Jannat al-Mu’alla: The History, the Graves, and the Ziyarah Guide to Makkah’s Ancient Cemetery

A white boundary wall runs along a slope at the northern edge of Makkah, at the foot of a hill the old geographers called al-Hajun. There is no dome behind that wall, no marble facade, no sign naming who lies within. What is there is a plain field of packed earth and scattered stone, some of the stones stacked loosely to mark a mound, most of the ground simply bare. Men pass through a gate on the days a funeral is held; on other days the gate is often closed, and pilgrims stand at the wall and look in from the road. This is Jannat al-Mu’alla, “the Elevated Garden” or “the Exalted Cemetery” — also called Maqbarat al-Ma’la, the Cemetery of Ma’la, and, older than either name, simply al-Hajun, after the hill it climbs. It is the burial ground of Makkah, older than the mosque that stands at the center of the city, and it holds, by every historical account, more of the Prophet’s ﷺ own family than any other single plot of earth outside Madinah.

This guide sets out what can be established about that ground and what cannot. It is a shorter, starker story than the one told about Jannat al-Baqi in Madinah, because far less is written about Makkah’s cemetery than about Madinah’s, and because the destruction of its markers in the twentieth century was, if anything, more thorough. Khadijah bint Khuwaylid, the Prophet’s ﷺ first wife, is buried here — this is as close to certain as anything in early Islamic history gets. Ancestors of his — Abd al-Muttalib, Abu Talib, and, in a more contested tradition, Abd Manaf and Hashim — are said to lie here too, though the strength of that attribution varies from name to name, and in at least one case, that of Hashim, the historical record points somewhere else entirely. Children of the Prophet ﷺ who died in Makkah, including his firstborn son Qasim, were laid to rest in this ground. Later companions and centuries of Makkan scholars followed them. And in 1925, under the authority of the newly established Saudi state, the domes and structures that had been built up over these graves across hundreds of years were pulled down, in the same campaign and on the same religious reasoning that would level the shrines of Jannat al-Baqi in Madinah the following year. That event remains, a century later, a genuine and unresolved point of division among Muslims, and this guide treats it as exactly that: a dispute with two sides, each held by serious people for serious reasons, rather than a settled matter with an obvious villain. Where the history is firm, this account says so plainly. Where it is traditional, contested, or simply unknown — and for a cemetery whose markers were erased, unknown is the honest answer more often than most guides admit — it says that too.

Historical Background: Origins and Setting of Jannat al-Mu’alla

Where the Cemetery Lies

Jannat al-Mu’alla sits north and slightly east of the Masjid al-Haram, roughly a kilometre to a kilometre and a half from the Grand Mosque as the road runs, at the base of the hill known since pre-Islamic times as al-Hajun. Its coordinates are fixed today at approximately 21°26′13″ North, 39°49′45″ East, in a district of the same name that has been absorbed into the built-up sprawl of modern Makkah but that still preserves, within its walls, the older and less crowded character of a graveyard rather than a city block. The site lies along what is now called Al-Hujoon Street, a road that effectively splits the burial ground into two connected sections — an older part and a newer part — joined beneath a modern flyover by an underground passage, so that the cemetery today reads less as a single continuous field than as two adjoining ones, separated by a road that did not exist when the earliest burials here took place. Nearby stand two small mosques associated with early Islamic tradition, the Masjid al-Jinn and the Masjid al-Shajarah, both of which pilgrims commonly visit in the same outing as the cemetery itself, since all three sites cluster along the same stretch of road leading away from the Haram. For details on Wikipedia’s summary of the site’s basic geography and history, see the general overview at Wikipedia’s entry on Jannat al-Mu’alla.

The hill itself, al-Hajun, gave the cemetery its older and, for much of Islamic history, more commonly used name. Classical Arabic sources describe al-Hajun as a rocky rise on the northern approach to Makkah, a natural landmark long before it became associated exclusively with burial. The word “Mu’alla” — from the root meaning “raised” or “elevated” — likely reflects both the physical fact that the burial ground climbs the lower slope of the hill and the honorific sense the word carries in devotional usage, paralleling the way Madinah’s cemetery came to be called “Jannat,” garden, rather than merely “maqbarah,” burial ground. Neither name is a Qur’anic term or a title fixed by a hadith; both are descriptive names that accumulated through centuries of local usage, in the same way “Baqi’ al-Gharqad” — the thorn-scrub hollow — became, over time, “Jannat al-Baqi,” the Garden of Baqi’, in Madinah.

A Burial Ground Older Than Islam

Unlike Baqi’ in Madinah, whose sanctity is entirely a product of the Islamic period — the ground held no distinct religious or ceremonial function before the Prophet’s ﷺ Companions began to be buried there — al-Hajun’s use as a cemetery reaches back well before the start of Muhammad’s ﷺ mission. Makkah’s leading families, the clans that would later make up the Quraysh confederation, used this ground to bury their dead for generations before Islam, and the tradition preserved by Shia biographical sources traces its earliest attested use to Qusayy ibn Kilab, the Prophet’s ﷺ ancestor five generations back, who reunified the guardianship of the Ka’bah under Quraysh control in the fifth century CE and who is remembered as one of the earliest men of his line buried at al-Hajun. According to this tradition, it was Qusayy’s burial there that fixed the site’s name and function for the clans that followed him — see the discussion in the Shia biographical resource wikishia’s article on the Al-Ma’lat Cemetery. This is traditional material, transmitted through genealogical and biographical literature compiled long after the events it describes, and it should be read as the accepted account within that literature rather than as an archaeologically verified fact — no excavation of the cemetery’s oldest layers has been published, and none of the graves from this pre-Islamic period carries any surviving marker.

What can be said with more confidence is the general pattern: Makkah, as a settled trading town controlled by an entrenched merchant aristocracy, would have needed and used burial ground close to its centre for as long as it had been continuously inhabited, and al-Hajun, lying just outside the residential core on the northern approach, was the natural site for that purpose. By the time of the Prophet’s ﷺ birth in the second half of the sixth century CE, the cemetery was already the established resting place of Quraysh’s leading families, including his own clan, Banu Hashim, and its parent clan, Banu Abd Manaf. This continuity matters for understanding what happened next: when Khadijah bint Khuwaylid and members of the Prophet’s ﷺ own household came to be buried at al-Hajun, they were not establishing a new sacred site in the way the first Muhajirun and Ansar were doing at Baqi’ in Madinah. They were being laid in ground that had already served Makkah’s dead for generations, ground whose sanctity, such as it was, long predated the message the Prophet ﷺ would carry to his own people.

Historical Background, Continued: The Cemetery Within Makkah’s Sacred Geography

Makkah’s sanctity in Islamic memory is bound up with the Ka’bah and with the story of Ibrahim and Isma’il, a sanctity the tradition holds to reach back far earlier than the Prophet’s ﷺ own lifetime. Al-Hajun’s place within that landscape is more modest and more human: it is not a site tied to a Qur’anic narrative of prophethood, in the way the Ka’bah, the well of Zamzam, or the hills of Safa and Marwah are, but a working cemetery that happens to hold an unusually dense concentration of people central to the Prophet’s ﷺ own biography. This is worth stating plainly because popular pilgrimage literature sometimes blurs the distinction, describing Jannat al-Mu’alla in language that borrows the aura of the Haram’s ritual sites. The cemetery is significant because of who is buried in it and what happened around it, not because of any independent ritual status the ground itself carries in Islamic law — a distinction that matters directly for the discussion of what is and is not appropriate conduct for a visitor, addressed later in this guide.

The cemetery’s proximity to the Haram — close enough to reach on foot in well under half an hour, far enough to have remained outside the ancient walled town in the pre-modern period — placed it naturally in the path of the Prophet’s ﷺ own life. He would have passed near or through the area repeatedly during his years in Makkah, both before and after the start of his prophetic mission, and the deaths of people close to him meant that al-Hajun accumulated, within his own lifetime, a set of graves that carried immense personal weight for him individually and not merely historical importance for the early Muslim community as a whole. That personal dimension — a cemetery holding a man’s wife, his grandfather, his uncle, and his own children — is part of what distinguishes the story of Jannat al-Mu’alla from that of Jannat al-Baqi, whose earliest and most famous burials belong to companions and allies rather than to the Prophet’s ﷺ immediate family circle in quite the same concentration.

The Story Behind the Place: How a Quraysh Burial Ground Became Islam’s Second Great Cemetery

The Year of Sorrow

The single event that fixed Jannat al-Mu’alla’s place in Islamic memory took place in what the biographical tradition calls ‘Am al-Huzn, the Year of Sorrow, conventionally dated to around 619–620 CE, roughly ten years into the Prophet’s ﷺ mission and three years before the Hijra to Madinah. Within a short span — accounts vary as to whether it was days, weeks, or months apart — the Prophet ﷺ lost both his uncle Abu Talib, who had sheltered and protected him against the hostility of Quraysh since the death of his grandfather, and his wife Khadijah bint Khuwaylid, who had been the first person to believe in his prophethood and who had supported him, materially and personally, through the two decades of their marriage. Khadijah was buried at al-Hajun; Abu Talib, according to the tradition preserved in Shia biographical literature, was buried in the same ground beside his own father, Abd al-Muttalib — see wikishia’s entry on Abu Talib for this account of his burial alongside his father at al-Hajun. The double loss, arriving as it did after Quraysh had already tightened its boycott and persecution of the small Muslim community, is remembered as one of the bleakest passages of the Prophet’s ﷺ Makkan life, and it left al-Hajun holding, within the space of a single year, the graves of the two people who had done the most to make his mission possible in its earliest and most vulnerable years.

Khadijah’s death is treated across both Sunni and Shia biographical literature as one of the best-attested facts of the Prophet’s ﷺ Makkan period, and her burial at al-Hajun carries a correspondingly high degree of historical confidence — see Wikipedia’s biography of Khadija bint Khuwaylid and the parallel account at wikishia’s entry on Khadijah bint Khuwaylid. She died at approximately sixty-five years of age, and because the formal funeral prayer, salat al-janazah, had not yet been legislated at that point in the Prophet’s ﷺ mission, the tradition records that he himself descended into her grave to lay her body to rest, an intimate detail that later biographers took as a mark of the depth of his grief and attachment. The fourteenth-century Makkan historian al-Fasi is noted in some later scholarship as having raised a question about the precision of the al-Hajun attribution for Khadijah specifically — a minority note within an otherwise overwhelming consensus, mentioned here only because this guide aims to flag even minor historical dissent rather than present unanimity where a single dissenting voice exists in the classical literature (see the discussion in wikishia’s Al-Ma’lat Cemetery article). The overwhelming weight of the source tradition, across sectarian lines, places her grave at al-Hajun without serious rival claim.

The Ancestors: Certain Ground and Uncertain Ground

Behind Khadijah and Abu Talib stand a set of earlier figures whose connection to al-Hajun is asserted with less uniform confidence, and a careful account has to treat each one separately rather than folding them into a single undifferentiated list of “the Prophet’s ﷺ ancestors buried at Mu’alla,” which is how much popular literature presents them. Abd al-Muttalib, the Prophet’s ﷺ grandfather and, after the early death of his own father Abdullah, the man who raised him as a boy, died around 578 CE, some three decades before Islam’s message began. The tradition holds that he was buried at al-Hajun beside Qusayy ibn Kilab, and that the young Muhammad ﷺ, then about eight years old, followed the funeral procession and wept at his grandfather’s death — a detail transmitted in the Shia biographical tradition at wikishia’s entry on Abd al-Muttalib. This burial predates any Muslim eyewitness reporting in the later, more rigorous sense associated with hadith transmission; it rests on the same class of early biographical and genealogical material — akhbar and ansab literature — that preserves most pre-Islamic Quraysh history, material that later Muslim scholarship generally accepted as broadly reliable for factual detail of this kind even though it does not carry hadith-grade chains of transmission.

Further back still stand Abd Manaf ibn Qusayy, the Prophet’s ﷺ great-great-grandfather, and Hashim ibn Abd Manaf, his great-grandfather and the eponym of the Prophet’s ﷺ own clan, Banu Hashim. Both names appear in the standard modern listing of notable burials at Jannat al-Mu’alla, including in the summary table given at Wikipedia’s Jannat al-Mu’alla article, and both were commemorated, in the period before the 1925 demolition, by domed structures that Ottoman-era visitors described seeing at the site. But the strength of the underlying historical claim differs sharply between the two. Abd Manaf’s burial at al-Hajun is asserted mainly by later genealogical compilations rather than by any detailed early narrative account, and it should be read as a traditional attribution resting on the general expectation that a leading Quraysh patriarch would have been buried in his clan’s customary ground, rather than as a claim supported by an independent early report describing the burial itself.

Hashim ibn Abd Manaf’s case is more serious, because the evidence here does not merely fall short of certainty — it points in a different direction entirely. The standard historical account of Hashim’s death, preserved through Ibn Sa’d, al-Tabari, and Ibn Ishaq’s material as transmitted in later sources, holds that he died while leading a Quraysh trading caravan to Syria and was buried in Gaza, not in Makkah; the tradition even names the site of his tomb there, associated today with the Sayed al-Hashim Mosque in Gaza City (see Wikipedia’s biography of Hashim ibn Abd Manaf). Yet Ottoman-era descriptions of Jannat al-Mu’alla, and some later popular pilgrimage literature, list a dome for Hashim among the tombs of the cemetery, alongside those of Abd al-Muttalib and Abu Talib. A detailed discussion of this discrepancy, drawing on al-Tabari’s own account, argues explicitly that “the tomb to Hashim in Mecca cannot be right,” since the historical record of his death places him in Gaza at the time — see the analysis at nabataea.net’s discussion of Islamic graveyards and the qiblah. The most honest way to describe Hashim’s connection to Jannat al-Mu’alla, then, is that a commemorative dome bearing his name stood in the cemetery before 1925, honouring him as an ancestor whose actual burial, according to the stronger historical record, took place hundreds of miles away. A memorial tradition and an actual grave are not the same thing, and where popular guides conflate them, this account does not.

The Prophet’s ﷺ Children

Khadijah bore the Prophet ﷺ several children in Makkah before the Hijra, and more than one of them died in infancy or early childhood and was buried at Jannat al-Mu’alla. The best-attested of these is Qasim, the Prophet’s ﷺ firstborn son, after whom the Prophet ﷺ was known by the honorific kunyah Abu al-Qasim; Qasim died as a very young child, before his second or third birthday depending on the account, years before the start of the prophetic mission, and his burial at al-Hajun is recorded consistently across the biographical tradition (see Wikipedia’s entry on Qasim ibn Muhammad, which should not be confused with the later jurist of the same name, Qasim ibn Muhammad ibn Abi Bakr). A second infant son, sometimes named Abdullah, is also mentioned in some later sources as buried in the same ground, though the textual basis for this second burial is considerably thinner than for Qasim’s, resting on later compiled pilgrimage and travel literature rather than on the earlier biographical corpus, and this guide notes it accordingly as a less firmly attested claim rather than an established fact of equal weight to Qasim’s burial.

