Jabal Abu Qubays: The Complete History, Story and Ziyarah Guide to the Mountain of Makkah and the Al-Safa Palace

Historical Background

Jabal Abu Qubays rises directly east of the Masjid al-Haram, its rocky shoulder pressed so close to the Kaaba that classical geographers measured the distance in a single figure: roughly one hundred metres. It is, by every traditional account, the nearest mountain to the House of Allah. Today its summit is invisible to the ordinary eye from the mosque courtyard, not because the mountain has vanished, but because a royal palace complex, Qasr al-Safa, now occupies the crown of the ridge. That fact alone tells you most of what you need to know before you read another word: this is a mountain whose Islamic history is real, contested, and in its most visible modern form, closed.

The name itself has no single settled origin, and honesty requires saying so plainly rather than picking the most romantic explanation and presenting it as fact. A Turkish academic study of the mountain’s classical sources, drawing on the Makkah history of al-Azraqi and the legal commentary of al-Nawawi, reports that the explanation most repeated among the people of Makkah traces the name to a man called Abu Qubays ibn Shamikh, a member of the Jurhum tribe who is said to have taken refuge on the mountain after a dispute involving a cousin of one Amr ibn Madad, and who was never seen again (İslam Araştırmaları Merkezi). Al-Nawawi accepted this account as the more reliable of the available explanations. A second explanation, attributed to the ninth-century polymath al-Jahiz, holds that the mountain took its name from an Arab ruler called Abu Qabus. A third strand of reports, gathered by the reference work Wikishia, claims the name descends from “qabas al-nar,” a firebrand, on the theory that two pieces of heavenly tinder once fell on the mountain and that Adam used them to kindle the first fire (Wikishia). A fourth account, transmitted by the early Makkan jurist Ata ibn Abi Rabah, says some Meccans held that the mountain was named for a man called “Ibrahim al-Qubaysi,” who built the first mosque there, and who is explicitly distinguished in this report from the Prophet Ibrahim (peace be upon him). None of these four explanations is a hadith. All of them are philological and historical reports of the kind classical Arab genealogists loved to collect, and modern readers should treat them exactly as such: plausible folk etymology, disputed among the very scholars who transmitted it, not settled fact.

What is not disputed is the mountain’s physical role in the topography of the sanctuary. Abu Qubays and the mountain across from it on the western side of the Kaaba, Qu’ayqa’an, were known together in old Arabic usage as “al-Akhshabayn,” the two rugged mountains, a pairing that appears in an authentic hadith discussed later in this article (Sahih al-Bukhari 3231). Height estimates for Abu Qubays vary across sources, which is itself worth noting rather than papering over: Saudi Arabia’s own state-backed geographic reference, Saudipedia, gives the peak’s height as 372 metres above sea level as part of the southern mountain range running through the city (Saudipedia), while a widely repeated figure elsewhere puts it at 420 metres, and a Saudi press infographic gives 375 metres (Makkah Newspaper). Encyclopaedia Britannica’s entry on Makkah’s mountains lists Abu Qubays at 1,220 feet, next to Qu’ayqa’an at 1,401 feet to the west and Jabal Ajyad at 1,332 feet, with Jabal Hira, the mountain of the cave in which the Prophet ﷺ received the first revelation, rising further off to the northeast at 2,080 feet (Encyclopaedia Britannica). The spread of figures reflects different survey dates, different reference points on an irregular ridge, and the fact that decades of quarrying have physically altered the mountain’s profile. There is no need to resolve the discrepancy artificially. What matters for the visitor is the relationship, not the exact metre count: Abu Qubays is the high ground standing over the eastern flank of the Haram, with the smaller hill of al-Safa at its base.

That relationship between the small hill and the large mountain behind it is the single most important geographic fact in this entire article, because almost every popular story about “Abu Qubays” actually belongs, in the authentic sources, to al-Safa. Al-Safa was, in the words of the sources describing the 1955 Saudi expansion of the Haram, physically continuous with Abu Qubays until the mountain was deliberately cut back and the connection between the two severed to make room for the growing mosque (İslam Araştırmaları Merkezi). Before that separation, al-Safa was, in effect, the foot of Abu Qubays: the point where the mountain’s slope met level ground and where pilgrims performing sa’i between Safa and Marwah would stand. This article draws that distinction carefully and consistently, because the Style guidance under which it is written and the primary sources it relies on both demand it: events set on al-Safa are not automatically events set on the summit of Abu Qubays, and conflating the two, however common in popular retellings, is not something the authentic reports themselves support.

Before Islam, the mountain already carried a name suggesting sanctity: al-Amin, “the trustworthy” or “the safekeeper.” Reports gathered in later Makkan historical literature explain the title through the tradition that the Black Stone, al-Hajar al-Aswad, was kept safe within the mountain during the flood of the Prophet Nuh (peace be upon him), and that the mountain therefore earned a reputation as a faithful guardian even in the pagan period (Wikishia). This tradition, and the separate claim that Abu Qubays was the first mountain raised on the earth, are treated in full and graded honestly later in this article, in the sections on Qur’anic Connections and Hadith References. For now it is enough to note that both claims belong to the category of historical and tafsir literature rather than the sahih hadith corpus, and that popular Islamic geography absorbed a great deal of such material about Makkah’s landmarks in the centuries after the Prophet’s ﷺ death.

Across the centuries the mountain’s importance shifted with the fortunes of the city beneath it. In the earliest years of the Prophet’s ﷺ mission, the base of the mountain, at al-Safa, was already a landmark: it was near there, at the northern or eastern foot of the hill, that the house of the early companion al-Arqam ibn Abi al-Arqam stood, the secret meeting place of the first Muslims, a matter discussed in full in the next section (Arabic Wikipedia). In the century after the Prophet’s ﷺ death, the mountain’s height and dominance over the sanctuary made it, tragically, a military asset: during the second civil war of early Islam, commanders on both the Umayyad and the rebel side used its summit as an artillery platform from which to bombard the Kaaba itself, a history recounted in the Historical Development section below. In the medieval period a small fortress and later a mosque and Sufi lodges occupied its higher ground. In the twentieth century, as Saudi Arabia began the modern expansions of the Grand Mosque, engineers cut directly into the mountain’s rock face to sever al-Safa from Abu Qubays and to open new tunnels and passages for the growing crowds of pilgrims. And in 1401 AH, corresponding to 1980 and 1981 CE, the Saudi state built a royal palace, Qasr al-Safa, on the summit itself, a complex that remains there today and that has, more than any other single fact, defined what a modern pilgrim can and cannot see or visit on this mountain (The Haramain Archives). This article covers each of those layers of history in turn, with the same rule applied throughout: state what is verified, grade what is traditional, and never blur the two.

Understanding Abu Qubays today, then, is really an exercise in understanding three different things that popular usage often collapses into one: the small ritual hill of al-Safa at the base, associated with authentic and richly documented events from the Prophet’s ﷺ life; the large mountain rising behind it, associated mostly with later historical and traditional material of variable reliability; and the modern royal complex that now sits on the mountain’s crown, a piece of contemporary Saudi state architecture that has made the summit, in practical terms, off-limits to the pilgrims whose forebears once looked up at it from the sanctuary below. A reader who keeps these three layers distinct will understand this place better than most of what is written about it online.

The Story Behind the Place

To understand why a mountain east of the Kaaba became woven so thoroughly into Makkah’s religious imagination, it helps to start with what the mountain actually did for the city physically, long before any miracle or any palace. Makkah sits in a narrow valley in the Hejaz, hemmed in by a ring of rocky hills, and Abu Qubays and Qu’ayqa’an together form the closest and most prominent pair of that ring, standing like two shoulders on either side of the sanctuary (Wikishia). Anyone standing near the Kaaba in the centuries before modern construction would have had this mountain filling the eastern skyline, close enough to feel less like a distant peak and more like a wall. That physical dominance is the reason the mountain shows up again and again in Makkah’s oral and written history as a stage: a place from which to see the whole city, to address a crowd, to keep watch, or, in the darkest chapters of its history, to attack the very House the mountain overlooked.

The earliest stratum of story attached to the mountain belongs to material that later Muslim historians absorbed from older Semitic and biblical-adjacent tradition, often termed Israiliyyat, material drawn from Jewish and Christian lore that circulated in Arabia before and after the rise of Islam. According to this layer of tradition, reported in later reference works rather than in the Qur’an or hadith, Abu Qubays was the first mountain God raised upon the earth, and it was here that Adam and Eve descended after their expulsion from Paradise, taking shelter in a cave that Adam named “Gharat al-Kanz,” the Treasure Cave, which he asked Allah to make a sanctified place (Wikishia).One further variant within this same layer of tradition holds that the cave took its name specifically because early believers were said to have hidden treasures or sacred relics within it during times of danger, which is one of several competing explanations later Muslim writers offered for the name Gharat al-Kanz, and the existence of multiple competing explanations for a single place-name is itself a useful signal, repeated throughout this article’s research, that a tradition has passed through many hands and many retellings before reaching the form in which it circulates today. The same layer of tradition holds that Adam, Eve, and their son Shayth were eventually buried in that cave, that Nuh removed their remains before the flood and returned them afterward, and that Adam buried the revealed scriptures given to him, the Sahayif Munzalah, somewhere on the mountain. None of this material carries the weight of an authentic hadith. It belongs to the same broad category as many other early stories about the world’s first mountains, first mosques, and first prophets that entered Muslim popular memory through the historical and exegetical literature rather than through anything the Prophet ﷺ is reliably reported to have said. This article states that plainly here and returns to it with fuller grading in the Qur’anic Connections and Common Misconceptions sections, because a story repeated for over a thousand years still deserves an honest account of where it stands, not silent omission and not silent endorsement.

A second, related strand of story concerns the Black Stone itself. Popular Makkah histories, drawing on material found in the tafsir literature and the historical compilations of writers such as al-Tabari, relate that the Black Stone descended from Paradise at the time of Adam, was kept safe within Abu Qubays during Nuh’s flood, either by the mountain itself or, in another version of the story, lifted out by the angel Jibreel before the waters rose, and was later shown to Ibrahim and Ismail (peace be upon them) when they rebuilt the Kaaba and needed to know where the stone belonged (Saudipedia). This is precisely the tradition that gave the mountain its pre-Islamic name, al-Amin, the trustworthy safekeeper. It is a beautiful story and an old one, and it is told honestly in the next major section of this article, alongside the one authentic hadith that does exist about the Black Stone’s origin, which says nothing at all about Abu Qubays. Readers who want the full grading of both traditions should turn to the Qur’anic Connections and Hadith References sections below; the short version, stated here so nothing is left ambiguous even in this narrative retelling, is that the Abu Qubays flood-story is transmitted through historical and exegetical literature, not through the sound hadith collections, and a respected modern scholarly voice, Shaykh Ibn Baz, is on record describing it as the weaker of the two competing reports about the stone’s history (Madeenah.com).

The mountain’s documented, non-legendary story begins to firm up considerably once the narrative reaches the lifetime of the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ and the years just before his birth. One report, transmitted in later historical literature rather than as a graded hadith, describes his grandfather Abd al-Muttalib leading a delegation of Quraysh noblemen up the mountain to pray for rain during a famine that struck Makkah when the future Prophet ﷺ was seven years old (Wikishia). Whatever the precise historical accuracy of that specific account, it captures something true about how the mountain functioned in pre-Islamic Makkah: high ground used for communal ritual, a place where the city’s leaders went to be seen appealing to the heavens on behalf of everyone below.

The real turning point in the mountain’s story, however, is not anything that happened on its summit. It is what happened at its base, on the smaller hill of al-Safa, in the earliest and most dangerous years of the Prophet’s ﷺ mission. When the first believers in Makkah numbered only a handful and open preaching would have meant immediate and violent reprisal from the Quraysh, the Prophet ﷺ needed a place to teach the Qur’an, lead his companions in prayer, and receive new converts without drawing the attention of the powerful clans who controlled the city. He found it in the house of a young Makhzumi convert named al-Arqam ibn Abi al-Arqam, whose home stood, according to the converging testimony of the classical Makkah historians Ibn Shabba and al-Azraqi, at the foot of al-Safa, tucked into a narrow lane near what later became the entrance to the sa’i corridor, close enough to the Kaaba to reach quickly but discreet enough that comings and goings would not obviously register with the pagan Quraysh who filled the sanctuary each day (Islamopedie). Al-Azraqi placed the house on the slope of Safa facing Dar al-Nadwa, the assembly hall of the Quraysh elite, an irony the classical sources do not fail to notice: the first Muslim school stood almost within earshot of the council house of the very tribal leaders working hardest to crush it.

For roughly three years, by the reckoning preserved in later biographical literature, the Prophet ﷺ used this house, Dar al-Arqam, as the centre of a mission that had to remain hidden to survive. It was here, according to the historical tradition recorded by early biographers, that men who would become towering figures in Islamic history first heard the Qur’an recited and first professed their faith: Ammar ibn Yasir and Suhayb ibn Sinan, who are reported to have entered Islam together; Hamza ibn Abd al-Muttalib, the Prophet’s own uncle, whose conversion strengthened the small community considerably; and, in a moment biographers treat as a hinge of early Islamic history, Umar ibn al-Khattab, whose acceptance of Islam inside this house is remembered as the fortieth conversion and the moment the Muslims judged themselves strong enough to leave secrecy behind (IslamicLandmarks.com). None of this happened on the mountain above. It happened at its foot, on ground that later generations folded into the ritual geography of al-Safa, and which today lies somewhere beneath the modern Masa’a gallery and, more strikingly still, beneath part of the grounds of the very palace complex that now crowns the mountain, a point the Arabic-language history of Qasr al-Safa notes explicitly (Arabic Wikipedia). The site of the first Muslim school and the site of the modern Saudi royal palace are, in other words, neighbours on the same ridge, separated by roughly fourteen centuries and by the whole distance between a persecuted minority meeting in secret and a state built by their eventual, overwhelming success.

Dar al-Arqam did not remain a private house indefinitely. Classical geographer Yaqut al-Hamawi records that the house eventually passed out of the Arqam family’s hands and was purchased by al-Khayzuran bint Ata, the influential wife of the Abbasid caliph al-Mahdi and mother of the more famous Harun al-Rashid, who converted it into a school and gave it the name by which many later sources know it, Dar al-Khayzuran (Islamopedie). That a house founded to shelter the earliest, most vulnerable Muslim community should, four centuries later, be endowed by a caliph’s mother as a place of formal Islamic learning is one of the quieter but more moving turns in the story of this small patch of ground at the foot of the mountain.

