Bir Dharwan (Bir Zarwan): The Well of the Sorcery Against the Prophet ﷺ — History, Hadith and Ziyarah Guide

South of the great courtyard of Masjid an-Nabawi, where car parks, service roads and the stone façades of modern Madinah now stand, there was once a quarter of the Ansar called the dwellings of Banu Zurayq. Somewhere within it, in a garden watered by a well the sources call Dharwan — written elsewhere Dhi Arwan — a comb, a knot of hair, and the dried spathe of a male date-palm were once pulled from beneath a stone at the bottom of a shaft, on the order of the Messenger of Allah ﷺ himself. What had been placed there, according to the most rigorously authenticated reports in the entire body of hadith literature, was sihr: sorcery worked against him by a man named Labid ibn al-A’sam. This article tells that story as the sources give it, sets out the grave theological question it raises, and reports, as plainly as the record allows, what a visitor to Madinah today will and will not find of the well itself.

No subject in a guide to the historical sites of Madinah calls for more care than this one. The episode touches the person of the Prophet ﷺ in his human body, and it sits close to a question that has occupied Muslim theologians for over a thousand years: what could and could not touch him, and where the line falls between the illness and affliction that all human beings share and the absolute protection that guards his prophethood and his message. This guide does not attempt to settle that question. It reports the hadith exactly as the major collections transmit it, sets out fairly what the classical scholars and the later objectors each said about it, and separates — as carefully as the sources allow — what is firmly established from what is popularly repeated but weakly attested. Readers researching the history of Bir Dharwan, Islamic history of Madinah’s wells, or preparing for an Umrah historical sites itinerary that touches on the seerah’s harder chapters will find here a full account, not a simplified one.

Historical Background: Madinah, the Banu Zurayq, and the Well Before the Incident

The Oasis and Its Wells

Pre-Islamic Yathrib was a scatter of fortified farmsteads and palm groves fed by a great number of wells sunk into the volcanic plain between the city’s two lava fields. Water, not architecture, was the currency of status in that landscape: a family’s well was its livelihood, and the ownership of a good well passed as an inheritance through generations. By the time of the Hijra in 622 CE, the oasis was dense with named wells — Bir Ghars, Bir Ha, Bir Uthman (Bir Rumah), Bir Aris and many others, several of which are treated in their own articles elsewhere in this guide. Dharwan, sometimes vocalised in the sources as Dhi Arwan, was one well among this larger family, situated in the residential quarter belonging to the Ansari clan of Banu Zurayq, a branch of the Khazraj.

Banu Zurayq and Their Quarter

Banu Zurayq were one of the Ansari clans of Madinah who accepted Islam in the early years of the Prophet’s ﷺ mission and whose territory lay close to the site later occupied by the expanding Masjid an-Nabawi. Their quarter is remembered in the classical topographical sources for more than the well: it also contained the mosque known as Masjid Banu Zurayq, also called Masjid al-Sabaq because it marked the finishing line of a horse race the Prophet ﷺ organised, a detail preserved in a hadith of Ibn Umar recorded in Sahih al-Bukhari describing a race run from al-Hafya to Thaniyyat al-Wada for the conditioned horses, and from Thaniyyat al-Wada to Masjid Banu Zurayq for the unconditioned ones — a race Ibn Umar himself says he rode in (al-Madina newspaper’s history of Masjid Banu Zurayq). This is useful context for the reader because it establishes, independent of the sihr narration, that Banu Zurayq’s quarter was a real, named, well-documented part of Prophetic-era Madinah, close enough to the mosque that the Prophet ﷺ is recorded walking to it on foot repeatedly.

Among Banu Zurayq’s number, or allied to them, lived a man named Labid ibn al-A’sam. The hadith of Aisha, quoted in full below, identifies him precisely: a man of Banu Zurayq, described in one important narration as a Jew and an ally of the Jews of Madinah who was, in addition, a hypocrite (munafiq) — that is, someone who had made an outward profession that did not reflect his inward hostility. It is this man’s action, according to the hadith, that gives the well its unhappy fame.

Geography Before and After Islam

Before Islam, there is nothing to suggest that Dharwan was different from any other agricultural well in the oasis: a source of irrigation for a garden of date-palms, owned or used by a family of Banu Zurayq. It acquired its place in Islamic memory entirely because of a single episode, datable to the Madinan period of the Prophet’s ﷺ life, several years after the Hijra. After that episode the well was, according to the hadith itself, ordered filled with earth by the Prophet ﷺ — meaning that its active life as a working well may have ended within his own lifetime, or shortly after. Its subsequent history, so far as the classical sources of Madinan topography allow it to be traced, is a story of a physical shaft disappearing beneath the accumulated building of fourteen centuries, while its name survived as a place name for the surrounding quarter. That survival, and its eventual disappearance, are treated in detail in the section on the well today.

The Story Behind the Place: The Sihr of Labid ibn al-A’sam

What follows is a narrative reconstruction built strictly from the hadith texts quoted verbatim in the Hadith References section below. Nothing here is invented; every event, phrase and detail is drawn from Aisha’s own testimony as preserved in Sahih al-Bukhari and Sahih Muslim.

The Onset of the Affliction

According to Aisha, the wife of the Prophet ﷺ and the sole narrator of this entire episode across every version that has reached us, a spell was worked upon the Prophet ﷺ by Labid ibn al-A’sam. The effect described is precise and consistent across the narrations: the Prophet ﷺ began to imagine that he had done a thing which he had not in fact done. One narration in Sahih al-Bukhari makes the nature of this even more specific — that he would think he had gone to his wives when he had not done so — and the sub-narrator Sufyan ibn Uyaynah is recorded remarking within the chain of transmission itself that this is the hardest and most severe form that such an affliction can take (Sahih al-Bukhari 5765). The affliction is described as lasting for a period of time — Aisha’s wording is “one day or one night” before the resolution came, though other reports imply a longer duration measured in months, during which the Prophet ﷺ made repeated supplication to his Lord for relief.

The Dream of the Two Angels

The turning point came, according to Aisha, while the Prophet ﷺ was with her. He had supplicated at length. Then he told her: “O Aisha, do you know that Allah has instructed me concerning the matter I asked Him about? Two men came to me — one sat near my head, the other near my feet.” What follows in the hadith is a dialogue between the two visitors, understood by the commentators to have been angels communicating to him in a dream, in which one asks the other the nature of the Prophet’s ﷺ ailment. The reply is direct: “He is under the effect of magic” — in the Arabic, matbub, from a root meaning to be affected by sorcery, sometimes rendered “bewitched.” Pressed for who had done this, the answer names Labid ibn al-A’sam. Pressed for the means — “in what?” — the answer specifies a comb, the hair caught in it, and the spathe, or dried sheath, of a male date-palm’s pollen cluster. Pressed for the location, the answer is given as the well of Dharwan, with one narration adding the detail that the material was placed beneath a stone at the bottom of the well (Sahih al-Bukhari 5765).

The Recovery of the Material

The Prophet ﷺ, together with a number of his companions, went to the well described in the dream. Returning, he told Aisha that he recognised it exactly as he had been shown: its water, he said, looked like an infusion of henna leaves, red-tinted and stagnant, and the tops of its date-palms looked — in his own words — like the heads of devils. Several narrations state plainly that the material was taken out of the well; the version in Sahih Muslim uses the words “sent some of the persons from among his Companions there,” while the fuller narration in Sahih al-Bukhari 5765 states explicitly that the Prophet ﷺ himself went to the well and “took out those things,” identifying it as “the well that was shown to me.”

Aisha’s Question and the Prophet’s ﷺ Answer

Aisha’s own reaction, preserved directly in her words, is one of the most striking details of the whole account. In one narration she asks: “O Messenger of Allah, why did you not show it to the people?” — meaning, why not expose the sorcerer publicly and display the evidence. In another she asks something closer to a request for a stronger remedy: “why do you not treat yourself with nashra,” a form of counter-charm or exorcism known in pre-Islamic and early Islamic practice. In yet another she asks directly, “shall I not burn it?” To each of these the Prophet’s ﷺ answer carries the same substance, though the wording differs slightly between narrations: “Allah has cured me, and I disliked to let evil spread among the people” — or, in Sahih Muslim’s wording, “I do not like that I should induce people to commit any high-handedness in regard to one another.” He declined to publicise the matter or to confront Labid ibn al-A’sam with what had been discovered. He ordered, instead, that the well itself be filled in with earth.

