Jannat al-Baqi: The Complete History, Story and Ziyarah Guide to the Cemetery of Madinah

A low wall runs along the south-eastern flank of Masjid an-Nabawi, separated from the mosque only by a wide plaza of white marble known as Bayn al-Haramayn, “between the two sanctuaries.” Cross that plaza on any ordinary day and you will find a gate, a small crowd of men waiting for it to open, and beyond the gate a flat field of sand and stone stretching out under the Madinah sun. There are no domes here. There are no inscriptions, no marble tombs, no names carved for the visitor to read. What you see is a wide, featureless expanse of earth, broken only by small unmarked mounds and a scatter of plain stones — and beneath that earth, by the most-repeated estimate in the historical literature, lie the remains of somewhere between seven thousand and ten thousand of the men and women who knew the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ face to face.

This is Jannat al-Baqi — the Garden of Baqi’, or more fully, Baqi’ al-Gharqad, the thorn-bush hollow of Madinah. It is the oldest Islamic cemetery still in continuous use, and it may also be the most contested piece of ground in the Muslim world, because what is missing from it is not an accident of time. Twice in recorded history, once in 1220 AH (1806 CE) and again on 8 Shawwal 1344 AH (21 April 1926 CE), the domes, shrines and grave-markers that had accumulated here over centuries were deliberately torn down, on the religious authority of scholars who believed the structures themselves were a wrong that had to be corrected. Millions of Muslims accept that reasoning as sound and necessary. Millions of others regard the same events as an act of desecration that severed a living link to the family of the Prophet ﷺ and the first generation of Islam. Both communities pray toward the same qiblah. Both trace their line of authority back to the same Messenger ﷺ. And both, when they stand at that gate today, are looking at the same absence.

This guide sets out to do something that is rarely attempted with this subject: to tell the whole story, from the pre-Islamic thorn-scrub to the marble plaza of today, without asking the reader to take a side. It narrates the burials — of companions, of the Prophet’s ﷺ own family, of the wives, of scholars who shaped Islamic law for a thousand years afterward. It sets out the textual case that the demolitions rested on, hadith by hadith, exactly as the scholars who issued the rulings understood it. It sets out, with equal seriousness, the case made by those who mourned what was lost, then and now. It treats the disputed burial place of Fatimah al-Zahra, the Prophet’s ﷺ daughter, as an open question answered differently by different traditions, not as a puzzle with a single correct solution waiting to be revealed. Where the sources disagree, this guide says so. Where a report is popular but the chain behind it is weak, this guide says that too. The dead of Baqi’ deserve better than a legend cleaned up for effect, and the living — Sunni and Shia alike — deserve an account of their own history that treats their convictions as intelligible rather than merely mistaken.

Historical Background: Origins and Geography of Jannat al-Baqi

Where Baqi’ Lies

Jannat al-Baqi sits immediately outside the south-eastern corner of Masjid an-Nabawi, the Prophet’s Mosque, in the heart of Madinah. The plaza that now separates the cemetery from the mosque — Bayn al-Haramayn, paved today in cool white marble — once held the houses of the Prophet’s ﷺ family and a working marketplace; it was not always empty ceremonial space, but a lived-in quarter of the early Islamic city. The historic Bab al-Baqi’, the Gate of Baqi’, was for centuries the mosque gate nearest the cemetery, standing in line with Bab as-Salam and close to the Rawda, the sacred space between the Prophet’s ﷺ pulpit and his grave. The site’s coordinates are fixed today at 24°28′01″ North, 39°36′59″ East, a few hundred metres of flat ground that has outlasted every dynasty that has ruled it.

The cemetery has grown enormously since its founding. Tradition describes the first burial ground as barely eighty square metres — a modest, unremarkable patch of scrubland. Various historical estimates put its size at around fifteen thousand square metres under the Ottomans, roughly fifty-six thousand square metres after mid-twentieth-century work, and between one hundred seventy and one hundred seventy-five thousand square metres following the major extension of 1373 AH (1953–54 CE). A 2014 report in Arab News described plans for a further expansion tied to the northern extension of the Prophet’s Mosque, eventually reaching some three hundred thousand square metres and around forty-two thousand grave spaces. Exact figures vary between sources, and the reader should treat all of them as historical estimates rather than fixed, audited measurements — no census of graves at Baqi’ has ever been possible, because the vast majority of the dead here have never been marked by name.

The Name: Baqi’ al-Gharqad

The Arabic word baqi’ (بقيع) denotes a tract of open land covered in trees or scrub — not a garden in the ornamental sense, but wild ground with vegetation growing through it. Gharqad (غرقد) is the Arabic name for a specific thorny shrub, a boxthorn or nitre-bush, identified in different sources as Lycium shawii or Nitraria retusa. No such plant grows at the site today; it has vanished from the landscape entirely, leaving only the name behind. Put the two words together and you get “Baqi’ al-Gharqad” — the scrubland of the boxthorn — which over time became honoured with the addition of Jannat, “garden,” to produce “Jannat al-Baqi,” the Garden of Baqi’.

One popular claim connects this honorific directly to a hadith stating that on the Day of Judgment the people of Baqi’ al-Gharqad will be among the first to enter Paradise. This is a widely repeated idea in devotional and travel literature, but no exact hadith reference — collection and number — could be confirmed for it in the research behind this guide. It should be treated as a popular tradition of uncertain textual standing, not as an established hadith, until a specific, checkable citation is produced.

A note on authenticity: the claim that the name “Jannat” derives from a specific graded hadith about the people of Baqi’ entering Paradise first could not be verified against a primary hadith collection. It is repeated frequently in popular sources but should be understood as an unconfirmed devotional tradition rather than an authenticated report.

What the Ground Looked Like Before Islam

When the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ arrived in Yathrib from Makkah in September of 622 CE, completing the Hijra that would refound the town as Madinah, the land that would become Baqi’ was simply uncultivated scrubland lying behind the inhabited quarters, thick with the thorny gharqad bush, with palm groves further to the east and houses to the west. There is no substantive record, in the sources consulted for this guide, of any distinct pre-Islamic cemetery or cultic function attached to this specific plot of ground. The standard modern academic treatment of Madinah’s sacred topography, Harry Munt’s The Holy City of Medina (Cambridge University Press, 2014), was not directly accessible during this research, and the reader should understand that the claim of “no pre-Islamic religious use” rests on the negative evidence of the sources that were available, not on an exhaustive check of the academic literature. What can be said with more confidence is that a large Jewish cemetery existed adjacent to the site — separate from Baqi’ al-Gharqad itself — and that this adjoining ground was only merged into the Muslim burial ground later, under the Umayyad caliph Mu’awiyah, an episode treated further below. Before Islam, in other words, this was ordinary ground: no shrine, no pilgrimage, nothing to mark it out from the scrub around it. What made it sacred was not ancient superstition. It was what began to happen here within the first two years after the Hijra.

Historical Background, Continued: Madinah’s Geography and the Placement of Baqi’

Madinah in the pre-Islamic and early Islamic period was not a single unified settlement in the way a modern city is, but a cluster of distinct residential quarters, each associated with a particular tribe or clan, interspersed with palm groves, agricultural plots, and open scrubland. The specific plot that became Baqi’ al-Gharqad lay to the south-east of the area where the Prophet’s ﷺ mosque and house would be built, on ground that, prior to the Hijra, appears to have held no distinct religious or ceremonial significance beyond its covering of gharqad thornbush — a detail worth returning to, since it means the sanctity Baqi’ holds today is entirely a product of what happened there after 622 CE, not a continuation of any earlier local reverence for the site. This matters for understanding the broader pattern of Islamic sacred geography in Madinah: unlike Makkah, where the Ka’bah’s sanctity predates Islam by a period the tradition itself acknowledges reaches back to Ibrahim, Madinah’s sacred sites — the mosque, Baqi’, the mosque of Quba — all derive their status entirely from events that occurred during or immediately after the Prophet’s ﷺ own lifetime. Baqi’ is, in this sense, a purely Islamic-era sacred site, its history beginning and ending within documented Islamic history rather than reaching back into a longer, pre-Islamic devotional past.

The Story Behind the Place: How a Thornbush Hollow Became a Cemetery

A Dispute as Old as the Ground Itself: Who Was Buried First?

Every sacred cemetery has a founding grave, a first name that anchors everything that follows. At Baqi’, that question turns out to have two answers, and the disagreement between them is not a modern argument. It is recorded by the earliest Muslim historians themselves, and it runs along a fault line that would recur throughout the early history of the community: the distinction between the Muhajirun, the emigrants who had come with the Prophet ﷺ from Makkah, and the Ansar, the Helpers of Madinah who had received them.

The Ansari case rests on As’ad ibn Zurarah, a leading man of the Khazraj who had taken part in both Pledges of al-‘Aqaba — the secret meetings at which delegations from Yathrib had committed themselves to the Prophet ﷺ before the Hijra even took place. As’ad fell ill with what the sources describe as a throat or neck ailment, resembling quinsy or diphtheria, and died only about nine months after the Prophet’s ﷺ arrival in the city. Ansari tradition, and the great Madinan historian al-Samhudi in his Wafa’ al-Wafa bi-Akhbar Dar al-Mustafa, record him as the very first person buried at Baqi’.

The Muhajir case rests on Uthman ibn Maz’un, a prominent early emigrant from Makkah who died in 2 AH, somewhere between twenty-two and thirty months after the Hijra depending on which account is followed — in any case, after the Battle of Badr. The reports describing his burial are vivid and specific: the Prophet ﷺ himself led the funeral prayer, took part in the burial, placed a stone or two stones at the head of the grave, and said, “This is the grave of our predecessor,” naming the plot Rawha. When the next Muhajir died, the Prophet ﷺ is reported to have said she should be buried “with our predecessor, Uthman ibn Maz’un” — language that only makes sense if Uthman ibn Maz’un was already understood, at least among the Muhajirun, as the first of their number laid to rest there.

The medieval scholar Ibn Abd al-Barr traces this disagreement to its root: it was, in essence, a friendly rivalry between the Ansar, who wanted their own tribesman remembered as the founder of the burial ground in the city that was theirs, and the Muhajirun, who wanted the honour to belong to one of their own. Separately, the Prophet’s ﷺ own daughter Ruqayyah, who died in 624 CE while her father ﷺ was away at the Battle of Badr, is recorded as the first member of the Ahl al-Bayt, the Prophet’s ﷺ household, to be buried at Baqi’ — a distinct claim, about the first Ahl al-Bayt burial rather than the first burial overall, and one that does not resolve the As’ad/Uthman question either way.

A note on authenticity: the popular claim that Uthman ibn Maz’un was simply “the first Muslim buried in Baqi’,” stated as settled fact, goes further than the hadith evidence supports. Shaykh al-Albani states plainly, in his Silsilat al-Ahadith al-Sahihah (7/165), that nothing authentic (sahih) has been specifically established on this point. The honest presentation is that this is a historical question on which the earliest sources themselves disagree — a matter of reports and communal memory, not a hadith-certified fact with only one correct answer.

Naming the Plots: Rawha and Zawra

What these founding burials illustrate is something easy to miss in a cemetery that today looks like one undifferentiated field: Baqi’ was never a single plot. It grew as a patchwork of named sections, each associated with a family, a generation, or an event. Uthman ibn Maz’un’s grave gave its section the name Rawha. Decades later, when the Prophet’s ﷺ infant son Ibrahim was buried nearby, that plot took the name Zawra. Over the following centuries the cemetery would absorb still more named enclosures — the burial ground of the Umayyad-built dome over Uthman ibn Affan’s grave, the shared family enclosure that would come to hold Abbas ibn Abd al-Muttalib and members of the Prophet’s ﷺ own bloodline, and the plot popularly known as Maqabir Banu Hashim. What the visitor sees today as one flat field of undistinguished sand was, for most of Islamic history, a small city of the dead with its own internal geography, its own street of family plots, each stone and each dome a marker of memory for those who could read them.

An Ever-Widening Circle

The pattern that begins with As’ad ibn Zurarah and Uthman ibn Maz’un repeats itself, grave by grave, for the next thirteen centuries. A companion dies; the Prophet ﷺ or, later, the community, chooses Baqi’ as the resting place; the choice is remembered, retold, and becomes part of why the next family also chooses Baqi’. Within a generation, the scrubland behind the town had become the place every believer in Madinah wanted, above all other ground on earth, to be buried. That desire did not fade with the Prophet’s ﷺ death. If anything, it intensified, because Baqi’ now held him by proximity — his mosque a few hundred metres away — and it held, in ever-growing numbers, the men and women who had walked beside him. The story of Baqi’ is, in this sense, the story of Madinah’s living community slowly transferring itself, generation after generation, into the ground behind its own mosque, until the population of the dead there came to be spoken of not in the low hundreds, as at Uhud’s martyrs’ cemetery, but in the thousands — a distinct and much larger community of memory than any single battle could have produced.

The Prophet ﷺ and This Place

The Night Visits: “Peace Be Upon You, Abode of a People Who Are Believers”

Of all the reports connecting the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ personally to Baqi’, none is more tender, and none more securely authenticated, than the account of his night visits, preserved by his wife Aisha in Sahih Muslim 974. She reported that whenever it was her turn for the Messenger of Allah ﷺ to spend the night with her, he would rise toward the end of the night and go out to al-Baqi’, where he would say:

“Peace be upon you, abode of a people who are believers. What you were promised would come to you tomorrow, you receiving it after some delay; and God willing we shall join you. O Allah, grant forgiveness to the inhabitants of Baqi’ al-Gharqad.”

Grade: Authentic (sahih) — Sahih Muslim, Book of Funerals. This is the textual foundation for one of the most widespread devotional practices in the Islamic world: the greeting offered to the dead of any Muslim cemetery, and specifically the formula many pilgrims recite on entering Baqi’ itself. Related narrations of the same event describe the angel Jibril coming to the Prophet ﷺ at night and instructing him that Allah commanded him to go to Baqi’ and seek forgiveness for its people — material that belongs to the same broader narrative complex surrounding this hadith, though the precise sub-numbering of these variant wordings (974a, 974b, and related passages) differs slightly between print and online editions of Sahih Muslim, and should be checked against a specific edition before being quoted as a separate, independent report.

What makes this hadith remarkable is not only its wording but its picture of the Prophet’s ﷺ private devotional life. He did not merely permit visits to the graves of the believers; he sought them out himself, alone, at the darkest and quietest hour of the night, leaving the warmth of his own household to stand among the dead and ask forgiveness for them. A close variant of the same core report, paraphrased by the Shia source al-Islam.org, renders it: “Peace be upon you, O abode of the faithful! God willing, we should soon join you. O Allah, forgive the fellows of al-Baqi'” — a paraphrase of the same hadith rather than an independent report, which illustrates how widely and how consistently this act of the Prophet ﷺ is remembered across the different traditions of Islam that otherwise disagree sharply about matters connected to this same cemetery.

A note on authenticity: a separate set of reports exists in which the Prophet ﷺ sought and was refused permission to ask forgiveness for his own mother, while being granted permission to visit her grave. These reports concern Aminah bint Wahb’s grave near Abwa’ or Waddan, not Baqi’, and should not be conflated with the Baqi’ visitation hadith above, even though both concern the Prophet’s ﷺ practice of grave-visitation and forgiveness. The exact collection and number for the Aminah reports — commonly cited elsewhere as Sahih Muslim 976 — could not be independently confirmed in the research behind this guide and should be checked before being cited as a fixed reference.

The Prescribed Salam: A Formula, Not an Improvisation

The words the Prophet ﷺ used at Baqi’ were not a spontaneous utterance he happened to repeat; they became, through his repetition of them, a fixed and prescribed form of address to the dead — a salam offered to “a people who are believers,” an acknowledgement that the grave is not annihilation but a waiting, and a plea for forgiveness on their behalf. Generations of scholars have treated this hadith as the primary textual warrant for the practice of greeting the dead when visiting any Muslim graveyard, with the Baqi’-specific wording naturally reserved for Baqi’ itself and a more general form — commonly rendered “Peace be upon you, abode of a people who are believers and Muslims, and we will, if Allah wills, join you soon; I ask Allah for well-being for us and you” — used elsewhere. The distinction matters for visitors today: the exact words the Prophet ﷺ spoke at this specific cemetery carry a particular weight, because they were spoken about this specific ground, by the man for whom this ground would one day also serve as the resting place of members of his own family.

The Burial of Ibrahim and the Eclipse

Among the most sorrowful episodes connecting the Prophet ﷺ personally to Baqi’ is the death of his infant son Ibrahim ibn Muhammad, born to Maria al-Qibtiyya and traditionally dated to around 27 January 632 CE, in the tenth year after the Hijra. Ibrahim died in infancy. He was carried to al-Baqi’ on a small bier by the Prophet ﷺ himself, together with his uncle al-Abbas ibn Abd al-Muttalib and others; the Prophet ﷺ led the funeral prayer, the grave was filled with sand, water was sprinkled over it, and a marker was placed. The plot where Ibrahim was laid to rest took the name Zawra, and the Prophet’s ﷺ own daughters Zaynab and Umm Kulthum were later buried nearby, close to the grave of Uthman ibn Maz’un.

Popular accounts add that the Prophet ﷺ, watering the grave with his own hands, remarked that tombstones do neither good nor ill in themselves, but that they help console the living who are left behind. This saying is widely repeated in devotional literature about Ibrahim’s burial, but its exact wording and its chain of transmission could not be independently confirmed against a primary hadith collection during the research for this guide. It most likely originates in early biographical (sira or maghazi) literature — material such as Ibn Sa’d’s Tabaqat — rather than in a graded hadith of the six major collections.

A note on authenticity: the “tombstones do neither good nor ill” saying attributed to the Prophet ﷺ at Ibrahim’s grave should be treated as an unverified, likely sira-derived tradition rather than an authenticated hadith, pending confirmation of a specific isnad.

Ibrahim’s death coincided with a solar eclipse, and the people of Madinah, following the instinct common to pre-modern societies everywhere, connected the two events, concluding that the sun had darkened in mourning for the Prophet’s ﷺ son. The Prophet ﷺ corrected this directly. Sahih al-Bukhari 1043, in the Book of Eclipses, narrated by al-Mughira ibn Shu’ba, records:

“The sun eclipsed in the lifetime of Allah’s Messenger ﷺ on the day when (his son) Ibrahim died. So the people said that the sun had eclipsed because of the death of Ibrahim. Allah’s Messenger ﷺ said: ‘The sun and the moon do not eclipse because of the death or life (i.e., birth) of someone. When you see the eclipse, pray and invoke Allah.'”

