Souq Okaz (Suq Ukaz): History of Arabia’s Great Pre-Islamic Fair Between Ta’if and Nakhlah, and Its Modern Revival

For twenty days each year, in the last centuries before Islam, the tribes of Arabia set down their weapons and walked into a stretch of open ground between Ta’if and Nakhlah to trade, to arbitrate their disputes, and to listen to men and women compete in verse for a fame that could outlast their names by fifteen hundred years. This was Souq Okaz — sometimes written Souk Okaz or Suq Ukaz — and it is, by the account of nearly every historian of pre-Islamic Arabia, the most important commercial and literary gathering the peninsula produced before the coming of Islam. It is also a place the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ knew personally, first as a boy watching from the edge of a crowd, later as a young man present at a war fought over its market days, and finally as a preacher who walked its rows of tents inviting tribe after tribe to Islam, trailed by an uncle who called him a liar. This article sets out the history of Souq Okaz as carefully as the surviving sources allow, distinguishes what is authenticated from what is reported tradition, and gives an honest account of what a visitor finds there today, as part of this guide’s coverage of Islamic heritage and Seerah locations connected to the wider story of Umrah historical sites.

The site carries no ziyarah status of its own. It is not one of the handful of Makkah and Madinah locations — the Kaaba, the Prophet’s Mosque, his grave, Jannat al-Baqi, the martyrs of Uhud, Masjid Quba — for which the Sunnah establishes intentional devotional visitation. It is a place of history, literature, and, in the seventh century of the Christian era, a stage on which the Prophet ﷺ himself once stood as an unwelcome preacher among skeptical crowds. Those two facts — its importance and its lack of devotional status — are not in tension. They simply mean this article is a history, not a guide to reward.

History of Souq Okaz: Location, Dating, and the Seasonal Circuit of Arabia’s Markets

Okaz was not a permanent town but a seasonal market that came alive once a year in open country in the Hejaz, in the region historians place between Ta’if and Nakhlah, close to the sacred plain of Arafat. Multiple sources place its physical position at a site later called al-Arafa or al-Urafa (also transliterated al-‘Arafah), in what is now the Ta’if Governorate of Makkah Province, at the confluence of the valleys of Shirb and al-Ukhaidar. According to Wikipedia’s account of Souk Okaz, the coordinates most commonly cited for the site sit at roughly 21°28′28″N, 40°38′42″E, and the market ran for the first twenty days of the lunar month of Dhu al-Qa’dah — one of the four sacred months of the Arabian calendar, during which inter-tribal warfare was traditionally suspended. Saudipedia, the Saudi state-backed reference encyclopedia, gives the same span — the first through the twentieth of Dhu al-Qa’dah — and adds that the market’s origins reach back to the year 501 CE, roughly a century before the Prophet’s ﷺ birth.

The precise distance and bearing from Ta’if vary by source, and it is worth being honest about that variance rather than picking a single number and presenting it as settled. The Wikipedia article on Ta’if places the site some 40 kilometers north of the city; a 2017 Arab News feature on the market’s revival describes it as 45 kilometers to the northeast, “on a flat plain surrounded by valleys and mountains”; a 2016 Arabic-language report from Asharq Al-Awsat locates the historic market site “in al-Arafa, northeast of the city of Ta’if.” The differences are small and likely reflect different reference points within Ta’if rather than a genuine dispute about the market’s location, but readers should know the figure is approximate, not surveyed to the meter.

That approximation is itself part of the history. For centuries after the market’s disappearance, its exact location was lost. Historical geographers debated the site using classical Arabic descriptions until modern specialists, working under the patronage of King Faisal bin Abdulaziz, undertook to identify it before the twentieth-century revival effort — a detail recorded in the Arab News piece on the market’s history and repeated in several Arabic retrospectives on the festival’s founding.

Okaz Within the Seasonal Circuit: Majannah and Dhu al-Majaz

Okaz did not stand alone. It was the first stop in a sequence of three markets that carried the tribes of Arabia toward the Hajj itself, and understanding that sequence matters for understanding both the market’s religious context and, later, the exact wording of the Qur’anic verse revealed about it. According to a detailed account published by Ithra, the King Abdulaziz Center for World Culture, and corroborated across multiple historical sources, the pattern ran as follows: traders and tribes gathered first at Okaz for the first twenty days of Dhu al-Qa’dah; the market then shifted for roughly the final ten days of that month to Majannah, located near the hills of Marr al-Zahran (also called Wadi Fatimah) close to present-day al-Jumum, some thirty kilometers from Makkah; and finally, in the first eight or nine days of the following month, Dhu al-Hijjah, the gathering moved to Dhu al-Majaz, a market close enough to Makkah — about twenty kilometers to its east — that pilgrims could walk from there directly into the rites of Hajj. Okaz, in other words, was the opening act of a month-long procession of trade, poetry, and pilgrimage that ended at the Kaaba itself.

This sequencing explains why classical sources sometimes name only Okaz, sometimes name Okaz and Dhu al-Majaz, and sometimes name all three markets together — a variation that appears, as this article will show, even within two hadith narrations of the same historical episode in Sahih al-Bukhari.

How Long the Market Lasted, and How It Ended

On the market’s total lifespan, sources again show minor disagreement that is worth reporting rather than smoothing over. The Arabic Wikipedia article on Souq Okaz and Saudipedia both date its founding to 501 CE and its final destruction to the year 129 AH (747 CE), when Kharijite rebels under a leader named al-Mukhtar bin Awf — who had briefly seized control of Makkah — looted and destroyed the market. A separate database maintained by the Islamic Architectural Heritage database of IRCICA describes the market’s life as spanning “over two centuries,” beginning roughly seventy years before the Hijrah and continuing to around 129 AH — broadly consistent with the other sources, though phrased differently. Saudipedia notes that even after the Kharijite destruction, the site continued to function in a reduced capacity as a trade and pilgrimage waystation until as late as the twelfth century CE, before falling fully out of use. The reasons commonly given for the market’s decline are the expansion of the Islamic conquests, which redirected trade routes far beyond Arabia, and the shift of the Islamic world’s political and cultural centers to Damascus and later Baghdad — developments that left a seasonal fair in the Hejaz increasingly peripheral to the empire it had once served.

None of this changes the core, well-corroborated fact: Okaz operated for roughly two centuries, spanning the last hundred years of the Jahiliyyah (the pre-Islamic period) and the first century of Islam, reaching its final destruction only in the Umayyad period, more than a century after the Prophet’s ﷺ death.

Trade at Okaz: What Was Actually Bought and Sold

Poetry gave Okaz its lasting fame, but the market’s original and, for most of the tribes who attended, primary purpose was commercial. Okaz functioned as the largest general trade fair of pre-Islamic Arabia, drawing merchants and goods from a genuinely wide geographic range: from Hajar in eastern Arabia, from Iraq, from the Levant, from Persia, from Yemen, and from the surrounding desert encampments, according to the detailed account preserved in Saudipedia’s entry on Souk Okaz. Bedouin herders from the interior brought ghee, milk, dried curd, sheep, and camels. Yemen sent embroidered cloaks and finished leather goods north. The Levant supplied weapons — a category of goods whose presence at a market held under a sacred truce says something about how thoroughly commercial function and tribal reality coexisted at Okaz even during a period when fighting was formally forbidden. Persia contributed perfumes and silk, carried across the peninsula along the same routes that fed Makkah’s own Quraysh-led caravan trade. From nearby Ta’if itself came leather, raisins, and grapes, the produce of the well-watered highland agriculture that has always distinguished Ta’if from the more arid country around it.

Leather in particular became so closely associated with Okaz that a specific commercial term grew up around it: goods described as “Okazi leather” (adim ‘ukazi) were understood across Arabia to mean leather of a certain recognized quality, even though, as Saudipedia’s account notes explicitly, the leather was not actually manufactured at Okaz itself — the name had become a mark of the market’s reputation as a trading hub rather than a literal statement of origin, in much the way a modern buyer might speak of a “Savile Row suit” without the garment having been cut in London. Classical accounts collected in the reference work Aswaq al-‘Arab fi al-Jahiliyyah wa al-Islam (“The Markets of the Arabs in Pre-Islamic Times and in Islam”) describe an even wider range of goods moving through Okaz: wine from Hajar, Iraq, Gaza, and Busra; ghee from the desert tribes; fine woven and embroidered cloth from Yemen; perfume, aromatic resins, and weapons; silk, sword-belts, sandals, and other manufactured goods carried in by professional traders “from their sources,” according to the same compilation, as reproduced in the digital text hosted at alsunniah.com’s edition of Aswaq al-‘Arab. The same source records that the pre-Islamic king of al-Hirah, al-Nu’man ibn al-Mundhir, sent a laden caravan of musk to Okaz under armed protective escort each year specifically to be sold there — a detail that illustrates how far Okaz’s commercial reputation extended beyond the Hejaz itself, reaching the Arab client-kingdoms on the frontier of the Persian Empire.

