

Within that broad agreement that no gate is obligatory, the classical schools differ in how strongly they recommend this particular gate as the preferred one, and on what basis.

  • The Hanbali school states the recommendation explicitly and links it to a named report. The manual Kashshaf al-Qina’ ‘an Matn al-Iqna’ records: “He enters the mosque through Bab Bani Shaybah, in emulation of the Messenger of Allah ﷺ… because of what is reported from Jabir, that the Prophet ﷺ entered Makkah in the forenoon and halted his mount at Bab Bani Shaybah, then entered — reported by Muslim.” The same text adds the juristic reasoning that Bab Bani Shaybah is the nearest gate on that side to a position directly facing the Kaaba’s door, making it preferable to entering elsewhere and having to cross the mosque. This is a clearly stated mustahabb (recommended, not obligatory) ruling with a named hadith as its support (Islamweb’s presentation of the Hanbali ruling).
  • The comparative survey Hajj: The Islamic Pilgrimage According to Five Schools of Islamic Law states that all five schools it treats — Hanafi, Maliki, Shafi’i, Hanbali, and the Twelver Ja’fari school — agree that it is mustahabb for a person entering Makkah to bathe beforehand, to pass through the city’s higher ground on approach, “to enter through Bab Bani Shaybah,” to raise the hands on first sight of the Kaaba, and to recite the prescribed takbir, tahlil, and du’a — while noting a minor internal Maliki disagreement over whether raising the hands for the du’a specifically is recommended.
  • The Twelver Ja’fari position, summarised in the Persian-language fiqh reference Wiki Fiqh, likewise records it as mustahabb for the pilgrim performing Hajj or Umrah to enter through Bab Bani Shaybah, with the same acknowledgment that the historic gate “has no trace today because of the mosque’s expansion” and that a person should now simply enter through the area of Bab al-Salam and proceed inward past the columns, since that is understood to be its approximate historic line.
  • The contemporary Salafi-leaning position, represented by the Standing Committee’s rulings quoted above and by scholars such as Ibn Uthaymeen in his teaching notes on al-Kafi, accepts the same Jabir report as the basis for a mustahabb recommendation, while being emphatic that it is not obligatory, that the modern gate does not occupy the historic footprint, and that using it is a matter of good manners and following an established custom rather than a fixed rite of Hajj or Umrah.

Put together, no school treats entering by this gate as a pillar, a wajib act, or a condition of a valid Umrah. The strongest formal position — the Hanbali one — treats it as mustahabb on the authority of the Jabir report in Muslim, while the weight of practice across the centuries, described by Arabic-language heritage writers, shows that Makkan governors, judges, and dignitaries specifically favoured entering by this gate as a matter of prestige and emulation, a custom formalised enough that the Ottoman-era chronicler al-Sinjari described it as “al-qanun al-mu’tad” — the customary law. That phrase is itself instructive: even a near-contemporary source describes the practice using the language of custom, not the language of binding religious obligation.

The Du’a on Entering the Mosque

Whichever gate you use, the sunnah is the same, and it is on far firmer ground than any gate-specific claim. Abu Usayd (or Abu Humayd, per the alternate narration) reported that the Messenger of Allah ﷺ said: “When any one of you enters the mosque, he should say: ‘O Allah, open for me the doors of Your mercy,’ and when he goes out he should say: ‘O Allah, I ask You for Your bounty'” (Sahih Muslim 713). This is graded Authentic (sahih) by its inclusion in Sahih Muslim and applies to every mosque a Muslim enters, Masjid al-Haram included, regardless of which of its many gates is used. Entering with the right foot first, sending blessings on the Prophet ﷺ, and reciting this supplication is the actual, universally agreed sunnah of mosque entry; the choice of gate at the Haram is, at most, an additional point of recommended good practice layered on top of that firm foundation, not a substitute for it.

Qur’anic Connections: The Verses Inscribed on the Historic Arch

Two Qur’anic verses were carved into the crown of the historic Bab Bani Shaybah arch, and a third, related verse is closely associated with it in the wider literature on entering Makkah. Treating these honestly requires separating the verses’ own meaning and context of revelation from the decorative and devotional use later generations made of them on this particular archway.

﴿ٱدْخُلُوهَا بِسَلَـٰمٍ ءَامِنِينَ﴾

“Enter it in peace, safe and secure.” — Surah al-Hijr 15:46

This verse, according to the classical tafsir tradition including Ibn Kathir’s commentary, describes the greeting extended to the righteous as they enter Paradise — it is eschatological, not a historical statement about any earthly gate (Ibn Kathir’s tafsir of Surah al-Hijr 15:46 via Quran.com). Sources describing the historic arch record that this verse was carved on its outer face, facing the person about to enter — a devotional and evocative reuse of the phrase, likening the pilgrim’s entry into the sanctuary to the believer’s entry into the Garden, but not a claim that the verse was originally revealed about this gate.