Grade: Authentic (sahih) — Sahih al-Bukhari. This hadith is not itself a description of Ibrahim’s burial, but it is chronologically and thematically inseparable from the episode; it is the standard textual anchor historians and scholars use when discussing the death of Ibrahim, precisely because it captures the Prophet’s ﷺ theological correction of a natural human impulse to read cosmic significance into private grief — even his own.

A Family Cemetery: The Wives of the Prophet ﷺ

Over the following decades, Baqi’ became, among much else, the resting place of most of the Prophet’s ﷺ own wives. According to the sourced table compiled from historical and biographical material in Wikipedia’s article on al-Baqi cemetery, the following wives are reported buried there: Zaynab bint Khuzaymah, known as Umm al-Masakin, who died around 625 CE; Rayhana bint Zayd, who died around 631 CE; Maria al-Qibtiyya, mother of Ibrahim, who died around 637 CE; Zaynab bint Jahsh, who died in 640 or 641 CE; Sawdah bint Zam’ah, whose death is given variously as around 644 or 674 CE; Umm Habiba, who died in 664 CE; Safiyya bint Huyayy, who died between roughly 664 and 672 CE; Hafsa bint Umar, daughter of the second caliph, who died around 665 CE; Juwayriya bint al-Harith, who died in 676 CE; Aisha bint Abi Bakr, who died around 678 CE; and Umm Salama, whose death is given as around 680 or 682–683 CE.

Qur’anic Connections

“Do Not Think of Those Slain in the Path of Allah as Dead”

No single Qur’anic verse names Baqi’ directly, and readers should be cautious of any claim that a specific ayah was revealed about this cemetery by name — no such claim is well attested in the sources consulted for this guide. What the Qur’an offers instead is the broader theological framework within which the Prophet’s ﷺ practice of visiting Baqi’, greeting its dead, and asking forgiveness for them, makes sense.

﴿وَلَا تَحْسَبَنَّ الَّذِينَ قُتِلُوا فِي سَبِيلِ اللَّهِ أَمْوَاتًا ۚ بَلْ أَحْيَاءٌ عِندَ رَبِّهِمْ يُرْزَقُونَ﴾

“And never think of those who have been killed in the cause of Allah as dead. Rather, they are alive with their Lord, receiving provision.”
— Surah Aal Imran 3:169

This verse was revealed, according to the classical occasion-of-revelation (asbab al-nuzul) literature, in connection with the martyrs of the Battle of Uhud, not with Baqi’ specifically; it is included here because it is the verse most frequently invoked by scholars and preachers when explaining why the Prophet ﷺ treated the graves of Baqi’ as an “abode of a people who are believers” rather than as a place of simple absence. Classical commentators, including al-Tabari and Ibn Kathir in their respective tafsir works, read the verse as establishing a general Islamic principle about the nature of death for the believer: that physical death is not annihilation, and that the deceased retain a form of life and provision with their Lord, a state beyond ordinary human perception. The modern lesson many preachers draw from this verse, when applied to a visit to Baqi’, is that the cemetery should be approached not as a monument to loss but as a threshold — a place where the visitor stands closer, in a spiritual sense, to a living community than an ordinary field of the dead.

“To Allah We Belong, and to Him We Return”

﴿الَّذِينَ إِذَا أَصَابَتْهُم مُّصِيبَةٌ قَالُوا إِنَّا لِلَّهِ وَإِنَّا إِلَيْهِ رَاجِعُونَ﴾

“Who, when disaster strikes them, say, ‘Indeed we belong to Allah, and indeed to Him we will return.'”
— Surah al-Baqarah 2:156

This verse, familiar to virtually every Muslim as the words spoken on hearing of a death, frames the entire theology of visiting a cemetery like Baqi’. Classical tafsir treats it as part of a wider passage on patience in the face of loss of life, wealth and fruits — the trials by which Allah tests the believer’s faith. Asbab al-nuzul literature situates the broader passage in the general Madinan context of hardship facing the early Muslim community, rather than tying it to any single death or burial. Applied to Baqi’, the verse offers the visitor a vocabulary for the encounter with ten thousand unmarked graves: not resignation to meaninglessness, but an active acknowledgment that both the deceased and the visitor belong, ultimately, to the same source and the same return.

The Verse on Building and the Limits of Worldly Attachment

﴿وَمَا هٰذِهِ الْحَيَاةُ الدُّنْيَا إِلَّا لَهْوٌ وَلَعِبٌ ۚ وَإِنَّ الدَّارَ الْآخِرَةَ لَهِيَ الْحَيَوَانُ ۚ لَوْ كَانُوا يَعْلَمُونَ﴾

“And this worldly life is not but diversion and amusement. And indeed, the home of the Hereafter — that is the [eternal] life, if only they knew.”
— Surah al-Ankabut 29:64

This verse does not concern Baqi’ or grave-construction specifically, and no classical tafsir cited in the research behind this guide directly applies it to the later disputes over shrine-building at Baqi’. It is included here because Salafi-oriented scholarship on the subject of grave structures — treated fully in the Hadith References and Historical Development sections below — regularly cites the broader Qur’anic emphasis on the transience of worldly monuments as part of the theological background to their reading of the hadith evidence on levelling graves. Scholars who take a different view of grave-structures do not, on the whole, dispute this general Qur’anic emphasis on the transience of the world; the disagreement concerns a different, later, and much more specific body of hadith evidence, not this verse.

Al-Tawbah 9:84 and the Refusal of Prayer Over the Hypocrites

ﴼوَلَا تُصَلِّ عَلَىٰ أَحَدِن مِّنْهُم مَّاتَ أَبَدًا وَلَا تَقُمْ عَلَىٰ قَبْرِهِ ۖ إِنَّهُم كَفَرُوا بِاللّهِ وَرَسُولِهِ وَمَاتُوا وَهُمْ فَاسِقُونَﴽ

“And never pray [the funeral prayer] over any of them who has died and never stand at his grave. Indeed, they disbelieved in Allah and His Messenger and died while they were defiantly disobedient” (Qur’an 9:84).

This verse belongs to a cluster of revelations in Surat al-Tawbah addressing the hypocrites (munafiqun) of Madinah, and the classical asbab al-nuzul accounts connect it to the death of Abdullah ibn Ubayy, the most prominent of the Madinan hypocrites, whose funeral the Prophet ﷺ had initially agreed, out of a kind of forbearance, to attend before this verse instructed him otherwise. The connection to Baqi’ is indirect but instructive: while Abdullah ibn Ubayy himself was in fact buried at Baqi’ according to most historical accounts — the cemetery, as a communal burial ground for Madinah, received the bodies of hypocrites and true believers alike, since burial ground was a civic and practical matter, not solely a mark of religious commendation — this verse establishes that ordinary Muslim burial at Baqi’ does not, by itself, constitute a religious endorsement of the deceased’s standing before Allah. Commentators including Ibn Kathir explain the verse as drawing a sharp line specifically around the funeral prayer and the Prophet’s ﷺ personal act of standing at a grave in supplication, rather than around burial location as such. The modern lesson available here is a corrective one: a visitor moved by the sanctity of Baqi’ should not assume that mere burial within its boundary is itself a mark of righteousness. The ground holds believers of the very highest rank alongside, in at least this one documented case, a figure the Qur’an itself singles out for exclusion from the Prophet’s ﷺ personal prayer — a reminder that sanctity, in the Islamic framework, attaches to the deceased’s faith and deeds, not to their geographic resting place.

Al-Hashr 59:18 and Preparing for What Lies Ahead

ﴼيَا أَيُّهَا الَّذِينَ آمَنُوا اتَّقُوا اللّهَ وَلْتَنْظُرْ نَفْسٌ مَّا قَدَّمَتْ لِغَدٍ ۖ وَاتَّقُوا اللّهَ ۖ إِنَّ اللّهَ خَبِيرٌ بِمَا تَعْمَلُونَﴽ

“O you who have believed, fear Allah. And let every soul look to what it has put forth for tomorrow, and fear Allah. Indeed, Allah is Acquainted with what you do” (Qur’an 59:18).

This verse does not name Baqi’ or any cemetery directly, and no specific asbab al-nuzul account ties it to a burial or a grave; it belongs to a broader passage in Surat al-Hashr addressing the believers’ conduct and accountability. It is included in this guide’s Qur’anic connections not as a verse historically associated with the site, but because it is among the verses most commonly recited or reflected upon by visitors and scholars writing about graveyard visitation generally, precisely because of how directly it names the act every visitor to Baqi’ is implicitly engaged in: looking ahead to “what it has put forth for tomorrow.” Commentators including al-Qurtubi read “tomorrow” here as a reference to the Day of Judgment, and the verse’s placement in devotional literature about grave-visiting reflects a long tradition of using cemetery visits as an occasion for exactly this kind of self-accounting. The modern lesson is direct: standing among ten thousand people who have already faced the reckoning this verse describes is, for many visitors, the most natural possible occasion to ask themselves honestly what they have “put forth” so far, and what they still have time to change.

Hadith References: The Reports Connected to Baqi’, Consolidated and Graded

On the Prophet’s ﷺ Own Visits and the Salam

Sahih Muslim 974 — Grade: Authentic (sahih). Aisha’s report of the Prophet’s ﷺ night visits to Baqi’ and his salam: “Peace be upon you, abode of a people who are believers…” Discussed fully above. This is the single most important hadith connecting the Prophet ﷺ personally, and repeatedly, to this specific cemetery.

On the Eclipse and Ibrahim

Sahih al-Bukhari 1043 — Grade: Authentic (sahih). Al-Mughira ibn Shu’ba’s report of the Prophet’s ﷺ correction of the belief that the eclipse on the day of Ibrahim’s death was caused by his passing. Discussed fully above.

On Levelling Graves and the Sunni/Salafi Case for the Demolitions

The following hadiths form the textual core of the argument, held by Wahhabi and Salafi scholarship in particular, that raised graves and structures built over them must be levelled — an argument that would eventually be applied, in 1344 AH/1926 CE, to Baqi’ itself. They are presented here in full, with their gradings, as the primary sources the reader will need before reaching the Historical Development section’s account of the two demolitions.

Sahih Muslim 968 — Grade: Authentic (sahih). Thumamah ibn Shufayy reported: “We were with Fadalah ibn Ubayd in the land of the Romans at a place known as Rhodes. One of our companions passed away, so Fadalah ordered his grave to be levelled flat. Then Fadalah said: ‘I heard the Messenger of Allah ﷺ ordering them to be levelled.'”

Sahih Muslim 969 (969a) — Grade: Authentic (sahih). Abu al-Hayyaj al-Asadi reported that Ali ibn Abi Talib said to him: “Shall I not send you on the same mission as Allah’s Messenger ﷺ sent me? Do not leave an image without obliterating it, or a high/raised grave without levelling it.” This is the single most-cited textual anchor for the Wahhabi and Salafi position that structures raised over graves must be removed, precisely because the instruction is attributed to Ali ibn Abi Talib himself — the fourth caliph in Sunni reckoning and, notably, a figure venerated by Shia Muslims as the first Imam. The argument commonly drawn from this hadith runs as follows: if Ali — continuing an instruction he says came from the Prophet ﷺ himself — ordered graves levelled and images effaced, then a later ruler enforcing the same standard, even against graves belonging to the Prophet’s ﷺ own family, is simply applying an established and uncontested Sunnah evenhandedly. Shia scholarship, as discussed further below, does not dispute the authenticity of this hadith or its content; the disagreement concerns how it should be interpreted and applied.

A close parallel to this same report appears in Jami’ at-Tirmidhi 1049, Grade: Hasan (so graded by al-Tirmidhi himself). The same entry records al-Shafi’i’s own view: “I dislike that the grave be raised except to the extent that it is known to be a grave, so that it not be trodden upon or sat upon” — indicating that even within the Sunni tradition’s own foundational jurists, the ruling was understood as a dislike of excessive elevation rather than an absolute ban on any marker whatsoever.

Sahih Muslim 970 (970a) — Grade: Authentic (sahih). Jabir ibn Abdullah reported: “The Messenger of Allah ﷺ forbade that the grave should be plastered (cemented), that it be sat upon, or that a building be built over it.”

Sahih Muslim 972 — Grade: Authentic (sahih). Abu Marthad al-Ghanawi reported the Messenger of Allah ﷺ said: “Do not sit on graves, and do not pray facing towards them.”

Classical commentary on this body of hadith is itself divided on questions of degree. Al-Nawawi, commenting on Muslim 969 in his Sharh Sahih Muslim, states that the Sunnah is not to raise a grave much above ground level nor to make it convex — a grave should be raised approximately one handspan and then levelled — attributing this view to al-Shafi’i and those who followed him. Al-Qadi Iyad, however, is reported as noting that most other scholars, including Imam Malik, held that the best practice is in fact to make the grave convex or rounded, rather than perfectly flat. Al-Shawkani, in Nayl al-Awtar, interprets the command to “level a raised grave” as directed against building graves up to distinguish the virtuous dead from others, rather than as a wholesale prohibition on any visible marker. Modern Salafi scholarship, represented in sources such as Abu Khadeejah and Salafi Publications, summarizes the ruling in three points: it is forbidden (haram) to build over graves, to elevate them, or to cement them; forbidden to sit on graves; and forbidden to pray facing them. The Saudi Permanent Committee for Islamic Research and Fatwas (al-Lajna al-Da’ima), whose membership has included Shaykh Ibn Baz, is cited stating that building over graves is “a disagreeable heresy (bid’a)… and leads to polytheism (shirk),” and that it is therefore incumbent upon the relevant authorities to remove such structures.

Narrations Whose Authenticity Requires a Caution

Several stories associated with Baqi’ in popular retelling do not rest on the same firm textual footing as the hadiths above, and honesty to the reader requires saying so plainly rather than passing them off as equally authoritative:

• The claim that Uthman ibn Maz’un was, as a matter of settled hadith, the first Muslim buried at Baqi’ — see the discussion above; al-Albani states nothing authentic establishes this specifically (Silsilat al-Ahadith al-Sahihah, 7/165).
• The saying attributed to the Prophet ﷺ at Ibrahim’s grave that tombstones “do neither good nor ill, but help appease the living” — likely sira-derived, not independently confirmed against a graded hadith.
• The claim that the name “Jannat” derives from a specific hadith promising early entry to Paradise for the people of Baqi’ al-Gharqad — no checkable hadith reference located.
• A narration circulated online stating that “17,000 will rise from Baqi’ and enter Paradise without reckoning,” attributed to al-Haythami’s Majma’ al-Zawa’id — this appeared only in a low-authority social media post during research for this guide, with no grading given and no primary-source confirmation obtained. It should be treated as unverified pending direct confirmation against the primary text.

A note on authenticity: none of the four items above should be repeated to visitors as established hadith. They circulate widely in popular devotional literature about Baqi’, but the evidentiary standard this guide holds itself to — an exact collection and number, with a grading — is not met by any of them on the sources available.

Historical Development: Baqi’ Through Fourteen Centuries

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

In the years immediately following the Prophet’s ﷺ death in 11 AH (632 CE), Baqi’ continued to receive the community’s dead exactly as it had before: companions, family members, and, in time, the caliphs themselves came to rest here, without domes, without inscriptions, and without any structure beyond a simple raised mound and perhaps a marking stone. Abu Bakr and Umar ibn al-Khattab, the first two caliphs, were both buried not at Baqi’ but inside the Prophet’s ﷺ own house, beside him — a separate and distinct burial arrangement from the cemetery under discussion here, and one the reader should not confuse with Baqi’ itself.

The third caliph, Uthman ibn Affan, was assassinated in 35 AH (656 CE) amid the civil unrest of the first fitna. Reports state he was initially intended for burial in Baqi’ proper, but local resistance and the volatility of the moment meant he was instead buried in the adjoining Jewish cemetery known as Hash Kawkab — ground that lay just outside Baqi’s boundary at the time. This single, contested burial would go on to reshape the cemetery’s geography for the rest of its history, as described in the next section.

The Umayyad Period (41–132 AH / 661–750 CE): The First Dome

The first Umayyad caliph, Mu’awiyah ibn Abi Sufyan, incorporated the adjoining Jewish burial ground — the place where Uthman had been laid to rest — into Baqi’ proper, specifically in order to honour Uthman’s memory. This was the cemetery’s first significant physical expansion, and it carried a lasting consequence: the Umayyads went on to build the first dome ever erected at Baqi’, over Uthman’s grave. Before this point, so far as the sources allow us to say, the cemetery had contained no built structures at all — only mounds of earth and simple stones. The construction of Uthman’s dome under Umayyad patronage therefore marks the beginning of a building tradition at Baqi’ that would continue, expand, and eventually provoke controversy for the next twelve centuries.

The Medieval Period: The Dome of the Imams

At some point in the medieval period, a second and much larger dome was raised over a shared family enclosure that had grown up around the graves of Abbas ibn Abd al-Muttalib — the Prophet’s ﷺ uncle — and, in time, several of the Prophet’s ﷺ direct descendants through his daughter Fatimah and his son-in-law Ali: Hasan ibn Ali, Ali ibn al-Husayn (known as Zayn al-Abidin), Muhammad al-Baqir, and Ja’far al-Sadiq. In Twelver Shia reckoning these last four are, respectively, the second, fourth, fifth and sixth Imams, and this shared enclosure — commonly called the Maqbarat al-A’imma, the Tomb of the Imams, or referred to collectively as the Biqa’ al-Baqi’, the Monuments of al-Baqi’ — became the single most important Shia pilgrimage site within the cemetery, and arguably within the whole of Madinah, before 1926.

The exact date of this dome’s construction is not settled in the sources. One account attributes a large dome over these graves to a figure named Majd al-Mulk al-Barawistani in the fifth century AH (eleventh century CE); a separate account, from the scholar al-Mutri, dates its construction to the period of the Abbasid caliph al-Nasir li-Din Allah, placing it in roughly the late sixth century AH (twelfth century CE). A further source states that the structure — described there as a “maqam” — was built in 668 AH (1269–70 CE) by the Mamluk sultan al-Malik al-Zahir Baibars, with subsequent expansion under later Mamluk and Ottoman patronage. These dates cannot be fully reconciled against one another with the evidence available, and this guide presents the range — roughly the eleventh through the thirteenth century CE — as an open question in the scholarship, rather than asserting a single fixed date that the sources do not, in fact, agree on.