Modern retrospectives on the market, including a detailed piece published by the Saudi newspaper Al-Watan quoting Ta’if University history professor Aid al-Zahrani, add textiles, foodstuffs, livestock, jewelry of every kind, and swords to this list, along with a designated section of the market specifically for arms — swords, spears, shields, and daggers — reflecting how frequently the Arabian peninsula’s tribes were engaged in conflict with one another or with neighboring powers even during the sacred-month truce that made trade possible in the first place. A separate historical account published by Ultrasawt describes the market as effectively subdivided by product category — a livestock and camel section, a spice, perfume, and incense section, a textile section trading silk, linen, and cotton, a jewelry section dealing in bracelets, necklaces, pearls, and carnelian, a leather and woven-rug section, a food section for dates, honey, spices, and dried fish, and an arms section — organized enough to resemble, in the words of one of the historians consulted by Al-Watan, a fair with more categories and more geographic reach than many modern trade exhibitions, even without modern infrastructure. The same Ultrasawt account notes that no taxes were levied on goods sold during the Okaz season, a detail that, if accurate, would have added meaningfully to the market’s appeal as a trading destination relative to other commercial arrangements of the period.

One further category of commerce recorded at Okaz deserves direct and honest mention rather than omission: the market is reported in multiple classical and modern Arabic sources, including the Aswaq al-‘Arab compilation and the Youm7 historical retrospective, to have included a trade in captives taken in tribal warfare and raiding — enslaved people bought and sold as war spoils, a grim but historically documented feature of pre-Islamic Arabian commerce that Islam did not invent and that the Qur’an and the Prophet’s ﷺ own teaching worked, over the following decades, to progressively restrict and ultimately move toward eliminating. This dimension of the market’s history connects directly and specifically to the Prophet’s ﷺ own household: the seerah records that Zayd ibn Harithah, who would become the Prophet’s ﷺ adopted son and one of the few Companions named directly in the Qur’an, had been captured as a boy and was purchased, according to several sira accounts, in a market transaction of this kind before eventually coming into the possession of Khadijah bint Khuwaylid, who gifted him to the Prophet ﷺ, who then freed him. Whether that specific transaction took place at Okaz itself, at Makkah, or at another market is not stated with full precision across the sources consulted for this article, and this article does not claim more precision than the sources support; what can be said honestly is that this exact category of pre-Islamic commerce — captives sold as property — is well documented at markets of Okaz’s kind, and that it forms part of the same larger historical backdrop against which Islam’s teachings on manumission and the gradual restriction of slavery should be understood.

What this fuller commercial picture demonstrates is that Okaz was never, even at its most literary, a market that existed for poetry alone. It was, as the Arabic Wikipedia article on the market puts it, a gathering that combined shi’ri (poetic) and tijari (commercial) functions in a single annual event, and the physical goods moving through it — wool and leather and silk and grain and weapons and livestock — mattered as much to most of the tens of thousands of people who attended as any ode recited from a leather pavilion. The poetry is what survived in later memory and later literature; the trade is what most people actually came for.

The Poetry of Okaz: Competitive Recitation and the Mu’allaqat

If Okaz is remembered for one thing above all others, it is poetry. In a society without a state, without a shared script in wide use, and without institutions of literary criticism beyond the tribe and the marketplace, Okaz functioned as something like a combined stock exchange, supreme court, and national theater for the spoken word. A poet’s reputation, and by extension his or her tribe’s standing among the Arabs, could be made or broken in front of a crowd at Okaz. This section reports what is known about the poets most associated with the market, and then reports — honestly, and without adjudicating — the modern scholarly controversy over how much of what survives from this literary tradition can actually be trusted as genuinely pre-Islamic.

The Poets and the Mu’allaqat

The single body of work most closely associated with the pre-Islamic poetic tradition is the Mu’allaqat — literally the “Suspended” or “Hanging” Odes, a collection of long odes (qasidas) attributed to a small group of pre-Islamic poets and regarded, across the history of Arabic literature, as the supreme achievement of the pre-Islamic poetic form. The standard list, as transmitted by the ninth-century compiler Ibn Abd Rabbih, names seven poets: Imru’ al-Qays, Tarafa ibn al-‘Abd, Zuhayr ibn Abi Sulma, Labid ibn Rabi’ah, Amr ibn Kulthum, Antarah ibn Shaddad, and al-Harith ibn Hilliza. Other early compilers gave different lists — the philologist Abu ‘Ubaydah’s version substitutes in al-Nabighah al-Dhubyani and al-A’sha, while Ibn Qutaybah’s version adds ‘Abid ibn al-Abras — a variation itself recorded in the Wikipedia entry on the Mu’allaqat and consistent with the fact that the “canon” of seven was never fixed by any single early authority.

Imru’ al-Qays, who died around 544 CE, is often called the father of Arabic poetry. A prince of the Kindite royal line, tradition holds that his father was murdered by a rival tribe and that Imru’ al-Qays spent much of his life seeking vengeance; a later, more legendary strand of the tradition holds he was eventually poisoned by order of the Byzantine emperor after an affair with the emperor’s daughter, though this detail belongs to legend rather than verified history. His Mu’allaqah opens with the line “Stop, both of you, let us weep” (qifa nabki), among the most quoted opening lines in the whole of Arabic literature.

Tarafa ibn al-‘Abd, the youngest of the seven, was reportedly executed around 569 CE at about twenty years old, after satirical verses aimed at the Lakhmid king Amr ibn Hind provoked the king to send him, unknowing, carrying his own sealed execution order to a governor. Zuhayr ibn Abi Sulma, the eldest and by tradition the wisest of the group, composed his ode after witnessing the long and costly War of Dahis and al-Ghabra between the tribes of Abs and Dhubyan, and used it to praise the two peacemakers, Harim ibn Sinan and al-Harith ibn Awf, who had ended the conflict by paying blood-money from their own wealth. Labid ibn Rabi’ah stands apart from the rest: he alone among the traditional seven lived to embrace Islam and survived deep into the Islamic era, dying around 661 CE.

Antarah ibn Shaddad al-‘Absi is remembered as a Black warrior-poet, son of an Abs tribal chief and an enslaved Ethiopian mother named Zabiba; tradition holds his father initially refused to acknowledge him as a free man until he defended the tribe in battle, at which point, according to the famous line attributed to him, his father called him forward saying a slave does not fight for a cause he has no stake in, and freed him. His Mu’allaqah interweaves a love address to his cousin Abla with scenes of combat. Amr ibn Kulthum, chief of the Taghlib tribe, composed what is often called the most thunderous of the seven odes, a pure tribal boast of such enduring power among his people that the caliph Umar ibn al-Khattab is reported to have remarked of the Taghlib’s devotion to it, “their poem is their Qur’an” — a report of literary tradition, not a hadith, and repeated here as such. Al-Harith ibn Hilliza al-Yashkuri, who died around 580 CE, composed his ode as a legal defense of his tribe, Bakr, before King Amr ibn Hind in a dispute with the rival tribe of Taghlib — Amr ibn Kulthum’s own people.

Structurally, the qasida form these poets used typically opens with a nasib, a nostalgic address to the remains of an abandoned campsite and a lost beloved; moves through a rahil, a description of a journey, often across harsh desert terrain, frequently narrated through the poet’s she-camel; and closes with a fakhr, a boast of the poet’s own or his tribe’s virtues, or occasionally a hija, a satire of an enemy. This structure is described consistently across academic treatments of pre-Islamic Arabic poetry, including the overview in the Wikipedia article on pre-Islamic Arabic poetry.

Did the Mu’allaqat Actually Hang at the Kaaba?

The name “Mu’allaqat” has traditionally been explained by a striking legend: that the seven winning odes were written in gold ink on fine Coptic linen and physically hung on the curtains of the Kaaba in Makkah, a monument to their poets’ triumph. This is one of the most beloved stories in the history of Arabic literature — and it is also one that a careful, honest history must flag clearly as unverified and, in the judgment of most modern scholars, almost certainly untrue as literal fact.

The earliest surviving source for the physical-hanging story is the tenth-century literary anthologist Ibn Abd Rabbih, writing in his compendium al-‘Iqd al-Farid — a text compiled roughly three and a half centuries after the poems themselves were supposedly composed. No source closer to the events describes any such display. The tenth-century grammarian and Qur’an commentator al-Nahhas explicitly denied the story in his own era, writing, as recorded in the Wikipedia entry on the Mu’allaqat, that “as for the assertion that they were hung up in the Kaaba, it is not known to any of those who have handed down ancient poems.” The Encyclopaedia Britannica’s entry on al-Mu’allaqat notes it is “by no means clear… that Hammad himself ever used the name” for the collection — Hammad al-Rawiya, the eighth-century transmitter usually credited with first assembling the seven odes into a single collection, reportedly called them simply “the seven renowned ones” (al-sab’ al-mashhurat), with no reference to hanging.