﴿وَقُل رَّبِّ أَدْخِلْنِي مُدْخَلَ صِدْقٍ وَأَخْرِجْنِي مُخْرَجَ صِدْقٍ وَٱجْعَل لِّي مِن لَّدُنكَ سُلْطَـٰنًا نَّصِيرًا﴾

“And say: My Lord, cause me to enter a sound entrance and to exit a sound exit, and grant me from Yourself a supporting authority.” — Surah al-Isra 17:80

The asbab al-nuzul (occasion of revelation) for this verse, as reported by al-Tirmidhi from Ibn Abbas and graded Hasan Sahih by al-Tirmidhi himself, concerns the Prophet’s ﷺ hijrah from Makkah to Madinah — a prayer that his exit from Makkah and his entry into Madinah both be blessed and sound, not a statement composed for or about the Bani Shaybah gate (Mufti Shafi Usmani’s Ma’arif al-Qur’an on Surah al-Isra 17:80 via Quran.com). The historic arch inscribed this verse on the inner, lower part of its crown, on the side facing into the mosque — again, a beautiful and fitting reuse of language about entering and exiting well, applied to the literal act of walking through a doorway, but distinct from the verse’s own historical occasion, which belongs to the story of the hijrah rather than the conquest of Makkah or this gate specifically.

A third phrase, reported in the descriptions of the arch’s Kaaba-facing inner face, drew on the language of Surah az-Zumar 39:73 — “Peace be upon you, you have been good, so enter it, abiding therein eternally” — again an eschatological verse about the reception of the righteous into Paradise, repurposed as an inscription of welcome for the pilgrim entering the sanctuary. In each case, the classical builders and later restorers were doing what Islamic architecture across the world regularly does: borrowing the Qur’an’s most resonant language about safe and joyful entry and mounting it over a physical threshold, without claiming that the verse was revealed about that threshold. A modern reader should enjoy the inscriptions for what they were — devotional, carefully chosen, deeply felt — without mistaking decorative reuse for asbab al-nuzul.

A note on method here: this article did not locate a primary hadith or tafsir source explicitly connecting Surah al-Hijr 15:46 or Surah al-Isra 17:80 to the Bab Bani Shaybah arch beyond the historical-descriptive accounts of the arch’s inscriptions themselves (principally Muhammad Tahir al-Kurdi’s history and the heritage-journalism pieces that quote him). Where a claim could not be traced to a primary tafsir or hadith source, it is presented here as a historical-architectural fact — that the inscription existed — rather than as a scriptural claim about the gate.

Hadith References: Consolidated and Graded

For clarity, every hadith cited in this article is gathered here with its grading restated.

  • Authentic (sahih): Aisha’s report that the Prophet ﷺ entered Makkah during the year of the conquest through Kada, at the upper part of the city — Sahih al-Bukhari 4290. This establishes the route into the city, not the specific mosque gate used afterward.
  • Authentic (sahih): Ibn Umar’s fuller account of the same entry, describing the Prophet ﷺ arriving mounted with Usamah ibn Zayd, Bilal, and Uthman ibn Talha, halting in the mosque, and sending for the key of the Kaaba — preserved in Bukhari’s chapter on the Prophet’s entry from the upper part of Makkah and discussed in Ibn Hajar’s Fath al-Bari.
  • Authentic (sahih): Abu Usayd’s report of the general du’a for entering and leaving any mosque — Sahih Muslim 713. This applies to Masjid al-Haram as it applies to every mosque, independent of which gate is used.
  • Weak to acceptable, treated as sufficient by the Hanbali school specifically for a mustahabb ruling: Jabir ibn Abdullah’s report that the Prophet ﷺ, arriving in Makkah in the forenoon, halted his riding beast at Bab Bani Shaybah before entering the mosque, cited in Hanbali fiqh manuals as reported by Muslim. This article was not able to independently verify a Sahih Muslim reference number for this specific wording through the sources consulted, and it is presented here as it is cited in the classical fiqh literature rather than as independently checked against the primary hadith collection text.
  • Weak (da’if), on the criticism of later scholars: the report attributed to Ibn Umar via Abdullah ibn Nafi’, transmitted by al-Tabarani, that “the Messenger of Allah ﷺ entered, and we entered with him, through Bab Bani Abd Manaf, which people call Bab Bani Shaybah.” The narrator Abdullah ibn Nafi’ is flagged by the critic al-Sulaymani with the formula “fihi nazar,” a standard marker of reliability doubt in the science of hadith criticism.
  • Historical custom, not an independently graded hadith in the sources consulted: the claim that the Prophet ﷺ regularly used this gate to go to and from the house of Khadijah رضي الله عنها, and that he passed through it during the Farewell Pilgrimage. These appear in topographical and biographical literature, notably material attributed to al-Azraqi, as historical memory rather than as narrations with a stated chain that this article could grade.