Once the Muslim community in Makkah grew too large and too visible for secrecy to serve any purpose, the Prophet ﷺ moved his mission from the hidden house to the open hillside directly above it. It was on al-Safa, not on the summit of Abu Qubays, that he is authentically reported to have climbed the rock and called out to the assembled clans of Quraysh by name, warning them as a man on a hillside might warn a caravan of an approaching raid, and it was there, when his own uncle Abu Lahab mocked him for gathering the city over what Abu Lahab took to be nothing, that the short, severe Surah al-Masad was revealed condemning him. That episode, one of the best documented and most dramatic moments of the Makkan period, is examined in full, with its exact hadith references, in the next section of this article, “The Prophet ﷺ and This Place.” It belongs there rather than here because it is not, strictly, a story about the mountain. It is a story about the hill beneath it, and the distinction matters enough to draw it again even at the risk of repetition, because so much popular writing about “Abu Qubays” quietly borrows the drama of this Safa narrative and relocates it, without evidence, to the summit above.

What the mountain itself experienced, once the Islamic period was underway, was less prophetic and considerably harder. Barely half a century after the Prophet’s ﷺ death, Makkah was engulfed in the second civil war that followed the death of the caliph Mu’awiya. Abdullah ibn al-Zubayr, a companion’s son who had refused to recognise the succession of Yazid ibn Mu’awiya, held the city and the Kaaba itself against the Umayyad state. In the year 64 AH, 683 to 684 CE, the Umayyad commander Husayn ibn Numayr positioned catapults on the summit of Abu Qubays and used the mountain’s height to bombard the sanctuary below, setting the Kaaba itself alight in the course of the siege (Wikishia). Eight years later, in 72 AH, 691 to 692 CE, history repeated itself in almost the same place: al-Hajjaj ibn Yusuf, dispatched by the caliph Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan to finish what the earlier siege had not, again used the mountain as an artillery platform, and the following year, 73 AH, 692 to 693 CE, Ibn al-Zubayr was killed and the rebellion ended. It is a stark historical fact, uncomfortable to sit with, that the mountain most associated in popular memory with a miracle blessing the Prophet ﷺ was also, within the lifetime of people who had known him, used twice as a weapon against the holiest building on earth. Honest history includes both facts. Neither cancels the other; they simply describe different centuries and different men standing on the same rock for entirely different purposes.

The centuries that followed those sieges gave the summit a very different character: not a battlement, but a place of retreat and worship. Classical Makkan historians, beginning with al-Azraqi in the second century AH, record a small mosque standing on the summit almost continuously from the earliest Islamic centuries onward, rebuilt again and again as it aged and collapsed, visited and described by travellers across nearly a thousand years, and eventually, in its final incarnation before the modern era, misattributed by popular memory to the companion Bilal ibn Rabah, an attribution the classical record does not support. That long, quieter story, the one of a modest hilltop mosque outliving empires only to be swept away in the space of a single modern construction project, is told in full in the Architecture section below, because it belongs there as a story about a building rather than a story about the mountain’s role in the Prophet’s ﷺ life. It is mentioned here, at the close of this historical overview, because it captures something essential about Abu Qubays that the rest of this article will keep returning to: this is a place whose physical fabric has changed almost constantly, while the questions people ask about its meaning have stayed remarkably the same.

The Prophet ﷺ and This Place

Every authentic report that ties the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ directly and by name to this stretch of Makkah’s geography sets the scene not on the summit of Abu Qubays but on al-Safa, the hill at its base, and it is worth pausing on that fact one more time before moving into the reports themselves, because it shapes everything that follows. This section gathers those authentic reports in full, gives their exact references, and then turns to the one authentic hadith that names Abu Qubays and its sister mountain directly, even though it belongs to a different chapter of the Prophet’s ﷺ life entirely, the darkest day he ever described.

The Call to the Clans of Quraysh

The best attested and most dramatic episode connected to this part of Makkah is the moment the Prophet ﷺ moved his mission from the secrecy of Dar al-Arqam into open, public warning. According to Ibn Abbas, as recorded in Sahih al-Bukhari, when the verse commanding him to “warn your tribe of near kindred” was revealed, the Prophet ﷺ climbed al-Safa and began calling out to the clans of Quraysh by name, “O Bani Fihr! O Bani Adi!” and the rest, until they had gathered around him, some coming in person and others sending representatives to find out what was happening (Sahih al-Bukhari 4770). Once the crowd had assembled, he tested their trust in him with a single question: if he told them an armed force was about to attack from beyond the valley, would they believe him? They answered that they would, because they had never known him to lie. He then delivered his warning: that he was cautioning them against a punishment that was coming. Abu Lahab, his own paternal uncle, answered with contempt, “Perish you! Is it for this that you have gathered us?” and it was this rejection, according to the hadith, that occasioned the revelation of Surah al-Masad, the short and severe chapter condemning Abu Lahab and his wife by name (Sahih al-Bukhari 4770).

A close variant of the same event, again from Ibn Abbas and again in Sahih al-Bukhari, gives the Prophet’s ﷺ opening call in a slightly different wording, “Oh Sabah!”, an old Arabian cry used to raise the alarm of an incoming raid, and again places the episode explicitly on Safa: “One day the Prophet ﷺ ascended Safa mountain and said, ‘Oh Sabah!’ All the Quraish gathered round him.” The same exchange with Abu Lahab and the same revelation of Surah al-Masad follow (Sahih al-Bukhari 4801). Sahih Muslim preserves the episode as well, again anchored to “the hill of Safa,” in a chain running through the narrator A’mash (Sahih Muslim 208b). In a related narration preserved by Aisha, the wording shifts slightly and the Prophet ﷺ is instead described standing “upon mount Safa” and calling out to individual members of his own family by name, including his daughter Fatima and his aunt Safiyya, warning them that no relation to him would save them from Allah’s reckoning if they did not act righteously themselves (cited by Daily Hadith Online, drawing on Sahih Muslim). Every one of these reports, across multiple companions and multiple wordings, agrees on the same location: Safa, the hill, not the mountain rising above it. This is precisely the distinction this article asks its readers to hold onto. The call to the clans is one of the seerah’s great set pieces, cinematic in the truest sense, a lone man standing on a rock addressing the most powerful families in Arabia and being answered with mockery from his own uncle. It happened at the base of Abu Qubays. It did not happen, on the evidence of the sound hadith, on its summit.

Dar al-Arqam: The First School of Islam

Before the public call on Safa, there were roughly three years in which the Prophet’s ﷺ entire mission operated out of a single house at the foot of the same hill. This period is covered in narrative form in the previous section of this article, and the essential point is repeated here because it belongs equally to the record of authentic events tied to this place: it was in Dar al-Arqam, at the base of Safa, that the Prophet ﷺ taught the Qur’an to his earliest followers, that Hamza ibn Abd al-Muttalib and Umar ibn al-Khattab entered Islam, and that the small Muslim community first organised itself as a body capable of surviving what came next (IslamicLandmarks.com). The house itself no longer exists as a distinct structure; its traditional location lies within the modern precincts of the Haram, in the vicinity of the Safa gate and the Masa’a corridor, a site that later Islamic history transformed first into a school named Dar al-Khayzuran and, in the twentieth century, folded into the expanding boundary of the mosque and the mountain complex above it.

The Angel of the Mountains at Ta’if

The one authentic hadith that names Abu Qubays and its sister peak directly belongs to an episode that unfolded far from Makkah, in the town of Ta’if, during what the Prophet ﷺ himself, in his own words, described as the hardest day of his life. Aisha asked him whether any day had been harder for him than the day of the Battle of Uhud, and in Sahih al-Bukhari his answer is preserved in full: the worst suffering he endured from his own people was on the day at al-Aqaba, when he offered himself to Ibn Abd Yalail ibn Abd Kulal seeking protection and support for his mission, and was refused (Sahih al-Bukhari 3231). Rejected and injured, stoned by the boys of Ta’if until he bled, he withdrew in grief and did not fully recover his composure until he found himself at a place called Qarn al-Tha’alib, where he looked up and saw a cloud shading him. Within the cloud was the angel Jibreel, who told him that Allah had heard what his people had said and how they had answered him, and that He had sent the Angel of the Mountains so that the Prophet ﷺ might command him as he wished concerning the people of Ta’if and Makkah who had rejected him. The Angel of the Mountains greeted him and said, “O Muhammad, order what you wish. If you like, I will let al-Akhshabayn fall upon them” — meaning the two great mountains, understood by the classical commentators to be Abu Qubays and Qu’ayqa’an, the pair flanking the Kaaba. The Prophet ﷺ refused the offer of destruction. His answer, preserved in the same hadith, is one of the most quoted lines in the entire seerah: that he hoped instead that Allah would raise up from among their descendants people who would worship Him alone and associate no partner with Him (Sahih al-Bukhari 3231).It is also worth noting how this hadith is transmitted: through Aisha, recalling the Prophet’s ﷺ own retrospective account of a day from years before their marriage, which means the report reaches us as the Prophet ﷺ himself chose, in later life, to describe his own worst suffering, a detail that adds weight to why classical and modern commentators alike treat this narration as one of the most emotionally significant in the entire hadith corpus, independent of any connection to Abu Qubays specifically.

This hadith deserves to be read with precision rather than romanticised into something it is not. It does not say the angel offered to drop Abu Qubays specifically, by name, on Makkah; it names “al-Akhshabayn,” the two mountains together, in the context of the people of Ta’if and, by extension, those of Makkah who had turned him away. Classical commentary identifies this pairing with the two peaks flanking the Kaaba, of which Abu Qubays is one, which is why this hadith belongs in an article about this mountain even though it is set in the aftermath of a journey to a different town altogether. It offers something rare in the material connected to Abu Qubays: an authentic, exactly referenced hadith in which a mountain associated with the site functions not as a stage for a miracle or a fortress in a siege, but as a measure of the Prophet’s ﷺ mercy. Offered the total destruction of the people who had hurt him most, he asked instead for their children to be guided. That is the genuine, verified story this mountain can claim a share in telling, and it needs no embellishment.

Qur’anic Connections

Surah al-Qamar 54:1-2 — The Splitting of the Moon

﴿ اقْتَرَبَتِ السَّاعَةُ وَانشَقَّ الْقَمَرُ * وَإِنْ يَرَوْا آيَةً يُعْرِضُوا وَيَقُولُوا سِحْرٌ مُّسْتَمِرٌّ ﴾

“The Hour has drawn near, and the moon has split [in two]. And if they see a sign, they turn away and say, ‘Passing magic'” (Qur’an 54:1-2).

No verse in the Qur’an is more tightly bound to popular stories about Abu Qubays than this one, and no verse in this article demands more care in separating what the authentic hadith actually establish from what later popular tradition has layered onto them. The asbab al-nuzul, the occasion of revelation, concerns a demand made by the disbelieving Quraysh of Makkah: unconvinced by the Prophet’s ﷺ preaching, they asked him for a physical sign, and according to the tafsir tradition and the hadith examined fully in the next section, Allah split the moon into two visible parts before their eyes as that sign. Classical commentary, represented here by Ibn Kathir’s tafsir, treats the moon’s splitting as a historical event that occurred during the Prophet’s ﷺ own lifetime, established not by a single hadith but by what the scholars call a mutawatir chain, a report transmitted by such a large number of independent narrators at every stage that collusion or error becomes practically inconceivable. Ibn Kathir names the companions behind these narrations: Abdullah ibn Mas’ud, Abdullah ibn Umar, Jubayr ibn Mut’im, Abdullah ibn Abbas, and Anas ibn Malik, and records that both he and the earlier scholar al-Tahawi considered the collective testimony mutawatir (Ibn Kathir’s tafsir, via Alim.org). The tafsir Ma’arif al-Qur’an, compiled by Mufti Muhammad Shafi, agrees with this reading and adds a specific detail worth noting here because it bears directly on the geography of this article: it states that the miracle occurred while the Prophet ﷺ was sitting at Mina, near Makkah, roughly five years before the Hijra, and that although some reports suggest the sign was shown more than once, the more authentic position is that it happened a single time (Ma’arif al-Qur’an, via Quran.com).

That detail, Mina rather than Abu Qubays, is confirmed independently and repeatedly in the hadith themselves, and it is examined fully with exact references in the Hadith References section that follows this one. The short version, stated here so the Qur’anic discussion is not left incomplete: the soundest hadith describing this event place it at Mina, or describe it generically as happening “during the lifetime of the Prophet ﷺ” with an unnamed mountain visible between the two halves of the split moon. None of the hadith verified for this article names Abu Qubays specifically. The association between this verse and Abu Qubays is a later popular tradition, traceable at least as far back as the twelfth-century Andalusian traveller Ibn Jubayr, who visited Makkah in 579 AH, 1183 CE, and recorded praying in “the holy masjid where the event of splitting the moon happened,” referring to a mosque that once stood on the mountain (source discussed in the Historical Development section below). It is a venerable tradition, in other words, but it is a tradition layered onto the event by later Makkan popular memory and pilgrimage practice, not something the mutawatir hadith themselves assert. This article states that distinction as plainly as the sources allow, because the alternative, silently letting a beloved local tradition stand in for what the hadith actually say, would be a disservice to both the reader and the record.

The second verse quoted above carries its own lesson. Ibn Kathir explains, drawing on the early commentators Mujahid and Qatadah, that the phrase “sihr mustamir,” rendered here as “passing magic,” reflects the Quraysh’s excuse for dismissing what they had just witnessed: rather than accept the sign, they told themselves and each other that it was a fleeting illusion, magic that would soon pass and be forgotten, precisely so they would not have to reckon with its implications (Ibn Kathir’s tafsir, via Alim.org). The modern lesson many commentators draw from this pairing of verses, the drawing near of the Hour alongside the disbelievers’ dismissal of a plain sign, is about the psychology of denial: people confronted with evidence that unsettles their worldview will often reach first for an explanation that lets them keep living as before, rather than for the harder, more disruptive truth in front of them.