Modern scholars have offered several alternative explanations for the name that do not require a literal physical display: that “golden,” a term also attached to the poems in some traditions, was meant figuratively, denoting their supreme excellence rather than a material fact; that “suspended” referred instead to the poems being denied their proper place of honor, an interpretation some scholars have connected to a metaphorical use of the same root in the Qur’an at verse 4:129; or, more simply, that the poems “hang” in the mind and memory of the reader, the way a cherished line stays with a person long after it is heard. None of these theories can be proven any more than the hanging legend itself can be disproven outright — this is a case where the earliest, most reliable sources are silent, and everything after them is later literary elaboration. This article reports the legend, and reports honestly that it is exactly that: a legend, unattested before the tenth century and explicitly rejected by at least one contemporaneous classical scholar.

Taha Husayn, D. S. Margoliouth, and the Twentieth-Century Authenticity Controversy

A separate and larger controversy concerns not just the Kaaba legend but the authenticity of the entire pre-Islamic poetic corpus — whether the poems attributed to Imru’ al-Qays, Zuhayr, and the rest were actually composed in the Jahiliyyah at all, or whether they were substantially invented much later, in the first two or three centuries of Islam, and retroactively projected backward onto famous pre-Islamic names. This is not a fringe theory. It was argued, independently and almost simultaneously, by two serious scholars in the 1920s, and it produced one of the most consequential controversies in modern Arabic intellectual history.

In 1925, the British Orientalist David Samuel Margoliouth published an article titled “The Origins of Arabic Poetry” in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society. According to a scholarly overview of the article’s reception published by the University of Mosul’s journal Muthuruk, Margoliouth argued that because pre-Islamic poetry was not written down until the second and third Islamic centuries — long after the events and figures it claimed to describe — the delay opened the door to alteration, addition, and outright fabrication by later transmitters. He pointed specifically to reports that certain transmitters, notably Hammad al-Rawiya and Khalaf al-Ahmar, had themselves been accused by classical Arab critics of inventing verses and passing them off as ancient. Margoliouth did not claim that no authentic pre-Islamic poetry existed at all; rather, as one recent academic summary of his position puts it, he suggested that an authentic early core likely existed, but that it was considerably smaller than the vast body of verse that has come down to the present day, and that political rivalries in the Umayyad and Abbasid periods had encouraged the wholesale reshaping of the poetic past to serve later tribal and dynastic interests.

The following year, the Egyptian scholar Taha Husayn — who had studied in Europe and was well aware of Margoliouth’s article — published his own book, Fi al-Shi’r al-Jahili (“On Pre-Islamic Poetry”), independently developing a closely related but considerably more sweeping argument. According to the summary in the Wikipedia article on On Pre-Islamic Poetry, Husayn concluded that “the general mass of what we call pre-Islamic literature had nothing whatever to do with the pre-Islamic period, but was just simply fabricated after the coming of Islam. It is therefore Islamic, and represents the life, the inclination, the desires of Muslims, rather than the life of pre-Islamic Arabs.” Husayn dated the bulk of the corpus’s fabrication to the Abbasid era and attributed it to political, religious, and narrative motives — including, controversially, motives connected to the transmission of hadith and qisas (edifying stories) literature. He went further than Margoliouth in one specific and explosive respect: he also cast doubt on the historicity of certain Qur’anic narratives concerning pre-Islamic Arabian figures such as Ibrahim and Isma’il, on the grounds that if the poetry used to corroborate ancient Arabian life was itself fabricated, the corroboration collapsed. This aspect of his argument, rather than the poetry question alone, is what produced the “violent storm of protest,” in the words of one account on Islamic Awareness’s overview of the controversy, that led Husayn to withdraw the book from circulation and republish a revised, more cautious version two years later under the title Fi al-Adab al-Jahili (“On Pre-Islamic Literature”).

The counter-arguments, made at the time and repeated by later scholars, were substantial. Critics — among them contemporary Egyptian literary figures such as Ahmad Shawqi and Muhammad Mandur — pointed out that Husayn’s own methodology sometimes amounted to declaring a poem inauthentic because its content seemed, to a modern reader, too polished or too coherent to be primitive, which is a matter of literary taste rather than historical evidence. A separate and often-cited counter-argument rests on the Qur’an itself: the text repeatedly engages with poetry as a known and contested category of pre-Islamic Arabian speech, at one point instructing the Prophet ﷺ to answer the accusation that he is merely “a poet possessed” — evidence, proponents of the corpus’s authenticity argue, that a living poetic tradition genuinely existed in the society the Qur’an was addressing, whatever the fate of any specific surviving poem. A recent scholarly survey by researchers writing on the perspective of the modern Turkish scholar Fuat Sezgin, published by the academic journal RumeliDE, notes that Sezgin, drawing on deep expertise in the manuscript tradition, argued for the essential originality of the Jahili poetic corpus against what he saw as the excessive skepticism of Margoliouth and Husayn. More broadly, a research overview from the SOAS repository observes that “while their theory has been largely abandoned, doubts about the authenticity of the corpus have continued to persist” — meaning that the specific claim of total, wholesale forgery is no longer the dominant scholarly position, but that genuine, unresolved uncertainty about how much of any given poem reflects sixth-century composition versus later transmission and editing remains part of the field to this day.

This article does not adjudicate between Margoliouth, Husayn, and their critics. What can be stated plainly is this: the question of how much of the surviving pre-Islamic poetic corpus is genuinely pre-Islamic was raised seriously by credentialed scholars in the 1920s, provoked real controversy in the Arab world, was met with substantive rebuttals, and remains, in modified and more cautious form, a live question in the academic study of early Arabic literature.

Al-Nabighah al-Dhubyani’s Pavilion and the Judging of Poets

Among the most vivid images that survive of Okaz is the report of a red leather dome or tent (qubbah min adam) erected at the market for the poet al-Nabighah al-Dhubyani (Ziyad ibn Mu’awiyah), who lived roughly between 535 and 604 or 605 CE. According to this literary tradition — reported across classical Arabic sources and summarized in a modern retelling by a study of al-Nabighah al-Dhubyani’s career, poets who wished to have their verse judged and ranked against their rivals would come to al-Nabighah’s pavilion and recite before him, and he would render a verdict on the relative merit of what he heard. This function made him, in effect, the closest thing pre-Islamic Arabia had to a literary judge with market-wide authority, and poets who sought fame at Okaz reportedly submitted to his pavilion to have their reputations tested in public.

The best-known story to come out of al-Nabighah’s pavilion involves three of the most celebrated poetic names of the era: al-Nabighah himself as judge, the poet al-Khansa, and the young Hassan ibn Thabit, who would later become the Prophet’s ﷺ own poet after the establishment of Islam in Madinah. According to the account preserved by Ithraeyat, a cultural publishing platform of the King Abdulaziz Center (Ithra), al-Khansa recited before al-Nabighah, who praised her verse highly, telling her: “Were it not for the poet al-A’sha before you, I would have proclaimed you the greatest poet among all humans and jinn alike.” Hassan ibn Thabit, present in the same gathering, objected to being ranked beneath her, declaring, “I am better than both you and her.” Al-Nabighah is said to have then invited al-Khansa to answer the challenge herself; she asked Hassan to recite the line of poetry he was proudest of, and then dissected it before the assembled crowd, identifying what the tradition records as seven distinct literary faults in it — leaving Hassan, in the words of the account, speechless.

A slightly different version of the same core episode appears in the 1911 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, reproduced on Wikisource’s entry on al-Khansa, which states that “Nabigha Dhubyani is said to have placed A’sha first among the poets then present, and Khansa second, above Hassan ibn Thabit” — the same essential ranking and the same three names, framed slightly differently. Both versions belong to literary tradition rather than hadith transmission, and this article reports them as exactly that: a beloved and frequently repeated story from the classical Arabic literary heritage, not a historically documented transcript of a specific afternoon at Okaz. The story’s durability says something true about how Arabs of the era understood poetic reputation to be made and unmade — in public, before a judge, with real consequences for standing among one’s peers — even where the precise dialogue cannot be verified word for word.

The Prophet Muhammad ﷺ and Okaz: Distinguishing Sahih Reports from Sira Narrative

Okaz enters Islamic history for a second reason beyond poetry: the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ attended it, more than once, across different periods of his life, and at least two of those episodes are anchored in authenticated hadith rather than biographical narrative (sira) alone. This section separates the two categories carefully, because the difference matters. A hadith recorded in Sahih al-Bukhari carries a different evidentiary weight than a report found only in the sira literature of Ibn Ishaq or later biographers, and a reader deserves to know which is which.