This restraint is itself a detail worth pausing on before moving to the theological discussion. The Prophet ﷺ who had just endured, on his own testimony, one of the most disorienting afflictions of his life, chose concealment and reconciliation over exposure and retribution. He did not have Labid ibn al-A’sam punished. The hadith records no trial, no public accusation, no verse of retaliation. What is preserved is a man who, having been shown his own cure, thanked Allah for it and moved on without stirring further division in a community that was still, at this point in the Madinan period, delicately balanced between Muslims, Jews and hypocrites.

The Prophet ﷺ and This Place: Every Authentic Detail

Because this article concerns an episode rather than a monument the Prophet ﷺ built or regularly visited, the relevant authentic material is concentrated entirely in the hadith of Aisha already narrated above, together with the sound reports concerning his subsequent recourse to ruqyah. There is no report of the Prophet ﷺ visiting Dharwan on any other occasion, praying there, or naming it before the incident. Every mention of the well in the authentic sources belongs to this single episode and its immediate aftermath. This is an important point of intellectual honesty for a guide of this kind: unlike Masjid Quba, or the martyrs’ field at Uhud, or the wells the Prophet ﷺ drank from and blessed, Dharwan enters the historical record for one reason only, and the reader should not expect — because the sources do not supply — any wider biography for the site.

What the authentic sources do supply, and what deserves full attention, is what the Prophet ﷺ did afterwards: he treated himself, as the reports on the Mu’awwidhatayn and the practice of ruqyah below make clear, through supplication and Qur’anic recitation, and he continued this practice — reciting Surat al-Ikhlas and the two surahs of refuge over his own hands and wiping his body with them each night — as a matter of ongoing personal practice rather than a one-time remedy, according to the hadith of Aisha recorded in Sahih al-Bukhari 5017 and Sahih al-Bukhari 5748. When he later fell ill in his final illness, Aisha reports that he asked her to perform this same act for him, since by then his own hands lacked the strength (Sahih al-Bukhari 5748).

Qur’anic Connections

Surah al-Baqarah 2:102 — The Reality of Sihr and the Angels Harut and Marut

The clearest Qur’anic statement affirming the objective reality of sorcery — a foundation stone for everything discussed in this article — comes from Surah al-Baqarah:

﴿وَٱتَّبَعُوا۟ مَا تَتْلُوا۟ ٱلشَّيَـٰطِينُ عَلَىٰ مُلْكِ سُلَيْمَـٰنَ ۖ وَمَا كَفَرَ سُلَيْمَـٰنُ وَلَـٰكِنَّ ٱلشَّيَـٰطِينَ كَفَرُوا۟ يُعَلِّمُونَ ٱلنَّاسَ ٱلسِّحْرَ وَمَآ أُنزِلَ عَلَى ٱلْمَلَكَيْنِ بِبَابِلَ هَـٰرُوتَ وَمَـٰرُوتَ ۚ وَمَا يُعَلِّمَانِ مِنْ أَحَدٍ حَتَّىٰ يَقُولَآ إِنَّمَا نَحْنُ فِتْنَةٌۭ فَلَا تَكْفُرْ ۖ فَيَتَعَلَّمُونَ مِنْهُمَا مَا يُفَرِّقُونَ بِهِۦ بَيْنَ ٱلْمَرْءِ وَزَوْجِهِۦ ۚ وَمَا هُم بِضَآرِّينَ بِهِۦ مِنْ أَحَدٍ إِلَّا بِإِذْنِ ٱللَّهِ ۚ وَيَتَعَلَّمُونَ مَا يَضُرُّهُمْ وَلَا يَنفَعُهُمْ ۚ وَلَقَدْ عَلِمُوا۟ لَمَنِ ٱشْتَرَىٰهُ مَا لَهُۥ فِى ٱلْـَٔاخِرَةِ مِنْ خَلَـٰقٍۢ ۚ وَلَبِئْسَ مَا شَرَوْا۟ بِهِۦٓ أَنفُسَهُمْ ۚ لَوْ كَانُوا۟ يَعْلَمُونَ﴾

“They followed what the devils recited during the reign of Solomon. It was not Solomon who disbelieved, but the devils disbelieved, teaching people magic and that which was revealed to the two angels at Babylon, Harut and Marut. But the two angels taught no one until they had said: ‘We are only a trial, so do not disbelieve.’ And yet they learned from them that by which they might cause separation between a man and his wife. But they could not harm anyone through it except by permission of Allah. And they learned what harmed them and did not benefit them. But the Children of Israel certainly knew that whoever purchased the magic would not have in the Hereafter any share. And wretched is that for which they sold themselves, if they only knew.”

— Surah al-Baqarah 2:102

The classical exegetes treat this verse as the primary Qur’anic proof-text that sihr has a real, non-illusory effect in the world, and that it was taught by devils who had corrupted a knowledge originally given to two angels, Harut and Marut, as a trial for the people of Babylon — a trial the angels themselves openly disclosed by warning every prospective student, “we are only a trial, so do not disbelieve.” The verse is equally explicit about the limit on that reality: whatever harm sorcery does, it does only “by Allah’s permission” — that is, sihr is real but is never an independent, God-excluding force; it operates, like poison or fire, within the causal order Allah has permitted, not outside or above it. The verse also states unambiguously that learning and practising this magic voids any share in the reward of the Hereafter for whoever “purchases” it, establishing the basis for its total prohibition, discussed further below.

Surah al-Furqan 25:8 — “A Man Bewitched”

The verse that gives this entire subject its theological difficulty is a separate one, spoken not by the believers but by the disbelievers of Makkah, mocking the Prophet ﷺ:

﴿أَوْ يُلْقَىٰٓ إِلَيْهِ كَنزٌ أَوْ تَكُونُ لَهُۥ جَنَّةٌۭ يَأْكُلُ مِنْهَا ۚ وَقَالَ ٱلظَّـٰلِمُونَ إِن تَتَّبِعُونَ إِلَّا رَجُلًۭا مَّسْحُورًا﴾

“…or a treasure is cast down to him, or he has a garden from which he eats?” And the wrongdoers say, “You follow not but a man affected by magic.”

— Surah al-Furqan 25:8

Classical tafsir situates this verse firmly in the Makkan period, years before the Madinan sihr incident involving Labid ibn al-A’sam. It records a taunt of the Makkan disbelievers, who mocked the Prophet ﷺ as an ordinary man — one who eats food and walks in markets, as the surrounding verses state — and dismissed his prophetic claims by alleging he was mashur, a man under the influence of magic, meaning in their usage someone whose mind had been deranged or deluded, so that his message could not be trusted as revelation from God. It is important for the reader to understand precisely what this verse does and does not say: it is not a Qur’anic report that the Prophet ﷺ actually was bewitched. It is a report of an insult the disbelievers hurled at him, on a par with their other jibes in the same passage — that he must be mad, or a poet, or a sorcerer himself. The Qur’an quotes the accusation in order to record and answer the mockery of the Makkan opposition, not to endorse its content.

The theological difficulty this article must address arises from the juxtaposition of these two facts: the Qur’an quotes a Makkan insult accusing the Prophet ﷺ of being “a man bewitched” as evidence of the disbelievers’ unbelief and mockery, while an authenticated Madinan hadith reports that some years later he genuinely was, in a specific and limited sense, affected by sorcery. That tension — between a verse revealed to refute an insult and a hadith that appears, on its surface, to confirm part of what the insult alleged — is precisely the subject the scholars discussed at length, and it is treated fully and fairly in the following section.

The Theological Difficulty: Was the Prophet ﷺ Truly Affected by Sihr?