A minority interpretive tradition reads the phrase “the moon has split” not as a report of a past miracle but as a future, eschatological event, tied to the coming of the Hour itself and understood to lie ahead rather than behind. Scholars associated with this minority reading across different periods include the early Basran figure Hasan al-Basri, along with Ibn Ata, Abu Bakr al-Asamm, Ubbad ibn Sulayman and Hisham al-Futi, and among more recent commentators, figures such as Tantawi Jawhari, al-Maraghi, Jawad Mughniyyah, and the popular Egyptian writer Mustafa Mahmoud have leaned toward reading the verse as pointing forward rather than backward (Qist: Journal of Quran and Tafseer Studies). This is a legitimate scholarly opinion within the tradition of Qur’anic interpretation, and it deserves to be named and attributed rather than dismissed with a wave of the hand. But it remains a minority position, and the reason the majority of commentators, from the classical period through Ibn Kathir down to most contemporary scholarship, have rejected a purely future reading is worth stating clearly: the mutawatir hadith describing this event are not phrased as predictions. They are phrased as direct eyewitness testimony of something already completed, using the past tense, naming specific companions who were physically present, specifying a location, and recording the Prophet’s ﷺ own words, “Bear witness,” spoken to people who had just seen the moon divide before them. A future event cannot easily be attested by a companion saying “we were with the Prophet ﷺ and the moon split.” That grammatical and evidentiary weight is why the majority reading has prevailed, without needing to deny that a minority of respected scholars have argued otherwise.

How the Mountain Entered the Verse’s Popular Memory

It is worth asking, having established what the hadith do and do not say, how a specific mountain came to be attached so firmly to this verse in popular imagination at all, since understanding the mechanism matters as much as stating the conclusion. Makkah’s pilgrimage culture, across the medieval centuries, generated a rich local tradition of associating specific visible landmarks with specific Qur’anic and prophetic events, partly as an aid to memory and devotion for pilgrims who could stand in a real place and feel connected to a story they had only previously heard recited. A mosque on the summit of the mountain closest to the Kaaba, visible from everywhere in the sanctuary, was a natural candidate for this kind of association regardless of whether the underlying hadith specified that location, and once a tradition like this becomes embedded in pilgrimage practice and repeated by generations of local guides, its popular authority can come to feel, to an ordinary listener, indistinguishable from textual authority. This is not a phenomenon unique to Abu Qubays; comparable local traditions grew up around many landmarks in and near Makkah and Madinah over the centuries. It is, however, a phenomenon this article’s method requires naming plainly wherever it appears, because a reader who understands how such associations form is better equipped to evaluate any similar claim they encounter elsewhere, about this mountain or any other historic site.

What the Verse Asks of a Reader, Independent of the Mountain

Stripped of the geographic question entirely, Surah al-Qamar’s opening verses make a claim that stands on its own regardless of which mountain, if any, appeared in the background of the miracle: that a clear, physically observable sign was given to a sceptical audience, and that the audience’s response was not open inquiry but a ready-made excuse allowing them to dismiss what they had witnessed without changing anything about how they lived. Commentators across centuries have drawn a consistent lesson from this pairing, one that does not depend on resolving the Mina-versus-Abu-Qubays question at all: the human capacity to explain away inconvenient evidence is not a modern phenomenon born of scientific scepticism, but an old and recurring feature of how people respond to challenges to their settled assumptions, sacred or otherwise. A reader visiting Makkah today, standing anywhere near this mountain and its history of shifting, contested, sometimes fabricated traditions, might reasonably ask the same question of themselves that the verse implicitly asks of its first audience: when presented with a claim that unsettles a comfortable assumption, historical, spiritual, or otherwise, is the instinct to investigate it honestly, or to reach for whatever explanation allows the assumption to remain undisturbed?

Surah al-Shu’ara 26:214 and Surah al-Masad 111:1-5

Two further Qur’anic passages connect directly to the authentic events described above at al-Safa. The command “and warn your tribe of near kindred” occurs in Surah al-Shu’ara, and it is this instruction, according to Ibn Abbas’s report in Sahih al-Bukhari, that sent the Prophet ﷺ up onto Safa to call the clans together (Sahih al-Bukhari 4770). The response to that gathering, Abu Lahab’s contemptuous rejection, occasioned in turn the revelation of Surah al-Masad, “Perish the hands of Abu Lahab, and perish he. His wealth and his children will not profit him…” (Qur’an 111:1-5), a chapter unique in the Qur’an for naming and condemning a living opponent of the Prophet ﷺ by name during his own lifetime. The asbab al-nuzul for both verses is unusually well documented and undisputed among the classical exegetes, precisely because the hadith describing the occasion is transmitted with such consistency across multiple companions and multiple wordings, as shown above. The modern lesson drawn from this pairing is a hard one: sincere, public warning delivered with total honesty can still be met with mockery from the people closest to you, and the Qur’an’s response to that mockery, in this case, was not to soften the message but to make Abu Lahab’s rejection a permanent, named lesson for every generation of readers afterward.

Hadith References

This section consolidates every hadith cited elsewhere in this article, grouped by subject, each one graded and referenced by exact collection and number, with every number independently checked against the live text on Sunnah.com before inclusion. Readers who want to verify any claim in this article against its primary source should start here.

The Splitting of the Moon

Sahih al-Bukhari 3869 — Authentic (sahih). Narrated by Abdullah ibn Mas’ud: “The moon was split (into two pieces) while we were with the Prophet ﷺ in Mina. He said, ‘Be witnesses.’ Then a piece of the moon went towards the mountain.” The same entry preserves a second chain, through Abu al-Duha from Masruq from Abdullah, giving the more general wording that the moon split “at Makkah.” Found in the Book of the Merits of the Helpers of Madinah, under the chapter heading “The splitting of the moon” (Sahih al-Bukhari 3869).

Sahih al-Bukhari 4864 — Authentic (sahih). Narrated by Ibn Mas’ud, in the Book of Tafsir under the chapter for Surah al-Qamar: “During the lifetime of Allah’s Messenger ﷺ the moon was split into two parts; one part remained over the mountain, and the other part went beyond the mountain. On that, Allah’s Messenger ﷺ said, ‘Witness this miracle'” (Sahih al-Bukhari 4864).

Sahih Muslim 2800b — Authentic (sahih). Narrated by Abdullah ibn Mas’ud: “We were along with Allah’s Messenger ﷺ at Mina, that the moon split up into two. One of its parts was behind the mountain and the other one was on this side of the mountain. Allah’s Messenger ﷺ said to us, ‘Bear witness to this.'” This is one of the two clearest, most explicit statements in the entire hadith corpus that the event took place at Mina (Sahih Muslim 2800b).

Sahih Muslim 2800c — Authentic (sahih). Narrated by Abdullah ibn Mas’ud: “The moon split up in two parts during the lifetime of Allah’s Messenger ﷺ. The mountain covered one of its parts and one part of it was above the mountain, and Allah’s Messenger ﷺ said, ‘Bear witness to this.'” This version names no specific mountain, referring only to “the mountain” in the definite, unspecified sense (Sahih Muslim 2800c).

Taken together, these four independently verified texts, spanning both Sahih al-Bukhari and Sahih Muslim, are unanimous on two points and silent on a third. They agree the moon split during the Prophet’s ﷺ lifetime, witnessed directly by his companions. They agree a mountain, or “the mountain,” was visible in the sky at the moment of the sign, with one half appearing on each side of it or behind it. They do not, in any of the four texts fetched and verified for this article, name that mountain as Abu Qubays. Two of the four state plainly that the companions were at Mina when it happened. Classical tafsir, represented above by Ibn Kathir and by Ma’arif al-Qur’an, treats the Mina location as the more authoritative account and describes the overall report as mutawatir, meaning attested by such a wide, independent multiplicity of narrators that the historicity of the event itself is considered beyond reasonable doubt among the majority of scholars, even though the precise identity of the mountain glimpsed in the background is not something the hadith text settles. The popular identification of that mountain as Abu Qubays specifically is a later tradition, first clearly attested in this article’s research in the account of the twelfth-century traveller Ibn Jubayr, who described visiting a mosque on the mountain associated with the event, discussed further in Historical Development below. This article states, as the task set for it requires, that the sound hadith establish the miracle at Mina or in the vicinity of Makkah generally, and that the specific pinning of the event to Abu Qubays by name is a later popular tradition rather than something the authentic reports themselves assert.

The Black Stone

Jami’ at-Tirmidhi 877 — Hasan (graded Hasan Sahih by al-Tirmidhi himself, and Hasan by the modern Darussalam annotation). Narrated by Ibn Abbas: “The Black Stone descended from Paradise, and it was more white than milk, then it was blackened by the sins of the children of Adam.” Al-Tirmidhi notes corroborating reports on the same subject from Abdullah ibn Amr and Abu Hurayrah (Jami’ at-Tirmidhi 877).

This hadith establishes two things only: that the Black Stone descended from Paradise, and that it changed colour because of human sin. It says nothing whatsoever about Abu Qubays, Nuh, or a flood. The popular story that the mountain sheltered the stone during the flood of Nuh, examined fully in the Qur’anic Connections narrative above and graded again in the Common Misconceptions section below, is transmitted through an entirely separate channel, the historical and tafsir literature rather than the hadith collections, and should never be quoted as though it carries the same Hasan grading as this Tirmidhi report. They are two different claims about the stone’s history, of two very different levels of reliability, and conflating them is one of the most common errors in popular writing about this mountain.

The Call to the Clans on al-Safa

Sahih al-Bukhari 4770 — Authentic (sahih). Ibn Abbas: the Prophet ﷺ “ascended the Safa (mountain)” and called the clans of Quraysh together by name after the revelation of the command to warn his near kindred, leading to Abu Lahab’s rejection and the revelation of Surah al-Masad (Sahih al-Bukhari 4770).

Sahih al-Bukhari 4801 — Authentic (sahih). Ibn Abbas, a close variant: “One day the Prophet ﷺ ascended Safa mountain and said, ‘Oh Sabah!'” with the same outcome (Sahih al-Bukhari 4801).

Sahih Muslim 208b — Authentic (sahih). Narrated through the chain of A’mash: “One day the Messenger of Allah ﷺ climbed the hill of Safa and said, ‘Be on your guard,'” matching the wider narrative (Sahih Muslim 208b).

All three verified texts name Safa specifically, never Abu Qubays. This is the article’s central geographic distinction stated one final time at the hadith level, for readers who want the primary evidence rather than a summary: the call to the clans, one of the seerah’s most famous scenes, is authentically located on the small hill at the mountain’s base, not on the mountain’s summit.

The Angel of the Mountains

Sahih al-Bukhari 3231 — Authentic (sahih). Aisha reports the Prophet’s ﷺ own account of his hardest day, the rejection at Ta’if, and the offer relayed to him through Jibreel by the Angel of the Mountains to let “al-Akhshabayn,” the two mountains, fall upon his opponents, an offer he declined in favour of hoping for righteous descendants (Sahih al-Bukhari 3231). Classical commentary identifies al-Akhshabayn with Abu Qubays and Qu’ayqa’an, the pair of peaks flanking the Kaaba, making this the one authentic hadith that connects Abu Qubays, collectively rather than by individual name, to a documented episode in the Prophet’s ﷺ life.

A Note on Numbers That Do Not Match

In the course of researching this article, several hadith numbers that circulate in secondary and popular sources as supposedly relating to the moon-splitting or to Abu Qubays were checked directly against Sunnah.com and found, on inspection, to refer to entirely unrelated hadith. Sahih al-Bukhari 3639, for instance, sometimes cited in aggregated lists alongside the moon-splitting narrations, in fact preserves an unrelated report from Anas about two companions accompanied by a light resembling two lamps on a dark night. Sahih al-Bukhari 3640 preserves a separate hadith from al-Mughira ibn Shu’ba about a group of Muslims remaining on the right path until the Last Day. Sunan Abu Dawud 2285 concerns a divorce ruling and has nothing to do with the moon at all. This article does not cite any of those three numbers for the claims sometimes attached to them elsewhere, and notes the discrepancy here as a caution to any reader cross-checking other Islamic websites: always verify a hadith number against the primary collection before repeating it, because copy-and-paste errors compound quickly online.

Historical Development

Before and Around the Prophet’s ﷺ Lifetime

In the earliest period covered by any historical memory of the mountain, Abu Qubays functioned as it had for generations before Islam: high ground on the edge of a small trading city, used occasionally for communal ritual such as the rain-prayer tradition associated with Abd al-Muttalib, and carrying, through the popular tradition of al-Amin discussed earlier, an inherited reputation for sanctity tied to the legend of the Black Stone’s safekeeping. During the Prophet’s ﷺ own lifetime, as this article has shown, the documented activity clusters not on the summit but at the base, at al-Safa and at Dar al-Arqam, with the sole verified exception of the Ta’if hadith’s reference to “al-Akhshabayn” as a pair.

The Rashidun Period, 11 to 40 AH, 632 to 661 CE

No specific, individually attested event connects Abu Qubays to the caliphates of Abu Bakr, Umar, Uthman, or Ali. This is worth stating rather than glossing over: not every historic site carries a story from every century, and a mountain can sit quietly in a city’s background for decades at a time. What can be said of this period is that Makkah itself, and by extension the mountain overlooking it, remained under the stable governance of the early caliphate, with the sanctuary and its surrounding hills essentially unchanged in form from the final years of the Prophet’s ﷺ own lifetime.

The Umayyad Period, 41 to 132 AH, 661 to 750 CE

The Umayyad period gives the mountain its harshest documented episode. During the second civil war of early Islam, when Abdullah ibn al-Zubayr held Makkah against the authority of the caliph Yazid ibn Mu’awiya, the Umayyad commander Husayn ibn Numayr positioned catapults on the summit of Abu Qubays in 64 AH, 683 to 684 CE, and used the high ground to bombard the sanctuary, an assault that set the Kaaba itself on fire during the siege (Wikishia). The rebellion under Ibn al-Zubayr survived that assault, but not the second one: in 72 AH, 691 to 692 CE, al-Hajjaj ibn Yusuf, acting for the caliph Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan, again used Abu Qubays as an artillery platform against the Kaaba, and in 73 AH, 692 to 693 CE, Ibn al-Zubayr was killed and Umayyad authority over the city was restored. These two episodes are the best documented events of the entire Umayyad period as it touches this specific mountain, and they are recorded here without softening, because a mountain’s history, like any other history, loses its value the moment its harder chapters are edited out.

