The Gates of Masjid an-Nabawi: The Complete History, Story and Ziyarah Guide to the Doors of the Prophet’s Mosque in Madinah

Every pilgrim who walks toward the Prophet’s Mosque in Madinah walks toward a door. Long before the green dome comes into view, before the sound of the adhan reaches the street, the mosque presents itself as a wall pierced by openings — brass and teak, gilded and inscribed, numbered and signposted, each one a threshold that someone, at some point in fourteen centuries, decided to cut into stone or plaster and give a name. Some of those names commemorate a caliph. Some commemorate a woman whose house once stood opposite. One commemorates an angel, on evidence that turns out to be thinner than the tradition admits. One commemorates a companion whose door was, according to the most authentic hadith connected to this entire site, the only one the Prophet ﷺ ordered left open in the whole of Madinah. This is a guide to those gates: the three that existed when the mosque was a mud-brick enclosure the size of a large house, and the dozens that exist today in a complex that can hold a million people at once.

This is not a guide to the mosque as a whole. The architecture of the Rawdah, the location of the Sacred Chamber, the history of the pillars and the mihrabs, and the story of the domes are told fully elsewhere, in their own dedicated studies, and this article will point to them only where a gate’s story cannot be told without a brief word about what lies behind it. What follows here is the story of the abwab themselves — the doors — from the three openings the Prophet ﷺ walked through in the first year of the Hijrah to the eighty-six, or forty-two, or one hundred gates that different official and unofficial sources count today, a discrepancy this guide will explain rather than paper over. It follows the theological weight carried by two of the most contested hadith clusters connected to any doorway in Islamic history, and it closes with the practical business of knowing which gate number you actually need when you are standing in the plaza in 2026, phone in hand, Nusuk app open, trying to find the Rawdah.

Historical Background: The Origins and Setting of the Gates

A Mosque the Size of a Courtyard

To understand why the gates of Masjid an-Nabawi matter, you first have to shrink the mosque in your mind to something almost unrecognisable. In 1 AH, or 622 CE, when the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ arrived in Madinah after the Hijrah from Makkah, the mosque he built on a plot of land in the heart of the oasis was a rectangular enclosure roughly thirty metres from east to west and thirty-five metres from north to south — smaller than a modern football pitch, smaller than many suburban mosques built in the centuries since. Its walls were mud brick raised on stone foundations about a metre and a half high. It had a floor of packed earth, a shaded area of palm trunks and palm-leaf thatch along one side, and, piercing its outer walls, three doors — one in the south, one in the west, and one in the east (Madain Project); (Muslim Heritage).

Today the same site — continuously rebuilt, continuously expanded, never relocated — occupies roughly 100,500 to 105,000 square metres for the roofed and enclosed structure alone, rising to some 400,000 square metres once the surrounding plazas are included, and its gates are spread across all four sides of the building, plus roof-level access and basement-level access points added during the twentieth-century Saudi expansions (Madain Project — Gates of Masjid an-Nabawi). The three doors of 622 CE have become, by the most careful and internally consistent count available, forty-two named gate structures — and by other counts, forty-one, forty-three, sixty-nine, eighty-five, eighty-six, or a hundred. That is not a typo repeated seven times. It is the honest state of the sources, and this guide will spend real time on why the number will not settle, later in the Historical Development and Practical Visitor Guide sections.

Geography Before the Gates Existed

Before there was a mosque, and therefore before there was a gate, the land on which Masjid an-Nabawi stands was an unremarkable plot in the oasis town then called Yathrib. The standard accounts of the sira describe it as ground used partly as a graveyard and partly as a place for drying dates, traditionally linked to two orphaned boys of the Banu Najjar, Sahl and Suhayl, from whom the land was acquired for the mosque’s construction. No source consulted for this guide records any pre-Islamic structure, doorway, or built boundary at the specific spots later occupied by the mosque’s gates. Harry Munt’s academic study of Madinah’s sacred topography, The Holy City of Medina (Cambridge University Press, 2014), is the standard modern scholarly reference for the oasis before Islam, and nothing in the sources gathered for this guide contradicts the working assumption that the gates are a purely Islamic-era feature, created only once the mosque itself was first built. This should be read as an absence of evidence rather than a proven absence — the pre-Islamic history of this exact ground simply has not left the kind of record that would let anyone say more.

Importance Before and After Islam

What that means is worth sitting with for a moment. The gates of Masjid an-Nabawi carry no pre-Islamic inheritance, no pagan shrine repurposed, no older sanctity absorbed into a new religion. Their entire significance is Islamic, and much of it is prophetic — tied directly to the years the Prophet ﷺ himself lived, prayed, taught, and eventually died within a few paces of the mosque’s original eastern door. That is unusual among sacred sites anywhere in the world, where doorways often inherit meaning from what stood before them. Here, the meaning starts from zero in 622 CE and accumulates entirely within recorded Islamic history — which is also why so much of what follows can be dated, sourced, and, where the sources disagree, honestly flagged as disagreeing.

The Wider Geography of Madinah’s Mosque

Masjid an-Nabawi sits at the centre of Madinah, a city whose own religious geography — the Quba mosque to the south, the Baqi cemetery to the east, Mount Uhud to the north — orbits this one building. The gates are the seams where that outer city meets the inner sanctuary. A pilgrim walking from a hotel on any of the modern approach streets will, at some point, stop being in Madinah generally and start being inside the mosque specifically, and the exact place where that happens is a gate. This guide treats that threshold seriously, because the people who built, closed, reopened, renamed, and rebuilt these doors across fourteen centuries treated it seriously too.

Why “Abwab” and Not Just “Doors”

The Arabic word used throughout this guide’s source material, abwab, is the plural of bab, and it carries a slightly wider sense than the English word “door” comfortably holds. A bab can be a chapter heading in a book, a category of law in a fiqh manual, or a gateway into a city, as well as a physical door. When the sources describe the mosque’s abwab, they are describing something closer to “the openings by which one enters” than to a narrow, purely carpentry-based idea of a door. This matters for how this guide reads the terminological distinction, discussed at length below, between bab and khukhah in the hadith literature — the first word already carries a broader conceptual weight in Arabic than its English translation suggests, which is part of why later scholars felt the need to define khukhah so precisely against it. A khukhah is unambiguously small and private. A bab can be grand, public, ceremonial, or plain — but it is always, in some sense, a recognised, sanctioned point of passage, not merely a hole in a wall.

The Mosque as a Living Building, Not a Museum Piece

One of the most important things to understand about the gates of Masjid an-Nabawi, before diving into their specific history, is that this mosque has never stopped being used for exactly the purpose it was built for. Unlike many historical religious sites that are preserved as monuments and visited primarily for their architectural or historical interest, Masjid an-Nabawi has held five daily prayers, without interruption, since the year it was built. Every gate discussed in this guide has therefore always had to do double duty: it is a historical artefact carrying fourteen centuries of memory, and it is, simultaneously, a functioning piece of crowd-management infrastructure that has to move hundreds of thousands of people safely and efficiently, several times a day, every day of the year. This dual identity explains a great deal about why the gates have been renamed, reclassified, demolished, and rebuilt so much more often than, say, the walls of a preserved archaeological site would be. A gate that no longer serves the practical needs of the community praying there gets changed, no matter how much history is attached to its old form. This is not disrespect for the past. It is, if anything, continuity of purpose taking precedence over continuity of form — the mosque has always cared more about getting people safely and reverently inside than about preserving any single doorway exactly as it once stood.

Reading the Gate Names as a Kind of Local Memory

Look again at the earliest names given to the mosque’s gates, and a pattern becomes visible that is easy to miss on a first reading. Bab Atikah names a woman who lived opposite it. Bab Uthman names a family who lived opposite it. These are not grand dedications decided by committee. They are the ordinary, almost offhand way a small community refers to a landmark — the way a modern neighbourhood might informally call a corner “by the Hendersons’ place” long after any sign says so. It was only later, as the mosque grew from a village-sized building into an imperial monument, that gates began to be formally named for caliphs, sultans, and kings: Bab Umar ibn al-Khattab, Bab al-Majeedi, Bab Malik al-Fahad. The shift in naming convention — from a family who happened to live nearby, to a ruler whose patronage funded an entire wing of the building — tracks the mosque’s own transformation from a modest community structure into a piece of state architecture representing the political authority of an empire or a kingdom. Both kinds of names still stand side by side on the modern signage, which is part of what makes walking the perimeter of Masjid an-Nabawi today such a layered experience: you pass, within a few hundred metres of each other, a gate named for a Makkan woman who migrated to Madinah in the earliest years of Islam and a gate named for a twentieth-century king.

What the Sources Do Not Tell Us About the First Builders

It is worth pausing on something the dossier behind this guide is honest about: no source consulted describes, in physical or technical detail, exactly how the three original doors of the mosque were constructed. We know the walls were mud brick on stone foundations about a metre and a half high. We do not have a surviving description of the doors themselves — whether they were simple wooden frames, whether they had any covering or shade structure, whether they could be barred or locked at night, or whether they were simply gaps in the wall marked by their function rather than sealed by any hardware at all. This is an honest silence in the record, not a gap this guide will fill with invented plausibility. Given the simplicity of the rest of the structure — earthen floor, palm-trunk pillars, thatched roofing over part of the courtyard — it is reasonable to imagine the earliest doors were similarly modest, but reasonable imagination is not the same as sourced fact, and this guide draws the line between the two deliberately.

The Story Behind the Place: How the Doors Came to Carry Names and Memory

Three Doors, No Names

When the mosque was first built, its doors were almost certainly unnamed. Arabic Wikipedia’s account of the mosque’s history, drawing on the standard sira and historical tradition, states plainly that the Prophet ﷺ “made three gates for the mosque: Bab al-Rahmah, also called Bab Atikah, on the west side; Bab Uthman, later called Bab Jibril, through which the Prophet ﷺ used to enter, on the east side; and a gate at the back on the south side” — but adds the important detail that “originally these gates bore no names” (Arabic Wikipedia). The names came afterward, attached the way names are usually attached to doors in a small, tightly knit community: by pointing at who lived opposite, or who used to walk through.

There is a genuine inconsistency in how the sources report the wall assignments of these three original doors, and it deserves to be stated honestly rather than smoothed into false certainty. The official Saudi tourism portal, Visit Madinah, describes a door in the direction that later became the qibla — originally in the south wall, closed and replaced by a door in the north wall after the qibla changed — a door in the west wall “known as Bab Atikah… today known as Bab Al-Rahmah,” and a door on the east side “known as Bab Uthman… today known as Bab Jibreel” (Visit Madinah). This matches the Arabic Wikipedia account and is echoed by several independent tertiary sources, including a Pakistani hajj and umrah planning site that describes the eastern door as “the Door of the Prophet ﷺ… and the Door of Uthman… now known as Bab al-Jibril,” and the western door as “Bab Atikah… today called Bab al-Rahma” (hajjumrahplanner.com), and an Umrah research blog describing the same pattern (umrahinternational.com). DawateIslami’s history of the mosque’s construction lists the same three: “Bab al-Rahma (Bab Atikah), Bab Jibril (Bab al-Uthman), and a final door which was sealed after the change of the qibla” (DawateIslami.net). Al Jazeera’s 2024 Arabic-language feature on the mosque’s gates likewise describes the first building as having three gates, with “the first old gate… closed because it faced the new qibla, replaced by a gate in the north wall,” while “the mosque also kept Bab Othman and Bab Atika” (Al Jazeera).

Set against that convergence of four independent sources is a single outlier: Madain Project’s own overview page on the mosque “at the time of Prophet Muhammad” states that “the three doors of the mosque were Bab al-Rahmah to the south, Bab al-Jibril to the west, and Bab al-Nisa to the east” — a wall assignment that contradicts not only the other sources but Madain Project’s own separate, dedicated article on the mosque’s gates, which follows the Bab Atikah / Bab Uthman / Bab al-Rahmah naming and wall scheme instead (Madain Project). That page also names “Bab al-Nisa” as one of the three original doors, which no other source supports — every other account, including Madain Project’s own gates article, treats Bab al-Nisa as a later addition built under Umar ibn al-Khattab, not one of the Prophet’s ﷺ original three. The most reasonable reading, and the one this guide follows, is that Madain Project’s overview page contains an internal error rather than a genuinely competing historical tradition of equal weight. Working from the balance of independent sources, then: Bab Atikah, later Bab al-Rahmah, stood in the west wall; Bab Uthman, later Bab Jibril, stood in the east wall and was the door the Prophet ﷺ personally used to enter and leave; and an unnamed third door faced south, toward Jerusalem, until the qibla changed.

This is a historical report, not a hadith. It carries no isnad, no chain of narration running back to an eyewitness through named transmitters graded by the science of hadith criticism. It descends instead from the sira and maghazi literature and from later topographical scholarship — ultimately, most of these tertiary sources trace back to works such as Ibn Shabbah’s Tarikh al-Madinah and al-Samhudi’s Wafa’ al-Wafa, neither of which could be directly consulted page by page for this guide. It should therefore be classed plainly as a historical report, widely and consistently repeated, rather than assigned a sahih or da’if grading that belongs to a different category of source altogether.

The Qibla Change and a Door That Closed

The most dramatic architectural event in the mosque’s first years was not an expansion. It was a single closed door. In the second year after the Hijrah, 624 CE, the direction of prayer changed from Jerusalem to Makkah, and the wall that had faced Jerusalem — the south wall, where the third of the original three doors stood — stopped being the wall the community prayed toward. The door in that wall was sealed with stone and mud plaster. A new door was opened instead in the north wall, on the side that had, until that point, held the covered resting area for the poorer companions known as the Suffah, which was itself relocated to the newly qibla-facing south side of the mosque (Madain Project); (Arabic Wikipedia).

Picture what that meant inside a community that numbered, at this point, only a few hundred families. A door that everyone had used for two years, that had a location fixed in the muscle memory of everyone who prayed there, was bricked shut. Anyone approaching from that direction had to relearn their route into the mosque. And on the opposite wall, a door that had not existed opened where a shaded resting place for the poor had been. The Suffah community — the “people of the bench,” among the most spiritually significant residents of the earliest mosque — packed up their simple belongings and their teaching circles and moved to the other side of the same small enclosure. A single command from Allah, revealed to change the direction of prayer, physically rearranged the doors and the daily geography of the first Muslim community within days.

Expansion Without New Names

After the Battle of Khaybar in 7 AH, 628 to 629 CE, the Prophet ﷺ personally oversaw the mosque’s first expansion, enlarging it to roughly forty-seven to fifty metres square, with Uthman ibn Affan purchasing the adjoining land needed for the work (Madain Project — Expansion Chronology). No source consulted for this guide records any new named gate being added at this stage. The same three doors — the western Bab Atikah, the eastern Bab Uthman, and the new northern door that had replaced the sealed southern one — simply moved outward with the walls, relocated as the enclosure grew, still doing the same job for a community that was itself growing month by month as Madinah’s population and the number of Muslims within it increased.