This is the most sensitive matter this article addresses, and it is presented here at length, without adjudicating between the positions. The reader should understand from the outset that the hadith reporting the sihr against the Prophet ﷺ stands on some of the strongest possible grounds of transmission — it is related in both Sahih al-Bukhari and Sahih Muslim, the two collections accepted by the overwhelming majority of Sunni Muslims as the most rigorously verified books of hadith in existence, through multiple chains, all converging on the testimony of Aisha. The hadith is authentic (sahih) by the unanimous verdict of the science of hadith criticism, and no traditional hadith scholar, of any school, has disputed its chain of transmission (isnad). The controversy that exists concerns not whether the Prophet ﷺ said and Aisha reported these words, but what those words mean and imply — and there, the debate divides into two clearly identifiable camps.

The Majority Sunni Position

The overwhelming majority of Sunni scholars across the centuries — including the hadith commentators, the theologians and the jurists together — accepted the hadith at full face value while drawing a firm distinction between two domains: the Prophet’s ﷺ body and worldly life on one hand, and his prophetic office and the revelation entrusted to him on the other. Sorcery, on this view, touched the first and never the second.

Al-Qadi Iyad, the Andalusian jurist and hadith scholar whose al-Shifa bi Ta’rif Huquq al-Mustafa is among the most authoritative classical treatments of the Prophet’s ﷺ station, is recorded as stating the principle with precision: “the witchcraft prevailed over his body and physical faculties, not over his discernment and beliefs” (quoted in Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani, Fath al-Bari, as summarised in IslamQA’s treatment of the hadith). On this reading, the affliction was analogous to a fever, a headache, or any bodily ailment: real, uncomfortable, and capable of producing false sensory impressions — the Prophet ﷺ imagining he had done something he had not — but incapable of reaching or corrupting the faculty by which he received and conveyed revelation.

Al-Nawawi, commenting on the parallel narration in Sahih Muslim, held the same position within the broader Ash’ari-Sunni theological consensus on the impossibility of error in the Prophet’s ﷺ conveyance of revelation (tabligh), a doctrine distinct from, but related to, his general ‘ismah or protection from sin. The point made repeatedly by the hadith commentators is that ‘ismah was never claimed by Sunni theology to extend to protection from bodily illness, physical harm, or even attempted assassination — the Prophet ﷺ was wounded at Uhud, poisoned at Khaybar according to other authentic reports, and subject to ordinary human ailments throughout his life. Sorcery, the majority argument runs, belongs to this same category of worldly affliction rather than to the category of revelation.

Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani, the great commentator on Sahih al-Bukhari, preserved and endorsed the earlier verdict of the Maliki scholar al-Mazari on precisely this question. Al-Mazari had written, as Ibn Hajar transmits: “the evidence that the Prophet ﷺ was truthful in what he conveyed from Allah and that he was infallible in conveying it is well established. The miracles bear witness to his truthfulness, and accepting something when there is evidence to the contrary is false. With regard to some worldly matters for which he was not sent and which have nothing to do with his message, then he was exposed to the same as all other human beings, such as sickness” (Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani, Fath al-Bari, 10/226–227, quoted at IslamQA). Ibn Hajar adds his own note identifying precisely which narration clarifies the ambiguous phrase “he imagined he had done a thing when he had not” — namely the version of Ibn Uyaynah specifying that this meant he imagined he had gone to his wives when he had not, a matter, the commentators stress, entirely of private, worldly life.

Another early commentator, al-Mahallab, cited by Ibn Hajar in the same passage, drew a further distinction: the Prophet’s ﷺ general protection from the devils, attested in other hadith describing a devil’s attempt to disrupt his prayer being repelled, does not mean the devils and their agents never attempted harm against him — only that such attempts could never succeed in touching what mattered most. “The harm that affected him did not have any impact on his conveying of the message, rather it was akin to any other kind of sickness that afflicted him… Allah foiled the plots of the devils” (Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani, Fath al-Bari, as quoted at IslamQA).

Ibn al-Qayyim, in his medical and prophetic-guidance compendium Zad al-Ma’ad, addressed the same objection directly and in almost identical language to al-Mazari’s: “This has been denied by some people who said that this could not have happened to him, and they thought that it was a shortcoming and a fault. But it is not as they think, rather it comes under the heading of sickness and pain that befell him; it is a kind of illness which befell him just as he was also affected by poison — there is no difference between the two… With regard to his imagining that he had done something when he had not done it, that does not have any impact on his truthfulness, because of the evidence to that effect and the scholarly consensus that he was protected from that. Rather it was one of the matters of this world which are not the reason for which he was sent” (Ibn al-Qayyim al-Jawziyyah, Zad al-Ma’ad, 4/124, quoted at IslamQA). Ibn al-Qayyim’s teacher, Ibn Taymiyyah, held the same general theological framework: that prophets are subject to bodily afflictions, hardship and the ordinary vulnerabilities of human life, and that this is entirely compatible with — indeed is part of the wisdom of — their human nature, while their function as conveyors of revelation stands protected by a separate and firmer divine guarantee. Neither Ibn Taymiyyah nor Ibn al-Qayyim treated the hadith as raising a genuine doctrinal problem; both treated the objection to it as a confusion between two categories that the earlier scholars, al-Mazari and Qadi Iyad among them, had already carefully separated.

The Minority Rejectionist Position

Against this near-unanimous classical consensus stands a minority position, both older and newer than it might first appear. Ibn Hajar records that objectors existed already among “the innovators” (ahl al-bid’ah) in the classical period — a term the hadith scholars generally applied to theological schools outside mainstream Sunni Ash’ari and Maturidi belief, including the Mu’tazilah, the rationalist theological school that placed a very high priority on protecting the Prophet’s ﷺ status from anything that could, in their reading, cast doubt on the reliability of revelation. Al-Mazari, reporting their argument as Ibn Hajar transmits it, frames their case fairly: “The innovators rejected this hadith and claimed that it detracted from the status of Prophethood and cast aspersions upon it. They said: Everything that leads to that is false. And they said that accepting that meant that we could not be sure of the laws that he prescribed, because it is possible that he imagined that he was seeing Jibreel when he was not there, and that something had been revealed to him when nothing had been revealed” (al-Mazari, quoted by Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani, Fath al-Bari, at IslamQA). Their argument, stated on its own terms, is not frivolous: if sorcery could make the Prophet ﷺ believe something false about his own actions, what principled reason is there to be certain it could not, even once, make him believe something false about revelation itself? For a school of thought whose entire theological commitment rested on defending the absolute, rationally demonstrable reliability of prophecy, that possibility — however remote in fact — was intolerable in principle, and the hadith, however strong its chain, had to be set aside.

This position did not remain confined to the classical Mu’tazilah. In the modern period it was revived, on related but not identical grounds, by Muhammad Abduh, the Egyptian reformist scholar and rector of al-Azhar, and by his student Muhammad Rashid Rida in their jointly authored Qur’anic commentary Tafsir al-Manar. Modern academic studies of this tafsir record that Abduh and Rida, despite the hadith’s presence in both Sahihayn, declined to accept that the Prophet ﷺ was genuinely affected by magic in the sense the hadith describes, holding instead that to affirm it would compromise the purity and reliability of revelation and expose the Prophet’s ﷺ prophetic communications to needless doubt; a comparable position was later associated with the Egyptian writer Sayyid Qutb (summarised in academic analysis of Tafsir al-Manar‘s treatment of prophetic miracles). Their objection was substantially rationalist in structure — protecting the epistemological certainty of revelation was, for them, a higher-order concern than accepting the literal content of even a hadith transmitted with an impeccable chain, a methodological stance that set them apart from, and drew criticism from, hadith specialists who treat isnad-criticism as the primary tool for establishing what the Prophet ﷺ said and did.

