The Hujurat: The Chambers of the Prophet’s Wives at Masjid an-Nabawi, Madinah

Along the eastern wall of the first mosque in Madinah once stood a row of small, mud-walled rooms, each barely wide enough for a man to stretch out his arms, each roofed in palm branches that a person standing inside could touch with an outstretched hand. There were nine of them at the Prophet Muhammad’s ﷺ death, one for each of the wives who survived him, and they were not built as monuments. They were built as homes — for a household that owned little beyond a water-skin, a worn mat, and a handful of barley kept in a leather bag hanging from the wall. It is easy, visiting Masjid an-Nabawi today and looking toward the green dome, to imagine something grander than what was actually there. This guide exists to correct that imagination. It is a history of the hujurat — the chambers, plural of hujrah — as buildings: how they were made, who is reported to have lived in which one, what happened inside them, why two verses of the Qur’an speak of people shouting from outside their walls, and why, on the order of a Umayyad caliph roughly eighty years after the Prophet’s ﷺ death, they were pulled down and absorbed into the growing mosque. It closes with what a visitor to Masjid an-Nabawi can and cannot see of them today.

This is a companion piece to this guide’s articles on the history of Masjid an-Nabawi, on the Rawdah and the Sacred Chamber, on the mosque’s pillars, and on its gates. Those articles cover the mosque’s founding, the burial of the Prophet ﷺ and his two closest companions, and the architecture that surrounds that burial today. This article deliberately does not repeat that ground. Its subject is domestic, not funerary: the row of ordinary homes that stood along the mosque’s eastern side while the Prophet ﷺ was alive, before any of them became a grave.

Historical Background: A Mosque With Houses Attached

Why the Chambers Existed

When the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ arrived in Yathrib in 622 CE and began building the mosque that would become Masjid an-Nabawi, he built his own living quarters as part of the same project, attached to the mosque’s eastern and northern sides. This was not unusual in itself — many households of the early Muslim community lived close to where they prayed — but the arrangement at the Prophet’s ﷺ mosque became, over the following decade, something more specific: a row of small apartments, each built for a wife at or near the time of her marriage to him, opening directly onto the mosque courtyard. As the Prophet ﷺ married more wives across the Madinan period, more chambers were added, generally on the same eastern flank, until nine stood there by the time of his death in 11 AH/632 CE.

The scholarly literature on Madinah’s topography, drawing on early historians such as Ibn Zabalah and reproduced by the fifteenth-century historian al-Samhudi in his monumental Wafa’ al-Wafa bi Akhbar Dar al-Mustafa, treats the wives’ apartments as a known and named feature of the early city, distinct from the mosque itself, though built directly against its wall. This matters for how the subject should be read: the hujurat were not, in their own time, an appendage to a shrine. They were a residential row attached to a place of worship — much as small houses might once have stood beside any modest neighbourhood mosque — and their sanctity in later memory is entirely a function of who lived in them and what happened while they did.

The Historical Sources and Their Character

Almost everything known about the chambers as physical structures comes from a handful of interlocking reports preserved in three kinds of sources: the biographical dictionaries of the early Islamic centuries, above all Ibn Sa’d’s al-Tabaqat al-Kubra (compiled in the early third century AH); the local histories of Madinah, chiefly Ibn Shabbah’s Tarikh al-Madina al-Munawwarah (also third century AH) and al-Samhudi’s later Wafa’ al-Wafa (ninth century AH), which draws heavily on Ibn Shabbah and on earlier Madinan historians such as Ibn Zabalah whose own works are now lost except as quoted by others; and scattered hadith reports, some in the major canonical collections and some in smaller specialized works such as al-Bukhari’s al-Adab al-Mufrad. None of these sources is a physical survey in the modern sense. They are recollections, transmitted through named chains of narrators, of a set of buildings that had already been demolished by the time most of the surviving written accounts were compiled. That does not make them worthless — the chain of transmission in the central report, discussed below, reaches an eyewitness who saw the buildings standing — but it does mean that dimensions, materials, and attributions should be read as testimony to be weighed, not as an architect’s plan to be taken as certain in every particular. Where the sources disagree, this guide says so rather than silently choosing one version.

The Story Behind the Place: What Was Actually There

Al-Hasan al-Basri’s Eyewitness Account

The single most important description of the hujurat as standing buildings comes down through the words of al-Hasan al-Basri, the great early ascetic and jurist of Basra (d. 110 AH/728 CE), who as a child in Madinah is reported to have had personal access to the wives’ apartments. Al-Hasan’s mother, Khayrah, was a freedwoman (mawla) attached to the household of Umm Salamah, one of the Prophet’s ﷺ wives, and this connection is the reported explanation for how a small boy came to be inside rooms that were otherwise the private quarters of the Mothers of the Believers. The report, preserved in al-Bukhari’s al-Adab al-Mufrad, no. 450, has al-Hasan saying (a life summarised in the biographical notice at the standard reference entry on al-Hasan al-Basri): “I used to go into the houses of the wives of the Prophet ﷺ during the khalifate of Uthman ibn Affan, and I could touch their ceilings with my own hand.” Al-Albani, the modern hadith critic whose grading is widely used for al-Adab al-Mufrad, rated this report authentic (sahih). It is a small sentence, but it does a great deal of work: it dates al-Hasan’s memory to the caliphate of Uthman (24–35 AH/644–656 CE), meaning the chambers he describes were the same ones the Prophet ﷺ himself had lived among only years before, still standing largely unaltered, and it establishes in a single physical detail — a ceiling a grown man could touch without stretching — the humility of construction that every other source about these buildings goes on to confirm.

A companion report in the same chapter of al-Adab al-Mufrad, transmitted from Dawud ibn Qais, gives fuller dimensions from direct measurement. Dawud reports going with others to look at the apartments before their demolition and measuring the distance between the outer entrance and the door of an individual room at roughly seven spans, the room itself at around ten spans across, and the height of the roof — reachable by hand — at some seven to eight spans. These are folk measurements, not a surveyor’s figures, and different secondary compilations render the exact spans slightly differently, but the consistent picture across every version is the same: rooms only a few metres in each direction, with roofs so low that touching them required no effort at all.

The Materials: Brick, Palm Branch, and Hair-Cloth

The most detailed material description comes through a report attributed to Abdullah ibn Yazid (also rendered in some compilations as Imran ibn Abi Anas — the two names appear in different secondary retellings of what looks like a single underlying account, and this guide flags that as a variant rather than silently picking one), preserved via Ibn Sa’d’s Tabaqat and repeated by later historians including al-Samhudi. The report describes nine houses in total, of two distinct types of construction. Four were said to be built of unbaked mud brick (libn), with internal partitions of palm-branch matting (jarid) plastered over with mud, giving each of those four houses more than one room. Five were built entirely of palm branches plastered with mud, without brick and without internal partition walls — single-room dwellings. Every doorway, in both types, was covered not by a wooden door but by a curtain of coarse black hair-cloth (musuh), and one report gives the size of these curtains with unusual precision: roughly three cubits by three cubits, “or a little more.” The roof material in every account is palm branch (jarid or jareed), unbaked and untreated, laid across simple wooden supports — which is precisely why a person standing inside, as al-Hasan al-Basri recalled, could reach up and touch it.

One further detail deserves note because it corrects a natural assumption: the report states that the house belonging to Maymunah bint al-Harith, the Prophet’s ﷺ last wife, was among those built without internal partitions — a single undivided room rather than a house with a separate hujrah. Her nephew, the young Abdullah ibn Abbas, is remembered as having slept there on more than one occasion during his boyhood, including the night he stayed close to the Prophet ﷺ in order to observe how he performed the night prayer — an episode recorded in the major hadith collections in connection with Ibn Abbas’s own upbringing, though the report of the house’s construction and the report of the sleepover come from separate strands of narration and should not be treated as a single continuous account.

Nine Chambers: A Number the Sources Agree On

Unlike many of the details of individual attribution, the total number of chambers standing at the Prophet’s ﷺ death is not seriously disputed: the sources converge on nine, matching the nine wives who survived him. Of the eleven women the Prophet ﷺ married across his lifetime, two had died before him — Khadijah bint Khuwaylid, his first wife (a life recounted in the reference entry on Khadijah bint Khuwaylid), who died in Makkah roughly three years before the Hijra, and Zaynab bint Khuzaymah, who died in Madinah only months or a few years after her marriage. Neither, therefore, is associated with one of the nine standing hujurat at the time of the demolition discussed later in this guide, though both are named among the Mothers of the Believers in the wider tradition. The nine wives living at the Prophet’s ﷺ death, and traditionally counted as the nine chamber-holders, were Sawdah bint Zam’ah, Aisha bint Abi Bakr (see the biographical summary at the reference entry on Aisha), Hafsah bint Umar, Zaynab bint Jahsh (see the reference entry on Zaynab bint Jahsh), Umm Salamah (Hind bint Abi Umayyah) (see the reference entry on Umm Salamah), Umm Habibah (Ramlah bint Abi Sufyan), Juwayriyyah bint al-Harith (see the reference entry on Juwayriyyah bint al-Harith), Safiyyah bint Huyayy, and Maymunah bint al-Harith (see the reference entry on Maymunah bint al-Harith).