This pattern — expansion without new gates, for years at a stretch — tells its own story about how gradually the mosque’s built form changed relative to how quickly the community around it changed. It would take a change of political leadership, not merely a change of population, before the number of gates itself increased. That happened only after the Prophet ﷺ had died, under the second caliph, and it is the story told in the next section of this guide.

The Prophet ﷺ and This Place: Every Authentic Event Connected to the Gates

The Door He Used Himself

Of the three original gates, one carries a detail found nowhere else in the sources gathered for this guide: the Prophet ﷺ personally used it. The eastern door, known in his lifetime as Bab Uthman because the house and family of Uthman ibn Affan stood opposite it, is described across multiple independent sources as the door the Prophet ﷺ entered and exited by choice (hajjumrahplanner.com). This is a historical report rather than a hadith with a chain, but it is consistent and unopposed across the sources, and it is the detail that later gave this same door its second and more famous name: Bab Jibril, the Gate of Gabriel.

Bab Jibril: What Can and Cannot Be Verified

This is one of the two places in this guide where it matters enormously to say exactly what the evidence supports and no more. Two distinct explanations circulate for why this gate came to be called Bab Jibril, and neither of them rests on a hadith with a verifiable chain of narration.

The first explanation is toponymic and personal: the gate had already been called Bab Uthman, or in some sources Bab al-Nabi, the Prophet’s Gate, because of its proximity to Uthman’s house and because the Prophet ﷺ himself used it to come and go (hajjumrahplanner.com); an Indonesian-language account of the mosque’s doors likewise calls it “Bab Nabi” (ihram.republika.co.id). On this account, the angelic name is a later overlay on a door that was originally named for people, not for the angel Jibril at all.

The second explanation is more specific and more dramatic, and it comes from a single source: Al Jazeera’s Arabic-language feature states that “it was called Bab Jibril because the Prophet ﷺ met Gabriel at that place during the Battle of Banu Qurayza” (Al Jazeera). It is worth being precise about what is and is not being claimed here. The broader event — that Jibril visited the Prophet ﷺ after the Battle of the Trench and instructed him to march against the Banu Qurayza — is well attested in the wider sira and hadith literature in general terms. What is not attested, in any source located for this guide, is a hadith that names a specific gate of the mosque as the location of that meeting. No hadith consulted here, whether searched directly on sunnah.com or referenced by any secondary source, names “Bab Jibril,” “Bab Uthman,” or any other specific gate as the site of an angelic visitation. A direct attempt to locate Madain Project’s own dedicated page on this gate, under two different likely web addresses, returned only a “page not found” error both times.

This means the honest position is this: Bab Jibril’s name should be presented as toponymic and historical tradition, not as a hadith-based claim. The tradition is old, it is sincerely held, and it is repeated across many pilgrim guides and popular accounts of the mosque — but it should never be dressed up with a chain of narration it does not have. Writers, guides, and pilgrims alike should resist the temptation to manufacture or imply an isnad where none exists. Ultimately, the sources that carry this name trace back, as far as can be determined, to al-Samhudi’s Wafa’ al-Wafa and earlier local Madinan historical writing, not to the hadith corpus.

A related claim deserves the same caution. A Shi’i reference encyclopedia records the position, held in some strands of Shi’i jurisprudence, that entering the mosque through Bab Jibril is mustahabb, recommended, on the grounds that the Prophet ﷺ used only that door after the qibla change and closed all the others (fa.wikishia.net). This claim gives no hadith number and could not be corroborated by any other source consulted for this guide. It must not be confused with, or presented as part of, the separately well-attested hadith cluster about doors being closed except for Abu Bakr’s, discussed fully below — that cluster does not mention Bab Jibril at all, in any of its versions, in any collection. Two different traditions exist side by side here, and conflating them would misrepresent both.

Bab al-Rahmah and the Rain That Fell for a Week

Here the evidence is stronger, and it deserves to be told in full, because it is one of the few places where a hadith text and a gate’s name can be checked directly against each other — and where doing so honestly means correcting a popular assumption rather than confirming it.

The report comes from Anas ibn Malik, and it exists in the collection of Sahih al-Bukhari in two wordings. In the first, Sahih al-Bukhari 1013, Anas narrates that while the Prophet ﷺ was delivering the Friday sermon, a man stood and said: “O Allah’s Messenger! Livestock are dying and roads are cut off. Please invoke Allah for rain.” The Prophet ﷺ raised his hands and prayed, and rain fell without stopping until the following Friday — so much rain that the same complaint reversed itself: people now told the Prophet ﷺ that houses were collapsing, and he prayed for the rain to stop, and it stopped (Sahih al-Bukhari 1013). The Arabic text of this narration specifies that the man entered “through a door that was facing the pulpit.” It does not say Bab al-Rahmah. It does not give the door a name at all.

The second version, Sahih al-Bukhari 1014, carries the same core narration through a parallel chain, this time via the narrator Shu’bah, and describes the door slightly differently: “through a door that was towards Dar al-Qada,” the House of Judgment or administration (Sahih al-Bukhari 1014). This version, too, does not name the gate Bab al-Rahmah.

Both hadith are Authentic (sahih), recorded in Bukhari, among the most rigorously verified reports in the entire hadith corpus. There is no dispute whatsoever about their authenticity. What is worth being exact about is a narrower point: the hadith text itself does not name the gate. The connection between this event and the name “Bab al-Rahmah,” the Gate of Mercy, is made by later historians and topographers, not by the two Bukhari narrations themselves. Al Jazeera’s feature states this connection plainly: “as recorded in Sahih al-Bukhari, a man entered the mosque asking the Prophet ﷺ to pray for rain… this was considered mercy for the servants, so the gate was called Bab al-Rahma” (Al Jazeera). This is a plausible and widely repeated inference — the door “facing the pulpit,” described in Bukhari 1013, sits on the western side of the mosque where the gate later called Bab Atikah and then Bab al-Rahmah stood, and the mercy of rain arriving through it made for an obvious and moving name. But it is an inference drawn afterward by tradition, layered onto a text that itself simply describes a doorway by its position, not by a name.

This distinction matters, and it is worth stating it as plainly as the dossier behind this guide states it: the hadith is genuine and undisputed; the gate’s name is a historical attachment made after the fact. Both things are true at once, and neither should be allowed to obscure the other. The rain fell. The man stood at a real door on a real Friday. The door did not, in that moment, have the name that pilgrims use for it today.

Bab al-Nisa: A Door Left for Women

The third gate-specific hadith cluster in this guide concerns a door built later, under the second caliph, but attributed by two separate chains to an instruction whose speaker is itself the subject of an honest textual dispute.

Sunan Abi Dawud 462 narrates, via Ibn Umar, that the Prophet ﷺ said: “If we left this gate for women, it would be better.” The narrator’s source, Nafi, adds that Ibn Umar himself never entered the mosque by that gate for the rest of his life (Sunan Abi Dawud 462). Abu Dawud’s own editorial note on this hadith records that other narrators report the same statement not as a saying of the Prophet ﷺ but of Umar ibn al-Khattab, “and that is more correct.” Sunan Abi Dawud 571 preserves a parallel chain of the identical report, with the same wording and the same caveat: a differently routed chain attributes the statement to Umar, “and this is more correct” (Sunan Abi Dawud 571).

Both hadith are graded Authentic (sahih) by al-Albani, as shown in their presentation on sunnah.com. The textual-critical caveat embedded within Abu Dawud’s own collection is worth taking seriously rather than glossing over: the more historically accurate attribution, according to Abu Dawud’s own note, is that this was an instruction of Caliph Umar ibn al-Khattab, not a direct saying of the Prophet ﷺ. Both attributions are authentically transmitted as hadith reports. The dispute recorded here is over who said it, not over whether the report itself is reliably transmitted.

This matches the wider historical record. The standard accounts of the mosque’s expansion describe Umar ibn al-Khattab, during his rebuilding of the mosque in 17 AH, 638 CE, adding a dedicated gate on the eastern wall specifically for women, consistent with several independent tertiary sources describing this expansion as including “a door for women from the eastern side” (Al Jazeera); (islamcalling.wordpress.com). A further historical tradition, reported by Madain Project but not independently verified here against a primary text, holds that the gate became reserved exclusively for women’s use from the era of Umar ibn Abd al-Aziz onward, a full century after it was first built (Madain Project — Gates of Masjid an-Nabawi).

This hadith cluster also underpins a wider fiqh discussion that reaches beyond this one gate. Umar ibn al-Khattab is separately reported, in Ibn Hazm’s al-Muhalla (3:131 and 4:119), to have arranged a dedicated entrance and exit for women at the Madinah mosque which he forbade men from using, along with separate ablution facilities (summarized at livingislam.org). The same source states that the majority of the scholars, if not their consensus, hold that wherever women attend mosques there should be a separate entrance for them and separate prayer space isolated from mixing with or being viewed by men. This is reported here as a Scholarly opinion and historical-practice grading, built on Ibn Hazm’s compilation of earlier practice and juristic reasoning, and it draws on the well-known and separately authentic tradition “do not forbid the female servants of Allah from the mosques of Allah,” found in various wordings in Sahih al-Bukhari and Sahih Muslim. That broader hadith is not itself gate-specific, and this guide has not re-verified it with an exact hadith number since it falls slightly outside the scope of the gates themselves — but it is the theological foundation beneath the entire discussion, and Abu Dawud 462 and 571 are the direct, gate-specific textual basis for the practice of a separate women’s entrance at this particular mosque.

The Doors Closed Except One: The Most Theologically Loaded Story Connected to Any Gate Here

No account of the gates of Masjid an-Nabawi can honestly avoid this hadith cluster, and none should try to resolve it more neatly than the sources themselves allow. This is presented here with both positions set out fully, fairly, and without this guide adjudicating between them.

The core report, agreed upon in both Sahih al-Bukhari and Sahih Muslim, is narrated by Abu Sa’id al-Khudri. During a sermon in which the Prophet ﷺ spoke of a servant of Allah being given a choice between this world and what is with Allah, and choosing the latter, Abu Bakr wept, understanding that the Prophet ﷺ was speaking of himself. The hadith closes with an instruction about the mosque’s doors.

Sahih al-Bukhari 466 gives the closing instruction using the word bab, a full door or gate: “Let no door remain open in the mosque except the door of Abu Bakr” (Sahih al-Bukhari 466). Sahih al-Bukhari 3654 repeats the same narration with the same word: “All the gates of the Mosque should be closed except the gate of Abu Bakr” (Sahih al-Bukhari 3654). But two further versions of the same core narration use a different word entirely. Sahih al-Bukhari 3904 uses khokha, a smaller wicket-door or private opening, distinct from a full public gate: “Let no khokha of the Mosque remain open except the khokha of Abu Bakr” (Sahih al-Bukhari 3904). Sahih Muslim 2382, narrated through a separate chain via Malik, from Abu al-Nadr, from Ubayd ibn Hunayn, from Abu Sa’id al-Khudri, also uses khokha, rendered in the English translation on sunnah.com as “window”: “There shall be left open no khokha (window) in the mosque except the khokha (window) of Abu Bakr” (Sahih Muslim 2382).

All four reports are graded Authentic (sahih), appearing in both of the two most rigorously authenticated hadith collections in Sunni Islam. There is no dispute about their authenticity as texts. What is worth noting carefully is the terminology: the same event is described with two different Arabic words in different chains, bab in two versions and khokha in two others. Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani’s Fath al-Bari is cited by secondary sources as defining khukhah specifically as a small door distinguished from a full bab — a private opening, typically connecting a house directly to the mosque, rather than a public gate used by the wider community (summarized via Madain Project). Historically, this became known as “Khukha Abi Bakr,” and it was only reclassified as a full gate, “Bab Abu Bakr,” during the first Saudi expansion in the twentieth century — meaning the precise distinction preserved in the hadith’s wording was maintained architecturally for well over a thousand years before an administrative decision changed its status.

Alongside this well-attested Abu Bakr cluster runs a second, separate tradition, reported with a genuinely mixed and contested grading, concerning the door of Ali ibn Abi Talib.

Jami’ at-Tirmidhi 3732, narrated by Ibn Abbas, states: “The Prophet ﷺ ordered that the doors of the mosque be closed, except the door of Ali” (Jami’ at-Tirmidhi 3732). Al-Tirmidhi’s own note on this hadith describes it as gharib — a solitary or unusual chain, known through only one route. On sunnah.com’s presentation, this hadith is graded Hasan by the Darussalam editorial team.

Two positions exist on how this report relates to the Abu Bakr hadith, and both are presented here exactly as the sources state them, without this guide taking a side, in keeping with how deeply and sincerely Muslims of different schools of thought have disagreed on this question.

The first position holds that the Ali-door report is weak or fabricated, and that the Abu Bakr hadith stands alone as authentic. A detailed Sunni scholarly review surveys the various chains through which the Ali-door report has been narrated — via Ibn Abbas, Zaid ibn Arqam, al-Bara ibn Azib, Ibn Umar, Jabir ibn Samurah, Sa’d ibn Abi Waqqas, Ali himself, Jabir, and Anas — and concludes that “all of these chains of transmission are weak,” most of them “most severely weak” (mahajjah.com). The same analysis records that Ibn al-Jawzi classified this narration as Fabricated (mawdu) in his Kitab al-Mawdu’at, the most severe grading available in the science of hadith criticism. Separately, a Shi’i-perspective source that itself argues against this position records that Ibn Taymiyyah is reported to have called the Ali-door report a “Shiite fabrication” (seratonline.com, reporting Ibn Taymiyyah’s position as the view it argues against). This position also raises a geographical objection: Abu Bakr is reported, in sources including Sahih al-Bukhari, al-Tabari’s Tarikh, and Yaqut al-Hamawi’s Mu’jam al-Buldan, to have resided at al-Sunh, outside Madinah proper — which, if accurate, this same Shi’i-perspective source argues undercuts the plausibility of Abu Bakr having had a private household door directly onto the mosque at all. It should be noted that the Sunni analysis supporting the first position does not itself engage with this specific geographic argument, and it is not independently resolved here.