An Eyewitness from 579 AH (1183–84 CE): Ibn Jubayr

The Andalusian traveller Ibn Jubayr visited Madinah during his celebrated journey, the Rihla, and left a description of Baqi’ that is among the earliest detailed eyewitness accounts available. As preserved in later citation: “Al-Baqi’ is situated to the east of Madina. You enter it through the gate known as the gate of al-Baqi’. As you enter, the first grave you see on your left is that of Safiya, the Prophet’s aunt, and further still is the grave of Malik bin Anas, the Imam of Madina. On his grave is raised a small dome.” Ibn Jubayr further described the large dome near the cemetery’s entrance, covering the graves of the Imams and Abbas, as “very tall,” with the graves inside raised above ground level and set within wooden cenotaph frames (darihs) decorated with marble reliefs and nail-work. His account confirms that by the late twelfth century CE, Baqi’ contained substantial, elaborately decorated architecture — a picture very different from the flat, featureless ground a visitor sees today.

Al-Samhudi (d. 911 AH/1533 CE), the great historian of Madinah and author of Wafa’ al-Wafa bi-Akhbar Dar al-Mustafa, records that As’ad ibn Zurarah was the first companion buried at Baqi’, dying nine months after the Hijra — a citation obtained only at second hand in the research behind this guide, and the reader should understand that a fuller architectural account from al-Samhudi’s own text was not directly available for this article. The fourteenth-century traveller Ibn Battuta likewise described the graves of Safiyyah, Malik ibn Anas, and Ibrahim ibn Muhammad at Baqi’, and is cited alongside al-Samhudi as a source describing the great dome over the Imams’ graves.

The Ottoman Period (923–1337 AH / 1517–1918 CE): Reconstruction After the First Demolition

The Ottoman period at Baqi’ is best understood in two halves, divided by the event treated fully in the next section — the first demolition of 1220 AH/1806 CE. After that destruction, the Ottoman Sultan Mahmud II ordered restoration of the sacred sites of the Hijaz, and reconstruction proceeded from 1818 CE onward under his successors — described in one source as “Caliph Abdul Majid and his successors, Caliphs Abdul Hamid and Mohammed” — with further major renovations recorded in 1848 and 1860 CE, funded partly by donations collected at the Prophet’s ﷺ tomb and reportedly costing close to £700,000, an immense sum for the period.

The results of this Ottoman rebuilding were substantial and are well documented by outside observers. The British explorer Sir Richard Francis Burton, who visited Madinah in 1853 disguised as an Afghan Muslim, reported fifty-five mosques and shrines standing at the site after the Ottoman reconstruction. An anonymous English traveller visiting in 1877–78 described Madinah itself as “a small beautiful city resembling Istanbul,” noting its white walls, golden slender minarets, and green fields. The Egyptian official Ibrahim Rif’at Pasha, who travelled with the Hajj caravan between 1901 and 1908 and later authored Mir’at al-Haramayn, described sixteen domes marking individual and collective graves at Baqi’ in this late Ottoman period — a picture of a cemetery rich with built memory, on the very eve of its second and far more thorough destruction.

The First Demolition: 1220 AH / 1806 CE

At the turn of the nineteenth century, the Emirate of Diriyah — the First Saudi State — allied with the reform movement founded by Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, extended its control over the Hijaz, taking Makkah and Madinah by 1806. The doctrine driving this movement held that the building of shrines and structures over graves constitutes an innovation (bid’a) bordering on, or leading to, idolatry (shirk) — the same doctrinal position, resting on the same body of hadith evidence discussed in the previous section, that would later be invoked at far greater scale in 1926. Acting on this conviction, the Saudi-Wahhabi authorities demolished a large number of religious buildings across the Hijaz — tombs, mausoleums and mosques both inside and outside Baqi’ — razing the structures and stripping their decorations and contents.

This first campaign was accompanied by broader religious and political restrictions. The Saudi authorities barred Iraqi and Iranian pilgrims from the Hajj in 1805, and Syrian and Egyptian pilgrims in 1806–07; musical instruments and the ceremonial mahmal palanquins traditionally carried with the Hajj caravans were also banned. The Swiss explorer Johann Ludwig Burckhardt, who visited Madinah in 1815 — after this first wave of destruction — observed the ruined domes and remarked, with evident disapproval, that the people of Madinah were “niggardly” in honouring their “celebrated countrymen,” a comment that captures an outsider’s surprise at finding the graves of famous companions left bare.

This first Saudi state did not last. Ottoman Sultan Mahmud II dispatched the governor of Egypt, Muhammad Ali Pasha, to retake the Hijaz, launching the Ottoman–Wahhabi War of 1811 to 1818. Muhammad Ali’s son, Ibrahim Pasha, defeated the Saudi-Wahhabi forces at the Battle of Diriyah in 1818, bringing the First Saudi State to an end and clearing the way for the Ottoman-sponsored rebuilding described above — a rebuilding that would stand for just over a century, until history repeated itself.

The Second Demolition: 8 Shawwal 1344 AH / 21 April 1926 CE

The Political Context

The House of Saud, under Abdulaziz ibn Saud, regained control of the Hijaz in 1924–1925, in the process that would culminate in the Kingdom of Hejaz and Nejd and, eventually, modern Saudi Arabia. Sources differ slightly on the precise year most commonly cited for the second demolition — some giving 1925, others 1926 — but the great majority of scholarly and encyclopedic accounts converge on the specific date of 8 Shawwal, corresponding to 21 April, and place it in 1344 AH, which corresponds to 1926 CE. Some Shia sources instead date the same event to 1345 AH, corresponding to 1925 CE on a different reckoning. This guide follows the date most consistently attested across the wider range of sources consulted: 8 Shawwal 1344 AH, 21 April 1926 CE. The reader visiting other accounts of this event should be aware that the one-year discrepancy exists and is not a simple error on either side; it reflects genuine variation in how different sources have converted between the Hijri and Gregorian calendars for this specific episode.

The Fatwa

King Ibn Saud authorised the demolition on the religious ruling of Qadi Abdullah ibn Bulayhid. At Ibn Bulayhid’s request, a group of fifteen scholars of Madinah were convened and unanimously issued a fatwa shortly before the demolition, condemning the construction of mausoleums over graves and declaring their destruction to be religiously required. The central legal argument of this fatwa rested on the same hadith evidence set out in the Hadith References section above — above all, Ali ibn Abi Talib’s instruction to Abu al-Hayyaj, recorded in Sahih Muslim 969, in which Ali reports that the Prophet ﷺ himself had commanded that no raised grave be left unlevelled. The fatwa extended this specific instruction into a general legal conclusion: that building any structure over a grave is prohibited by the consensus (ijma’) of the scholars, and that existing structures — including those standing for centuries over the graves of companions, the Prophet’s ﷺ family, and the Imams venerated by Shia Muslims — were therefore obligated to be removed rather than merely permitted to remain.

Execution

The demolition itself was carried out by the Ikhwan — “the Brothers” — the Wahhabi religious militia that formed the military backbone of Ibn Saud’s movement. Reports state that the labourers who carried out the physical work of demolition were paid 1,000 Majidi Riyal for it. The destruction was described as comprehensive: even the simplest of gravestones were destroyed, not merely the larger domes and mausoleums. The British convert and travel writer Eldon Rutter was an eyewitness to the aftermath, and his description remains the most vivid contemporary account available:

“All over the cemetery, nothing was to be seen but little indefinite mounds of earth and stones, pieces of timber, iron bars, blocks of stone, and a broken rubble of cement and bricks, strewn about.”

Rutter compared the effect to an earthquake. Where sixteen domes had stood in the late Ottoman period according to Ibrahim Rif’at Pasha’s account, and fifty-five mosques and shrines according to Burton’s earlier count across the wider Hijaz, there was now, within days, nothing raised above ground level at all.

What Was Destroyed

The structures destroyed in this single, coordinated campaign — synthesised from the available historical accounts — included the domes associated with Abdullah ibn Abd al-Muttalib and Aminah (the Prophet’s ﷺ father and mother, whose actual graves lie elsewhere, but whose memorial structures were included in this Hijaz-wide campaign); Isma’il ibn Ja’far, the eldest son of the sixth Imam Ja’far al-Sadiq; the graves of Abbas ibn Abd al-Muttalib and Hamza ibn Abd al-Muttalib, the Prophet’s ﷺ uncles (Hamza’s grave itself lies at Uhud, not at Baqi’, which illustrates how this campaign extended across the whole of the Hijaz and not to Baqi’ alone); the graves of Ibrahim ibn Muhammad, Malik ibn Anas, and Uthman ibn Affan; and the shared shrine of the four Imams — Hasan ibn Ali, Ali ibn al-Husayn, Muhammad al-Baqir, and Ja’far al-Sadiq — along with, in the broadest estimate, the markers of some seven thousand people reported to have had ties to the Prophet ﷺ. The reader should note carefully that several of the named domes destroyed in this campaign — those associated with Abdullah and Aminah, and the grave of Hamza — were not physically located within Baqi’s own walls; they belonged to the wider wave of shrine demolitions carried out across the Hijaz in the same period, and should not be pictured as standing inside the cemetery gate.

The Sunni and Salafi Textual Case for the Demolitions

The hadiths that furnish the religious reasoning behind both demolitions have already been presented in full in the Hadith References section above, and are summarised here in the specific context of how they were applied to Baqi’. The core argument, as understood by the scholars who issued the 1926 fatwa and by Wahhabi and Salafi scholarship more broadly, runs in three parts. First, Sahih Muslim 969 records Ali ibn Abi Talib instructing Abu al-Hayyaj al-Asadi to leave no image unobliterated and no raised grave unlevelled, explicitly stating that this was the same mission the Prophet ﷺ had sent him on. Second, Sahih Muslim 970 records the Prophet ﷺ forbidding that graves be plastered, sat upon, or built over. Third, Jami’ at-Tirmidhi 1049, graded hasan, preserves a parallel version of the Ali/Abu al-Hayyaj report together with al-Shafi’i’s own gloss disliking any elevation of a grave beyond what is needed to mark it as a grave.

From this textual base, the argument concludes that a ruler with the authority to enforce Islamic law is not merely permitted but religiously obligated to remove structures built over graves, wherever they stand and whoever is buried beneath them — a conclusion the 1926 fatwa applied without exception, to the graves of companions, wives of the Prophet ﷺ, scholars, and the Imams alike. Proponents of this view have historically emphasised that the demolition was, in their understanding, an act of even-handed consistency rather than sectarian targeting: the same standard, they argue, was applied to the grave of Uthman ibn Affan — the third Sunni caliph — as to the shared shrine of the Shia Imams, and to the grave of Malik ibn Anas, founder of a major Sunni school of law, as to that of Abbas ibn Abd al-Muttalib. On this reading, the fact that Ali ibn Abi Talib himself is the source of the foundational hadith is treated as significant: a figure honoured as the first Imam in Shia belief is, in this argument, also the direct transmitter of the command later used to justify removing the shrine built over his own descendants’ graves.

The Objections: Interpretation, Politics, and Grief

A Different Reading of the Same Hadith

Shia scholarship does not, on the whole, dispute the authenticity of Sahih Muslim 969 or the other hadiths cited above; the disagreement concerns their interpretation and the scope of their application. The Shia scholar Mohammad Jafar Tabasi has argued that the shrines standing over the Imams’ graves at Baqi’ had been venerated for many centuries without any Sunni scholar of the intervening period treating them as religious innovation — and that if the hadith evidence truly and unambiguously forbade any structure whatsoever over a grave, it is historically difficult to explain why centuries of Sunni scholarship, including the Ottoman state itself, tolerated, funded, and repeatedly repaired these same structures. WikiShia’s article on “Building over graves” states that, historically, the construction of structures over graves “was not encountered with any objection from the Prophet ﷺ or the [companions or their successors],” and traces the origin of the modern prohibitionist position specifically to the scholar Ibn Taymiyyah (d. 728 AH/1328 CE) and his student Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyyah (d. 751 AH/1350 CE), a position that Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab is said to have adopted and, in the view of these Shia sources, extended further still. A doctoral thesis consulted in the research behind this guide notes that earlier Hanbali scholars did not, as a body, forbid the construction of structures over graves; that Ibn Taymiyyah himself acknowledged a diversity of opinion within the Hanbali school even while arguing personally for prohibition; and that Ibn Abd al-Wahhab went further than Ibn Taymiyyah by disallowing even touching or wiping the graves themselves.

On the specific reading of Sahih Muslim 969, the Shia position holds that “levelling a high grave” addresses excessive, ostentatious elevation of the earthen mound itself — restoring it to the modest, customary height of roughly a handspan — and is not a categorical prohibition on constructing a modest marker, canopy, or mausoleum to preserve the memory of the dead. This is, notably, close to al-Nawawi’s own reading of the same hadith within the Sunni tradition, discussed in the Hadith References section above, which likewise understood the ruling as a limitation on excessive height rather than an absolute ban on any structure — an area of real, if partial, overlap between traditions that are often assumed to be in total opposition on this question.

A Political Reading

The Islamic-studies scholar Adeel Mohammadi, in an academic paper titled “The destruction of Jannat al-Baqi’: A case of Wahhabi Iconoclasm,” has argued that the demolition carried a political dimension alongside its theological one: a ruler’s duty to “enjoin good and forbid wrong” can, in practice, only be exercised through political power, and the demolition therefore also served to announce the newly consolidated authority of the Al Saud and Najdi state over the Hijaz to the wider Muslim world. Because Baqi’ contained the graves of the Shia Imams, Mohammadi’s analysis suggests the act could additionally be read — whether or not this was its primary intent — as a signal of the new state’s position relative to Shia religious claims in the two holy cities. This is offered here as one scholar’s academic analysis of motive, not as an agreed historical fact about the intentions of Ibn Saud or the fifteen scholars who signed the fatwa; readers should understand it as an interpretive argument advanced in the secondary literature, to be weighed alongside the religious reasoning set out in the fatwa itself.

Yawm al-Hadm: The Shia Commemoration

Many Shia communities annually commemorate 8 Shawwal as Yawm al-Hadm, “the Day of Demolition,” known especially in South Asian usage as Yaum-e Gham, “the Day of Sorrow” or “Day of Mourning.” In Pakistan, the organisation Tehreek Nafaz-e-Fiqh-e-Jafariya has organised a formal annual observance of the “Demolition Day of Jannat al-Baqi'” on this date, explicitly framed by its organisers as a protest against oppression in general terms rather than against any specific individual or political party. The commemoration functions, for the communities that observe it, as an act of collective memory directed at the loss of tangible, visitable shrines connected to figures central to Shia religious identity — the Imams, and Fatimah al-Zahra, whose disputed burial place is treated fully below.

Diplomatic Protests and International Reaction

The 1926 demolition provoked a wide diplomatic and popular reaction well beyond the borders of the new Saudi state. Iran’s National Consultative Assembly, the Majles-e Shora-ye Melli, formally discussed the events and dispatched a delegation to the Hijaz to investigate; that delegation reached the region in May 1926 and, according to an Iranian-sourced account, reported that “the first news that had a lightning effect on us was that all holy places including Jannat al-Baqi’ have also been bulldozed.” Protests and expressions of grief were reported from Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Iran, Turkey, Afghanistan, Iraq, China, Mongolia, and India, with correspondence sent to Saudi authorities warning of the consequences of the act. Leading figures of the Shia clerical establishment in Najaf and Qom, including Sayyid Abu al-Hasan al-Isfahani and Shaykh Abd al-Karim Ha’iri — the founder of the Qom seminary, who is reported to have wept while teaching upon hearing the news — took strong public positions of condemnation. Rallies were held annually thereafter in India, Pakistan, Iran, and the United States.

The reaction was not confined to Shia communities alone. According to the Encyclopaedia Islamica, “prominent Sunni theologians and intellectuals have condemned the ‘unfit’ situation of the Baqi cemetery,” though Saudi authorities have to date rejected all requests for restoration. In 1982, Iranian religious scholars and political figures made renewed efforts toward restoring the cemetery and its shrines, again without success, according to the same source.

A separate strand of Indian Muslim political activity is sometimes connected to this episode. The Khilafat Movement, a pan-Islamic campaign organised by Indian Muslims between roughly 1919 and 1924 to defend the Ottoman Caliphate’s custodianship of Makkah, Madinah and Jerusalem, had by the time of the 1926 demolition already seen its central political objective collapse: the Ottoman Sultanate was abolished in November 1922, and the Caliphate itself was abolished by the Grand National Assembly in Ankara on 3 March 1924, roughly two years before the Baqi’ demolition took place. The organisational network that had powered the Khilafat Movement — the Central Khilafat Committee — is described in at least one source as having continued to mobilise opposition to Ibn Saud’s actions in the Hijaz through the mid-1920s, including sending its own delegation and organising protest meetings after the Baqi’ and Jannat al-Mu’alla demolitions. This specific connection, however, rests in the research behind this guide on a single Shia-affiliated source, and was not independently corroborated in an academic secondary history of the Khilafat Movement’s later phase. The reader should treat the link between the well-documented Khilafat Movement of 1919–1924 and the specific 1926 Baqi’ demolition as suggestive rather than firmly established, pending further primary-source verification.

The Argument from Heritage

Beyond the specifically religious and political dimensions of the dispute, a distinct argument has been made — by historians, heritage advocates, and ordinary pilgrims of multiple traditions — that the destruction of Baqi’s domes and markers represents an irrecoverable loss of tangible Islamic heritage, independent of any position on the underlying theological question of grave-structures. On this argument, the loss is not only that individual Shia or Sufi devotional practices lost their physical focus, but that centuries of Islamic architectural history — the work of Umayyad, Fatimid or Ayyubid-era, Mamluk, and Ottoman patrons, recorded by eyewitnesses from Ibn Jubayr to Burton to Rif’at Pasha — was erased in a matter of days, leaving later generations of Muslims and non-Muslims alike unable to see, with their own eyes, the material record of how earlier Muslims across fourteen centuries had chosen to honour their dead. This argument does not require accepting the Shia position on the underlying jurisprudence, and versions of it have been voiced by Sunni heritage scholars and international observers who take no position on the fatwa’s legal merits; it is presented here as a distinct strand of the wider objection to the demolitions, sitting alongside, but separate from, the specifically theological and political arguments described above.