A Boy and a Young Man at the Market

According to Saudipedia’s entry on Souk Okaz, the Prophet ﷺ is recorded to have attended the market as a boy, as a young man, and again after the start of his prophethood. As a boy, he reportedly accompanied his uncle al-Abbas ibn Abd al-Muttalib to see the tribal encampments there — an early, formative exposure to the full breadth of Arabian tribal life, gathered in one place, that the future Prophet ﷺ would later draw on when he began, as an adult, to identify tribes he judged might be receptive to his message. These attendances belong to the biographical tradition (sira) rather than to a specific hadith with an isnad in the major collections, and this article reports them on that basis: plausible, widely repeated in the classical biographical literature, but not carrying the same grade of authentication as a hadith in Bukhari or Muslim.

The Fijar Wars

A firmer point of contact between the Prophet’s ﷺ youth and Okaz’s market calendar is the Fijar War (Harb al-Fijar), a series of clashes between the Quraysh and their allies and the tribe of Hawazin that broke out, according to tradition, precisely because they violated the truce of the sacred months under which markets like Okaz operated — hence the name Fijar, from a root meaning transgression or violation of a sacred prohibition. According to the overview in the Wikipedia article on the Fijar Wars, sources agree that Muhammad ﷺ — variously described as being between fourteen and twenty years old at the time, depending on the source — was present at the fighting, having been brought along by his uncles. The consistent report is that he did not fight himself or wield a sword in anger, but assisted by collecting and handing arrows to his uncles and shielding them from enemy fire. As with the earlier boyhood visits, this account belongs to the sira tradition rather than to a hadith with a formal isnad, and is reported here on that understanding.

Calling the Tribes to Islam at Okaz, Majannah, and Dhu al-Majaz

The most theologically significant reports of the Prophet’s ﷺ presence at Okaz concern the Makkan period of his mission, after the start of revelation, when — according to the sira tradition — he went from tribe to tribe at the seasonal markets, including Okaz, Majannah, and Dhu al-Majaz, inviting them individually to accept Islam and offer him protection so that he could deliver his message freely. One frequently cited episode, recorded in a retelling published by Questions on Islam drawing on the classical sira sources, describes the Prophet ﷺ approaching an elderly man, said to be around 120 years old, from a clan of the tribe of Muharib ibn Khasafah, only for the old man to reply that he could not respond because, as he put it, Abu Lahab was standing nearby. Abu Lahab, the Prophet’s ﷺ own paternal uncle and a committed opponent of his mission, is reported in this tradition to have followed him through the market “like a black spirit,” warning tribal leaders against the Prophet ﷺ and denouncing him as a liar and a sorcerer — a bitter reversal, tradition notes, from the years before revelation when the same Quraysh had called Muhammad ﷺ “al-Amin,” the trustworthy one.

This episode, like the boyhood and Fijar War reports, belongs to the sira and maghazi literature rather than to a hadith with a formal chain of transmission graded by the muhaddithun. It is a widely repeated and broadly consistent element of the traditional account of the Makkan period, but it should not be presented to a reader as carrying the same evidentiary status as a hadith recorded in the six canonical collections. This article reports it as sira: historically plausible, deeply embedded in the traditional biography of the Prophet ﷺ, but not sahih in the technical hadith-science sense of that word.

Qur’an 2:198 and the Markets of Okaz, Majannah, and Dhu al-Majaz

The clearest and most firmly authenticated connection between Okaz and the Qur’an itself concerns a verse revealed about trading during the Hajj season — and this connection is anchored not in sira narrative but in two separate hadith recorded in Sahih al-Bukhari, both traced back to the Companion Ibn Abbas.

﴿لَيْسَ عَلَيْكُمْ جُنَاحٌ أَن تَبْتَغُوا۟ فَضْلًۭا مِّن رَّبِّكُمْ ۚ فَإِذَآ أَفَضْتُم مِّنْ عَرَفَـٰتٍۢ فَٱذْكُرُوا۟ ٱللَّهَ عِندَ ٱلْمَشْعَرِ ٱلْحَرَامِ ۖ وَٱذْكُرُوهُ كَمَا هَدَىٰكُمْ وَإِن كُنتُم مِّن قَبْلِهِۦ لَمِنَ ٱلضَّآلِّينَ﴾

“There is no blame on you for seeking the bounty of your Lord [during Hajj by trading]. Then when you depart from ‘Arafat, remember Allah near the sacred site (al-Mash’ar al-Haram), and remember Him as He has guided you, for indeed you were, before that, among those astray.” (Qur’an 2:198)

The asbab al-nuzul (occasion of revelation) for this verse is recorded in two separate narrations in Sahih al-Bukhari, and the two narrations differ slightly in which markets they name — a variation worth reporting rather than concealing. The first, Sahih al-Bukhari 1770, narrates on the authority of Ibn Abbas: “Dhul-Majaz and ‘Ukaz were the markets of the people during the Pre-Islamic period of ignorance. When the people embraced Islam, they disliked to do bargaining there till the following Holy Verse was revealed: ‘There is no harm for you if you seek of the bounty of your Lord (during Hajj by trading, etc.)'” This version names only two markets: Dhu al-Majaz and Okaz.

The second narration, Sahih al-Bukhari 2050, again on the authority of Ibn Abbas, gives a fuller list: “‘Ukaz, Majanna and Dhul-Majaz were marketplaces in the Pre-Islamic period of ignorance. When Islam came, Muslims felt that marketing there might be a sin. So, the Divine Inspiration came: ‘There is no harm for you to seek the bounty of your Lord (in the seasons of Hajj).’ Ibn ‘Abbas recited the Verse in this way.” This version names all three markets of the seasonal circuit — Okaz, Majannah, and Dhu al-Majaz — matching the fuller geographical picture described earlier in this article.

Both hadith are found in Sahih al-Bukhari and are therefore authenticated (sahih) at the highest grade of hadith science; the difference between them is a difference in how much detail each narrator’s chain preserved, not a contradiction about the underlying event. The occasion for revelation, in both versions, is the same: early Muslims, newly conscious of avoiding anything associated with the practices of the Jahiliyyah, had begun to feel uneasy about continuing to trade at these markets during the sacred season of Hajj, and the verse was revealed to reassure them that seeking lawful commercial gain during the pilgrimage season was not sinful. This is, among other things, direct Qur’anic evidence that Muslims in Madinah continued to know Okaz, Majannah, and Dhu al-Majaz by name and continued to do business at them well into the Islamic period — a market that predated Islam did not simply vanish the moment the Prophet ﷺ emigrated to Madinah.

Hilf al-Fudul and the Prophet’s ﷺ Presence

A separate but related episode from the Prophet’s ﷺ pre-prophetic life, connected to the same period and the same climate of tribal violence that produced the Fijar Wars, is the pact known as Hilf al-Fudul, or the Alliance of the Virtuous. According to the tradition recorded across the sira literature, in the aftermath of an incident in which a visiting trader from Yemen was cheated and mistreated by a powerful Makkan and could find no one in Makkah willing to help him recover his rights, a coalition of clans — among them Banu Hashim (the Prophet’s ﷺ own clan), Banu Zuhrah, Banu al-Muttalib, Banu Asad, and Banu Taym ibn Murrah — gathered at the home of Abdullah ibn Jud’an during the sacred month of Dhu al-Qa’dah and swore an oath to stand together against any oppressor and in support of any wronged person in Makkah, regardless of tribal affiliation. Tradition holds that the youngest people present at this pact included the future Prophet Muhammad ﷺ and the future caliph Abu Bakr al-Siddiq, both still young men at the time.

Unlike the Fijar Wars and the sermon-market visits, this episode is remembered in a hadith carrying the Prophet’s ﷺ own later testimony about it, cited across multiple classical sources: he is reported to have said, “I witnessed a pact of virtue in the house of Abdullah ibn Jud’an that I would not exchange for a herd of red camels; and if I were called to it now, in Islam, I would respond.” A related narration, on the authority of Abd al-Rahman ibn Awf, records the Prophet ﷺ saying: “I was present with my uncles at the alliance of the perfumed ones (Hilf al-Mutayyabin), and I would not wish to break it, even for red camels” — red camels being, in the idiom of the time, a byword for the most valuable wealth an Arab could possess. This alliance is also called Hilf al-Mutayyabin, “the Pact of the Perfumed,” from the tradition that its founding members dipped their hands in perfume and pressed them to the wall of the Kaaba to seal the oath. The Prophet’s ﷺ own later endorsement of the pact — recorded as his express statement that he would honor it again even after prophethood — gives Hilf al-Fudul a distinct evidentiary standing among the pre-Islamic episodes touched on in this article: it rests on the Prophet’s ﷺ own remembered words, not sira narrative alone, even where this article has not been able to verify a single, specific Bukhari or Muslim reference number for the wording quoted above and reports it, accordingly, as a well-attested statement from the broader hadith and sira literature rather than citing an unverified collection number.