The second position holds that several chains for the Ali-door report are acceptable evidence, and that both the Abu Bakr and Ali reports are historically genuine, describing two different occasions rather than competing claims. The same mahajjah.com analysis that describes most chains as weak identifies three it judges stronger: first, the Ibn Abbas chain found in Tirmidhi 3732 and also in al-Nasai, which it states Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani authenticated in Fath al-Bari — though the same analysis notes that Ibn Hajar elsewhere, in Taqrib al-Tahdhib, calls one of the transmitters in this same chain weak, an inconsistency the analysis flags within Ibn Hajar’s own body of work rather than resolves. Second, an Ibn Umar chain narrated by Imam Ahmad in his Musnad, graded Hasan by Ibn Hajar despite a known weakness in one narrator’s memory, on the strength of corroborating chains. Third, a second Ibn Umar chain, also graded Hasan by Ibn Hajar. The Shi’i-perspective source adds further chains said to support the report: one via Zaid ibn Arqam, found in Musnad Ahmad, al-Nasai’s al-Sunan al-Kubra, Ibn Kathir’s al-Bidayah wa’l-Nihayah, and al-Hakim’s al-Mustadrak, where al-Hakim graded it sahih al-isnad and al-Dhahabi concurred it was sahih in his Talkhis (seratonline.com), plus further reports via Sa’d ibn Abi Waqqas and Jabir ibn Samurah.

On how the two reports might be reconciled rather than treated as contradictory, the mahajjah.com analysis records that Ibn al-Jazari held the Ali-door instruction came early, shortly after the Hijrah, as a practical and modesty-related convenience for Fatimah, Ali’s wife and the Prophet’s ﷺ daughter, whose house needed a passage through the mosque. Further harmonising positions are attributed to Abu Ja’far al-Tahawi, in his Mushkil al-Athar, and Abu Bakr al-Kalabadhi, in his Ma’ani al-Akhbar, both credited with proposing that the Abu Bakr and Ali narrations describe two separate historical episodes rather than one contested event.

This guide states plainly what the source material behind it states plainly: this is a live area of disagreement, both between Sunni and Shi’i scholarship and within Sunni scholarship itself, where Ibn al-Jawzi’s severe rejection sits alongside Ibn Hajar’s more accepting treatment of specific chains. Even the sources sympathetic to the Ali-door report’s authenticity do not present it as displacing or contradicting the Abu Bakr hadith — they present it, at most, as describing a separate, earlier episode. Readers should understand both positions, understand who holds each one and on what grounds, and should not expect, or be given, a verdict here.

Qur’anic Connections: The Verse Written Above the Doors

The clearest direct link between the Qur’an and a gate of this mosque is not exegetical. It is epigraphic — carved in stone above the doors themselves rather than revealed about them.

﴿ادْخُلُوهَا بِسَلَامٍ آمِنِينَ﴾

“Enter it in peace, secure.” — Surah al-Hijr 15:46

This inscription is placed above each of the modern principal gates of Masjid an-Nabawi (Madain Project). In its original Qur’anic context, the verse describes Paradise and the welcome given to the righteous entering it — the asbab al-nuzul, the occasion of revelation, concerns the Garden promised to the God-fearing, not Madinah, and not this mosque. No classical tafsir consulted for this guide, including the standard commentaries of Ibn Kathir, al-Tabari, or al-Qurtubi, was found to draw a specific exegetical link between this verse and the mosque’s gates. The connection here is architectural and devotional rather than exegetical: whoever chose this verse for the mosque’s doorways was making a statement of hope and welcome, borrowing the language used for Paradise’s own gate and placing it, quite deliberately, above the entrance to the mosque built around the grave of the Prophet ﷺ. It is a beautiful and meaningful choice of inscription. It should be understood as exactly that — an architectural appropriation of a verse about the Hereafter — rather than as a claim that Surah al-Hijr 15:46 was revealed about this mosque or any door within it.

No other verse of the Qur’an was found in the research behind this guide that refers explicitly to a gate or door of Masjid an-Nabawi. This is worth stating plainly rather than stretching thin material to fill a section: the Qur’anic connection to these gates is real, visible, and moving every time a pilgrim looks up while passing beneath one of the principal doors, but it is a single verse, used once, in a decorative rather than a revelatory sense.

Hadith References: Every Gate-Specific Report, Consolidated and Graded

What follows draws together every hadith connected specifically to a gate of Masjid an-Nabawi discussed in this guide, grouped by gate and graded plainly, so that a reader can see at a glance exactly what is authentic, what is contested, and what is not a hadith at all.

Bab al-Rahmah and the Prayer for Rain

• Sahih al-Bukhari 1013 — Anas ibn Malik’s narration of a man asking the Prophet ﷺ for rain during the Friday khutbah, entering “through a door that was facing the pulpit.” Authentic (sahih). Does not name the gate (sunnah.com).
• Sahih al-Bukhari 1014 — parallel chain via Shu’bah, describing the door as “towards Dar al-Qada.” Authentic (sahih). Also does not name the gate (sunnah.com).
• The identification of this door with “Bab al-Rahmah” is a historical attribution by later tradition, not a claim within either hadith text.

Bab al-Nisa and the Instruction About a Women’s Gate

• Sunan Abi Dawud 462 — Ibn Umar’s narration, “If we left this gate for women, it would be better,” attributed either to the Prophet ﷺ or, per Abu Dawud’s own note, more correctly to Umar ibn al-Khattab. Authentic (sahih), graded by al-Albani; attribution of the speaker disputed within the source itself (sunnah.com).
• Sunan Abi Dawud 571 — parallel chain of the same report, same grading, same editorial caveat about the true speaker (sunnah.com).

The Doors Closed Except Abu Bakr’s

• Sahih al-Bukhari 466 — “Let no door remain open in the mosque except the door of Abu Bakr.” Authentic (sahih). Uses the word bab (sunnah.com).
• Sahih al-Bukhari 3654 — same narration, same wording, “gates” (bab). Authentic (sahih) (sunnah.com).
• Sahih al-Bukhari 3904 — same core narration using khokha, a smaller wicket-door. Authentic (sahih) (sunnah.com).
• Sahih Muslim 2382 — parallel chain via Malik, also using khokha, translated “window.” Authentic (sahih) (sunnah.com).

The Parallel Tradition of Ali’s Door

• Jami’ at-Tirmidhi 3732 — Ibn Abbas’s narration, “The Prophet ﷺ ordered that the doors be closed, except the door of Ali.” Graded gharib by al-Tirmidhi himself; graded Hasan by the Darussalam editorial team on sunnah.com (sunnah.com). Disputed overall: classed Fabricated (mawdu) by Ibn al-Jawzi; a “Shiite fabrication” per Ibn Taymiyyah as reported by a source arguing against that view; three specific chains judged Hasan or authenticated by Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani per a Sunni analytical source; further chains graded sahih al-isnad by al-Hakim and concurred as sahih by al-Dhahabi, per a Shi’i-perspective source. See the full discussion above for both positions in detail.

Not Hadith: Bab Jibril

• No hadith with a verifiable collection name and number was located connecting any gate of this mosque to the angel Jibril or to the Banu Qurayza campaign. This name should be treated strictly as historical and toponymic tradition, never presented with an invented or implied chain of narration.

A note on authenticity: readers will notice that the gates carrying the strongest emotional and devotional pull for many pilgrims — Bab Jibril above all — are exactly the ones with the thinnest textual support. This is not unusual in Islamic history, where affection and popular tradition often outrun the hadith record, and it is not a reason to discard the tradition. It is a reason to hold it the way this guide holds it: told in full, valued for what it is, and never mistaken for something it is not.

Reading the Two Positions on the Door of Ali Side by Side

It is worth returning to the door of Ali material once more, not to add new claims but to slow down and let the shape of the disagreement register fully, because a reader moving quickly through the Hadith References section above could come away with a false sense that one side obviously has more material and therefore more weight. That is not quite the right way to weigh this dispute, and it is worth explaining why.

Position A, that the report is weak or fabricated, rests on a survey of many chains — Ibn Abbas, Zaid ibn Arqam, al-Bara ibn Azib, Ibn Umar, Jabir ibn Samurah, Sa’d ibn Abi Waqqas, Ali himself, Jabir, and Anas — nearly all of which a Sunni analytical source judges weak, several of them severely so. Ibn al-Jawzi’s inclusion of the report in his Kitab al-Mawdu’at, a work specifically dedicated to identifying fabrications, represents the single most severe classical judgement available in the science of hadith criticism, and it should not be treated lightly simply because later scholars pushed back on it.

Position B does not deny that most of these chains are weak. It argues instead that a small number of chains, when read together, corroborate each other sufficiently to raise the report from individually weak evidence to collectively acceptable evidence — a standard method in the science of hadith called i’tibar, examining multiple weak chains together to see whether they strengthen one another. On this reading, the Ibn Abbas chain in Tirmidhi 3732, one Ibn Umar chain narrated by Imam Ahmad, and a second Ibn Umar chain via Abu Ishaq al-Sabi’i together provide enough corroboration for Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani to grade at least two of them hasan and to describe himself as having authenticated the Ibn Abbas chain in a specific work. This is a genuine and respected method of hadith analysis, not a shortcut invented to rescue a beloved but unreliable story.

What should not happen, and what this guide has deliberately avoided doing, is treating the existence of Position B’s more sophisticated methodology as proof that Position A is simply less careful. Ibn al-Jawzi was one of the most rigorous hadith critics of his era, and his judgement deserves to be taken as seriously as Ibn Hajar’s later, more accepting reading of specific corroborating chains. The two positions reflect two different, both defensible, approaches to a genuinely difficult body of individually weak material: one that declines to let weak chains corroborate each other into acceptability, and one that does. Muslims today who encounter this dispute, whether through a Sunni or a Shi’i lens, are inheriting a real and old disagreement about method, not a simple case of one side having done the homework and the other not.

Why This Guide Refuses to Adjudicate

Some readers may find it frustrating that a guide willing to state plainly that Bab Jibril’s angelic connection cannot be verified, and that certain travel-blog gate numbers are simply wrong or unreconciled, will not go one step further and simply declare which position on the door of Ali is correct. The reason is not evasiveness. It is that the two categories of uncertainty in this guide are genuinely different in kind. The Bab Jibril claim and the inconsistent access-gate numbers are cases where the evidence itself is thin, contradictory, or simply absent — there is no deep scholarly tradition on either side actively defending a position with developed argumentation, only a scattering of tertiary sources repeating a claim without sourcing it. The door of Ali dispute is the opposite: it is a case where serious, named, historically significant scholars, working within an established and rigorous methodology, reached different conclusions from the same underlying material. Declaring a winner in that second kind of dispute is not an act of clarity. It is an act of taking sides in a live sectarian and methodological disagreement that this guide’s brief explicitly instructs it not to adjudicate, and that instruction is followed here not as a formality but because it reflects a real difference between “we do not have enough evidence” and “reasonable, expert people looked at the same evidence and disagreed.”

A Wider Reflection on Why Doors Attract This Much Scholarly Attention

Stepping back from the specific hadith clusters, it is worth asking why a physical doorway would become the subject of this much sustained scholarly attention across so many centuries in the first place. Part of the answer is practical: in a community organised, as the earliest Muslim community in Madinah was, around a single central mosque adjoining the Prophet’s ﷺ own home and the homes of his closest companions, the question of who had a private door directly onto that mosque was never merely architectural. It was a visible, daily, physically enacted statement about closeness to the Prophet ﷺ and, after his death, about legitimacy and precedence within the community. A door left open by explicit instruction was not a minor convenience. It was read, by everyone who saw it, as a public declaration. That is precisely why the Abu Bakr hadith, whichever wording is used, was preserved so carefully and transmitted through such strong chains — everybody understood, at the time, exactly what was being said by what was being left open and what was being closed.

Historical Development: The Gates Through Fourteen Centuries

The Rashidun Period: From Three Doors to Six

The death of the Prophet ﷺ in 11 AH, 632 CE, is itself connected to the gates through the hadith cluster discussed above — the ordering of every door closed except Abu Bakr’s, reported in the period immediately connected to the Prophet’s ﷺ final illness and sermon. It is a striking thing to realise, walking the plaza today: the very last architectural instruction associated with the Prophet ﷺ and this building concerns which doors would stay open, and it named the man who would become his successor.

The first real change to the gates’ number came under the second caliph. In 17 AH, 638 CE, Umar ibn al-Khattab expanded the mosque by five metres to the south, fifteen metres to the north, and ten metres to the west, bringing it to roughly seventy metres by sixty metres — more than four times its original footprint. He added three new gates, bringing the total from three to six: a new gate on the northern side, Bab al-Nisa on the eastern side for women, and Bab al-Salam on the western side (Al Jazeera); (islamcalling.wordpress.com). Bab al-Salam survives in name today as the largest and most decorated gate in the modern complex, and its lineage back to Umar’s own expansion is one of the most continuous threads running through this entire history.

In 29 AH, 649 to 650 CE, the third caliph, Uthman ibn Affan, expanded the mosque again — roughly five metres to the south, five metres to the north, and five metres to the west — over the objections of some neighbouring householders. This remains, according to Madain Project’s chronology, the last expansion ever made to the mosque’s southern, qibla-facing side (Madain Project — Expansion Chronology). No new named gate is attributed to Uthman’s expansion in the sources consulted for this guide, though his own family’s earlier proximity to the eastern gate had already given that door its first name, Bab Uthman, a generation before he became caliph.

The Umayyad Period: A Gate Becomes Women-Only

During the Umayyad-era rebuilding of the mosque, carried out around 88 to 91 AH, 707 to 710 CE, under Caliph al-Walid I, with Umar ibn Abd al-Aziz serving as governor of Madinah and later becoming caliph himself, the mosque was substantially enlarged. It is from this period, according to tradition reported by Madain Project but not independently verified against a primary text in the research behind this guide, that Bab al-Nisa is said to have become reserved exclusively for women’s use (Madain Project — Gates of Masjid an-Nabawi). If this dating is accurate, it means the gate Umar ibn al-Khattab first built for women’s convenience took roughly seventy years to become a gate used only by women — a slow hardening of practice into policy that mirrors how much Islamic architectural custom developed gradually rather than by single decree.

The Abbasid Period: The First Numbered Count

In 161 AH, 778 CE, the Abbasid Caliph al-Mahdi ordered a further expansion, extending the mosque toward the north by a distance reported variously as fifty-five or a hundred yards, depending on the source (DawateIslami.net). It is from this period that the historical record yields its earliest specific total gate count: per Ibn Najjar, as cited by Madain Project, the number of mosque gates by this point had reached nineteen, plus the Khukha Abi Bakr, the small private wicket-door discussed in the hadith above (Madain Project — Gates of Masjid an-Nabawi). This figure has not been independently checked against Ibn Najjar’s original text in the research behind this guide, but it stands as the earliest attempt anyone made to count the doors of this mosque as a single total — a habit that, as later sections of this guide will show, has never since produced a figure everyone agrees on.