Readers who want to check any hadith number against the primary text are encouraged to use the Sunnah.com links provided rather than relying on secondary summaries, since gate names and companion attributions are exactly the kind of detail that drifts across retellings.

Historical Development: From Rashidun Lane to Ottoman Arch to Saudi Perimeter Gate

The Rashidun and Umayyad Period

In the time of the Prophet ﷺ and the first two caliphs, as already noted, there was no enclosing wall around the mosque at all — only the ring of Quraysh houses with gaps between them. Umar ibn al-Khattab, expanding the sanctuary around 17 AH (638 CE) to accommodate the growing number of pilgrims, purchased and demolished some of the surrounding houses and, for the first time, built a low wall around the mataf with lamps set upon it, though apparently still without formal gates in the sense of the later period. Uthman ibn Affan continued this work around 26 AH (647 CE), adding porticos (the first roofed arcades at the mosque) and, in most accounts, the first proper gates. Bab Bani Shaybah, inheriting the name and approximate position of the old pre-Islamic lane beside Shaybah ibn Uthman’s house, was carried forward as the principal eastern gate through each of these phases.

The Abbasid Expansion

The most consequential early change came under the Abbasid caliph al-Mahdi, whose expansion of 164–167 AH (780–784 CE) enlarged the mosque substantially and, in the process, absorbed the historic house of Shaybah ibn Uthman that had originally given the gate its name. The house disappeared into the new construction; the gate’s name did not. From this point on, “Bab Bani Shaybah” refers not to an opening beside a specific standing house but to whichever archway occupies the equivalent position in the eastern mataf-facing wall of the ever-growing mosque — a naming pattern that will recur, in a much larger way, in the twentieth century.

The Ottoman Period

Ottoman rule of the Hijaz, beginning with Sultan Selim I’s assumption of the title of custodian of the two sanctuaries in 923 AH (1517 CE), brought a sustained programme of rebuilding at the Haram. Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent renewed the arch of Bab Bani Shaybah in 931 AH, part of a wider mid-sixteenth-century campaign of works that also rebuilt several of the mosque’s minarets and porticos. The Ottoman-era mosque, as recorded in the Yildiz photographic albums from the reign of Abdulhamid II and in European travellers’ accounts from the same decades, shows the arch standing free in the mataf, unenclosed, its gilded crown visible above the heads of circumambulating pilgrims — visually distinct from the perimeter-wall gates most visitors picture when they hear the word “gate” today. Archnet’s architectural notes on the Haram’s Ottoman-era fabric record parallel renovation work on the mosque’s eastern gates generally in this period, including the addition of tall minarets with octagonal balconies at gates on this side of the complex, though the specific minaret pairing with the modern Bab al-Salam dates to the later Saudi rebuilding described below rather than to the Ottoman period itself (Archnet’s entry on Masjid al-Haram’s architectural history).

The First Saudi Expansion

The most dramatic change in this gate’s entire history came with the first Saudi expansion of the Haram, carried out in two phases between 1375 AH and 1400 AH (roughly 1955–1980 CE). The second phase of that expansion, dated by Saudipedia to 1381–1389 AH (1962–1969 CE), required clearing the mataf of every above-ground obstruction to allow the vastly increased number of pilgrims using the newly built multi-storey mosque to circumambulate without the historic furniture of the mataf in their way. The four madhhab prayer stations were removed in this period; so was the ancient minbar; and so, on 18 Rajab 1387 AH (22 October 1967 CE), was the Bab Bani Shaybah arch. A black marble marker was laid in its place, itself later removed during subsequent mataf resurfacing. From this point forward, the name “Bab al-Salam” belongs exclusively to a gate in the mosque’s outer perimeter wall — structurally, functionally, and architecturally a different kind of object from the free-standing mataf arch that preceded it. It is not a renovation of the old gate. It is a new gate that inherited an old name.

Later Saudi Expansions and the Present Day

Subsequent Saudi expansions — the second Saudi expansion under King Fahd in the 1980s–1990s, and the third Saudi expansion under King Abdullah and continuing under King Salman from 2011 onward — repeatedly altered the specific building fabric around the eastern perimeter, including the area near Bab al-Salam, while keeping a gate of that name in roughly the same eastern sector, close to the Marwah end of the Masa’a. Ongoing construction connected to the newly announced King Salman Gate project, reported in October 2025 as intended to add a vastly enlarged new entrance capable of accommodating roughly one million worshippers, is expected to affect the numbering and circulation pattern of gates on this side of the mosque again, though no firm completion timeline had been published as of the time of writing (DW Arabic’s October 2025 report on the King Salman Gate project). This is the plainest possible illustration of the point this article keeps returning to: the gate’s name has stayed remarkably stable across fourteen centuries, but the physical object behind that name, and its precise location, have not.