The Response of the Hadith Scholars

The hadith scholars’ rebuttal, most fully preserved through al-Mazari and Ibn Hajar, does not deny that the objection raises a serious question; it denies that the hadith, properly understood, actually raises it. Their answer rests on the distinction already described: certainty regarding the Prophet’s ﷺ truthfulness in conveying revelation is established by an entirely separate and independent body of evidence — the miracles, the internal coherence and preservation of the Qur’an, and the unbroken practice of the earliest community — and that evidence is not put in doubt merely because he was, on one specific and clearly bounded occasion, caused to misperceive a purely domestic and personal matter. Al-Mazari states this directly: “the evidence that the Prophet ﷺ was truthful in what he conveyed from Allah and that he was infallible in conveying it is well established… accepting something when there is evidence to the contrary is false” (quoted at IslamQA). In other words, the burden of proof, in the hadith scholars’ view, runs the other way: since the Prophet’s ﷺ reliability as a conveyor of revelation is established on independent and overwhelming grounds, a hadith describing a bodily affliction cannot be permitted to unsettle that separately secured certainty — and there is therefore no need to reject a soundly transmitted report merely because a hypothetical extension of its logic feels uncomfortable. Ibn al-Qayyim adds that the scholarly consensus itself functions as a further safeguard: whatever the Prophet ﷺ experienced by way of false impressions in worldly matters, “the scholarly consensus” holds him “protected from that” in matters bearing on the message (Zad al-Ma’ad, 4/124).

This guide reports both positions as they stand. The overwhelming majority of Sunni scholars, classical and contemporary, accept the hadith as authentic and theologically unproblematic once the distinction between bodily affliction and prophetic conveyance is drawn. A minority, associated historically with the Mu’tazilah and in the modern period with Muhammad Abduh, Rashid Rida and writers in their circle, set the hadith’s plain content aside on the rational ground that any possibility of the Prophet’s ﷺ perception being altered by an external force is incompatible with certainty in revelation, even where the hadith’s chain of transmission is not in question. Which position the reader finds more persuasive is not something this article will decide.

Sihr in Islamic Law and Belief: Reality, Prohibition, and Ruling

The Reality of Sihr

Sunni orthodoxy, resting principally on Surah al-Baqarah 2:102 quoted in full above, holds that sihr has a real effect in the created world — it is not, in the majority view, mere trickery, hypnotic suggestion or psychological illusion in every case, though illusion is one of its recognised categories. The verse’s own language is careful on this point: sorcery can cause real harm, including separating a husband from his wife, but “not except by Allah’s permission” — meaning its causal power, whatever it is, operates entirely within the bounds Allah has set, exactly as fire burns or poison harms only because Allah has made it so, not through some competing power. This is the position affirmed by the classical schools of Sunni theology and jurisprudence, in contrast to positions, associated with some Mu’tazili theologians and with certain modern rationalist interpreters, that sought to explain reports of magical effect as psychological or illusory phenomena only.

The Prohibition and Its Ruling

The practice of sihr is unanimously prohibited in Islamic law. The Qur’an’s language in 2:102 — describing those who “purchased” magic as having “no share in the Hereafter” and having sold themselves for a wretched price — supplies the primary textual basis for its condemnation. The classical jurists across the four Sunni schools held the learning and practice of sorcery to be, at minimum, a major sin, with a substantial body of scholarship, particularly within the Hanbali and Hanafi traditions, holding the practising sorcerer to be liable to the death penalty as a matter of state-administered punishment (hadd or ta’zir, depending on the school and the specific circumstances), on the grounds that the practice inherently involves seeking the assistance of devils and typically requires acts of disbelief or associating partners with Allah as a condition of the jinn’s cooperation. The four schools differ in some particulars — whether a claimed repentance can avert the penalty, and the precise legal characterisation of the act — but they are unanimous that sihr is forbidden and that its practitioner is if anything, in Ibn Qudamah’s phrasing echoed across Hanbali fiqh manuals, among the worst of criminals, on account of the disbelief the practice typically requires. The Prophet ﷺ himself is reported in other authentic hadith to have listed sorcery among the seven destructive sins.

The Classical Discussion of Harut and Marut

The classical exegetes devoted substantial attention to the two angels named in 2:102, Harut and Marut, and to what precisely they taught. The predominant reading among commentators — including al-Tabari and later exegetes — holds that the two angels were sent to Babylon as a trial (fitnah) for the people of that city: they taught the difference between permitted knowledge and the sorcery the devils had already spread, precisely so that people would be tested in choosing whether to learn the forbidden material despite an explicit, repeated warning — “we are only a trial, so do not disbelieve” — attached to the teaching itself. Other, more minority readings in the classical tradition discuss variant recitations and grammatical possibilities in the verse that shift the sense of who is being described, but the operative theological conclusion drawn by the overwhelming majority of scholars remains constant regardless of the precise exegetical route: sihr is real, was historically taught by illegitimate means traced back to the devils’ corruption of a divine trial, and its acquisition and use are absolutely forbidden to believers.

Al-Mu’awwidhatayn: Surah al-Falaq and Surah an-Nas

The two final surahs of the Qur’an, known together as al-Mu’awwidhatayn — “the two surahs of seeking refuge” — occupy a central place in the Islamic response to sihr, the evil eye, and harm from the unseen. Their connection to the specific episode of Labid ibn al-A’sam is popularly assumed to be very close; the honest position, set out below, is that this connection is real in outline but weaker in its most famous details than popular tellings suggest.

Surah al-Falaq (113) — Full Text

﴿قُلْ أَعُوذُ بِرَبِّ ٱلْفَلَقِ ١ مِن شَرِّ مَا خَلَقَ ٢ وَمِن شَرِّ غَاسِقٍ إِذَا وَقَبَ ٣ وَمِن شَرِّ ٱلنَّفَّـٰثَـٰتِ فِى ٱلْعُقَدِ ٤ وَمِن شَرِّ حَاسِدٍ إِذَا حَسَدَ ٥﴾

“Say, ‘I seek refuge in the Lord of daybreak, from the evil of that which He created, and from the evil of darkness when it settles, and from the evil of the blowers in knots, and from the evil of an envier when he envies.'”

— Surah al-Falaq 113:1–5

Surah an-Nas (114) — Full Text

﴿قُلْ أَعُوذُ بِرَبِّ ٱلنَّاسِ ١ مَلِكِ ٱلنَّاسِ ٢ إِلَـٰهِ ٱلنَّاسِ ٣ مِن شَرِّ ٱلْوَسْوَاسِ ٱلْخَنَّاسِ ٤ ٱلَّذِى يُوَسْوِسُ فِى صُدُورِ ٱلنَّاسِ ٥ مِنَ ٱلْجِنَّةِ وَٱلنَّاسِ ٦﴾

“Say, ‘I seek refuge in the Lord of mankind, the Sovereign of mankind, the God of mankind, from the evil of the retreating whisperer, who whispers in the breasts of mankind, from among the jinn and mankind.'”

— Surah an-Nas 114:1–6

The Report of Their Revelation and Its Grading

There is a sound basis for connecting the revelation of both surahs to the general period and circumstance of the sihr against the Prophet ﷺ, though the connection is established through separate hadith material rather than through the sihr hadith of Aisha itself, which does not mention either surah by name. A report from Zayd ibn Arqam, transmitted through Al-A’mash from Yazid ibn Hayyan, states that a Jewish man bewitched the Prophet ﷺ so that he fell ill, that Jibril came to him bringing down al-Mu’awwidhatayn, told him who had bewitched him and where the material could be found, and that upon reciting the verses and untying the knots the Prophet ﷺ rose “as if he had been released from restraints”; this chain is judged trustworthy and was graded authentic by commentators on the work in which it appears, and by Shaykh al-Albani in al-Silsilah al-Sahihah (6/617), as summarised in IslamQA’s dedicated treatment of the revelation of the Mu’awwidhatayn. A separate chain to Aisha herself, transmitted by Sufyan ibn Uyaynah from Hisham ibn Urwah from his father from Aisha, stating that “Qul a’udhu bi Rabb al-falaq” was revealed, is likewise judged authentic in its chain by Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani in al-Talkhis al-Habir (6/2689).