Architecture: What Stood, and What Remains

The Pre-1926 Cemetery

Before the second demolition, Baqi’ contained, by Ibrahim Rif’at Pasha’s count, some sixteen domes, marking both individual graves — Uthman ibn Affan, Malik ibn Anas, Ibrahim ibn Muhammad, Halimah al-Sa’diyyah — and collective enclosures, above all the large dome over the shared shrine of Abbas and the four Imams. Ibn Jubayr’s twelfth-century description of that great dome recorded graves raised above ground level within wooden cenotaph frames decorated with marble reliefs and nail-work, suggesting a level of architectural investment comparable to major shrine complexes elsewhere in the Islamic world. Halimah al-Sa’diyyah, the Prophet’s ﷺ wet-nurse and foster-mother, who died around 9 AH (630 CE), was marked in the pre-1925 cemetery by a low square enclosure, though her exact original grave location is not certainly known even from the pre-demolition sources.

What Is There Today

Following the 1926 demolition, no domes, buildings, or individually labelled tombs remain at Baqi’. What the visitor sees today is a flat, open field of sandy earth, broken by small unmarked mounds and simple stone markers, with no inscriptions distinguishing one grave from another beyond, in some places, an anecdotal and unverified convention reported by visitors — that a single stone denotes a male grave and two stones a female grave. This specific claim rests only on a single 2026 visitor video and no classical or contemporary scholarly text, and should be treated as folk practice rather than established convention.

The cemetery today retains three historical gates — north, east, and the main western entrance used for both visitor access and current burials — though gate numbering in the surrounding mosque complex has shifted repeatedly with successive renovations of Masjid an-Nabawi, and any specific gate number given in a travel guide should be treated as liable to change. A general information display near the entrance stairs presents background on the Prophet’s ﷺ family tree for visitors, and a fenced-off area restricts close approach to the graves of the Imams’ enclosure and to the grave of Umm al-Banin, the mother of Abbas ibn Ali, a further indication that the cemetery’s internal geography — even stripped of its domes — has not been entirely levelled into complete uniformity.

What Was Lost: A Summary

Set against the pre-1926 picture, what was lost architecturally at Baqi’ was not a single monument but an entire visual and devotional landscape: sixteen domes of varying age and craftsmanship, spanning Umayyad, medieval, Mamluk and Ottoman patronage; carved cenotaph frames with marble reliefs; individually marked graves for companions, wives, and scholars whose locations pilgrims of every century from Ibn Jubayr to Rif’at Pasha had been able to name and visit by sight. What replaced this landscape was uniformity — a levelled field in which the location of any specific grave, including that of the Prophet’s ﷺ own daughters, wives, and the Imams venerated by Shia Muslims, is now a matter of general reports and traditional memory rather than a marker a visitor can stand before and read.

What the Marketplace and Houses of Bayn al-Haramayn Once Were

Before the twentieth-century expansions of Masjid an-Nabawi swallowed it entirely, the plaza now known as Bayn al-Haramayn — the marble expanse a visitor crosses today to reach Baqi’ from the mosque — was a living quarter of the city, not empty ceremonial space. Historical accounts describe the houses of the Ahl al-Bayt standing in this area, along with an ordinary marketplace serving the needs of Madinah’s residents. To walk from the mosque to the cemetery in, say, the Abbasid or Mamluk period was to walk through a functioning neighbourhood: the smell of food, the calls of merchants, children in the street, before arriving at the quiet of the burial ground beyond. The transformation of this space into an open marble plaza, part of the twentieth-century Saudi expansions of the mosque, has altered the sensory experience of approaching Baqi’ considerably: what was once a walk through a living town is now a walk across an open, sun-blasted square, with the scale and grandeur of the modern mosque complex visible on one side and the flat cemetery visible ahead. Neither experience is more or less authentic than the other; they simply belong to different centuries of the same city’s life, and the modern visitor should understand that the approach to Baqi’ has itself been transformed by the same broad historical process — expansion, renovation, and the clearing of what stood before — that transformed the cemetery’s own interior in 1806 and 1926.

The Function of a Cemetery Beside a Mosque

It is worth asking directly why Baqi’ sits where it does — immediately beside the mosque, rather than at a distance from the town as many cemeteries in the ancient and medieval world were sited, often for reasons of ritual purity or simple practicality. The answer lies in the pattern established from the very earliest burials discussed above: Madinah in the first years after the Hijra was a small oasis town, and the scrubland behind the inhabited quarter was simply the nearest available open ground suited to burial. There was no deliberate town-planning decision to place a cemetery beside a mosque in the way a modern planner might design such a relationship; the mosque and the cemetery both grew, organically, at the edges of a town whose centre was the Prophet’s ﷺ own house and the adjoining place of prayer. Over time, as the mosque expanded through successive Umayyad, Abbasid, Mamluk, Ottoman, and Saudi renovations, it grew steadily closer to the cemetery that had once been simply “the scrubland out past the houses,” until the two now stand separated only by the width of a marble plaza. The proximity a modern pilgrim experiences — praying in the world’s second-holiest mosque, then walking a few hundred metres to stand before ten thousand graves — is therefore not a symbolic architectural statement designed by any single ruler, but the accumulated outcome of fourteen centuries of a living city’s growth around two fixed points that happened, from the very first years of Islam, to sit close together.

Baqi’ in Comparison with Other Sacred Islamic Cemeteries

Placed alongside the other great cemeteries of early Islamic history — Jannat al-Mu’alla in Makkah, where Khadijah bint Khuwaylid rests; the martyrs’ cemetery at the foot of Mount Uhud; the vast City of the Dead in Cairo, with its Mamluk-era mausolea still standing; or the shrine cities of Najaf and Karbala in Iraq, where Ali ibn Abi Talib and Husayn ibn Ali are buried beneath elaborately maintained golden domes that remain intact to this day — Baqi’ stands out for a single, stark reason: it is the one major site among these where the built commemorative tradition was twice deliberately dismantled by the very authorities who controlled it, rather than preserved, expanded, or left to decay naturally. Najaf and Karbala, under different political authorities across the centuries, retained and even elaborated their shrine architecture; the City of the Dead in Cairo has been continuously maintained as a monument; Jannat al-Mu’alla, though comparatively modest, has not undergone anything resembling the scale of the 1926 demolition. Baqi’s bareness today is therefore not the product of neglect, decay, or the simple passage of time acting on any cemetery — it is the specific, documented outcome of a religious and political decision, taken twice, by identifiable authorities, on identifiable dates, for reasons those authorities set out in writing. This comparison matters because it corrects a misconception that a first-time visitor might otherwise form: that Baqi’ simply “never had” the kind of architecture found at Najaf or Karbala. It had such architecture, in comparable if not always equal splendour, for well over a thousand years, and lost it not gradually but in two sudden, deliberate campaigns whose full history this guide has set out above.

Archaeological Findings

No published, peer-reviewed archaeological excavation of Jannat al-Baqi’ was located in the research behind this guide. This absence should be stated plainly rather than filled in with speculation: unlike some other Islamic historical sites where controlled excavation has produced dated findings, Baqi’ remains, so far as publicly available academic literature shows, an active cemetery that has not been the subject of a published archaeological study examining its stratigraphy, its pre-Islamic use, or the physical remains of the demolished structures described above. The one physically documented episode resembling an archaeological observation comes not from a scientific excavation but from a historical account: during the caliphate of Mu’awiyah, decades after the martyrs of Uhud were interred at that separate site, a watercourse project required some graves to be reopened, and witnesses described the remarkably preserved state of the bodies found — a report that belongs properly to the Uhud martyrs’ cemetery, not to Baqi’, and should not be conflated with it. No comparable account exists in the sources for Baqi’ itself. Given the religious sensitivities and the site’s continued active use for burial, formal archaeological investigation of Baqi’ is unlikely to be undertaken in the foreseeable future, and this guide makes no claim beyond what the available published record actually shows: that no such findings currently exist in the public academic literature.

Stories of the Companions Buried at Baqi’

Uthman ibn Maz’un: The First of the Muhajirun

Uthman ibn Maz’un’s story has already been told in outline above, in the account of the first-burial dispute. It is worth returning to him here for what his life, not only his death, tells us. He was among the earliest converts to Islam in Makkah, a man remembered for a personal asceticism unusual even among the early Muslims — reports describe him considering, and being gently discouraged by the Prophet ﷺ from adopting, a life of celibacy and permanent fasting, on the grounds that the Prophet’s ﷺ own example of a balanced life was the better model. He migrated to Madinah, fought at Badr, and died in 2 AH. The Prophet’s ﷺ words over his grave — “This is the grave of our predecessor” — mark him, whatever the precise historical priority over As’ad ibn Zurarah, as a man whose death opened a category: the first of the emigrants to be received by this specific ground.

As’ad ibn Zurarah: The Ansari Who May Have Been First

As’ad ibn Zurarah’s death nine months after the Hijra places him, on the account given by al-Samhudi, before Uthman ibn Maz’un in strict chronology. He was a senior figure of the Khazraj and one of the small number of Madinans who had travelled to Makkah before the Hijra and pledged themselves to the Prophet ﷺ at both Pledges of al-‘Aqaba — men whose commitment preceded the Hijra itself and who, in a real sense, made the Hijra possible by preparing a community in Madinah ready to receive the Prophet ﷺ. His death from a throat ailment, so soon after the community’s arrival in its new home, must have been received as an early and sobering loss — the first close bereavement of a community that had only just begun to imagine its future in this city.

Uthman ibn Affan at al-Baqi: A Caliph Denied His Own Cemetery

No burial at al-Baqi’ carries more political weight than that of Uthman ibn Affan, the third caliph, who was killed in his own house in Madinah in Dhu al-Hijjah 35 AH (656 CE) and then, according to the great majority of the classical reports, kept from the very cemetery he had spent twelve years governing over. The circumstances of his death and burial are recorded by al-Tabari, Ibn Sa’d, al-Baladhuri and later al-Samhudi, and while all four agree on the broad shape of events, they disagree, sometimes sharply, on details as basic as who carried his body, who led the prayer over him, and what kind of ground he was finally laid in. Those disagreements are old and unresolved, and they are reported here as such rather than smoothed into a single tidy account.

The Siege and the Killing

Uthman’s final months were spent besieged inside his own home by aggrieved provincials and Madinan malcontents who accused him of nepotism and misgovernance. Al-Tabari’s history places the siege at somewhere between forty and forty-nine days depending on the chain of transmission being followed, tightening in its final stage after most of the pilgrims bound for Hajj had already left Madinah, which the besiegers seem to have judged as their best window before a relief force could arrive (al-Tabari’s History of the Prophets and Kings, via archive.org). Abd-Allah ibn al-Zubayr, and separately Hasan ibn Ali and Husayn ibn Ali, are named among those who stood guard at the gates during parts of the siege, an effort that did not, in the end, prevent the rebels from breaking through. Uthman was killed on a Friday; al-Tabari records the date as 18 Dhu al-Hijjah, though he is explicit that there is disagreement even over the year, since “the great majority” place the killing in the year 35 AH, corresponding to 17 June 656 CE, while a minority tradition pushes it to year 36 (7 June 657 CE) (al-Tabari, via archive.org). This is a Scholarly opinion split within the earliest historiography itself, not a matter that can be resolved from within the sources, and it is left open here accordingly.

Three Days Unburied

What is not disputed is that Uthman’s body was not buried immediately. Multiple reports converge on a delay of roughly three days, though they differ on why and on what happened to the body during that time. One line of transmission, reproduced with its Arabic isnad by a source citing al-Tabari’s Tarikh (3/438), states that the body was thrown aside and left unburied for three days, that a mob stoned the bier when an attempt was made to carry it out, and that Ali ibn Abi Talib personally intervened to stop the stoning before the burial could go forward (antimajozze.wordpress.com, reproducing and grading the isnad). That same source, working from a Salafi-oriented critical methodology, grades this particular report as very weak (da’if jiddan) and states it is more likely fabricated (mawdu’), on the grounds of an unreliable chain running through narrators it identifies as unknown or discredited. A separate account preserved via Imam Malik in al-Mu’jam al-Kabir describes the body being left on a rubbish heap for three days before a small group came at night with a lamp hidden in a box to retrieve it (fnoor.com, citing al-Mu’jam al-Kabir 1/78). A third, less dramatic strand simply states that Na’ila, Uthman’s widow, could not find anyone willing to help bury her husband until three days had passed, without describing stoning or a rubbish heap at all (see the general account at Wikipedia’s article on Uthman). These are not the same story, and the sources do not allow one to be preferred over the others on evidentiary grounds alone; what can be said plainly is that a three-day delay before burial is the one point on which nearly every account agrees, and that the reasons offered for it range from continued public hostility to simple difficulty finding willing hands.

A note on authenticity: the stoning-of-the-bier narrative, however vivid, rests on a chain graded weak to fabricated by at least one source that examined it closely, and it should not be read as an agreed historical fact. It is included here because it circulates widely in popular retellings of Uthman’s death, not because it is established.

The Night Burial and Its Attendees

On the question of who actually buried Uthman, the sources again diverge, though less severely. One widely cited account, traced through Niyar ibn Mukarram, names four men as having carried the body: Niyar himself, Jubayr ibn Mut’im, Hakim ibn Hizam, and Abu Jahm ibn Hudhayfa, with Jubayr ibn Mut’im leading the funeral prayer, a detail this source states was confirmed independently in a narration going back to Mu’awiyah (313companions.org, drawing on classical sira sources). A second, competing report gives a congregation of sixteen people rather than four. Ibn Sa’d, weighing the two, states explicitly that the four-man account is the more correct of the two (313companions.org), which is itself worth noting: this is a case where a classical historian recorded a live disagreement in his own sources and adjudicated between them, rather than simply repeating both without comment. A list drawn from Wikipedia’s account of the burial names a slightly larger group of participants, including Marwan ibn al-Hakam, Zayd ibn Thabit, Huwaytib ibn Abd al-Uzza, Jubayr ibn Mut’im, Abu Jahm ibn Hudhayfa, Hakim ibn Hizam and Niyar ibn Mukarram, and states that Jubayr ibn Mut’im led the funeral prayer (Wikipedia’s article on Uthman). Yet a wholly separate report, again via Imam Malik in al-Mu’jam al-Kabir, names twelve men present, including Malik ibn Abi Amir, Huwaytib ibn Abd al-Uzza, Hakim ibn Hizam, Abdullah ibn al-Zubayr and Uthman’s daughter Aisha, and states that those present disagreed among themselves over who should lead the prayer, with the narrator himself uncertain whether it was Hakim ibn Hizam or Huwaytib ibn Abd al-Uzza who finally did so (fnoor.com, citing al-Mu’jam al-Kabir 1/78). This is a genuine, unresolved conflict between two named-leader traditions, Jubayr ibn Mut’im in one line and an uncertain choice between Hakim ibn Hizam and Huwaytib ibn Abd al-Uzza in another, and it is reported here as open rather than settled.

What the sources agree on with more confidence is the atmosphere of the burial itself: it took place after dark, quietly, without the public ceremony that would normally attend a caliph’s funeral. Na’ila is reported to have carried a lamp during the procession but to have had to extinguish it partway so as not to draw attention (Wikipedia’s article on Uthman). One account adds that when the body was lowered into the grave, Uthman’s daughter Aisha cried out, and that Abdullah ibn al-Zubayr warned her to be silent for fear of provoking further violence (fnoor.com). Alim.org’s account of the funeral likewise records that after the burial, both Na’ila and Aisha bint Uthman wished to speak publicly but were advised by those present to hold their peace, given the danger still surrounding the household (Alim.org’s account of the funeral of Uthman). On the specific claim that Uthman was buried without any funeral prayer being performed over him at all, as opposed to a prayer performed quietly rather than publicly, the weight of the sourcing favours the latter: nearly every account that discusses the burial names someone as having led a prayer, even where they disagree on who. The idea that no prayer was said appears to be a later simplification rather than a report with its own independent chain, and it is treated here as unverifiable in that stronger form.

Hash Kawkab: Garden or Jewish Cemetery

Where Uthman was actually laid to rest is the point on which the sources conflict most sharply, and the conflict is not merely about geography but about what kind of ground it was. The name given in the sources is Hash Kawkab, also written Hashsh Kawkab, and two incompatible explanations of that name circulate. The first, associated with a Sunni apologetic reading and traced to Imam al-Nawawi’s Tahdhib al-Asma’, holds that “hash” simply means a garden or enclosed orchard, and that “Kawkab” was the name of an Ansari man who owned it; on this account, Uthman had purchased the garden and added it to al-Baqi’, and was the first person buried in it, carried there secretly on a board precisely because public burial was not safe (antimajozze.wordpress.com, citing Ibn Abd al-Barr’s al-Isti’ab 1/322, Ibn Hajar’s al-Isabah 5/626 no. 7474, and al-Dhahabi’s Tajrid Asma’ al-Sahabah 2/36 no. 388). A related source defending Uthman against later polemical criticism repeats this reading, insisting that Hash Kawkab was never Jewish-owned land at all (mahajjah.com), though that same source, in the course of its own argument, also describes Mu’awiyah as later buying the land “from the Jews,” an internal inconsistency worth flagging rather than papering over.

The second explanation, carried in the same al-Tabari report discussed above and repeated by WikiShia’s entry on the monuments of al-Baqi’, holds that Hashsh Kawkab was land where Jews of Madinah buried their own dead, and that Uthman’s body was hurried there precisely because he could not be buried among the Muslims (WikiShia’s article on the monuments of al-Baqi’). Madain Project’s description of Uthman’s tomb likewise states plainly that he was buried “in the Jewish graveyard behind Jannat al-Baqi” (Madain Project’s entry on the tomb of Uthman ibn Affan), and the general Wikipedia article on al-Baqi’ Cemetery states the same (Wikipedia’s article on al-Baqi’ Cemetery). A further variant, found in a guide to the cemetery, states that the ground had in fact been bought earlier by Uthman himself as farmland for his son Aban, which would make it neither an Ansari’s garden purchased for Uthman’s own burial nor Jewish burial ground, but a family property already in Uthman’s possession before his death (Hajj and Umrah Planner’s guide to Jannat al-Baqi). These three explanations, an Ansari’s purchased garden, a Jewish cemetery, and Uthman’s own prior family land, cannot all be correct, and nothing in the present sourcing allows a confident choice between them. It is reported here as a live and old disagreement, not a settled question, in keeping with al-Samhudi’s own practice of recording competing local traditions about al-Baqi’s boundaries without always resolving them himself.