Quss ibn Sa’idah al-Iyadi: The Sermon at Okaz and Its Authenticity

One of the most evocative stories connected to Okaz concerns a figure who was neither a poet competing for fame nor a tribal leader trading goods, but a preacher: Quss ibn Sa’idah al-Iyadi, a pre-Islamic Arabian religious figure, sometimes described as a bishop of Najran, who died around 600 CE, roughly a decade before the start of the Prophet’s ﷺ mission. According to the Wikipedia entry on Quss ibn Sa’ida al-Iyadi, he is considered a legendary or, at most, a semi-legendary figure, known only from Muslim sources rather than any independent pre-Islamic record — a fact that itself bears on how his story should be weighed.

Tradition holds that Quss preached at Okaz, mounted on a camel, calling the crowds gathered there to abandon their idols and their heedlessness, warning them of death and the passing of generations, and describing a coming religion that he said was more pleasing to God than what they practiced. The fullest surviving version of the sermon, as transmitted through the chain recorded by the tenth-century scholar al-Baqillani in his work I’jaz al-Qur’an — a chain running through Muhammad ibn Ali al-Ansari, back through several further narrators including a certain Mujalid, to al-Sha’bi and Ibn Abbas — opens with the memorable lines: “O people, gather, and when you have gathered, listen; and when you have listened, understand; and when you have understood, speak the truth… Whoever lives, dies; and whoever dies, is gone; and everything that is coming will come.” It goes on to describe the sky, the stars, the sea, the mountains, and the succession of the dead, closing with an oath that God holds a religion more pleasing to Him than the one Quss’s audience followed at the time.

The Prophet Muhammad ﷺ is reported, in a widely repeated tradition recorded across multiple classical sira and hadith-adjacent sources, to have recalled seeing and hearing Quss deliver this sermon at Okaz before the start of his own prophethood. Years later, when a delegation from the tribe of Iyad — Quss’s own tribe — came to him in Madinah, the Prophet ﷺ reportedly asked them for news of Quss, and on learning that he had died, is reported to have said: “I have not forgotten him at Okaz, upon a red camel, speaking eloquently,” before reciting from memory the lines of the sermon he had heard as a young man, at one point needing a companion to supply a couplet he could not fully recall. Concerning Quss himself, the Prophet ﷺ is reported to have said, “May God have mercy on Quss; indeed, I hope he will be raised on the Day of Judgment as a nation unto himself” — reflecting a tradition that Quss, though he lived and died before Islam, is remembered as having recognized and awaited a true religion beyond what his own contemporaries practiced.

A note on authenticity: this is a beloved story, told and retold across centuries of Arabic literary and devotional writing, and it is repeated in this article for that reason — it belongs to how generations of Muslims have understood Okaz and the world the Prophet ﷺ grew up in. But it should be graded plainly as weak. Quss ibn Sa’idah is, by the assessment of the Wikipedia summary of modern scholarship on him, a legendary or semi-legendary figure attested only in later Muslim sources, with no independent pre-Islamic corroboration of his existence or his sermon. The fullest chain of transmission for the sermon itself, as preserved by al-Baqillani, passes through narrators — including the transmitter Mujalid ibn Sa’id — whom hadith critics have generally graded as weak in other contexts, and the report as a whole was not judged strong enough for inclusion in the six canonical hadith collections. The correct classification for this material, applying the standard grading vocabulary of hadith science, is weak (da’if): a report with a chain of transmission that does not meet the standard of authenticity required for confident historical or legal reliance, even though its content is not obviously fabricated and has been treated for centuries as broadly plausible tradition rather than invention. Readers should hold the story exactly there — as cherished tradition, not as verified history.

The Decline of Okaz and What Archaeology Has Found

Okaz did not end abruptly with the coming of Islam. As the hadith of Ibn Abbas cited earlier in this article make clear, Muslims in Madinah were still debating whether it was appropriate to trade at Okaz, Majannah, and Dhu al-Majaz well after the Hijrah, and the Qur’anic verse revealed on the matter reassured them that it was permitted. The market’s real end came more than a century later, in the year 129 AH (747 CE), when — according to Saudipedia and the Arabic Wikipedia account of the market’s history cited earlier in this article — Kharijite rebels under a commander named al-Mukhtar bin Awf, who had briefly seized control of Makkah during the political upheavals of the late Umayyad period, looted and destroyed the market. Even after this destruction, Saudipedia records that the site continued to function in a diminished capacity as a waystation for trade and pilgrimage traffic until as late as the twelfth century CE, before falling out of use entirely and slipping, over the following centuries, out of secure historical memory to the point that its precise location had to be rediscovered by modern researchers.

What Has Actually Been Found at the Site

Modern archaeological survey of the Okaz site has been limited but not fruitless, and it is worth reporting exactly what has and has not been documented rather than either overstating or dismissing it. According to the detailed inventory published by Saudipedia, the following features have been identified and recorded at or near the historic market site in Ta’if Governorate:

• On the Red Saraya Plateau (Hamra al-Saraya), rock carvings executed in black pigment, including abstract drawings and a depiction of a horse with a visible rider.
• At Wadi Luwan, approximately seven kilometers east of the Okaz site, two separate rock art locations showing drawings of cattle, an abstract human figure, and a well-executed depiction of a camel.
• The site known as al-‘Abal, roughly two kilometers east of Okaz: an elevated hill with two peaks, a stone circle at its summit, and the foundations of several archaeological structures located about 500 meters northwest of Okaz’s northern gate.
• On the Red Saraya Plateau, a set of Islamic-era commemorative inscriptions — supplications and Qur’anic verses — carved in unpointed Kufic script and dated by specialists to a range spanning the seventh to ninth centuries CE, i.e., from close to the time of the Prophet ﷺ through the early Abbasid period.
• The al-Bayda Well, approximately 2.47 kilometers southeast of Okaz, which served as a water source on the historic Yemeni pilgrimage route, together with the foundations of an early Islamic-period structure situated just to its west.
• Several later historical structures in the wider area: the Musharrafah Palace, dated to the Umayyad or Abbasid period; the al-‘Arafah Fortress, built in the late nineteenth century; and the Marwan Fortress, located about three kilometers south of the Okaz site.

Taken together, this record shows a landscape of long, layered human use — pre-Islamic rock art, early Islamic religious inscriptions, medieval waystation architecture, and a nineteenth-century fortress — but it does not amount to the excavation of a coherent, dateable “market district” of shops, stalls, or tents comparable to what has, in a separate and more recent survey, been documented at the related market site of Dhu al-Majaz. A 2023 survey conducted by Saudi Arabia’s Heritage Commission at the Dhu al-Majaz site, roughly twenty kilometers east of Makkah, reported by Arab News, uncovered architectural units believed to be shop structures, what may have been a main commercial passage or market thoroughfare, Islamic-era inscriptions, and pottery and ceramic fragments. This is a genuinely useful point of comparison for understanding what physical traces a seasonal Arabian market of this type can leave behind — but it concerns a different site in the same three-market circuit, not Okaz itself, and this article is careful not to conflate the two. No comparably detailed excavation of shop structures or market infrastructure at Okaz itself has been found in the sources available for this article; what has been documented there is the surrounding rock art, inscriptions, wells, and later fortifications listed above, and it would be dishonest to claim more than that.

The Modern Revival: The Souq Okaz Festival

After roughly 1,300 years of dormancy, Souq Okaz was revived as a modern cultural festival under the patronage of King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz, with the initiative driven personally by Prince Khalid al-Faisal, then and still the Governor (Emir) of the Makkah Region. According to the account given in a 2007 feature by Arab News on the market’s revival, and corroborated by Saudipedia’s Arabic-language history of the festival, the first modern edition of the Souq Okaz Festival launched in 1428 AH, corresponding to 2007 CE. The revival was explicitly framed by its organizers not as a recreation of pre-Islamic religious practice — Okaz was, after all, a market with pagan-era idols and rites that Islam would later abolish — but as a celebration of the market’s literary and commercial heritage: its poetry, its role as a meeting point for the tribes of Arabia, and its place in the story that leads directly into the seerah of the Prophet ﷺ himself.