Architecture: The Ottoman Arch and the Modern Gate

The Historic Arch

The Bab Bani Shaybah arch that stood in the mataf until 1967 is described consistently across the sources as a free-standing semi-circular archway raised on two solid columns — described variously as square-based or later refaced in marble — reaching a height at its highest point of roughly eight metres. It was never part of an enclosure wall; nothing stopped a pilgrim from walking around it rather than through its opening, which is part of why it functioned as a ceremonial and customary threshold rather than a security or access-control feature. Its crown carried gilded lettering: the outer face, facing a person approaching from outside the mataf, bore the phrase from Surah al-Hijr 15:46, “Enter it in peace, safe and secure”; the inner, lower face of the crown, facing into the mosque, bore the opening of the du’a from Surah al-Isra 17:80, “My Lord, cause me to enter a sound entrance.” Names of the early caliphs Abu Bakr and Umar appeared on the sides of the arch according to several descriptions. A Turkish-language heritage source additionally describes a third inscription on the Kaaba-facing side drawing on Surah az-Zumar 39:73, together with medallions naming the four Rightly-Guided Caliphs at the arch’s corners — a detail not corroborated by the Arabic-language architectural sources consulted for this article, and presented here with that caveat rather than as settled fact.

The Modern Gate

The gate that carries the name Bab al-Salam today is an integrated feature of the Saudi-era multi-storey mosque structure: a wide arched opening (in practice several adjoining archways rather than a single door) set into the eastern perimeter wall, built in reinforced concrete faced with the same pale stone cladding used across the Saudi-era expansions, rising through the ground floor and opening onto the mosque’s upper floors via the internal stair and escalator system that threads through this section of the building. It is not a single freestanding monument but part of a continuous arcade of broadly similar gates along this stretch of wall, distinguished from its neighbours mainly by signage rather than by any unique architectural feature of its own. Where the historic arch was an isolated object you walked around or through as you pleased, the modern gate is a controlled entrance into a specific circulation route, functioning the way an airport concourse entrance functions: a point of throughput rather than a monument in its own right. Reports on the Ottoman and Saudi-era rebuilding of the mosque’s eastern gates describe accompanying minarets rising around 89 metres on square bases with paired octagonal balconies near this sector of the building, part of the general programme of minaret construction across the Saudi expansions rather than a feature unique to Bab al-Salam specifically (Archnet). A claim occasionally repeated online that a minaret or gate at this location dates from “around 780 AD” appears to conflate the Abbasid al-Mahdi expansion date, when the historic Bani Shaybah house was absorbed into the mosque, with the construction date of the present-day structure; the present gate is unambiguously a twentieth-century Saudi-era building, and this article treats the 780 CE claim as a probable confusion rather than a verified fact about the current structure.

Archaeological Findings

There is little to report here, and it is more honest to say so plainly than to pad the section. No published archaeological excavation report on the specific footprint of the historic Bab Bani Shaybah arch was located in the course of researching this article. The area is now covered by the Mataf’s marble paving, which itself has been replaced and re-laid multiple times since the 1960s as part of ongoing capacity and safety upgrades, meaning that even if sub-surface remnants of the arch’s foundations existed at some point after 1967, they have likely been disturbed or removed by subsequent construction work rather than preserved. The Saudi authorities do not, as a matter of general practice, conduct or publish open archaeological work inside the active mataf, since the area remains in continuous use for circumambulation around the clock. What survives of the arch’s appearance survives in photographs — including the Ottoman-era Yildiz albums and early-twentieth-century photographs reproduced in sources such as Ibrahim Rif’at Pasha’s Mir’at al-Haramayn — and in written descriptions, not in any excavated or conserved physical remains open to inspection today. Readers hoping for a marked “original site” to visit, in the way one might visit a marked archaeological site elsewhere, should adjust that expectation: there is nothing to see, and no announced plan to mark the spot.

Stories of the Companions

The companion most closely tied to this gate is not a visitor to it but a custodian of what lay beyond it. Uthman ibn Talha ibn Abi Talha al-Abdari, of the Bani Abd al-Dar clan from which the Bani Shaybah descend, held the key of the Kaaba at the time of the conquest of Makkah. Ibn Umar’s account of the conquest, discussed above, places Uthman ibn Talha at the Prophet’s ﷺ side as he entered the mosque and sent for the key so that the Kaaba could be opened and its idols removed. This guide’s article on the door of the Kaaba tells the fuller story of what happened once the key was handed over — Uthman ibn Talha’s initial reluctance, the Prophet’s ﷺ insistence, and the famous declaration that the key would remain with his family “eternally, until the Day of Resurrection… taken from you only by one who is unjust and a wrongdoer” — and there is no need to repeat that narrative here. What belongs in this article is simply the observation that the gate bearing this family’s name and the door whose key this family held are, in the story of the conquest, points on the same short walk: through the gate, across the mataf, to the door, key in hand.