It is worth pausing on what these infant deaths meant within the Prophet’s ﷺ own household before any of the later theological weight of prophethood was attached retrospectively to his biography. He was, in the years these children died, an ordinary Makkan merchant grieving ordinary losses — infant mortality was common in seventh-century Arabia, and nothing in the earliest sources suggests his sons’ deaths were treated at the time as anything other than the private grief of a father. It was only later, after the start of his mission, that later verses and later companions’ testimony would frame his experience of loss — including the loss, after the Hijra, of his son Ibrahim in Madinah — as part of the broader pattern of trial that the Qur’an describes as attending every messenger’s life. Jannat al-Mu’alla holds this earlier, pre-prophetic layer of his grief, a layer that gets less attention in popular literature than the more theologically freighted losses of his Madinan period, but that is no less a part of the historical record of his life.

What Cannot Be Said With Confidence: The Missing Map

Before turning to the rest of the cemetery’s history, one point needs to be stated as plainly as possible, because it will recur throughout this guide and because popular pilgrimage material routinely obscures it: the exact location of any individual grave at Jannat al-Mu’alla is not known today, and in most cases it was probably not known with precision even before the domes were demolished in 1925. The thirteenth-century Makkan scholar al-Firuzabadi compiled a treatise, Itharat al-Hajun li-Ziyarat al-Hujun, listing some thirty-eight companions and early Muslims said to be buried in the cemetery, and the Ottoman traveller Evliya Çelebi, visiting in the seventeenth century, counted around seventy-five domed structures standing over graves at the site. These lists and counts tell us that the cemetery was densely built up with commemorative markers by the medieval and early modern periods, and that a substantial tradition of identifying particular graves had developed by then — but the modern scholarly summary of this material is blunt about its limits: as the entry on the cemetery at wikishia states, for the great majority of those named in this tradition, “the identity and exact burial site of them are unknown” today (wikishia’s Al-Ma’lat Cemetery article). A name attached to a dome in a seventeenth-century traveller’s account is not the same as an archaeologically verified grave, and readers of this guide, and visitors to the site itself, should not expect — and should not be told by anyone standing at the wall today — that a particular patch of ground can be pointed to as belonging to any specific individual, Khadijah included. The most that can honestly be said is that she, and the others named in this section, are buried somewhere within this ground; where within it, no one now living can say.

The Prophet ﷺ and This Place

A Cemetery Woven Into His Own Biography

Few sites outside Madinah appear as personally, rather than merely historically, in the Prophet’s ﷺ life as Jannat al-Mu’alla. This was not, for him, a general burial ground of the community in the way Baqi’ would become after the Hijra; for the first fifty years of his life it was the place where his family had always buried its dead, and then, in swift succession, the place where his wife, his protector, and more than one of his own children came to rest. The biographical tradition does not record a single formal “visit to al-Hajun” narrative in the way it records his nightly visits to Baqi’ after the move to Madinah, and this absence is itself informative: the practice of visiting graves as a distinct devotional act, accompanied by a specific taught supplication, is a Madinan-period development in the textual record, tied to hadith that describe the Prophet’s ﷺ changed ruling on the matter after an earlier general prohibition (discussed in full in the Hadith References section below). Before that ruling, in the Makkan period during which Khadijah, Abu Talib, and his infant sons died, there is no comparably detailed narration describing the Prophet ﷺ making structured visits to their graves at al-Hajun, only the underlying fact, well attested, that they were buried there and that their deaths marked him deeply.

What the sources do preserve, and what later generations built much of their devotional memory of the cemetery around, is the emotional weight the Prophet ﷺ is described as carrying for Khadijah specifically, for the rest of his life after her death. Aisha, his later wife, is reported in multiple narrations to have described the Prophet’s ﷺ continued praise of Khadijah, his practice of sending gifts to her friends after her death, and his visible emotion whenever she was mentioned or a sheep was slaughtered and portions sent to those who had been dear to her — narrations preserved in the major hadith collections concerning his household life, distinct from any narration specifically describing a visit to her grave at al-Hajun. That his devotion to her memory was intense and lifelong is among the best-attested emotional facts of his biography; that this devotion took the specific form of ritualised grave visitation at al-Hajun, before the general permission to visit graves had even been given, is not something the earliest sources describe in detail, and this guide does not manufacture a scene that the textual record does not supply.

Al-Hajun and the Boycott Years

The hill and the burial ground at its foot also intersect with the broader story of Quraysh’s persecution of the early Muslim community, in the years leading up to the deaths of Khadijah and Abu Talib. The historical tradition describes the boycott imposed by Quraysh on Banu Hashim and Banu al-Muttalib, confining them for roughly three years to the quarter associated with Abu Talib, a period of severe hardship that ended only shortly before Abu Talib and Khadijah both died. Al-Hajun, lying on the northern approach to the town, is mentioned in some accounts of Makkah’s topography from this period as a landmark along routes used by the persecuted clans and by travellers entering and leaving the city, though the specific claim that the boycott quarter or its access routes ran directly past the cemetery rests on general topographical reconstruction rather than on a hadith or sira narration naming al-Hajun in that context. What can be said with confidence is only the broader fact: this was hard ground for the Prophet ﷺ and his family in more than one sense, the site of his most painful bereavements arriving at the tail end of the most materially difficult years of his entire mission.

Returning to Makkah: The Conquest and the Cemetery

When the Prophet ﷺ returned to Makkah in triumph in 630 CE, at the head of the army that accepted the city’s surrender without the large-scale bloodshed Quraysh had feared, he returned to a city that held, at al-Hajun, the graves of his wife, his uncle, his grandfather, and his infant sons. Popular devotional literature sometimes describes the Prophet ﷺ making a specific visit to Khadijah’s grave during this return, drawing on the same emotional logic that appears in his visits to Baqi’ in Madinah. This guide has not been able to locate a hadith, graded and referenced to a specific collection, that describes such a visit during the conquest of Makkah in the detailed way the Baqi’ visitation narrations describe his nightly visits there. Where such a visit is asserted in popular accounts without a checkable citation, it should be treated as a plausible but textually unconfirmed tradition rather than an established historical event, in keeping with this guide’s approach throughout: emotionally resonant stories are told, but they are not dressed up as more textually secure than the sources actually make them.

A note on authenticity: the widely repeated image of the Prophet ﷺ visiting Khadijah’s grave at al-Hajun during or shortly after the conquest of Makkah, though consistent with everything known about his enduring devotion to her memory, could not be traced in this research to a specific, gradable hadith in the major collections. It should be understood as a plausible devotional inference drawn from his known character and known statements about Khadijah elsewhere, not as an authenticated report of a specific visit on a specific occasion.

Qur’anic Connections

No Verse Names This Ground

Unlike the Ka’bah, Safa and Marwah, or the Cave of Hira, Jannat al-Mu’alla is not named or described in the Qur’an, and no verse was revealed specifically about it or about the events that took place there. This is worth stating at the outset, because a guide of this kind can otherwise create the false impression that every site of Islamic historical importance carries a direct scriptural anchor. What the Qur’an does address, repeatedly and in ways directly relevant to how a visitor should understand this cemetery, are the underlying questions the site raises: the nature of death, the permissibility of remembering and praying for the deceased, and the sharp line the Qur’an draws against calling upon the dead, or upon anyone other than Allah, for help. These verses do not describe al-Hajun; they govern how a Muslim is meant to think and act when standing at any grave, including the graves at al-Hajun, and for that reason they belong in this guide.

On the Powerlessness of Those Called Upon Besides Allah

﴿ذَٰلِكُمُ اللَّهُ رَبُّكُمْ لَهُ الْمُلْكُ ۚ وَالَّذِينَ تَدْعُونَ مِن دُونِهِ مَا يَمْلِكُونَ مِن قِطْمِيرٍ * إِن تَدْعُوهُمْ لَا يَسْمَعُوا دُعَاءَكُمْ وَلَوْ سَمِعُوا مَا اسْتَجَابُوا لَكُمْ ۖ وَيَوْمَ الْقِيَامَةِ يَكْفُرُونَ بِشِرْكِكُمْ﴾

“That is Allah, your Lord — all authority belongs to Him. But those you invoke besides Him do not possess even the skin of a date stone. If you call upon them, they cannot hear your call; and even if they were to hear, they could not respond to you. And on the Day of Resurrection they will deny your association [of them with Allah].” (Surah Fatir 35:13–14)

These verses come from Surah Fatir, a Makkan surah revealed, like most of the Qur’an’s sustained arguments against the worship practices of pre-Islamic Arabia, in the period when the Prophet ﷺ was contending directly with Quraysh’s polytheism — the same social and religious environment, and very likely the same years, in which Khadijah, Abu Talib, and the Prophet’s ﷺ young sons were being buried at al-Hajun. The verses address a specific feature of that environment: the practice of calling upon intermediaries — whether idols, ancestors, or other figures believed to hold some power or nearness to the divine — to intercede or provide help. The classical exegetical tradition reads “those you invoke besides Him” primarily as a reference to the idols of Quraysh, not to deceased human beings as such, but the principle the verses establish is general: whatever is called upon besides Allah has no independent power, cannot hear a call directed to it in the sense that matters, and cannot respond even if it somehow could hear. Later scholarship addressing the etiquette of visiting graves — discussed at length elsewhere in this guide — draws directly on this passage and others like it to argue that a supplication directed to a deceased person, asking them for help, provision, or intercession in their own right, falls under exactly the warning these verses issue, regardless of whether the deceased is an idol, an ancestor, or a righteous believer buried at a place like al-Hajun.

The modern lesson many contemporary scholars draw from this passage, when applying it to cemetery etiquette, is a distinction between honouring the dead and petitioning them. A visitor may remember Khadijah’s virtues, may reflect on Abu Talib’s protection of the Prophet ﷺ at great personal cost, may feel the full weight of gratitude and love that their stories deserve — none of that is what the verse addresses. What the verse addresses is the act of turning to them, at their grave or anywhere else, as though they could independently hear and answer a request. That specific act, the tradition holds, is what these verses were revealed to close off, first with respect to the stone idols of Quraysh and, by clear extension in the later fiqh literature, with respect to any created being, living or dead. Readers can review the verses in their fuller surah context at Quran.com’s rendering of Surah Fatir, verses 13–14.

On Calling Upon Other Than Allah

﴿وَلَا تَدْعُ مِن دُونِ اللَّهِ مَا لَا يَنفَعُكَ وَلَا يَضُرُّكَ فَإِن فَعَلْتَ فَإِنَّكَ إِذًا مِّنَ الظَّالِمِينَ﴾

“And do not invoke besides Allah that which neither benefits you nor harms you, for if you did, then you would indeed be one of the wrongdoers.” (Surah Yunus 10:106)

This verse, from a Makkan surah addressing the same core theological dispute between the Prophet ﷺ and Quraysh over the nature of divine power, uses starker language than Surah Fatir: to call upon something that can neither help nor harm is not merely futile, the verse says, but places the one who does so among “the wrongdoers,” a term (al-zalimin) that recurs throughout the Qur’an in contexts of serious moral and theological failure. The classical tafsir tradition treats this verse, like the Fatir passage, as addressed in its immediate context to the practice of praying to idols, but the principle it establishes — that invoking anyone or anything other than Allah for that which only Allah can grant is itself a wrong, independent of who or what is being invoked — is the verse most commonly cited by scholars discussing the impermissibility of calling upon deceased persons at their graves. Applied to a site like Jannat al-Mu’alla, the lesson drawn is not a prohibition on visiting or remembering the dead, both of which are established as sunnah elsewhere in this guide, but a clear boundary on what a visitor may say while standing there: prayer is addressed to Allah alone, never to Khadijah, never to Abu Talib, never to any other person buried in that ground, however great their standing in Islamic history. The verse can be read in full context at Quran.com’s rendering of Surah Yunus, verse 106.

On Death as Universal and as Instruction

﴿كُلُّ نَفْسٍ ذَائِقَةُ الْمَوْتِ ۗ وَإِنَّمَا تُوَفَّوْنَ أُجُورَكُمْ يَوْمَ الْقِيَامَةِ﴾

“Every soul will taste death, and you will only be given your full compensation on the Day of Resurrection.” (Surah Ali ‘Imran 3:185)

This verse is not tied to any single narrated occasion of revelation (asbab al-nuzul) connecting it specifically to Makkah’s cemetery, but it is one of the verses most frequently invoked in the classical and contemporary literature on the purpose of visiting graves, and it belongs in this guide because it states in the most direct terms the theological premise underlying the entire practice: death is not an exception applied to some and withheld from others, but the universal condition of every created soul, and the true settlement of a life’s account is deferred to the Day of Resurrection rather than rendered at the moment of death itself. Standing before a field of graves that includes a Prophet’s ﷺ wife, his uncle, his grandfather, and his own children, and recognising that none of them — however close to him, however celebrated in the later tradition — escaped the fate the Qur’an describes as universal, is precisely the reflection the hadith on grave visitation (discussed in detail below) identify as the purpose of the practice: a physical reminder of mortality intended to reorient the visitor’s attention from the present world to the hereafter. The verse can be reviewed at Quran.com’s rendering of Surah Ali ‘Imran, verse 185.

On Trial Through Loss

﴿وَلَنَبْلُوَنَّكُمْ بِشَيْءٍ مِّنَ الْخَوْفِ وَالْجُوعِ وَنَقْصٍ مِّنَ الْأَمْوَالِ وَالْأَنفُسِ وَالثَّمَرَاتِ ۗ وَبَشِّرِ الصَّابِرِينَ﴾

“And We will surely test you with something of fear and hunger and a loss of wealth, lives, and fruits — but give good tidings to the patient.” (Surah al-Baqarah 2:155)

This verse, though revealed in Madinah in the context of the early Muslim community’s broader trials after the Hijra, speaks directly to the pattern of loss recorded at Jannat al-Mu’alla during the Prophet’s ﷺ Makkan years: the loss of Khadijah, of Abu Talib, and of more than one infant son, arriving within a period of severe material and social hardship for the small community of believers. The verse does not describe these specific losses — it postdates them, addressed as it is to the Madinan community — but the theological logic it sets out, that loss of life and provision is a form of trial to be met with patience rather than despair, is the lens through which the biographical tradition frames the Prophet’s ﷺ endurance of the Year of Sorrow. The modern lesson drawn from reading this verse alongside the history of al-Hajun is that grief and faith are not in tension in the Islamic tradition; the Prophet ﷺ wept, visibly and repeatedly, at the graves of those he loved, and the Qur’an’s promise of glad tidings to the patient was never presented, in the classical understanding, as a demand for stoic suppression of that grief, only for its expression without despair of Allah’s mercy. See the verse in context at Quran.com’s rendering of Surah al-Baqarah, verse 155.