Whose Chamber Was Whose — And Where the Sources Run Out

Naming which wife occupied which physical position along the row is where the sources become noticeably less certain, and honesty requires saying so plainly rather than presenting a tidy map that the classical historians themselves did not agree on. The compilers of Madinah’s topography, working from earlier historians such as Muhammad ibn Hilal as preserved in later works like Subul al-Huda wal-Rashad, report general agreement on the location of five of the nine: the chambers of Hafsah, Aisha, Sawdah, and Zaynab bint Khuzaymah (whose room, though she died early, seems to have remained associated with her name in the topographical memory), together with Umm Salamah, are placed on the mosque’s eastern side, arranged in a row that extended somewhat beyond the mosque’s original northern boundary. Beyond these five, the sources diverge, and later historians candidly note the disagreement rather than resolving it. A broad distinction is drawn between two kinds of dwelling: some were a single room only (bayt), and others were a room with an attached open enclosure (bayt plus hujrah) — a distinction that maps loosely onto the brick-versus-palm-branch construction difference described above, though the two classification schemes do not align perfectly across every source. A separate strand of the topographical tradition places the chambers of Juwayriyyah, Safiyyah, Umm Habibah, and Maymunah to the north of the mosque but not directly attached to it, with other companions’ houses standing between them and the mosque wall — a position distinct from, though near, the eastern row.

A widely repeated modern reconstruction, drawing on al-Samhudi and summarized in accessible form by several contemporary writers on Madinah’s history including a detailed account carried by Business Recorder, describes the row beginning from the south with Hafsah’s hut, then two further rows of two huts each moving north: in the first of these, one hut facing west toward Hafsah’s was Aisha’s, and the other, facing east toward the Baqi cemetery, was Sawdah’s. On this reconstruction the area occupied today by the Green Dome once covered the huts of Aisha, Sawdah, and Umm Salamah, and — in part — Hafsah’s, with each hut on the order of two hundred square feet (roughly sixteen by twelve feet, or about five by three and a half metres). A narrow lane is said to have separated Aisha’s hut from Hafsah’s — so narrow that only one person could pass through it at a time, and narrow enough that the two women, sitting inside their respective rooms, could hear and speak to each other. This account is plausible and consistent with the material already described, but it is a modern synthesis of the classical topographical reports rather than a single classical source speaking with one voice, and it should be read with that caveat. Beyond the five chambers on which the sources broadly agree, and this general eastern-versus-northern grouping for the remaining four, this guide has found no single classical account that confidently assigns each of the nine names to one specific, undisputed plot — and it is more honest to say so than to manufacture a certainty the sources themselves do not offer.

The Prophet ﷺ and This Place: Aisha’s Chamber

Built at the Time of a Marriage

Among the nine, the chamber of Aisha bint Abi Bakr carries the most detailed textual record, both because of her own long life as a transmitter of hadith and because her chamber later became the burial place of the Prophet ﷺ himself — a fact covered in depth in this guide’s article on the Rawdah and the Sacred Chamber, and touched on here only insofar as it bears on the building’s earlier life as a home. Aisha’s chamber, like several of the others, appears to have been built or prepared specifically around the time of her marriage, which the majority of the classical sources place in Shawwal of 1 AH, in the early months after the Hijra, though the exact interval between the marriage contract and its consummation — and therefore the exact date construction was completed — is a point on which biographical sources vary by months rather than years. What is consistent across the sources is that her room, like the others in the eastern row, opened directly onto the mosque courtyard, a detail confirmed by the arrangement described in the reports on the demolition below, in which the chambers’ walls and the mosque’s eastern wall were, in effect, one and the same structure.

The Hadith of the Doors

The clearest textual link between Aisha’s chamber and the mosque’s fabric is the hadith concerning doors and small gateways (khawkhah) opening from private houses directly into the mosque. Sahih al-Bukhari, no. 466, narrated from Abu Sa’id al-Khudri, records the Prophet ﷺ delivering a sermon in which he said, “Close all the gates in the mosque except that of Abu Bakr” (la yabqayanna fi’l-masjidi babun illa sudda illa baba Abi Bakr). A closely related report, Sahih al-Bukhari, no. 467, narrated from Ibn Abbas, places this instruction during the Prophet’s ﷺ fatal illness, delivered from the pulpit: “Close all the small doors (khawkhah) in this mosque except that of Abu Bakr.” Both reports are rated authentic without dispute in the Sunni hadith tradition, and together they establish that of all the private doorways opening from the surrounding houses into the mosque courtyard, only the one connecting to Abu Bakr’s household — which is to say, in practice, the doorway of his daughter Aisha’s chamber — was to remain open. Sunni commentators, including Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani in his commentary on al-Bukhari, generally read this as one of several signs the Prophet ﷺ gave, in the days before his death, of his wish that Abu Bakr succeed him in leading the community, since keeping his door alone open into the mosque meant Abu Bakr alone could pass through it to lead prayer without needing to go outside and back in by the main entrance.

It should be noted, for the sake of completeness rather than adjudication, that Shia sources report a different and much-discussed hadith naming a door belonging to Ali ibn Abi Talib as the one exempted, found in collections such as Jami’ al-Tirmidhi, no. 3727, and treat the Abu Bakr version as a later insertion; Sunni scholars such as Ibn Hajar have generally held either that the two reports describe two separate occasions with two separate instructions, or that the report naming Ali’s door concerns an earlier and narrower permission (relating to ritual purity and access rather than the mosque’s general doors), while the fatal-illness report naming Abu Bakr’s door is the authentic report bearing on the succession. This is a live point of sectarian disagreement in the literature, noted here so the reader is not left unaware of it, though the task of resolving it lies outside the scope of a guide to the chambers as buildings.

From Home to Grave

Aisha’s chamber is where the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ died, on the day that had been her turn in the rotation the wives had agreed to during his final illness (a matter discussed further below), and it is where he was buried — a decision recorded across multiple hadiths as resting on the principle, reported by Abu Bakr, that prophets are buried where they die, a tradition summarised in the wider historical account at the reference entry on the Green Dome. Abu Bakr himself was buried beside him within the same room a little over two years later, in 13 AH/634 CE, and Umar ibn al-Khattab a decade after that, in 23 AH/644 CE, the space for his grave reportedly offered by Aisha herself, in what had until then remained a room in her own house. The architecture, decoration, and centuries of building that grew up around these three graves — the pentagonal wall, the grilles, the green dome — are the subject of this guide’s separate article on the Rawdah and the Sacred Chamber, and are treated only briefly again near the end of this guide, in the specific context of what survives of the hujurat as a group.

Qur’anic Connections: The Verses That Speak of These Walls

Surah al-Hujurat 49:4–5: Voices Raised Outside the Rooms

﴿إِنَّ الَّذِينَ يُنَادُونَكَ مِن وَرَاءِ الْحُجُرَاتِ أَكْثَرُهُمْ لَا يَعْقِلُونَ﴾

“Indeed, those who call you from behind the chambers — most of them do not understand.”

— Surah al-Hujurat 49:4, quran.com

﴿وَلَوْ أَنَّهُمْ صَبَرُوا حَتَّىٰ تَخْرُجَ إِلَيْهِمْ لَكَانَ خَيْرًا لَّهُمْ ۗ وَاللَّهُ غَفُورٌ رَّحِيمٌ﴾

“And if they had been patient until you came out to them, it would have been better for them. And Allah is Forgiving and Merciful.”

— Surah al-Hujurat 49:5, quran.com

This is the only place in the Qur’an where the word hujurat itself appears, and it gives the surah — and this article — its name. The word is the plural of hujrah, meaning a walled dwelling with its own enclosed space, and the mufassirun are unanimous that the verse refers to the Prophet’s ﷺ private apartments, the very buildings this guide describes. The disagreement among the classical exegetes concerns the specific occasion (sabab al-nuzul) that provoked the revelation, and two distinct accounts circulate side by side in the tafsir literature.

The first, transmitted from Zayd ibn Arqam and recorded by exegetes including al-Wahidi, holds that a group of people came to the Prophet’s ﷺ apartment while he was resting and called out loudly from outside, “O Muhammad! O Muhammad!” — a manner of address the verse rebukes as disrespectful of both his person and his need for privacy in his own home. The second account, favoured by Ibn Ishaq and repeated by later exegetes including al-Baghawi and reproduced in the modern Ma’arif al-Qur’an commentary hosted at quran.com, ties the verse to the arrival of a delegation from the tribe of Banu Tamim during the so-called Year of Delegations, 9 AH, whose leading men — named in the sources as al-Aqra’ ibn Habis, Uyaynah ibn Hisn, al-Zibriqan ibn Badr, and Qays ibn Asim — entered the mosque and shouted from outside the Prophet’s ﷺ chamber, “O Muhammad, come out to us, for our praise is fine and our blame is stinging,” a boast about their tribe’s poetic and oratorical skill that the Prophet ﷺ found intrusive and discourteous. Ibn Kathir’s tafsir, available in translation via alim.org, preserves both traditions without forcing a choice between them, and this guide follows that lead: the verse may address a single remembered incident, or it may be a general rebuke applicable to more than one occasion of the same kind of behaviour, and the sources themselves leave the matter open. What both accounts agree on, and what matters most for this guide’s subject, is the physical picture they assume: that the chambers had walls close enough to the open mosque courtyard that a raised voice outside could easily be heard by, and disturb, whoever was resting inside — precisely the picture of thin mud-and-palm-branch construction confirmed independently by al-Hasan al-Basri’s account and the Ibn Sa’d material discussed above.