Mu’awiyah, the Merger, and the Normalising of the Grave

What happened after Uthman’s death is comparatively less contested. Once Mu’awiyah ibn Abi Sufyan secured the caliphate, he moved to bring Hash Kawkab formally into al-Baqi’. The clearest statement of his reported motive comes from the same account that describes the initial burial: it states that Mu’awiyah ordered the enclosure razed and the boundary opened, and separately commanded people to bury their own dead around Uthman’s grave, a step this account frames explicitly as intended to normalise a burial that had originally been forced and disgraceful (see the report reproduced at antimajozze.wordpress.com, citing al-Tabari’s Tarikh). Wikipedia’s article on al-Baqi’ Cemetery agrees on the broad shape of this, stating that Mu’awiyah incorporated the Jewish cemetery into al-Baqi’s grounds “to honor Uthman” as part of the first expansion of the cemetery under Umayyad rule (Wikipedia’s article on al-Baqi’ Cemetery).

On exactly whose hands carried out the physical work, the sources again diverge in a small but real way. Some accounts attribute the demolition of the dividing wall to Mu’awiyah directly, as an act of caliphal policy. Others attribute the physical act to Marwan ibn al-Hakam, who at various points governed Madinah on Mu’awiyah’s behalf; a guide to the cemetery states plainly that “the governor of Madinah, Marwan ibn al-Hakam, demolished the wall between Baqi and Hash Kawkab” (Hajj and Umrah Planner’s guide to Jannat al-Baqi), and WikiShia’s account likewise places the removal of the wall “during the reign of Marwan b. al-Hakam in Medina” (WikiShia’s article on the monuments of al-Baqi’). Since Marwan served as Mu’awiyah’s governor, these are not necessarily contradictory reports so much as a question of whether credit belongs to the caliph who ordered the policy or the governor who executed it locally, and both readings are represented in the sources without either being clearly primary.

The First Dome

Whatever the precise mechanics of the merger, the sources agree that a dome was eventually raised over Uthman’s grave, and that this was the first dome al-Baqi’ ever possessed. Wikipedia’s article on al-Baqi’ Cemetery states this directly: “The Umayyad Caliphate constructed the first dome over Uthman’s grave” (Wikipedia’s article on al-Baqi’ Cemetery). Madain Project’s photographic record of the cemetery before the twentieth-century demolitions describes it as “a large white washed and painted dome,” and gives its later history in some detail: it was first destroyed around 1810, during the Wahhabi-Saudi campaign of that period, then rebuilt once the Ottomans reasserted control over the Hijaz around 1850, before being destroyed again, this time finally, in the 1925-26 demolitions (Madain Project’s record of Jannat al-Baqi before the demolitions). Ibrahim Rifat Pasha, an Egyptian official who travelled through the region between 1901 and 1908 and counted sixteen domes standing in al-Baqi’ at that time, included Uthman’s among them (Wikipedia’s article on the demolition of al-Baqi’). Reports from the years just before the final demolition describe it more modestly as “a small dome” at “the farthest end of al-Baqi’,” alongside the nearby grave of Fatimah bint Asad (al-Islam.org’s printable history of the cemetery of Jannat al-Baqi), a description that sits somewhat at odds with Madain Project’s “large” dome and may simply reflect different eras of the structure’s several rebuildings rather than a real contradiction.

The Grave Today

Since the 1925-26 demolition, Uthman’s grave has carried no structure of any kind. Madain Project states that the site today has “only a mark-less headstone and a stone boundary” (Madain Project’s record of Jannat al-Baqi before the demolitions), consistent with the unmarked condition of the rest of the cemetery since that date. A further detail worth noting for anyone trying to picture the site today: because of the various expansions of al-Baqi’s outer boundary over the centuries, the grave that once sat at the cemetery’s eastern edge, beyond an internal dividing wall, now lies well inside the enclosure, closer to its centre than to any boundary (Hajj and Umrah Planner’s guide to Jannat al-Baqi). The caliph who could not, in his own lifetime, be buried among the community he had led, ended up at the heart of ground that would come to hold tens of thousands of Muslim dead, a fact none of the sources treat as ironic but which the geography itself makes plain.

Al-Abbas ibn Abd al-Muttalib: The Prophet’s Uncle

Al-Abbas, the Prophet’s ﷺ paternal uncle, died around 653 CE and was buried at Baqi’. His former house — according to Shia sources, more precisely the house of his relative Aqil ibn Abi Talib — later became associated with the burial plot for several figures of the Ahl al-Bayt, a plot that came to be known as Maqabir Banu Hashim, the graves of the Banu Hashim clan. Abbas’s grave would, in time, become part of the same shared enclosure that held Hasan ibn Ali and the later Imams, and it was destroyed along with theirs in 1926.

Hasan ibn Ali: The Prophet’s Grandson

Hasan ibn Ali, son of Ali ibn Abi Talib and Fatimah al-Zahra, and thus the Prophet’s ﷺ grandson, died in 670 CE. He is revered by Twelver Shia Muslims as the second Imam, and by Sunni Muslims as one of the most beloved members of the Prophet’s ﷺ household and, briefly, as caliph, before he relinquished the office to Mu’awiyah in the interest of the community’s unity. A widely repeated historical report states that Aisha initially objected to his burial beside the Prophet ﷺ — inside the Prophet’s ﷺ own house, where Abu Bakr and Umar had also been buried — so he was buried at Baqi’ instead. This detail comes from historical and biographical literature rather than a hadith text with an independently graded chain, and should be understood as a widely transmitted historical report rather than a matter established with hadith-level certainty. Whatever its precise circumstances, Hasan’s burial at Baqi’ placed him at the centre of what would become, for the next twelve and a half centuries, the single most visited Shia devotional site within the cemetery.

The Later Imams: Zayn al-Abidin, al-Baqir, and al-Sadiq

Three further descendants of the Prophet ﷺ through this line came to rest in the same family enclosure. Ali ibn al-Husayn, known as Zayn al-Abidin, the fourth Imam in Twelver reckoning, died around 712–714 CE. Muhammad al-Baqir, the fifth Imam, died around 732 CE. Ja’far al-Sadiq, the sixth Imam and one of the most influential scholars of early Islam — a figure from whom both the Twelver Shia legal tradition and, through his teaching, aspects of Sunni jurisprudence trace lines of transmission — died in 765 CE. All three were buried alongside Hasan ibn Ali and Abbas, and this shared enclosure, over which the great dome discussed in the Historical Development section was eventually raised, stood as the principal focus of Shia pilgrimage at Baqi’ until its destruction in 1926.

Fatimah bint Asad: A Mother’s Honour

Fatimah bint Asad, the mother of Ali ibn Abi Talib and thus the Prophet’s ﷺ aunt by marriage, is buried at Baqi’. Widely reported traditions in the sira literature describe the Prophet ﷺ visiting her grave, giving his own shirt to serve as her shroud, and even lying briefly in the grave before her burial as a sign of honour — accounts that circulate widely but have not been independently confirmed here against a hadith with a graded chain, and should be understood as part of the received devotional tradition rather than as an authenticated hadith report. Her burial place has taken on a further significance in the modern era, because — as discussed fully below — some Shia scholars argue that the grave commonly shown to pilgrims within the Imams’ enclosure as belonging to “Fatimah” is, in fact, hers, rather than that of the Prophet’s ﷺ daughter Fatimah al-Zahra.

Halimah al-Sa’diyyah: The Wet-Nurse Who Nursed a Prophet

Halimah al-Sa’diyyah, of the Banu Sa’d, was the Prophet’s ﷺ wet-nurse in his infancy, and died around 9 AH (630 CE). She was buried at Baqi’, where a low square enclosure marked her grave in the pre-1925 cemetery, though even before the demolition the exact original location of her grave was not certainly established in the sources — a reminder that some uncertainty about specific grave locations at Baqi’ predates the twentieth-century demolitions and is not simply a consequence of them.

Safiyyah bint Abd al-Muttalib: An Aunt, Distinguished from a Wife

Safiyyah bint Abd al-Muttalib, the Prophet’s ﷺ paternal aunt and the mother of Zubayr ibn al-Awwam, is reported buried at Baqi’. She should be carefully distinguished from Safiyya bint Huyayy, one of the Prophet’s ﷺ wives, who is a separate person also buried at Baqi’; some sources list a “Safiyya” at the cemetery without specifying which of the two is meant, and the careful reader — and the careful pilgrim listening to a local guide — should always ask which Safiyya is intended.

The Estimate of Ten Thousand Companions

Multiple sources describe Baqi’ as holding the graves of at least, or up to, ten thousand companions of the Prophet ﷺ. Other sources give a lower figure of roughly seven thousand. These are traditional and popular estimates, not archaeologically verified counts — the great majority of graves at Baqi’ are, and always have been, unmarked, and no census of the site has ever been conducted or published. The honest way to state the scale of this cemetery is as a widely cited range, seven thousand to upward of ten thousand, rather than as a precise figure that the evidence does not actually support.

The Mothers of the Believers at al-Baqi

An earlier section of this guide already lists the wives of the Prophet ﷺ buried at al-Baqi’ together with their approximate death dates, drawn from a general summary of the cemetery’s notable interments. What follows goes beyond that list: it takes each wife in turn, sets out what is actually recorded about her death and burial, and reports the specific points on which the classical sources disagree rather than smoothing them into a single date.

The title given to the Prophet’s wives, Ummahat al-Mu’minin, “Mothers of the Believers,” is not an honorific invented by later generations but a term with direct Qur’anic grounding. Surah al-Ahzab states: “The Prophet is closer to the believers than their own selves, and his wives are their mothers” (Qur’an 33:6). Commentators reading this verse take it to establish a specific legal and spiritual status: the wives could never be married by anyone after the Prophet ﷺ, precisely because they held, in a real if metaphorical sense, the standing of mothers to the entire community of believers (see the discussion at Quran.com’s presentation of Surah al-Ahzab, verse 6). Nine of the Prophet’s wives came to be buried at al-Baqi’; two did not, for reasons addressed below.

Sawdah bint Zam’ah

Sawdah bint Zam’ah was the Prophet’s second wife, married after Khadijah’s death, and her date of death is one of the more sharply disputed among all the wives, with a gap of some thirty years separating the two main reports. Ibn Sa’d’s Tabaqat places her death in 54 AH (674 CE), well into the caliphate of Mu’awiyah, and adds the detail that Mu’awiyah subsequently purchased her house for 180,000 dirhams. A separate line of transmission, associated with Ibn Abd al-Barr and Ibn al-Athir, places her death instead near the end of Umar’s caliphate, around 22 AH (644 CE), fully three decades earlier (summarized at al-Islam.org’s biographical entries on the wives of the Prophet and corroborated by the general chronology at Wikipedia’s article on Sawdah bint Zam’ah). Al-Zarkali and al-Waqidi are also cited in support of the later, 54 AH date. This is a Disputed point with no clear resolution in the sources consulted, and it is left open here. What is agreed is that she is remembered for having, according to a widely told report, voluntarily given her allotted night with the Prophet ﷺ to Aisha in her later years, a detail of her character that survives more securely than the date of her death.

Zaynab bint Khuzaymah

Known before Islam as Umm al-Masakin, “Mother of the Destitute,” for her generosity to the poor, Zaynab bint Khuzaymah was previously married to Ubaydah ibn al-Harith, who was killed at the Battle of Badr, before her marriage to the Prophet ﷺ in the third year after the Hijrah. Her time as his wife was brief: sources place her death anywhere from two or three months to about eight months after the marriage, in Rabi’ al-Thani of year 4 AH (September 625 CE), when she was approximately thirty years old (WikiShia’s entry on Zaynab bint Khuzaymah; consistent with the chronology given by Wikipedia’s article on al-Baqi’ Cemetery). She has the distinction of being, by most accounts, the second of the Prophet’s wives to die after Khadijah, and the only other wife besides Khadijah to predecease him. Multiple sources agree that the Prophet ﷺ personally led her funeral prayer and that she was buried at al-Baqi’, making her the first of the wives to be interred there (WikiShia’s entry on Zaynab bint Khuzaymah). The cause of the illness that killed her is not recorded in the sira literature; several modern retellings note plainly that nothing further is known about it.

Zaynab bint Jahsh

Zaynab bint Jahsh was the Prophet’s cousin, daughter of his aunt Umayyah bint Abd al-Muttalib, and her marriage to him, following her earlier marriage to his freedman and adopted son Zayd ibn Harithah, is directly addressed in the Qur’an at 33:37. She died during the caliphate of Umar ibn al-Khattab, in the twentieth year after the Hijrah (640-641 CE), and multiple sources agree that Umar himself led her funeral prayer (see the account at “Women in Islam,” Wives of the Prophet Muhammad, archive.org). She is remembered in particular through a specific hadith concerning which of the wives would be the first to join the Prophet ﷺ after his death. According to Sahih al-Bukhari 1420, Aisha reported that some of the Prophet’s wives asked him who among them would be the first to follow him in death, and he answered, “whoever has the longest hand.” The wives then measured their hands against a stick, and Sawdah’s hand proved to be the physically longest. It was only later, when Zaynab bint Jahsh died first of all the wives, during Umar’s caliphate, that the wives realised the saying had been about the “long hand” of charity rather than physical measurement, since Zaynab was known for working with her hands and giving the proceeds away; Sawdah, whose hand had measured longest, in fact died much later, during the caliphate of Mu’awiyah (Sahih al-Bukhari 1420). A parallel version in Sahih Muslim 2452 records the same saying and adds that Zaynab “used to work with her hand and spend that income on charity” (Sahih Muslim 2452). Both reports are Authentic (sahih), being drawn from the two most rigorously authenticated hadith collections. Zaynab bint Jahsh is thus remembered as the first of the wives to die after the Prophet ﷺ himself, a distinction the hadith itself frames as a mark of honour rather than misfortune.

Hafsa bint Umar

Hafsa bint Umar, daughter of the second caliph, is most often reported to have died in Sha’ban 45 AH (October or November 665 CE), a date given by Ibn Sa’d and by al-Zubayr ibn Bakkar. An alternative report, attributed to al-Waqidi, instead places her death in 41 AH, at the very start of Mu’awiyah’s caliphate, a gap of roughly four years between the two traditions that is not resolved in the sources consulted. Her funeral prayer is reported to have been led by Marwan ibn al-Hakam, who was then governing Madinah, and her brothers Abdullah ibn Umar and Asim ibn Umar are named as having lowered her into the grave (drawing on the general biographical summary at Wikipedia’s article on Hafsa bint Umar). One detail that distinguishes her account from those of the other wives is that she is reported to have died while fasting, and to have asked before her death that her property be given away in charity rather than inherited.

Umm Salama

Umm Salama, born Hind bint Umayyah, is reported by most accounts to have been the last of the Prophet’s wives to survive, living to a very old age, variously given as eighty-four or ninety, and dying somewhere between 59 and 64 AH (approximately 679-684 CE). She is reported to have lived long enough to hear of the killing of the Prophet’s grandson Husayn at Karbala in 680 CE, an event that is said to have caused her great grief (see the general chronology at Wikipedia’s article on the wives of Muhammad). Her claim to being the very last survivor is not, however, uncontested. Al-Tabari’s own history contains an internal contradiction on this point: in one place he states that Maymunah bint al-Harith, who was not buried at al-Baqi’ but at Sarif, died in 61 AH and was “the last of the wives of the Prophet to die,” while elsewhere in the same work he asserts that Umm Salama outlived Maymunah (Wikipedia’s article on Maymunah bint al-Harith, summarizing al-Tabari’s conflicting statements). This is a genuine disagreement within a single classical source rather than between different authorities, and it is left open here; no attempt is made to adjudicate which of al-Tabari’s own statements should be preferred.

Umm Habibah

Umm Habibah, born Ramla bint Abi Sufyan, was the half-sister of the caliph Mu’awiyah, and her death is dated by most sources to 45 AH (664 or 665 CE), during his reign, though the range of reported dates is unusually wide: one Shia biographical source lists alternative reports of 42, 44, 50, 55 and 59 AH, before concluding, on the authority of Abu Bakr ibn Abi Khaythamah’s statement that she died one year before Mu’awiyah himself (who died in 60 AH), that 59 AH is the most likely of the reported dates (al-Islam.org’s biographical entry on Umm Habibah). This is a wider spread of conflicting dates than exists for almost any other wife, and it is reported here as unresolved. A further complication is that a minority report places her death and burial in Damascus, near Bab al-Saghir cemetery, rather than in Madinah, though the same source notes that “according to some authentic hadiths, she passed away in Medina and was buried there” (WikiShia’s entry on Umm Habiba). The Madinah burial at al-Baqi’ is the more widely accepted account and is what this guide follows, but the Damascus tradition exists in the literature and is not dismissed here as impossible, only as the less favoured report.

Juwayriyah bint al-Harith

Juwayriyah bint al-Harith, daughter of the chief of Banu al-Mustaliq, became the Prophet’s wife after being taken captive following the campaign against her tribe; her marriage is credited in several accounts with leading directly to the freeing of a large number of her tribespeople once other Muslims learned they had become, through her marriage, in-laws of the Prophet ﷺ. On her death there are two competing reports. The majority view places it in Rabi’ al-Awwal 56 AH, at around seventy years of age, during Mu’awiyah’s caliphate, with Marwan ibn al-Hakam, then governor of Madinah, ordered by Mu’awiyah to lead her funeral prayer, which is said to have been attended by a large crowd (al-Islam.org’s biographical entry on Juwayriyah bint al-Harith). A second, less favoured report places her death six years earlier, in 50 AH, at sixty-five years of age. Both reports agree she was buried at al-Baqi’ among the other Mothers of the Believers.

Safiyyah bint Huyayy

Safiyyah bint Huyayy, of Jewish descent from the Banu al-Nadir before her conversion and marriage to the Prophet ﷺ, is the wife whose death date shows perhaps the widest spread of competing reports among sources that otherwise take her seriously as a historical figure: 50 AH, 52 AH, and 36 AH have all been proposed. The 36 AH date can, however, be ruled out on internal grounds, since Safiyyah is reported to have transmitted hadith to Ali ibn al-Husayn Zayn al-Abidin, who was not born until after that year; a report that requires her to have died before her own reported informant was born cannot be correct (al-Islam.org’s biographical entry on Safiyyah bint Huyayy). Between the remaining two dates, Ibn Abd al-Barr and al-Ya’qubi are cited in favour of 50 AH, during Mu’awiyah’s caliphate, and this is treated as the better-supported of the surviving options, though 52 AH is not entirely excluded by the sources. She is buried at al-Baqi’; care should be taken not to confuse her with Safiyyah bint Abd al-Muttalib, the Prophet’s paternal aunt, who is also buried at al-Baqi’ and discussed elsewhere in this guide, since the two women share a name but are otherwise unrelated.