Hadith References: The Narrations Concerning al-Hajun and the Visiting of Graves

What Is Not Found: The Absence of a Direct al-Hajun Narration

Before setting out the hadith that are properly attributed and graded in the major collections, it is necessary to state clearly what this research did not find, because the gap matters more here than in almost any other section of this guide. A great deal of popular literature about Jannat al-Mu’alla implies or states outright that specific words of the Prophet ﷺ about al-Hajun by name, spoken at the cemetery itself, are preserved in the hadith collections in the same way his words about Baqi’ are preserved in Sahih Muslim. This research did not locate such a narration. The hadith that are authentically preserved and that are most relevant to grave visitation in general — discussed below — either name Baqi’ specifically, as in the case of the Prophet’s ﷺ nightly visits described by Aisha, or address the general ruling on visiting graves without naming any particular cemetery at all. Where popular sources attribute specific words about al-Hajun to the Prophet ﷺ without a checkable collection and number, this guide treats those attributions as unverified, and in keeping with the caution urged throughout this guide, does not repeat them as established fact.

The General Ruling: Prohibition, Then Permission

The single most important hadith for understanding the entire practice of grave visitation, at al-Hajun or anywhere else, is the narration recording that the Prophet ﷺ first forbade visiting graves and later permitted it. The most reliably graded version of this narration is preserved in Sahih Muslim, on the authority of Ibn Buraydah, who narrated it from his father:

“I forbade you to visit graves, but you may now visit them, for they help in remembering the Hereafter.” (Sahih Muslim 977a, on the authority of Buraydah)

This wording is confirmed in the Sahih Muslim text available at Sunnah.com’s listing of Sahih Muslim 977, and it is authentic (sahih) by the standard of Sahih Muslim’s inclusion. A close parallel appears in Sunan Abi Dawud, again through Buraydah’s narration, graded sahih by al-Albani: “I forbade you to visit graves, but you may now visit them, for in visiting them there is a reminder,” recorded as Sunan Abi Dawud 3235 and viewable at Sunnah.com’s listing of Sunan Abi Dawud 3235. A third version of essentially the same ruling, transmitted through a different chain via Ibn Mas’ud and recorded in Ibn Majah, uses slightly different wording — “I used to forbid you to visit the graves, but now visit them, for they will draw your attention away from this world and remind you of the Hereafter” — but this specific route, recorded as Sunan Ibn Majah 1571 and viewable at Sunnah.com’s listing of Sunan Ibn Majah 1571, is explicitly graded da’if (weak) by Darussalam’s editorial grading on Sunnah.com, and the same Ibn Mas’ud route appears again in Mishkat al-Masabih as hadith 1770, likewise graded weak by al-Albani. This is a case, common enough in hadith literature generally, where a single core ruling is transmitted through multiple chains of varying strength: the ruling itself — that an earlier general prohibition on visiting graves was later lifted — is firmly established through the authentic Buraydah narrations in Muslim and Abu Dawud, even though one popular version of the same wording, transmitted through Ibn Mas’ud, does not meet the same standard and should not be cited as though it did.

The earlier prohibition itself, which this permission superseded, is understood by the classical scholars to have applied in the very early Islamic period, when the community’s understanding of monotheism was still being consolidated and the risk of grave visitation sliding into the graveside practices of pre-Islamic Arabia — including practices resembling ancestor veneration — was judged too high to permit even well-intentioned visits. Once that risk had receded and the community’s monotheistic commitments were firmly established, the Prophet ﷺ lifted the restriction and explicitly reframed grave visitation as a beneficial practice, valuable specifically for the reminder of death and the Hereafter that it provides — a purpose named in the hadith text itself, not added later by commentators.

The Supplication Taught for Entering a Graveyard

Alongside the permission to visit graves, the hadith literature preserves a specific supplication the Prophet ﷺ taught for use upon entering a cemetery. The fullest version, again on the authority of a Companion visiting Baqi’ with the Prophet ﷺ, is recorded in Sahih Muslim:

“Peace be upon the inhabitants of the abode, among the believers and the Muslims, and we shall, if Allah wills, join you. I ask Allah for well-being for us and for you.” (Sahih Muslim 975)

This text is confirmed at Sunnah.com’s listing of Sahih Muslim 975 and is authentic. A closely related narration, again through Aisha, describes the Prophet’s ﷺ regular practice at Baqi’ specifically:

“Peace be upon you, abode of a people who are believers. What you were promised will come to you, and, Allah willing, we shall join you. O Allah, grant forgiveness to the people of Baqi’ al-Gharqad.” (Sahih Muslim 974)

This narration, confirmed at Sunnah.com’s listing of Sahih Muslim 974, describes Aisha reporting that on nights when it was her turn to host him, the Prophet ﷺ would go out toward the end of the night to Baqi’ and offer this greeting and supplication. It is, properly speaking, a Madinan narration describing his practice at Baqi’, not at al-Hajun, and this guide is careful not to transplant it onto Makkah’s cemetery as though it described events there. What it does establish, and what is relevant for any Muslim visiting any Islamic cemetery including Jannat al-Mu’alla, is the specific form of words the Prophet ﷺ modelled for greeting the dead and praying for their forgiveness — a form of words scholars generally hold to be applicable, by clear analogy, to any Muslim graveyard a believer visits, al-Hajun included, even though the specific narration names Baqi’.

On the Permissibility of Visiting a Non-Muslim Relative’s Grave, and the Question of Aminah’s Grave

A narration in Sahih Muslim, on the authority of Abu Hurayrah, records the following:

“The Prophet ﷺ visited the grave of his mother, and he wept, and he made those around him weep, and he said: I sought permission from my Lord to ask forgiveness for her, but it was not granted to me, and I sought permission to visit her grave, and it was granted to me. So visit graves, for they remind you of death.” (Sahih Muslim 976)

This text is confirmed at Sunnah.com’s listing of Sahih Muslim 976 and is authentic. It is one of the most emotionally striking narrations in the entire corpus concerning grave visitation, describing the Prophet ﷺ weeping openly at his own mother’s grave and explaining, in the same breath, both the theological limit on his ability to intercede for a parent who died before his prophethood and the personal comfort he found in visiting the grave itself. It is also, however, a narration that requires geographic care. The hadith text itself does not name a location. The dominant view in the biographical tradition, as discussed earlier in this guide, places Aminah bint Wahb’s grave not at al-Hajun in Makkah but at al-Abwa’, a village on the route between Makkah and Madinah where she died while the Prophet ﷺ, then a boy of about six, was travelling with her back from a visit to his relatives in Madinah — see Wikipedia’s biography of Amina bint Wahb. A minority report transmitted by al-Tabari places her burial “in the ravine of Abu Dharr” near Makkah instead, but the early biographer Ibn Sa’d explicitly calls this report an error, and the Arabic-language secondary literature on her life likewise treats the al-Abwa’ location as the well-established (mashhur) view against a minority report favouring a Makkan burial. This guide follows that weight of evidence: Sahih Muslim 976 describes a real and authentic event, but it almost certainly describes a visit to al-Abwa’, not to Jannat al-Mu’alla, and any popular account that places this specific narration at al-Hajun should be read with that caution attached.

Prohibitions on Building and Raising Structures Over Graves

A distinct cluster of hadith, central to understanding the demolitions of 1925 discussed later in this guide, concerns not the act of visiting graves but the physical treatment of the grave itself. The clearest of these is narrated by Abu al-Hayyaj al-Asadi, who reported that Ali ibn Abi Talib said to him:

“Should I not send you on the same mission as Allah’s Messenger ﷺ sent me? Do not leave an image without obliterating it, nor a raised grave without levelling it.” (Sahih Muslim 969a)

This narration, authentic and confirmed on Sunnah.com’s listing of Sahih Muslim under this chapter, is the primary textual basis cited by those who hold that graves should not be built up, domed, or otherwise raised above the level needed for simple identification. A second narration, from Jabir ibn Abdullah, extends the same principle to the broader treatment of graves:

“The Messenger of Allah ﷺ forbade plastering graves, sitting on them, and building over them.” (Sahih Muslim 970)

This text is confirmed at Sunnah.com’s listing of Sahih Muslim 970 and is authentic. A third, closely related narration, from Thumama ibn Shufayy on the authority of Fadalah ibn Ubayd, records the Prophet’s ﷺ direct command that graves be levelled, preserved as Sahih Muslim 968 and confirmed at Sunnah.com’s listing of Sahih Muslim 968. Together, these three narrations form the textual core of the argument, developed at length in the section on the 1925 demolition below, that graves in Islamic law are meant to remain low, plain, and unadorned — a ruling that predates the Saudi state that enforced it at Jannat al-Mu’alla by well over a millennium, whatever one concludes about the wisdom or manner of that enforcement in 1925.

The Warning Against Taking Graves as Places of Worship

The most consequential hadith for the entire history of grave architecture in Islam is the narration, agreed upon by both Sahih al-Bukhari and Sahih Muslim, describing words the Prophet ﷺ spoke during his final illness. Aisha reported:

“The Messenger of Allah ﷺ said, during the illness from which he did not recover: ‘Allah cursed the Jews and the Christians, for they took the graves of their prophets as places of worship.’ She [Aisha] said: Had it not been for that, his grave would have been left exposed, but it was feared that it would be taken as a place of worship.” (Sahih al-Bukhari 435; parallel wording at Sahih al-Bukhari 1390 and Sahih al-Bukhari 3453; Sahih Muslim 529)

This narration is confirmed at Sunnah.com’s listing of Sahih al-Bukhari 435 and at Sunnah.com’s listing of Sahih al-Bukhari 3453, and it is authentic by the highest standard available in the hadith sciences, agreed upon (muttafaqun ‘alayhi) by both Bukhari and Muslim. A closely related narration, recorded in Imam Malik’s Muwatta’ and separately in Musnad Ahmad with a chain graded sahih by the hadith scholar Ahmad Shakir, has the Prophet ﷺ supplicating directly: “O Allah, do not make my grave an idol that is worshipped. Allah’s anger is severe upon a people who took the graves of their prophets as places of worship” (Muwatta’ Malik, Book of Shortening the Prayer, no. 88; Musnad Ahmad 7352). These narrations, taken together, are the single most important textual foundation for the theological argument, examined in detail in the section on the 1925 demolition below, that building structures over graves and treating them as sites of ritual devotion is not merely discouraged but actively warned against by the Prophet ﷺ himself, in terms sharp enough that Aisha understood them as the reason his own grave was deliberately kept from being made a visible, prominent monument.

On Women Visiting Graves

A distinct and genuinely disputed hadith concerns women’s visitation of graves specifically. Abu Hurayrah narrated that “the Messenger of Allah ﷺ cursed women who frequently visit graves” (zawwarat al-qubur), a narration recorded by Ahmad, Tirmidhi — who graded it hasan sahih — and Ibn Majah, and confirmed in the Mishkat al-Masabih compilation as hadith 1770, where al-Albani’s grading affirms its authenticity. A related narration through Ibn Abbas adds further detail: “The Messenger of Allah ﷺ cursed the women who visit graves, and those who take them as places of worship, and those who place lights over them,” transmitted through Abu Dawud, Tirmidhi, al-Nasa’i, and Ibn Majah, and judged authentic on the strength of its combined chains by later scholars including al-Albani. This hadith, and the scholarly disagreement over how to apply it, are addressed in full in the dedicated section on women visiting graves later in this guide; it is flagged here only to note that it is authentically transmitted, whatever conclusion different schools of thought draw from its scope and its relationship to the general permission to visit graves discussed above.

A note on authenticity: readers will notice that several of the hadith cited above carry parallel versions of differing strength — the Buraydah narrations on visiting graves are sound, while the Ibn Mas’ud route to the same ruling is weak; the core prohibition on grave structures is sound across multiple chains. This is normal and expected in hadith literature, and it is exactly the kind of distinction a careful guide is obligated to preserve rather than flatten. Where this guide cites a hadith without a weak-grading caveat, it has been checked against Sunnah.com’s listing and found to carry an authentic or at minimum a sound classical grading; where a weak narration is mentioned, it is labelled as such explicitly.

Historical Development: From Quraysh Ground to Modern Cemetery

The Rashidun Period (11–40 AH / 632–661 CE)

By the time of the Prophet’s ﷺ death in 11 AH (632 CE), the centre of gravity of the Muslim community had already shifted decisively to Madinah, and it was Jannat al-Baqi, not Jannat al-Mu’alla, that became the primary burial ground for the generation of companions who lived through the years of conquest and consolidation under the first four caliphs. Madainproject’s summary of the cemetery’s history states this transition plainly: Abu Talib and Khadijah “would be the last two major figures to be buried in Jannatul Mualla before the establishment of the Maqbarat al-Baqi in Madinah, which became the cemetery of choice later” (see Madain Project’s entry on Jannat ul-Mu’alla). This does not mean burials at al-Hajun ceased — Makkah remained an inhabited city with its own population needing its own burial ground, and the cemetery continued in continuous use for Makkans throughout the Rashidun period and beyond — but it does mean that al-Hajun’s role as the pre-eminent burial site associated with the earliest history of Islam was, from the Hijra onward, secondary to Baqi’s. The Rashidun period left no known architectural mark on the cemetery itself; the sources describing this era are silent on any structure, marker, or formal organisation of the burial ground beyond its continued use.

The Umayyad and Early Abbasid Periods (41–256 AH / 661–870 CE)

Through the Umayyad caliphate and into the early Abbasid period, Makkah remained a city of major religious importance even as the political centre of the Muslim world moved first to Damascus and then to Baghdad, and al-Hajun continued to serve as its principal cemetery. It was during this broad period that later companions and figures from the generation after the companions (the Tabi’un) came to be buried there, including, according to the notable-burials tradition preserved on Wikipedia, Asma bint Abi Bakr — the daughter of the first caliph and a companion in her own right, who lived to a great age in Makkah — and Abdullah ibn al-Zubayr, the companion’s son who led a rival caliphate centred in Makkah before his death in 73 AH (692 CE) during the siege of the city by Umayyad forces under al-Hajjaj ibn Yusuf (see Wikipedia’s Jannat al-Mu’alla article for this listing). Abdullah ibn al-Zubayr’s death and burial are historically well documented events, recorded in the major historical chronicles of the period, distinguishing his case from the more thinly sourced pre-Islamic ancestors discussed earlier in this guide. The most striking Abbasid-era burial at al-Hajun belongs to a caliph rather than a companion: Abu Ja’far al-Mansur, the second Abbasid caliph and the founder of Baghdad, died in 158 AH (775 CE) while performing Hajj, and was buried at Jannat al-Mu’alla rather than being returned to Iraq — a burial recorded in the Abbasid court chronicles and preserved in the modern summary of notable interments at the site.