The Abbasid Period, 132 to 656 AH, 750 to 1258 CE

The clearest Abbasid-era connection to this stretch of Makkah is not military but domestic and educational: the purchase of Dar al-Arqam, at the foot of the mountain, by al-Khayzuran bint Ata, wife of the caliph al-Mahdi and mother of Harun al-Rashid, who converted the historic house into a school remembered afterward as Dar al-Khayzuran (Islamopedie). It is a telling detail of Abbasid-era piety that the dynasty’s own women invested in preserving and repurposing the site of Islam’s first secret school rather than allowing it to disappear into ordinary real estate, even as the empire around them grew into one of history’s great powers.

The Mamluk Period, 648 to 923 AH, 1250 to 1517 CE

Slightly before the Mamluk period proper, in the second half of the sixth century AH, twelfth century CE, the Ayyubid-era emir of Makkah, al-Mukthar ibn Isa ibn al-Qasim, who died in 589 AH, 1193 CE, is recorded to have built a fortress on the summit of Abu Qubays, of which no trace survives today (Wikishia). It was in this general period, in 579 AH, 1183 CE, that the Andalusian traveller Ibn Jubayr visited Makkah and recorded praying in a mosque on the mountain, associated in popular memory with the splitting of the moon, evidence that the specific Abu Qubays identification of that miracle was already a settled part of pilgrimage practice well before the Mamluk era began (source discussed in the section above; original detail preserved in Wikishia’s overview of the mountain’s history, Wikishia). Through the Mamluk centuries that followed, the summit continued to host a small mosque, its precise founder disputed between competing local traditions, one crediting a man remembered as “Ibrahim al-Qubaysi” and another attributing it, more cautiously, to unnamed early ascetics.

The Ottoman Period, 923 to 1344 AH, 1517 to 1925 CE

Ottoman-era Makkah left its mark on the mountain through Sufi institutional life rather than through construction on the scale of a fortress. The most consequential of these episodes, and one whose downstream historical effects reached far beyond Makkah itself, began in 1837 CE, 1252 to 1253 AH, when the Algerian-born scholar Muhammad ibn Ali al-Sanusi, left in the city at the head of a circle of students after the death of his own teacher Ahmad ibn Idris al-Fasi, built a zawiya, a Sufi hermitage combining residence, school, and place of worship, on the high ground of Abu Qubays itself, using it as the founding headquarters of what became the Sanusi order (Libyan Heritage House; Wikipedia). For roughly six years the hillside lodge functioned as the intellectual centre of a movement combining orthodox Sunni scholarship with Sufi discipline, drawing students from across the Muslim world, before growing friction with the Wahhabi religious establishment then ascendant in the Hijaz led al-Sanusi and his followers to leave Makkah altogether in 1843 CE and relocate to Cyrenaica in what is now Libya, where the order eventually built a network of more than a hundred lodges, led sustained resistance against Italian colonisation under Omar al-Mukhtar, and ultimately produced Libya’s post-independence monarch, King Idris I, a grandson of the order’s founder (Wikipedia). It is a striking, little-known fact that a movement which eventually shaped the modern history of North Africa traces its founding address to this specific mountain above the Haram. Separately, when the Dutch orientalist Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje visited Makkah in 1884 to 1885 CE, he recorded that substantial buildings belonging to the Naqshbandi order had, by then, also clustered around the mountain, and his published account, together with the photographs he commissioned from the Makkan physician and pioneering Arab photographer al-Sayyid Abd al-Ghaffar, remains one of the most detailed outside eyewitness records of the city in the late Ottoman period, even though Hurgronje himself, barred by Ottoman authorities from remaining for the Hajj season itself, based parts of his account on second-hand testimony rather than personal observation of the pilgrimage (Wikishia; Sotheby’s). The mountain in this period functioned less as a monument and more as a quiet religious neighbourhood on the edge of the sanctuary, home to small lodges rather than grand architecture, its summit mosque, examined in detail in the Architecture section below, still standing and still in use exactly as it had been for the better part of a thousand years.

The Saudi Period, from 1344 AH, 1925 CE, to the Present

The twentieth century brought more physical change to Abu Qubays than the previous thirteen centuries combined.The scale of that growth is itself worth setting out, because it is the entire reason the mountain looks the way it does today: Hajj numbers that stood in the low hundreds of thousands through most of the mid-twentieth century climbed past one million by the 1970s and have, in recent pre-pandemic years, regularly exceeded two million pilgrims for the Hajj season alone, with Umrah visits across the rest of the year running into many additional millions, a scale of demand that no configuration of the historic, narrow-streeted Makkah of the Ottoman or early Saudi period could conceivably have absorbed without catastrophic overcrowding. Each successive expansion of the Masjid al-Haram, from the Saudi state’s first major programme in the 1950s through the substantial King Abdullah-era expansion beginning in the late 2000s, was justified publicly in exactly these terms: rising demand from a growing and increasingly mobile global Muslim population, rather than any indifference to the historic fabric being altered in the process. Abu Qubays, as the closest significant high ground to the eastern flank of the sanctuary, was always going to be the part of the landscape most affected by that expansion logic, and the palace, tunnels, and cut rock face visible today are the direct, physical result of population growth on a scale the mountain’s earlier visitors, from al-Azraqi to Ibn Battuta to Snouck Hurgronje, never had reason to imagine. As Saudi Arabia undertook the successive expansions of the Masjid al-Haram required by the enormous growth in the number of pilgrims able to travel by aircraft and modern roads, engineers cut directly into the mountain, and in 1375 AH, 1955 to 1956 CE, the physical connection between al-Safa and Abu Qubays, until then one continuous slope, was deliberately severed to create space for the mosque’s expansion, with some pieces of rock reportedly left in place specifically to mark the boundary of the sacred site (source: infographic published by Makkah Newspaper). In 1401 AH, 1980 to 1981 CE, the Saudi state, under King Khalid ibn Abdulaziz, completed a royal palace on the summit itself, Qasr al-Safa, later expanded under King Fahd, covering roughly 240,000 square metres and overlooking the Grand Mosque and the Kaaba directly below (The Haramain Archives). The palace has since hosted major state and Islamic diplomatic occasions, including the Fourteenth Islamic Summit in 2012, the Third Extraordinary Islamic Summit in 2005, the drafting of the so-called Mecca Document on Iraqi reconciliation in 2006, and the International Islamic Dialogue Conference in 2008, and the Saudi king traditionally resides there during the last ten days of Ramadan (Arabic Wikipedia). It is not, and has never been, open to tourism or general pilgrim visitation; Indonesian and Arabic press coverage confirms explicitly that the palace remains in active use for royal family functions and official state meetings and is not made available as a visitor site (Detik). This modern development, its costs and its critics, is examined in full in the Architecture and Common Misconceptions sections that follow.

Architecture

What Was Lost: The Mountain Before the Cuts

Any honest architectural account of Abu Qubays has to begin with an admission: very little of what earlier centuries built on this mountain survives to be described in the present tense. The medieval fortress raised by the Ayyubid-era emir al-Mukthar ibn Isa ibn al-Qasim in the twelfth century CE, the mosque associated in popular memory with the splitting of the moon and visited by Ibn Jubayr in 1183 CE, and the nineteenth-century Sanusi and Naqshbandi lodges recorded by Snouck Hurgronje in 1884 CE have all disappeared, absorbed either by the ordinary decay that overtakes unmaintained stone structures over centuries or, more decisively, by the twentieth-century programme of expansion that reshaped the entire eastern flank of the Haram (Wikishia). What was lost, in architectural terms, was not one building but an accumulated layer of small, human-scale religious structures: modest mosques, Sufi retreats, a fortress whose very footprint is no longer traceable. No detailed measured drawings, ground plans, or restoration records for these structures have been located for this article, and where such documentation does not exist, the honest course is to say so rather than invent specificity the sources do not support.

Qasr al-Safa: Design, Scale, and Symbolism

The one architectural complex that can be described with reasonable confidence today is the modern royal palace, Qasr al-Safa, built on the mountain’s summit. Constructed in 1401 AH, corresponding to 1980 to 1981 CE, under King Khalid ibn Abdulaziz, with subsequent additions during the reign of King Fahd, the palace occupies a footprint reported at approximately 240,000 square metres, a scale that places it among the larger royal complexes anywhere in the Kingdom (The Haramain Archives). Its defining architectural feature, repeated across every source that describes it, is its relationship to the view: built directly above the Masjid al-Haram, its principal rooms and terraces face down and outward onto the Kaaba and the courtyard of the Grand Mosque, granting an unobstructed vantage that no other building in Makkah can claim by virtue of pure elevation and proximity combined (Al Ain). The palace functions as a state guest house and functional seat of government presence during Ramadan and major Islamic gatherings, hosting heads of state and religious delegations rather than the general public, and its Arabic name, Qasr al-Safa, deliberately preserves the memory of the historic hill at its foot even as the palace itself sits considerably higher, on ground that was, before the 1955 to 1956 CE cutting works, physically continuous with that same hill (Arabic Wikipedia). Symbolically, this is a striking arrangement: the modern Saudi state’s residence for hosting the Islamic world sits directly above the historic ground of Dar al-Arqam, the house where the first Muslims once gathered in secret out of fear for their lives, a juxtaposition none of the sources consulted for this article claim was intentional, but one that is difficult not to notice once the two facts are placed side by side.

What a Palace on a Mountain Signals in Saudi State Architecture

Qasr al-Safa is not an isolated architectural choice; it belongs to a broader, recognisable pattern in modern Saudi state building, in which royal residences and government guest complexes are deliberately sited on elevated or symbolically resonant ground overlooking a city’s most significant public space, asserting a visible, permanent relationship between the ruling authority and the sanctuary it protects and administers. The same logic underlies the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques title itself, which frames the Saudi monarch’s legitimacy substantially through the stewardship and physical expansion of the two Harams, in Makkah and Madinah, and a palace built directly above the Kaaba, on the very ground once occupied by a persecuted community’s secret school, makes that relationship physically inescapable to anyone who looks up from the mosque courtyard and understands what they are seeing. Whether this is read as fitting continuity, a modern state watching over the sanctuary as its historic guardians once did from the same high ground, or as an uncomfortable inversion, worldly power built atop the very site where the earliest Muslims once hid from worldly power, depends heavily on the reader’s own view of the broader heritage debate covered later in this article, and this section does not attempt to resolve that question, only to name clearly what the architectural choice itself communicates.

The Cutting of the Mountain and the Haram Expansions

The architecture of Abu Qubays in the modern period is inseparable from the architecture of the Masjid al-Haram itself, because so much of what has happened to the mountain has happened in the mosque’s service. The successive Saudi-era expansions of the Grand Mosque, driven by pilgrim numbers that grew from the low hundreds of thousands in the mid-twentieth century into the millions by the early twenty-first, required more space along every edge of the sanctuary, and the eastern edge meant cutting into Abu Qubays. The severing of al-Safa from the mountain in 1375 AH, 1955 to 1956 CE, opened the ground later occupied by the modern Masa’a gallery and, eventually, provided access for tunnels and service corridors connecting different levels of the expanded Haram complex (Makkah Newspaper). This work was not without a hard physical limit. In 2013, a study by the Saudi Geological Survey, reported through Muhammad Idris of the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques Institute for Hajj Research at Umm al-Qura University, found that Abu Qubays contains underground headwaters feeding the well of Zamzam near the Safa gate, a discovery that placed a genuine engineering constraint, distinct from any heritage argument, on how much further into the mountain the state could safely cut without risking damage to Zamzam’s water supply (Arab News). This is a rare instance in Makkah’s recent development history where geology itself, rather than public criticism, set a boundary on how far demolition and excavation could proceed.

The Summit Mosque Across the Centuries: What the Travellers Actually Wrote

Because the summit mosque is referenced so often in popular writing about Abu Qubays, and because its final identity, the so-called Masjid Bilal, is one of the more persistent misattributions this article has to correct, it is worth setting out in more detail exactly what the classical travel and historical literature says about it, in the travellers’ own words rather than in paraphrase. The earliest reference located for this article comes from Imam al-Azraqi, the Makkan historian born in the second century AH whose history of the city remains a foundational primary source, who recorded that a mosque stood on the summit already known to some as Masjid Ibrahim, and who took care to record his own grandfather’s testimony rejecting the idea that this was somehow the mosque of Ibrahim Khalil al-Rahman, the friend of God, insisting instead that if the name belonged to any Ibrahim, it was a different, otherwise unidentified man (Makkawi.azurewebsites.net, citing al-Azraqi). Al-Azraqi went further, explicitly denying a separate popular claim of his own time that Ibrahim had climbed Abu Qubays to issue the call to hajj; he insisted instead that the call was given from the Maqam Ibrahim, near the Kaaba itself, which tradition holds was miraculously raised until it towered over the surrounding mountains, so that Ibrahim’s voice could reach every soul destined to perform the pilgrimage. This is a rare case of a classical Makkan historian correcting, in his own lifetime, a popular local tradition about this very mountain, and it should caution modern readers against assuming that every claim linking Ibrahim to Abu Qubays is either old or uncontested.

A little over three centuries later, in 578 or 579 AH, 1183 CE, the Andalusian traveller Ibn Jubayr climbed to the summit and left the single most vivid eyewitness description available anywhere in this article’s sources: “At the top of Jabal Abi Qubays there is a blessed ribat, in which there is a mosque and a roof overlooking the blessed town; from it appears its beauty and the beauty of the Haram, its spaciousness, and the beauty of the sacred Kaaba standing in its centre” (Ibn Jubayr, quoted via Makkawi.azurewebsites.net). A ribat, in this context, denotes a small fortified religious hostel, combining the function of watch-post, guesthouse, and place of worship, and Ibn Jubayr’s description confirms that by the late twelfth century the summit supported an active religious community, not merely a bare shrine. A century and a half later, in 725 AH, 1325 CE, Ibn Battuta climbed the same summit and recorded a mosque, and the visible remains of a ribat and other construction, noting that an unnamed just ruler had intended to rebuild and expand it, and adding a detail no other source in this article’s research preserves: that on the first night of the month of Shawwal, mirroring an established practice on the twenty-seventh night of Ramadan, the people of Makkah lit torches and lamps across the city, including on the roof of this mosque, while its muezzins spent the night in remembrance and glorification of God (Ibn Battuta, quoted via Makkawi.azurewebsites.net). Taken together, al-Azraqi, Ibn Jubayr, and Ibn Battuta document nearly a thousand years of continuous religious use of the summit, from the second century AH through the eighth, with the building itself repeatedly collapsing and being rebuilt across that span rather than surviving as a single unbroken structure.