Al-Qurtubi, in al-Jami’ li Ahkam al-Qur’an, draws out the verse’s legal and ethical content: it establishes a general principle of respecting a person’s privacy at their own door and not summoning them in a manner that presumes on their time or dignity, a principle he extends by analogy beyond the Prophet’s ﷺ own household to anyone’s home. Fakhr al-Din al-Razi, in Mafatih al-Ghayb, reads the verse’s closing words — that patience until the Prophet ﷺ came out on his own would have been “better for them” — as an instruction in etiquette (adab) toward anyone deserving of honour, not merely a historical rebuke of the individuals involved. The modern lesson drawn by contemporary commentators is straightforward and widely repeated: consideration for another person’s rest, privacy, and dignity at the threshold of their own home is a Qur’anic value, not merely a matter of local custom, and it is fitting that the verse survives attached forever to the humble walls that provoked it.

Surah al-Ahzab 33:53: The Verse of the Curtain

﴿يَا أَيُّهَا الَّذِينَ آمَنُوا لَا تَدْخُلُوا بُيُوتَ النَّبِيِّ إِلَّا أَن يُؤْذَنَ لَكُمْ إِلَىٰ طَعَامٍ غَيْرَ نَاظِرِينَ إِنَاهُ ۙ وَلَٰكِنْ إِذَا دُعِيتُمْ فَادْخُلُوا فَإِذَا طَعِمْتُمْ فَانتَشِرُوا وَلَا مُسْتَأْنِسِينَ لِحَدِيثٍ ۚ إِنَّ ذَٰلِكُمْ كَانَ يُؤْذِي النَّبِيَّ فَيَسْتَحْيِي مِنكُمْ ۖ وَاللَّهُ لَا يَسْتَحْيِي مِنَ الْحَقِّ ۚ وَإِذَا سَأَلْتُمُوهُنَّ مَتَاعًا فَاسْأَلُوهُنَّ مِن وَرَاءِ حِجَابٍ ۚ ذَٰلِكُمْ أَطْهَرُ لِقُلُوبِكُمْ وَقُلُوبِهِنَّ﴾

“O you who have believed, do not enter the houses of the Prophet except when you are permitted for a meal, without awaiting its readiness. But when you are invited, then enter; and when you have eaten, disperse without lingering for conversation. Indeed, that is bothersome to the Prophet, and he is shy of dismissing you, but Allah is not shy of the truth. And when you ask [his wives] for something, ask them from behind a partition. That is purer for your hearts and their hearts.”

— Surah al-Ahzab 33:53, quran.com

The occasion of this verse’s revelation is unusually well attested and specific, and it is directly, physically tied to the hujurat. Anas ibn Malik, whose account is preserved in both Sahih al-Bukhari and Sahih Muslim and reproduced by exegetes including al-Wahidi in Asbab al-Nuzul, narrates that the verse was revealed at the wedding feast (walimah) of the Prophet ﷺ and Zaynab bint Jahsh. After the meal, a number of guests lingered in conversation well past the point the Prophet ﷺ wished to be alone with his new wife; too courteous to ask them directly to leave, he left the room himself several times hoping they would take the hint, and when they did not, the verse descended, rebuking the lingering guests directly and instructing them in the etiquette of visiting. Anas records that the Prophet ﷺ then drew a curtain between himself and Anas, who had remained in the doorway. A second and complementary strand of the exegetical tradition, recorded via Anas and cited by commentators including Sayyid Abul A’la Maududi in his modern tafsir Tafheem al-Qur’an, records that Umar ibn al-Khattab had on more than one occasion urged the Prophet ﷺ to require his wives to observe a stricter veil, on the grounds that “all sorts of people, good and bad, come to visit you” — and that this verse, together with the verse of hijab discussed next, answered that concern.

The verse’s final clause — “ask them from behind a hijab” — is the origin of the practice, confirmed independently in the historical material on the chambers, of hanging curtains across the doorways of the wives’ apartments; the hair-cloth curtains al-Hasan al-Basri and Dawud ibn Qais describe decades later are the material, lived-in continuation of the instruction this verse first gave. Al-Qurtubi notes that the verse’s instruction to “ask from behind a hijab” applies specifically to seeking something (mata’, a household item or similar) from the wives, and became, in the broader Islamic legal tradition, one of the textual foundations — alongside the verse discussed next — for norms of screening between unrelated men and women, though jurists differ on precisely how far that principle extends beyond the Prophet’s ﷺ own household, a point taken up further below.

Surah al-Ahzab 33:33: “Remain in Your Houses”

﴿وَقَرْنَ فِي بُيُوتِكُنَّ وَلَا تَبَرَّجْنَ تَبَرُّجَ الْجَاهِلِيَّةِ الْأُولَىٰ﴾

“And stay in your houses and do not display yourselves as [was the custom of] the times of former ignorance.”

— Surah al-Ahzab 33:33, quran.com

This verse, addressed grammatically and by unanimous classical agreement to the Prophet’s ﷺ wives specifically, is read by Ibn Kathir and al-Qurtubi as instructing them toward a settled domestic life befitting their unique status as the Mothers of the Believers, in contrast to practices of the pre-Islamic period in which women moved about display-conscious among men outside their own households. Al-Qurtubi extends the underlying principle, by analogy rather than by the verse’s direct address, to Muslim women generally, a reading many later jurists have followed, while noting that the verse’s grammatical subject remains, strictly, the wives of the Prophet ﷺ. A separate and genuinely live point of disagreement, raised by some modern exegetes, concerns the verb qarna itself: the majority reading treats it as derived from the root meaning to settle or remain, giving the sense “stay put,” but a minority of commentators — citing a variant root connected to dignity or gravity (waqar) — have argued the verse enjoins a manner of comportment (dignified, unhurried, modest bearing) rather than or in addition to a literal instruction to remain physically indoors. This is a genuine grammatical and exegetical disagreement recorded in the classical dictionaries and tafsir literature, not a modern invention, and this guide presents it as unresolved rather than picking a side. What is not disputed is the verse’s placement within the same passage as 33:53 above, and its clear address to the same nine women living in the same nine small rooms this guide describes — making the verse, whatever its precise scope of application beyond them, first and most directly a statement about life inside the hujurat.

Surah an-Nur 24:27: Permission at the Threshold

﴿يَا أَيُّهَا الَّذِينَ آمَنُوا لَا تَدْخُلُوا بُيُوتًا غَيْرَ بُيُوتِكُمْ حَتَّىٰ تَسْتَأْنِسُوا وَتُسَلِّمُوا عَلَىٰ أَهْلِهَا ۚ ذَٰلِكُمْ خَيْرٌ لَّكُمْ لَعَلَّكُمْ تَذَكَّرُونَ﴾

“O you who have believed, do not enter houses other than your own houses until you ascertain welcome and greet those inside them. That is best for you, that you may be reminded.”

— Surah an-Nur 24:27, quran.com

Unlike 33:53 and 49:4–5, this verse is not tied in the tafsir literature to a single specific incident inside the Prophet’s ﷺ own household; the mufassirun, including the author of Ma’arif al-Qur’an, treat it as a general legal principle (isti’dhan, seeking permission) governing entry into any Muslim’s home, revealed as part of the broader set of privacy and modesty instructions collected in Surah an-Nur. This guide, having consulted the tafsir of this verse gathered at quran.com’s collected commentaries, has not found a classical report tying its revelation specifically to an incident at one of the hujurat, and it would be dishonest to invent one merely because the verse’s subject matter — the sanctity of a threshold, the wrongness of entering uninvited — resonates so obviously with everything else in this article. What can honestly be said is that the principle the verse establishes for every Muslim household was, by the more specific instructions of 33:53, applied with particular strictness to the Prophet’s ﷺ own doors, and that the three verses together — 49:4–5, 33:53, and 24:27 — form a connected Qur’anic treatment of the same underlying concern: the inviolability of a person’s home and rest, given its fullest and most personal expression in the row of small rooms along the mosque’s eastern wall.

Hadith References: Daily Life Inside the Rooms

Months Without a Fire

The clearest single window into the material poverty of life inside the hujurat is a report from Aisha to her nephew Urwa ibn al-Zubayr (a companion and early historian whose life is summarised in the reference entry on Urwa ibn al-Zubayr), preserved in Sahih al-Bukhari, no. 2567: “We used to see the crescent, and then the crescent, and then the crescent — in this way we saw three crescents in two months, and no fire [for cooking] used to be made in the houses of Allah’s Messenger ﷺ.” Urwa asked what sustained them in that case, and Aisha answered, “The two black things: dates and water. Our neighbours from the Ansar had some milch camels and they used to present Allah’s Messenger ﷺ some of their milk, and he used to make us drink it.” Variant wordings of the same underlying report appear in Sahih al-Bukhari, nos. 6458 and 6459, and in Sahih Muslim, no. 2972, with only minor differences of phrasing; all are accepted as authentic. Two full lunar months — sixty days by the calendar Aisha describes — passing in more than one household without a cooking fire being lit even once is not a poetic flourish. It is a direct, first-person statement about what living in one of these mud-and-palm-branch rooms actually meant on an ordinary day: dates, water, and occasionally borrowed milk, nothing more.