The Mamluk and Ottoman Periods (Ninth–Thirteenth Centuries AH / Fifteenth–Nineteenth Centuries CE)

It is in the Mamluk and, above all, the Ottoman periods that the cemetery’s built environment took the form later travellers would describe in detail and that the Saudi state would demolish in 1925. The ninth-century-AH (fifteenth-century-CE) Makkan historian al-Fasi is noted in the modern secondary literature as having engaged with questions about the cemetery’s burials, including raising doubt about the precision of Khadijah’s al-Hajun attribution, evidence that scholarly attention to the cemetery’s history and to the reliability of its burial traditions was already active by this period (see wikishia’s Al-Ma’lat Cemetery article). The thirteenth-century-AH scholar al-Firuzabadi’s treatise Itharat al-Hajun li-Ziyarat al-Hujun, compiled to guide pilgrims visiting the cemetery, named some thirty-eight companions and early Muslims understood in his time to be buried there — a text that itself testifies to a flourishing devotional practice of ziyarah, cemetery visitation, organised around named individual graves by this period, whatever uncertainty attaches, in retrospect, to some of those individual identifications.

Ottoman rule over the Hijaz, beginning in the early tenth century AH (sixteenth century CE) and continuing until the First World War, saw the most extensive building campaign the cemetery is known to have experienced. Madainproject’s historical description states that the domes and structures visible at the site before the 1925 demolition were “mostly built or rebuilt during the Ottoman period” (Madain Project’s entry on Jannat ul-Mu’alla), a pattern consistent with the well-documented Ottoman practice of monumentalising the graves of prophets, companions, and scholars across the empire, from Istanbul to Damascus to the Hijaz. The seventeenth-century Ottoman traveller Evliya Çelebi, whose ten-volume travelogue the Seyahatname remains one of the richest primary sources for the physical appearance of Ottoman-era Islamic sites, counted approximately seventy-five domed tombs standing in the cemetery during his visit, a figure repeated across the modern secondary literature on the site (see Wikipedia’s Jannat al-Mu’alla article). By the early twentieth century, on the eve of the Saudi conquest of the Hijaz, photographs and traveller accounts describe a cemetery dominated visually by these domes rather than by open ground — the opposite of the plain, featureless field a visitor encounters today.

The Saudi Period and the 1925 Demolition (1343–1345 AH / 1924–1926 CE)

The Hijaz fell to the forces of Abd al-Aziz ibn Saud in stages through 1924 and 1925, with Makkah itself coming under Saudi control in October 1924 and the wider consolidation of the region continuing into the following year. Within this same period, the newly dominant Saudi religious and political authorities carried out the demolition of the domed tombs at Jannat al-Mu’alla, an event Madain Project’s summary dates to 1925, describing it as occurring “the same year that the Jannat al-Baqi’ cemetery in Medina was demolished by Saudi King Ibn Saud,” while a companion Madain Project page on the broader demolition campaign gives a specific date of 21 April 1926 CE for the wider “1925/1926 demolitions” event, corresponding to 8 Shawwal in the Islamic calendar (see Madain Project’s Jannat ul-Mu’alla entry and Madain Project’s entry on the 1926 demolitions). Sources vary in whether they treat the Makkah and Madinah demolitions as a single coordinated event or as two closely spaced episodes within the same broader campaign, and this guide follows the more detailed treatment given to the subject in the companion account of Jannat al-Baqi elsewhere in this collection, which fixes the Madinah demolition specifically to 8 Shawwal 1344 AH (21 April 1926 CE); readers are directed to that fuller discussion of the dating and its sources for the Madinah side of the story. What is consistent across every source consulted for this guide is the substance of the event at Makkah: the domed structures over the cemetery’s most venerated graves were torn down within this same general period, on the authority of the emerging Saudi state and its religious establishment, and the theological reasoning and the reactions to it — treated in full in the dedicated section below — were the same reasoning and the same reactions that attended the demolition at Baqi’.

Madain Project’s page on the demolitions preserves a description, evidently drawn from a photograph or detailed traveller’s account of the cemetery immediately before its destruction, of exactly which domes stood where: “the largest dome to the left belongs to the tomb of Khadijah,” a “relatively smaller dome” is identified as belonging to “the tomb of Aminah bint Wahab,” and “twin domes in the background” are identified with the tombs of Abu Talib, Abd Manaf, Hashim ibn Abd Manaf, Abd al-Muttalib, and Qasim ibn Muhammad (Madain Project’s entry on the 1926 demolitions). This description is valuable because it documents, in concrete terms, exactly what the cemetery looked like on the eve of its transformation — a landscape of substantial domed architecture, not the plain field it is today — while also illustrating, in its inclusion of a dome for Aminah bint Wahb and one for Hashim ibn Abd Manaf, precisely the kind of popular attribution this guide has already flagged as historically doubtful: a physical structure clearly existed commemorating both figures at this Makkan site, whatever the stronger historical record says about where they were actually buried. A dome, in other words, records what a community believed and venerated; it does not, on its own, settle a historical question about an actual burial location centuries earlier.

After the Demolition: The Modern Period

Since 1925, Jannat al-Mu’alla has remained an active cemetery for the population of Makkah without any of its pre-modern architectural features restored. Modern development around the site has been substantial: Al-Hujoon Street, a major road, now runs through the area, dividing the cemetery into two sections joined by an underground passage beneath a flyover, and the surrounding district has been absorbed into the dense modern urban fabric of the city, a considerable change from the more open approach to the site that would have existed in earlier centuries. The cemetery itself, however, has been maintained specifically in its plain, unbuilt form; no new domes or monumental markers have been erected over graves there in the century since 1925, consistent with the religious policy that produced the original demolition. It continues to receive burials from Makkah’s resident population today, and pilgrims from across the Muslim world visit the site, standing at its boundary wall to pay their respects to the general company of the dead it holds, in a form the historical record shows to be a marked departure from how the same site was experienced by a visitor in, say, the eighteenth century.

A Comparative Note: Makkah’s Cemetery Versus Madinah’s

It is worth pausing to compare, briefly, the historical trajectories of Jannat al-Mu’alla and its sister cemetery in Madinah, Jannat al-Baqi, because the comparison sharpens what is distinctive about Makkah’s burial ground. Both cemeteries began as unremarkable tracts of ground before Islam gave them their significance, or, in al-Hajun’s case, before Islam intensified a significance the ground already carried for the Quraysh. Both accumulated substantial architectural commemoration under later dynasties, especially the Ottomans. Both were stripped of that commemoration within roughly the same eighteen-month window in the mid-1920s, on the same religious authority and the same textual reasoning. Yet Baqi’, by virtue of Madinah’s status as the seat of the first Islamic polity and the burial place of a far larger proportion of the Prophet’s ﷺ companions, attracted a depth of classical scholarly documentation — above all through al-Samhudi’s exhaustive fifteenth-century history — that al-Hajun never received in comparable measure. This is not a claim that Makkah’s cemetery matters less; the Prophet’s ﷺ own wife and closest family are buried there, a claim Baqi’ cannot make in quite the same way. It is only to say that the surviving documentary record is thinner, and a guide that is honest about its sources has to say so rather than borrowing false specificity from the richer literature that exists about Madinah’s cemetery and applying it, by unwarranted extension, to Makkah’s.

Architecture

What Stood Before 1925

The Ottoman-era cemetery that Evliya Çelebi described and that survived into early twentieth-century photographs was, in architectural terms, a dense field of small domed mausolea (locally, qubab, singular qubbah), typically square or polygonal chambers of stone or brick construction topped with a rounded dome, a building type used across the Ottoman world for the tombs of prophets, saints, scholars, and notable figures. Madain Project’s description of the pre-demolition site names specific domes by the figures they commemorated — the largest dedicated to Khadijah, a smaller one to Aminah bint Wahb, and a set of twin domes shared among Abu Talib, Abd Manaf, Hashim, Abd al-Muttalib, and Qasim ibn Muhammad (Madain Project’s entry on the 1926 demolitions) — a layout that suggests a hierarchy of commemoration, with the most historically significant or most venerated figures given individual structures and others sharing space within a single building. This pattern parallels what is separately documented for Jannat al-Baqi in Madinah, where the wives of the Prophet ﷺ and members of his family were likewise commemorated with a mix of individual and shared domed structures before the analogous demolition there.

What Stands Today

The architecture of the present-day cemetery is, by design, an architecture of absence. Madain Project’s description of the current site is spare: “a long white wall restricts the site,” and within it, “rocks mark the places of the dead,” rocks that “have no identification” (Madain Project’s entry on Jannat ul-Mu’alla). There is no dome, no inscribed stone, no map or directory identifying whose remains lie where. This absence of architecture is itself the most significant architectural fact about the site: it is a direct, intentional, century-old expression of the theological position — examined fully in the section on the 1925 demolition below — that graves should be low, plain, and unbuilt, a position enforced here with such consistency that a visitor today cannot distinguish, by sight alone, the grave of Khadijah from the grave of any anonymous Makkan resident buried last year. The cemetery’s boundary wall itself, along with the modern road infrastructure that now divides the site, constitute essentially the entirety of its built environment; everything else is open ground.

Archaeological Findings

No published archaeological excavation, survey, or systematic study of Jannat al-Mu’alla was located in the research for this guide. This is consistent with the broader pattern across the holy sites of Makkah and Madinah, where active religious use, the ongoing sanctity of the ground, and Saudi Arabia’s general reluctance to permit invasive archaeological work at sites of continuing devotional significance have combined to leave much of the physical history of these locations undocumented by modern archaeological method. What evidence exists for the cemetery’s historical appearance comes instead from textual sources — traveller accounts such as Evliya Çelebi’s, pilgrimage guides such as al-Firuzabadi’s treatise, and photographic documentation from the decades immediately before the 1925 demolition, some of which is preserved in the descriptions used by modern reference sites such as Madain Project. No inscriptions, tomb markers, or grave goods from the cemetery’s pre-Islamic or early Islamic layers have been published in the academic literature available to this research. Readers should understand that claims occasionally made in popular sources about specific archaeological confirmation of particular graves at Jannat al-Mu’alla — including Khadijah’s — are not supported by any published excavation report identified in this research, and should be treated as unverified until such documentation is produced.

Stories of the Companions

A Cemetery of Family Before It Was a Cemetery of Companions

It is important, in telling the stories connected to Jannat al-Mu’alla, to be honest about a distinction that popular accounts often blur: most of the people most closely associated with this cemetery in the Prophet’s ﷺ own household — Khadijah, Abu Talib, Abd al-Muttalib, Qasim — either died before the start of his prophetic mission or, in Abu Talib’s case, died without ever formally embracing Islam, a fact the classical biographical and hadith literature does not conceal and this guide will not conceal either. Abu Talib protected the Prophet ﷺ for decades, at real cost to his own standing among Quraysh, and the tradition holds him in the deepest respect and gratitude for that protection; it also records, in narrations concerning the circumstances of his death, that despite the Prophet’s ﷺ presence and appeal at his deathbed, he did not pronounce the declaration of faith before he died, a fact discussed candidly in the classical sira literature rather than a later polemical invention. His grave lies at al-Hajun, but he was not, in the technical sense the later tradition uses, a companion (sahabi) of the Prophet ﷺ, since that term is reserved for those who believed in him and met him as a Muslim. This is not a diminishment of Abu Talib’s historical role; it is simply an accuracy this guide owes its reader, in the same spirit that requires care about which graves are firmly located and which are traditional attribution.

Khadijah bint Khuwaylid: The First to Believe

Khadijah, by contrast, holds a place in the tradition that no other figure buried at al-Hajun shares: she is remembered as the first human being to believe in Muhammad’s ﷺ prophethood, immediately upon his return from the Cave of Hira in a state of fear and uncertainty after the first revelation, and she is remembered as the person whose material wealth, social standing, and personal steadiness sustained him through the most dangerous years of his early mission. The tradition describes her comforting him on that first night, telling him that Allah would not disgrace him because of his good character, his care for his relatives, his honesty, and his generosity to the poor — an account recorded across the major biographical sources on his life. Her death in the Year of Sorrow, alongside Abu Talib’s, marked the beginning of the hardest period the Prophet ﷺ faced before the Hijra, and the tradition’s consistent record of his continued devotion to her memory for the rest of his life — recorded through Aisha’s later testimony about his emotion whenever she was mentioned — reflects the unique weight her twenty-five years of marriage and support carried in his biography. She is buried at al-Hajun; where within that ground, as this guide has stressed throughout, no one can say with precision.

Abd al-Muttalib and the Boy Who Would Become the Prophet ﷺ

Abd al-Muttalib, too, predates the mission by decades, dying when his grandson was a child of about eight. His significance to the story of al-Hajun lies less in any independent religious status — he too died before Islam’s message reached Makkah — and more in the human detail the tradition preserves of the young Muhammad ﷺ following his grandfather’s funeral procession to the burial ground and weeping at his loss, a detail recorded in the Shia biographical tradition and consistent with the broader pattern of the Prophet’s ﷺ early life as a child repeatedly bereaved of his closest guardians: his father Abdullah before his birth or in his infancy depending on the account, his mother Aminah at around six years of age, and then his grandfather at eight, before finally being raised to adulthood under the protection of his uncle Abu Talib. Al-Hajun, in this reading, is not only the resting place of adults whose stories are told in the history books; it is also the site connected to some of the earliest and least remarked-upon losses of a boy who had not yet begun to be seen by anyone, including himself, as a future prophet.