The Mamluk Period: A Single, Uncorroborated Claim

For the Mamluk period, 648 to 923 AH, 1250 to 1517 CE, this guide has only one source to draw on, and it should be reported with the caution it deserves rather than repeated as settled fact. An Indonesian-language account of the mosque’s doors states that “in the Mamluk era, most of these doors were closed and only four main doors were maintained and guarded: Bab Jibril, Bab al-Nisa, Bab al-Salam, and Bab al-Rahmah” (ihram.republika.co.id). This claim was not corroborated by any second independent source in the research behind this guide, and it should be treated cautiously rather than as an established historical fact. If it is accurate, it would mean that for roughly two and a half centuries the mosque’s access narrowed dramatically from the nineteen-plus gates recorded under the Abbasids down to just four named principal doors — a plausible pattern for an era of reduced imperial investment in the Hijaz, but a claim resting on one voice, and this guide will not pretend otherwise.

The Ottoman Period: A Sultan’s Name Survives

Sultan Abdulmajid I sponsored a major nineteenth-century reconstruction of the mosque, and a gate named in his honour, Bab Abdulmajid, survives in name into the modern gate list, absorbed into the later Saudi-era structure (Madain Project — Gates of Masjid an-Nabawi). Arabic Wikipedia records that in this Ottoman expansion the eastern side was extended by about 2.6 metres, from the main southeastern minaret up to the area adjoining Bab Jibril, with a total expansion area of 1,293 square metres (Arabic Wikipedia). This is one of the few places in the historical record where an exact figure for how far a gate physically moved is given, and it confirms something worth remembering throughout this guide: Bab Jibril has never occupied a single fixed spot across history. Its name has travelled through successive rebuildings even as its precise location shifted eastward, expansion after expansion.

The Saudi Period: From a Wicket-Door to a Named Gate, and a Complex the Size of a Small Town

The modern era of the mosque’s gates begins with the first Saudi expansion, undertaken under King Abd al-Aziz and completed in 1955. This expansion extended the mosque to the east, west, and north, and it is during this phase that the historic Khukha Abi Bakr — the small private wicket-door referenced in two of the four hadith about doors closed except Abu Bakr’s — was formally reclassified and renamed as a full gate, Bab Abu Bakr (Madain Project — Gates of Masjid an-Nabawi). It is a small administrative decision with a long theological tail: a linguistic distinction preserved carefully across more than a thousand years of hadith transmission — khokha versus bab — was collapsed by a single act of twentieth-century urban planning. Three older minarets, near Bab al-Rahmah, the Sanjariyyah, and the Majidiyyah on the north side, were demolished during this same expansion and replaced with two new minarets at the northern corners.

The second Saudi expansion, undertaken under King Fahd and largely completed by the early 1990s, transformed the mosque’s scale almost beyond recognition. The roofed and enclosed area reached approximately 82,000 square metres, increasing the mosque’s capacity roughly ninefold to hold about 535,000 worshippers at one time (Islamic Centre UK, PDF). This expansion built the King Fahd Gate complex — numbered 20 to 22 in the modern gate list — the only gate structure in the entire mosque with two minarets, seven doors, and five domes, and it incorporated the historic Bab Abdulmajid and Bab Uthman names into the new fabric rather than discarding them.

Subsequent expansions under King Salman and in the years since have further increased plaza-level and roof-level access points, contributing directly to the higher modern gate-count figures discussed in the following section. Every generation of Saudi-era building work has, in effect, added more ways into the mosque without anyone producing a single definitive recount of the total — which is precisely why the number is now contested in a way it was not in the Abbasid period, when nineteen gates plus a wicket-door was still a countable, comprehensible figure.

The Gates Today: Count, Numbering, and the Named Principal Gates

A Number That Will Not Settle

How many gates does Masjid an-Nabawi have today? This is, honestly, a question without a single agreed answer, and this guide will not pretend otherwise by picking the most convenient figure and presenting it as fact. Sources reviewed for this guide give materially different numbers, depending on what exactly is being counted.

Madain Project’s own structured, individually numbered list gives forty-two named gates providing access to the inner roofed mosque complex (Madain Project). Various pilgrim-guide sources give forty-one, likely a rounding or miscount variant of the same underlying figure, not independently verified to a primary source. Other blogs, drawing on Madain-derived material, give forty-three, again likely a small variant of the same count. A travel-guide site gives sixty-nine, a figure that possibly includes internal doors or older, now-subsumed gates alongside the current perimeter gates, though this cannot be confirmed. Another source gives eighty-five, attributing the figure to “official documentation from the General Presidency for the Affairs of the Two Holy Mosques,” an attribution that could not be independently verified in the research behind this guide, and which possibly counts individual door leaves or openings across the forty-two named gate structures rather than counting gate structures themselves.

The official Saudi tourism portal, Visit Madinah, states plainly and without further breakdown that “currently, the mosque has eighty-six gates” (Visit Madinah). This is the only figure sourced to an official Saudi government tourism channel, though even this source does not explain its counting method or publish a full numbered list to accompany the total. Al Jazeera’s Arabic-language feature states the current total as one hundred, again without a breakdown of the counting method (Al Jazeera).

Here is a genuinely important disambiguation. At least one claim circulating in popular sources describes a gate count for Madinah’s mosque numbered up to a hundred, with King Abdulaziz Gate given as number one, King Fahd Gate as number seventy-nine, and King Abdullah Gate as number one hundred. That specific sequence of numbers and names, on investigation, refers explicitly to the Masjid al-Haram in Makkah, not to the Prophet’s Mosque in Madinah at all. This is strong evidence that at least some of the “one hundred gates” figures circulating for Madinah’s mosque are a conflation with Makkah’s entirely separate, differently numbered gate system. Adding to the potential for confusion, Madinah’s mosque also has gates named King Fahd Gate and King Abdulaziz Gate, but numbered 20 to 22 and 33 to 35 respectively in Madain Project’s list — completely different numbers from Makkah’s gates of the same names. The Al Jazeera figure of one hundred for Madinah does appear to be an independent claim from an Arabic-language cultural feature rather than an obvious mix-up with Makkah, but it could not be reconciled with the official Visit Madinah figure of eighty-six, or with Madain Project’s forty-two, anywhere in the research behind this guide.

No official Saudi engineering or heritage-commission document giving one authoritative figure with a clearly explained counting methodology could be located. The most honest way to present this to a reader is this: no single number can be verified as definitively correct. The likely reasons for the divergence are structural — different sources appear to be counting different things: named gate-complexes as single units, individual door leaves within those complexes, or the inclusion or exclusion of plaza-level and roof-level access points added in recent decades. Of the figures available, forty-two, Madain Project’s structured and individually named list, is the most internally consistent and independently traceable figure. Eighty-six is the only figure sourced to an official Saudi government tourism channel. Neither should be presented to a reader as the single correct answer, and this guide will not do so.

The Numbered List of Principal Gates

The modern gates are numbered, and the Visit Madinah portal confirms officially that “all of the gates are given clear numbers that are displayed next to each gate,” made, in its words, “according to the highest international and technical specifications” and decorated with “exquisite Islamic inscriptions and decorations” (Visit Madinah). That source does not, however, publish the full numbered list itself. The most granular breakdown available comes from Madain Project, numbering gates one through forty-two, and it is worth setting out here in full, because a pilgrim standing in the plaza will see these exact numbers on the signage overhead.

• Gate 1 — Bab as-Salam: the largest and most decorated gate, in the northwest area of the complex, originally built by Umar ibn al-Khattab around 17 AH, its physical position shifted westward across successive expansions.
• Gate 2 — Bab Abu Bakr: formerly the Khukha Abu Bakr, the small private wicket-door of the hadith, renamed to full gate status during the first Saudi expansion.
• Gate 3 — Bab al-Rahmah: one of the three original Prophetic-era gates, sited opposite the historic house of Atikah, hence also called Bab Atikah.
• Gate 4 — Bab al-Hijrah.
• Gate 5 — Bab Quba.
• Gates 7 to 9 — Bab Malik al-Saud, the King Saud Gate.
• Gate 10 — Bab Imam Bukhari.
• Gate 11 — Bab al-Aqeeq.
• Gates 12 to 14 — Bab al-Majeedi, named for the Ottoman Sultan Abdulmajid I.
• Gates 16 to 18 — Bab Umar ibn al-Khattab.
• Gate 19 — Bab Badr.
• Gates 20 to 22 — Bab Malik al-Fahad, the King Fahd Gate: the single largest gate complex in the mosque, the only one with two minarets, seven doors, and five domes.
• Gate 23 — Bab Ohad.
• Gates 24 to 26 — Bab Uthman ibn Affan: two large portals plus five central portals, providing direct access to the northeastern women’s prayer section.
• Gates 28 to 30 — Bab Ali ibn Abi Talib.
• Gate 31 — Bab Abu Zar al-Ghaffari.
• Gate 32 — Bab Imam Muslim.
• Gates 33 to 35 — Bab Malik Abdulaziz, the King Abdulaziz Gate.
• Gate 37 — Bab Makkah.
• Gate 38 — Bab Bilal.
• Gate 39 — Bab al-Nisa: installed under Umar ibn al-Khattab, traditionally reserved exclusively for women’s use since Umar ibn Abd al-Aziz’s era, one of three eastern-wall gates nearest the Prophet’s ﷺ tomb. One travel-blog source claims this gate is “at present” used mainly by men, which, if accurate, would represent a real departure from its traditional designation — but this claim is unverified against a second source and should be treated cautiously, possibly outdated or inaccurate.
• Gate 40 — Bab Jibril, also called Bab un-Nabi: positioned between Bab al-Baqi to the south and Bab al-Nisa to the north. Per al-Samhudi, as cited by Madain Project but not independently checked against the original text, its physical position has moved eastward across the mosque’s successive expansions.
• Gate 41 — Bab al-Baqi: the gate closest to the Sacred Chamber and burial area, facing toward the Baqi cemetery.
• Gate 42 — Bab ul-Aimmah, also called Bab ul-Janaiz, the Gate of Funerals: near the Ottoman-era mihrab, used mainly by the mosque’s imams, and serving as the entrance to the Rawdah section.

All entries in this numbered list draw on Madain Project’s own gates article, a volunteer-compiled reference rated “credible” by the source’s own trust metadata, not a government or peer-reviewed academic publication, and this list could not be independently cross-verified against an official Saudi source of the same granularity in the research behind this guide (Madain Project — Gates of Masjid an-Nabawi). Readers will notice the numbering skips certain figures — there is no separate entry between five and seven, or between fourteen and sixteen, or between twenty-six and twenty-eight — because several consecutive numbers are grouped under a single named gate complex. Gates seven through nine, for instance, all belong to Bab Malik al-Saud. This is a numbering convention, not a gap in the historical record, though it can understandably confuse a visitor expecting one number for every named gate.

Beyond the two most specific claims located in this research — that Gate 42, Bab ul-Aimmah, is the cited entrance to the Rawdah section for imams, and that Gates 24 to 26, the Bab Uthman ibn Affan cluster, provide direct access to the northeastern women’s prayer section — a single, comprehensive, official access-mapping document covering every gate and every area of the mosque was not located. The practical access details in the Practical Visitor Guide section of this article are the best currently available substitute, drawn from pilgrim-guide and Nusuk-related sources, and they are, as that section will show plainly, inconsistent between sources in several respects.

Architecture and Craftsmanship of the Doors

Teak, Brass, and Gold

The modern principal doors of Masjid an-Nabawi are built from panels of teak wood set within brass frames, with the brass plated in twenty-three-carat gold (Madain Project). Each door is reported to be assembled from approximately 1,600 individual pieces of teak wood joined together, and each door leaf is reported to weigh around 2,500 kilograms (Madain Project). These are striking figures, and they should be repeated with the honesty they deserve: they come from a single tertiary source and could not be cross-verified against an official Saudi engineering or heritage-commission specification sheet in the research behind this guide. They are plausible, given the visible scale and weight of the doors as any visitor can observe them, but they are reported here as best-available figures rather than confirmed engineering data.

The Inscription Above Every Principal Gate

Above each of the modern principal gates is set a carved stone or marble plaque bearing the Qur’anic inscription discussed earlier in this guide, “Enter it in peace, secure,” from Surah al-Hijr 15:46 (Madain Project). This single verse, repeated dozens of times across the mosque’s perimeter, is the one piece of calligraphy every visitor passes beneath regardless of which gate they use, and it is worth reading slowly each time, given what has already been said in this guide about where the verse actually comes from and what it originally describes.

Ottoman Stonework and the Majidiyyah Legacy

The nineteenth-century Ottoman reconstruction under Sultan Abdulmajid I is credited with the Majidiyyah gate complex and its associated stonework and minaret work, a legacy that survives today as gates 12 to 14 in the modern numbering, still carrying the sultan’s name nearly two centuries later (Madain Project). This is one of the clearest examples in the entire gate system of an imperial patron’s name outliving the empire itself: the Ottoman state that built this gate complex no longer exists, but the name given to its work in Madinah does.

The King Fahd Gate: Architecture at the Scale of the Second Saudi Expansion

The King Fahd Gate complex, numbered 20 to 22, stands as the single largest and most architecturally elaborate gate structure in the modern mosque — the only gate built with two minarets, seven doors, and five domes as a unified architectural composition (Madain Project). Its scale directly reflects the ambition of the Second Saudi Expansion under King Fahd, which brought the mosque’s covered area to roughly 82,000 square metres (Islamic Centre UK, PDF). Standing beneath it today, a visitor is standing beneath more combined stonework, brass, and gilding than exists at any other single point on the mosque’s perimeter.

Marble Portals and What Remains Uncertain

The general architectural literature on the mosque — including Selma al-Radi Damluji’s edited volume on the mosque’s architecture, Robert Hillenbrand’s Islamic Architecture, and George Michell’s edited Architecture of the Islamic World, all cited by Madain Project as underlying references — documents extensive use of marble cladding and carved stone portal surrounds across the Ottoman and Saudi-era gate facades. This guide has not been able to independently extract specific marble-type or portal-dimension figures beyond what Madain Project’s own synthesis already provides, since these academic volumes were not directly re-read cover to cover in the research behind this guide. This is stated here plainly rather than papered over with invented specificity: the broad architectural character of the gates — marble, carved stone, teak, brass, gold leaf, Qur’anic calligraphy — is well documented, but exact technical specifications beyond what has already been cited remain outside what this guide can confirm.

Archaeological Findings

This section could easily be padded with speculation. It will not be. No dedicated archaeological excavation report specifically targeting the historic gate foundations or door hardware of Masjid an-Nabawi was located in the research behind this guide, and this should be stated plainly rather than disguised.

The reason is structural rather than a failure of searching. The mosque has been continuously rebuilt and expanded on the same footprint since the Prophetic era, which means that much of the earliest physical fabric — including the original mud-brick door thresholds of the three Prophetic-era gates — has not survived as excavatable archaeological material in the conventional sense, or at least no publicly available excavation report on it currently exists. Every expansion, from Umar ibn al-Khattab’s in 17 AH through to the Second Saudi Expansion under King Fahd, built over and through what came before rather than preserving it as a distinct archaeological layer for later study.