Beyond this, the companions’ names attached to the gate are mostly attached to it by later commemoration rather than by their own action at the gate itself: Abu Bakr and Umar, whose names several sources describe as inscribed on the historic arch, are honoured there as the first two caliphs and as men who, in the general Islamic historical memory, are believed to have observed the custom of entering the sanctuary by this gate during their own visits to Makkah as rulers, following the Prophet’s ﷺ example, though this article did not locate an independently gradable hadith describing either caliph’s individual entry by this specific gate. The stronger and more precisely evidenced companion story remains Uthman ibn Talha and the key.

Stories of Great Islamic Scholars

The gate’s fullest documentation comes not from a single celebrated scholar’s personal anecdote but from the historians and jurists who recorded and preserved its history across the centuries, and it is worth naming them because their work is the entire reason anything can be said about this gate with confidence today.

Al-Azraqi (Abu al-Walid Muhammad ibn Abdullah al-Azraqi, third century AH), author of Akhbar Makkah, is the earliest and most important source for the mosque’s early topology, and it is his description — preserved and quoted by later writers — that identifies Bab Bani Shaybah as the gate through which the early caliphs customarily entered, with stone steps set into its threshold. Without al-Azraqi’s careful early recording, most of what is said about the gate’s early history would be unrecoverable.

Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani (773–852 AH), in Fath al-Bari, his monumental commentary on Sahih al-Bukhari, is the scholar whose careful distinction between the hadith establishing the Prophet’s ﷺ route of entry into the city of Makkah (via Kada) and the separate, less firmly evidenced question of which mosque gate he then used, underpins the evidentiary caution this article has tried to maintain. Later writers who blend the two claims into a single confident narrative are, in effect, moving past a distinction Ibn Hajar himself was careful to preserve.

Muhammad Tahir al-Kurdi al-Makki (1321–1400 AH, d. 1980 CE), a twentieth-century Makkan historian, wrote al-Tarikh al-Qawim li-Makkah wa Bayt Allah al-Karim, a detailed modern history of the mosque that recorded the arch’s inscriptions, dimensions, and appearance in the years immediately before its 1967 demolition — meaning his description is, in effect, the last detailed eyewitness-adjacent account of the arch as it stood, written by someone who could still see it, shortly before it disappeared.

Ibn Uthaymeen (1347–1421 AH, d. 2001 CE), among the most widely studied contemporary Hanbali scholars, addressed the fiqh of entering the Haram by this gate in his teaching notes on classical Hanbali texts, affirming the mustahabb status of the practice on the authority of the Jabir report while making clear it is not an obligation — representing the living continuation of the fiqh discussion into the present day.

Spiritual Reflection

There is a particular kind of disappointment that can follow learning the history in this article, and it is worth addressing directly rather than leaving you to feel it alone. You may have hoped, walking through Bab al-Salam, that you were tracing the Prophet’s ﷺ own footsteps in a literal, physical sense — that the stone under your feet was the stone he crossed. It is not. The stone he crossed, if the tradition about his crossing it is accepted at all, lies buried under mataf pavement laid decades after the arch above it was pulled down, with no marker and no way to stand on the exact spot with certainty.

But consider what you are left with once the literal claim is set aside, because it is not nothing. You are left with a name that has been carried, deliberately and continuously, by a community of scholars, builders, and worshippers for fourteen centuries, through the collapse of the arch that first bore it, through five or six distinct rebuildings of the mosque around it, through a change from an open pre-Islamic lane to an Umayyad gap in a wall to an Ottoman monument to a Saudi-era concourse. Every generation that walked through whatever structure carried this name chose to keep calling it Bab al-Salam, Gate of Peace, or Bab Bani Shaybah, gate of the family that still holds the Kaaba’s key today. That continuity of intention — the choice to keep naming this entrance after peace and after a lineage of trustworthy custodianship, even as the stones themselves were replaced again and again — is arguably a more durable form of connection to the Prophet’s ﷺ example than standing on a particular flagstone would be. The sunnah that is genuinely, unambiguously his — the du’a for entering any mosque, asking Allah to open the doors of His mercy — travels with you through whichever gate you use. It does not depend on stone at all.