Abdullah ibn al-Zubayr: A Later Companion’s Son and the Second Fitna

Among the burials at al-Hajun from a considerably later period, and one resting on much firmer historical documentation than the pre-Islamic ancestors discussed above, is Abdullah ibn al-Zubayr, son of the companion al-Zubayr ibn al-Awwam and Asma bint Abi Bakr, and himself widely regarded in the historical tradition as having been the first child born to the Muhajirun after the Hijra. Abdullah grew to become a prominent figure of the generation after the Prophet’s ﷺ death, and during the period of civil conflict known as the Second Fitna he was acclaimed caliph by a substantial part of the Muslim world in opposition to the Umayyad dynasty based in Damascus, ruling in practice from Makkah for several years. His rule ended in 73 AH (692 CE) when Umayyad forces under the general al-Hajjaj ibn Yusuf besieged Makkah — a siege during which, according to the historical chronicles, catapults were used against the city and the Ka’bah itself was damaged — and Abdullah was killed in the fighting. His mother Asma, by then in extreme old age and, according to the tradition, blind, is reported to have gone to see her son’s body after his death and to have urged him, before the siege’s end, to die honourably rather than surrender; she is recorded as having died herself only a short time after him, and both mother and son are listed among the notable interments at Jannat al-Mu’alla. Their burials there, unlike the pre-Islamic ancestors’ graves, fall within a period covered by detailed and broadly reliable Islamic historical chronicles, giving this particular pair of graves a stronger evidentiary basis than most of the older attributions in the cemetery, even though, as with every other grave at al-Hajun, their precise location within the ground is unknown today.

What the Sources Do Not Give Us

Beyond Abdullah ibn al-Zubayr and Asma bint Abi Bakr, al-Firuzabadi’s thirteenth-century treatise lists some thirty-eight companions and early Muslims understood in his time to be buried at the cemetery, a number that testifies to centuries of continuous use by the Makkan Muslim community and to a once-active tradition of identifying and visiting particular graves. This guide has deliberately not attempted to reproduce or dramatise that full list, for the same reason it has been cautious throughout: a name on a medieval pilgrimage guide’s list is evidence of what later devotional tradition believed, not proof, independently verifiable today, of an actual grave location, and the modern scholarly summary of this material is explicit that for most of these names, “the identity and exact burial site of them are unknown” (wikishia’s Al-Ma’lat Cemetery article). A responsible account of the companions connected to this cemetery says what can be said about the best-attested cases, and declines to manufacture certainty about the rest merely because a name appears on an old list.

Stories of Great Islamic Scholars

The Founders of the Legal Schools and Makkah

None of the four founding imams of the major Sunni legal schools — Abu Hanifah, Malik ibn Anas, al-Shafi’i, or Ahmad ibn Hanbal — is buried at Jannat al-Mu’alla, and this guide will not claim otherwise. Each of them, however, has a documented connection to Makkah through the obligation and practice of Hajj, and their engagement with the city inevitably touched on questions relevant to this cemetery’s later history, even if none of them wrote extensively and specifically about al-Hajun by name in the sources reviewed for this guide. Imam Malik ibn Anas, who spent his entire life in Madinah and built his legal methodology substantially on the practice of that city’s scholarly community, is recorded, through his student’s transmission in the Muwatta’, as the source of the hadith in which the Prophet ﷺ supplicated, “O Allah, do not make my grave an idol that is worshipped” — a narration central to this guide’s discussion of grave architecture, and one that reflects Malik’s broader concern, shared by the Madinan scholarly tradition he represented, with guarding the boundary between honouring the Prophet’s ﷺ memory and slipping into practices resembling the veneration Allah’s messengers had always warned against.

Al-Shafi’i, who studied under Malik in Madinah before developing his own independent legal school, and Ahmad ibn Hanbal, who studied under al-Shafi’i in turn, both performed Hajj and would have passed near or visited Jannat al-Mu’alla in the course of their pilgrimages to Makkah, though no specific narration recording either scholar’s personal reflections on the cemetery was located in this research. Ahmad ibn Hanbal’s legal and theological positions, transmitted and developed by later scholars in the Hanbali school, form much of the doctrinal basis for the stricter position on grave structures that would eventually be enforced at the cemetery in 1925, discussed at length below — a genealogy of ideas running from Ahmad’s own writings through later Hanbali scholarship to Ibn Taymiyyah and, eventually, to Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, though it would be a mistake to attribute the specific twentieth-century demolition decision directly to Ahmad ibn Hanbal himself, who lived and died a millennium before it occurred.

Ibn Taymiyyah and the Doctrine Behind the Demolition

Of all the classical scholars whose thought bears on the later history of Jannat al-Mu’alla, none is more directly relevant than Ibn Taymiyyah, the Hanbali jurist and theologian of the seventh and eighth centuries AH (thirteenth and fourteenth centuries CE), whose writings on the visitation of graves and shrines provided much of the intellectual foundation for the reform movement that would, some six centuries after his death, carry out the demolitions of 1925 and 1926. Ibn Taymiyyah performed Hajj to Makkah in 691 AH (1293 CE), and the experience is recorded as having motivated him to compile a treatise on the rites of Hajj, Manasik al-Hajj, in which he argued forcefully against practices of grave visitation that he considered to have exceeded their proper bounds, including journeys undertaken specifically to visit graves for the sake of seeking blessing from them — a position summarised in the modern scholarly overview of his views at Wikipedia’s article on the views of Ibn Taymiyya. Ibn Taymiyyah held that visiting the tombs of prophets and righteous people with the intention of seeking their intercession or blessing, rather than simply for the sake of remembering death and praying for the deceased in the manner the Prophet ﷺ had taught, constituted a blameworthy innovation and, in its more extreme forms, a practice bordering on or constituting shirk. His position was controversial in his own lifetime — he faced repeated confrontation with contemporary scholars and rulers over these and related theological positions, and he died in imprisonment in Damascus in 728 AH (1328 CE), a circumstance later writers have connected, though with varying degrees of direct evidence, to the controversy surrounding his views on grave visitation and shrine devotion. His writings on this subject were not acted upon at the scale of an actual demolition campaign during his own lifetime or for centuries afterward; that step waited for the alliance, four centuries later, between the reformist preacher Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab and the political power of the House of Saud, discussed in the section on the 1925 demolition below.

Ibn Kathir, al-Nawawi, and Ibn Hajar: The Hadith Scholars Behind the Rulings

The hadith rulings that stand behind both the permission to visit graves and the prohibition on building structures over them — set out in full in the Hadith References section above — were transmitted, compiled, and explained by generations of hadith scholars whose work this guide relies on for its own grading of every narration cited. Imam al-Nawawi, the seventh-century-AH (thirteenth-century-CE) Shafi’i jurist and hadith commentator whose commentary on Sahih Muslim remains one of the standard references for understanding that collection, addressed the ruling on visiting graves directly in his explanatory work, affirming the scholarly near-consensus, reported through Ibn Abd al-Barr, that visiting graves is recommended for men by the overwhelming weight of the textual evidence, while treating the specific question of women’s visitation as a matter of continuing juristic disagreement — a treatment that anticipates, by many centuries, the section on women visiting graves later in this guide. Ibn Kathir, the eighth-century-AH (fourteenth-century-CE) historian and Qur’an commentator, and Ibn Hajar al-‘Asqalani, the ninth-century-AH (fifteenth-century-CE) hadith master whose commentary on Sahih al-Bukhari, Fath al-Bari, remains the single most authoritative classical commentary on that collection, both engaged extensively with the hadith concerning grave visitation and the prohibition on grave structures in their respective works, providing the detailed chain analysis and contextual explanation that later scholars, including the modern muhaddithun whose gradings this guide has followed on Sunnah.com, have built upon. None of these three scholars is reported in the sources consulted for this guide to have written specifically and at length about Jannat al-Mu’alla by name, as opposed to writing about the general rulings on grave visitation and grave architecture that this guide has applied, by extension, to that specific site.

Al-Samhudi and the Comparative Case of Baqi’

Al-Samhudi, the Madinan historian of the ninth and tenth centuries AH (fifteenth and sixteenth centuries CE) whose Wafa’ al-Wafa bi-Akhbar Dar al-Mustafa remains the definitive classical history of Madinah and its sacred sites, wrote in extraordinary detail about Jannat al-Baqi, documenting its early burials, its physical development, and the disputes over the identity of specific graves within it — a level of documentary attention that Makkah’s cemetery did not receive from any scholar of comparable stature and thoroughness in the sources available to this research. This asymmetry is itself informative: it reflects Madinah’s status, after the Hijra, as the primary seat of the early Muslim community’s religious and scholarly life, with the result that its cemetery attracted the kind of sustained historical documentation that al-Hajun, despite its equal or greater personal significance to the Prophet’s ﷺ own biography, generally did not. Where a comparably detailed account of al-Hajun’s individual graves does exist, it is al-Firuzabadi’s more modest thirteenth-century pilgrimage guide, discussed above, rather than a work of al-Samhudi’s scholarly depth — one of several reasons, alongside the more thorough demolition and the smaller surviving textual record, that so much less can be said with confidence about individual graves at Jannat al-Mu’alla than about individual graves at Jannat al-Baqi.

The 1925 Demolition: An Honest Account

What Happened

In the years immediately following the Saudi conquest of Makkah in October 1924, the domed tombs and mausoleum structures that had accumulated at Jannat al-Mu’alla over the preceding centuries — described in the preceding section on Historical Development and Architecture — were torn down on the authority of the new Saudi state and its allied religious establishment. Sources place this event, along with the closely related demolition of the shrine structures at Jannat al-Baqi in Madinah, within the period 1925–1926, with Madain Project’s account of the Makkah cemetery specifically stating that “the cemetery was demolished in 1925” and that this was “the same year that the Jannat al-Baqi’ cemetery in Medina was demolished” (Madain Project’s entry on Jannat ul-Mu’alla), while other sources, including a companion page on the same reference site, place the wider demolition campaign specifically on 21 April 1926 CE, corresponding to 8 Shawwal 1344 AH (Madain Project’s entry on the 1926 demolitions). This guide follows the more extensively documented dating given in its companion account of Jannat al-Baqi, which fixes the Madinah demolition to 8 Shawwal 1344 AH (21 April 1926 CE) after weighing multiple sources on that specific question; readers seeking the fuller discussion of the dating evidence are directed to that companion guide’s treatment of the subject. What matters for the history of Makkah’s cemetery is not the exact calendar date so much as the substance and the timing relative to the wider campaign: the structures at al-Hajun were removed within the same short window, under the same authority, and for the same stated reasons as those at Baqi’.

The structures removed included, according to the descriptive record preserved by Madain Project, the largest dome in the cemetery, which stood over the tomb of Khadijah; a smaller dome associated with the tomb of Aminah bint Wahb; and a set of twin domes shared among the tombs of Abu Talib, Abd Manaf, Hashim ibn Abd Manaf, Abd al-Muttalib, and Qasim ibn Muhammad (Madain Project’s entry on the 1926 demolitions). Madain Project’s account states explicitly that “although the tombs and mausoleums were demolished, no graves were destroyed during the demolition process” — a claim that reflects the position, consistently maintained by the Saudi religious authorities who ordered the demolitions and by scholars sympathetic to that position, that the target of the campaign was the built structure standing over a grave, not the grave itself or the remains within it. Other accounts of the broader campaign, including some cited by critics of the demolitions, use more totalising language describing the destruction, and this guide notes that difference in framing honestly rather than adopting either side’s preferred vocabulary as the neutral description.

The Theological Argument For the Demolition

The demolition was carried out on the authority of the Saudi state in alliance with the religious movement associated with Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, an eighteenth-century reformist scholar whose theological programme, built substantially on the earlier writings of Ibn Taymiyyah discussed in the preceding section, held that the veneration of graves and the structures built over them represented one of the gravest threats to Islamic monotheism (tawhid) in the contemporary Muslim world. The textual foundation for this position rests on the hadith set out in full in the Hadith References section above, and it is worth restating the core texts here because they are the specific evidence the demolition’s defenders point to. Ali ibn Abi Talib is reported to have instructed a follower: “Do not leave an image without obliterating it, or a high grave without levelling it” (Sahih Muslim 969a, confirmed at Sunnah.com’s listing of Sahih Muslim 969a). The Prophet ﷺ is reported to have “forbidden plastering graves, sitting on them, and building over them” (Sahih Muslim 970, confirmed at Sunnah.com’s listing of Sahih Muslim 970). And in his final illness, according to Aisha’s widely transmitted and agreed-upon report, the Prophet ﷺ said, “Allah cursed the Jews and the Christians, for they took the graves of their prophets as places of worship,” a statement Aisha herself explained as the reason his own grave was deliberately kept from being made a visible, elevated monument (Sahih al-Bukhari 435 and Sahih Muslim 529, confirmed at Sunnah.com’s listing of Sahih al-Bukhari 435).

From these texts, the position associated with Ibn Abd al-Wahhab and the Saudi religious establishment draws a chain of reasoning: a raised, domed, or otherwise monumentalised grave draws visitors to treat it with a degree of reverence that easily slides into practices — praying at the grave, seeking the intercession of its occupant, circumambulating it, touching or kissing it for blessing — that the Qur’an’s warnings against calling upon anyone besides Allah (discussed in the Qur’anic Connections section above, citing Surah Fatir 35:13–14 and Surah Yunus 10:106) and the Prophet’s ﷺ own explicit warnings against turning graves into places of worship were revealed and spoken specifically to prevent. On this reasoning, removing the structure is not an act of disrespect toward the deceased but a protective measure, closing off a means (sadd al-dhari’ah, a recognised principle in Islamic legal reasoning that permits restricting an otherwise neutral act when it reliably leads to a prohibited outcome) by which even well-intentioned veneration of righteous people risks curdling into the same error the Qur’an condemns in the Jews and Christians who, in the Prophet’s ﷺ own words, took the graves of their prophets as places of worship. Qadi Abdullah ibn Bulayhid, a religious authority associated with the Saudi state in this period, is recorded in some historical accounts as having provided the specific religious ruling authorising the demolition at Baqi’, a role presumed by extension, though not separately documented with the same specificity in the sources reviewed for this guide, to have applied to the parallel decision at Jannat al-Mu’alla as well.

The Position of Those Who Objected — Then and Now

The demolitions provoked objection at the time and continue to provoke objection today, and this guide sets out that objection with the same seriousness it has given the case for the demolition, rather than treating one side as self-evidently correct. Madain Project’s own account of the Makkah demolition notes that it occurred “despite protests from the international Islamic community” (Madain Project’s entry on Jannat ul-Mu’alla), and the historical record shows that objections came from a wide range of Sunni Muslims — including scholars and populations with strong devotional traditions of visiting the graves of prophets, companions, and saints, traditions especially prominent historically in the Ottoman world, South Asia, and North Africa — as well as, with particular intensity and continuing organisation, from Shia Muslims, for whom several of the individuals commemorated at both Baqi’ and, to a lesser extent, al-Hajun hold a distinctive religious significance tied to the standing of the Prophet’s ﷺ family (Ahl al-Bayt).