From its founding until 1438 AH (2016 CE), the festival was organized and supervised directly by the Emirate of the Makkah Region. Responsibility then passed to the Ministry of Tourism (through what was then the Saudi Commission for Tourism and National Heritage, later restructured), which folded Souq Okaz into the wider program of Saudi Seasons — the kingdom’s calendar of major annual cultural and tourism events. This transition is confirmed by the Arabic-language Saudipedia entry on the Souq Okaz Festival, which states plainly that “the first edition of Souq Okaz launched in 1428 AH/2007 CE, and it later flourished over the years; it was organized and supervised by the Emirate of the Makkah Region until 1438 AH/2016 CE, after which organization passed to the Ministry of Tourism as part of the Saudi Seasons.” This article flags, and resolves in the reader’s favor, a conflict in the sources here: the separate English-language Saudipedia article on the festival states in one place that “the first edition of Souq Okaz was launched in 2017,” which would contradict the well-documented and independently corroborated 2007 founding date confirmed by contemporaneous Arab News and Asharq Al-Awsat reporting on the sixth edition in 2012, the ninth edition in 2015, the tenth edition in 2016, and the eleventh edition opening in July 2017. The most likely explanation, consistent with the Arabic-language Saudipedia text and with a 2017 Asharq Al-Awsat report on that year’s eleventh edition describing it as “the first edition for which the Saudi Commission for Tourism and National Heritage assumed responsibility,” is that 2017 marks the point at which a new organizing authority took over the festival, not its true founding year. This article treats 2007 as the founding date and reports the 2017 figure as a likely data error or an organizational-transition point mislabeled as a launch, rather than presenting both as equally credible.

How the Festival Grew: A Documented Edition-by-Edition History

The years following the 2007 launch show a clear pattern of growth in scale, funding, and ambition, confirmed across multiple contemporaneous news reports:

• By its fifth edition in 2011, according to a retrospective published by Qafilah magazine, the festival’s main poetry prizes were withheld that year, a detail suggesting the festival’s judging processes were taken seriously enough that no submission was judged worthy in a given cycle.
• The ninth edition, in 2015, ran under the patronage of King Salman bin Abdulaziz — confirming that royal patronage continued after King Abdullah’s death in January 2015 — and featured, according to Asharq Al-Awsat’s coverage, a dramatic staging of the life of the poet Labid ibn Rabi’ah and the launch of a new “poetic exchange” competition aimed at younger participants.
• The tenth edition, held from 9 to 19 August 2016, drew a reported 394,718 visitors over its run, according to a report from Al Ain News — at the time a record, up from roughly 261,000 the previous year — and saw the launch of an Arabic Poetry Academy dedicated to the study and promotion of classical Arabic verse.
• The eleventh edition opened on 12 July 2017 under King Salman’s patronage, the first edition organized under the Saudi Commission for Tourism and National Heritage’s direct supervision, held at the historic site in al-Arafa northeast of Ta’if, according to reporting from Arab News and the Okaz newspaper. That year’s honored poet was the pre-Islamic figure Duraid ibn al-Simma, and the festival inaugurated a new “Culture Avenue” featuring calligraphy, rock-carving demonstrations, interactive drawing, and a three-dimensional art exhibition.
• The twelfth edition ran from 27 June to 13 July 2018 under King Salman’s patronage, according to Arab News’s coverage of the preparations and a report from TTN Worldwide, and featured a 700-meter “Okaz Avenue” lined with roughly seventy shops, around fifteen leather pavilions honoring individual historical poets, and, for the first time, Egypt as an official guest-nation with its own dedicated pavilion.
• The thirteenth edition ran for the full month of August 2019, from 1 to 31 August, folded into the broader “Taif Season” program, according to Arab News’s coverage. That edition drew what one Arab News piece called some of the best manifestations of the festival to date, hosted pavilions representing eleven other Arab nations (the UAE, Kuwait, Bahrain, Oman, Iraq, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Tunisia, and a dedicated Saudi pavilion), and featured evening concerts by major regional performers including Ahlam, Hussein Al Jassmi, Assala Nasri, Abadi al-Johar, and Dalia Mubarak, alongside a poetry program offering prizes up to SAR 300,000 for the top Arabic poetry award and a cultural program of eleven seminars and three poetry evenings involving 72 participants from fourteen Arab and Asian countries, according to a report from al-Madina newspaper.

Across these editions, a consistent structure emerges. The festival centers on two main thoroughfares: a Culture Avenue (Jaddat al-Thaqafah), hosting calligraphy, visual art, rock-carving demonstration, and photography exhibitions; and an Okaz Avenue, hosting reenactments of historic market life, camel and horse processions, fencing and knight-themed performances, and a heritage crafts marketplace. A “Cultural Tent” (al-Khaimah al-Thaqafiyyah) hosts academic seminars and evening poetry recitals. A children’s program, sometimes called “Fityan Okaz” (the Youths of Okaz), teaches classical Arabic and storytelling to younger visitors. Individual leather pavilions, echoing al-Nabighah al-Dhubyani’s original tent, have in various years honored historical poets including Imru’ al-Qays, Antarah, Zuhayr, Tarafa, al-A’sha, al-Khansa, Hassan ibn Thabit, and Quss ibn Sa’idah — the very figures discussed earlier in this article. Prize money across the festival’s various poetry, calligraphy, storytelling, and entrepreneurship competitions has run into the millions of Saudi riyals in several editions, and total prize pools in earlier editions were reported at figures such as SAR 1.7 million (per a report on the tenth edition from the Emirate of Makkah Region’s own website) rising to a stated SAR 2.5 million total in later descriptions of the event’s programming.

Souq Okaz City: The Permanent Tourism Infrastructure Project

Beyond the annual festival itself, Saudi authorities have pursued a separate, longer-term project to build permanent tourism infrastructure at the historic site, generally referred to as “Souq Okaz City” (Madinat Souq Okaz). Reporting from the period around the eleventh and twelfth editions describes this as one of the Ministry of Tourism’s flagship national development projects — intended, according to figures cited in contemporaneous Arabic press coverage, to occupy a large tract of land at the historic site (reported variously as approximately ten to fourteen million square meters across different sources), to include museums, heritage centers, hospitality facilities, and a conference center, and to aim eventually at attracting a substantial volume of annual tourist visits and creating thousands of jobs in the Ta’if region. This article treats the scale figures for this infrastructure project with appropriate caution: the underlying press figures vary across sources and years, several date to the project’s announcement phase around 2017–2018 rather than to a confirmed, completed state, and this article was not able to verify current, on-the-ground completion status for the full “city” concept as of July 2026 from primary sources.

Current Status as of July 2026: An Honest Account of an Unresolved Gap

Here this article must be direct about the limits of what could be confirmed. The most recent editions of the Souq Okaz Festival that this research was able to verify with confidence, through corroborated contemporaneous press reporting naming a specific numbered edition and specific dates, run from the first edition in 2007 through the thirteenth edition in August 2019. Beyond 2019, the sources available to this research become considerably thinner and, in one case, actively misleading, and this article reports that honestly rather than guessing at a current programme it cannot verify.

One official-looking source, a page on the Saudi government services portal GOV.SA, describes Prince Khalid al-Faisal launching “the third annual Souq Okaz,” on behalf of “King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz.” This page carries a displayed date of 6 April 2025 but internally cites a Saudi Press Agency report dated 5 November 2024, and its content — a “third annual” event held under the active patronage of King Abdullah, who died in January 2015 — cannot describe a real event from 2024 or 2025. This is almost certainly a case of an old article (most likely describing the genuine third edition, which would fall around 2009–2010) being resurfaced or re-indexed with a misleading current date, rather than evidence of any 2024 or 2025 festival activity. This article does not rely on that page for any claim about the festival’s current status, and flags it here explicitly as a source conflict left open rather than silently discarded.

A second data point, a 2024 piece from What’s On Saudi Arabia, describes the site as located roughly 40 kilometers from Ta’if, spanning more than 41,000 square meters, and charging an entry fee of SAR 50 per adult and SAR 25 per child — practical details that suggest some form of ongoing, ticketed operation at the site as of that publication date, though the piece does not name a specific festival edition or a specific set of 2024 dates. A separate, undated ticketing and travel page from Rehlat repeats similar practical figures — a 41,000-square-meter traditional market area, an open-air theater program, and pavilions representing Lebanon, the UAE, Kuwait, Oman, Bahrain, Iraq, Jordan, Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco, and Saudi Arabia — again without a specific dated edition number attached. A 2026 travel overview from the independent site House of Saud lists “Souk Okaz, Taif” among the recurring summer-season events in the kingdom’s cultural calendar, alongside Jeddah Season and Soundstorm Jeddah, describing it as timed to Ta’if’s cooler mountain climate during June through August — consistent with the festival’s traditional summer timing but, again, without a specific 2026 date range or edition number that this research could verify.

This article’s honest conclusion, applying the principle that a source conflict should be reported rather than resolved by guessing: the Souq Okaz Festival is well documented as an established, growing annual event from 2007 through at least 2019, and general travel and tourism sources through 2024 and into 2026 continue to describe it as an active, recurring part of Saudi Arabia’s summer cultural calendar in Ta’if, with an entry fee and a physical site that functions, at least seasonally, as a ticketed attraction. However, this research was not able to independently verify a specific numbered edition, a specific set of festival dates, or a confirmed 2026 programme for Souq Okaz beyond these general and undated descriptions. A reader planning a visit around a specific festival edition in 2026 should treat the summer timing (roughly June through August, consistent with the market’s traditional position in Dhu al-Qa’dah, which in 1447 AH falls between 18 April and 17 May 2026 on the Gregorian calendar, with the following Dhu al-Hijjah and its associated market season falling in the weeks after) as indicative rather than confirmed, and should verify current dates directly with Saudi Arabia’s Ministry of Tourism or the Visit Saudi national calendar before traveling.