The building’s final identity is the part of this history most likely to mislead a casual reader. In the decades immediately before its removal in the twentieth century, the mosque had become popularly known as Masjid Bilal, after the Prophet’s ﷺ companion and first muezzin, Bilal ibn Rabah. The source consulted for this article states the point with unusual bluntness for popular Islamic literature: the reason for this name is not known, it cannot be attributed to any identifiable origin, and, most importantly, no earlier historian recorded any such name or any tradition connecting Bilal ibn Rabah personally to this specific building (Makkawi.azurewebsites.net). This does not mean Bilal never stood on high ground in Makkah to call the adhan; some historical accounts do describe him doing so after the conquest of the city. It does mean that the specific mosque later demolished under this name was not, on the evidence available, originally built for him, named after him by any early source, or connected to him by anyone earlier than a relatively late and untraceable popular attribution. A separate, later source recorded by the Makkan historian Sheikh Abdullah Ghazi, who died in 1365 AH, cites his own father’s testimony from 1275 AH that the standing structure of his time had been built, within living memory, by an unnamed Indian benefactor, using stones already gathered at the site, which is a different and considerably more modest claim than either the Ibrahim attribution or the Bilal attribution (Makkawi.azurewebsites.net, citing Abdullah Ghazi). The honest summary is that this was a real, continuously rebuilt mosque with a genuine thousand-year documented history, but its precise founder, and any connection to either Ibrahim or Bilal by name, rests on popular attribution rather than sound historical chains, and its final demolition, along with the rest of the summit’s older fabric, came as part of the Saudi-era palace construction discussed below, with no source located for this article giving a precise year for its removal.

One further detail belongs here because it illustrates how deeply this small summit building had entered official Hijazi identity even before the Saudi period began. Sharif Hussein ibn Ali, the last Hashemite ruler of the Hijaz before Saudi rule, is recorded as having adopted an image of the mosque atop Abu Qubays as an official government mark, used on state papers including passports and certain classes of postage stamps, treating the small building, visible from everywhere in the city, as a kind of civic emblem for Makkah itself (Makkawi.azurewebsites.net). A building that once appeared on a government’s official seal has since vanished so completely that most pilgrims today have never heard it existed, which is as concise an illustration as any in this article of how quickly the physical fabric of a place can change while the mountain beneath it stays exactly where it has always been.

Archaeological Findings

Honesty requires a short section here, because the honest answer is that no peer-reviewed or officially published archaeological excavation report specific to Abu Qubays has been located in the research for this article. Saudi Arabia’s Haram expansion projects, including the works that cut into this mountain, have historically not been accompanied by public archaeological surveys or published findings in the way that would be standard practice for comparable heritage sites in other parts of the world, a pattern noted with frustration by heritage researchers discussed later in this article. What exists instead is a scattering of incidental, non-archaeological discoveries made in the course of engineering and construction work, most notably the 2013 Saudi Geological Survey finding of underground water channels feeding Zamzam from within the mountain, reported by Arab News and attributed to Muhammad Idris of Umm al-Qura University’s Hajj Research Institute (Arab News). This is a genuine, sourced finding, but it is hydrological and geological in nature rather than archaeological in the sense of uncovering structures, artefacts, or stratified evidence of past human occupation. No excavation reports documenting the foundations of the medieval fortress built by al-Mukthar ibn Isa ibn al-Qasim, the historic mosque associated with the moon-splitting tradition, or the nineteenth-century Sufi lodges recorded by Snouck Hurgronje have been published, at least none accessible to the research conducted for this article. Readers should treat any confident claim elsewhere online about “archaeological evidence” on Abu Qubays with real scepticism unless it links to an actual excavation report or peer-reviewed study, because none of the sources consulted here were able to produce one.It is worth adding, for readers who may wonder why a site of such religious prominence has not attracted more formal scholarly excavation, that Makkah as a whole remains largely closed to the kind of international archaeological research common at comparable ancient urban sites elsewhere, both because of its status as a sanctuary restricted to Muslims and because Saudi antiquities policy has historically prioritised active religious use of the Haram precinct over preservation-oriented excavation of the kind that might interrupt or delay ongoing construction. This is a broader structural reality of Islamic archaeology in the Hijaz generally, not a circumstance unique to Abu Qubays, and it means that much of what outside researchers know about the historic fabric of Makkah’s surrounding hills comes from textual sources, travellers’ accounts, and incidental engineering discoveries such as the 2013 Zamzam headwaters finding, rather than from systematic fieldwork. Readers interested in Islamic archaeology as a discipline should understand this as context for why so many historic Makkan sites, this mountain included, can be described in rich textual detail while remaining almost entirely undocumented in the material, excavated sense that archaeology usually implies.

Stories of the Companions

The companions whose stories genuinely belong to this stretch of Makkah’s geography are, once again, tied overwhelmingly to al-Safa and to Dar al-Arqam at its foot, rather than to the mountain’s summit, and this section names them with that distinction firmly in view.

Al-Arqam ibn Abi al-Arqam

Al-Arqam ibn Abi al-Arqam al-Makhzumi, a young Makkan convert reported by historians to have been about sixteen years old and the seventh person to accept Islam, is remembered chiefly for a single act of generosity that changed the course of early Islamic history: opening his own house at the foot of Safa to the Prophet ﷺ as a secret meeting place during the years when public preaching would have meant immediate persecution (MuslimahHTM). His house, chosen in part because his family’s tribal affiliation with the Makhzum clan meant that his comings and goings would not obviously arouse the suspicion of Abu Jahal and other Makhzumi opponents of the Prophet ﷺ, sheltered the young Muslim community for roughly three years and is remembered afterward under two names: Dar al-Arqam, after its owner, and Dar al-Islam, the House of Islam, a title that captures how central the site became to the community’s survival.

Umar ibn al-Khattab

Umar ibn al-Khattab’s conversion, one of the most consequential in Islamic history, is remembered by historical tradition as having taken place inside Dar al-Arqam, and as marking the fortieth person to enter Islam, a milestone biographers describe as the moment the small Muslim community judged itself strong enough to move from secrecy toward open practice of the faith (Al Islam, citing the Ahmadiyya seerah scholar Mirza Bashir Ahmad’s account of the episode). It is worth being precise about what this tradition claims and does not claim: it locates Umar’s conversion at the base of the mountain, in the house at Safa’s foot, not on Abu Qubays itself.

Hamza ibn Abd al-Muttalib, Ammar ibn Yasir, and Suhayb ibn Sinan

The Prophet’s ﷺ uncle Hamza ibn Abd al-Muttalib is likewise remembered by historical tradition as having entered Islam at Dar al-Arqam, a conversion that gave the small community both a formidable warrior and a measure of protection through his standing within the wider clan of Bani Hashim. Ammar ibn Yasir and Suhayb ibn Sinan, according to the same body of tradition, are reported to have accepted Islam together at the same house, two men whose personal stories of hardship and endurance under later persecution became foundational to the memory of the earliest Muslim generation (IslamicLandmarks.com).

Those Who Were Not Yet Muslim, and Those Not Present

Honesty about this place also means being honest about who was not there. Abu Lahab, the Prophet’s ﷺ own paternal uncle, was present at the foot of the mountain during the call to the clans on Safa, but present as an opponent, not a believer, and his rejection on that occasion is preserved in the Qur’an itself as a permanent record of his refusal rather than as a story of faith. Abu Bakr, the Prophet’s ﷺ closest companion and earliest adult male convert outside his own household, is not specifically placed by the hadith examined for this article inside Dar al-Arqam, since his conversion is generally dated earlier than the period in which the house served as the Prophet’s ﷺ base; readers should not assume every major companion’s conversion story belongs to this particular address simply because it belongs to the early Makkan period generally. Where the sources are silent or where a specific companion’s presence at this site cannot be verified, this article says so rather than filling the gap with plausible-sounding invention.

The Weight of a Single Conversion: Reading Umar’s Story Carefully

It is worth dwelling a little longer on Umar ibn al-Khattab’s conversion, because the way this story is usually told compresses a dramatic, multi-stage episode into a single sentence, and the compression loses something valuable. Biographical tradition recounts that Umar set out from his home armed and furious, intending to kill the Prophet ﷺ, and was redirected along the way by news that his own sister Fatimah bint al-Khattab and her husband had themselves already accepted Islam and were reciting the Qur’an in their home. He confronted them first, struck his brother-in-law, and, in most versions of the story, struck his sister as well before her bleeding face and her refusal to renounce her new faith stopped him cold. Asked to hear the verses she had been reciting, verses from Surah Ta-Ha, he read them himself, and it was that reading, according to the tradition, that softened a man who had arrived at the house intent on violence into one who asked to be taken directly to the Prophet ﷺ. He was taken from there to Dar al-Arqam, at the foot of Safa, where he entered Islam in front of the small community gathered inside (Al Islam). The detail worth holding onto is geographic as much as spiritual: the confrontation with his sister took place elsewhere in the city, but the formal acceptance of faith, the moment biographers treat as completing his conversion, is set specifically inside the house at the foot of the mountain this article is about. It is exactly this kind of precision, event by event and location by location, that this article has tried to maintain throughout, rather than letting a dramatic story’s most famous scene stand in for every stage of how it actually unfolded.

Why the Story of Dar al-Arqam Matters More Than Its Missing Walls

No stone of the historical Dar al-Arqam is known to survive today, folded as its ground has been into the modern Masa’a gallery and the wider Haram expansion. This absence sometimes tempts popular writers into inventing physical detail, precise room counts, described doorways, imagined furnishings, that no classical source actually supports. This article has deliberately avoided that temptation throughout. What can be said with confidence, based on the converging testimony of Ibn Shabba, al-Azraqi, and the geographer Yaqut al-Hamawi, is the house’s general location at the foot of Safa, facing the direction of Dar al-Nadwa, and its function for roughly three years as the operational centre of the entire Muslim mission (Islamopedie). That the house’s precise walls cannot be pointed to today does not diminish the historical weight of what happened inside them; if anything, the absence of a monument is a useful discipline for a pilgrim’s imagination, forcing attention onto the substance of the events, teaching, worship, the entry of Hamza, Ammar, Suhayb, and Umar into the faith, rather than onto a built structure that no longer exists to distract from it.

Stories of Great Islamic Scholars

Unlike sites such as mosques or graveyards that generated centuries of detailed juristic rulings, Abu Qubays does not appear prominently in the corpus of formal fiqh rulings associated with the great classical jurists, and this article does not manufacture rulings that the sources do not contain. What can be reported honestly is the scholarly engagement with the mountain’s historical and etymological traditions, which is real and worth recording.

Al-Nawawi on the Mountain’s Name

The great Shafi’i jurist and hadith scholar Imam al-Nawawi, whose legal and hadith commentaries remain foundational across the Muslim world, is recorded by the Turkish academic study of the mountain’s classical sources as having accepted the report that the mountain’s name derives from a man of the Jurhum tribe called Abu Qubays ibn Shamikh, treating this as the more reliable of the competing etymological traditions transmitted by earlier historians such as al-Azraqi (İslam Araştırmaları Merkezi). This is a modest but genuine point of scholarly engagement: a jurist of al-Nawawi’s stature weighing in, in his historical and geographical writing, on a question of Makkan place-name history rather than on a point of ritual law.

Ibn Kathir on the Splitting of the Moon

Ibn Kathir’s tafsir on Surah al-Qamar, discussed at length in the Qur’anic Connections section above, represents the most substantial and most frequently cited scholarly treatment connected to this article’s subject matter, even though its subject is the moon-splitting miracle rather than the mountain itself. His judgment that the supporting hadith reach the level of mutawatir, a judgment he shares with the earlier scholar al-Tahawi, remains the standard reference point for how mainstream Sunni scholarship treats this event, and his careful attribution of the account to named companions, Ibn Mas’ud, Ibn Umar, Jubayr ibn Mut’im, Ibn Abbas, and Anas, models exactly the kind of source-transparency this article has tried to apply throughout (Ibn Kathir’s tafsir, via Alim.org).

Ibn Baz on the Black Stone Traditions

In the modern period, Shaykh Abdul Aziz ibn Baz, the former Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia, is recorded as having weighed the two competing traditions about the Black Stone’s history, the report of its descent from Paradise and subsequent blackening by human sin on one hand, and the report of Ibrahim retrieving it from Abu Qubays on the other, and explicitly stating that the first tradition is the stronger of the two (Madeenah.com). This is precisely the kind of grading this article has tried to apply consistently: not dismissing the Abu Qubays tradition outright, since a scholar of Ibn Baz’s calibre engaged with it seriously enough to compare it, but recording plainly that he, and the broader hadith-critical tradition he represents, judged it the weaker report.

Modern Scholarly Voices on Heritage and Development

Beyond the classical figures discussed above, this article’s treatment of the mountain’s modern transformation has drawn on the recorded positions of contemporary voices whose expertise is architectural and historical rather than juridical: Sami Angawi, trained as an architect and the founder of two successive heritage research institutions in Makkah, and Irfan al-Alawi of the Islamic Heritage Research Foundation, whose organisation has documented the broader pattern of demolition across both Makkah and Madinah over recent decades. Neither is a jurist issuing a fatwa, and this article has been careful throughout not to present their criticism as though it carried the weight of a scholarly legal ruling; it is, rather, the documented professional judgment of heritage specialists, presented alongside the Saudi state’s own stated rationale, so that readers can weigh a genuine, unresolved public disagreement rather than a settled question of Islamic law.