The Withdrawal to the Mashrubah and the Marks of the Mat

The fullest and most vivid account of the physical austerity of the Prophet’s ﷺ own quarters comes embedded within a longer and otherwise unrelated episode: a period, reported across multiple collections, in which the Prophet ﷺ withdrew from his wives for a stretch of time after some of them had pressed him — according to the report, principally Aisha and Hafsah — for greater material provision. During this withdrawal he removed himself to an upper storage room or attic (mashrubah), reached by a ladder made from the trunk of a date palm. Rumour spread through Madinah that he had divorced all his wives. Umar ibn al-Khattab (whose own life and later caliphate are documented in the reference entry on Umar ibn al-Khattab), Hafsah’s father, went to investigate and gives the fullest surviving eyewitness account of what he found, preserved at length in Sahih Muslim, no. 1479a: he first confronted Aisha and then his own daughter Hafsah, then made his way to the mashrubah itself, where the Prophet’s ﷺ servant Rabah sat on the threshold. Umar called up three times before being motioned to climb. “I visited Allah’s Messenger ﷺ,” Umar reports, “and he was lying on a mat. I sat down, and he drew up his lower garment over him, and he had nothing else over him, and the mat had left its marks on his sides. I looked into the store-room of Allah’s Messenger ﷺ. I found only a handful of barley, about a sa’ in quantity, and a similar quantity of the leaves of a mimosa tree in a corner, and a semi-tanned leather water-skin hanging on one side, and I was moved to tears.” When the Prophet ﷺ asked why he wept, Umar answered that Caesar and Chosroes lived amid abundance while the chosen Messenger of Allah had nothing. The Prophet ﷺ replied, “Ibn Khattab, are you not satisfied that for us there should be the good things of the Hereafter, and for them the good things of this world?” The same episode records that the Prophet ﷺ had stayed in the mashrubah twenty-nine nights, and that when Umar later remarked he had understood the month to have thirty days, the Prophet ﷺ answered, “The month may sometimes be twenty-nine days.” Umar’s visit is also connected in this same narration to the revelation of the “verse of option” (ayat al-takhyir), Surah at-Tahrim 65:5, and to Surah an-Nisa 4:83, on the danger of spreading unverified rumour, which Umar says was revealed regarding his own hasty announcement in the mosque that the Prophet ﷺ had not, in fact, divorced anyone.

A shorter, independent version of the mat-marks detail alone — without the surrounding divorce-rumour narrative — is preserved in Jami’ al-Tirmidhi, no. 2461, again on Umar’s authority via Ibn Abbas: “I entered upon the Messenger of Allah ﷺ and saw him reclining upon a mat woven from fibres, and I could see the impressions it had left upon his side.” Al-Tirmidhi himself grades this report hasan sahih, and notes explicitly that “in the hadith there is a long story” — an acknowledgement, from within the classical source itself, that this compact version is an excerpt of the fuller Sahih Muslim narrative rather than a separate incident. Readers should understand the mat-marks report, then, not as two different stories but as one story preserved at two different lengths in two different collections — a useful reminder of how hadith transmission often works, compressing or expanding a single remembered event depending on what a given narrator or compiler judged relevant to include.

The Affair of the Slander (al-Ifk) and Its Setting

The incident known as al-ifk, the slander, unfolded partly on the road and partly within the walls this guide is concerned with, and its full narrative is among the longest and most carefully preserved in the entire hadith corpus, recorded at length in Sahih Muslim, no. 2770a, with contributions credited to four separate narrators — Sa’id ibn al-Musayyib, Urwa ibn al-Zubayr, Alqamah ibn Waqqas, and Ubaydullah ibn Abdullah — and paralleled in Sahih al-Bukhari‘s chapters on the military expeditions. The events began on the return march from an expedition — the classical sources most often identify it as the campaign against Banu al-Mustaliq, though secondary chronologies differ on whether this fell in 5 AH or 6 AH, a dating question this guide leaves open rather than adjudicate. Aisha, who had accompanied the army after the customary casting of lots among the wives, was inadvertently left behind at a rest stop while searching for a lost necklace; the caravan, assuming her covered litter still carried her, moved on without noticing her absence. Safwan ibn al-Mu’attal, a companion whose role in this episode is described further in the reference entry on Safwan ibn al-Mu’attal, who had fallen behind the main body, found her and brought her back to the army on his camel, leading it on foot himself. Malicious rumour about the two of them being alone together began to circulate in Madinah on their return, propagated chiefly, according to the hadith, by Abdullah ibn Ubayy ibn Salul and spread further by a small circle that included, to Aisha’s particular grief, some of her own relatives.

What matters for this guide is where the affair’s most consequential moments actually took place. Aisha fell ill for a month after returning to Madinah, unaware at first of what was being said. Noticing a coldness in the Prophet’s ﷺ manner toward her, she asked and received his permission to go to her parents’ house to learn what was happening — and it was there, at Abu Bakr’s house rather than her own hujrah, that Umm Mistah first told her the substance of the rumour. The Prophet ﷺ, for his part, consulted Ali ibn Abi Talib (see the reference entry on Ali ibn Abi Talib) and Usama ibn Zayd during this period, and questioned the freed maidservant Barirah, before addressing the congregation from the pulpit and appealing for the community’s support against Abdullah ibn Ubayy. The resolution, when it came, came back inside Aisha’s own house: the Prophet ﷺ visited her there, recited the words of testimony, and told her that if she was innocent Allah would vindicate her, and if she had erred she should seek forgiveness. Aisha, weeping, answered that she would say nothing except what the father of Yusuf had said, quoting what would become part of Surah Yusuf 12:18. The revelation exonerating her — the opening verses of Surah an-Nur, 24:11 onward — descended while the Prophet ﷺ sat in that same room with her family still present, and his first words to her afterward were, “Aisha, there is good news for you: Allah has declared your innocence.” The affair began on a desert road outside Madinah, then, but its most decisive scenes — the accusation reaching her, the Prophet’s ﷺ visit and question, and the revelation of her exoneration — took place inside the walls of her own hujrah, making it as much a part of this building’s story as of the wider Seerah.

The Final Illness

The Prophet’s ﷺ last days are the subject of extensive hadith material properly treated in this guide’s article on the Sacred Chamber, and are noted here only for what they reveal about the hujurat as a household rather than as a burial site. Sahih al-Bukhari, no. 4450, narrated by Aisha via Urwa, records that during his fatal illness the Prophet ﷺ repeatedly asked, “Where will I be tomorrow? Where will I be tomorrow?” — seeking to know whose turn in the wives’ rotation was approaching, since he wished to be with Aisha. His wives, recognising his condition, agreed among themselves that he could stay wherever he wished, and he remained in Aisha’s house until he died there, on the day that would have been her turn, his head resting against her chest. Aisha adds the detail of Abd al-Rahman ibn Abi Bakr’s tooth-stick (siwak), which she took, chewed soft, and gave to the Prophet ﷺ to use in his final hours. The episode is a reminder that even in its last days, the household of nine small rooms continued to function as exactly that — a household, with its own domestic rhythms and rotations — right up until the moment one of its rooms became something else entirely.

Historical Development: From Homes to Rubble to Rowdah

The First Decades: Growth by Marriage

The chambers were not built all at once but accumulated over roughly a decade of the Madinan period, each one raised at or near the time of a marriage, mostly along the mosque’s eastern flank and, for a smaller group, along part of the northern side. No source suggests any centrally planned layout; the row grew organically as the household grew, using the same materials and the same modest scale throughout, so that by the Prophet’s ﷺ death in 11 AH/632 CE the mosque was flanked by nine small homes that had simply always been there, indistinguishable in construction quality from countless other houses in the oasis.

The Rashidun Period: Left Largely Undisturbed

Under the first two caliphs, Abu Bakr (see the reference entry on Abu Bakr; 11–13 AH/632–634 CE) and Umar ibn al-Khattab (13–23 AH/634–644 CE), the mosque itself was expanded to accommodate a growing community, but the hujurat were left standing along the eastern wall, now including the room that had become the burial place of the Prophet ﷺ and, in turn, of each of these two caliphs. Umar’s expansion is recorded as having enlarged the mosque without touching the chambers; the third caliph, Uthman ibn Affan (see the reference entry on Uthman ibn Affan; 23–35 AH/644–656 CE), likewise expanded the mosque’s other sides while the row of houses — the same houses al-Hasan al-Basri recalled visiting during Uthman’s caliphate — remained in place. The mosque, in other words, grew around the chambers for a full two generations without displacing them.

The Umayyad Demolition: Al-Walid’s Order

The decisive break came under the Umayyad caliph al-Walid ibn Abd al-Malik (r. 86–96 AH/705–715 CE), whose wider reign is documented in the reference entry on al-Walid I. According to al-Tabari’s History, al-Walid ordered, beginning in Safar of 88 AH (January–February 707 CE), the demolition of the mosque of the Messenger of Allah ﷺ and, explicitly, “the pulling down of the rooms of the wives of the Messenger of God… and the incorporation of them into the mosque.” The order was addressed to his governor of Madinah, his cousin and brother-in-law Umar ibn Abd al-Aziz — the future caliph remembered in Islamic history, per the biographical summary at the standard reference entry on Umar ibn Abd al-Aziz, for his personal piety — instructing him to purchase the chambers, by then held as inherited property by the wives’ heirs, and to expand the mosque to a stated size of two hundred by two hundred cubits, citing as precedent the earlier expansions carried out under Umar ibn al-Khattab and Uthman. The project, by the converging testimony of al-Tabari and later historians, was completed in 91 AH (711 CE).