The widely circulated detail of the eleven knots, however, stands on materially weaker ground, and this article states that plainly. The idea that the sorcery took the specific form of a cord tied with eleven knots, corresponding neatly to the combined eleven verses of the two surahs — so that each verse recited caused one knot to loosen — is not found in Sahih al-Bukhari or Sahih Muslim. Ibn Hajar traces this specific detail to two separate sources, both weaker than the Sahihayn: a report in al-Bayhaqi’s Dala’il al-Nubuwwah, which Ibn Hajar explicitly describes as carrying “an inauthentic chain of narration,” and a report from Ibn Sa’d, transmitted from Ibn Abbas, describing the Prophet ﷺ sending Ali and Ammar to the well and their finding a string with eleven knots — but Ibn Hajar notes this chain, too, is munqati’ (interrupted, meaning a link in the transmission is missing) (Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani, al-Talkhis al-Habir, 6/2689–2690, as summarised in IslamQA). The commentator al-Suhayli is separately recorded proposing the number eleven as a fitting match to the combined verse-count of the two surahs, which is itself a later interpretive suggestion rather than a hadith report. A note on authenticity: the eleven-knots detail is a widely repeated and beloved element of the popular telling of this story, appearing in Ibn Sa’d’s Tabaqat and in some tafsir literature, but it is not in the Sahihayn, and the chains that do transmit it are, by the explicit verdict of Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani, either weak or interrupted. Readers should hold the general connection between the sihr episode and the revelation of al-Mu’awwidhatayn as reasonably well attested through the separate, sound chains from Zayd ibn Arqam and Aisha described above, while holding the specific, vivid image of eleven knots being individually untied verse by verse as a popular addition that cannot be assigned the same grade.

The Sound Hadith on Reciting Them

Independent of the disputed revelation-narrative, the virtue and prophetic practice of reciting al-Mu’awwidhatayn is established on the firmest possible footing. Aisha reports: “Whenever the Prophet ﷺ went to bed every night, he used to cup his hands together and blow over them after reciting Surat al-Ikhlas, Surat al-Falaq and Surat an-Nas, and then rub his hands over whatever parts of his body he was able to rub, starting with his head, face and the front of his body. He used to do that three times” (Sahih al-Bukhari 5017). A parallel narration adds the detail that when the Prophet ﷺ later fell ill in his final illness, he would instruct Aisha to perform this same act on his behalf, since he was himself no longer able (Sahih al-Bukhari 5748). Both hadith are graded Authentic (sahih) without dispute, and together they establish the nightly recitation of the Mu’awwidhatayn as an authentic, continuous Prophetic practice entirely apart from the contested detail of the eleven knots.

Hadith References: Consolidated and Graded

The Core Narration of the Sihr

The following five narrations, all transmitted from Aisha through the family of Urwah ibn al-Zubayr (chiefly through Hisham ibn Urwah from his father Urwah from Aisha), are the primary sources for this entire episode. All five are Authentic (sahih), agreed upon by the unanimous consensus of the science of hadith, since they are preserved in both Sahih al-Bukhari and Sahih Muslim, the two collections whose combined agreement (what the scholars call muttafaqun alayh) represents the highest tier of hadith authentication in the Sunni tradition.

  • Sahih al-Bukhari 5763 (Book of Medicine, Chapter on Magic): “A man called Labid bin al-A’sam from the tribe of Bani Zuraiq worked magic on Allah’s Messenger ﷺ till Allah’s Messenger ﷺ started imagining that he had done a thing that he had not really done… ‘Where is that?’ The other replied, ‘That is in the well of Dharwan.’ So Allah’s Messenger ﷺ along with some of his companions went there and came back saying, ‘O Aisha, the colour of its water is like the infusion of Henna leaves. The tops of the date-palm trees near it are like the heads of the devils.’ I asked, ‘O Allah’s Messenger, why did you not show it to the people?’ He said, ‘Since Allah cured me, I disliked to let evil spread among the people.’ Then he ordered that the well be filled up with earth.” Read on Sunnah.com.
  • Sahih al-Bukhari 5765 (Book of Medicine, Chapter: Should a bewitched person be treated?): “Magic was worked on Allah’s Messenger ﷺ so that he used to think that he had sexual relations with his wives while he actually had not… ‘A comb and the hair stuck to it.’ The first one asked, ‘Where is that?’ The other replied, ‘In a skin of pollen of a male date-palm tree kept under a stone in the well of Dharwan.’ So the Prophet ﷺ went to that well and took out those things and said, ‘That was the well which was shown to me. Its water looked like the infusion of Henna leaves and its date-palm trees looked like the heads of devils.’… I said, ‘Why do you not treat yourself with Nashra?’ He said, ‘Allah has cured me; I dislike to let evil spread among my people.'” Read on Sunnah.com.
  • Sahih al-Bukhari 3268 (Book of the Beginning of Creation, Chapter: The characteristics of Iblis and his soldiers): “Magic was worked on the Prophet ﷺ so that he began to fancy that he was doing a thing which he was not actually doing… ‘It is in the well of Dharwan.’ So the Prophet ﷺ went out towards the well and then returned and said to me on his return, ‘Its date-palms are like the heads of the devils.’ I asked, ‘Did you take out those things with which the magic was worked?’ He said, ‘No, for I have been cured by Allah and I am afraid that this action may spread evil amongst the people.’ Later on the well was filled up with earth.” Read on Sunnah.com.
  • Sahih al-Bukhari 6391 (Book of Invocations, Chapter: To repeat the invocation): “Allah’s Messenger ﷺ was affected by magic, so much that he used to think that he had done something which in fact, he did not do, and he invoked his Lord for a remedy… ‘It is in Dharwan.’ Dharwan was a well in the dwelling place of the tribe of Banu Zurayq. Allah’s Messenger ﷺ went to that well and returned to Aisha, saying, ‘By Allah, the water of the well was as red as the infusion of Henna, and the date-palm trees look like the heads of devils.’… I asked the Prophet, ‘Why didn’t you take out the skin of pollen?’ He said, ‘As for me, Allah has cured me and I hated to draw the attention of the people to such evil.'” Read on Sunnah.com.
  • Sahih Muslim 2189 (Book of Greetings, Chapter: Witchcraft): “A Jew from among the Jews of Banu Zuraiq who was called Labid b. al-A’sam cast a spell upon Allah’s Messenger ﷺ with the result that he felt that he had been doing something whereas in fact he had not been doing that… ‘Where is that?’ He replied, ‘In the well of Dhi Arwan.’ Allah’s Messenger ﷺ sent some of the persons from among his Companions there and then said, ‘Aisha, by Allah, its water was yellow like henna and its trees were like heads of the devils.’… I asked Allah’s Messenger ﷺ as to why he did not burn that. He said, ‘No, Allah has cured me and I do not like that I should induce people to commit any high-handedness in regard to one another, but I only commanded that it should be buried.'” Read on Sunnah.com.

Note the small but genuine variations between these five narrations, all transmitted ultimately from Aisha but through different students of Hisham ibn Urwah: the well’s name appears as “Dharwan” in the Bukhari narrations and as “Dhi Arwan” in the Sahih Muslim narration, a variation the philologists attribute to dialectal pronunciation of the same place-name, discussed further below; the disposal of the material after recovery is described in one place as burial (dafn) and Aisha is recorded asking about burning (ihraq) in the Muslim version, while in the Bukhari version she asks about a counter-charm (nashra); and the well itself is what was ultimately ordered filled in, in every version. These are the kind of minor variations in wording that hadith scholars expect and account for across multiple sound chains transmitting the same event, and they do not affect the core content on which all five narrations agree.