Aisha bint Abi Bakr

Aisha bint Abi Bakr, daughter of the first caliph and the wife through whom a large proportion of the Prophet’s recorded sayings reached later generations, died on the night of the seventeenth of Ramadan, 58 AH, at an age given as sixty-seven or sixty-eight, during the governorship of Marwan ibn al-Hakam in Madinah (“Women in Islam,” Wives of the Prophet Muhammad, archive.org). Her funeral prayer is reported to have been led by Abu Hurayrah, Abd al-Rahman ibn Sakhr, a detail recorded in the same source. She had asked to be buried at al-Baqi’ alongside the Prophet’s other wives rather than beside the Prophet ﷺ himself in her own chamber, where he and Abu Bakr and Umar were buried, an instruction that is widely reported though the precise wording attributed to her varies between accounts. She is buried at al-Baqi’ as she requested.

Maria al-Qibtiyya and Rayhanah bint Zayd: A Disputed Status

Two women associated with the Prophet ﷺ occupy a genuinely contested position in the sources: it is not settled whether either was formally his wife or remained, throughout, his concubine (umm walad in Maria’s case, since she bore him his son Ibrahim). Maria al-Qibtiyya, a Coptic Egyptian woman sent to the Prophet ﷺ as a gift by the Muqawqis, the governor of Alexandria, in 628 CE, is described as a wife by several of the earliest biographers, including Ibn Ishaq, Ibn Sa’d and al-Tabari, and Ibn Kathir states outright in his sira that the Prophet ﷺ married her (Wikipedia’s article on Maria al-Qibtiyya). Against this, other scholars point to the fact that she was freed only after bearing her son, a detail some read as more consistent with the status of a concubine whose child grants her a particular legal protection than with that of a full wife from the outset. She died around 637 CE and is buried at al-Baqi’; this guide does not adjudicate between the two positions, since credible classical authorities can be found on both sides.

Rayhanah bint Zayd, of the Banu al-Nadir or, by another report, Banu Qurayza, presents the same ambiguity. The same source that discusses Maria’s status states plainly that “like Rayhana bint Zayd, there is some debate between historians and scholars” over whether she was ever formally married to the Prophet ﷺ or remained a concubine throughout (Wikipedia’s article on Maria al-Qibtiyya, discussing the parallel case). She died around 631 CE, before the Prophet ﷺ himself, and is generally listed among those buried at al-Baqi’, though, as with Maria, her position among the Ummahat al-Mu’minin proper is Disputed rather than settled, and this guide records the dispute rather than resolving it.

Khadijah and Maymunah: The Two Not Buried Here

Two of the Prophet’s wives lie elsewhere, and the reasons in both cases are matters of straightforward biography rather than dispute. Khadijah bint Khuwaylid, his first wife, died in Makkah, most sources say in Ramadan of the tenth year after the start of his prophethood, about three years before the Hijrah (619 CE), meaning the migration to Madinah, and with it the founding of al-Baqi’ as a Muslim cemetery, had not yet taken place. She was buried at al-Hajun, in what is today known as Jannat al-Mu’alla, Makkah’s own principal cemetery, and the Prophet ﷺ is reported to have descended briefly into her grave himself before she was covered (Wikipedia’s article on Khadija bint Khuwaylid). There is some variation in the sources over the precise year of her death, with reports ranging from three to five years before the Hijrah, though three years before is the most widely cited and is treated by several biographers as the best-supported figure (al-Islam.org’s biographical entry on Khadijah bint Khuwaylid). Jannat al-Mu’alla itself later suffered the same fate as al-Baqi’, its historic graves and structures demolished in 1925 as part of the same wave of destruction (al-Islam.org’s printable history of the cemetery of Jannat al-Baqi).

Maymunah bint al-Harith, the Prophet’s last wife by marriage, is buried at Sarif, a location roughly twenty kilometres north of Makkah on the route between the two holy cities. The reason is again a matter of simple circumstance: Sarif was the place where she married the Prophet ﷺ in the seventh year after the Hijrah, during the journey to perform the compensatory Umrah after the Treaty of Hudaybiyyah, and she was later buried at the same spot, reportedly beneath the very tree under which the marriage had taken place (Hajj and Umrah Planner’s entry on the grave of Maymunah bint al-Harith). As already noted above, the exact year of her death and her place in the order of the wives’ deaths is itself disputed within al-Tabari’s own history.

The Wives’ Enclosure Before 1926

Before the demolitions of the twentieth century, the graves of the Prophet’s wives at al-Baqi’ stood beneath their own dedicated structure, distinct from the larger dome that covered the Ahl al-Bayt and from the separate, smaller shrine built over the graves of the Prophet’s daughters. Ibn Battuta, describing al-Baqi’ in the first half of the eighth Islamic century, recorded “a tomb in which wives of the Prophet were buried,” alongside his description of Malik ibn Anas’s small dome and Ibrahim’s white-domed grave (WikiShia’s account of the demolition of the shrines, citing Ibn Battuta). A description drawn from an early twentieth-century eyewitness account, preserved in an al-Islam.org history of the cemetery, likewise describes, in sequence, the grave of Malik ibn Anas, then “facing those graves… a small shrine containing the graves of the Prophet’s wives,” followed by the separate shrine of al-Abbas (al-Islam.org’s printable history of the cemetery of Jannat al-Baqi). A separately circulated list numbering the domes of al-Baqi’ before 1926 describes this same structure as “the Dome of the Ummuhat al-Mu’mineen, the Mothers of the Believers,” built over the resting places of the wives including Aisha and Hafsa, explicitly excepting Khadijah and Maymunah, who are noted as being buried elsewhere. This structure, whatever its exact size and appearance, was destroyed along with every other dome and marker in al-Baqi’ in the demolition of 8 Shawwal 1344 AH (21 April 1926 CE), discussed elsewhere in this guide. What was lost was not merely a building but the last physical means of identifying, at a glance, precisely where each of the Mothers of the Believers lay.

What Remains Today

A visitor to al-Baqi’ today looking for the graves of the Prophet’s wives will find no structure, no dome, and no individual headstones bearing their names. The ground in the area where they are known to have been buried is, like the rest of the cemetery, level and unmarked, indistinguishable to the eye from the resting places of the thousands of companions buried around it. What can be stated with confidence is their presence in that ground and, for most of them, an approximate date of death; what cannot be recovered, after the demolitions, is any physical marker distinguishing one grave from another.

Companions Who Are Not Buried Here

In the spirit of the honesty this guide has tried to maintain throughout, it is worth naming a few of the Prophet’s ﷺ closest companions who are not at Baqi’, so that the visitor does not assume every major figure of early Islam rests within this one field. Abu Bakr and Umar ibn al-Khattab, the first two caliphs, are buried inside the Prophet’s ﷺ own former house, immediately beside him, within the mosque complex — a distinct and separate burial arrangement from Baqi’. Khadijah bint Khuwaylid, the Prophet’s ﷺ first wife, is buried in Makkah at Jannat al-Mu’alla, not in Madinah at all. Maymunah bint al-Harith, another of his wives, is reported buried at Sarif, near Makkah. Hamza ibn Abd al-Muttalib, martyred at the Battle of Uhud, is buried at the martyrs’ cemetery at the foot of Mount Uhud, several kilometres from Baqi’. The tendency in popular piety to imagine that “everyone” from the earliest generation of Islam rests at Baqi’ is understandable, given the sheer numbers involved, but it is not accurate, and a guide that aims at honesty should say so plainly.

Rabi’ah ibn Ka’b and the Companions of the Suffah

Among the categories of companions who came to rest at Baqi’ were men who, in life, had possessed almost nothing. The Ashab al-Suffah, the “People of the Bench,” were a group of poor, often unmarried or displaced companions who lived in a covered area attached to the mosque itself, sustained by the charity of the wealthier Muslims and by the Prophet’s ﷺ own household. Their poverty in life stands in sharp, deliberate contrast with the honour of their burial: men who owned no house of their own in Madinah came, in death, to share the same ground as the caliphs, the Prophet’s ﷺ own wives, and his grandsons. Baqi’ does not distinguish by wealth. The unmarked, featureless character of the cemetery today — a feature many visitors initially experience as a loss — was in a sense already present in spirit from the earliest years, in a community that buried its poorest members within reach of its most exalted ones, under the same undecorated sand.

Zaynab and Umm Kulthum: Daughters Beside Their Brother

The Prophet’s ﷺ daughters Zaynab and Umm Kulthum were buried, according to the historical accounts, close to the grave of their infant half-brother Ibrahim and near Uthman ibn Maz’un, in the same general area of the cemetery that had become associated with the Prophet’s ﷺ own family. Zaynab, the eldest of his children, had been married to Abu al-‘As ibn al-Rabi’ and endured a long separation from her father ﷺ during the Makkan period before eventually settling in Madinah; she died in 8 AH. Umm Kulthum, married successively to Uthman ibn Affan after the death of her sister Ruqayyah, died in 9 AH. Their burials, clustered together with Ibrahim’s, illustrate how the plot named Zawra became, within a single decade of the Hijra, a family cemetery within the larger cemetery — a devotional geography of loss that the Prophet ﷺ himself walked through more than once in his own lifetime.

The Companions Who Never Reached Baqi’

It is worth pausing on the sheer diversity of fates among the earliest Muslims, because not every companion who died in the Prophet’s ﷺ lifetime was buried at Baqi’, and the cemetery’s population reflects specific historical circumstance rather than a uniform rule. Companions who died in Makkah before the Hijra — a number of early converts who were killed or died there under persecution — could not be buried at Baqi’ at all, since the site did not yet exist as a Muslim cemetery. Companions who fell at Badr were, for the most part, buried on the battlefield itself, near Madinah but not at Baqi’. The martyrs of Uhud were buried, on the Prophet’s ﷺ own explicit instruction, where they fell, at the foot of the mountain — a separate cemetery, several kilometres distant, that this guide’s companion volume on Uhud treats in full. Only those companions who died in Madinah itself, after the Hijra, and whose deaths did not occur in the specific circumstances of a battle requiring burial on the field, came to rest at Baqi’. The cemetery’s population is therefore best understood not as “the resting place of the companions” in some general, undifferentiated sense, but specifically as the resting place of the Madinan Muslim community across roughly fourteen centuries — a distinction that matters for anyone trying to understand why some very famous names are here and others, no less illustrious, are not.

Later Caliphs and the Widening of Communal Memory

Beyond the Rashidun and early Umayyad period, Baqi’ continued to receive burials from every subsequent century of Madinan history, though the sources consulted for this guide are considerably thinner on named burials after the earliest generations, since the cemetery’s ordinary function — receiving the Muslim dead of an ordinary, living city — generated far less documentary attention than its extraordinary early burials had. What can be said is that Baqi’ never stopped being a working cemetery even as it accumulated its reputation as a site of extraordinary sanctity; residents of Madinah across the Abbasid, Mamluk, Ottoman, and modern Saudi periods have continued, generation after generation, to be buried there, alongside the tourists’ and pilgrims’ attention that focuses overwhelmingly on the small number of names from the earliest period. This continuity — a cemetery that is simultaneously a historical monument of the first magnitude and a perfectly ordinary local burial ground still receiving new graves today — is one of the most distinctive things about Baqi’ relative to other historic Islamic sites, most of which have long since been frozen in time as monuments rather than remaining functionally alive in the way Baqi’ still is.

The Dispute Over Fatimah al-Zahra’s Burial Place

Among the oldest and most sensitive questions connected to Baqi’ is the burial place of Fatimah bint Muhammad ﷺ, known as Fatimah al-Zahra, the Prophet’s ﷺ daughter, wife of Ali ibn Abi Talib, and mother of Hasan and Husayn. She died, by the traditional account, around six months after her father ﷺ, in 11 AH (632 CE). Both major traditions of Islam hold Fatimah in the highest reverence; what they do not agree on is a simple, verifiable fact — where her body actually lies.

The Sunni Majority Position

Most Sunni scholars and historical sources hold that Fatimah is buried in the shared family enclosure at Baqi’, in the same plot later marked as the tomb of the four Imams and Abbas. This is presented in general historical compilations as the majority tradition: “the exact burial place is not known, though many traditions hold that her grave is in Jannat al-Baqi.” At the same time, Sunni sources themselves preserve alternative possibilities without treating any single one as certain — her own house, the Rawda (the sacred area between the Prophet’s ﷺ grave and his pulpit), the exterior of Aqil ibn Abi Talib’s house, and a location referred to as Bayt al-Ahzan. The existence of these competing Sunni traditions is itself informative: even within the tradition that leans toward Baqi’, there is no unanimous, settled certainty, only a majority tendency.

The Shia Position

The dominant Shia narrative holds that Fatimah, before her death, instructed her husband Ali ibn Abi Talib to keep her illness and death secret, to bury her at night, and to conceal or efface the location of her grave entirely. This tradition, grounded in reports transmitted within sources such as the al-Amali collection attributed to the Twelver hadith tradition associated with al-Shaykh al-Saduq and al-Tusi, connects Fatimah’s instruction to her documented dispute with the administration of the first caliph Abu Bakr over the inheritance of Fadak, an estate she believed had been wrongly withheld from her, and to her sense that her position, and her father’s ﷺ household, had been politically slighted after his death. Because of this deliberate concealment, mainstream Shia scholarship holds that her exact grave location is genuinely unknown to history — not merely disputed, but unknown by design, as an act of protest that succeeded in its own stated aim. The leading Shia hypotheses locate her actual grave in her own house, later absorbed into the expanded Masjid an-Nabawi complex near the Rawda, or possibly at Baqi’ — with her own house being, on the sources consulted here, the majority Shia position.

Some Shia scholars go a step further, arguing that the specific grave commonly shown to pilgrims within the Imams’ enclosure at Baqi’ as “Fatimah’s” is, in fact, that of Fatimah bint Asad, the mother of Ali ibn Abi Talib — discussed above — and that a conflation of the two women named Fatimah served, in this reading, to relieve the tension created by the deliberate Shia insistence on the secrecy of Fatimah al-Zahra’s true resting place. This is presented in the academic literature as one scholarly argument among Shia writers, not as a position universally held even within Shia scholarship.

How This Guide Presents the Question

This guide takes no position on which tradition has correctly identified Fatimah al-Zahra’s grave, because the sources themselves do not converge on a single, verifiable answer, and a guide that adjudicated the question would be manufacturing a certainty the historical record does not supply. What can be stated fairly is this: the Sunni majority view places her, with an acknowledged degree of uncertainty, within the Baqi’ family enclosure; the Shia tradition holds that her grave was deliberately hidden at her own request, as an act tied to her grievance over her treatment after the Prophet’s ﷺ death, with her own house or the adjoining Rawda being the most commonly cited actual location among Shia scholars, and the visible Baqi’ grave often understood within that tradition to belong to a different Fatimah entirely. A Sunni reader and a Shia reader consulting this guide should each recognise their own tradition’s position stated here in terms their own scholars would recognise as fair — and should also recognise that the other tradition’s position rests on its own coherent textual and historical reasoning, not on error or bad faith.

Stories of Great Islamic Scholars Connected to Baqi’

Imam Malik ibn Anas: Buried Beneath a Small Dome

Imam Malik ibn Anas, founder of the Maliki school of Islamic law and author of the Muwatta, died in 179 AH (795 CE) and was buried at Baqi’. His life’s work was conducted almost entirely in Madinah, and it is fitting that his grave lay within the same cemetery as so many of the companions whose practice he had spent his career documenting and systematising. Ibn Jubayr’s twelfth-century travel account specifically describes his grave as marked by a small dome, located just inside the Baqi’ gate near the grave of Safiyyah — one of the details that lets us reconstruct, with some confidence, at least the approximate layout of the pre-1926 cemetery. Malik’s own juristic position on the height and treatment of graves, as recorded by al-Qadi Iyad and discussed in the Hadith References section above, held that the best practice was to make a grave convex or rounded — a view that sits in some tension with the stricter reading later applied by the scholars behind the 1926 fatwa, and a reminder that even the founder of a major Sunni legal school did not hold the most restrictive position available on this specific question.

Al-Samhudi: The Historian Whose Book Recorded What Would Be Lost

Al-Samhudi (d. 911 AH/1533 CE), author of the monumental Wafa’ al-Wafa bi-Akhbar Dar al-Mustafa, stands as the single most important premodern historian of Madinah’s sacred topography, and his work is the ultimate source, at several removes, for much of what is known about Baqi’s medieval development, including the priority dispute between As’ad ibn Zurarah and Uthman ibn Maz’un discussed at length above. The research behind this guide obtained only a single specific citation from al-Samhudi’s text directly — his statement on As’ad ibn Zurarah’s priority, found at volume three, page 810 of Wafa’ al-Wafa — and a fuller architectural and historical account of Baqi’s medieval structures, which al-Samhudi is known to have documented in detail, was not directly accessible in this research pass. This is flagged here honestly as a gap: readers seeking the fullest available premodern architectural record of Baqi’ before the Ottoman rebuilding should consult al-Samhudi’s own text directly, rather than relying on the partial secondary citations available here.

Ibn Taymiyyah and Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyyah: The Doctrinal Root of the Later Rulings

Ibn Taymiyyah (d. 728 AH/1328 CE) and his student Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyyah (d. 751 AH/1350 CE) occupy a position in this story that both Sunni and Shia sources agree is central, even though they draw very different conclusions about it. Both scholars argued forcefully against the construction of structures over graves, understanding such structures as a slide toward practices resembling the veneration accorded to idols in the pre-Islamic Arabian religion the Prophet ﷺ had abolished. Within the Sunni tradition, this position is understood as a rigorous and textually grounded application of the hadith evidence discussed above — a minority position among earlier Hanbali scholars, by the account of at least one academic thesis consulted in this research, but one that Ibn Taymiyyah defended with considerable juristic force, while still acknowledging that other opinions existed within his own school. Centuries later, Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab drew heavily on Ibn Taymiyyah’s reasoning in formulating the doctrine that would animate both the 1806 and 1926 demolitions — though, according to the same academic source, Ibn Abd al-Wahhab extended the position further than Ibn Taymiyyah himself had gone, prohibiting even the touching or wiping of graves, practices Ibn Taymiyyah had not necessarily forbidden.