Grief, Objection, and a Governor’s Reported Hesitation

The demolition provoked recorded public grief in Madinah. Sources including the compilation on the mosque’s history at islamicstudies.info, drawing on classical historians, describe the rooms as having been “included into the mosque of the Prophet ﷺ by the order of al-Walid ibn Abd al-Malik, while the people were weeping.” Arabic-language historical compilations describe the household of Banu Hashim in particular weeping “as on the day of the Prophet’s ﷺ death” when the walls came down, and record — though this specific detail, sourced to later compilation rather than to an identified classical chain, should be treated with some caution — that Umar ibn Abd al-Aziz himself initially wrote back to al-Walid raising an objection before al-Walid repeated the order and left him no choice but to proceed.

The most quoted objection on record belongs to Sa’id ibn al-Musayyib (d. 94 AH/715 CE), one of the most senior scholars of Madinah in that generation, a man who had grown up among the last companions of the Prophet ﷺ. Reports transmitted from Ata’ ibn Abi Rabah and from Imran ibn Abi Anas, gathered in a modern compilation of the classical sources on this episode — the latter also credited elsewhere, in what looks like an overlapping strand of the same tradition, with the detailed eyewitness description of the chambers’ construction discussed earlier in this guide — record Sa’id saying on the day of the demolition: “By Allah, I wish they had left them as they were, so that the youth of Madinah and travellers from distant lands could see what the Messenger of Allah ﷺ sufficed himself with during his life. That would cause people to abandon pride and rivalry in worldly wealth.” A related sentiment is attributed to a companion named Abu Umamah, preserved in the Madinan history Akhbar al-Madinah: “I wish they had abandoned this idea, so that people would be discouraged from erecting grand buildings, and would see what Allah was pleased to give His Prophet, despite the treasures of the earth being placed in his hands.” This guide has traced these quotations to modern compilations that identify Ibn Sa’d, Ibn Shabbah, and al-Samhudi as the ultimate classical sources, but has not independently located each quotation within a directly consulted primary edition of those three works; they are reported here, as the task requires, with that caveat made plain, rather than presented as independently re-verified against the classical text itself.

One further, frequently repeated detail belongs to this same episode, though it belongs more properly to the history of the Sacred Chamber than to the hujurat as a group, and is noted only briefly here: while digging near what had been Aisha’s eastern wall, workers reportedly uncovered a foot, and the sudden fear that it might belong to the Prophet ﷺ himself was resolved, according to the report transmitted via Raja ibn Haywah and preserved by Ibn Hajar in Fath al-Bari, when it was recognised as belonging to Umar ibn al-Khattab. The episode is well attested in the secondary historical literature though, again, this guide has not independently traced it to a primary classical edition beyond the citation already given, and it is included here only for completeness given how frequently it appears in accounts of the demolition.

A useful point of comparison, noted by several historians of the mosque’s expansions, is that no companion is recorded objecting to Umar ibn al-Khattab’s own earlier, comparatively humble expansion of the mosque — objection appears in the sources specifically in connection with the more elaborate work carried out under Uthman and, later and more sharply, under al-Walid, a contrast drawn out explicitly in the historical summary at this account of the mosque’s successive expansions. Whether that contrast reflects a real difference in how each expansion was carried out, or simply which objections happened to be recorded and transmitted, is not something the sources allow this guide to resolve with confidence.

Architecture: Reconstructing the Chambers

Scale and Proportion

Piecing together the eyewitness reports discussed above, the hujurat can be reconstructed, with appropriate caution, as follows. Each room measured on the order of three to five metres per side — modern secondary estimates drawing on al-Samhudi’s later measurements of the site converge on a range of roughly five by four metres for the main room, with some houses including a smaller adjoining yard of about five by three and a half metres. Ceiling height was low enough, on al-Hasan al-Basri’s direct testimony, for a standing adult to touch it by hand — commonly estimated at somewhere between two and two and a half metres, though no source gives an exact figure and this remains an inference rather than a measurement. The distance from the outer entrance to an individual room’s door, per Dawud ibn Qais’s account, was around seven spans; the room’s own width around ten spans. None of these figures should be read with false precision — they are memories of measurement, transmitted across generations by narrators using an informal unit — but the consistent order of magnitude across every account, from al-Hasan al-Basri’s ceiling to Dawud ibn Qais’s spans to the later topographical estimates of two hundred square feet per hut, leaves no real doubt about the scale involved: these were among the smallest dwellings in Madinah, not among its largest.

Construction Method

Two building types are recorded, as discussed above: four houses of unbaked mud brick (libn) with internal partitions of mud-plastered palm branch, giving more than one room, and five houses built entirely of palm branch plastered with mud, without internal partition, each a single room. In both types, the roof was formed of palm branches (jarid) laid across simple wooden supports, without tile, thatch, or any waterproofing beyond what packed mud might have offered — a detail consistent with reports elsewhere in the Seerah literature of rain finding its way into the mosque and its adjoining rooms during Madinah’s occasional heavy downpours. Doorways had no wooden doors in the modern sense; they were closed, when privacy was wanted, by a curtain of coarse black hair-cloth (musuh), a material and a practice directly linked, as discussed in the Qur’anic Connections section above, to the revelation of Surah al-Ahzab 33:53. One report gives the size of these curtains as roughly three cubits square, “or a little more” — large enough to cover a low, narrow doorway completely, and no more.

Orientation and Relationship to the Mosque

The defining architectural fact about the hujurat, more important in some ways than any individual measurement, is that they were not freestanding houses set apart from the mosque; their outer walls were, in effect, continuous with the mosque’s own eastern (and, for some, northern) wall, so that a doorway from a chamber could open directly into the mosque courtyard — precisely the arrangement presumed by the hadith on Abu Bakr’s door discussed earlier, and by the verses of Surah al-Hujurat describing voices calling from just outside. This adjacency is also what made the demolition of 88–91 AH structurally straightforward in engineering terms, whatever grief it caused: removing the chambers and extending the mosque wall outward to their former outer line was, physically, a matter of removing a lightly built partition rather than clearing an independent structure.

Archaeological Findings

There is, honestly, very little to report under this heading, and this guide states that plainly rather than manufacturing a false sense of excavation history. The hujurat were demolished in the early second century AH and their former footprint has lain continuously beneath an active, repeatedly rebuilt and expanded mosque for well over thirteen hundred years since; no modern controlled archaeological excavation of the site — of the kind that has, for instance, been conducted at other early Islamic sites in the Hijaz — has been published for this specific location, for the straightforward reason that the area has never stopped being an active place of worship and, more recently, the single most visited enclosed religious space in the Muslim world, making such excavation both practically and religiously fraught. What is known of the chambers’ physical form, as this guide has shown throughout, rests entirely on textual transmission — eyewitness memory recorded in writing, not stratigraphy or material culture recovered from the ground. The one physical fact that can be stated with confidence, because it is visible rather than excavated, is the pentagonal wall discussed in the section on what survives below, which is a standing structure rather than an archaeological find in the technical sense, having never been buried or rediscovered.

Stories of the Companions: Lives Lived Behind These Curtains

Sawdah bint Zam’ah: The First Chamber After Khadijah

Sawdah bint Zam’ah, the Prophet’s ﷺ second wife, married him in Makkah after Khadijah’s death and before the marriage to Aisha, making her chamber among the earliest, along with Aisha’s, to be built after the Hijra. The classical biographical sources describe her as a woman of notable size and good humour, reported in more than one account to have offered her turn in the household rotation to Aisha in her later years — a detail cited by biographers as an example of the domestic generosity that characterised relations among the wives, whatever ordinary friction is also honestly recorded in other reports from the same household.

Hafsah bint Umar: A Neighbour Across a Narrow Lane

Hafsah, daughter of Umar ibn al-Khattab, married the Prophet ﷺ in 3 AH/625 CE, after the death of her first husband at the Battle of Badr. Her chamber, per the topographical tradition discussed earlier, stood close enough to Aisha’s that the two women — reportedly close companions as well as, at times, rivals for the Prophet’s ﷺ attention, as the mat-marks episode above illustrates — could converse from within their respective rooms across the narrow lane said to have separated the two huts. Hafsah is also credited, in the broader hadith tradition, with preserving one of the earliest written copies of portions of the Qur’an, a role connected to her chamber’s later place in the physical memory of Madinah though not, strictly, to its architecture. Basic biographical detail on her marriage and family is summarised in the reference entry on Hafsah bint Umar.