Shia religious and cultural organisations continue to mark 8 Shawwal annually as “Yaum-e Gham,” the Day of Sorrow, mourning the demolitions at both cemeteries as a unified event of grief. Organisations including the Africa Federation, a Shia community body, have published commemorative material describing the destruction in unambiguous terms, characterising it as an act carried out under what they describe as “the Saudi Wahhabi regime” and treating it as a continuing grievance rather than a closed historical episode (see the Africa Federation’s commemorative statement on the demolition). Other commentary from within this broader tradition of objection frames the destruction not as a legitimate application of hadith-based reasoning but as, in the words of one such account, “not theological reform but a painful erasure of Islamic historical memory,” and identifies the ideological movement associated with Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab as the driving force behind a campaign its critics regard as having gone well beyond what the underlying hadith evidence requires (see the discussion at New Age Islam’s commentary on the demolition of Khadijah’s tomb). Some academic analysis of the episode has argued that the demolitions carried political as well as narrowly religious motivations — asserting the dominance of the newly ascendant Najdi religious and political establishment over the older urban elites of the Hijaz, and, in the particular case of Baqi’, sending a pointed message regarding the veneration of Ahl al-Bayt burial sites associated with Shia devotional practice — an interpretation that treats the demolition as inseparable from the broader consolidation of Saudi state authority over the Hijaz in this period, rather than as a purely doctrinal matter.

Those who object to the demolitions do not, for the most part, dispute the authenticity of the hadith cited in their defence; the dispute lies instead in how those hadith should be applied. Critics of the demolition frequently argue that the prohibition on “building over graves” recorded in Sahih Muslim 970 was intended to prevent the specific abuses the hadith on Jews and Christians describes — turning a grave into an object and place of worship in the fullest sense, with prostration and ritual devotion directed at it — and that a modest, unobtrusive dome marking a grave’s location for identification and remembrance, without any accompanying practice of worship at the site, does not fall under the same prohibition. On this reading, defended historically by significant strands of Sunni scholarship, especially within traditions more closely tied to Sufi devotional practice, honouring a grave with a marker is a matter of preserving communal memory and expressing respect (ta’zim) for a righteous person, categorically distinct from directing worship (ibadah) to that person, and the wholesale removal of every such marker, rather than a more targeted correction of specific worship practices where they occurred, is criticised as an overcorrection that destroyed historical memory without a proportionate religious justification.

Letting the Reader Judge

Both positions set out above rest on real textual evidence and real religious reasoning, developed and defended by serious scholars across many centuries, and both continue to be held today by large communities of practising Muslims who pray toward the same qiblah and trace their religious authority to the same Prophet ﷺ. This guide has tried to set out the theological argument for the demolition with the same rigour and the same sourcing it has given the position of those who object to it, because the alternative — presenting one side as simple religious fidelity and the other as simple sentimentality, or vice versa — would misrepresent a genuine and long-running dispute within Islamic scholarship as something simpler and more settled than it actually is. What is certain is only the historical fact: the domes that once stood over Khadijah’s grave and the graves of the Prophet’s ﷺ ancestors and children at Jannat al-Mu’alla were pulled down in the mid-1920s, they have not been rebuilt in the century since, and the wound this event left in the Muslim world’s collective memory, for those who count it as a wound, has not closed.

The Etiquette and the Errors: What Is Legitimate at a Grave

Du’a For the Dead: The Established Practice

The single most firmly established form of devotion permitted at a grave, including at Jannat al-Mu’alla, is du’a made on behalf of the deceased — asking Allah to forgive them, show them mercy, and grant them ease in the grave and success in the hereafter. This practice rests directly on the hadith already discussed in this guide: the specific supplication the Prophet ﷺ taught for entering a graveyard, “Peace be upon the inhabitants of the abode, among the believers and the Muslims… I ask Allah for well-being for us and for you” (Sahih Muslim 975, confirmed at Sunnah.com’s listing of Sahih Muslim 975), and his own regular practice at Baqi’ of praying, “O Allah, grant forgiveness to the people of Baqi’ al-Gharqad” (Sahih Muslim 974, confirmed at Sunnah.com’s listing of Sahih Muslim 974). Classical scholarship treats this practice as recommended by near-consensus for men, a position the medieval scholar Ibn Abd al-Barr reported as the settled view of the majority of jurists, on the strength of exactly this kind of textual evidence combined with the general permission established in the Buraydah narrations discussed in the Hadith References section. A visitor to Jannat al-Mu’alla who greets the dead with this or a similar supplication, and asks Allah’s forgiveness for Khadijah, for the Prophet’s ﷺ family, and for the general company of Muslims buried there, is doing precisely what the hadith literature describes the Prophet ﷺ himself as having done and taught.

Du’a To the Dead: The Line That Should Not Be Crossed

The clearest and most consequential distinction in this section of the guide is the one between asking Allah for the deceased — legitimate — and asking the deceased for something directly, as though they could hear the request and grant it independently — not legitimate, and regarded by mainstream Islamic scholarship as either shirk outright or a serious and dangerous means to it, depending on the precise form and intention involved. This distinction rests on the Qur’anic material discussed in the Qur’anic Connections section: the warning that “those you invoke besides Him do not possess even the skin of a date stone… if you call upon them, they cannot hear your call” (Surah Fatir 35:13–14, viewable at Quran.com’s rendering of Surah Fatir 13–14), and the direct command, “do not invoke besides Allah that which neither benefits you nor harms you, for if you did, then you would indeed be one of the wrongdoers” (Surah Yunus 10:106, viewable at Quran.com’s rendering of Surah Yunus 106). A visitor at Jannat al-Mu’alla who addresses Khadijah directly — asking her, rather than Allah, for provision, healing, or intercession — has, on this near-universal mainstream understanding, crossed from legitimate remembrance into an act the Qur’an and hadith warn against in the strongest terms available in the Islamic textual tradition. This is not a matter of etiquette or good manners; it is treated by the overwhelming majority of Sunni and Shia jurists alike as a matter of the basic content of Islamic monotheism, whatever disagreement exists between different schools on the narrower, related questions discussed below.

Tawaf and Circumambulation of Graves

Circumambulation, tawaf, is an act of worship the Islamic tradition reserves exclusively for the Ka’bah in Makkah; performing tawaf around any other structure, including a grave, is addressed directly in the fatwa literature of scholars such as Ibn Baz, the twentieth-century Saudi Grand Mufti, who held that circling a grave with the intention of drawing near to Allah through that act, while believing such an act permissible, constitutes a blameworthy innovation (bid’ah) requiring the person to repent and cease, while circling a grave specifically with the intention of seeking the deceased’s help or protection — treating the grave, in effect, as the Ka’bah is treated — constitutes major shirk on this view. This ruling reflects the same underlying logic discussed throughout this section: a physical act of devotion that the Prophet ﷺ specified for one location and one purpose cannot be transplanted to a grave without altering its religious meaning in a way the tradition treats as a serious transgression, whatever the visitor’s personal intention.

Touching, Kissing, and Seeking Blessing (Tabarruk)

The practice of touching or kissing a grave in the hope of obtaining blessing (tabarruk) from proximity to a righteous person’s remains is treated with more variation across the Islamic scholarly tradition than the clearer prohibitions discussed above. The dominant position among Hanbali and Salafi-oriented scholarship, including the tradition that shaped the Saudi religious establishment responsible for the 1925 demolition, holds that seeking blessing through physical contact with a grave has no basis in the practice of the Prophet ﷺ or his companions and constitutes an innovation to be avoided regardless of the visitor’s sincerity, precisely because it risks normalising exactly the graduated slide toward veneration and eventual worship that the hadith on building over graves are understood to guard against. Historically, however, popular devotional practice in various parts of the Muslim world — including regions with strong Sufi traditions across South Asia, North Africa, and the Ottoman lands that once governed the Hijaz itself — has included touching or kissing the graves and shrine structures of prophets, saints, and scholars as an established expression of reverence, a practice that developed and persisted within communities operating under Shafi’i, Maliki, and Hanafi legal traditions even though formal fiqh literature within those same schools does not uniformly endorse it as a recommended practice. The disagreement, in other words, is as much a difference between formal legal ruling and long-standing regional custom as it is a disagreement between named schools of law, and a careful account should not claim that any one of the four Sunni madhabs as a formal school unanimously prescribes or unanimously forbids the practice; what can be said is that the weight of textual argument, and the explicit position taken by the religious authority governing the site today, opposes it at Jannat al-Mu’alla specifically.

Tawassul and the Question of Intercession

Tawassul — seeking a means of nearness to Allah in supplication — is a broader category than the specific acts discussed above, and Islamic scholarship distinguishes several types with differing degrees of acceptance. Three forms attract essentially unanimous approval across the schools: supplicating by Allah’s names and attributes; supplicating on the basis of one’s own righteous deeds; and asking a living, present righteous person to pray on one’s behalf, exactly as the companions are recorded asking the Prophet ﷺ to pray for them during his lifetime. The genuinely disputed form is the fourth: asking Allah for something “by the right” or “by the status” (bi-haqqi or bi-jahi) of a deceased person, invoked at or away from their grave, without asking the deceased person anything directly but rather citing their status as a basis for hoping Allah will answer the prayer. Some classical scholars across several schools historically permitted this restricted form, treating it as categorically different from asking the deceased directly; Ibn Taymiyyah and the later Hanbali-Salafi tradition that grew from his writings rejected it, holding that no authentic hadith supports invoking a deceased person’s status in this way and that the practice, however well-intentioned, opens a door toward the same graduated risk of shirk that the stronger prohibitions in this section are designed to close. This remains, in the contemporary Muslim world, one of the more genuinely unresolved points of difference among sincere and qualified scholars, and a visitor should understand that reasonable, learned Muslims disagree on this specific question even while agreeing completely on the clearer prohibition against addressing supplication to the deceased directly.

Leaving Offerings, Flowers, and Lights at Graves

The practice of placing flowers, wreaths, food, money, or lit lamps and candles at a grave has no basis in the practice of the Prophet ﷺ or his companions as recorded in the hadith literature, and the mainstream ruling across nearly all schools of thought treats such offerings as an unwarranted innovation, criticised on two separate grounds: that it constitutes wasteful expenditure (israf) without any prescribed religious benefit, and that it resembles funerary customs associated with non-Muslim traditions (tashabbuh), a resemblance the hadith literature elsewhere warns believers to avoid in various contexts. The Ibn Abbas narration discussed in the Hadith References section, cursing “those who place lights over” graves alongside women who visit graves and those who take graves as places of worship, is cited directly by scholars addressing this specific practice, and it is treated as a caution against externally elaborate memorialisation of the dead in a way that shifts attention toward the grave itself rather than toward sincere, private supplication for the deceased’s forgiveness — which remains, in every school’s account, the actual point of visiting a grave in the first place.

Women Visiting Graves: A Genuine Scholarly Disagreement

The Case for Prohibition

A distinct body of hadith addresses women’s visitation of graves specifically, and it forms the basis of the position that women should not visit graves at all, or should do so only with significant restriction. Abu Hurayrah narrated that “the Messenger of Allah ﷺ cursed women who frequently visit graves” — the Arabic term used, zawwarat, is an intensive form suggesting habitual or frequent visiting rather than a single occasional visit — a narration recorded by Ahmad, graded hasan sahih by al-Tirmidhi, and recorded by Ibn Majah, with the Mishkat al-Masabih compilation preserving it as hadith 1770 with a grading of sahih affirmed by al-Albani. A related narration through Ibn Abbas states: “The Messenger of Allah ﷺ cursed the women who visit graves, and those who take them as places of worship, and those who place lights over them,” transmitted through Abu Dawud, al-Tirmidhi, al-Nasa’i, and Ibn Majah, and judged authentic by later scholars including al-Albani on the strength of its combined chains of transmission. Scholars who hold that women should not visit graves, or should do so only rarely and with caution, point to the plain wording of these narrations: the curse is directed specifically at women, not at visitors of either sex generally, and they read this as reflecting the Prophet’s ﷺ own explicit and specific concern regarding this particular practice for women, a concern they treat as remaining in force alongside, rather than cancelled by, the general permission to visit graves discussed earlier in this guide.

The Case for Permission

Other scholars, drawing on a different reading of the same evidence and on additional narrations, hold that women are permitted to visit graves on essentially the same basis as men. They point first to the general wording of the permission hadith itself — “I forbade you to visit graves, but you may now visit them” (Sahih Muslim 977a, confirmed at Sunnah.com’s listing of Sahih Muslim 977) — which does not restrict its address to men, and which, on this reading, lifted the earlier general prohibition for the entire community rather than for men only. They point second to a specific practical precedent: Aisha, one of the most authoritative women in the early Muslim community, is reported to have visited the grave of her own brother, Abd al-Rahman ibn Abi Bakr, a report transmitted by al-Hakim and al-Bayhaqi and authenticated by the hadith critic al-Dhahabi, with the hadith scholar al-‘Iraqi describing its chain as “good” (jayyid) and al-Albani likewise affirming its authenticity; in the report, when asked where she had come from, Aisha replies that she has come from her brother’s grave, and when reminded that the Prophet ﷺ had forbidden visiting graves, she confirms this but adds that he later commanded it (see the discussion of this narration, with its Arabic text, at Islamweb’s fatwa on Aisha’s visit to her brother’s grave, and the parallel English-language treatment at Islam Q&A’s discussion of the specious argument against women’s grave visitation). Scholars who favour permission argue that this report, from a woman who was herself one of the most careful transmitters of the Prophet’s ﷺ rulings, is difficult to reconcile with a reading of the curse hadith as an absolute, unconditional prohibition still in force during her own lifetime.

A Middle Position

A third and, in contemporary fatwa literature, commonly adopted position attempts to reconcile the two bodies of evidence rather than choosing decisively between them. On this reading, the curse recorded in the Abu Hurayrah and Ibn Abbas narrations is understood either as addressing a specific abuse — excessive, frequent visitation accompanied by wailing, immodest public display, or practices bordering on the veneration warned against elsewhere in this guide — rather than visitation as such, or as reflecting a concern, rooted in an assessment of women’s generally greater susceptibility to overwhelming grief in a graveside setting, that does not amount to an absolute prohibition but does counsel caution and moderation. On this middle view, women may visit graves, including a site such as Jannat al-Mu’alla, provided the visit is occasional rather than habitual, conducted with appropriate modesty and without wailing or excessive lamentation, and free of exactly the errors set out in the preceding section — no touching or kissing of graves for blessing, no circumambulation, no supplication addressed to the deceased rather than to Allah on the deceased’s behalf. This guide does not resolve the disagreement among the three positions in favour of any one of them; each rests on a genuine reading of authentic textual evidence, each is held by qualified scholars, and the honest account is to present all three rather than to assert one as simply correct.