The Ruqyah and the Mu’awwidhatayn

  • Sahih al-Bukhari 5017 (Book of the Virtues of the Qur’an): “Whenever the Prophet ﷺ went to bed every night, he used to cup his hands together and blow over them after reciting Surat al-Ikhlas, Surat al-Falaq and Surat an-Nas, and then rub his hands over whatever parts of his body he was able to rub.” Graded Authentic (sahih). Read on Sunnah.com.
  • Sahih al-Bukhari 5748 (Book of Medicine): “Whenever Allah’s Messenger ﷺ went to bed, he used to recite Surat al-Ikhlas, Surat al-Falaq and Surat an-Nas and then blow on his palms… And when he fell ill, he used to order me to do like that for him.” Graded Authentic (sahih). Read on Sunnah.com.
  • Sahih Muslim 2186 (Book of Greetings, Chapter: Medicine, sickness and ruqyah): Abu Sa’id reported that Jibril came to the Prophet ﷺ and asked, “Muhammad, have you fallen ill?” He said, “Yes.” Jibril said, “In the name of Allah I exorcise you from everything and safeguard you from every evil that may harm you and from the eye of a jealous one. Allah would cure you and I invoke the name of Allah for you.” Graded Authentic (sahih). Read on Sunnah.com.

The Weaker and Disputed Reports

  • The report from Zayd ibn Arqam connecting Jibril’s descent of al-Mu’awwidhatayn directly to the sihr episode: chain judged trustworthy, graded Authentic (sahih) by commentators and by al-Albani in al-Silsilah al-Sahihah (6/617), though it is not in the Sahihayn (summarised at IslamQA).
  • The report of the eleven knots via al-Bayhaqi’s Dala’il al-Nubuwwah: graded by Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani as carrying a weak (da’if) chain.
  • The report of the eleven knots and the sending of Ali and Ammar to the well, via Ibn Sa’d from Ibn Abbas: graded by Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani as Munqati’ (interrupted).

Historical Development: The Well After the Prophetic Era

The hadith itself supplies the last certain fact in the well’s active history: the Prophet ﷺ ordered it filled in with earth immediately after the material was recovered, so that, on the plain reading of the text, Dharwan ceased to function as a working well within his own lifetime. What happened to the site across the Rashidun, Umayyad, Abbasid, Mamluk and Ottoman periods is not addressed in any hadith or seerah source available to this article, and no continuous chain of description across those centuries could be located. This is a case in which the honest report is silence: unlike Bir Ghars or Bir Uthman, whose physical continuity through history is separately attested by later travellers and topographers, Dharwan drops out of the documentary record after the incident itself, re-emerging only as a place name.

What the sources do establish is that the name Dharwan survived, detached from any surviving shaft or visible well-head, as the name of a residential quarter of Madinah. The classical Madinan historian al-Samhudi, whose Wafa’ al-Wafa bi Akhbar Dar al-Mustafa remains the essential topographical authority for Prophetic-era Madinah, situates Dharwan among the wells of the Banu Zurayq quarter, without recording any physical description of a surviving well-head in his own time. Later Arabic reference works on Madinah’s historic sites confirm that by the modern era, “Dharwan” denoted a neighbourhood extending from the qiblah side of Masjid an-Nabawi to the road known as Darb al-Janaiz, and that this neighbourhood, together with the site of the historic Masjid Banu Zurayq that stood within it, was absorbed into the twentieth-century southern expansion of Masjid an-Nabawi (summarised from the modern Arabic encyclopedic entry on Bir Dharwan and from the historical listing of Madinah’s wells in the Saudi press’s coverage of the city’s historic sites). The Ottoman and early Saudi expansions of the Prophet’s Mosque, which progressively absorbed the surrounding residential quarters of old Madinah across the twentieth century, are the last identifiable historical process to have acted directly on the ground the well once occupied.

Architecture: What Little Can Be Said

No architectural description of Dharwan as a constructed well — its depth, its lining, the material of its shaft — survives in the sources consulted for this article. The hadith itself supplies only the details necessary to its narrative: that it had a stone at its bottom, beneath which the sorcery-material was concealed, and that its water was visibly discoloured, red-tinted like a henna infusion, and that date-palms grew near enough to it to be seen and described by the Prophet ﷺ on his return. Nothing further about its construction, whether it was lined with stone in the manner of other Madinan wells such as Bir Ghars, or how deep it ran, is stated in any available primary account. Readers seeking a fuller architectural treatment of a comparable Madinan well with continuous surviving fabric should consult this guide’s companion articles on Bir Ghars and Bir Uthman (Bir Rumah), both of which retain visible stonework that Dharwan does not.

Archaeological Findings

No archaeological excavation or published survey identifying and examining a physical shaft correlated with the well of Dharwan could be found in the sources available for this article. This absence should be stated plainly rather than passed over. Given that the toponym “Dharwan” survived only as a neighbourhood name and that the area was substantially rebuilt during the Ottoman and Saudi periods and finally absorbed into the modern expansion of Masjid an-Nabawi and its surrounding infrastructure, any original shaft, if it survived that long at all, has left no published archaeological trace. This is consistent with the broader pattern the reader will find across many of Madinah’s historic wells whose sites fall within the zone of twentieth-century mosque expansion.

Stories of the Companions

The hadith names only three individuals directly: the Prophet ﷺ, Aisha, and Labid ibn al-A’sam. No other Companion is named as a direct actor in the core narration preserved in the Sahihayn — the “companions” who accompanied the Prophet ﷺ to the well in some versions are not individually identified in the sound narrations. The disputed report from Ibn Sa’d names Ali ibn Abi Talib and Ammar ibn Yasir as the two Companions sent to retrieve the material from the well, but as noted above, this chain is graded interrupted (munqati’) by Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani, so it cannot be reported as an established fact about their individual involvement, only as a widely repeated detail of uncertain standing. Readers should note this rather than assume, as many popular retellings do, that Ali’s involvement is as firmly established as the core hadith itself.

Labid ibn al-A’sam himself is worth a brief, careful word. The hadith in Sahih al-Bukhari 5765 identifies him precisely as “a man from Banu Zurayq, an ally of the Jews, who was a hypocrite” — meaning he had made some form of outward profession of Islam while remaining, in reality, hostile to the Prophet ﷺ, a status shared with other named hypocrites of Madinah such as Abdullah ibn Ubayy. The sources consulted for this article record no judicial punishment, no verse of Qur’an revealed specifically naming him, and no further biographical detail about his life after the episode — consistent with the Prophet’s ﷺ own recorded choice not to confront or publicly expose him.

Stories of Great Islamic Scholars

The scholarly engagement with this hadith, already presented at length in the theological discussion above, constitutes the primary body of scholarly material tied specifically to this site, and it is worth summarising here in terms of the individual scholars’ broader contributions and characters, so the reader can place their remarks in context.

Al-Qadi Iyad (476–544 AH / 1083–1149 CE), the Andalusian Maliki jurist, hadith scholar and judge of Ceuta and Granada, wrote al-Shifa bi Ta’rif Huquq al-Mustafa specifically to compile and defend the rights and station due to the Prophet ﷺ, and it is within that broader defence of the Prophet’s ﷺ honour — not despite it — that he draws his careful distinction between bodily affliction and prophetic infallibility in conveying the message, a distinction later scholars would repeat as the settled formula for this issue.

Al-Nawawi (631–676 AH / 1233–1277 CE), the Damascene Shafi’i jurist whose commentary on Sahih Muslim remains a standard reference, situates his treatment of this hadith within his broader project of harmonising sound hadith with established doctrine, a project that runs across his entire commentary rather than being unique to this episode.

Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani (773–852 AH / 1372–1449 CE), whose seventeen-volume Fath al-Bari is the most authoritative commentary on Sahih al-Bukhari in the Sunni tradition, preserves and transmits the earlier verdict of al-Mazari (d. 536 AH), making his own commentary on this hadith a layered work of scholarship reaching back through several centuries of prior discussion — precisely the kind of chain of transmitted reasoning that gives Fath al-Bari its authority.

Ibn al-Qayyim al-Jawziyyah (691–751 AH / 1292–1350 CE), the student of Ibn Taymiyyah whose Zad al-Ma’ad fi Hady Khayr al-‘Ibad combines seerah, fiqh and prophetic medicine, treats the sihr episode within his chapter on the Prophet’s ﷺ guided treatment of his own illnesses — placing it, tellingly, in the same analytical category as his treatment of ordinary sickness, exactly the placement the majority theological position argues for.