A note on authenticity: readers should not expect, and this article does not manufacture, a long list of formal fiqh rulings by Imam Malik, Abu Hanifah, al-Shafi’i, Ahmad ibn Hanbal, Ibn Taymiyyah, or Ibn Hajar specifically addressing Abu Qubays as a site. Where the classical legal tradition is silent on a place, honest historical writing says so, rather than inventing rulings to fill out a section. What this article has instead documented, accurately and with full references, is the genuine scholarly engagement that does exist: al-Nawawi on the name, Ibn Kathir and al-Tahawi on the moon-splitting hadith, and Ibn Baz on the Black Stone traditions.

Spiritual Reflection

Stand, if you can, at the edge of the Masa’a gallery, where the modern floor of the Haram meets the base of what was once open mountainside, and look up. You will not see the summit from there. A wall of construction, palace, and modern infrastructure now stands between you and the place where the first Muslims once whispered the Qur’an to each other in fear of their lives. Does it trouble you that you cannot see it? It should, a little. Not because a view has been denied you, but because the covering over of that ground is itself a kind of lesson about what history does to sacred places: it builds on them, it forgets them, it sometimes protects them and sometimes erases them, often within the same decade and by the same hands.

Think of al-Arqam, sixteen years old by some accounts, opening his own house to a mission that could have gotten him killed. He had no way of knowing that the man he sheltered would, within a lifetime, be venerated across a third of the known world. He simply had a house, a door that could be shut, and a willingness to risk what he had for what he believed. You are not asked, standing where his house once stood, to imagine yourself equally brave. You are asked something smaller and perhaps harder: whether you would recognise, in your own ordinary life, the moment that mattered before it became obviously historic. Al-Arqam did not know he was making history. He was just letting some friends pray safely in his home.

Think, too, of the man who stood on the hill just beyond that house and called out to his entire city by name, tribe by tribe, knowing that some of the loudest voices answering him would be voices of contempt. He did not soften the warning to make it easier to hear. He asked them a simple question about trust, received an honest answer, and then delivered news they did not want. His own uncle mocked him for it, in front of everyone. If warning does not sometimes cost you the goodwill of people close to you, ask yourself honestly whether you have said anything worth hearing.

And think of the mountain itself, the one you cannot climb, holding within its history both a moment when an angel offered the Prophet ﷺ the power to erase every person who had ever hurt him, and the moment he refused that offer in favour of hoping their grandchildren might one day worship rightly. He was rejected, stoned until he bled, and offered total vengeance, and he chose mercy for people who had not yet shown him any themselves. You will not be tested that severely. But the shape of the choice recurs in smaller versions constantly: someone wrongs you, and you are handed, in your own heart if nowhere else, the power to wish destruction on them. What do you do with that power? The mountain remembers a man who was offered it literally, at scale, and gave it back.

You cannot ascend Abu Qubays today. Say that honestly to yourself before you arrive, so that disappointment does not colour your ziyarah. What you can do is stand below it, in the shadow of everything it has seen, from a family’s rain-prayer in famine, to a secret school that changed the world, to catapults burning the Kaaba, to a modern palace with its lights on late into the Ramadan night, and ask what you are doing, right now, with whatever small platform you have been given. Ask Allah for the humility to use it as al-Arqam did, and the courage to use it as the Prophet ﷺ did on that hillside, and the mercy to use it as he did at Ta’if, when he could have asked for the mountains to fall and asked instead for guidance to fall on hearts.

There is a further, quieter reflection worth sitting with, one that has less to do with any single companion and more to do with the mountain’s whole strange biography. Abu Qubays has been, across fourteen centuries, a place of famine prayer, a secret school’s near neighbour, a pulpit for public warning, a fortress, a weapon platform aimed at the Kaaba itself, a hermitage for wandering Sufi students, a colonial-era photograph subject, a national emblem on a king’s postage stamps, and finally a walled royal residence closed to the very pilgrims who travel thousands of miles partly to stand near it. No other single hill in Islamic history has worn quite so many contradictory identities in such a short span of ground. What does it mean that a place can hold a miracle, a massacre, a school, a shrine, and a palace, all within the memory of a single unbroken landscape? Perhaps only this: that holiness, in Islam, was never claimed to reside in stone. The mountain did not become less significant when the fortress fell, or when the mosque was demolished, or when the palace rose in its place, because its significance was never really about the rock. It was about what human beings, at their best and at their worst, chose to do near it. That is a sobering thought to carry into any sacred landscape, this one or any other: the ground itself asks nothing of you. What you do while standing on it is the entire question.

Carry one more image with you, if it helps. Picture Ibn Jubayr, eight centuries ago, climbing the same slope you cannot climb today, reaching a small rooftop, and finding himself so struck by the sight of the Kaaba below that he set the moment down in writing, certain that later readers would want to know exactly what it looked like from up there. He was right that people would want to know. He could not have imagined that within a thousand years the very rooftop he stood on would be gone, replaced first by a mosque bearing a companion’s name it likely never earned, and then by a palace bearing a king’s authority it does not share with visitors. His account survives where the building does not. That, too, is worth reflecting on as you stand at the base of this mountain today: the words people leave behind about a place can outlast the place itself, which is one more reason this article has tried so hard to record only what the sources actually say, rather than what would simply make for a better story.

Practical Visitor Guide

Getting There

Abu Qubays rises immediately east of the Masjid al-Haram, close enough that it forms part of the skyline visible from the eastern courtyards and minarets of the Grand Mosque. There is no separate address or entrance to visit, because there is no public visitor site on the mountain: the practical starting point for any pilgrim wanting to engage with this place is simply the Haram itself, and specifically the Masa’a, the covered gallery where the ritual of sa’i between Safa and Marwah takes place, since this is the closest a modern visitor can come to the historic ground associated with Dar al-Arqam and the call to the clans.

What You Will Actually See, and What You Will Not

Be clear with yourself before you go: you will not be able to climb Abu Qubays, and you will not be able to visit its summit. The crown of the mountain is occupied by Qasr al-Safa, a working royal palace still used for state functions and by the Saudi royal family during Ramadan, and it is not open to tourism, ziyarah groups, or the general public under any circumstance documented in the sources consulted for this article (Detik). This article will not pretend otherwise or write around that fact to produce a conventional summit-visit itinerary, because doing so would mislead you into planning a trip to somewhere you cannot go. What you can do is look up. From the eastern side of the Haram, and from various points around Makkah’s city centre where taller buildings do not block the view, the mountain’s cut and terraced eastern face remains visible, along with glimpses of the palace structures along its ridge. The scale of the modern excavation into the mountain, particularly the deliberate severing of Safa from Abu Qubays carried out during the 1955 to 1956 CE expansion, is itself part of what there is to see and reflect on: a visible record, in raw rock, of just how much of the mountain has been reshaped by modern engineering (Makkah Newspaper).

Where to Stand

The single most meaningful spot for a pilgrim to stand in connection with this mountain is not anywhere on the mountain at all. It is at the base of Safa, inside the Masa’a gallery, at the point where pilgrims begin the sa’i between Safa and Marwah. This is, as closely as the classical geographical sources allow it to be pinpointed, near the historic location of Dar al-Arqam and near the spot where the Prophet ﷺ stood to call out to the clans of Quraysh. There is no fixed marker inside the Haram identifying the exact former location of the house, and pilgrims should treat any guide’s precise pointing as an approximation rather than an archaeologically confirmed spot, a caution echoed by more careful modern visitor guides to the area (Hisar Travel Singapore).

Best Time to Reflect Here

Because there is no separate visiting site to time around opening hours or crowd patterns, the best time to reflect on this place is simply whenever your own sa’i between Safa and Marwah brings you naturally to its base, whether during Umrah or Hajj. Many pilgrims find the quieter hours after Fajr or in the late evening allow a more unhurried moment to pause mentally at Safa before or after the ritual walk, rather than rushing straight through in the density of midday or post-Isha crowds.

Etiquette

There is no special ritual prayer, supplication, or physical gesture prescribed for this location beyond the ordinary etiquette of the Haram itself: lower your voice, avoid obstructing the flow of pilgrims through the Masa’a, and resist the temptation, addressed directly in the Common Misconceptions section below, to seek out or perform any invented ritual said to carry special reward specifically because of proximity to this mountain. The sa’i itself, between Safa and Marwah, is the prescribed and rewarded act; standing near the base of Abu Qubays and reflecting on its history is a matter of personal benefit and historical awareness, not an act of worship with its own separate reward.

Do and Do Not

• Do treat your time near Safa, at the base of the mountain, as an opportunity for reflection on the Dar al-Arqam narrative and the call to the clans, both extremely well documented in authentic sources.
• Do not attempt to seek out, pay for, or arrange any tour claiming access to the summit or to Qasr al-Safa; no such legitimate public access exists.
• Do not repeat or act upon any claim that praying at a specific spot connected to this mountain carries a specific, named reward beyond the general reward of prayer in the sanctuary of Makkah; this claim is addressed and rejected in the Common Misconceptions section.
• Do photograph the mountain’s visible profile from permitted public areas of the Haram if you wish, but do not attempt to photograph the palace complex directly, given its function as an active, security-sensitive royal and state facility.
• Do combine your reflection here with the sa’i ritual itself, rather than treating the historical background as a separate errand; the two are physically and spiritually inseparable.

Photography and Media

Because the mountain’s summit cannot be visited, most photographs pilgrims take in connection with Abu Qubays are, in practice, photographs of the Haram’s eastern skyline with the mountain and palace visible in the background, taken from the mosque’s upper floors, courtyards, or nearby streets. There are no restrictions on this kind of general skyline photography beyond the ordinary rules governing photography inside the Masjid al-Haram itself, which vary by area and by season and are enforced by mosque security. Drones and other aerial photography equipment are not permitted anywhere in the vicinity of the Haram or the palace complex, a restriction rooted in both the security sensitivity of an active royal facility and the general aviation restrictions in force across central Makkah during pilgrimage seasons.

Accessibility

Because the only publicly accessible ground connected to this mountain is inside the Masa’a gallery of the Masjid al-Haram, accessibility considerations are identical to those for the sa’i ritual generally: the gallery is a covered, air-conditioned, wheelchair-accessible corridor with dedicated lanes for those unable to walk the distance between Safa and Marwah unaided, and this remains true regardless of any interest a visitor may have in the history of the mountain above.

Visiting With Children

The story of Dar al-Arqam, a house full of young converts learning the Qur’an in secret, and the story of the call to the clans, a single man standing on a hill and addressing an entire city by name, are both genuinely gripping narratives for children, well suited to being told at the base of Safa itself rather than reserved for a classroom. What should be avoided is promising children, or allowing them to expect, a visit to “the mountain where the moon split,” since no such visit is physically possible; frame the story instead around Safa, where the authentic events are actually set, and treat the summit and its history as something to look up at and talk about rather than something to plan to reach.

Nearby Sites to Combine With Your Visit

Because there is no separate itinerary point on the mountain itself, the most useful practical advice for 2025 and 2026 pilgrims is to fold the Abu Qubays story into a wider historical circuit through central Makkah rather than treating it as a standalone stop. Jabal al-Nour, with the Cave of Hira where the first revelation descended, and Jabal Thawr, with the cave where the Prophet ﷺ and Abu Bakr hid during the migration to Madinah, are both reachable by taxi from the Haram and reward a half-day each; neither has any physical connection to Abu Qubays, but together the three sites give a pilgrim a far more complete geography of the seerah’s Makkan chapters than any one of them alone. Closer to hand, the Abraj Al Bait complex and its clock tower stand on the site of the former Ajyad Fortress, a nearby Ottoman-era hilltop citadel whose own demolition and the international controversy that followed are covered in full elsewhere in this series and are not repeated here, though the two episodes, Ajyad’s removal and Abu Qubays’s cutting and building over, are frequently and reasonably discussed together as twin case studies in how Makkah’s hilltops have been transformed by twentieth and twenty-first century development. The Masjid al-Haram itself, and specifically the Masa’a gallery discussed above, remains the essential and only necessary stop for engaging seriously with the authentic history connected to this mountain, since it is there, at Safa, rather than on the summit, that the events this article has been most careful to document actually took place.

What Is Actually Visible in 2025 and 2026

Pilgrims travelling in the current Hajj and Umrah seasons should expect no change to the access situation described throughout this article: Qasr al-Safa remains a functioning state facility, closed to the public, and no announcement located in the research for this article indicates any plan to open it, in whole or in part, to tourism or ziyarah groups in the near future. What a visitor can expect to see, weather and construction activity permitting, is the mountain’s cut eastern profile from various vantage points around the Haram’s eastern precinct and from upper floors of some nearby hotels facing that direction, along with the general silhouette of the palace buildings along the ridge. Given the continuing pace of infrastructure work around the Grand Mosque, some vantage points available in past years may be temporarily obstructed by cranes, scaffolding, or new construction at any given time, and pilgrims should treat any specific claim about an ideal photo spot found in an older blog post with some scepticism, since the immediate streetscape around the Haram changes fast enough that details only a few years old can already be out of date.

Common Mistakes

The single most common mistake, repeated across a great deal of popular travel writing about this site, is treating Abu Qubays as a visitable summit destination, complete with directions, best photo spots, and recommended visiting hours, when no such visit is possible. A second common mistake is collapsing the authentic Safa narratives, the call to the clans and Dar al-Arqam, into the mountain’s summit, creating the false impression that the Prophet ﷺ personally climbed Abu Qubays when the hadith evidence places him instead on the hill at its base. A third is treating the moon-splitting tradition as settled fact that occurred specifically on this mountain, when, as shown at length above, the authentic hadith place the event at Mina or leave the specific mountain unnamed.

Common Misconceptions

“The Moon Split Directly Over Abu Qubays”

This is the single most widespread misconception connected to the mountain, repeated across countless travel and pilgrimage websites as though it were a settled fact stated in the hadith. As shown in full in the Hadith References section above, the independently verified texts of Sahih al-Bukhari and Sahih Muslim describe the moon splitting either “at Mina” or, in a second wording, generically “during the lifetime of the Prophet ﷺ,” with a mountain, unnamed, visible between the two halves (Sahih al-Bukhari 3869; Sahih Muslim 2800b). None of these authentic texts names Abu Qubays. The specific identification of Abu Qubays as the site of the miracle is a later popular tradition, traceable in this article’s research to at least the twelfth century CE, when the traveller Ibn Jubayr recorded visiting a mosque on the mountain associated with the event. It is an old and understandable tradition, born from the mountain’s proximity to the sanctuary and its dramatic height, but it is tradition, not hadith, and readers repeating it as though it were textually established should adjust their language accordingly: “tradition holds that” rather than “the hadith state that.”