Zaynab bint Jahsh: The Chamber Built for a Revelation

Zaynab bint Jahsh’s marriage to the Prophet ﷺ, in 5 AH/627 CE, is the direct occasion of the revelation of Surah al-Ahzab 33:53 discussed above — making her wedding feast, and by extension her own hujrah, the specific setting in which the Qur’an first instructed the community in the etiquette of visiting and the practice of the curtain. She is remembered in the tradition as notably generous, supporting herself and giving to charity from her own handiwork, and as the wife who, when asked by the Prophet ﷺ during the affair of the slander whether she had seen anything objectionable in Aisha, answered that she would say only what she had seen and heard herself, and had found nothing but good — a response the hadith tradition credits to her god-consciousness despite an acknowledged rivalry between the two women.

Umm Salamah and Umm Habibah: Two Households, One Lineage of Memory

Umm Salamah, whose given name was Hind bint Abi Umayyah, married the Prophet ﷺ in 4 AH/626 CE after the death of her first husband, and her chamber is of particular importance to the sourcing of this entire guide: it was her household to which al-Hasan al-Basri’s mother Khayrah was attached as a freedwoman, and it is this connection that is reported to explain al-Hasan’s own boyhood access to the row of chambers whose ceiling he recalled touching. Umm Habibah, born Ramlah bint Abi Sufyan, was the daughter of the Makkan leader Abu Sufyan ibn Harb and had emigrated to Abyssinia with her first husband before his death there; her marriage to the Prophet ﷺ, arranged at a distance through the Abyssinian ruler, is recorded in the biographical sources as taking place around 6–7 AH, a life summarised further in the reference entry on Umm Habibah bint Abi Sufyan.

Juwayriyyah, Safiyyah, and Maymunah: The Later Marriages

Juwayriyyah bint al-Harith and Safiyyah bint Huyayy both came into the Prophet’s ﷺ household following military campaigns against their respective communities — Juwayriyyah after the campaign against the Banu al-Mustaliq in the same general period as the affair of the slander, and Safiyyah, a descendant of the Prophet Aaron through her father’s line by the tradition’s own account, after the conquest of Khaybar in 7 AH/629 CE, a marriage summarised in the biographical reference entry on Safiyyah bint Huyayy. Maymunah bint al-Harith, the Prophet’s ﷺ last wife, married him in the same year; her chamber, as noted earlier, is specifically recorded as having been built without internal partition, a single undivided room in which her young nephew Abdullah ibn Abbas is remembered as having slept as a boy, a nephew whose own later career as a scholar is documented in the reference entry on Ibn Abbas.

Sa’id ibn al-Musayyib: The Scholar Who Objected

Sa’id ibn al-Musayyib (d. 94 AH/715 CE) deserves fuller introduction here, since his recorded objection to the demolition is one of this guide’s central episodes. Born around 15 AH, only a few years after the Prophet’s ﷺ death, he grew into one of the most respected jurists of the generation after the companions (the tabi’un), based in Madinah, and is remembered in the biographical tradition for a scrupulous, sometimes uncompromising integrity — including a willingness to voice unwelcome opinions to those in power, of which his recorded lament over the demolished chambers is a clear example. His words, as given above, frame the chambers’ humility not as an embarrassment to be tidied away but as a standing lesson in restraint that he believed the Muslim community was poorer for losing.

Stories of Great Islamic Scholars: Recording What Had Vanished

Al-Hasan al-Basri: The Boy Who Touched the Ceiling

Al-Hasan al-Basri (21–110 AH/642–728 CE) is best known to history as one of the towering figures of early Islamic asceticism and jurisprudence, a preacher whose sermons on mortality and sincerity shaped generations of later scholarship in Basra. For the purposes of this guide, though, his significance is narrower and more precious: he is the last identifiable eyewitness whose direct testimony about the physical chambers survives in the hadith literature, a boy who happened, through his mother’s position in Umm Salamah’s household, to have had access to rooms that within his own lifetime would be pulled down forever. Without his brief, almost incidental remark in al-Adab al-Mufrad, a great deal of what this guide has been able to say about the chambers’ physical humility would rest on secondhand report alone.

Ibn Sa’d: The Compiler Who Preserved the Description

Muhammad ibn Sa’d (d. 230 AH/845 CE), a student of the historian al-Waqidi, compiled in his al-Tabaqat al-Kubra one of the earliest and most systematic biographical dictionaries of the Prophet’s ﷺ companions and contemporaries, arranged by generation. It is through his transmission — and through the parallel local history of his approximate contemporary Ibn Shabbah (d. 262 AH/876 CE) in Tarikh al-Madina al-Munawwarah — that the detailed material description of the nine chambers, their brick-and-palm-branch construction, their curtain sizes, and their assignment to named companions has come down to the present day. Both works predate the great topographical synthesis of al-Samhudi by more than five centuries and are, in the chain of transmission this guide has followed, the earliest layer of written record standing behind everything that came later.

Al-Samhudi: The Historian of Madinah

Ali ibn Abd Allah al-Samhudi (844–911 AH/1440–1506 CE), the Mamluk-era historian whose Wafa’ al-Wafa bi Akhbar Dar al-Mustafa remains the single most comprehensive classical history of Madinah’s sacred topography, wrote some eight centuries after the chambers themselves had disappeared, but he had access to earlier Madinan historical works — including that of Ibn Zabalah, now lost except through al-Samhudi’s own quotations — that allowed him to reconstruct, in far more topographical detail than Ibn Sa’d or Ibn Shabbah alone provide, the likely arrangement of the chambers along the mosque’s eastern and northern sides, and the later history of the pentagonal wall discussed in the next section. Nearly every modern account of the hujurat’s physical arrangement, including the reconstructions offered earlier in this guide, traces back through al-Samhudi to these earlier, partly lost sources.

Spiritual Reflection: What the Emptiness Teaches

Stand today in Masjid an-Nabawi facing the green dome, and you are looking at the site of something that no longer exists in any visible form except a single walled shape you cannot see into. That absence is worth sitting with rather than rushing past. The Prophet Muhammad ﷺ, who could have commanded any dwelling Arabia had to offer, chose — or rather, simply lived within — nine rooms so small that a grown man standing inside could touch the roof, so poorly provisioned that two full months could pass without a fire being lit, so thinly built that a raised voice outside could be heard by whoever rested within. You have read, in this guide, of barley measured by the handful, of a leather water-skin as the sum total of a household’s stored provisions, of a mat that left its marks on the skin of God’s Messenger because that mat was all he chose to lie upon. None of this was imposed on him by poverty beyond his control. Wealth came into Madinah in his lifetime — spoils, gifts, tribute — and he distributed almost all of it before it reached his own house.

Consider what it means that Sa’id ibn al-Musayyib’s recorded regret was not that the chambers had been humble, but that later generations would no longer be able to see that humility for themselves. He did not wish the buildings preserved as relics to be venerated. He wished them preserved as evidence — as a plain, physical argument against exactly the kind of monumentalising impulse that, ironically, has since surrounded the very ground where they stood. There is something for you to take from that regret whether or not you ever stand in Madinah. The measure Sa’id feared losing was not architectural; it was moral. A society that can still see how little its most honoured figures required is a society with some defence against its own appetite for excess. When you consider your own home, your own possessions, your own sense of what a comfortable life requires, the hujurat as this guide has described them are not a piece of trivia about seventh-century construction. They are a standing question about how much a person actually needs, asked by the plainest imaginable rooms, and left unanswered by everyone who has ever walked past the green dome without knowing what those rooms once were.

Practical Visitor Guide: Orienting Yourself, as of July 2026

Where the Chambers Stood, Relative to Today’s Mosque

Masjid an-Nabawi today is vastly larger than the mosque the hujurat once flanked — its Saudi-era expansions have multiplied its footprint many times over, so that the small eastern-and-northern row of houses this guide describes now sits, in plan, well inside what feels like the middle of the modern building rather than anywhere near an edge. The single fixed point a visitor can use to orient themselves is the green dome itself: the ground beneath and immediately around it corresponds to the area where several of the chambers stood, above all Aisha’s, whose walls — rebuilt in stone by Umar ibn Abd al-Aziz during the same 88–91 AH campaign that removed the others — form the innermost structure the dome now covers. The Rawdah, the open area between the Prophet’s ﷺ former pulpit and this chamber, preserves in its name and its boundaries a memory of the same stretch of ground, and this guide’s separate article on the Rawdah and the Sacred Chamber treats that area’s history and etiquette in full. Beyond this one anchor point, a visitor cannot reliably locate the footprint of the other eight chambers on the ground today: the topographical uncertainty this guide has been honest about throughout — the disagreement among even the classical sources on where, precisely, Juwayriyyah’s or Safiyyah’s or Maymunah’s room stood relative to the others — means there is no signage, no marker, and no scholarly consensus precise enough to point to and say, with confidence, “here.”

What a Visitor Can Actually Orient To

What you can reliably do, standing inside Masjid an-Nabawi as of July 2026, is orient yourself to the general eastern quadrant of the historic mosque core — the area encompassing the Rawdah, the green dome, and the mihrab and minbar covered in this guide’s other articles — and understand that you are standing within, or very close to, the ground the nine chambers once occupied, without being able to distinguish one chamber’s former footprint from another’s beyond the general position of Aisha’s, fixed by the dome above it. Access to the Rawdah area itself is managed through the Nusuk app’s permit system for the Riyadh al-Jannah booking, described in current visitor guidance such as this 2026 guide to the Rawdah permit process, which as of 2026 requires visitors to reserve a specific time slot in advance through the official Nusuk platform rather than simply walking in; men’s and women’s visiting hours for this area are scheduled separately, and slots are reported to fill quickly, so travellers wishing to pray or stand in this specific area should arrange their permit well before arriving in Madinah. The wider mosque itself, by contrast, is open at the usual daily prayer times without any permit requirement, and the general area around the green dome can be seen and approached, subject to crowd management, without booking.