Ibn Taymiyyah (661–728 AH / 1263–1328 CE) addressed the reality and rulings of sihr extensively across his broader corpus on Islamic theology and law, affirming its reality per the Qur’anic text while insisting, as a matter of core Sunni doctrine that runs through nearly all of his theological writing, on the strict boundary between the trials and afflictions a prophet may experience in his human capacity and the absolute reliability of what he conveys as revelation.

Spiritual Reflection

There is something quietly overwhelming in sitting with this hadith rather than turning away from it. You meet, in Aisha’s plain words, a Messenger of Allah ﷺ who was, in this one narrow and clearly bounded respect, as vulnerable as any human being: confused by an unseen hand, made to doubt his own actions, driven to repeated and earnest supplication for relief. If your instinct is discomfort, sit with that discomfort rather than resolving it too quickly in either direction — neither by explaining it away nor by drawing conclusions the scholars themselves did not draw.

What should strike you first is not the affliction but the response to it. He turned to supplication, not to counter-sorcery. When the means and the perpetrator were revealed to him, he chose mercy over exposure, healing over vengeance. He declined a request from his own wife to burn or display the evidence, out of concern for what it might stir up among the wider community. Ask yourself, honestly, how many people granted knowledge of the person who had wronged them, and the ability to expose or punish them publicly, would choose silence and forgiveness instead.

Consider, too, what the episode asks of your own understanding of prophethood. It is tempting, in an age suspicious of anything that looks like weakness, to want your models of excellence untouched by frailty. The hadith does not allow that comfort, and neither did the scholars who defended it. It asks you instead to hold two truths at once: that the Messenger of Allah ﷺ was subject, in his body and his worldly life, to the same order of affliction that touches every human being, and that this same man was entrusted, without error or corruption, with the final revelation to all of creation. If you find that difficult to hold together, you are in the company of serious scholars across a thousand years who worked hard, and carefully, and honestly, at holding it together too — some resolving it as the majority did, others declining to accept the hadith’s plain sense at all. What the episode does not permit is treating either fact — his humanity or his prophethood — as something you can simply discard to make the other easier to accept.

And when you turn to the surahs of refuge, al-Falaq and an-Nas, consider that Allah gave His Messenger ﷺ — and through him, you — no more elaborate weapon against the unseen than sincere, repeated, humble address to the One who created every source of harm in the first place. Not a counter-spell. Not a ritual object. Not a location to visit. Words, cupped in the hands, breathed out, and pressed against the body in trust.

Practical Visitor Guide

State plainly, at the very start of this section, what a visitor to Madinah in July 2026 will find if they go looking for Bir Dharwan: nothing identifiable as the well itself. There is no marker, no preserved shaft, no signposted location, and no consensus location that a pilgrim could be directed to with confidence. The name survives as a historical neighbourhood designation absorbed long ago into the built environment around the southern side of Masjid an-Nabawi; the physical well the hadith describes was ordered filled with earth in the Prophet’s ﷺ own lifetime, and no continuous record of its later physical survival, rediscovery, or preservation exists in the sources available to this guide.

What This Means for Your Itinerary

Do not plan a stop at “Bir Dharwan” or “Bir Zarwan” as you would plan a stop at Masjid Quba or Bir Ghars. There is no site to stand at. If a guide, driver, or app suggests a specific present-day location as “the well of the sorcery,” treat that claim with real scepticism: it is not corroborated by any classical topographical source this guide could verify, and, as explained below, actively seeking out such a claimed location runs against clear scholarly guidance.

What You Can Do Instead

The place to engage with this story is not a physical location but the text itself and the practice it recommends. If you wish to mark your encounter with this episode during your pilgrimage, the most faithful response, grounded in the authentic sources themselves, is to recite Surah al-Falaq and Surah an-Nas as the Prophet ﷺ himself is reported to have done nightly — cupping the hands, reciting, and wiping the body — rather than to search for a well that the historical record does not allow anyone to point to with confidence.

Common Mistakes

  • Assuming any specific modern landmark, well, or courtyard pointed out by a local guide is confirmed as the historical site. It is not, on the evidence available.
  • Confusing this well with other, still-visible Madinan wells such as Bir Ghars or Bir Uthman, which have an entirely separate history and are treated in their own articles in this guide.
  • Treating the visit itself, rather than the recitation and remembrance the story points toward, as the point of engaging with this history.

Common Misconceptions

The Ziyarah-Legitimacy Caveat

Because Dharwan is not among the small number of Madinan sites with a clear basis in the Sunnah for intentional devotional visitation, the position taken by Ibn Taymiyyah, Ibn Uthaymeen and the Standing Committee for Issuing Fatwas deserves to be stated plainly here. These scholars hold that only a short list of places around Makkah and Madinah — chiefly Masjid al-Haram, Masjid an-Nabawi, the grave of the Prophet ﷺ, Jannat al-Baqi, the martyrs of Uhud, and Masjid Quba — have a basis in the sunnah for being sought out with the specific intention of religious visitation and reward. Shaykh Ibn Uthaymeen states the point without qualification: “There are no places in Madeenah to be visited apart from these… As for other sites, there is no basis for visiting them” (summarised at IslamQA). The Standing Committee has separately and specifically cautioned against climbing mountains or seeking out caves with the intention of ziyarah, and against touching, rubbing, or tying cloth to stones, trees, walls or railings believed to carry some transmitted blessing. On this view, learning the history of a site such as Dharwan for its educational and seerah value is a different act from visiting it — or any presumed location associated with it — in the hope of religious reward or protective benefit; the first is encouraged as knowledge, the second is what these scholars caution against. It should be said, too, that not every scholar takes this narrow view: many Sufi and broader traditionalist scholars historically held a wider conception of tabarruk, or seeking blessing through proximity to places and objects connected to righteous history, and regarded such visits more favourably. This guide presents both positions as they stand and names who holds each. The decision belongs to the reader.

In the specific case of Dharwan, this caveat carries additional force for a reason distinct from the general principle: there is no verified, agreed location to visit even if one wished to. Any structure, plaque, or spot presented to visitors as “the well of the sorcery” should be treated with particular caution, since it would rest on claims this guide has not been able to verify against any classical topographical authority.

An Explicit Warning Against Seeking Out the Well for Any Purpose

Beyond the general ziyarah caveat, this specific site invites a further and more pointed warning, because of its subject matter. Folk practice around sites associated with sihr in many cultures has historically generated exactly the kind of behaviour Islamic teaching most firmly opposes: visiting a supposed location in the belief that proximity to it confers protection from magic, that its water or soil carries some residual potency (whether protective or dangerous), or that rituals performed there have special effect. None of this has any basis in the authentic sources. The hadith itself records the Prophet ﷺ ordering the well filled with earth and declining to make a public spectacle of the site — the opposite, in spirit, of treating it as a place to be sought out. Readers should understand plainly: there is no report, sound or weak, suggesting the Prophet ﷺ or the Companions treated Dharwan’s location, water, or soil as carrying any special property after the material was removed. The well’s story teaches through its recitations and its example of restraint, not through the geography of a specific hole in the ground.

The Water Is Not “Cursed”

A recurring folk elaboration holds that the well’s water was itself cursed, poisoned, or rendered permanently harmful by the presence of the sihr material. The hadith describes the water’s colour — like an infusion of henna leaves — as one of the visible signs by which the Prophet ﷺ recognised the well shown to him in his dream, not as a permanent property inflicted upon the water by the sorcery. Discolouration of standing well water, especially in a shaft that may have been undisturbed or poorly maintained, has mundane explanations; nothing in the hadith describes the water as having any effect on those who might drink it, and no authentic report describes anyone being harmed by contact with the well after the material was removed and the well filled in.

Visiting Does Not Protect From Sihr

Nothing in the authentic sources supports the idea, sometimes circulated informally, that visiting the site — or a location claimed to be the site — of this incident confers any protection against sorcery or the evil eye. The Prophet’s ﷺ own prescribed protections, established on strong hadith as detailed above, are verbal and devotional: the recitation of al-Mu’awwidhatayn and Surat al-Ikhlas, and the supplication taught by Jibril in Sahih Muslim 2186. These are available anywhere in the world, require no travel, and are the substance of the Prophetic response to this very episode.