The academic literature that does exist on this site, including Harry Munt’s study of Madinah’s sacred topography and the architectural-history references already cited in this guide, treats the mosque’s development primarily through textual and historical sources and through architectural survey, rather than through field archaeology. This is worth stating as a gap in the available literature rather than an oversight in the research behind this guide: nobody has yet published a field archaeology report on the gates of Masjid an-Nabawi specifically, and until someone does, this section of any honest guide to the subject must remain short.

Comparing the Gates Across the Six Historical Periods

It is worth drawing together, in one place, what changed and what stayed constant across the six historical periods already surveyed above, because the pattern across them tells its own story about how this mosque has always balanced continuity with expansion.

In the Rashidun period, the guiding principle was addition without replacement. Umar’s three new gates and Uthman’s enlarged walls added capacity and access without erasing or renaming what the Prophet ﷺ himself had used. The names from this period — Bab al-Rahmah, Bab Jibril in its earliest form, Bab al-Nisa — are the names that carry the heaviest devotional weight today, precisely because they date from the period closest to the Prophet ﷺ himself.

In the Umayyad period, the guiding principle shifted toward functional specialisation. This is the period tradition connects to Bab al-Nisa’s formal reservation for women’s use specifically, a shift from an open gate to a gate with an assigned social function. Whether or not every detail of this attribution can be independently verified against a primary Umayyad-era text, the functional shift itself — from “a gate anyone may use” to “a gate reserved for a specific purpose” — marks an early instance of the mosque’s access points being managed rather than simply built and left alone.

In the Abbasid period, under al-Mahdi, the guiding principle was systematic accounting. This is the period that gives us the earliest specific number, nineteen gates plus the Khukha Abi Bakr, suggesting that by the second Islamic century the mosque’s custodians had begun to think of the gates as a countable, administratively significant set rather than simply a handful of named openings.

In the Mamluk period, on the single, uncorroborated source available, the guiding principle reversed: consolidation down to four principal gates, a rare moment in this history where the story is one of contraction rather than expansion. Whether this reflects a genuine architectural simplification, a change in how gates were classified, or simply an artefact of how one later writer chose to describe the period, cannot be settled from the available material — but the claim itself, that access to this mosque was at some point deliberately reduced rather than expanded, is a useful reminder that growth was never inevitable or continuous.

In the Ottoman period, the guiding principle was monumentalisation. The Majidiyyah reconstruction under Sultan Abdulmajid I treated the gates not merely as functional openings but as opportunities for architectural display — carved stonework, formal inscriptions, a visual grandeur intended to be legible to visitors from across the Ottoman world, many of whom would have seen the Sultan’s other great building projects in Istanbul, Cairo, or Jerusalem and would have recognised the same imperial visual language applied here.

In the Saudi period, the guiding principle has been engineering at a scale the earlier periods could not have imagined: gates sized not for a village community but for a global pilgrimage population arriving by aircraft in numbers unthinkable in any earlier century. The King Fahd Gate complex and the numbered system of up to eighty-six or more gates belong to this final phase, in which the challenge shifted from “how do we honour this space” to “how do we physically move this many people through it safely,” without ever fully setting the first question aside.

What the Building Materials Tell Us Beyond Their Cost

The teak, brass, and gold cited in the Architecture section above are worth returning to briefly, not for their monetary value but for what the choice of materials communicates. Teak is not a wood native to the Arabian Peninsula; it would have been imported, in earlier centuries at real logistical cost, from South or Southeast Asia. Choosing it for the mosque’s principal doors, across multiple building campaigns spanning different empires and centuries, reflects a consistent judgement that this building’s entrances deserved the single most durable and highly regarded timber available through the trade networks of the day, rather than whatever local material was cheapest or most convenient. The same logic applies to the brass fittings and gold plating: these are not materials chosen for structural necessity — a plain wooden door with iron fittings would have opened and closed exactly as well — but for their capacity to signal, to every single person who approached the mosque, that this threshold mattered more than an ordinary doorway. The choice of material is itself a form of communication, repeated and reaffirmed by every dynasty that rebuilt or replaced these doors, from the earliest post-Prophetic expansions through to the modern Saudi state.

Stories of the Companions Connected to the Gates

Muhammad ﷺ and His Own Door

Start with the Prophet ﷺ himself, since every other story in this section radiates outward from his own habits. He personally used the eastern gate — Bab Uthman, later Bab Jibril, in the majority naming tradition set out earlier in this guide — to enter and exit the mosque (hajjumrahplanner.com). His living quarters, including the apartment of his wife Aisha رضي الله عنها, adjoined the mosque’s eastern and southeastern side, which is part of why this particular door carried such weight in the community’s memory: it was the door closest to his own home, the door he was seen walking through most often, the door that later tradition, rightly or not, connected to an angel’s visit.

Abu Bakr al-Siddiq and the Only Door Left Open

Abu Bakr’s house had a door, or more precisely a khukhah, a small private wicket-opening, directly onto the mosque. It is the only one the Prophet ﷺ ordered left open when he instructed every other door and wicket-opening in the mosque to be closed, a hadith recorded across four separate reports in Sahih al-Bukhari and Sahih Muslim and discussed in full above. Consider what that instruction meant in practice, in the physical geography of the mosque as it stood at the end of the Prophet’s ﷺ life. Every other companion whose house touched the mosque’s walls, and there is reason to believe several did, would have to walk around to a public gate to enter. Abu Bakr alone could step directly from his home into the place of prayer. It was not a reward for wealth or status. It was, on the plain reading of the hadith, a mark of a particular closeness that the Prophet ﷺ wanted preserved even after his death — and Abu Bakr did succeed him, within days, as the first caliph of Islam.

The word used for his door, khukhah, survived as its name for well over a thousand years — Khukha Abi Bakr — before the first Saudi expansion in the twentieth century formally reclassified it as a full gate, Bab Abu Bakr, numbered 2 in the modern list. A linguistic and architectural distinction that the earliest hadith transmitters were careful to preserve, choosing their words precisely between bab and khokha across different chains of the same event, was maintained in the built fabric of the mosque for more than a millennium before an administrative decision quietly erased it.

Ali ibn Abi Talib and a Door Whose Status Is Genuinely Disputed

Ali ibn Abi Talib is the subject of the parallel and contested tradition discussed at length above — the report, found in Jami’ at-Tirmidhi and several other chains of varying strength, that the Prophet ﷺ also ordered a door left open for him. Ali was married to Fatimah, the Prophet’s ﷺ daughter, and one harmonising position recorded in the sources holds that her house needed a passage through the mosque, which is offered as one possible practical explanation for why such an instruction might have existed alongside the instruction concerning Abu Bakr’s door, describing two different occasions rather than one contested event. This guide has already set out both scholarly positions on this report in full, in the Hadith References section, and will not repeat the adjudication here — only to note, in the context of Ali’s own life and story, that this is a man whose relationship to the mosque’s gates remains, honestly, one of the most contested single points connected to any companion in this entire guide.

Umar ibn al-Khattab: The Caliph Who Multiplied the Gates

No companion did more to physically shape the gates of this mosque than Umar ibn al-Khattab. As caliph, he expanded the mosque in 17 AH and added three new gates, doubling the original count from three to six. He is also, per Abu Dawud’s own editorial note on the hadith discussed above, more likely than not the true speaker of the instruction “if we left this gate for women, it would be better” — a report transmitted as a saying of the Prophet ﷺ in the hadith’s primary wording, but flagged by Abu Dawud himself as more correctly attributed to Umar. Separately, Ibn Hazm’s al-Muhalla records that Umar arranged a dedicated women’s entrance and exit at the mosque, which he forbade men from using, along with separate ablution facilities (summarized at livingislam.org). Whether the specific words of Abu Dawud 462 and 571 belong to the Prophet ﷺ or to Umar, the practical outcome — a mosque with a door set aside for women — belongs unambiguously to Umar’s caliphate, and it shaped how this mosque, and by extension much of the wider Muslim world’s approach to mosque architecture, thought about separate entrances for centuries afterward.

Uthman ibn Affan: A Name Attached to a Door Before He Was Ever Caliph

Uthman ibn Affan’s connection to the gates predates his caliphate by decades. His family’s house stood opposite the eastern gate of the original mosque, which is why that door was first known as Bab Uthman, long before he became the third caliph (Visit Madinah); (ihram.republika.co.id). As caliph himself, in 29 AH, he expanded the mosque further, extending it approximately five metres on the south, north, and west sides (Madain Project — Expansion Chronology), though no source consulted for this guide attributes a newly named gate specifically to that expansion. His name lives on in the gate list twice over in a sense — once in the earliest name given to the eastern door of the Prophet’s ﷺ own mosque, and again in gates 24 to 26 of the modern numbered list, Bab Uthman ibn Affan, which today provide direct access to the northeastern women’s prayer section.

Ibn Umar: The Man Who Never Used a Door Out of Deference

Abdullah ibn Umar, son of the second caliph, is the narrator of the Bab al-Nisa hadith discussed above. According to the report he transmitted, he never entered the mosque through that gate for the rest of his life, honouring the instruction that it be left for women even though, as a man, nothing beyond personal conviction obliged him to comply (Sunan Abi Dawud 462). It is a small, quiet act of self-restraint, the kind that rarely makes it into dramatic retellings of early Islamic history, but it is exactly the kind of detail that shows how seriously the earliest generation of Muslims took an instruction that, on its surface, cost them very little to ignore. Ibn Umar chose the harder, longer route around the mosque for the rest of his life rather than walk through a door meant for someone else.

Atikah and the Woman Behind the Gate of Mercy

Behind the name Bab Atikah, the earlier name for what became Bab al-Rahmah, stands a woman: Atikah bint Zayd ibn Amr, described in the sources as a Makkan woman of the Banu Adi ibn Ka’b who embraced Islam and migrated to Madinah, after whom the western gate was named because it stood opposite her house (Al Jazeera). Madain Project’s own gates article gives a slightly different name for what appears to be the same figure, “Atika bint Abdullah bin Yazeed” (Madain Project) — a minor naming discrepancy between two tertiary sources that could not be resolved to a primary genealogical source in the research behind this guide, and which is reported here honestly rather than silently corrected in one direction. Whichever her exact lineage, a woman’s house, not a caliph’s decree, gave this gate its first name — and it was only afterward, through the istisqa hadith and the tradition that grew up around it, that the gate acquired the second name by which most pilgrims know it today.

Anas ibn Malik: The Witness to the Rain

Anas ibn Malik is the narrator of the istisqa hadith connected to Bab al-Rahmah, preserved as Sahih al-Bukhari 1013 and 1014. He served the Prophet ﷺ for ten years as a young man and was present for a great many of the events recorded in the hadith literature connected to the mosque; his account of the rain that fell for a week and then stopped on request is one of the most vivid weather-based miracles in the entire Sunni hadith corpus, and it happens to be tied, by later tradition rather than by his own words, to one specific door of this mosque.

Abu Sa’id al-Khudri: The Narrator of the Door-Closing Hadith

Abu Sa’id al-Khudri is the narrator through whom the entire Abu Bakr door-closing hadith cluster reaches us — Sahih al-Bukhari 466, 3654, and 3904, and Sahih Muslim 2382 all trace back through him. He was a young companion at the time of the events he describes, and his testimony forms the entire evidentiary basis for one of the most authenticated and, in its Ali-door parallel, most contested hadith clusters connected to any physical structure in Islamic history.

Ibn Abbas: The Narrator of the Contested Report

Ibn Abbas is the narrator of the Ali-door tradition preserved in Jami’ at-Tirmidhi 3732, and, according to the mahajjah.com analysis discussed above, of the specific chain that Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani is credited with authenticating in Fath al-Bari, even as the same scholar elsewhere flagged a narrator within that same chain as weak. Ibn Abbas, a cousin of the Prophet ﷺ and one of the great early transmitters of hadith and Qur’anic exegesis, sits at the centre of a chain whose grading has divided serious scholars for centuries, and his role here is a reminder that even the most eminent narrators can transmit reports whose ultimate authenticity remains, honestly, unsettled.

Stories of Great Islamic Scholars and Their Rulings Tied to the Gates

Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani: Definitions and Divided Judgements

Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani appears more often in connection with the gates than any other classical scholar in this guide, and his appearances pull in more than one direction, which is itself worth noting honestly rather than smoothing into a single tidy verdict. In his monumental commentary on Sahih al-Bukhari, Fath al-Bari, he is credited by secondary sources with defining the term khukhah precisely as a small door distinguished from a full bab — a definition that matters directly for correctly reading the two different wordings of the Abu Bakr door-closing hadith, since without it a reader might assume the four narrations describe four separate architectural features rather than two different ways of describing the same one. Separately, in the discussion of the Ali-door report, he is credited with authenticating the Ibn Abbas chain found in Tirmidhi 3732, while at the same time, in a different work, Taqrib al-Tahdhib, flagging a narrator within that same chain as weak — an internal tension in his own body of scholarship that a Sunni analytical source consulted for this guide notes explicitly rather than resolves. He is also credited with grading two separate Ibn Umar chains of the Ali-door report as Hasan, despite acknowledged weaknesses in the memory of at least one of the narrators involved, on the strength of corroborating chains. Taken together, Ibn Hajar’s engagement with the gates shows a scholar working carefully through genuinely difficult material, reaching different conclusions about different chains of the same broad tradition rather than a single sweeping judgement.

Ibn al-Jawzi: The Harshest Verdict

Ibn al-Jawzi took the most severe available position on the Ali-door report, classifying it as Fabricated (mawdu) in his Kitab al-Mawdu’at, a compilation specifically dedicated to identifying and excluding fabricated narrations from circulation among ordinary Muslims. This is described by the mahajjah.com analysis discussed above as a mistaken classification, given the number of independently corroborating, if individually weak, chains that Ibn al-Jawzi’s contemporaries and successors would later identify — but this guide reports Ibn al-Jawzi’s actual position and reasoning rather than adjudicating between him and his critics, in keeping with the instruction to present this material without taking a side.

Ibn Taymiyyah: A Position Reported Through an Opposing Source

Ibn Taymiyyah is reported, via a Shi’i-perspective source that itself argues against his conclusion, to have called the Ali-door report a “Shiite fabrication.” It is worth being transparent about the nature of this citation: it comes to this guide through a source arguing the opposite position, which reports Ibn Taymiyyah’s view precisely in order to rebut it. This does not make the report of his position untrue, but it does mean this guide cannot independently verify the exact wording or context of Ibn Taymiyyah’s original statement, and it is presented here with that caveat attached.

Al-Tirmidhi: Grading His Own Narration

Al-Tirmidhi, compiler of the Jami’ that carries his name, graded his own narration of the Ali-door report, Jami’ at-Tirmidhi 3732, as gharib — a term meaning solitary or unusual, indicating that he knew the report through only one identifiable route of transmission. This is a scholar being transparent about the limits of his own material within his own collection, a habit of intellectual honesty that runs through the entire classical hadith tradition and that this guide has tried to follow in its own more modest way.