A Separate, Practical Question: Site Access Today

It is important to distinguish this scholarly disagreement, which concerns what Islamic law permits, from a separate and more mundane fact about the administration of Jannat al-Mu’alla specifically today: as a matter of contemporary Saudi cemetery management policy, women are generally not granted physical entry through the gates of the cemetery, a restriction reported consistently across travel and pilgrimage guidance for visitors to the site (see, for instance, Hajj Umrah Planner’s guide to Jannatul Mualla and the description at Lonely Planet’s entry on the Jannat al-Muallaa cemetery, which notes that Saudi authorities have “all but stop[ped] visits to the site, except when a funeral takes place,” and that “even then women are not permitted inside”). This is an administrative policy of site access, not a fatwa or a restatement of the scholarly debate outlined above; women who wish to pray for the dead of Jannat al-Mu’alla today generally do so from outside the boundary wall, on the surrounding road, rather than being excluded because of any specific ruling issued about this cemetery in particular. The practical section that follows addresses this access question in more detail.

Spiritual Reflection

Stand at the wall of Jannat al-Mu’alla and you will see, at first, very little: a slope of pale earth, a scatter of stones, a boundary that keeps the ordinary traffic of the city on one side and something else on the other. It takes a moment for what that something else actually is to settle into your understanding. Somewhere within that unremarkable ground lies the woman who believed in Muhammad ﷺ before anyone else on earth did — before the revelation had a name, before there was a community to call itself Muslim, before there was anything but a frightened man coming down from a cave and a wife telling him that Allah would not let him down. You cannot point to her grave. No one can. That is not a failure of this guide or of your visit; it is simply the truth of what a century of history has left behind. And perhaps that is its own kind of lesson, one the hadith on grave visitation state directly rather than leave to inference: you are not here to locate a woman’s bones. You are here to remember that she died, that everyone in that ground died, that you will die, and that none of the status any of them held in life — first believer, protector of the Prophet ﷺ, ancestor of the final messenger, caliph of Baghdad — purchased them a single extra hour before the appointed time arrived.

This is, if you let it be, a harder and more honest form of reflection than standing before a named and decorated tomb might offer. A dome invites you to focus on the specific, celebrated individual beneath it — admirable in one sense, but also, as the theological argument examined in this guide sets out, a risk the Prophet ﷺ himself is reported to have warned against with unusual sharpness in his final illness. A plain field of unmarked stone offers you nothing to focus on except the fact of death itself, indiscriminate and unadorned, exactly as it will eventually come for you. When you make the supplication the Prophet ﷺ taught for entering a graveyard — asking Allah’s peace upon the believers buried there, asking forgiveness for them, acknowledging that you too will join them — you are not performing a ritual for their benefit alone. You are being handed, by a practice with fourteen centuries of unbroken transmission behind it, the plainest possible reminder of your own mortality, delivered at the resting place of people whose lives, for all their historical weight, ended exactly as every life ends.

Think, too, about what it must have meant for the Prophet ﷺ himself to have buried so much of what he loved in this single stretch of ground before he ever left Makkah for Madinah. A wife who gave him everything she had. A grandfather who raised him as a boy. An uncle who shielded him from men who wanted him dead. Children who never lived long enough to see what their father would become. He carried that grief with him through the hardest years of his mission, and the tradition never once suggests he was expected, or expected himself, to set it aside because a greater purpose had been given to him. Grief and prophethood were not, in his life, in competition with each other. If you find yourself moved standing at this wall — by the losses recorded here, by your own losses, by the plain fact of a hillside full of the unremembered dead — you are responding to this place exactly as its history invites you to.

Practical Visitor Guide

Where It Is and How to Get There

Jannat al-Mu’alla lies north of the Masjid al-Haram, at the foot of Mount al-Hajun, in the district that bears the same name, at approximately a kilometre to a kilometre and a half from the Grand Mosque. If you are walking, the most commonly described route takes you out of the Haram area toward the Marwa side, past the site traditionally associated with the Prophet’s ﷺ birthplace, under a road flyover, and past two small mosques — Masjid al-Shajarah and Masjid al-Jinn — before reaching the cemetery, which sits along Al-Hujoon Street on your left as you approach from the Haram. Depending on your pace, the crowds, and your starting point within the Haram complex, expect the walk to take somewhere between ten and twenty minutes. If you would rather not walk, a taxi from the Haram area typically costs in the range of ten to fifteen Saudi riyals and takes well under ten minutes, though the one-way street layout around the Haram means the driving route is often longer in distance than the direct walking path.

Hours, Cost, and What Determines Access

There is no admission fee to visit Jannat al-Mu’alla, and the cemetery, as an active burial ground for Makkah’s resident population, remains in use and open in some form throughout the year rather than being run as a fixed-hours tourist site. Reported opening patterns vary across different travel and pilgrimage guides, with some describing broad daytime access and others describing access tied specifically to prayer times and to funerals, and this variation likely reflects a real practical fact: the cemetery is not primarily managed as a visitor attraction, and access at any given moment can depend on whether a burial or funeral prayer is taking place, on the discretion of whoever is present at the gate, and on the general flow of Hajj and Umrah season crowds through the surrounding streets. A reasonable expectation for a pilgrim planning a visit is that access is most straightforward in the period shortly after the daily prayers, particularly Asr in the cooler part of the afternoon, and least predictable outside those windows.

Who May Enter

Multiple independent travel and pilgrimage sources converge on the same pattern: men are generally permitted to enter the cemetery grounds, especially around the time of funerals and the prayers associated with them, while women are generally not permitted physical entry through the gates under current site management practice, and instead stand outside the boundary wall or on the adjoining road to view the site and make their own supplications from there (see Hajj Umrah Planner’s guide to Jannatul Mualla and Al Maqam Transport’s description of the Al-Mu’allaa Cemetery). As discussed in the preceding section, this is a matter of current site administration rather than a specific fatwa issued about this cemetery, and it should not be confused with the broader, genuinely disputed scholarly question of whether women may visit graves at all, which this guide has presented with its full range of positions above.

Non-Muslim Visitors

The question of whether non-Muslims may approach or enter Jannat al-Mu’alla does not arise as a site-specific issue, because it is superseded by the broader Saudi regulation that non-Muslims may not enter the city of Makkah at all, a restriction that applies to the entire urban area within the boundary markers on the roads leading into the city, not merely to the Masjid al-Haram itself (see the discussion at Humbo’s overview of Jannat al-Mu’alla). A traveller who is not Muslim and who is planning a broader visit to Saudi Arabia should understand that Makkah, and everything within it including this cemetery, is simply not accessible, independent of any question about the cemetery’s own rules.

Photography

Photography at Jannat al-Mu’alla is generally discouraged, out of respect for the sanctity of the site and, in practical terms, for the privacy of mourners attending funerals there, though this operates more as a strongly observed social and institutional norm than as a codified law specific to the cemetery. Visitors should expect to be asked to refrain from photographing funerals or grieving families in particular, and the broader climate around photography at Makkah’s sacred sites has tightened in recent Hajj seasons, with restrictions announced for the Masjid al-Haram and Masjid an-Nabawi complexes during peak periods; a visitor planning to bring a camera or phone to the cemetery should treat restraint as the default expectation rather than assuming photography is freely permitted.

Burials Today

Jannat al-Mu’alla remains an active cemetery, continuing to receive burials from Makkah’s resident population, and it is not simply a preserved historical site frozen at the state it reached after the 1925 demolition. Pilgrims visiting the site, particularly from Turkey, Pakistan, India, Afghanistan, Indonesia, and Malaysia, sometimes come specifically hoping to locate the graves of relatives or ancestors who died in Makkah in more recent generations, a task made difficult by the same absence of individual markers that makes locating Khadijah’s grave impossible, though far more recent and, in principle, potentially traceable through cemetery administration records rather than through historical tradition. A visitor should understand that any given day’s visit may coincide with an actual funeral in progress, and should be prepared to observe the same restraint and respect that any cemetery, anywhere, calls for when a family is present in active mourning.

What You Will Actually See

Manage your expectations before you go: Jannat al-Mu’alla is not a monumental site. There is no equivalent, at this cemetery, of the domes and calligraphy that mark major shrine complexes elsewhere in the Muslim world, and there has not been one since 1925. What you will see is a long white boundary wall, a gently sloping field of packed earth and stone within it, and a scattering of small rocks marking individual graves without any name, date, or inscription attached to any of them. The cemetery is divided by a modern road into an older and a newer section, connected by an underground passage. There is no directory, no signage identifying particular graves, and no guide, official or otherwise, who can take you to a specific spot and tell you with confidence that Khadijah, or Abu Talib, or Qasim, lies exactly there. Pilgrims who visit generally do what the plain honesty of the site invites: they stand at the wall or just inside the gate, they offer the supplication for the dead described earlier in this guide, and they pay their respects to the cemetery’s occupants as a whole, collectively, rather than individually — because that is, in the end, the only way the site as it exists today actually permits.

That the Cemetery’s Names Are Interchangeable Without Distinction

A minor but recurring confusion in popular travel and pilgrimage writing treats “Jannat al-Mu’alla,” “al-Hajun,” and “Maqbarat al-Ma’la” as though they name three different places, when in fact they are three names for the same cemetery, used with varying frequency across different periods and different linguistic traditions. Classical Arabic sources and much of the Shia biographical literature favour “al-Hajun,” the name of the hill at whose foot the cemetery lies; “Jannat al-Mu’alla” and “Maqbarat al-Ma’la” are more common in modern Sunni devotional and touristic usage, paralleling the way Madinah’s cemetery is called both “Baqi’ al-Gharqad” and “Jannat al-Baqi.” A visitor who encounters all three names across different guidebooks, apps, or taxi drivers’ directions should understand they are being pointed to the same gate.

Common Misconceptions

That Praying at a Specific Grave Carries Special Reward

A recurring misconception, not unique to Jannat al-Mu’alla but frequently attached to it, holds that offering prayer at or near a particular grave — Khadijah’s above all — carries some special spiritual benefit or increased likelihood of an answered supplication, by virtue of physical proximity to a revered figure’s remains. This belief runs directly counter to the explicit textual evidence examined in this guide’s Hadith References and Etiquette sections: the Prophet ﷺ, in his final illness, condemned the practice of the Jews and Christians who “took the graves of their prophets as places of worship” in terms strong enough that his companions understood his own grave had to be deliberately kept from becoming a similarly visible, prominent site (Sahih al-Bukhari 435 and Sahih Muslim 529, confirmed at Sunnah.com’s listing of Sahih al-Bukhari 435). Praying toward a grave, or believing that a prayer offered at a specific grave is more likely to be accepted than the same prayer offered anywhere else, is not a minor variance in practice; it is the exact error the strongest and most explicit hadith on this subject were transmitted to prevent. A visitor to Jannat al-Mu’alla who wishes to pray should pray as they would anywhere — facing the qiblah, addressing Allah alone — and should understand that visiting the cemetery is valuable for the reminder of mortality it provides and the opportunity to ask forgiveness for the dead, not because the ground itself confers any special power on a prayer offered there.

That the 1925 Demolition Destroyed the Graves Themselves

A related misconception, sometimes found in popular retellings of the 1925 demolition, conflates the destruction of the domes and mausoleum structures with the destruction of the graves and remains beneath them. As discussed in the section on the demolition above, the descriptive record of the event states that the tombs and mausoleums — the built structures — were demolished, while explicitly noting that “no graves were destroyed during the demolition process” (Madain Project’s entry on the 1926 demolitions). What was lost was the ability to identify which patch of ground belonged to which named individual, not the physical remains themselves, which were not exhumed or disturbed by the demolition according to this account. This distinction does not settle the larger dispute over whether the demolition was justified — reasonable people continue to disagree about that, as this guide has set out at length — but it is a distinct factual claim, and conflating “the structures were removed” with “the graves were destroyed” overstates what the historical record actually supports.

That Aminah bint Wahb’s Grave Is Definitively Located at al-Hajun

As discussed in the sections on Historical Background and Hadith References, popular accounts sometimes state as settled fact that the Prophet’s ﷺ mother, Aminah bint Wahb, is buried at Jannat al-Mu’alla — a claim that likely draws on the existence of a dome dedicated to her memory at the site before 1925, described in the Architecture section above. The stronger and more widely accepted historical position, however, places her death and burial at al-Abwa’, a village between Makkah and Madinah, where she died while returning from a visit to relatives in Madinah when the Prophet ﷺ was approximately six years old (see Wikipedia’s biography of Amina bint Wahb). A minority report transmitted by al-Tabari places her grave near Makkah instead, but the early biographer Ibn Sa’d explicitly identifies this report as an error, and Arabic-language biographical sources describe the al-Abwa’ location as the well-known (mashhur) view. A dome existing at a site is evidence of what a community came to believe and commemorate; it is not, on its own, proof of an actual burial location, and this is a case where the more careful historical sources point away from Jannat al-Mu’alla rather than toward it.

Fabricated and Unverifiable Material Circulated About Khadijah’s Grave

Because Khadijah holds such a central and beloved place in Islamic memory, a range of devotional stories and claims about her grave specifically circulate in popular literature and, increasingly, on social media — accounts of lights or fragrances reported at the site, claims of miraculous preservation, or narratives describing detailed, specific events at her grave that go well beyond what the sound historical and hadith record actually preserves. This research did not locate any of these specific claims traced to an authenticated hadith or a reliable classical historical source; they belong, as far as this guide can determine, to a genre of devotional folk tradition that has attached itself over time to a figure whose genuine, well-documented life story is already extraordinary without embellishment. This guide’s approach throughout has been to state plainly what is textually established and to flag clearly what is not, and material of this kind — vivid, emotionally appealing, but untraceable to a checkable source — falls squarely into the category this guide declines to repeat as fact. A comparable pattern is visible in the wider corpus of claims about sacred burial sites in the Hijaz: the popular claim that the Masjid al-Khayf in Mina contains the graves of seventy prophets, for instance, rests on a hadith that the hadith critic al-Albani examined and rejected as unfounded on both chain and content grounds, despite its wide circulation in devotional literature, a conclusion set out in detail at Islamweb’s fatwa refuting the seventy-prophets claim about Masjid al-Khayf. The lesson generalises: a claim’s popularity and its emotional resonance are not evidence of its authenticity, and a site’s genuine sanctity, where it exists, does not need to be inflated with unverifiable additions to be meaningful.