What Cannot Be Seen

It bears repeating plainly, because pilgrims are sometimes led to expect otherwise: there is nothing standing, visible, or separately marked of eight of the nine chambers. They were demolished in 88–91 AH and their materials — unbaked brick, palm branch, hair-cloth curtains — were never the kind of thing that survives above ground even when a site is deliberately preserved, let alone when it has been continuously built over for well over a millennium. Only the walls enclosing what was Aisha’s chamber survive in any form, and even these cannot be seen directly, as the next section explains. Do not go to Masjid an-Nabawi expecting to find the foundations, the doorway, or any physical trace of Sawdah’s room, or Hafsah’s, or Umm Habibah’s. None of them can be shown to you, because none of them remain.

What Survives: The Pentagonal Wall

Nothing Above Ground But One Wall

Of the nine hujurat, only the walls enclosing Aisha’s chamber survive in any structural sense, and even this survival is indirect: what stands today is not the original mud-and-palm-branch room the Prophet ﷺ and Aisha lived in, but a sequence of later stone enclosures built around and eventually over its site as it became, in turn, a grave and then a shrine of enormous devotional weight. The other eight chambers have left no trace above ground whatsoever, and this guide states that without qualification: there is nothing of Sawdah’s house, or Zaynab bint Jahsh’s, or Juwayriyyah’s, Safiyyah’s, Umm Habibah’s, or Maymunah’s to see, visit, or photograph. What can be discussed is only the fate of the one chamber that, by virtue of becoming a burial place, was treated differently from the moment of the Prophet’s ﷺ death onward.

The Five-Sided Wall

During the same 88–91 AH campaign that removed the other eight chambers, Umar ibn Abd al-Aziz had the original walls of Aisha’s house — by then containing the three graves of the Prophet ﷺ, Abu Bakr, and Umar ibn al-Khattab — replaced with permanent stone, described in some accounts as resembling the black stone construction associated with the Kaaba. A second inner wall, built at the same time or shortly after and also attributed to Umar ibn Abd al-Aziz, was given a deliberately irregular five-sided, pentagonal shape rather than the simple rectangle the original room would have had. The reason given consistently across the sources — repeated by, among others, the article on the Sacred Chamber at Wikipedia’s overview of the Green Dome, by the Twelver Shia historical reference at WikiShia, and by the detailed visitor account of the Sacred Chamber at Take Me To Umrah — is that a square or rectangular enclosure would have made the chamber resemble the Kaaba in shape, and the builders wished to prevent both the visual association and, more importantly, the possibility of anyone treating the enclosure as a second Kaaba, circling it in tawaf or, when praying toward the qibla, finding themselves praying in a direction that squarely faced the grave rather than at an angle away from it. A teaching attributed in some modern retellings, including a detailed account given by the contemporary scholar Dr. Yasir Qadhi and preserved in a transcript at this set of lecture notes on the grave of the Prophet, holds that by deliberately misaligning the pentagon’s walls relative to the qibla direction, anyone praying toward Makkah from within the mosque would find themselves facing a slanted wall of the enclosure rather than looking directly at the grave itself — a psychological as much as a physical safeguard against the appearance of directing worship toward the grave. This wall has had no door and no window since its construction, and nothing built inside it has been seen by anyone outside a small number of historically documented, non-public occasions in over thirteen centuries.

Later Reinforcement

The pentagonal wall was reinforced and partly rebuilt across the centuries that followed, most significantly after a major fire in 886 AH/1481 CE, when the Mamluk sultan al-Ashraf Qaitbay rebuilt the surrounding structure in stone; a further, larger rectangular timber enclosure had already been added around the whole area in 668 AH/1279 CE by the Mamluk sultan al-Zahir Baybars, and grilles, domes, and decorative cladding continued to be added by later Mamluk and Ottoman patrons. All of this later construction, together with the history of the Green Dome itself, belongs properly to this guide’s article on the Rawdah and the Sacred Chamber and is noted here only to make one point clear: the pentagonal wall discussed in this section is the oldest surviving physical trace, in any form, of any of the nine hujurat, and it survives only because the room it once enclosed ceased, within months of being built, to be simply somebody’s house.

Common Misconceptions

“The Green Dome Marks a Chamber”

Many visitors assume the green dome visible above Masjid an-Nabawi marks the location of one of the Prophet’s ﷺ wives’ living chambers as such — a domestic room preserved beneath a monument. This is imprecise in an important way. The dome marks the grave, not a chamber in its lived, domestic sense. There was no dome, green or otherwise, for the first six and a half centuries after the Prophet’s ﷺ death: the earliest structure of any kind over the burial site was a plain wooden cupola built in 678 AH/1279 CE by the Mamluk sultan al-Mansur Qalawun, described in the historical summary preserved by Islam Question and Answer as square at its base and octagonal above, with no colour at all — it was variously known afterward as the white dome, the blue dome, or the fragrant dome, long before it was ever green. The dome was painted green for the first time only in 1253 AH, on the order of the Ottoman Sultan Abd al-Hamid, and it has been maintained in that colour since; the structure a visitor sees today, sitting above what remains of Aisha’s former hujrah and the graves of the Prophet ﷺ, Abu Bakr, and Umar within it, is a monument to the burial place, built many centuries after the room ceased to be a home and long after the building itself had been replaced multiple times over. It is fair to say the dome marks, loosely, the general area where Aisha’s chamber once stood; it is not accurate to say it marks “a chamber” in the sense this guide has spent most of its length describing — a lived-in room with a hair-cloth curtain and a leather water-skin. It marks a grave that happens to lie within the walls of what had been that room.

Touching or Rubbing the Enclosure Walls for Barakah

Masjid an-Nabawi is one of the sites this guide’s series treats as sunnah-sanctioned in its own right — visiting it is a recommended act of devotion in its own name, not something requiring the usual ziyarah-legitimacy caveat applied elsewhere in this series to sites whose visitation as a devotional practice is itself contested. The specific practice that does require comment here is different: the habit, observed among some visitors, of touching, rubbing, or pressing the body against the grilles, railings, or outer walls surrounding the Sacred Chamber in the hope of obtaining blessing (barakah) by physical contact. On this narrower question, mainstream Saudi religious authority has been consistent and direct. The Permanent Committee for Islamic Research and Ifta — the official Saudi fatwa body — states, in guidance reproduced at Islam Question and Answer, that touching the grille or walls of the Prophet’s ﷺ chamber, kissing them, or performing tawaf around them are “reprehensible innovations,” on the reasoning that circumambulation is legislated only around the Kaaba and that touching or kissing for blessing has no basis beyond specific, narrowly defined practices at the Kaaba itself. Shaykh Ibn Baz, in guidance collected in his Majmu’ Fatawa and summarised at IslamLand, rules in the same direction, describing the practice as bid’ah with no basis in the practice of the Prophet ﷺ or his companions, and warning that it can become a means toward shirk. Shaykh Muhammad ibn al-Uthaymeen, in al-Bid’u wal-Muhdathat, quoted in a compilation of his rulings at Aliman Light, addresses the same practice directly, stating that circumambulating the grave and touching, kissing, or pressing the cheek against the enclosure’s caging and walls is “a detestable innovation,” and that worshipping Allah in this manner at the chamber’s walls only distances a person from Him rather than bringing them closer.

It should be said, in fairness to the wider tradition and without this guide adjudicating the matter, that not every classical or traditionalist authority has drawn the line in an identical place, and that a longer historical conversation exists about seeking blessing more broadly from things connected to the Prophet ﷺ. Earlier scholars, including within the Hanbali school with which Ibn Baz and Ibn al-Uthaymeen are most closely associated in their approach to this question, debated related practices — touching the minbar, for instance, is treated more permissively by some sources, citing a report that Ibn Umar was seen placing his hand on the Prophet’s ﷺ seat on the pulpit and then on his own face — while touching the grave itself has been treated far more cautiously across the schools, with reports attributed to Imam Ahmad ibn Hanbal himself expressing discomfort at being touched for blessing during his own lifetime. Some modern voices within the broader Sunni tradition, associated with a more expansive reading of tabarruk, have argued for greater latitude than the Permanent Committee, Ibn Baz, and Ibn al-Uthaymeen allow; this remains a live point of difference among traditionalist scholars rather than a matter on which the tradition speaks with one voice, and this guide leaves it exactly there, reporting the mainstream contemporary Saudi position clearly while noting that it is not universally shared in every detail across the wider Islamic scholarly landscape.

“You Can See Inside the Chamber If You Look Through the Grille”

A further, more practical misconception is that a visitor looking through the openings in the golden grille surrounding the Sacred Chamber area is looking at the original room, or even at the pentagonal wall itself. In fact, as this guide’s article on the Sacred Chamber explains in full, what is visible through the viewing apertures is the outermost of several nested enclosures — a wall draped in green cloth, built centuries after the pentagonal wall it now conceals, itself built centuries after the original mud-brick room. No visitor, however positioned, sees the pentagonal wall directly, let alone anything of the original hujrah as it stood in the Prophet’s ﷺ lifetime.