Ibn Baz and the Modern Saudi Fatwa Tradition

In the modern era, the Saudi Permanent Committee for Islamic Research and Fatwas (al-Lajna al-Da’ima), whose scholarly membership has included Shaykh Abd al-Aziz ibn Baz, has continued to articulate the position that underpinned the 1926 demolition, stating that building over graves is “a disagreeable heresy (bid’a)… and leads to polytheism (shirk),” and that the relevant authorities are obligated to remove such structures. This body of modern fatwa represents the direct doctrinal descendant of Ibn Bulayhid’s 1926 ruling, applying the same textual reasoning — rooted in Sahih Muslim 969 and 970 and Jami’ at-Tirmidhi 1049 — to grave-structures wherever they are found today, not only at Baqi’.

Al-Nawawi and al-Qadi Iyad: A More Moderate Classical Reading

It is worth returning, in this section on scholars, to al-Nawawi (d. 676 AH/1277 CE) and al-Qadi Iyad (d. 544 AH/1149 CE), both cited earlier in the Hadith References section, because their readings of the same core hadith evidence demonstrate that a stricter application was never the only classical option available. Al-Nawawi, commenting on Sahih Muslim 969 in his celebrated Sharh Sahih Muslim, understood the ruling as directed against excessive height and convexity, recommending a modest raising of about a handspan followed by levelling — itself the position of al-Shafi’i, whose school al-Nawawi represents. Al-Qadi Iyad, in turn, records that most other scholars, including Malik, in fact preferred the grave to be made convex or rounded, rather than flat. Reading al-Nawawi and al-Qadi Iyad alongside the fifteen scholars who signed the 1926 fatwa shows a genuine range of opinion within the Sunni legal tradition itself on precisely how far this hadith evidence should be pressed — a range that the 1926 ruling resolved in favour of the stricter end of that spectrum, but which was never the only position a classical Sunni jurist could have held.

Ibn Kathir and Ibn Hajar: Historians of the Companions Interred Here

Ibn Kathir (d. 774 AH/1373 CE), in his historical and tafsir writings, and Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani (d. 852 AH/1449 CE), in his biographical dictionaries of the companions, both preserve and transmit much of the detailed information about individual companions buried at Baqi’ that this guide has drawn on — their dates of death, their relationships to the Prophet ﷺ, and the circumstances of their lives. Neither scholar is cited in the sources consulted here as having taken an active, documented position specifically on the question of grave-structures at Baqi’, and this guide makes no claim about their views on that specific dispute beyond what can be verified; their significance to this article lies chiefly in their role as the historians whose biographical and chronicle-writing preserved the memory of who, exactly, lies in this ground.

Spiritual Reflection: Standing at Baqi’

You cross the marble of Bayn al-Haramayn, and the sound changes. The mosque behind you hums with recitation and the low murmur of thousands of people; ahead of you, past the gate, there is comparatively little sound at all — wind, footsteps on sand, occasionally the quiet rhythm of Qur’an recited under someone’s breath as they stand before a stretch of unmarked ground. Nothing here tells you whose grave you are standing near. No name is carved anywhere. And that absence, once you have understood why it exists, becomes its own kind of instruction.

What does it mean to stand where ten thousand of the Prophet’s ﷺ companions are believed to rest, and to be unable to find a single one of them by name? It means, first, confronting how little of this world survives us in the form we imagine it will. The domes that once stood here — Umayyad, medieval, Ottoman, each built by people convinced they were honouring the dead in the right way — are gone. The people beneath them are not gone in any sense that matters to their Lord; but the visible, touchable memory of them, the thing you might have photographed or knelt beside, has been erased twice over, by 1806 and by 1926, in the name of a scholarly position about how graves should be treated. Whatever you believe about the correctness of that position, the ground itself asks you a question that has nothing to do with domes: what will remain of you, when the thing that remains is not stone?

Consider the Prophet ﷺ himself walking out here in the last hours of the night, leaving his wife’s bed to stand alone among these dead and ask forgiveness for them. He did not need to be seen doing it. He did not build anything here, mark anything here, or leave behind an inscription of his own visits. He left words instead — “Peace be upon you, abode of a people who are believers” — words that outlasted every dome that would later be built and destroyed on this ground. There is something for you in that. The most durable form of honouring the dead may not be the structure raised over them, but the du’a offered for them, repeated by strangers across fourteen centuries who never knew their names.

Think, too, about Uthman ibn Maz’un and As’ad ibn Zurarah, and the gentle, very human rivalry over which of them was buried here first. It is easy to smile at this kind of dispute from a distance — Ansar and Muhajirun, each wanting their own tribesman remembered as the first. But look at what the dispute is actually about: two communities, newly merged into one, each so eager to claim a share in this sacred ground that they argued, gently, for centuries, over who got there first. What would it mean for you to want, that badly, a share in something sacred? Do you approach your own prayer, your own charity, your own effort at faith, with anything like that hunger?

And think about Fatimah al-Zahra, whose grave — wherever it actually is — was hidden, on the account her own tradition gives, by her own instruction, as an act of grief and protest that history has never been able to undo. Whether you hold the Sunni view that inclines toward Baqi’, or the Shia view that holds her house or the Rawda more likely, you are looking, either way, at a woman who chose invisibility over a marked grave, and whose choice has outlasted every dome and every demolition since. There is a lesson available to you regardless of which tradition you follow: that the deepest human grief does not always want a monument. Sometimes it wants only to be believed, and left alone.

You will not solve, standing at this gate, the question of who was right about the domes. That is not what this ground is for. What this ground is for is what it has always been for, since the night the Prophet ﷺ first walked out here alone: the reminder that every name you might ask after — Uthman ibn Maz’un, Halimah al-Sa’diyyah, the wives, the Imams, the scholars, the seven thousand or ten thousand whose names nobody living can recover — belonged, once, to someone who breathed, prayed, doubted, hoped, and was finally received into this earth. You will be received into some earth too. Ask yourself, standing here, whether you are living in a way that makes that reception something to hope for.

Practical Visitor Guide to Jannat al-Baqi

Getting There

Jannat al-Baqi lies immediately adjacent to the south-eastern side of Masjid an-Nabawi, and the only practical way to reach it is on foot, through the mosque’s eastern exits and across the marble plaza of Bayn al-Haramayn to the cemetery’s main gate. Some visitor guides cite specific gate numbers — commonly in the 360s, such as gate 362 or 364 — but exact gate numbering has shifted repeatedly with successive expansions and renovations of the mosque complex, and you should not rely on a specific number found in an older guide; ask mosque staff, or simply follow the flow of other visitors heading toward the cemetery around the times given below.

Opening Hours: What the 2025–2026 Sources Actually Say

The cemetery is reported, across a range of independent 2025–2026 travel and visitor-etiquette sources, to open to visitors for two short windows each day, timed to the prayer schedule rather than to a fixed civil clock: a longer window after Fajr prayer, commonly reported as lasting up to roughly two to three hours depending on the season and the level of crowding, and a shorter window after Asr prayer, typically reported as anywhere from fifteen minutes to about an hour. Because these windows are tied to prayer times, which shift with the solar calendar through the year, and because they are reported as being curtailed further during Ramadan, Hajj, and other periods of high pilgrim volume, this guide is not able to give you a single, fixed opening and closing time that will hold true on the day of your visit. You should confirm the current schedule locally, either by asking mosque staff or by checking on arrival, rather than planning your visit around a specific clock time found in any guide, including this one. This uncertainty is not a gap in this guide’s research; it reflects the genuine nature of the site’s scheduling, which multiple independent sources through 2025 and 2026 describe in the same prayer-time-dependent terms.

Entry Cost and Permits

Entry to Jannat al-Baqi is free. No ticket and no Nusuk-app time-slot booking is required to enter the cemetery itself — a contrast with Riyadh al-Jannah inside the mosque, which does require a Nusuk-app reservation. If you have used the Nusuk app to arrange other parts of your Madinah visit, you do not need to look for a Baqi’-specific booking; none exists, as of the sources consulted for this guide.

Whether Women May Enter: The Current Position, Stated Plainly

This is a point on which visitors deserve total clarity, and where this guide must also be transparent about where the evidence is, and is not, fully settled. The consistent, weight-of-evidence reporting across a wide range of independent 2024–2026 sources — travel guides, pilgrim vlogs, Tripadvisor reviews, and dedicated visitor-etiquette articles aimed specifically at women pilgrims — is that entry inside the cemetery’s walls is restricted to men. Women are not permitted to enter Jannat al-Baqi, and instead view the cemetery, and offer their own du’a, from designated areas just outside the boundary wall or fence, or through a grille, rather than walking among the graves themselves.

One source consulted in the research behind this guide — Audiala, dated June 2025 — gives an answer in its own FAQ that partially conflicts with this weight of evidence, stating “Yes, [women are allowed], but may be subject to area or time restrictions.” This appears to be an outlier, or an imprecisely worded answer, inconsistent with the substantially larger body of 2024–2026 sourcing that describes a general restriction on women entering the cemetery interior, and it should be treated with caution rather than as the deciding word on the question. No credible, dated 2025–2026 source consulted for this guide reports an official, general policy change that has opened entry to women. If you are a woman planning a visit, you should plan on viewing Baqi’ from outside the wall, and treat any claim that general entry has opened to women as unconfirmed until you can verify it with mosque authorities on the day of your visit.

A separate and distinct exception exists, and should not be confused with a general opening of the cemetery to women: during Hajj season in some recent years, Saudi authorities have eased restrictions specifically for Shia pilgrims — reported predominantly as male pilgrims travelling from Iran — allowing them to enter and recite prayers and eulogies at Baqi’ that had previously been restricted. Reporting on this specific, Hajj-season, Shia-pilgrim-focused easing is not the same as a general policy on women’s entry, and the two should not be conflated. If you are travelling as part of a group where this distinction matters to your plans, verify the current, specific arrangement for your circumstances directly with Saudi authorities or your tour operator, rather than relying on a general statement about “restrictions being eased.”

What You Will Actually See

Prepare, before you go, for a flat, open field of sandy earth, broken by small mounds and simple, largely unmarked graves. There are no domes, no buildings, and no individually labelled tombs anywhere in the cemetery today — the 1926 demolition removed all of them, and no reconstruction has taken place since. A fenced-off area restricts close approach to the graves of the Imams’ enclosure and to the grave of Umm al-Banin specifically; you will be able to see this area from a respectful distance but not walk directly among those graves. A general information display near the entrance stairs presents background on the Prophet’s ﷺ family tree. Because Baqi’ remains an active cemetery today, you may witness a live funeral procession (janazah) arriving for burial during your visit — this is a normal part of the cemetery’s ongoing life, not an unusual event staged for visitors, and it is worth pausing, quietly, to reflect on it if it happens while you are there.

Where to Stand and What to Say

The Sunnah practice, grounded directly in the Aisha hadith discussed earlier in this guide (Sahih Muslim 974), is to offer a greeting and a du’a of forgiveness for the deceased upon entering, in the spirit of the Prophet’s ﷺ own words: “Peace be upon you, abode of a people who are believers… O Allah, grant forgiveness to the inhabitants of Baqi’ al-Gharqad.” A more general graveyard-visiting formula, related to but distinct from the specific Baqi’ wording, is commonly recited on entering any Muslim cemetery: “As-salamu alaykum ahl al-diyar min al-mu’minin wal-muslimin, wa inna in sha’a Allahu bikum lahiqun, as’alu Allaha lana wa lakumu al-‘afiyah” — “Peace be upon you, inhabitants of these abodes, believers and Muslims; and we shall, if Allah wills, join you; I ask Allah for well-being for us and for you.” Whichever wording you use, the essential content is a greeting to the dead and a plea for forgiveness on their behalf — not a request directed to the deceased themselves, and not an act of worship offered toward any grave. Keep your visit brief and reflective. Follow the designated paths, and take care not to walk directly on graves.

Etiquette: Do and Do Not

• Do offer the salam and du’a of forgiveness described above, quietly and without ostentation.
• Do dress modestly — full-length clothing is expected of all visitors and onlookers, including women viewing from outside the wall, for whom an abaya and headscarf are expected.
• Do keep your visit brief; this is not a site designed for lengthy sightseeing, and current visitor guides describe an active security presence enforcing the etiquette rules below.
• Do not photograph or film inside the cemetery. Multiple current guides report that this prohibition is enforced even at the cemetery’s boundary in some cases, not only within the gate.
• Do not touch, wipe, kiss, or lean on any grave or marker.
• Do not recite Qur’an loudly, pray facing the graves, or seek blessing (tabarruk) from the graves themselves — this last point reflects the theological position discussed at length in the Historical Development section above, and visitors of traditions that hold a different view on grave-visitation should be aware that this is the standard actively enforced at the site today.
• Do not make or take phone calls while inside; guides note that phones may be carried but should not be used for calls.
• Note: only Muslims may enter the cemetery; non-Muslims may view it from outside the walls.

Security personnel at the site actively enforce these rules and are reported to be willing to bar repeat offenders from future entry, so visitors should treat these guidelines as more than polite suggestions.

Best Time to Visit

Given the short, prayer-time-dependent opening windows described above, the practical answer is: go straight after Fajr, when the window is reported to be longest and the temperature is at its coolest — an important consideration in Madinah’s climate for much of the year. The shorter Asr window is a secondary option if you miss the morning opportunity, but budget for the possibility that it may be very brief.

Accessibility

The cemetery’s terrain is uneven, sandy, and unpaved in the areas open to visitors, which presents a real consideration for visitors with limited mobility, wheelchair users, or elderly pilgrims. No specific accessibility infrastructure — ramps, paved paths, or seating — is described in the sources consulted for this guide, and visitors with mobility needs should plan for a shorter visit, assistance from a companion, and realistic expectations about how far into the site they will be able to comfortably go.

Visiting With Children

Because visits are typically brief, and because the site’s spiritual character depends on quiet and reflection rather than activity, this is not a site suited to long stays with young children. If you bring children, prepare them beforehand for what they will see — an open field rather than a monument with statues or inscriptions to look at — and rehearse the etiquette points above with them, particularly the prohibition on photography and on touching graves, since these are among the rules most likely to be tested by a curious child.

Common Mistakes Visitors Make

• Assuming a specific mound or stone marks a specific named companion’s grave. With no inscriptions remaining after 1926, no visitor guide or local escort can reliably point to “this is Uthman ibn Maz’un’s grave” or “this is Fatimah’s grave” with certainty; treat any such claim offered to you on-site with real caution.
• Assuming women can enter the cemetery interior on the basis of an outdated or inconsistent online source. Confirm current practice locally, as discussed above.
• Trying to photograph the cemetery, its gate, or its graves — a rule actively enforced and one of the most common causes of friction between visitors and site security.
• Treating the visit as primarily a sightseeing stop rather than an act of ziyarah. The site rewards quiet reflection and du’a far more than it rewards a hurried look around for a photograph that cannot legally be taken anyway.
• Assuming the demolitions are a settled, uncontroversial matter of history that can be mentioned casually to a companion of the opposite tradition without care. As this guide has tried to show throughout, this is a subject that both Sunni and Shia visitors feel deeply about, for coherent reasons rooted in their own scholarship; approach any conversation about it, on-site or off, with the same care this guide has tried to model.

Common Misconceptions About Jannat al-Baqi

“Uthman ibn Maz’un was definitely the first Muslim buried here”

As discussed at length above, this is a widely repeated claim, but Shaykh al-Albani states plainly that nothing authentic (sahih) specifically establishes it, and the earliest sources themselves record a genuine, old disagreement between the claim for Uthman ibn Maz’un and the claim for As’ad ibn Zurarah. Present it, as this guide has tried to, as a historical question with two respectable answers, not a settled fact.

“There is a hadith promising the people of Baqi’ early entry to Paradise, which is why it is called ‘Jannat'”

This claim circulates widely in devotional and travel literature, but no specific, checkable hadith reference — collection and number — could be located to support it. Until such a reference is produced, it should be treated as an unverified popular tradition rather than an authenticated hadith.

“That mound over there is the grave of [a named companion]”

Since 1926, no grave at Baqi’ carries an inscription, and the pre-demolition layout — reconstructed only partially from accounts such as Ibn Jubayr’s — is not preserved in any form a modern visitor or guide could use to point confidently at specific ground. Any confident, specific claim of this kind made to you on-site should be treated as pious tradition or guesswork, not verified fact.

“The stone-count convention — one stone for a man, two for a woman — is an established Islamic practice”

This specific claim, repeated by some visitor guides and vloggers, is sourced in the research behind this guide only to a single 2026 visitor video, with no classical or contemporary scholarly text supporting it as an established convention. It may reflect a genuine local or informal practice, but it should not be presented to others as settled Islamic teaching.

“The demolition of Baqi’ was either purely a matter of correcting error, or purely an act of sectarian aggression”

Both of these extreme framings oversimplify a genuinely complex event. The demolition rested on a textual argument — set out in full above — that a significant body of Sunni and Salafi scholarship regards as sound, consistent, and evenhandedly applied across sectarian lines, since it was applied to Uthman ibn Affan’s and Malik ibn Anas’s graves as much as to the Imams’ shrine. It also provoked, and continues to provoke, deep and coherent objections rooted in an alternative reading of the same hadith evidence, a documented history of centuries of tolerated shrine-building that the stricter reading struggles to explain, and a real and lasting sense of loss among Shia communities and heritage-minded observers of multiple traditions. This guide has tried to present both positions with the seriousness they deserve, and declines to resolve the underlying disagreement, because doing so would go beyond what an honest account of the evidence permits.

“Fatimah al-Zahra’s grave has been definitively located”

As set out in full above, this is not the case. The Sunni majority tradition inclines toward the Baqi’ family enclosure, with acknowledged alternative possibilities; the Shia tradition holds her grave was deliberately concealed, with her own house being the most commonly cited actual location among Shia scholars. Neither position amounts to a settled, universally agreed identification, and any source that presents the question as closed is going beyond the evidence.