Visiting Souq Okaz: Practical Guidance for 2026

Souq Okaz is a cultural and historical site, not a place of religious devotion, and this guide says so plainly at the outset of any practical advice: there is no ziyarah attached to visiting it, no prayer associated specifically with the location, and no basis in the Sunnah for treating a visit there as an act of worship in itself. What follows is guidance for a traveler interested in Arabian literary and pre-Islamic history, and in the specific place where the Prophet ﷺ is remembered to have listened to poets and preachers as a young man, long before revelation began.

Getting There from Makkah and Ta’if

Souq Okaz sits in open country roughly 40 to 45 kilometers from the city of Ta’if, in the area historically called al-Arafa, northeast of the city, in Makkah Province. Distance figures from various route-mapping sources vary somewhat depending on the exact road taken and reference points used within each city, and this article reports that variance rather than presenting a single number as exact. From Ta’if itself, several driving-distance calculators put the direct road distance at anywhere between about 64 and 90 kilometers depending on route, generally requiring around an hour’s drive. From Makkah, the standard route runs first to Ta’if — a drive that mapping and travel-time sources place at somewhere between roughly 65 and 115 kilometers depending on the specific road and starting point within the city, typically taking a little over an hour by car via the mountain highway that climbs from the coastal plain up into the Ta’if highlands — and then onward from Ta’if toward the historic site. There is also a regular intercity bus service between Makkah and Ta’if, generally taking a little over two hours including stops, for travelers who prefer not to drive. Given the spread in reported figures across mapping services, travelers should treat any specific number here as approximate and confirm current road conditions and travel time using a live mapping app before departing, particularly since the mountain road between Makkah and Ta’if includes a significant, winding elevation change that can affect drive times regardless of distance.

What You Will Actually See

This is the point at which honesty matters most. Outside the annual festival window — whenever that specific window falls in a given year — Souq Okaz is not a developed, staffed heritage park in the manner of a museum. It is a historic open-air site: the general area of the ancient market, marked by the surrounding rock art locations, well sites, and later fortress ruins documented earlier in this article, together with whatever permanent festival infrastructure (avenues, pavilion platforms, the theater structure referenced in festival reporting as the Sakhrat al-Saraya Theater) has been built for the annual event and remains standing between festivals. Visitor reports collected on travel platforms, including reviews on Tripadvisor’s page for Souq Okaz, describe arriving outside the festival season to find the site effectively closed, with one visitor noting they discovered this only after driving out to the location. This is consistent with the site’s basic character: it was, and to a real extent remains, a seasonal venue, not a year-round tourist attraction with continuous staffing and exhibits.

That said, more recent practical listings — including the ticketing and entry-fee details reported by What’s On Saudi Arabia and Rehlat cited earlier in this article — describe an entry fee and a defined market area, suggesting that access arrangements may have become more consistent in recent years than the older Tripadvisor reviews suggest, at least during the active festival period. A traveler should therefore expect one of two realities, and should confirm which applies before making the trip: either a lively festival site during the active summer season, with avenues, pavilions, performances, and paid entry, or a quiet, largely unstaffed historic landscape outside that window, with little more to see than the natural terrain, the rock carvings, and the standing festival infrastructure. Neither of these is a reason not to visit — both are simply different experiences that call for different expectations, and a traveler who arrives expecting a museum-quality year-round heritage center outside festival season will be disappointed by design, not by any failure of the site itself.

Best Time to Visit

For a traveler who wants to see Souq Okaz as a living cultural event — poetry recitals, craft markets, pavilions, and performances — the festival period, historically falling in the summer months and consistent with the market’s ancient association with the month of Dhu al-Qa’dah, is the only time to go. As this article has already noted, this research could not confirm a specific 2026 festival edition or date range with confidence, and a prospective visitor should check directly with Saudi Arabia’s Ministry of Tourism, the Visit Saudi national events calendar, or the Ta’if regional tourism authority for confirmed current-year dates before planning travel. For a traveler primarily interested in the historical landscape itself — the rock art, the well, the fortress ruins — visiting outside the festival season is possible in principle, but should be undertaken with the clear expectation that facilities, signage, and staffing may be minimal or absent, and with the same practical precautions appropriate to any remote site in the Hejaz highlands: sufficient water, sun protection, and a reliable vehicle, given the site’s distance from central services in Ta’if.

Common Misconceptions About Souq Okaz

The most important misconception to address directly is the idea that visiting Souq Okaz carries any devotional or ziyarah significance comparable to the small number of sites in Makkah and Madinah for which such visitation has a clear basis in the Sunnah. It does not, and this guide states that plainly rather than implying otherwise through omission. Scholars including Ibn Taymiyyah and Ibn Uthaymeen, along with the Kingdom’s Permanent Committee for Islamic Research and Ifta (the Standing Committee), hold that intentional devotional visitation — travel undertaken specifically in the hope of religious reward from visiting a particular physical location — has a sound basis in the Sunnah for only a short and specific list of places in and around Makkah and Madinah: the Kaaba and the wider Masjid al-Haram, the Prophet’s Mosque and his grave in Madinah, Jannat al-Baqi, the graves of the martyrs of Uhud, and Masjid Quba. This position, laid out in detail by scholars associated with IslamQA’s treatment of the rulings on visiting historical Islamic sites, holds that other locations connected to the Prophet’s ﷺ life — however historically significant, however moving to stand in — are valuable for historical and educational reflection on the seerah, but that visiting them with the specific intention of earning religious reward is a different act from visiting them to understand history, and one this school of scholarship does not encourage. The Standing Committee has, in related rulings, specifically cautioned against practices such as climbing particular mountains or seeking out particular caves with devotional intent, and against touching, rubbing, or tying cloth to stones, trees, or railings at historical sites in the hope of blessing (tabarruk). This article presents that position as the position it is, names the scholars and body who hold it, and notes, without adjudicating between them, that other scholars — particularly within Sufi and some traditionalist currents of Islamic scholarship — take a broader view of tabarruk and historical visitation than the Standing Committee’s position reflects. Readers should understand Souq Okaz within this framework: a place with genuine, well-documented connections to the Prophet’s ﷺ life, a market named in the Qur’an’s own asbab al-nuzul, and a legitimate object of historical curiosity — but not a ziyarah site, and not a place where any specific act of worship is prescribed.

A second common misconception, addressed at length earlier in this article, concerns the Mu’allaqat and the story that the seven great odes hung physically from the Kaaba’s curtains. This is a widely repeated and much-loved story, but as this article has shown, it is unattested before the tenth century, was explicitly denied by at least one contemporaneous classical scholar, al-Nahhas, and is treated by most modern scholars as later literary elaboration rather than established historical fact.

A third misconception worth correcting is the assumption that Okaz was purely a poetry festival with commerce as an afterthought, or conversely that it was purely a trade fair with poetry as decoration. The surviving sources, taken together, describe a market that combined serious commercial activity — the buying and selling of goods from across Arabia and beyond — with arbitration of tribal disputes, formal treaty-making of the kind that produced Hilf al-Fudul, religious preaching of the kind associated with Quss ibn Sa’idah, and the competitive recitation that produced the Mu’allaqat tradition, all happening simultaneously in the same twenty-day window. It was not one type of gathering with another type layered on top; it was, by design, all of these functions at once, which is precisely what made it the most important annual gathering point in pre-Islamic Arabia.

Lesser-Known Facts About Souq Okaz

• The market’s seasonal position at the head of the Okaz–Majannah–Dhu al-Majaz circuit meant that by the time pilgrims reached the actual rites of Hajj, they had already spent the better part of a month traveling, trading, and being exposed to poetry recitation, legal arbitration, and public preaching — meaning the “Hajj season” in pre-Islamic Arabia functioned as a month-long circuit of civic and cultural activity, not merely a few days of ritual.
• The two Bukhari hadith discussed in this article’s Qur’an section — 1770 and 2050 — preserve two slightly different versions of the same recollection by the same Companion, Ibn Abbas, one naming two of the three seasonal markets and the other naming all three; read side by side, they offer a rare, concrete window into how even a single well-known Companion’s testimony about the same historical fact could be transmitted with small variations, none of which affects the core legal ruling both narrations were preserved to establish.
• Al-Nabighah al-Dhubyani, whose leather pavilion is remembered as the site of literary judgment at Okaz, is himself sometimes included among alternative lists of the Mu’allaqat poets in place of one of the traditional seven — meaning the market’s most famous judge of poetry was also, by some classical reckonings, one of its greatest competitors.
• Quss ibn Sa’idah is credited in several classical Arabic sources — repeated in outlets such as a retrospective on his sermon published by Al-Masry Al-Youm — with being the first Arab to use the now-common rhetorical transition phrase “amma ba’d” (“now then,” used to this day to move from an opening address into the main body of a speech or letter), and the first to lean on a staff while delivering an oration.
• The Islamic-era Kufic inscriptions documented on the Red Saraya Plateau near Okaz, dated to the seventh through ninth centuries CE, mean that even after the market’s classical pre-Islamic heyday, Muslims continued to leave devotional and commemorative marks at or near the site for several centuries into the Islamic period — physical evidence, distinct from the hadith and Qur’anic material discussed earlier, that the location remained meaningfully inhabited long after the Prophet’s ﷺ death.