If you find yourself standing at Bab al-Salam on your own visit, there is no harm and some real benefit in recalling Uthman ibn Talha handing over the key of the Kaaba nearby, in recalling that the custodianship established that day continues today, and in saying the mosque-entry du’a with full attention rather than as a formality. What is not necessary, and is not supported by the evidence, is the belief that your physical passage through this specific modern doorway replicates a physical passage of the Prophet ﷺ through the same stones. Let the history deepen your reverence rather than manufacture a false relic to be reverent about.

Practical Visitor Guide: Bab al-Salam in 2026

As of July 2026, Bab al-Salam sits on the eastern side of Masjid al-Haram, in the sector of the mosque’s perimeter that runs alongside the Masa’a, positioned closer to the Marwah end of that gallery than to the Safa end. It functions as one of the entrances into the mosque’s eastern concourse, from which pilgrims can proceed down toward the mataf level to circumambulate the Kaaba, or across toward the Masa’a to walk between Safa and Marwah. It does not open directly onto the mataf itself; like almost every gate in the modern multi-storey complex, it opens into an internal concourse from which stairs, ramps, and escalators lead to the various levels and areas of prayer.

You should expect this gate, like its neighbours along the eastern flank near the Masa’a, to be busy at nearly all hours, and especially busy in the periods immediately before and after the five daily prayers, during the last third of the night in Ramadan, and throughout the Hajj season, when the entire eastern sector of the mosque absorbs a very large share of incoming pilgrim traffic headed for the Masa’a. Crowd management at gates in this sector typically includes one-way flow enforcement at peak times, meaning you may be directed to a different nearby gate for exit even if you entered through Bab al-Salam, and gate access can be adjusted at short notice by mosque authorities managing overall capacity — a pattern consistent with the broader, still-ongoing King Salman Gate construction project in this general area, which is expected to keep altering circulation patterns on this side of the mosque for the foreseeable future.

Finding It

Signage inside the mosque names the gate clearly as Bab al-Salam, but as this article has already discussed at length, the gate’s number in the mosque’s numbering system is genuinely unsettled across the sources available, and you should not be surprised to see it labelled differently on different maps, apps, or signage generations. The Saudi Ministry of Hajj and Umrah’s own 2024 public gate-numbering announcement associates the name Bab al-Salam with three separate numbers — 19, 5, and 2 — most plausibly reflecting the fact that what is signed as one named gate today corresponds to multiple physical archways or levels grouped under a single historic name (Al-Saudi Al-Youm’s report on the Ministry’s 2024 gate list). Other widely circulated pilgrim guides give it as Gate 21, and still others distinguish a separate, adjacent “Bab Bani Shaibah” as Gate 22, treating the two historically synonymous names as two different physical gates in the current complex. This article cannot resolve that discrepancy for you, and neither, in practice, can most on-the-ground pilgrim guides — the safest approach is to use the Arabic-and-English signage naming the gate directly, ask any of the mosque’s guides or security personnel (mutawwifin and askari) if uncertain, and treat any specific gate number you read in an app or guidebook, including this one, as liable to be superseded by the next phase of construction.

What You Will and Will Not See

You will see a modern archway integrated into the mosque’s Saudi-era eastern wall, part of a continuous run of broadly similar gates along this stretch, with nothing about its stonework marking it out as historically distinct from its neighbours beyond its signage. You will not see any remnant, marker, plaque, or inscription connecting this structure to the Ottoman arch or to the Bani Shaybah family’s original gate — because, as this article has explained in detail, that arch stood in a different location, well inside what is now the open mataf, and was demolished in 1967 with its later marker also since removed. If a guide or a fellow pilgrim tells you that you are walking through “the original gate” or “the Prophet’s own gate,” you now have the information needed to receive that claim as devotional sentiment rather than architectural fact.

Honest Advice

If you are able to enter through Bab al-Salam on your first visit to the Haram, doing so connects you to a long and genuinely attested custom, followed by generations of scholars, caliphs, and ordinary pilgrims, and there is real merit in observing it if it is convenient for you. But it is not convenient for everyone. Crowd control, your point of arrival, mobility considerations, and simple logistics may mean you enter through a completely different gate — Bab al-Fath, Bab al-Umrah, King Abdulaziz Gate, or any of the more than two hundred other openings into this vast complex. None of the fiqh sources reviewed for this article treat entry through a different gate as reducing the validity or reward of your Umrah or Hajj in any way; the Standing Committee’s ruling could not be plainer that no gate is obligatory. Say the mosque-entry du’a, whichever gate carries you in, and do not let a logistics-driven choice of entrance become a source of anxiety about your worship.