Lesser-Known Facts About Jannat al-Baqi

• The plant that gave the cemetery its name, the gharqad thornbush, no longer grows anywhere at the site — the very vegetation the ground was named for has vanished from the landscape it named, a small irony worth noticing as you stand on ground that today grows nothing but sand.
• Baqi’ was not always a single, unified enclosure. For most of its history it grew as a patchwork of separately named plots — Rawha, where Uthman ibn Maz’un was buried; Zawra, where the infant Ibrahim was laid to rest — each associated with a specific founding burial, in a pattern closer to a set of adjoining family cemeteries than to one uniform ground.
• The first dome ever built at Baqi’ was raised not over a member of the Prophet’s ﷺ immediate family, but over the third caliph Uthman ibn Affan, and only because Mu’awiyah chose to incorporate an adjoining Jewish cemetery — where Uthman had initially been buried, following local resistance to his burial in Baqi’ proper — into the main cemetery in order to honour him.
• Before that incorporation, a large Jewish cemetery existed immediately adjacent to Baqi’ al-Gharqad, distinct from it, and it was only merged into the Muslim burial ground under Umayyad rule — meaning that for the first several decades of Islamic history in Madinah, a non-Muslim burial ground and the growing Muslim cemetery stood side by side as separate grounds.
• Ibrahim Rif’at Pasha’s early twentieth-century count of sixteen domes at Baqi’, recorded in his book Mir’at al-Haramayn, represents one of the last detailed architectural inventories of the site before its near-total destruction in 1926 — a snapshot of a cemetery that would, within a generation of his visit, look nothing like what he described.
• The 1926 demolition was reportedly carried out by paid labour: workers were compensated 1,000 Majidi Riyal for the physical work of tearing down the domes and structures, a detail that underscores how organised and deliberate the operation was, rather than an act of spontaneous crowd destruction.
• The same broader 1926 campaign that destroyed the structures at Baqi’ also destroyed the dome associated with Hamza ibn Abd al-Muttalib’s grave at Uhud, several kilometres away — a reminder that the demolition was not an isolated event confined to one cemetery, but part of a Hijaz-wide programme applied to shrine structures wherever the new authorities found them.
• Some Shia sources record that Shaykh Abd al-Karim Ha’iri, founder of the influential Qom seminary in Iran, wept while teaching upon receiving news of the 1926 demolition — a detail that captures, in a single moment, the scale of the emotional impact the event had on Shia religious leadership far outside Arabia.
• A 2014 report indicated planning for a further major expansion of Baqi’, potentially reaching some three hundred thousand square metres and around forty-two thousand grave spaces, tied to the ongoing northern expansion of Masjid an-Nabawi — a sign that, whatever the disputes over its past architecture, the cemetery continues to grow as an active, functioning burial ground for the present-day population of Madinah and visiting Muslims.
• No formal, published archaeological excavation of Jannat al-Baqi’ exists in the academic literature consulted for this guide — a genuinely obscure fact in the sense that it is often assumed such investigation must have taken place at so historically significant a site, when in fact it has not, for reasons rooted in both the site’s continued active religious use and its evident sensitivity.

Timeline of Jannat al-Baqi

Before and During the Prophet’s ﷺ Lifetime

• Before 622 CE: The land later known as Baqi’ al-Gharqad exists as uncultivated scrubland outside Yathrib, covered in gharqad thornbush, with no substantial evidence of a distinct pre-Islamic religious or burial function specific to this plot.
• September 622 CE (1–2 AH): The Prophet ﷺ completes the Hijra from Makkah to Yathrib, which becomes Madinah.
• Roughly nine months after the Hijra (1 AH): As’ad ibn Zurarah dies and, according to al-Samhudi’s account, is buried at Baqi’ — the burial reported by some as the very first at the site.
• 2 AH (624 CE): Uthman ibn Maz’un dies after the Battle of Badr and is buried at Baqi’; the Prophet ﷺ names the plot Rawha and calls him “our predecessor.” Ruqayyah, the Prophet’s ﷺ daughter, also dies in 624 CE and is buried at Baqi’, recorded as the first Ahl al-Bayt burial there.
• 10 AH (c. 27 January 632 CE): Ibrahim ibn Muhammad ﷺ, the Prophet’s infant son, dies and is buried at Baqi’ in the plot named Zawra, coinciding with a solar eclipse later addressed in Sahih al-Bukhari 1043.
• 11 AH (632 CE): The Prophet Muhammad ﷺ dies and is buried inside his own house in Madinah, not at Baqi’. Fatimah al-Zahra dies roughly six months later, in 11 AH; her burial place becomes, and remains, a matter of dispute between traditions, as set out above.

The Rashidun and Umayyad Periods

• 35 AH (656 CE): Uthman ibn Affan, the third caliph, is assassinated; initial local resistance leads to his burial in the adjoining Jewish cemetery, Hash Kawkab, rather than Baqi’ proper.
• Umayyad period, 41–132 AH (661–750 CE): Mu’awiyah ibn Abi Sufyan incorporates the adjoining Jewish cemetery into Baqi’ to honour Uthman ibn Affan, and the Umayyads build the first dome ever raised at the site, over Uthman’s grave.
• 670 CE: Hasan ibn Ali, the Prophet’s ﷺ grandson, dies and is buried at Baqi’.
• 712–714 CE: Ali ibn al-Husayn (Zayn al-Abidin) dies and is buried in the same family enclosure.

Later Medieval and Ottoman Development

• Eleventh to thirteenth century CE (dates disputed in the sources): A large dome is raised over the shared enclosure of Abbas and the Imams — variously attributed to Majd al-Mulk al-Barawistani in the eleventh century, to the patronage of the Abbasid caliph al-Nasir li-Din Allah in the twelfth century, or to Mamluk sultan Baibars in 668 AH (1269–70 CE).
• 179 AH (795 CE): Imam Malik ibn Anas dies and is buried at Baqi’, later marked with a small dome, as described by Ibn Jubayr.
• 579 AH (1183–84 CE): Ibn Jubayr visits Madinah and leaves the earliest detailed eyewitness description of Baqi’s layout available to this research.
• 1220 AH (1806 CE): The First Saudi State, allied with the Wahhabi movement, takes control of the Hijaz and carries out the first demolition of the shrines and domes at Baqi’ and elsewhere in Madinah.
• 1815 CE: Johann Ludwig Burckhardt visits Madinah and records the ruined state of the domes after the first demolition.
• 1811–1818 CE: The Ottoman–Wahhabi War; Ibrahim Pasha defeats the Saudi-Wahhabi forces at the Battle of Diriyah in 1818, ending the First Saudi State.
• From 1818 CE: Ottoman Sultan Mahmud II orders the reconstruction of the demolished shrines; further major renovations follow in 1848 and 1860 CE.
• 1853 CE: Sir Richard Francis Burton visits Madinah in disguise and reports fifty-five mosques and shrines standing across the city.
• 1901–1908 CE: Ibrahim Rif’at Pasha travels with the Hajj caravan and later records sixteen domes standing at Baqi’ in his book Mir’at al-Haramayn.

The Second Demolition and Its Aftermath

• 1924–1925 CE: Abdulaziz ibn Saud regains control of the Hijaz, establishing what becomes the Kingdom of Hejaz and Nejd.
• 8 Shawwal 1344 AH / 21 April 1926 CE: On the fatwa of Qadi Abdullah ibn Bulayhid and fifteen scholars of Madinah, the Ikhwan carry out the second and far more thorough demolition of the domes, shrines and grave-markers at Baqi’, including the graves of Uthman ibn Affan, Malik ibn Anas, Ibrahim ibn Muhammad, and the shared enclosure of Abbas and the four Imams. Eldon Rutter is an eyewitness to the aftermath.
• May 1926 CE: An Iranian delegation dispatched by the Majles-e Shora-ye Melli reaches the Hijaz to investigate and report on the demolition.
• 1926 CE onward: Annual commemorations of Yawm al-Hadm / Yaum-e Gham begin in Shia communities and continue to the present day; rallies are held in India, Pakistan, Iran, and the United States in the following decades.
• 1982 CE: Iranian religious scholars and political figures make a renewed, and again unsuccessful, effort toward restoring the cemetery and its shrines.
• 1373 AH (1953–54 CE): A major extension enlarges Baqi’ to an estimated 170,000–175,000 square metres.
• 2014 CE: Arab News reports plans for a further expansion of the cemetery to around three hundred thousand square metres, tied to the northern expansion of Masjid an-Nabawi.
• 2023 CE: Reports (Siasat, Shafaqna) describe Saudi authorities easing restrictions specifically for Shia pilgrims visiting Baqi’ during Hajj season.
• 2024–2026 CE: Current visitor-guide sources consistently describe a general restriction on women entering the cemetery interior, free entry with no permit requirement, and short, prayer-time-linked opening windows after Fajr and Asr.

Key Lessons from Jannat al-Baqi

Historical Lessons

Baqi’s history teaches that the material record of even the most sacred ground can be entirely remade within a single generation, and that this has already happened here twice — once in 1806, and again, far more completely, in 1926. It teaches that disputes over how to honour the dead are not a modern invention grafted onto Islamic history from outside; they run back to the earliest possible moment, visible already in the gentle rivalry between the Ansar and the Muhajirun over who was buried here first. It teaches, too, that a single hadith — in this case, Ali ibn Abi Talib’s instruction to Abu al-Hayyaj, recorded in Sahih Muslim 969 — can carry enormous historical weight across many centuries, shaping not only individual religious practice but the physical landscape of an entire city, when different generations of scholars read its scope differently.

Spiritual Lessons

The cemetery teaches that memory does not require monument. The Prophet’s ﷺ own practice at Baqi’ was not to build, but to speak — a salam and a du’a, repeated at night, alone, for people whose names history has not preserved for us any more fully than it has preserved them for the visitor today. It teaches, through the story of Fatimah al-Zahra’s disputed and possibly deliberately hidden grave, that grief does not always need to be found in order to be real, and that a request for concealment, honoured for fourteen centuries, can itself become a form of enduring testimony. And it teaches, through the sheer unmarked scale of the ground — seven to ten thousand believers, by the most commonly repeated estimate, resting beneath featureless sand — that anonymity before human eyes and standing before Allah are two entirely different measures, and that only the second one, in the end, is the one that matters.

Personal Lessons

Standing at Baqi’ invites you to ask what you are actually building your own religious life around: is it the visible, the photographable, the structure that can be pointed to and admired — or is it the private act, repeated quietly and without witnesses, that outlasts every structure built to commemorate it? Uthman ibn Maz’un’s ascetic instinct, gently corrected by the Prophet ﷺ toward balance rather than extremity, is a personal lesson in itself: sincerity does not require the most extreme available practice, only the most consistent one. And the story of the two demolitions, told without a verdict, is itself a personal challenge: can you hold a firm conviction about a contested religious question while still describing, accurately and respectfully, the reasoning of those who hold the opposite view? That is a harder discipline than it sounds, and Baqi’ is as good a place as any to practise it.

Practical Lessons

Practically, Baqi’ teaches the pilgrim to travel with humility about what can and cannot be verified on the ground. No local guide, however confident, can show you Uthman ibn Maz’un’s exact grave, or Fatimah’s, or the precise spot where a specific companion was laid to rest — the demolitions removed the physical basis for that kind of certainty, whatever devotional stories you may be told on-site. It teaches the practical necessity of checking current information — opening hours, entry rules for women, photography restrictions — close to the date of your own visit, since these are matters of local policy and enforcement that can and do shift, rather than fixed features of the site you can memorise once and rely on indefinitely.

Authentic Sources

Primary Islamic Sources

• Sahih Muslim 968, 969 (969a), 970 (970a), 972, 974 — Book of Funerals. sunnah.com; sounah.com
• Sahih al-Bukhari 1043 — Book of Eclipses. sunnah.com
• Jami’ at-Tirmidhi 1049. sunnah.com
• Sunan Ibn Majah 1:498 (cited secondhand via Hajj and Umrah Planner). hajjumrahplanner.com
• Al-Hakim, al-Mustadrak, vol. 3, p. 209, no. 4867 (cited secondhand). hajjumrahplanner.com
• Al-Samhudi, Wafa’ al-Wafa bi-Akhbar Dar al-Mustafa, vol. 3, p. 810 (cited secondhand). hajjumrahplanner.com
• Ibn Jubayr, Rihlat Ibn Jubayr. Georgetown University Library digitized edition; account of Baqi’ cited via al-Islam.org and WikiShia
• Al-Amali (Twelver hadith tradition), on Fatimah’s burial instructions. thaqalayn.net
• Al-Albani, Silsilat al-Ahadith al-Sahihah, 7/165, cited via Luton Islamic Centre

A caution on primary narrative sources: early biographical and campaign literature such as Ibn Ishaq’s Sira, al-Waqidi’s Kitab al-Maghazi, and al-Tabari’s History preserve much of the detailed narrative material historians rely on for the earliest period of Islamic history, including material touching on Baqi’. All three works are valued as essential historical sources, but classical and modern scholars alike have identified weaknesses in some of their chains of transmission and have noted that al-Waqidi in particular is regarded with caution by hadith specialists. Where this guide has relied on narrative detail plausibly originating in this literature — such as the “tombstones do neither good nor ill” saying attributed to the Prophet ﷺ at Ibrahim’s grave — it has flagged the material as unverified rather than presenting it as an authenticated hadith.

Classical Scholars and Commentators

• Al-Nawawi, Sharh Sahih Muslim, cited via IslamQA
• Al-Shawkani, Nayl al-Awtar, cited via chiite.fr
• Ibn Taymiyyah, al-Tawassul wa’l-Wasilah, p. 133, cited via The Way of Salafiyyah
• Saudi Permanent Committee (al-Lajna al-Da’ima) fatwa on building over graves, cited via Brandeis University Crown Paper 2

Modern Academic and Reference Sources

• Adeel Mohammadi, “The destruction of Jannat al-Baqi’: A case of Wahhabi Iconoclasm,” Undergraduate Journal of Middle East Studies (Canada), 8 (2014–2015): 47–56, cited via Wikipedia and Madain Project
• Werner Ende, “Baqīʿ al-Gharqad,” Encyclopaedia of Islam, 3rd ed. (Brill), cited via Madain Project
• Ali Bahramian and Tr. Rahmani Gholami, “al-Baqīʿ,” Encyclopedia Islamica (Brill), cited via Madain Project
• Wikipedia, “Al-Baqi Cemetery”
• Wikipedia, “Demolition of al-Baqi”
• WikiShia, “Uthman b. Maz’un”
• WikiShia, “Al-Baqi’ (Demolition of the Shrines)”
• WikiShia, “Demolition of al-Baqi'”
• WikiShia, “Monuments of al-Baqi'”
• WikiShia, “Building over graves”
• Madain Project, “Jannat ul-Baqi'”
• Madain Project, “Masjid al-Nabawi”
• al-Islam.org, “History of the Cemetery Of Jannat Al-Baqi”
• mahdism.net, “The Burial Place of Lady Fatima”
• Academic Persian-language article on Fatimah al-Zahra’s burial place, hiq.bou.ac.ir
• Ohio State University ETD thesis on Hanbali/Wahhabi views of grave visitation
• academia.edu, “Jannat al-Baqi”
• c-karbala.com, “Demolition of al-Baqi cemetery by Saudi Wahhabis,” Part I and Part II
• erfan.ir, “Historic perspective of demolition of Baqee & Mualla cemeteries”
• Arab News, “Al-Baqie graveyard in Madinah to undergo expansion” (2014)

Contemporary Visitor and Practical Guides (2024–2026)

• Hajj and Umrah Planner, “Jannatul Baqi | Baqi al-Gharqad Cemetery in Madinah”
• Arabian Trains, “Jannat ul Baqi: History, Graves & Visiting Guide” (2026)
• Airial Travel, “Jannat al-Baqi” (2025–2026)
• The Islamic Information, “Jannat ul Baqi Cemetery Visiting Hours”
• Roam Saudi, “Jannat al-Baqi: The Sacred Cemetery of Madinah’s Past” (2025)
• Audiala, “Al-Baqi Visiting Hours, Tickets, and Medina Historical Sites” (2025)
• Hisar Travel, “Jannat al-Baqi Ziyarah: Etiquette for Singaporeans” (2025)
• The Surah Rehman, “Is Jannat al Baqi Open to UK Pilgrims Visiting Madinah in 2025?”
• taxiserviceksa.com, “Jannat al-Baqi Cemetery Madinah: Guide to the Sacred…”
• Rehlat, “Jannatul Baqi, Medina”
• Siasat, “Saudi eases restrictions on Shia pilgrims’ visits to Al-Baqi cemetery” (2023)
• Shafaqna, “Saudis ease restrictions on Shia pilgrims visiting Baqi Cemetery”
• Tripadvisor, visitor reviews for Jannatul Baqi, Medina (2015–2025)
• Wanderlog, “Al Baqi Cemetery”
• Dawateislami, “Explore Sacred Historical Sites in Madinah”

A Note on Method

This guide has been prepared with particular care because of the subject matter’s sensitivity. Every hadith cited carries an explicit grading. Every claim flagged in the research dossier behind this article as unverified, weak, or disputed has been presented to the reader as such, rather than smoothed into confident narrative. Where Sunni and Shia sources disagree — on the interpretation of the hadith evidence behind the demolitions, on the motives behind the 1926 fatwa, and on the burial place of Fatimah al-Zahra — this guide has attempted to state each tradition’s position in terms its own scholars would recognise as a fair account, and has deliberately declined to adjudicate between them. Modern academic and journalistic sources have been drawn from both Sunni/Salafi-aligned outlets (sunnah.com, IslamQA, Salafi Publications, Abu Khadeejah) and Shia-aligned outlets (WikiShia, al-Islam.org, c-karbala.com, erfan.ir) precisely so that each tradition’s own reasoning could be represented in its own terms rather than filtered through the other’s framing. Readers seeking to go further than this guide should treat popular travel and devotional websites as a starting point only, and should follow the primary hadith citations back to sunnah.com or an equivalent primary hadith database, and the classical scholarly citations back to the original texts of al-Nawawi, al-Samhudi, Ibn Taymiyyah and the others named above, wherever their own study allows.

Frequently asked questions

Who is buried in Jannat ul Baqi?

Members of the Prophet's ﷺ household and thousands of his companions rest here, with Usman bin Affan among the best known. The cemetery holds the story of the first Muslim community, generation upon generation, in one walled expanse.

What are the visiting hours for Jannat ul Baqi?

The gates typically open for a window after Fajr prayer and a shorter one after Asr. Hours can shift with the seasons and during Ramadan and Hajj, so confirm locally or with your hotel before you go.

Can women visit Jannat ul Baqi?

Under current policy only men may enter the cemetery itself. Women can view the graves over the boundary from outside, particularly from the eastern side of Masjid an-Nabawi, and give their salam to the people of Baqi from there.

Why are the graves in Baqi unmarked?

Local practice keeps the graves deliberately simple: low mounds marked by one or two plain stones, without inscriptions or mausoleums. The uniformity reflects the equality of the dead before Allah.

Is there an entry fee?

No. Entry is free during the open windows. Visitors are expected to keep a quiet, respectful presence, greet the deceased with salam, and make dua for them.