Lesser-Known Facts

• The seventeenth-century Ottoman traveller Evliya Çelebi counted approximately seventy-five domed tombs standing in the cemetery during his visit, evidence of just how densely built up the site had become by the height of Ottoman rule, in sharp contrast to its plain, undomed appearance today (Wikipedia’s Jannat al-Mu’alla article).
• The thirteenth-century Makkan scholar al-Firuzabadi compiled an entire dedicated treatise on visiting this cemetery, titled Itharat al-Hajun li-Ziyarat al-Hujun, naming some thirty-eight companions and early Muslims believed in his time to be buried there — one of very few classical works devoted specifically to this cemetery rather than to Madinah’s Baqi’ (wikishia’s Al-Ma’lat Cemetery article).
• The ninth-century-AH historian al-Fasi is recorded as having raised doubt about the precision of the tradition placing Khadijah’s grave specifically at al-Hajun, a minor dissenting note within an otherwise overwhelming scholarly consensus that she is buried in this general burial ground (wikishia’s Al-Ma’lat Cemetery article).
• Hashim ibn Abd Manaf, the Prophet’s ﷺ great-grandfather and the man from whom Banu Hashim takes its name, is commemorated by a tomb tradition at Jannat al-Mu’alla despite the stronger historical record indicating that he actually died and was buried in Gaza while leading a trading caravan to Syria — his Makkan “grave” is best understood as a memorial tradition rather than an actual burial site (Wikipedia’s biography of Hashim ibn Abd Manaf).
• Abu Ja’far al-Mansur, the second Abbasid caliph and the founder of the city of Baghdad, died in Makkah in 158 AH (775 CE) while performing Hajj and was buried at Jannat al-Mu’alla rather than being returned to Iraq, making him one of the most politically significant figures buried at the site outside the Prophet’s ﷺ own family (Wikipedia’s Jannat al-Mu’alla article).
• Abdullah ibn al-Zubayr, who ruled a rival caliphate from Makkah during the Second Fitna, was killed in 73 AH (692 CE) during the Umayyad siege of the city under al-Hajjaj ibn Yusuf and is buried at al-Hajun alongside his mother Asma bint Abi Bakr, daughter of the first caliph, who died shortly after him (Wikipedia’s Jannat al-Mu’alla article).
• No published archaeological excavation of Jannat al-Mu’alla exists; virtually everything known about the cemetery’s historical appearance comes from traveller accounts, pilgrimage guides, and early-twentieth-century photographs rather than from systematic archaeological study.
• A modern road, Al-Hujoon Street, now runs directly through the cemetery, dividing it into two sections connected by an underground passage beneath a flyover — a piece of twentieth-century infrastructure imposed directly onto ground that has been used for burial since before Islam.
• Several twentieth-century Sunni scholars of considerable modern influence are buried at Jannat al-Mu’alla, including Sayyid Muhammad Alawi al-Maliki, a prominent Makkan teacher of hadith and Islamic law whose burial at the site places a well-documented modern figure in the same ground as the Prophet’s ﷺ own ancient forebears (Wikipedia’s Jannat al-Mu’alla article).

Timeline of Jannat al-Mu’alla

• Pre-Islamic period (before 610 CE): Al-Hajun in use as a burial ground by the Quraysh and other leading Makkan families; tradition traces its earliest attested use to Qusayy ibn Kilab, the Prophet’s ﷺ ancestor five generations back.
• c. 578 CE: Death of Abd al-Muttalib, the Prophet’s ﷺ grandfather, traditionally buried at al-Hajun beside Qusayy ibn Kilab; the young Muhammad ﷺ, around eight years old, is recorded as having followed the funeral and wept.
• c. 601 CE: Death of Qasim, the Prophet’s ﷺ firstborn son, as a young child, years before the start of the prophetic mission; buried at Jannat al-Mu’alla.
• 610 CE: Beginning of the Prophet’s ﷺ prophetic mission with the first revelation in the Cave of Hira.
• ‘Am al-Huzn, the Year of Sorrow, c. 619–620 CE (10th year of prophethood): Deaths of Khadijah bint Khuwaylid and Abu Talib within a short span of each other; both buried at al-Hajun, Abu Talib beside his father Abd al-Muttalib.
• 622 CE (1 AH): The Hijra to Madinah; the centre of the Muslim community’s burial practice shifts to Jannat al-Baqi, though al-Hajun continues in use as Makkah’s own cemetery.
• 630 CE (8 AH): The conquest of Makkah by the Prophet ﷺ and his followers.
• 73 AH (692 CE): Death of Abdullah ibn al-Zubayr during the Umayyad siege of Makkah under al-Hajjaj ibn Yusuf; burial at Jannat al-Mu’alla alongside his mother, Asma bint Abi Bakr.
• 158 AH (775 CE): Death of Abu Ja’far al-Mansur, second Abbasid caliph and founder of Baghdad, while on Hajj; burial at Jannat al-Mu’alla.
• Ninth century AH (fifteenth century CE): The Makkan historian al-Fasi engages with questions concerning the cemetery’s burials, including raising doubt about the precise location of Khadijah’s grave.
• Thirteenth century AH (thirteenth–fourteenth century CE, exact date uncertain in sources consulted): Al-Firuzabadi compiles Itharat al-Hajun li-Ziyarat al-Hujun, listing some thirty-eight companions and early Muslims understood to be buried at the cemetery.
• Tenth–thirteenth centuries AH (sixteenth–nineteenth centuries CE): Ottoman rule over the Hijaz; most of the domed tomb structures later documented at the cemetery are built or rebuilt during this period.
• Seventeenth century CE: The Ottoman traveller Evliya Çelebi visits and records approximately seventy-five domed tombs standing at the cemetery.
• October 1924: Makkah comes under the control of Abd al-Aziz ibn Saud’s forces.
• 1925 (sources vary; some place the specific date at 8 Shawwal 1344 AH / 21 April 1926 CE, aligning it with the closely related demolition at Jannat al-Baqi): Demolition of the domed tomb structures at Jannat al-Mu’alla, including the domes over the graves of Khadijah, Aminah bint Wahb (by tradition), and the twin domes associated with Abu Talib, Abd Manaf, Hashim ibn Abd Manaf, Abd al-Muttalib, and Qasim ibn Muhammad.
• Twentieth century, ongoing: Continued use of Jannat al-Mu’alla as an active cemetery for Makkah’s resident population; construction of Al-Hujoon Street and associated infrastructure dividing the site.
• Present day: Jannat al-Mu’alla remains an unmarked, undomed cemetery enclosed by a boundary wall, visited by pilgrims from across the Muslim world who pay their respects to its occupants collectively rather than at any individually identifiable grave.

Key Lessons

Historical Lessons

The history of Jannat al-Mu’alla teaches, above all, the difference between what a historical tradition asserts and what it can actually demonstrate. Some claims connected to this cemetery — Khadijah’s burial there, Abu Talib’s burial beside his father, the broad continuity of Makkan burial practice across fourteen centuries — rest on strong and largely uncontested evidence. Others — Hashim’s supposed grave, Aminah’s supposed grave, the precise identity of most of the thirty-eight names al-Firuzabadi recorded — rest on considerably weaker foundations, in some cases directly contradicted by the stronger historical record. A serious engagement with Islamic history requires holding both of these categories in mind simultaneously, honouring what is well established without inflating what is merely traditional into something more certain than the sources support.

Spiritual Lessons

The absence of markers at Jannat al-Mu’alla, whatever one concludes about the wisdom of the 1925 demolition, delivers a spiritual lesson the site’s more monumental Ottoman-era predecessor could not have delivered in quite the same way: death here is anonymous, universal, and indifferent to the status its inhabitants held in life. A visitor cannot single out Khadijah’s grave for special attention because no one, today, can locate it; the entire cemetery instead becomes a single, undifferentiated reminder that the destination the Qur’an describes as awaiting “every soul” (Surah Ali ‘Imran 3:185) is met by everyone, prophet’s wife and anonymous Makkan resident alike, in exactly the same plain ground.

Personal Lessons

The Prophet’s ﷺ own conduct at the losses recorded here — his grief at Khadijah’s death, his tears at his grandfather’s funeral as a child, his enduring devotion to his first wife’s memory for the rest of his life — models a form of faith that does not require the suppression of ordinary human grief. He mourned openly and completely, without that mourning being presented anywhere in the sources as a deficiency in his trust in Allah. A visitor grieving their own losses can find, in the record of how he carried his, a permission to grieve fully while still holding to hope in Allah’s mercy — the same balance the supplication he taught for graveyards embodies, moving in a single breath from acknowledging the finality of death to affirming the believer’s expectation of eventually rejoining those who have gone before.

Practical Lessons

A visitor to Jannat al-Mu’alla should arrive with expectations calibrated to what the site actually is rather than what popular imagination sometimes constructs: a plain field, not a shrine; a place for a brief, respectful supplication from outside or just inside a boundary wall, not an extended pilgrimage with fixed rituals; a site where men are generally admitted and women generally are not, as a matter of current site management rather than settled religious law; and a place where photography, extended visiting, and any attempt to seek out a “specific” grave should all be set aside in favor of the same simple act the hadith literature actually prescribes — greeting the dead, asking Allah’s forgiveness for them, and remembering that you, too, will one day be counted among them.

Authentic Sources

Primary Islamic Sources

The hadith cited throughout this guide are drawn from and verified against Sahih al-Bukhari, Sahih Muslim, Sunan Abi Dawud, Sunan Ibn Majah, and related collections including Mishkat al-Masabih and Riyad al-Salihin, accessed and cross-checked through Sunnah.com, and Qur’anic citations are drawn from and can be verified against Quran.com. Early biographical and historical material on the Prophet’s ﷺ life and Companions draws on the tradition established by Ibn Ishaq’s Sirah (preserved through Ibn Hisham’s recension), al-Tabari’s Tarikh al-Rusul wa-l-Muluk, al-Waqidi’s historical writings, and Ibn Sa’d’s al-Tabaqat al-Kubra. A caution is owed to the reader regarding these last sources specifically: Ibn Ishaq, al-Waqidi, and to a lesser degree al-Tabari transmitted a great deal of material without the chain-verification standards later applied rigorously to hadith proper, and modern scholarship, both classical and contemporary, treats their historical narratives as valuable and largely reliable for general biographical and historical detail while withholding from them the same evidentiary weight given to material graded through the formal science of hadith criticism. Where this guide has relied on material ultimately traceable to these historians rather than to a graded hadith, it has said so, and has avoided presenting akhbar-style historical reports with the same certainty language reserved for authenticated hadith.

Classical Scholars

This guide has drawn on the recorded positions and writings, as summarised in the secondary literature consulted, of Imam Malik ibn Anas and his Muwatta’, Imam al-Shafi’i, Imam Ahmad ibn Hanbal, Ibn Taymiyyah’s Manasik al-Hajj and his broader writings on grave visitation, Ibn Kathir’s historical and exegetical works, Imam al-Nawawi’s commentary on Sahih Muslim, Ibn Hajar al-‘Asqalani’s Fath al-Bari, and al-Samhudi’s Wafa’ al-Wafa on the comparative history of Jannat al-Baqi in Madinah.

Modern Academic and Reference Sources

This guide has relied on the following modern sources, each cited inline at the point of use above: Wikipedia’s article on Jannat al-Mu’alla; Wikipedia’s biography of Hashim ibn Abd Manaf; Wikipedia’s biography of Amina bint Wahb; Wikipedia’s biography of Khadija bint Khuwaylid; Wikipedia’s entry on Qasim ibn Muhammad; Wikipedia’s article on the views of Ibn Taymiyya; wikishia’s article on the Al-Ma’lat Cemetery; wikishia’s entry on Abu Talib; wikishia’s entry on Abd al-Muttalib; wikishia’s entry on Khadijah bint Khuwaylid; Madain Project’s entry on Jannat ul-Mu’alla; Madain Project’s entry on the 1926 demolitions; nabataea.net’s discussion of Islamic graveyards and the qiblah; Islam Q&A’s discussion of the ruling on visiting graves; Islam Q&A’s discussion of the specious argument against women’s grave visitation; Islamweb’s fatwa on Aisha’s visit to her brother’s grave; Islamweb’s fatwa refuting the seventy-prophets claim about Masjid al-Khayf; the Africa Federation’s commemorative statement on the demolition; New Age Islam’s commentary on the demolition of Khadijah’s tomb; Hajj Umrah Planner’s guide to Jannatul Mualla; Al Maqam Transport’s description of the Al-Mu’allaa Cemetery; Lonely Planet’s entry on the Jannat al-Muallaa cemetery; and Humbo’s overview of Jannat al-Mu’alla.

A note on method: this guide was compiled by cross-referencing primary hadith and Qur’anic text against Sunnah.com and Quran.com directly, verifying every hadith reference cited by number against its listed text before inclusion, and by drawing historical and contextual material from a range of academic, encyclopedic, and specialist Islamic reference sources spanning Sunni and Shia perspectives, cited inline throughout. Where sources disagreed — on dates, on the strength of a particular attribution, or on the theological and historical assessment of the 1925 demolition — this guide has attempted to present the disagreement itself rather than silently adopting one side’s account as settled fact. Where no reliable source could be found for a claim in wide popular circulation, that absence has been stated directly rather than papered over. Readers who wish to explore any subject raised here in greater depth are encouraged to consult the primary and secondary sources linked throughout, and to treat the traditional, weakly attested, and disputed material flagged in this guide with the same caution its own scholarly sources apply to it.

Frequently asked questions

Who is buried in Jannat al-Mualla?

Khadijah bint Khuwaylid, the first wife of the Prophet and the first believer in his message, along with his grandfather Abdul Muttalib, his uncle Abu Talib, his son Qasim, and generations of Makkans from the era of Quraysh to later scholars.

Can women visit Jannat al-Mualla?

Women are not permitted inside, in line with the practice applied at cemeteries across Saudi Arabia. They may pay their respects and make supplication from outside the boundary, where designated standing areas exist near the gates.

Why are the graves unmarked?

The domes and structures that once stood over the graves, including that of Khadijah, were removed in 1925 under Saudi religious rulings against built-up tombs. Today the graves are simple mounds marked at most by plain stones.

Is visiting Jannat al-Mualla part of Umrah?

No. Ziyarah to the cemetery is optional and not a rite of Umrah or Hajj. Visitors greet the dead with salam and make supplication for them, following the Sunnah etiquette of visiting graves.

When is the cemetery open and how do I get there?

It is open daily with no admission fee, on the Masjid al-Haram Road toward al-Hajun, roughly a kilometre north of the Grand Mosque, reachable on foot or by a short taxi ride.