Lesser-Known Facts

A number of details from the research behind this guide rarely make it into general accounts of Masjid an-Nabawi and are worth drawing out on their own. Maymunah’s chamber, alone among the nine by the account transmitted through Ibn Sa’d, had no internal partition at all — a detail easily missed but significant, since it means the classification of the nine houses into “four of brick, five of palm branch” was also, in effect, a classification by internal layout, brick houses alone offering a divided hujrah proper. The curtain sizes given in the classical sources — roughly three cubits square — are precise enough to calculate that these hangings covered an opening barely taller than an adult’s shoulder height, reinforcing just how low and narrow these doorways were. The report of Sa’id ibn al-Musayyib’s lament is one of the very few recorded instances in the early Islamic period of a scholar publicly voicing regret over an architectural decision made by a sitting caliph’s governor — a mark, noted by more than one modern historian, of how seriously the loss of this particular set of buildings was felt even by people who had no personal memory of the Prophet ﷺ himself. Finally, the account of the exposed foot discovered during the 88–91 AH works, discussed earlier in connection with the demolition, is a reminder that the physical transition from “house” to “grave beneath a mosque” was not instantaneous or clean even in the Umayyad period — workers digging near what had been a domestic wall were, quite literally, encountering the consequences of that transition in real time, over eighty years after the fact.

Timeline

• Circa 1 AH/622–623 CE — The Prophet ﷺ arrives in Madinah after the Hijra; construction of the mosque and the earliest wives’ chambers, including Sawdah’s and Aisha’s, begins.
• 3 AH/625 CE — Hafsah bint Umar marries the Prophet ﷺ; her chamber is built near Aisha’s.
• 4–5 AH/626–627 CE — Umm Salamah and Zaynab bint Jahsh marry the Prophet ﷺ; the marriage feast for Zaynab is the occasion of the revelation of Surah al-Ahzab 33:53.
• 5 or 6 AH/627–628 CE — The campaign against Banu al-Mustaliq and the affair of the slander (al-ifk) involving Aisha; the exact year is disputed among the classical sources.
• 6–7 AH/627–629 CE — Umm Habibah, Juwayriyyah, and Safiyyah marry the Prophet ﷺ, following the events described in the biographical sources for each.
• 7 AH/629 CE — Maymunah bint al-Harith, the Prophet’s ﷺ last wife, marries him; her chamber is built without internal partition.
• 11 AH/632 CE — The Prophet ﷺ falls fatally ill, withdraws to Aisha’s chamber by the wives’ collective agreement, and dies there; he is buried within the same room. Nine chambers stand at this point, matching the nine surviving wives.
• 11–13 AH/632–634 CE — Caliphate of Abu Bakr, who is buried beside the Prophet ﷺ within Aisha’s chamber upon his own death in 13 AH.
• 13–23 AH/634–644 CE — Caliphate of Umar ibn al-Khattab, who is buried in the same chamber upon his death in 23 AH.
• Reign of Uthman, 23–35 AH/644–656 CE — Al-Hasan al-Basri, as a boy, visits the wives’ houses and later recalls touching their ceilings by hand.
• Safar 88 AH/January–February 707 CE — Caliph al-Walid ibn Abd al-Malik orders the demolition of the remaining hujurat and the expansion of the mosque, to be executed by his governor Umar ibn Abd al-Aziz.
• 88–91 AH/707–711 CE — The demolition proceeds; public grief is recorded, along with Sa’id ibn al-Musayyib’s objection; a pentagonal stone wall is built around what remains of Aisha’s chamber. The project is completed in 91 AH.
• 668 AH/1279 CE — Mamluk sultan al-Zahir Baybars builds a larger timber enclosure around the pentagonal wall and the surrounding area.
• 678 AH/1279–1280 CE — Mamluk sultan al-Mansur Qalawun builds the first dome, of unpainted wood, over the burial chamber.
• 886 AH/1481 CE — A major fire damages the enclosure; Mamluk sultan al-Ashraf Qaitbay rebuilds the surrounding structure in stone.
• 1253 AH/1837–1838 CE — Ottoman Sultan Abd al-Hamid orders the dome painted green for the first time, giving rise to its modern name.
• As of July 2026 — The green dome and the surrounding grilles remain in place; access to the adjoining Rawdah area requires a Nusuk app permit; nothing of the original hujurat survives visibly except the concealed pentagonal wall.

Key Lessons

Historical

The hujurat’s history demonstrates how quickly living memory of a physical site can fade even within an unbroken chain of scholarly transmission — within a single lifetime after the Prophet’s ﷺ death, the buildings that had housed his own household were gone, and everything known of them afterward depended on a small number of individuals, chiefly al-Hasan al-Basri and the informants behind Ibn Sa’d and Ibn Shabbah’s compilations, who happened to see them before demolition and happened to have their testimony recorded.

Spiritual

The austerity recorded inside these rooms — months without a fire, a mat’s marks on bare skin, a handful of barley as a household’s entire reserve — was not misfortune imposed on the Prophet ﷺ from outside; it was a chosen relationship to worldly provision, maintained voluntarily by a man who had access to far more, and it stands as one of the clearest textual demonstrations in the entire Seerah of what contentment with little can look like in practice.

Personal

Sa’id ibn al-Musayyib’s regret over the demolition offers a personal challenge independent of any specific ruling on architecture: the discomfort many people feel encountering genuine material simplicity, and the temptation to explain it away, upgrade it, or hide it rather than sit with what it might be trying to teach.

Practical

For a visitor to Masjid an-Nabawi, the practical lesson of this guide is to hold two things at once without confusing them: reverence for the ground associated with the Prophet’s ﷺ household and its role in Islamic history, and clear-eyed honesty about what can and cannot actually be seen there today — an honesty this guide has tried to model throughout rather than only recommend.

Authentic Sources

Primary Islamic Sources

The hadith collections cited throughout this guide — Sahih al-Bukhari, Sahih Muslim, Jami’ al-Tirmidhi, and al-Bukhari’s smaller collection al-Adab al-Mufrad — are drawn from and can be verified at sunnah.com, and Qur’anic citations can be verified at quran.com. Early biographical and historical material comes chiefly from Ibn Sa’d’s al-Tabaqat al-Kubra, Ibn Shabbah’s Tarikh al-Madina al-Munawwarah, and al-Tabari’s History (referenced here via the English translation series available at kalamullah.com). Readers should approach material drawn from earlier narrators such as Ibn Ishaq (as preserved by Ibn Hisham), and from historians such as al-Waqidi, with the caution the classical hadith sciences themselves apply to these figures: valuable and often irreplaceable for historical detail, but graded with more caution than the material found in the sahih hadith collections, and this guide has tried throughout to flag, rather than obscure, that distinction.

Classical Scholars

The classical exegetical material in this guide draws on al-Tabari’s Tafsir, Ibn Kathir’s Tafsir al-Qur’an al-Azim, al-Qurtubi’s al-Jami’ li Ahkam al-Qur’an, and Fakhr al-Din al-Razi’s Mafatih al-Ghayb, together with the asbab al-nuzul compilation of al-Wahidi. The later historical and topographical synthesis of al-Samhudi’s Wafa’ al-Wafa underlies much of what this guide has said about the chambers’ arrangement and the later history of the pentagonal wall. Rulings cited in the Common Misconceptions section draw on the collected fatawa of Ibn Baz and Ibn al-Uthaymeen and on the published positions of the Permanent Committee for Islamic Research and Ifta.

Modern Academic and Reference Sources

This guide has also drawn on modern academic and reference material, including the peer-reviewed overview of the tomb’s construction history at Oxford University Press’s Oxford Islamic Studies reference, the historical summary at Wikipedia’s article on the Green Dome, the Twelver Shia historical reference at WikiShia (cited specifically where it presents a distinct sectarian perspective on the door hadith and related questions), the fatwa rulings collected at Islam Question and Answer and its companion answer on the Green Dome’s history, the ruling reproduced at IslamLand, and the topographical and biographical detail summarised at People of Madina and Take Me To Umrah. Qur’anic tafsir references throughout, including the Maududi and Ma’arif al-Qur’an material, are drawn from the tafsir collections aggregated at quran.com.

A Note on Method

This guide has aimed, throughout, to distinguish clearly between three different kinds of claim: hadith with an identified reference and grading, classical historical reports transmitted through named chains but not subject to hadith-critical grading in the same way, and modern secondary synthesis offered by contemporary writers and websites drawing on the classical material. Where a detail could be traced only to the second or third category, or where sources genuinely disagreed with one another, this guide has said so explicitly rather than presenting a single tidy narrative. Readers seeking the deepest possible verification of any specific point should consult the primary sources named above directly, particularly for material drawn from Ibn Sa’d, Ibn Shabbah, and al-Samhudi, portions of which remain accessible in English only through summary and secondary quotation. This guide is offered as a starting point for that deeper reading, on this guide’s continuing history of Masjid an-Nabawi and Islamic heritage more broadly — useful for ziyarah preparation, for a fuller Islamic history of the site, and for anyone building a serious historical understanding of the Seerah locations of Madinah, but not a substitute for direct study of the classical Arabic sources themselves.