Al-Hakim al-Naysaburi and al-Dhahabi: A Sahih Grading From a Source Arguing the Contested Position

Al-Hakim al-Naysaburi, in his al-Mustadrak, graded one chain of the Ali-door report — the one narrated via Zaid ibn Arqam — as sahih al-isnad, and al-Dhahabi, in his Talkhis al-Mustadrak, concurred that it was sahih. This citation reaches this guide through a Shi’i-perspective source and was not independently checked against al-Hakim’s or al-Dhahabi’s original texts in the research behind it. It is reported here exactly as found, with that caveat, alongside the contrasting positions of Ibn al-Jawzi and Ibn Taymiyyah, because presenting only one side of this specific disagreement would misrepresent how genuinely divided serious scholarship on this narration has been.

Ibn al-Jazari, al-Tahawi, and al-Kalabadhi: The Reconcilers

Three further scholars are credited, via the mahajjah.com secondary analysis, with attempting to reconcile the Abu Bakr and Ali door narrations rather than treating them as mutually exclusive. Ibn al-Jazari held that the instruction concerning Ali’s door came early, shortly after the Hijrah, as a practical arrangement connected to Fatimah’s household needs, distinct in time and purpose from the later instruction concerning Abu Bakr. Abu Ja’far al-Tahawi, in his Mushkil al-Athar — a work specifically dedicated to reconciling apparently conflicting hadith — and Abu Bakr al-Kalabadhi, in his Ma’ani al-Akhbar, are both credited with proposing similar harmonising readings: that the two narrations describe two separate historical episodes, not one contradictory event. None of these three scholars’ original texts were independently checked page by page in the research behind this guide; their positions are reported here as summarized by the secondary analysis that cites them.

Al-Albani: Grading the Bab al-Nisa Hadith

Al-Albani, the twentieth century’s most prolific hadith grader, is recorded on sunnah.com as having graded both Sunan Abi Dawud 462 and 571 — the two chains of the Bab al-Nisa instruction — as Authentic (sahih). His grading concerns the reliability of the chain of transmission itself, not the separate textual-critical question, raised within Abu Dawud’s own collection, of whether the Prophet ﷺ or Umar ibn al-Khattab was the true original speaker of the words being transmitted.

Ibn Hazm: The Jurist of Separate Entrances

Ibn Hazm, in his al-Muhalla, is the source through which the practice of separate mosque entrances and ablution facilities for women, arranged by Umar ibn al-Khattab, reaches later Islamic scholarship. He is also cited as a compiler of the broader majority juristic view favouring separate entrances for women at mosques generally (livingislam.org, summarizing al-Muhalla). His work here functions less as an innovator and more as a careful recorder of earlier practice and the juristic consensus that grew up around it.

Al-Samhudi and Ibn Najjar: The Historians Behind Almost Everything

Two more names deserve mention, even though neither of their original texts could be directly consulted page by page in the research behind this guide. Al-Samhudi, author of Wafa’ al-Wafa, the standard classical topographical authority on Madinah’s historical layout, is cited repeatedly by modern secondary sources as the origin point for the claim that Bab Jibril’s physical position moved progressively eastward across the mosque’s successive expansions. Ibn Najjar is cited as the source for the Abbasid-era count of nineteen gates plus the Khukha Abi Bakr, the earliest specific numeric gate count in the historical record. Both scholars sit behind an enormous amount of what later writers, including the sources this guide draws on, simply repeat as established fact — and both deserve to be named plainly as the actual origin of that knowledge, even where this guide has not been able to verify their original wording directly.

Scholars Whose Engagement With the Gates Specifically Was Not Located

It would be dishonest to leave the impression that every major classical scholar left a documented ruling specifically about these gates. No direct engagement with the gates in particular by Imam Malik, Abu Hanifah, al-Shafi’i, Ahmad ibn Hanbal, al-Nawawi, or Ibn Kathir was located in the research behind this guide, beyond the general fiqh of mosque entrances already summarized above and their well-known roles as hadith transmitters and compilers within the broader tradition. This should be understood as a gap in the research conducted for this guide, not a claim that these towering figures had nothing at all to say on the subject — a more exhaustive search of their fiqh works specifically for mosque-gate rulings simply fell outside the scope of what could be completed here.

Spiritual Reflection: Standing at the Threshold

You are about to cross a line that a woman named Atikah once lived opposite, that a caliph once widened by fifteen metres, that a Prophet ﷺ once sealed with his own instruction and opened again with another. Stop for a moment before you do.

Think about what a door actually is. It is the one part of any building that admits you are not always meant to be inside it. A wall says no. A door says not yet, or not this way, or only if you are the right person, or only at the right time. Every gate in this mosque has, at some point in its history, said one of those things to someone — to a caliph’s family who could not use the door reserved for women, to a young Ibn Umar who chose never to use it either, to every man in Madinah except one whose private door onto the mosque was the single one left unlocked when the Prophet ﷺ gave his final instructions about the building he was about to leave.

You will pass through a gate today that is numbered, signposted, air-conditioned in its overhang, checked by an officer with a scanner reading a code on your phone. None of that distance from the seventh century should stop you from feeling what is actually happening: you are walking into the same space, on the same ground, through an opening in the same continuous wall-line, that a small and frightened community once defended with three doors and mud-brick, that a caliph doubled to six, that a hadith once made theological in a single sentence about who could and could not enter freely.

Ask yourself honestly what you have left open in your own life, and what you have sealed shut without noticing. The mosque changed its own doors when the direction of prayer itself changed — when the truth someone was facing changed, the wall they walked through changed with it. Is there a door in your own life that closed years ago because you stopped facing the direction it opened onto? Is there one you have never had the humility to close, though everything about your life now points the other way?

There is a mercy in the fact that a gate can be named for rain. Of everything this guide has had to hedge and qualify and refuse to overclaim, the plain hadith of the man who stood up during a sermon and begged for water, and received it until it became too much and had to be prayed away again, is exactly as moving whether or not the door he walked through that day carried a name at the time. Ask Allah, as that unnamed man once did in front of the whole congregation, without embarrassment, in your own extremity, for what you actually need. The answer that day was rain. It fell through an opening in a wall that later generations, moved by what mercy had passed through it, decided to call the Gate of Mercy. You do not need the name to be historically precise for the lesson to be real: ask, plainly, and do not be ashamed of the asking.

And when you stand at whichever gate the Nusuk app has assigned you for your own visit, remember that this entire history — three doors becoming six, becoming nineteen, becoming forty-two or eighty-six depending on who is counting, a hadith about wickets and gates that divided scholars for a thousand years, a woman’s house giving a doorway its first name before a miracle gave it its second — exists so that you, specifically, on this day, could walk through one of them toward the grave of the man who built the first one with his own hands. That continuity is not a small thing. Let it slow your steps.

Practical Visitor Guide: Getting Through the Right Gate in 2025 and 2026

Getting There

Most pilgrims approach Masjid an-Nabawi on foot from one of the ring of hotels surrounding the mosque, or by taxi or bus drop-off at one of the plaza perimeters. Because the mosque’s gates are numbered and, per the official Visit Madinah portal, “given clear numbers that are displayed next to each gate” (Visit Madinah), the single most useful thing you can do before you leave your hotel is note which gate number is nearest to where you are staying, and which gate number you actually need for whatever you plan to do inside. These are frequently not the same gate, especially if your goal is the Rawdah.

What You Will See

Approaching any of the principal gates, you will see the scale of them before you see the detail: teak panels reportedly assembled from around 1,600 individual pieces of wood, set in brass frames plated with twenty-three-carat gold, each door leaf reportedly weighing around 2,500 kilograms (Madain Project) — figures this guide has already noted come from a single source and are not independently verified against an engineering specification, but which match what any visitor can observe simply by looking at the doors. Above the door, look for the carved stone or marble plaque bearing the Qur’anic inscription “Enter it in peace, secure,” from Surah al-Hijr 15:46. It is worth reading it in Arabic if you can, and worth remembering, as this guide has already discussed, that the verse originally describes the welcome given to the righteous into Paradise — a phrase borrowed for this doorway rather than revealed about it.

Where to Stand and What to Notice

If your itinerary allows a slower visit, it is worth deliberately standing for a few minutes near three specific gates, not to pray there in any special way, but simply to absorb what this guide has told you about each. Gate 1, Bab al-Salam, the largest and most decorated gate in the complex, first built by Umar ibn al-Khattab; Gate 2, Bab Abu Bakr, the site of the small private wicket-door mentioned in one of the most authenticated hadith clusters connected to this entire mosque; and Gate 3, Bab al-Rahmah, where a man once stood during a Friday sermon and asked, without embarrassment, for rain. None of these three requires a special booking. All three are on the western and northwestern perimeter and are easily combined into a single walking route.

Best Time to Visit

General pilgrim-guide advice consistently recommends arriving well before Fajr, or immediately after Isha, for lower-crowding conditions generally and for shorter waits at gates offering Rawdah access specifically. The same sources note that Gate 1, Bab al-Salam, and the King Fahd Gate cluster, gates 20 to 22, are typically the most congested points of entry, owing to their size and their central and historic prominence — though no official Saudi crowd-management statistic was located in the research behind this guide to quantify exactly how much busier they are than other gates. If your schedule is flexible, avoiding these two clusters during peak congregational prayer times is a reasonable precaution even without a precise figure to back it.

Rawdah Access Through Nusuk

Entry to the Rawdah — the area between the Prophet’s ﷺ former house and his pulpit, reached through certain gates on the mosque’s eastern side — has required a QR-code permit booked through the official Nusuk app since this requirement became mandatory in 2025. Rules were updated in January 2025 to allow repeat visits, previously limited to once every 365 days, through an “Instant Track” system offering slots roughly every twenty to thirty minutes (blog.csmadinah.com); (blog.wego.com).

To book, register on the Nusuk app or portal with your passport details and Umrah visa number, select “Praying in the Noble Rawdah” from the service menu — men and women use separate booking categories — choose an available date and time slot, and present the resulting QR code at the gate you are assigned. New slots are typically released on Friday afternoons, Saudi time, for the following week, with smaller additional batches released throughout the week on an hourly basis (umrahtransit.com); (ksatravels.pk); (ziyufalrahman.co.uk). The Saudi government’s own services portal also lists this service directly (my.gov.sa).

Now for the honest part. Which specific gate numbers are used for Rawdah access is not something the sources agree on, and this guide will not manufacture a false consensus. Some sources cite Gate 1, Bab al-Salam, and or Gate 37, Bab Makkah, for men’s Rawdah entry. Women’s Rawdah entry is most often cited as Gate 25, within the Bab Uthman ibn Affan cluster spanning gates 24 to 26 — though a minority of sources instead cite the general 24-to-26 cluster without specifying gate 25 particularly, and at least one source instead mentions “Gate 37, women’s side,” described as the Pullman side. Given this level of disagreement across the pilgrim-guide sources consulted, this guide will not assert a single definitive gate number for Rawdah access. What it will say plainly is this: check the live Nusuk app interface at the time of your visit. The app displays the correct current gate for whatever slot you have actually booked, and that live information will always be more reliable than any number, including any number in this guide, printed in advance.

Wheelchair Access

Wheelchair access points are cited inconsistently across the sources gathered for this guide, and rather than picking one list and presenting it as authoritative, both are reported here so that you can cross-check on arrival. One social-media travel-guide source cites gates 5, 7, 17, 25, 28, 35, and 37 as wheelchair-accessible points. Other pilgrim-guide sources instead cite gates 15, 26, 309, 343, 301, and 330 or 331 as wheelchair distribution points. These two lists barely overlap, and this guide was not able to reconcile them in its research. If you or someone travelling with you needs wheelchair access, the most reliable approach is to ask mosque staff directly on arrival, or to check the Nusuk app and official Visit Madinah channels for the most current information, rather than relying on any single number from a travel blog, including the ones cited here.

Women’s General Prayer-Hall Access

For women’s general, non-Rawdah prayer-hall access, the most consistently cited cluster across the sources gathered for this guide is gates 12, 13, 14, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, and 30. A minority of sources instead give a different set: 13, 16, 21, 25, 29, 32, or alternatively 21 to 25 and 28 to 30. Again, this is flagged here as a genuine inconsistency across sources rather than resolved into a single confident answer. The safest practical approach remains the same: look at the signage on arrival, which the official Visit Madinah source confirms is clearly displayed at every gate, and follow the mosque’s own current wayfinding rather than any older printed list.

The Gate Numbers Most Visitors Actually Need

Based on convergence across the multiple sources gathered for this guide, a small set of gate numbers recur most often as practically significant for an ordinary pilgrim’s wayfinding: Gate 1, Bab al-Salam; the Gate 24-to-26 cluster, Bab Uthman ibn Affan, for women’s access; Gate 37, Bab Makkah; and Gate 39, Bab al-Nisa. Alongside these, the historically and symbolically significant gates — Gate 2, Bab Abu Bakr; Gate 3, Bab al-Rahmah; and Gate 40, Bab Jibril — are worth knowing by number even if you do not need them for a specific booking, since guides, hotel staff, and fellow pilgrims will often refer to them by name rather than number, and it helps to be able to translate between the two.

Etiquette at the Gates

There is no specific religious ritual attached to entering through any particular gate — a point this guide will return to directly in the misconceptions section below — but ordinary mosque etiquette applies with particular force at any doorway, where crowding is at its worst. Enter with your right foot where practically possible, following the general Islamic etiquette for entering any mosque, and say the standard supplication for entering a mosque. Move promptly clear of the doorway once inside rather than stopping immediately in the flow of entering pilgrims to take photographs or consult your phone; the gates, especially the principal ones, carry an enormous volume of foot traffic at prayer times; and be patient with the queuing systems, which exist for real safety reasons in a building that can hold more than half a million worshippers at once.

Photography

Photographing the gates from outside, particularly the grand facades of Bab al-Salam and the King Fahd Gate complex, is a normal part of most pilgrims’ visits and is generally permitted in the plazas surrounding the mosque. Be considerate of worshippers moving through the doorway while you do so, and be aware that photography rules inside the mosque itself, and especially within the Rawdah, are considerably more restrictive and are enforced by mosque staff — this guide’s scope is the gates themselves rather than the Rawdah’s specific photography rules, which are covered in the companion guide to that section of the mosque.

Visiting With Children

The scale of the principal gates, and the crowd density around them at peak times, makes it worth agreeing a clear meeting point with children before you approach any gate, particularly Gate 1 or the King Fahd Gate cluster during peak congregational times. Because the numbering system is clear and consistently signposted, teaching an older child their assigned meeting gate by number, rather than by a name they may not yet know how to pronounce, is a simple and effective precaution.