Common Misconceptions

  • “Entering through Bab al-Salam is obligatory, or required for a valid Umrah.” It is not. Islam Question and Answer states plainly, on the authority of the Standing Committee for Academic Research and Issuing Fatwas, that entering through Bab al-Salam is not obligatory, and a separate ruling from the same body explicitly refutes the idea that using a different gate is sinful or reduces one’s reward (Islam Question and Answer 109317; Islam Question and Answer 34869).
  • “The gate you walk through today is the original structure the Prophet ﷺ used.” It is not, and this is the misconception this article has spent the most effort correcting. The historic Bab Bani Shaybah arch stood inside the mataf, behind Maqam Ibrahim, and was demolished in 1967 to clear space for a larger circumambulation area. The gate carrying the name Bab al-Salam today is a Saudi-era structure in the mosque’s outer perimeter wall, built decades after the historic arch was pulled down, in a different location serving a different function.
  • “This is the same gate as Bab al-Salam in Madinah.” It is a completely different gate at a completely different mosque. The Madinah gate is Gate 1 of Masjid an-Nabawi, on that mosque’s western side, built under the caliph Umar ibn al-Khattab around 18 AH (639–640 CE), closely associated with access to the Rawdah, and rebuilt with an Ottoman-era minaret; it has no structural or historical connection to the Makkah gate beyond sharing a name and a general theme of peaceful entry (Madain Project’s entry on As-Salam Gate at Masjid an-Nabawi).
  • “The Prophet ﷺ is reported in a clear, strong hadith to have entered the mosque through this exact gate at the conquest of Makkah.” The sahih hadith material (Bukhari, from Aisha and Ibn Umar) establishes his route into the city via the upper pass of Kada; it does not name the mosque gate. The reports that name Bab Bani Shaybah specifically are of mixed and generally weaker strength, ranging from a chain criticised as containing an unreliable narrator to a Jabir report used by the Hanbali school that more plausibly describes a general practice of his rather than the single, dated conquest event.
  • “Bab al-Nabi and Bab al-Salam are simply two names for two unrelated gates.” The relationship is more tangled than that. Several classical and heritage sources use “Bab al-Nabi” as an alternative historical name for Bab Bani Shaybah itself, connected to the Prophet’s ﷺ use of it to reach Khadijah’s house, while the modern official gate-numbering scheme assigns the name Bab al-Nabi to a separate, distinctly numbered gate elsewhere in the current complex. This is a genuine naming drift across centuries of expansion, not a simple case of two gates that have always been distinct.

Lesser-Known Facts

  • The historian al-Maqdisi, writing in the late fourth century AH, counted nineteen gates in Masjid al-Haram in his time and specifically identified Bab Bani Shaybah as the most important of them, with five gates total on the mosque’s eastern side in that era — a useful reminder that the mosque has always had many gates, and that this one’s prominence rests on its ceremonial and historical association rather than on being the only, or even the largest, entrance.
  • The nineteenth-century travellers Burckhardt and Burton both recorded the arch in their travel writing; Burckhardt specifically noted that in his time there were two separate gateways known by the name Bab al-Salam, an early instance of exactly the kind of naming ambiguity that this article has traced through to the present numbering disputes.
  • Some sources connect the custom of entering through this gate to a pre-Islamic idol called Hubal, said to have been buried near this spot; a narration attributed to Imam Ja’far al-Sadiq in the Twelver Shia tradition explicitly gives this as the reason the entry through Bab Bani Shaybah became a fixed sunnah in that school’s fiqh — a distinct rationale from the Sunni sources’ emphasis on the Prophet’s ﷺ own reported practice, and worth noting as a genuinely separate strand of the tradition rather than folding the two explanations together.
  • The black marble slab placed to mark the site of the demolished arch after 1967 no longer exists; it was itself removed during a later resurfacing of the mataf floor, meaning the site has now been unmarked for longer than it was marked.
  • Ibn Battuta, passing through Makkah in 725 AH (1324 CE) during his famous journeys, described the mataf paving as becoming scorching to the feet in the midday heat — a detail from the era when the Bani Shaybah arch would still have stood as a landmark within that same paved area, giving a rare sensory glimpse of what circumambulating near the historic gate actually felt like for a medieval pilgrim.