Timeline of Souq Okaz

• c. 501 CE — Traditional founding date of Souq Okaz as an annual seasonal market, according to Saudipedia and the Arabic Wikipedia account of the market’s history.
• c. 520–609 CE — Approximate lifespan of Zuhayr ibn Abi Sulma, among the Mu’allaqat poets associated with the market’s literary tradition.
• c. 525–608 CE — Approximate lifespan of Antarah ibn Shaddad al-‘Absi.
• c. 535–605 CE — Approximate lifespan of al-Nabighah al-Dhubyani, whose leather pavilion at Okaz is remembered as a site of poetic judgment.
• c. 544 CE — Traditional date of the death of Imru’ al-Qays.
• c. 569 CE — Traditional date of the execution of Tarafa ibn al-‘Abd.
• c. 570 CE — Traditional birth year of the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ.
• c. 580 CE — Traditional date of the death of al-Harith ibn Hilliza al-Yashkuri.
• c. 600 CE — Traditional date of the death of Quss ibn Sa’idah al-Iyadi, whose sermon at Okaz the Prophet ﷺ is reported to have recalled and recited from memory years later in Madinah.
• Ambiguous, reported as either shortly before or after the start of revelation, c. 605–610 CE — The Fijar Wars, in the course of which the young Muhammad ﷺ is reported to have been present, assisting his uncles.
• Reported shortly after the Fijar Wars, in Dhu al-Qa’dah — The pact of Hilf al-Fudul, sworn at the house of Abdullah ibn Jud’an, with the future Prophet ﷺ and the future caliph Abu Bakr among the youngest present.
• 610 CE — Start of the Prophet Muhammad’s ﷺ prophethood.
• Makkan period, after 610 CE — The Prophet ﷺ reportedly attends Okaz, Majannah, and Dhu al-Majaz to call individual tribes to Islam, followed and denounced by his uncle Abu Lahab, according to the sira tradition.
• 661 CE — Traditional date of the death of Labid ibn Rabi’ah, the only one of the traditional seven Mu’allaqat poets to convert to Islam and live into the Islamic era.
• 7th–9th centuries CE — Approximate dating of the Islamic-era Kufic inscriptions found on the Red Saraya Plateau near the Okaz site.
• 129 AH / 747 CE — Kharijite forces under al-Mukhtar bin Awf loot and destroy the market of Okaz, ending its classical operation.
• Until the 12th century CE — The Okaz site continues, per Saudipedia, to function in a reduced capacity as a waystation for trade and pilgrimage traffic before falling out of use.
• 1925–1926 — D. S. Margoliouth and Taha Husayn independently publish their respective challenges to the authenticity of the pre-Islamic Arabic poetic corpus.
• 1428 AH / 2007 CE — First modern edition of the revived Souq Okaz Festival, under the patronage of King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz and the direction of Prince Khalid al-Faisal.
• 1438 AH / 2016 CE — Organizational responsibility for the festival transfers from the Emirate of the Makkah Region to the Ministry of Tourism, as part of the Saudi Seasons program.
• 2019 CE — Thirteenth edition of the festival runs for the full month of August as part of Taif Season, the most recent edition this research was able to verify by specific number and date.
• As of July 2026 — General travel and tourism sources continue to describe Souq Okaz as an active seasonal attraction in Ta’if’s summer cultural calendar, though this research could not confirm a specific current-year edition number or festival date range; travelers should verify directly with Saudi Arabia’s Ministry of Tourism or the Visit Saudi calendar before planning a visit.

Key Lessons from the History of Souq Okaz

Historical Lessons

Okaz shows that pre-Islamic Arabia, often flattened in popular imagination into a simple picture of scattered, warring, illiterate tribes, in fact sustained a sophisticated seasonal infrastructure of trade, law, and literature that operated across tribal lines under a shared truce for centuries before Islam. The very existence of a month-long circuit of markets culminating in Hajj shows that the Arabian peninsula’s pre-Islamic religious calendar already organized large-scale, cross-tribal cooperation — a foundation Islam would later transform rather than invent from nothing.

Spiritual and Personal Lessons

The image of the young Muhammad ﷺ walking the rows of tents at Okaz, Majannah, and Dhu al-Majaz, tribe after tribe, seeking even a single group willing to protect him so he could deliver his message — trailed the entire way by his own uncle warning people against him — is one of the starkest illustrations in the whole seerah of the loneliness and rejection the Prophet ﷺ endured during the Makkan period, years before the Hijrah brought him a receptive community in Madinah. It is a reminder that acceptance of a message of truth is never guaranteed by the truth of the message itself, and that steadfastness in the face of near-total public rejection is itself part of the prophetic model.

Practical Lessons for Today’s Visitor

A visitor to Souq Okaz today should hold two things in mind at once: genuine respect for a site with real, sourced, and in places authenticated connections to the Prophet’s ﷺ life, and equally genuine clarity that this respect does not translate into a ziyarah obligation or a devotional practice. The most practically useful lesson is simply to verify current information before traveling — this article has shown how even government and semi-official sources can carry conflicting or stale dates, and a traveler who confirms festival timing directly with the Ministry of Tourism or Visit Saudi before setting out will be better served than one who relies on any single older article, including, where it goes further than the verified record allows, this one.

Authentic Sources

Primary Islamic Sources

The hadith references in this article are drawn from Sahih al-Bukhari 1770 and Sahih al-Bukhari 2050, both concerning the asbab al-nuzul of Qur’an 2:198. The reports concerning the Prophet’s ﷺ boyhood and youthful attendance at Okaz, the Fijar Wars, his calling of the tribes to Islam at the seasonal markets, and the sermon of Quss ibn Sa’idah belong to the broader sira and maghazi literature — the biographical tradition built up by early scholars such as Ibn Ishaq, al-Waqidi, and al-Tabari. A caution is appropriate here, consistent with how this guide treats such material throughout: these biographical compilers preserved an invaluable record of the Prophet’s ﷺ life, but they did not apply the same isnad-based authentication standards used for hadith in the six canonical collections, and material drawn from them should be understood as historically significant tradition rather than sahih hadith unless independently corroborated in a canonical collection, as the Qur’an-2:198 material in this article is.

Classical and Modern Reference Sources

This article draws on the classical anthology tradition represented by Ibn Abd Rabbih’s al-‘Iqd al-Farid for the Mu’allaqat hanging legend, on al-Baqillani’s I’jaz al-Qur’an for the fullest transmitted text of the Quss ibn Sa’idah sermon (accessed via the reproduction on IslamWeb’s library), and on the modern academic debate over pre-Islamic poetry represented by Taha Husayn’s On Pre-Islamic Poetry (summarized via Wikipedia) and D. S. Margoliouth’s 1925 article “The Origins of Arabic Poetry” (summarized via the University of Mosul’s Muthuruk journal and RumeliDE).

Modern reference material on the site’s location, dating, and archaeology is drawn primarily from Saudipedia’s entry on Souk Okaz and the related Saudipedia entry on the Souq Okaz Festival, the Wikipedia article on Souk Okaz and its Arabic-language counterpart, the Islamic Architectural Heritage database maintained by IRCICA, and reporting from Arab News, Ithra, and Ithraeyat. Coverage of the festival’s specific editions draws on contemporaneous reporting from Asharq Al-Awsat, Al Ain News, TTN Worldwide, and al-Madina newspaper. Archaeological comparison material on the related site of Dhu al-Majaz is drawn from Arab News’s coverage of the 2023 Heritage Commission survey.

A Note on Method

Every hadith cited in this article was verified directly against its text on Sunnah.com before use, and every Qur’anic citation was checked against Quran.com for both Arabic text and English translation. Where sources disagreed on a date, a distance, or an edition number, this article has reported the disagreement rather than silently picking one figure — the reader is better served by an honest range than a false precision. Where a report belongs to the sira and maghazi tradition rather than to a canonical hadith collection, this article has said so explicitly rather than allowing the two categories to blur together. Where a beloved story — the hanging of the Mu’allaqat, the sermon of Quss ibn Sa’idah — could not be verified to a standard this guide considers reliable, the story is still told, because it is part of how this history has been remembered for centuries, but it is graded honestly rather than presented as settled fact.