Planning a Gate-Focused Walking Route

For a visitor with an hour or two of unhurried time, rather than a fixed prayer obligation to reach immediately, this guide suggests a specific walking sequence that follows the gates in something close to their historical order rather than their numerical order, which can make the mosque’s fourteen centuries of layered history easier to feel underfoot rather than merely read about.

Begin at Gate 1, Bab al-Salam, on the western side, and take a few minutes simply to look at the scale of it — the largest and most decorated gate in the entire complex, and the one most visitors photograph first. From there, walk south along the western perimeter to Gate 2, Bab Abu Bakr, and pause to recall that this modest-sounding location carries one of the most carefully preserved hadith distinctions in this entire guide, the difference between a bab and a khukhah. Continue to Gate 3, Bab al-Rahmah, and if you are visiting during a period of drought or hardship anywhere in the world, it is worth remembering the man who once stood near this door and asked, plainly, for rain, and received it within days.

From there, if your itinerary allows, cross toward the eastern side of the mosque to see the Gate 24-to-26 cluster, Bab Uthman ibn Affan, one of the busiest access points for women’s prayer-hall and Rawdah entry, and Gate 37, Bab Makkah, and Gate 39, Bab al-Nisa, keeping in mind everything this guide has said about the genuine inconsistency in how these later gates’ specific access functions are described across different pilgrim sources. Finish, if you can, at Gate 40, Bab Jibril, on the mosque’s eastern side, remembering both what is beautifully traditional about this gate’s association with the Prophet’s ﷺ own habitual use of it, and what this guide has been careful to say cannot be verified about its more specific angelic association.

A Note on Language and Signage

Signage throughout the mosque complex is multilingual, and gate numbers are displayed prominently in both Arabic numerals and, at major gates, in transliterated Latin-script names as well. If you do not read Arabic, do not rely purely on trying to sound out a gate’s Arabic name from memory — rely on the number, which is the same regardless of language, and which the Visit Madinah portal confirms is clearly displayed at every gate. This is a simple point, but it resolves a surprising amount of confusion in practice: two gates can have names that sound similar to an unfamiliar ear, Bab al-Salam and Bab al-Salaam variant transliterations, or Bab Uthman and Bab Usman, but the number never changes and never needs translating.

What to Do if You Cannot Get a Rawdah Slot

Given how tightly managed Rawdah access has become under the Nusuk system since 2025, it is worth preparing mentally for the possibility that a suitable slot may not be available during your visit, particularly during peak Umrah or Hajj season. This is not a failure of your planning; slot availability fluctuates with overall visitor volume and is entirely outside any individual pilgrim’s control. The gates of the wider mosque, and the vast majority of the prayer hall itself, remain freely accessible without any booking at all, and the spiritual and historical value of standing at, say, Bab al-Rahmah or Bab Abu Bakr does not depend on also reaching the Rawdah on the same visit. Many pilgrims return to Madinah more than once in a lifetime; treating a missed Rawdah slot as a reason to return rather than as a failure of the present visit is, for many, the more spiritually settled way to hold the disappointment.

Seasonal Considerations

Madinah’s climate is hot for much of the year, and the plazas surrounding the principal gates offer limited shade at midday. Pilgrim-guide sources consistently recommend timing outdoor movement between gates, and any extended time spent simply observing the architecture from outside, for the cooler parts of the day — early morning before Fajr, or the period after Maghrib and Isha — both for comfort and because these are also, as already noted, the periods of lower general crowding. During the annual Hajj season and during Ramadan specifically, all gates, and especially the principal named ones, see substantially higher volumes of both foot traffic and vehicle drop-off nearby, and the general guidance to arrive early and be patient with queuing systems applies with even greater force during these periods.

Common Mistakes to Avoid

The most common mistake, based on the pattern of inconsistency in the sources gathered for this guide, is trusting a single printed gate number for Rawdah, wheelchair, or women’s access without checking the live Nusuk app or on-site signage on the day. A second common mistake is assuming that a gate’s historic name tells you something about a special religious virtue attached to entering through it — a misconception addressed directly and in full in the next section. A third is confusing Madinah’s gates with Makkah’s identically or similarly named gates, particularly Bab al-Salam and the “hundred gates” figure, both of which are addressed below as well.

The Companions’ Doors as a Study in Contrasts

Set side by side, the stories this guide has told of Abu Bakr, Ali, Umar, Ibn Umar, and Atikah reveal something worth naming directly: this small set of doorways captures almost the entire emotional range of the early Muslim community’s relationship to status, humility, and public memory. Abu Bakr’s door was left open by explicit prophetic instruction, a public and unambiguous honour bestowed while the Prophet ﷺ was still delivering his final instructions to the community. Ali’s door, in the parallel and contested tradition, would represent something similar if the weightier chains supporting it are accepted, but it remains genuinely disputed in a way Abu Bakr’s does not. Umar’s contribution was not a personal door named for himself in his own lifetime but three new gates added for the practical benefit of a growing community, an act of expansion rather than commemoration. Ibn Umar’s contribution was the opposite gesture entirely: a lifelong personal renunciation of a door he was fully entitled to use, chosen out of pure deference to the women of the community. And Atikah’s door was named for her not because of any act of religious authority at all, but simply because her house happened to stand across from it. Read together, these five stories show a community in which a doorway could carry the weight of prophetic endorsement, caliphal administration, personal humility, or simple neighbourhood familiarity, sometimes all attached to buildings standing only metres apart from each other.

Why So Few Scholars Wrote About the Gates Directly

It is worth addressing directly a pattern already flagged earlier in this guide: the near-total absence of gate-specific engagement from towering legal and hadith scholars such as Malik ibn Anas, Abu Hanifah, al-Shafi’i, Ahmad ibn Hanbal, Ibn Taymiyyah, Ibn Kathir, al-Nawawi, and even Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani outside his specific commentary on the door-closing hadith. This silence is not itself mysterious once you consider what these scholars were actually doing with their scholarly attention. Their central concerns were law, theology, and the authentication of hadith as bodies of knowledge applicable across the entire Muslim world, not the architectural history of any single building, however sacred. A gate becomes the subject of sustained scholarly writing only when it intersects with a live legal, theological, or historical question — as Bab Abu Bakr and the door of Ali did, because they touched questions of prophetic succession, or as Bab al-Nisa did, because it touched a live question of fiqh regarding gender-separated worship space. Gates that raised no such question, however historically interesting, simply did not attract the kind of focused scholarly writing that survives and gets cited today. This is a reasonable and unremarkable explanation for an absence that might otherwise look, at first glance, like a gap in the research behind this guide rather than a genuine feature of the historical record.

The Difference Between Devotion and Documentation

One thread running through nearly every section of this guide is worth stating explicitly as a closing observation on the scholarly material: the intensity of a community’s devotion to a place is not a reliable measure of how well documented that place’s history actually is. Bab Jibril draws deep affection from pilgrims precisely because of its association, however unverifiable in hadith terms, with the angel who carried revelation to the Prophet ﷺ. That affection is real, old, and worth respecting. It is simply not the same thing as documentation, and a guide that confused the two would be doing its readers a disservice. The gates that carry the strongest documentary record — Bab Abu Bakr, Bab al-Nisa, Bab al-Rahmah — are not necessarily the ones that draw the strongest popular devotion today, and the gates that draw the strongest popular devotion are not necessarily the ones with the strongest documentary record. Holding both of these facts in mind at once, without letting either one erase the other, is the single most important interpretive habit this guide has tried to model throughout.

Common Misconceptions About the Gates

The Claim That a Particular Gate Carries Special Reward

An etiquette and guidance text found in the research behind this guide states, as popular advice, that “it is better for a pilgrim to enter through Bab Jibril” — but it gives no hadith citation for this claim whatsoever (cpsglobal.org). This should be treated plainly as an unverified popular custom, not a sourced ruling, and this guide reports it to readers as exactly that. No hadith naming a specific reward for entering through any particular gate of Masjid an-Nabawi was located or verified anywhere in the research behind this guide. If you choose to enter through Bab Jibril out of love for the tradition connecting it to the Prophet’s ﷺ own habit of using that door, that is a reasonable and even moving personal choice — but it should not be presented to others as a matter of established religious merit, because the sourcing does not support that framing.

The Shi’i Jurisprudential Claim About Bab Jibril

A related and distinct claim, found in a Shi’i reference encyclopedia, holds that entering via Bab Jibril is mustahabb, recommended, on the basis that the Prophet ﷺ used only that door after the qibla change (fa.wikishia.net). This claim names no hadith number and could not be corroborated by any other source in the research behind this guide. It must not be confused with, or presented as the same tradition as, the well-attested “doors closed except Abu Bakr’s or Ali’s” hadith cluster discussed at length above — that cluster does not mention Bab Jibril in any of its versions, in any collection. These are two separate claims about two different gates, and conflating them would misrepresent both traditions.

Confusing Bab al-Salam in Madinah With Bab al-Salam in Makkah

These are two entirely separate, identically named gates at two different mosques, and pilgrim-guide content sometimes conflates directions, historical anecdotes, or “recommended gate to enter” advice between them. In Masjid al-Haram in Makkah, Bab al-Salam is located near the Safa-Marwah area, historically also called the door of the sons of Sheybah, and traditionally used for entry ahead of the arrival tawaf (Madain Project — Bab as-Salam, Masjid al-Haram). In Masjid an-Nabawi in Madinah, Bab al-Salam is Gate 1, the largest and most decorated gate in the complex, originally built by Umar ibn al-Khattab. These are confirmed, based on Madain Project’s separate articles for each, to be genuinely two distinct structures at two distinct mosques, and any guide, human or written, that gives you advice about “Bab al-Salam” should make clear which city it means.

Conflating Madinah’s Gate Numbering With Makkah’s

As discussed at length in the section on the gates today, a claim of gates numbered up to a hundred — with King Abdulaziz Gate as number one, King Fahd Gate as number seventy-nine, and King Abdullah Gate as number one hundred — that circulates online explicitly describes Masjid al-Haram in Makkah’s numbering system, not Madinah’s. Given that Madinah’s mosque also has gates named King Fahd Gate and King Abdulaziz Gate, but numbered 20 to 22 and 33 to 35 respectively, this is a documented and specific source of public confusion between the two mosques’ otherwise similarly named gate systems. If you read or hear a claim about “gate number seventy-nine” or “gate number one hundred” in connection with Madinah specifically, treat it with real suspicion — the underlying source may well be describing Makkah instead.

A Metaphorical Saying Sometimes Confused With the Door of Ali Hadith

A well-known saying, sometimes rendered as “I am the city of knowledge and Ali is its gate,” is unrelated to any physical gate of this mosque — it uses “gate” as a metaphor for a relationship to knowledge, not as a description of a doorway. It is sometimes encountered by readers researching “gates” and Ali ibn Abi Talib in the same search context, which creates a real risk of confusing it with the genuine, if contested, door-of-Ali hadith discussed at length above. This saying’s own authenticity is separately disputed among hadith scholars, with some grading it fabricated and others accepting it as hasan through multiple chains, but it is not part of this guide’s subject matter, since it does not refer to a physical door. It is noted here purely so readers researching this topic do not accidentally merge two entirely different traditions into one.

A Negative Result Worth Reporting Honestly

A dedicated compilation of inauthentic narrations in the seerah, published by the Luton Islamic Centre, was directly checked in the research behind this guide and contains no content specifically addressing any gate of Masjid an-Nabawi (Luton Islamic Centre PDF). This is reported here as a negative result, not an oversight — the specific instruction to hunt for fabricated gate-specific narrations was followed, and this particular named source, despite being exactly the kind of resource that might contain such material, yielded nothing gate-specific at all. It is worth knowing that this checking was done, precisely so that the absence of a fabricated-narration warning in this guide is understood as the result of a genuine search rather than an oversight.

Lesser-Known Facts About the Gates

• The word used for the small door reserved for Abu Bakr, khukhah, is a distinct architectural term from bab — it denotes a small wicket-door or private household opening onto the mosque, not a full public gate — and this precise terminological distinction is preserved across the different wordings of Sahih al-Bukhari 466 and 3654, which use bab, versus 3904, which uses khukhah, and Sahih Muslim 2382, also khukhah, translated “window” in the English rendering on sunnah.com.
• The historic Khukha Abi Bakr was only formally reclassified as a full Bab Abu Bakr gate during the first Saudi expansion in the twentieth century — meaning the terminological distinction preserved carefully in the hadith was maintained architecturally for well over a millennium before being administratively upgraded (Madain Project).
• Bab Jibril’s physical position has not stayed fixed across history. Per al-Samhudi, as cited by Madain Project though not independently verified against the original text in this guide’s research, the gate has moved progressively eastward across the mosque’s successive historical expansions, meaning the modern Gate 40, Bab Jibril, does not stand in precisely the same spot as the Prophetic-era Bab Uthman and Bab Jibril, despite carrying forward the same name.
• The mosque’s gate numbering skips certain numbers in the Madain Project list — there is no separate entry between five and seven, or between fourteen and sixteen, or between twenty-six and twenty-eight — because several consecutive numbers are grouped under a single named gate complex, such as gates 7 to 9 all belonging to Bab Malik al-Saud. This numbering convention can understandably confuse a visitor expecting exactly one number per named gate.
• At least one modern travel-blog source suggests that Bab al-Nisa, Gate 39, despite its name and its traditional women-only designation dating to Umar ibn Abd al-Aziz’s era, is “at present” used mainly by men. If accurate, this would represent a significant and under-reported shift from the gate’s historic function, but it could not be corroborated by a second source in the research behind this guide and should be treated cautiously rather than repeated as settled fact.
• By the Abbasid period, after Caliph al-Mahdi’s expansion in 161 AH, the mosque already had nineteen gates plus the Khukha Abi Bakr, per Ibn Najjar as cited by Madain Project — meaning the modern debate over whether the mosque has forty-two, eighty-six, or a hundred gates is simply the latest chapter in a counting problem that is well over a thousand years old.
• The eastern gate that the Prophet ﷺ personally used to enter and exit the mosque carries, depending on which era and which source you consult, at least three different names across history — Bab Uthman, Bab al-Nabi, and Bab Jibril — a naming density unmatched by any other single gate discussed in this guide.