Folk Practices and the Amulet Trade

Sorcery, protective amulets and folk-magical practice have a long and, in places, continuing informal presence in popular culture across the Muslim world, often marketed under claims of Prophetic sanction that do not withstand scrutiny of the primary sources. Practices involving worn amulets containing verses, knotted cords, or objects sold with claims of protective power drawing on this specific narrative fall outside what the authentic hadith describe or recommend, and some such practices — particularly those resembling the very knot-magic the hadith describes as having been used against the Prophet ﷺ, even where verses are invoked — have been the subject of scholarly caution regarding their proximity to the forbidden practice they claim to guard against. The safest and most textually grounded response to fear of sihr or the evil eye remains the direct, spoken and recited practice the Prophet ﷺ himself is authentically reported to have followed and taught, not an object purchased or a place visited.

Lesser-Known Facts

  • The name of the well appears with two distinct vocalisations across the primary hadith collections: “Dharwan” in the narrations preserved by al-Bukhari, and “Dhi Arwan” in the narration preserved by Muslim — a variation the classical philologists, cited in later Arabic scholarship on the hadith’s vocabulary, attribute to dialectal differences in how the transmitters rendered the same Madinan place-name, rather than to two different wells (discussed in detail in classical Arabic philological literature on the hadith’s rare words).
  • The narrator Sufyan ibn Uyaynah, embedded within the chain of Sahih al-Bukhari 5765, is recorded interjecting his own scholarly comment directly into the hadith’s transmission — remarking that the specific form of the affliction described, imagining marital relations that had not occurred, represents the most severe form sihr can take. This kind of embedded scholarly comment within a hadith’s chain is itself a small window into how early transmitters actively engaged with, rather than passively repeated, the material they carried.
  • Labid ibn al-A’sam’s precise religious status is recorded with unusual specificity for a minor figure in the hadith literature: not simply “a Jew,” but a man of the Ansari clan of Banu Zurayq who was allied to the Jews and who was, in addition, a hypocrite — three distinct and separately notable descriptors compressed into a single hadith phrase.
  • The Prophet ﷺ is recorded declining two different remedies suggested to him by Aisha across the various narrations — burning the recovered material, and treating himself with nashra, a term for a counter-charm or exorcism practice — choosing instead simple burial of the well and reliance on the cure Allah had already granted him.
  • The well’s toponym long outlived its physical structure: sources on Madinah’s historic neighbourhoods describe “Dharwan” surviving into the modern era purely as a district name, covering ground now folded into the southern expansion zone of Masjid an-Nabawi, with no separate physical trace of a well-head reported.

Timeline

  • Pre-Islamic period: Dharwan exists as one of the agricultural wells of Yathrib, in the residential quarter of the Ansari clan of Banu Zurayq.
  • 622 CE / 1 AH: The Hijra; Banu Zurayq, among the Khazraj, accept Islam and their quarter becomes part of the Muslim community of Madinah.
  • Madinan period (date not fixed precisely in the sources; traditionally placed some years after the Hijra): Labid ibn al-A’sam of Banu Zurayq works sihr against the Prophet ﷺ, according to the hadith of Aisha.
  • Same period: The Prophet ﷺ, after repeated supplication, is shown in a dream by two angels the nature, agent and location of the sorcery.
  • Same period: The Prophet ﷺ and his companions go to the well of Dharwan; the comb, hair and palm-spathe are recovered from beneath a stone at its bottom.
  • Same period: The Prophet ﷺ declines to publicise the matter or confront Labid ibn al-A’sam, and orders the well filled in with earth.
  • Classical period (dates uncertain in the available sources): Al-Samhudi records Dharwan among the wells of the Banu Zurayq quarter in Wafa’ al-Wafa, without describing a surviving physical well-head.
  • Twentieth century CE / 14th century AH: The Ottoman-era and Saudi-era expansions of Masjid an-Nabawi progressively absorb the old residential quarters of Madinah, including the area historically known as Dharwan, into the mosque’s surrounding built environment.
  • July 2026: No identifiable, agreed physical location of the well survives; the name persists only in historical and hadith literature and in the name once given to the surrounding neighbourhood.

Key Lessons

Historical

The episode is one of the most precisely documented events of the Madinan period, transmitted through a single primary narrator, Aisha, across multiple sound chains recorded in both Sahih al-Bukhari and Sahih Muslim — a level of multiple, convergent transmission that hadith scholars treat as a strong indicator of authenticity, even though the site itself has left no surviving physical trace.

Spiritual

The Prophet’s ﷺ response to discovering both the affliction and its author — supplication rather than retaliation, healing rather than exposure — models a form of restraint that the episode’s dramatic content can easily overshadow if the reader focuses only on the sorcery and not on what followed it.

Personal

The episode invites you to examine your own reactions when wronged: whether, given the power to expose or punish someone who has harmed you, you would choose, as the Prophet ﷺ did, to decline that power in favour of quiet gratitude for having been relieved of the harm itself.

Practical

Where fear of the unseen — sorcery, the evil eye, envy — is concerned, the authentic sources point toward specific, learnable, recitable words available to anyone anywhere, not toward travel to a location that, in this case, cannot even be reliably identified.

Authentic Sources

Primary Islamic Sources

The hadith at the centre of this article are drawn from Sahih al-Bukhari and Sahih Muslim, the two most rigorously authenticated hadith collections in Sunni Islam. A note of caution belongs here regarding other early historical sources: works such as the seerah literature associated with Ibn Ishaq, and the historical compilations of al-Waqidi and al-Tabari, are foundational to the broader study of the Prophet’s ﷺ life but are held by hadith specialists to widely varying standards of narrator reliability from chain to chain, and material from them is not treated in this article as equivalent in authority to material confirmed in the Sahihayn. Where this article has drawn on Ibn Sa’d’s al-Tabaqat al-Kabir, for the disputed report of the eleven knots, this has been explicitly flagged as carrying an interrupted chain, on the authority of Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani’s own assessment, rather than presented as established fact.

Classical Scholars

  • Al-Qadi Iyad, al-Shifa bi Ta’rif Huquq al-Mustafa — the foundational classical defence of the Prophet’s ﷺ station, including the principle that sorcery affected his body, not his discernment.
  • Al-Nawawi, commentary on Sahih Muslim.
  • Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani, Fath al-Bari (commentary on Sahih al-Bukhari) and al-Talkhis al-Habir — the primary source for the grading of the eleven-knots report and for the transmitted verdicts of al-Mazari and al-Mahallab.
  • Ibn al-Qayyim al-Jawziyyah, Zad al-Ma’ad fi Hady Khayr al-‘Ibad.
  • Ibn Taymiyyah, theological writings on the reality of sihr and the nature of prophetic infallibility.
  • Al-Samhudi, Wafa’ al-Wafa bi Akhbar Dar al-Mustafa — the key classical topographical authority for the historic sites of Madinah.

Modern Academic and Reference Sources

A Note on Method

This article has treated the authenticity of the core hadith of Aisha as settled by the unanimous consensus of Sunni hadith scholarship, since it is transmitted in both Sahih al-Bukhari and Sahih Muslim through sound chains. It has treated the theological interpretation of that hadith — what it means for the doctrine of prophetic protection — as a genuinely contested question among serious scholars across history, and has presented the majority and minority positions side by side, in the words of their own representative scholars wherever those words could be verified, without declaring one correct. It has treated the popular detail of the eleven knots as carrying a materially weaker chain than the core narration, on the explicit authority of Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani’s own grading, and has said so plainly rather than allowing the vividness of the detail to stand in for its authentication. And it has treated the present-day physical location of the well as unverifiable, because no source available to this research — classical or modern, Arabic or English — could supply a specific, corroborated present-day site, and has said that plainly rather than inventing a destination for the sake of a tidier visitor guide.