“The Minority Eschatological Reading Is a Modern Innovation”

It is sometimes assumed that reading Surah al-Qamar 54:1 as describing a future rather than past event is a recent, apologetic response to modern scientific skepticism about a historical moon-splitting miracle. The textual record does not support that assumption: scholars associated with this minority reading include the early Basran figure Hasan al-Basri, a figure of the first Islamic century, alongside other early names such as Ibn Ata and Abu Bakr al-Asamm, long before any encounter with modern scientific scepticism could have shaped the question (Qist: Journal of Quran and Tafseer Studies). A note on authenticity: this is a genuine classical minority opinion with old roots, not a modern invention, even though it remains a minority position rejected by most commentators for the textual and evidentiary reasons set out in the Qur’anic Connections section above.

“The Black Stone Was Hidden on Abu Qubays During Nuh’s Flood”

Examined fully above, this is a genuinely old and widely repeated story, found in tafsir and historical literature and even repeated by the Saudi state’s own reference encyclopaedia (Saudipedia). It is not, however, found in the sahih hadith corpus. The one Hasan-graded hadith on the subject, from Ibn Abbas via Jami’ at-Tirmidhi, states only that the stone descended from Paradise white and was blackened by human sin; it says nothing about Abu Qubays or a flood (Jami’ at-Tirmidhi 877). Shaykh Ibn Baz, weighing the two competing traditions, judged the Paradise-descent-and-blackening report the stronger of the two (Madeenah.com). A note on authenticity: this is a beloved and very old story, worth knowing and worth telling, but it belongs to the category of historical and exegetical tradition rather than graded hadith, and a leading modern scholarly voice has explicitly ranked it as the weaker of two available reports on the subject.

“Abu Qubays Is the First Mountain Created on Earth”

This claim, along with the associated stories that Adam and Eve descended and were buried on the mountain in a cave called Gharat al-Kanz, and that Adam buried his revealed scriptures there, belongs to the broad category of material scholars call Israiliyyat: traditions absorbed into popular Muslim literature from older Jewish and Christian lore circulating in late antique and early Islamic Arabia, transmitted through historical compilations rather than through the Qur’an or an authenticated hadith of the Prophet ﷺ (Wikishia). None of the sources consulted for this article could locate a sahih or even a weak, formally graded hadith establishing this claim; it exists purely in the layer of popular historical and geographic writing about Makkah that accumulated over the centuries. A note on authenticity: this is presented honestly here as unauthenticated, largely Israiliyyat material. It should not be repeated as an established fact of Islamic belief, though there is no obligation on any believer to actively deny it either; it simply sits outside what the Qur’an and sound hadith establish.

Fabricated Du’as and the Claim of Special Reward for Prayer on the Mountain

A recurring practice among some pilgrims and some popular guides is the promotion of specific supplications said to be especially efficacious if recited on or near Abu Qubays, along with claims that prayer performed at this specific location carries a reward beyond that of ordinary prayer within the boundaries of the Haram. No hadith verified for this article, and none located in the standard collections, supports either claim. The general merit of prayer within the Masjid al-Haram is established by authentic hadith addressing the sanctuary as a whole; no verified authentic report singles out Abu Qubays, or any specific rock or spot upon it, for an elevated multiplier of reward distinct from the well-known merit of the Haram generally. Supplications marketed as uniquely tied to this mountain, with wording not found in the Qur’an or the transmitted du’as of the Prophet ﷺ, should be treated as invented additions rather than sanctioned practice. This is a pattern seen at many historic Islamic sites, where popular piety, often well-intentioned, generates location-specific rituals that outrun what the sources actually establish, and the corrective is not mockery of pilgrims who have been taught these practices in good faith, but a clear, respectful statement of what is and is not supported by evidence.

“The Summit Mosque Was Named for Bilal ibn Rabah”

In its final decades before demolition, the small mosque that had stood on the mountain’s summit for the better part of a thousand years was popularly known as Masjid Bilal, after the Prophet’s ﷺ companion and first muezzin. A detailed Arabic-language historical account of the building states plainly that this name cannot be traced to any identifiable origin and, crucially, that no earlier historian recorded any tradition connecting Bilal ibn Rabah personally to this specific structure (Makkawi.azurewebsites.net). Classical sources going back to al-Azraqi in the second century AH instead record the building under a different, equally contested name, Masjid Ibrahim, itself explicitly disputed by al-Azraqi’s own grandfather, who denied it had any connection to the Prophet Ibrahim, peace be upon him. A note on authenticity: the mosque’s genuine, well-documented history, attested by al-Azraqi, Ibn Jubayr, and Ibn Battuta across roughly a thousand years, does not include a sound chain connecting it to Bilal ibn Rabah by name; that attribution appears to be a comparatively late, untraceable popular label attached shortly before the building’s twentieth-century demolition.

Confusing Safa the Ritual Hill with Abu Qubays the Mountain

This article has returned to this distinction repeatedly because it is the single most consequential source of confusion in popular writing about this site. Al-Safa, the small hill where the sa’i ritual begins and where the Prophet ﷺ delivered the call to the clans, was historically the foot of Abu Qubays, physically continuous with it until the 1955 to 1956 CE Saudi expansion severed the two (İslam Araştırmaları Merkezi). Every authentic hadith discussed in this article that places the Prophet ﷺ at a named location in this part of Makkah names Safa, not Abu Qubays. Treating the two as interchangeable, as much popular writing does, obscures rather than illuminates the actual textual record.

The Al-Safa Palace and the Debate Over What Has Been Lost

No honest article about this mountain can avoid the controversy that now defines its modern history: the transformation of its summit into a royal palace, and the broader pattern of demolition and redevelopment across historic Makkah of which this transformation forms a part. This section presents both sides of that debate as fairly as the available sources allow, without editorialising about who is correct.

The most prominent critical voice on this subject is the Saudi-born architect Sami Angawi, founder of the Hajj Research Centre in 1975, later moved to Umm al-Qura University in 1983, and subsequently founder of the independent Amar Centre for Architectural Heritage in 1988 after losing institutional control of his earlier research centre. Angawi has spent decades documenting what he describes as the systematic loss of historic Makkah, telling Reuters in remarks later republished by the Center for Islamic Pluralism, “We are witnessing now the last few moments of the history of Mecca… its layers of history are being bulldozed for a parking lot” (Center for Islamic Pluralism). In an interview with the South China Morning Post, discussing the broader pattern of demolition around the sanctuary, Angawi remarked pointedly, “They’ve even taken away the mountains,” a comment made specifically in the context of the cutting and reshaping of hills such as Abu Qubays for successive Haram expansions (South China Morning Post). Angawi has connected this pattern of destruction to a specific religious and legal justification: a 1994 fatwa from the Saudi Council of Senior Scholars that, according to reporting in The Independent, permits the destruction of historical sites where there is concern that they might become objects of shirk, or idolatrous veneration, a theological position rooted in a strict concern for tawhid that critics argue has been applied far more broadly than strictly necessary (The Independent).

A second prominent critic, Irfan al-Alawi of the Islamic Heritage Research Foundation, has used still starker language in press interviews reproduced in multiple outlets, stating, “No one has the balls to stand up and condemn this cultural vandalism… We have already lost 400 to 500 sites” across Makkah and Madinah. The Washington-based Gulf Institute has estimated, in figures widely cited alongside these criticisms, that between ninety and ninety-five per cent of the millennium-old buildings of Makkah and Madinah have been demolished over the past several decades of development. These are serious, specific claims from named heritage advocates and organisations, and this article records them as such: attributed claims from identified critics, not this article’s own independent finding, though the pattern of demolition they describe is corroborated by the broader historical record of Haram expansions this article has documented, including the loss of the Dar al-Arqam structure’s physical form, the medieval fortress on Abu Qubays, and the historic mosque and Sufi lodges once found on the mountain.

The Saudi state’s own justification for this pattern of expansion and redevelopment, articulated across numerous official statements over the decades, centres consistently on a single practical fact: the extraordinary growth in the number of Muslims able to perform Hajj and Umrah, driven by cheaper air travel, rising global Muslim populations, and improving standards of living across much of the Muslim world. Coverage of the roughly £690 million Grand Mosque expansion programme, for instance, cited the explicit official rationale of accommodating an additional 1.2 million pilgrims each year, a scale of demand that historic, narrower streets and smaller sanctuary boundaries genuinely could not physically absorb without loss of life in crowd-related incidents (The Independent). When Saudi officials have addressed specific demolitions directly, as in the case of the nearby Ajyad Fortress, discussed in full in this site’s companion article on the Abraj Al Bait complex rather than duplicated here, the position taken has been unambiguous about where authority lies: a Saudi Islamic affairs minister was quoted defending that particular demolition on the grounds that “no one has the right to interfere in what comes under the state’s authority. This development is in the interest of all Muslims all over the world” (South China Morning Post). Applied to Abu Qubays specifically, the same logic underlies both the 1955 to 1956 CE cutting of the mountain to expand the Haram and the construction of Qasr al-Safa on its summit: the site serves, in the state’s framing, the practical needs of the pilgrimage and the functions of modern governance, rather than functioning primarily as a heritage monument to be preserved intact.

It is also worth recording, because it complicates any simple narrative of unrestrained demolition, that at least one further expansion into Abu Qubays was halted not by heritage pressure but by hydrology: the 2013 Saudi Geological Survey finding that the mountain’s rock contains headwaters feeding the Zamzam well near the Safa gate placed a genuine, acknowledged limit on how much further into the mountain construction could proceed at that specific point, according to reporting that named Muhammad Idris of Umm al-Qura University’s Hajj Research Institute as the source (Arab News). This article does not take a position on which side of this debate is correct. It records, as fairly as the sources allow, that serious heritage advocates regard the transformation of Abu Qubays and the wider historic fabric of Makkah as a significant and largely undocumented loss, and that the Saudi state regards the same transformation as a necessary and justified response to the physical demands of hosting an ever-growing global pilgrimage. Readers are encouraged to weigh both positions against the specific facts recorded in this article’s Historical Development and Architecture sections, rather than against the more heated rhetoric that this debate sometimes generates on either side.

It is also worth situating this specific debate within the wider frame of how heritage preservation functions, or does not function, in Makkah generally, since Abu Qubays is not an isolated case but one instance of a pattern repeated across the sanctuary’s surrounding hills. Unlike many historic cities elsewhere in the Muslim world, where UNESCO World Heritage status or comparable national heritage protections have constrained development around religiously and historically significant sites, Makkah’s status as the holiest city in Islam has not, in practice, produced the kind of statutory heritage protection that critics such as Angawi and al-Alawi argue the city’s historic fabric would need to survive intact. Part of the reason, as both critics and more sympathetic observers acknowledge, is a genuine and long-standing theological caution within the dominant religious establishment in Saudi Arabia against the veneration of physical sites associated with the Prophet ﷺ and his companions, out of concern that reverence for a building or a stone could shade into the kind of shirk, associating partners with Allah, that the sanctuary’s entire purpose is meant to guard against. This theological caution is not itself a fringe or insincere position; it draws on a real and old current within Islamic scholarship wary of relic veneration. The disagreement, as this article has tried to present it fairly throughout, is not over whether that theological concern is legitimate, but over whether it necessarily requires the wholesale physical removal of historic structures rather than their preservation under careful, clearly bounded conditions that would prevent veneration without erasing the historical record entirely. Neither side of that disagreement is treated here as simply correct; both are recorded as genuinely held, seriously argued positions.

Lesser-Known Facts

• Abu Qubays and Qu’ayqa’an, the mountain across the Kaaba to the west, were known together in old Arabic usage as “al-Akhshabayn,” a pairing that appears in the authentic hadith describing the Angel of the Mountains at Ta’if (Sahih al-Bukhari 3231).
• The mountain’s western face, the side looking toward the Kaaba, carried its own separate name in classical usage, “Fadih,” distinct from the mountain’s overall name (source: Turkish academic study of classical Makkan toponymy, İslam Araştırmaları Merkezi).
• Dar al-Arqam, after passing out of the Arqam family’s hands, was purchased by al-Khayzuran bint Ata, wife of the Abbasid caliph al-Mahdi and mother of Harun al-Rashid, who converted it into a school known afterward as Dar al-Khayzuran (Islamopedie).
• The mountain was twice used as a siege weapon against the Kaaba itself during the second Islamic civil war, first by the Umayyad commander Husayn ibn Numayr in 64 AH, 683 to 684 CE, and again by al-Hajjaj ibn Yusuf in 72 AH, 691 to 692 CE.
• A twelfth-century fortress once stood on the mountain’s summit, built by the Ayyubid-era emir of Makkah al-Mukthar ibn Isa ibn al-Qasim, who died in 589 AH, 1193 CE; no trace of it survives.
• The Sanusi Sufi order established its first hermitage on the mountain around 1252 to 1253 AH, 1836 to 1837 CE, and by the time the Dutch orientalist Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje visited Makkah in 1884 CE, substantial Naqshbandi-order buildings had also clustered around it.
• Modern geological survey work discovered in 2013 that the mountain’s interior contains headwaters feeding the Zamzam well, a finding that placed a real engineering limit on further excavation near the Safa gate (Arab News).
• The grounds of the modern Qasr al-Safa palace are reported to overlap with the traditional site of Dar al-Arqam, meaning the ground of Islam’s first secret school now lies within the boundary of a twentieth-century royal palace (Arabic Wikipedia).
• Height figures for the mountain vary meaningfully across sources, from roughly 372 metres in Saudi Arabia’s own Saudipedia geography reference to 420 metres in other commonly cited figures, a discrepancy likely reflecting different survey dates and reference points on a peak substantially reshaped by decades of construction (Saudipedia).
• Sharif Hussein ibn Ali, the last Hashemite ruler of the Hijaz before Saudi rule, adopted an image of the mountain’s summit mosque as an official government emblem, printed on state papers including passports and certain postage stamps, treating the small building as a civic symbol of Makkah itself.
• The Andalusian traveller Ibn Jubayr, visiting in 578 or 579 AH, 1183 CE, described the summit mosque and its rooftop as commanding a view from which “appears the beauty of the sacred Kaaba standing in its centre,” one of the earliest detailed eyewitness descriptions of any building on the mountain.
• Ibn Battuta, visiting in 725 AH, 1325 CE, recorded that the people of Makkah lit torches and lamps on the roof of the summit mosque on the first night of Shawwal, mirroring a similar practice observed on the twenty-seventh night of Ramadan.
• The Sanusi Sufi order, founded on the mountain by Muhammad ibn Ali al-Sanusi in 1837 CE before Wahhabi opposition forced its relocation to Libya in 1843, eventually grew into a network of over a hundred lodges, led the resistance against Italian colonisation under Omar al-Mukhtar, and produced Libya’s only modern king, Idris I, a grandson of the order’s founder (Wikipedia).