Timeline

  • Pre-Islamic period: A narrow lane between the houses of Quraysh, beside the house of Shaybah ibn Uthman al-Hajabi, keeper of the Kaaba’s key, becomes known as the gate of his family.
  • 630 CE / 8 AH — Conquest of Makkah: The Prophet ﷺ enters the city via the upper pass of Kada (Sahih al-Bukhari 4290); later, less firmly evidenced reports place his entry into the mosque itself at Bab Bani Shaybah.
  • 638–647 CE / 17–26 AH: Umar ibn al-Khattab and then Uthman ibn Affan expand the sanctuary and build its first perimeter wall and formal gates.
  • 780–784 CE / 164–167 AH: The Abbasid caliph al-Mahdi’s expansion absorbs Shaybah ibn Uthman’s original house; the gate’s name is carried forward onto the new structure.
  • 1525 CE / 931 AH: Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent renews the Bab Bani Shaybah arch as part of a broader Ottoman rebuilding programme at the Haram.
  • Late 19th century: The arch is photographed for the Yildiz albums under Sultan Abdulhamid II and described in detail by European travellers including Burton and Burckhardt.
  • 22 October 1967 CE / 18 Rajab 1387 AH (some sources: 11 Rajab): The historic Bab Bani Shaybah arch is demolished during the second phase of the first Saudi expansion, to clear the mataf for a larger circumambulation area.
  • Late 20th century: The black marble marker placed at the demolition site is itself removed during subsequent mataf resurfacing.
  • 1980s–2020s: Second and third Saudi expansions repeatedly rebuild the eastern perimeter sector; a gate named Bab al-Salam persists in this general area throughout.
  • 2024: The Saudi Ministry of Hajj and Umrah publishes a gate-numbering list associating Bab al-Salam with the numbers 19, 5, and 2.
  • October 2025: The King Salman Gate project is announced, planned to add major new capacity in this general sector of the mosque, with construction expected to continue affecting this area’s gates and numbering.
  • July 2026 (present): Bab al-Salam functions as a named entrance on the mosque’s eastern flank near the Masa’a; its exact number varies by source, and further change is expected as construction continues.

Key Lessons

Historical Lesson

Names can outlive the structures that first carried them by centuries, and a name’s survival is not proof that the object behind it has survived unchanged. Bab Bani Shaybah has named at least three distinct physical realities — a gap between pre-Islamic houses, an Ottoman-era freestanding arch, and a twentieth-century perimeter gate — and treating all three as “the same gate” without qualification erases a history that is actually more interesting than the flattened version.

Spiritual Lesson

The most reliably transmitted, most universally applicable practices are often the least dramatic ones. The sahih du’a for entering any mosque, asking Allah to open the doors of His mercy, applies at every gate, at every mosque, every time, and rests on far firmer textual ground than the more specific and more romantic claim about which exact archway the Prophet ﷺ walked through at the conquest. Reliable devotion often looks less impressive than the story that made a gate famous.

Personal Lesson

It is possible, and arguably healthier, to hold reverence for a place and honesty about its history at the same time. Learning that the arch is gone and the marker is gone and the exact spot is unknown does not have to feel like a loss of faith; it can instead be an invitation to locate your devotion in what is actually certain — the du’a, the custodianship of the key that continues today, the fact of your own presence in the sanctuary — rather than in a physical claim that cannot bear the weight placed on it.

Practical Lesson

Do not build your Umrah logistics, or your peace of mind, around entering through one specific gate. Gate numbers change, construction continues, and crowd management authorities will sometimes route you elsewhere regardless of your preference. Learn the general mosque-entry sunnah, keep flexible about which gate you actually use, and treat any particular gate’s number as provisional information rather than a fixed fact to memorise.

Authentic Sources

Primary Sources

Classical Sources

  • Al-Azraqi, Akhbar Makkah (third century AH), the earliest detailed topographical history of the mosque and its gates, as quoted and summarised in later heritage literature.
  • Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani, Fath al-Bari, commentary on Sahih al-Bukhari, discussed via Islamweb’s presentation of the relevant chapter on the Prophet’s ﷺ entry into Makkah.
  • Muhammad Tahir al-Kurdi, al-Tarikh al-Qawim li-Makkah wa Bayt Allah al-Karim (twentieth century), the last detailed descriptive account of the historic arch before its demolition.
  • Hajj: The Islamic Pilgrimage According to Five Schools of Islamic Law, a comparative fiqh survey covering Hanafi, Maliki, Shafi’i, Hanbali, and Ja’fari positions on entering Makkah — islamicmobility.com/files/pdf/pdf444.pdf

Modern Sources

A Note on Method

This article has tried, throughout, to keep three categories separate that popular retellings routinely merge: what is established by a sahih hadith with a clear chain; what rests on a weaker or disputed chain that later writers repeated because it was already part of the received tradition; and what is simply historical custom, architectural description, or later devotional practice with no hadith chain to grade at all. Where sources disagreed on a specific date or number — the exact day of the arch’s demolition, the current official gate number, the total count of gates at the Haram — this article has reported the disagreement rather than silently choosing one figure to present as settled. Where a claim appeared online without a traceable primary or credible secondary source, including the “780 AD” construction date for the present gate, it has been flagged as unverified rather than repeated as fact. Readers who want to go deeper on the Bani Shaybah family’s custodianship of the Kaaba’s key, or on the broader system of the Haram’s many gates, should consult this guide’s companion articles on the door of the Kaaba and on the gates of Masjid al-Haram, both of which cover that adjacent ground in the depth it deserves.