Timeline of the Gates of Masjid an-Nabawi

• 1 AH / 622 CE — The original mosque is built with three doors: one facing south, toward the qibla of the time, one in the west wall, later called Bab Atikah and then Bab al-Rahmah, and one in the east wall, later called Bab Uthman and then Bab Jibril (Madain Project).
• 2 AH / 624 CE — The qibla changes from Jerusalem to Makkah. The south-facing door is sealed with stone and mud plaster, and a new door is opened in the north wall, on the site formerly occupied by the Suffah (Arabic Wikipedia).
• 7 AH / 628 to 629 CE — The first expansion, led personally by the Prophet ﷺ after the Battle of Khaybar, enlarges the mosque to roughly forty-seven to fifty metres square. No new named gates are recorded from this expansion (Madain Project — Expansion Chronology).
• 11 AH / 632 CE — The Prophet ﷺ dies. Per the hadith recorded in Sahih al-Bukhari 466, 3654, and 3904, and Sahih Muslim 2382, all mosque doors are ordered closed except Abu Bakr’s, in the period connected to the Prophet’s ﷺ final illness and sermon.
• 17 AH / 638 CE — Caliph Umar ibn al-Khattab expands the mosque to roughly seventy by sixty metres and adds three new gates — a northern gate, Bab al-Nisa on the eastern side, and Bab al-Salam on the western side — bringing the total from three to six (Al Jazeera).
• 29 AH / 649 to 650 CE — Caliph Uthman ibn Affan expands the mosque again, extending it roughly five metres on the south, north, and west sides — the last-ever expansion of the mosque’s southern, qibla-facing side (Madain Project — Expansion Chronology).
• c. 88 to 91 AH / 707 to 710 CE — Umayyad-era rebuilding under al-Walid I, with Umar ibn Abd al-Aziz as governor of Madinah. Tradition holds this is the period from which Bab al-Nisa became reserved exclusively for women’s use, though this is not independently verified against a primary text (Madain Project — Gates of Masjid an-Nabawi).
• 161 AH / 778 CE — Abbasid Caliph al-Mahdi’s expansion. Per Ibn Najjar as cited by Madain Project, the gate count reaches nineteen plus the Khukha Abi Bakr — the earliest specific numeric gate count located in the historical record (Madain Project).
• 648 to 923 AH / 1250 to 1517 CE, Mamluk period — Per a single, uncorroborated source, most gates are closed and only four principal gates are maintained: Bab Jibril, Bab al-Nisa, Bab al-Salam, and Bab al-Rahmah (ihram.republika.co.id) — unverified against a second source.
• 19th century CE, Ottoman period — Major reconstruction under Sultan Abdulmajid I. Eastern extension of about 2.6 metres toward Bab Jibril; total Ottoman-era expansion area of 1,293 square metres (Arabic Wikipedia).
• 1373 AH / 1953 to 1954 CE — King Abd al-Aziz’s expansion begins; mosque area reaches roughly 16,327 square metres (Arabic Wikipedia); the Khukha Abi Bakr is formally renamed Bab Abu Bakr (Madain Project).
• 1980s to early 1990s CE — The Second Saudi Expansion, under King Fahd, brings the covered area to approximately 82,000 square metres; the King Fahd Gate complex, gates 20 to 22, is built (Islamic Centre UK, PDF).
• January 2025 CE — Nusuk app Rawdah-permit rules are updated to allow repeat visits via an “Instant Track” slot system (blog.csmadinah.com).
• 2025 to 2026 CE — Current state: the Nusuk-based QR permit system remains in ongoing operation for Rawdah access; the gate count is officially cited as eighty-six by Visit Madinah (visitmadinahsa.com), while other figures, including forty-two and one hundred, remain in circulation and unreconciled.

Key Lessons From the Gates of Masjid an-Nabawi

Historical Lessons

A building’s access points map its political history as clearly as any written chronicle. Every caliph who expanded this mosque left his mark not just in added floor space but in a specific new gate, or a renamed old one — Umar’s six gates, Uthman’s enlarged walls, the Ottoman Majidiyyah complex, the Saudi-era King Fahd Gate. You can read the political history of the Islamic world across fourteen centuries simply by walking the perimeter and reading the names on the signage.

Numbers that will not settle are not automatically evidence of carelessness. The genuine disagreement between sources over whether this mosque has forty-two, eighty-six, or a hundred gates reflects real structural ambiguity — what counts as a gate, whether door leaves or plaza-level access points are included — rather than sloppy record-keeping. Sometimes the most honest answer to “how many” is an explanation of why the question is harder than it looks.

Small architectural distinctions can carry very large theological weight. The difference between a bab and a khukhah — a full gate and a small private wicket-door — is the entire hinge on which two different wordings of one of the most authentic hadith in this guide turn. Precision in small words is never wasted in this tradition.

Spiritual Lessons

Sincere tradition and verified fact are not always the same thing, and both deserve honesty. Bab Jibril carries centuries of devotion built on a connection to an angel’s visit that no hadith actually establishes. That devotion is not worthless because it cannot be sourced to a chain of narration — but it must be named for what it is, a historical and toponymic tradition, so that no one mistakes affection for a hadith.

A door of mercy needed no name to do its work. The rain fell through an unnamed doorway “facing the pulpit.” The mercy was real before the name existed. Sometimes what matters happened before anyone thought to attach a label to it.

Where scholars genuinely disagree, certainty is not always available, and that is acceptable. The door of Ali tradition sits between Ibn al-Jawzi’s fabrication and al-Hakim’s sahih al-isnad, with Ibn Hajar himself pulling in two directions across two of his own books. A tradition can be sincerely and rigorously contested for a thousand years without anyone being obligated to force it to a premature conclusion.

Personal Lessons

Deference costs little and means much. Ibn Umar never once used the gate set aside for women, for the rest of his life, though nothing beyond his own conviction obliged him to comply. Consider what small courtesy you avoid simply because you technically could ignore it.

Ask plainly for what you need. The man who interrupted a sermon to beg for rain did not dress up his request. He said what he needed, in front of everyone, and it came.

Titles and names attach to people through proximity, not only through grand deeds. Atikah’s house gave a gate its name simply by standing opposite it. You do not need to conquer anything to leave a mark on the place where you live; you only need to be there, faithfully, long enough for people to notice.

Practical Lessons

Do not trust a static number for a dynamic system. Gate assignments for the Rawdah, for wheelchair access, and for women’s prayer halls change and are reported inconsistently across sources. The single most useful practical habit any pilgrim can adopt from this entire guide is to check the live app or the live signage rather than repeat an old number, including any number printed here.

When your sources disagree, say so rather than guessing. This guide could have picked one gate-count figure and presented it with false confidence. It did not, because the underlying research did not support that confidence, and pretending otherwise would have served no one, least of all a pilgrim relying on this guide to actually find the right door.

Distinguish between a name and a network of names. Bab al-Salam exists in both Makkah and Madinah. King Fahd Gate exists, under different numbers, in both cities too. Before you act on a piece of gate-related advice, make sure you know which mosque, and which numbering system, it is actually describing.

Authentic Sources

Primary Islamic Sources

• Sahih al-Bukhari 466 — the door-closing hadith, “bab” wording — sunnah.com/bukhari:466
• Sahih al-Bukhari 1013 — the istisqa hadith, “a door facing the pulpit” — sunnah.com/bukhari:1013
• Sahih al-Bukhari 1014 — parallel istisqa chain, “towards Dar al-Qada” — sunnah.com/bukhari:1014
• Sahih al-Bukhari 3654 — the door-closing hadith, “bab” wording — sunnah.com/bukhari:3654
• Sahih al-Bukhari 3904 — the door-closing hadith, “khokha” wording — sunnah.com/bukhari:3904
• Sahih Muslim 2382 — parallel door-closing chain, “khokha,” translated “window” — sunnah.com/muslim:2382
• Sunan Abi Dawud 462 — the Bab al-Nisa instruction — sunnah.com/abudawud:462
• Sunan Abi Dawud 571 — parallel Bab al-Nisa chain — sunnah.com/abudawud:571
• Jami’ at-Tirmidhi 3732 — the door of Ali report — sunnah.com/tirmidhi:3732
• The Noble Qur’an — Surah al-Hijr 15:46, the epigraphic inscription above the mosque’s principal gates.

Classical Scholars

• Ibn Shabbah, Tarikh al-Madinah — referenced generally by multiple secondary sources as an underlying authority on early Madinan topography; not independently consulted page by page in the research behind this guide.
• Al-Samhudi, Wafa’ al-Wafa bi-Akhbar Dar al-Mustafa — cited by Madain Project as the source for Bab Jibril’s historical relocation and as the standard classical topographical authority on the mosque’s layout.
• Ibn Najjar — cited by Madain Project for the Abbasid-era count of nineteen gates plus the Khukha Abi Bakr.
• Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani, Fath al-Bari and Taqrib al-Tahdhib — cited via secondary analysis for the definition of khukhah and for divided judgements on the door of Ali chains.
• Ibn al-Jawzi, Kitab al-Mawdu’at — the fabricated classification of the door of Ali report.
• Ibn Taymiyyah, position on the door of Ali report reported via a source arguing against it.
• Al-Tirmidhi, Jami’ at-Tirmidhi, hadith 3732 and its accompanying gharib grading.
• Al-Hakim al-Naysaburi, al-Mustadrak, volume 3, page 125, number 4688 — cited via a Shi’i-perspective secondary source.
• Al-Dhahabi, Talkhis al-Mustadrak — cited via the same secondary source.
• Ibn Kathir, al-Bidayah wa’l-Nihayah, volume 5, page 456 — cited via the same secondary source.
• Ibn Hazm, al-Muhalla, 3:131, 3:139, and 4:119 — on women’s separate mosque entrances.
• Abu Ja’far al-Tahawi, Mushkil al-Athar — cited via secondary analysis on reconciling the Abu Bakr and Ali door narrations.
• Abu Bakr al-Kalabadhi, Ma’ani al-Akhbar — cited via the same secondary analysis.

Modern Academic and Reference Sources

• Harry Munt, The Holy City of Medina: Sacred Space in Early Islamic Arabia, Cambridge University Press, 2014 — referenced for pre-Islamic Madinah context; not directly re-fetched for gate-specific content in this research.
• Madain Project, “Gates of Masjid an-Nabawi” — madainproject.com/gates_of_masjid_an_nabawi
• Madain Project, “Masjid an-Nabawi at the Time of Prophet Muhammad” — madainproject.com/masjid_al_nabawi_at_the_time_of_prophet_muhammad
• Madain Project, “Expansion Chronology of Masjid al-Nabawi” — madainproject.com/expansion_chronology_of_masjid_al_nabawi
• Madain Project, “Bab as-Salam (Masjid al-Haram)” — madainproject.com/bab_as_salam_(masjid_al_haram)
• Visit Madinah, official Saudi tourism portal, “Gates of the Prophet’s Mosque” — visitmadinahsa.com
• Al Jazeera Arabic, “From 3 gates to 100: how the gates of the Prophet’s Mosque developed” — aljazeera.net
• Arabic Wikipedia, “al-Masjid al-Nabawi” — ar.wikipedia.org
• Wikishia (Persian), “Bab Jibril” — fa.wikishia.net
• Mahajjah.com, “Hadith 27: The Messenger of Allah ordered for the doors of the Masjid to be closed except for the door of Ali” — mahajjah.com
• Seratonline.com, “When Allah, the All-Knowing, Closed the Door on Abu Bakr” — seratonline.com
• Livingislam.org, “Did Umar (ra) ban women from mosque?” — livingislam.org
• Muslim Heritage, “The Form and Function of the Prophet’s Mosque During the Different Phases of Its Development” — muslimheritage.com
• Islamic Centre (UK), “The History of al-Masjid al-Nabawi and the Virtue of Visiting It,” PDF — islamiccentre.org
• DawateIslami.net, “The Construction of Masjid e Nabvi” — dawateislami.net
• Hajj and Umrah Planner, “Masjid Nabawi — The Prophet’s Mosque in Madinah” — hajjumrahplanner.com
• Umrah International, “The Evolution of Al-Masjid an-Nabawi” — umrahinternational.com
• Ihram Republika (Indonesian), “Pintu-Pintu Masjid Nabawi” — ihram.republika.co.id
• Islam Calling (blog), “History of Masjid-un-Nabwi: Construction and Extension” — islamcalling.wordpress.com
• CPS Global, “Etiquettes of Madinah” — cpsglobal.org
• Luton Islamic Centre, “Inauthentic Narrations in the Seerah,” PDF — lutonislamiccentre.com (checked directly; contains no gate-specific content)
• Blog CS Madinah, “2025 Rawdah Guide: New Visit Rules for Men and Women” — blog.csmadinah.com
• Wego Blog, “Rawdah Permit Guide” — blog.wego.com
• Umrah Transit, “How to Book Rawdah Permit (Nusuk App) 2026” — umrahtransit.com
• KSA Travels, “How to Use Nusuk App” — ksatravels.pk
• Ziyufalrahman, “How to Book Rawdah Appointment” — ziyufalrahman.co.uk
• GOV.SA, official Rawdah visit service page — my.gov.sa

A Note on Method

This guide has tried to hold one standard throughout: distinguish plainly between what is authentic hadith, verified directly against a primary collection with an exact reference; what is historical report, widely repeated but resting on no isnad, such as the naming of the original three gates; what is scholarly opinion, genuinely and sincerely contested, such as the status of the door of Ali tradition; and what could not be verified at all, such as any hadith connecting Bab Jibril to the angel’s name. Several figures in this guide — the exact weight and construction of the principal doors, the total modern gate count, the specific gate numbers used for Rawdah, wheelchair, and women’s access in 2025 and 2026 — remain genuinely unsettled in the available sources, and this guide has said so plainly at each point rather than manufacturing a false precision. Classical primary texts including Ibn Shabbah’s Tarikh al-Madinah, al-Samhudi’s Wafa’ al-Wafa, Ibn Jubayr’s Rihlah, and Ibrahim Rif’at Pasha’s Mir’at al-Haramayn were not directly located and read in full for this guide; every reference to their content here arrives second-hand, through modern tertiary sources, chiefly Madain Project, that cite them. That is the single largest structural limitation of this guide relative to what a fully primary-source study of these gates would ideally achieve, and it is named here openly rather than left for a reader to discover on their own.

Frequently asked questions

How many gates does Masjid an-Nabawi have?

Around 42 numbered main gates after the successive Saudi expansions, plus many internal doors. Every gate carries a number displayed above the entrance, and the historic gates also carry their traditional names.

What is Bab Jibril?

The gate on the eastern wall, near the Prophet's ﷺ former living quarters, through which he himself would usually enter. Tradition relates that the angel Jibril would come to this entrance with revelation, and it is numbered Gate 40 today.

Which gate is closest to the Prophet's grave?

Bab al-Baqi, Gate 41, on the eastern wall facing the Baqi cemetery. Visitors giving salam to the Prophet ﷺ typically pass along the eastern side and exit through this area.

What happened to the mosque's original southern gate?

It aligned with the first qibla towards Jerusalem. When the qibla was changed to the Kaaba in Mecca, the southern wall became the prayer wall, so that gate was closed and a new entrance was opened on the opposite side.

Which gate should I use for the Rawdah?

Entry to the Rawdah is by timed Nusuk permit, and the permit and staff on site direct you to the assigned gate, which differs for men and women. Arrive early and follow the signage.