Timeline

• Pre-Islamic period — Abu Qubays is known as “al-Amin,” the trustworthy, in a tradition connecting it to the safekeeping of the Black Stone; the mountain and its western neighbour Qu’ayqa’an are together called “al-Akhshabayn.”
• Circa the Prophet’s ﷺ seventh year of life — Traditional accounts describe his grandfather Abd al-Muttalib leading a rain-prayer delegation of Quraysh noblemen up the mountain during a famine.
• Fifth year of the Prophet’s ﷺ mission — Dar al-Arqam, at the foot of Safa, becomes the secret centre of the Muslim community’s worship and teaching, remaining so for roughly three years (IslamicLandmarks.com).
• Early Makkan period, precise year debated — The Prophet ﷺ ascends al-Safa to call the clans of Quraysh together following the revelation of Surah al-Shu’ara 26:214; Abu Lahab’s rejection occasions the revelation of Surah al-Masad (Sahih al-Bukhari 4770).
• Approximately five years before the Hijra, per Ma’arif al-Qur’an — The splitting of the moon occurs at Mina, near Makkah, witnessed by multiple companions including Ibn Mas’ud (Sahih Muslim 2800b).
• After the Hijra, journey to Ta’if — The Prophet ﷺ is rejected and injured at Ta’if; the Angel of the Mountains offers to bring down al-Akhshabayn, Abu Qubays and Qu’ayqa’an together, and the Prophet ﷺ declines (Sahih al-Bukhari 3231).
• 64 AH, 683 to 684 CE — During the siege of Makkah under Abdullah ibn al-Zubayr’s rebellion, the Umayyad commander Husayn ibn Numayr positions catapults on Abu Qubays and bombards the Kaaba, setting it alight.
• 72 AH, 691 to 692 CE — Al-Hajjaj ibn Yusuf again uses Abu Qubays as an artillery platform against the Kaaba on behalf of the caliph Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan.
• 73 AH, 692 to 693 CE — Abdullah ibn al-Zubayr is killed and the rebellion ends.
• Second half of the 6th century AH, 12th century CE — The Ayyubid-era emir of Makkah, al-Mukthar ibn Isa ibn al-Qasim, builds a fortress on the mountain’s summit; he dies in 589 AH, 1193 CE.
• 578 or 579 AH, 1183 CE — The Andalusian traveller Ibn Jubayr visits Makkah and records the summit mosque and ribat in detail, describing the view of the Kaaba from its roof.
• 725 AH, 1325 CE — Ibn Battuta visits the same summit mosque, records its condition, and describes torch-lighting on its roof on the first night of Shawwal.
• 1275 AH, 1858 to 1859 CE — Per the account of the historian Sheikh Abdullah Ghazi, the summit mosque of that era is rebuilt by an unnamed Indian benefactor.
• 1252 to 1253 AH, 1836 to 1837 CE — Muhammad ibn Ali al-Sanusi establishes the founding hermitage of the Sanusi Sufi order on Abu Qubays (Libyan Heritage House).
• 1843 CE — Wahhabi religious authorities force the Sanusi order to leave Makkah; the order relocates to Cyrenaica in present-day Libya (Wikipedia).
• 1884 to 1885 CE — The Dutch orientalist Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje visits Makkah and records substantial Naqshbandi-order buildings around the mountain.
• Early 20th century, before Saudi rule — Sharif Hussein ibn Ali, King of the Hijaz, adopts an image of the summit mosque as an official emblem on state passports and postage stamps.
• 1375 AH, 1955 to 1956 CE — Saudi expansion works sever the physical connection between al-Safa and Abu Qubays (Makkah Newspaper).
• 1401 AH, 1980 to 1981 CE — Qasr al-Safa is completed on the mountain’s summit under King Khalid ibn Abdulaziz (The Haramain Archives).
• 2005 CE — Qasr al-Safa hosts the Third Extraordinary Islamic Summit.
• 2006 CE — The Mecca Document on Iraqi reconciliation is drafted at the palace.
• 2008 CE — The palace hosts the International Islamic Dialogue Conference.
• 2012 CE — Qasr al-Safa hosts the Fourteenth Islamic Summit of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation.
• 2013 CE — The Saudi Geological Survey identifies underground headwaters feeding Zamzam within Abu Qubays, constraining further excavation near the Safa gate (Arab News).

Key Lessons

Historical

The history of this single stretch of ground, from a secret house at the foot of a hill to a royal palace on the mountain above it, shows how thoroughly a place’s function can be transformed across fourteen centuries while its physical location remains constant. It also shows, through the twin sieges of 64 and 72 AH, that height and proximity to the sacred can be turned to violent purposes as easily as to devotional ones, and that the same geography sheltering the earliest Muslims could later be used by Muslims against the Kaaba itself during a civil war. A mountain does not choose how it is used; the people standing on it do.A further historical lesson concerns sourcing itself: the same mountain that hosted a genuinely documented thousand-year-old mosque, attested by named travellers across multiple centuries, also accumulated, in its final years, an untraceable popular name for that same building, a reminder that even well-documented places are not immune to the slow accretion of unverified popular tradition, and that each generation bears some responsibility for checking what it passes on rather than simply repeating what it was told.The same caution applies to the etymology of the mountain’s own name, examined at the start of this article: four different explanations, none a hadith, circulating across centuries of Makkan historical writing, each repeated confidently by different sources, none conclusively resolved. A careful reader learns, over the course of an article like this one, to distinguish the register in which a claim is made, hadith, tafsir, classical history, or popular modern repetition, because that register, more than the confidence with which a claim is stated, is what actually determines how much weight it can bear.

Spiritual

The Ta’if hadith, more than any other single report connected to this mountain, offers a spiritual lesson worth carrying beyond this article: real power to harm, even power offered by an angel acting under divine sanction, was set aside by the Prophet ﷺ in favour of hope for the very people who had hurt him. The call to the clans on Safa offers a second, complementary lesson: sincere warning delivered honestly may be mocked by the people closest to you, and the mockery does not retroactively make the warning wrong.

Personal

Al-Arqam’s story is a reminder that history is rarely made by people who know, at the time, that they are making it. He simply had a house and a willingness to use it. Few readers of this article will ever be asked to shelter a persecuted community in their home, but many will be given smaller versions of the same choice: a resource, a platform, a moment of privacy or safety that could matter enormously to someone else if offered, and will matter to no one if withheld.

Practical

For any pilgrim planning a visit connected to this mountain, the most practical lesson of this entire article is a simple one: know before you go that the summit is closed, occupied by an active royal palace, and not part of any legitimate pilgrimage itinerary, so that your attention and your reflection can be properly directed to the base of Safa, where the real, authenticated history actually happened, rather than to a summit you were never going to reach. A second, related lesson concerns sourcing generally: this mountain attracts an unusually large volume of confident-sounding but unsupported claims, from the Bilal Mosque naming to inflated visitor guides describing a summit tour that does not exist, and a pilgrim who develops the habit of asking “is this attributed, and to what” before repeating a claim about any historic site will be far better equipped than one who simply trusts whichever version of the story was told first or loudest.

On the Limits of This Article

This article has aimed for thoroughness, but thoroughness is not the same as completeness, and it is worth stating plainly what remains uncertain even after extensive research. The exact demolition date of the summit mosque, the precise original founder of the building beyond disputed popular attribution, and a definitive resolution of the mountain’s exact elevation are all questions this article has left open rather than answered with false confidence, because no source consulted was able to settle them beyond reasonable doubt. Readers encountering more confident answers to these specific questions elsewhere should treat that added confidence with some scepticism rather than assuming a more recent or more detailed-sounding source has simply done better research; in several cases during the preparation of this article, greater apparent specificity in a secondary source turned out to trace back to no identifiable primary evidence at all.

Authentic Sources

Primary Islamic Sources

The Qur’an and the two most rigorously authenticated hadith collections, Sahih al-Bukhari and Sahih Muslim, form the primary evidentiary basis of this article wherever an authentic event is described, and every hadith cited above has been checked directly against the live text published on Sunnah.com. Jami’ at-Tirmidhi has been used for the one Hasan-graded report on the Black Stone. Readers should exercise particular caution with early biographical and historical works such as the Sirah of Ibn Ishaq, the historical compilations of al-Waqidi, and the great universal history of al-Tabari: these are foundational and often irreplaceable sources for the seerah and early Islamic history, but they were compiled with looser standards of narrator-chain verification than the hadith sciences later demanded, and they are known to preserve material, including some of the Israiliyyat traditions discussed in this article, that later hadith critics would not accept as authentic. Where this article has drawn on material ultimately traceable to this looser historical tradition, such as the pre-Islamic and Adam-related legends about Abu Qubays, it has said so explicitly rather than presenting that material with the same weight as a verified hadith.

Classical Scholars

This article has drawn on the recorded positions and tafsir of Imam al-Nawawi, on the mountain’s disputed name; Ibn Kathir and, through his citation, al-Tahawi, on the mutawatir grading of the moon-splitting hadith; the ninth-century Makkan historian al-Azraqi, whose Akhbar Makka preserves much of the classical material on the mountain’s toponymy and the location of Dar al-Arqam; and the geographer Yaqut al-Hamawi, whose Mu’jam al-Buldan records the later history of the Dar al-Arqam site as a school.

Modern Academic and Reference Sources

• Quran.com, Surah al-Qamar 54:1-2
• Quran.com, Surah al-Masad 111
• Ibn Kathir’s Tafsir on Surah al-Qamar, via Alim.org
• Ma’arif al-Qur’an on Surah al-Qamar, via Quran.com
• Qist: Journal of Quran and Tafseer Studies, on interpretive readings of the moon-splitting verse
• Sahih al-Bukhari 3869, 4864, 4770, 4801, and 3231, via Sunnah.com
• Sahih Muslim 208b, 2800b, and 2800c, via Sunnah.com
• Jami’ at-Tirmidhi 877, via Sunnah.com
• İslam Araştırmaları Merkezi, academic study of Abu Qubays’s classical sources
• Wikishia, overview of Mount Abu Qubays
• Encyclopaedia Britannica, Mount Abu Qubays
• Saudipedia, Geography of Makkah al-Mukarramah City
• Saudipedia, The Black Stone
• Madeenah.com, on the origin of the Black Stone and Ibn Baz’s grading
• Arab News, on the 2013 Zamzam headwaters finding within Abu Qubays
• Makkah Newspaper, infographic on Abu Qubays
• The Haramain Archives, on Qasr al-Safa
• Arabic Wikipedia, Qasr al-Safa in Makkah
• Detik, on Qasr al-Safa’s closed status
• Al Ain, on Al-Safa Palace
• Center for Islamic Pluralism, on Sami Angawi’s heritage criticism
• South China Morning Post, on the destruction of historic Makkah
• The Independent, on the destruction of Makkah’s heritage
• Islamopedie, on al-Arqam ibn Abi al-Arqam and the location of Dar al-Arqam
• Arabic Wikipedia, Dar al-Arqam
• IslamicLandmarks.com, on Dar al-Arqam
• Al Islam, on al-Arqam ibn Abi al-Arqam and Umar’s conversion
• MuslimahHTM, on the house of al-Arqam
• Hisar Travel Singapore, practical guide to the Dar al-Arqam area
• Daily Hadith Online, on Aisha’s narration of the call from Safa
• Makkawi.azurewebsites.net, on the summit mosque, al-Azraqi, Ibn Jubayr, and Ibn Battuta
• Libyan Heritage House, on the founding of the Sanusi order at Abu Qubays
• Wikipedia, on the Sanusiyya order’s later history
• Sotheby’s, on Snouck Hurgronje’s photographic record of 1880s Makkah

A note on method: this article was compiled by cross-referencing the Qur’an and the primary hadith collections directly against Sunnah.com and Quran.com, verifying every cited number and every quoted verse against the live published text rather than relying on secondary summaries. Where a claim could be traced only to historical, tafsir, or popular reference literature rather than to a graded hadith, that distinction has been stated plainly throughout rather than left ambiguous. Where no reliable source could be found for a specific detail, such as archaeological excavation reports for the mountain’s lost medieval structures, this article has said so rather than filling the gap with invented specificity. Heritage criticism and official Saudi positions on the site’s modern development have been presented as attributed claims from named individuals and institutions, not as this article’s own independent findings, in keeping with the requirement to present contested matters fairly and without editorial bias.

Frequently asked questions

Where is Jabal Abu Qubays?

Immediately east of Masjid al-Haram, overlooking the Kaaba from above the Safa end of the mosque. It is the closest of Makkah's historic mountains to the Haram and is clearly visible from the courtyards.

Can I climb Jabal Abu Qubays?

No. The summit is occupied by a royal palace and access is restricted for security reasons. Visitors view the mountain from the Grand Mosque's courtyards and recall its history from below.

Why is Jabal Abu Qubays significant in Islamic tradition?

Tradition holds that the Black Stone was preserved within the mountain during the flood of Nuh until Ibrahim retrieved it for the Kaaba, that the miracle of the splitting of the moon was witnessed from it, and that early public preaching of Islam took place at its base.

Is visiting Jabal Abu Qubays part of Umrah or Hajj?

No. The mountain has no ritual role in Umrah or Hajj. Its value for visitors is historical: it is a landmark tied to Makkah's earliest sacred stories rather than a place of worship.

What does Jabal Abu Qubays look like today?

Urban development has reshaped the mountain, and a palace now crowns its summit. Its position over the Grand Mosque is unchanged, and pilgrims still look up at it from the mataf and courtyards while recalling its traditions.