The Minbar of the Prophet ﷺ: History, Hadith and Ziyarah Guide to the Pulpit of Masjid an-Nabawi

Inside Masjid an-Nabawi in Madinah, at the western edge of the small carpeted rectangle known as Riyad al-Jannah, stands a tall, free-standing marble structure with a green conical cap. Pilgrims file past it every day, most of them focused on the green-domed chamber further east where the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ is buried. Few pause long enough to consider that this object — the minbar, the pulpit from which the Friday sermon is still delivered — carries one of the strangest and most consistently transmitted miracle reports in the entire Islamic tradition: a story about a tree trunk that wept. This article is about the minbar itself, not the wider history of Masjid an-Nabawi, the Rawdah, the pillars, the mihrabs, or the gates, each of which this guide treats separately. It is about the object the Prophet ﷺ stood on to speak to his community, the trunk it replaced, the sequence of minbars that followed it across thirteen centuries, and the pulpit that a visitor performing Umrah historical sites research or a Ziyarah guide reading in July 2026 will actually see today.

Any serious account of the history of the minbar has to start from an uncomfortable fact: the sources disagree about almost everything except the core outline. They disagree about who built the first one. They disagree about how many steps later caliphs added and when. They disagree, in the fullest technical sense of the word, about what happened to the palm trunk the minbar replaced — though they agree, overwhelmingly, that something happened to it that onlookers themselves could hear. This account tries to hold those disagreements openly rather than resolve them by picking a favourite version, because that is what the underlying scholarship does, and because a guide to the Islamic history of Masjid an-Nabawi that pretends to a certainty the sources do not have is not actually more useful to a reader — only more comforting.

Historical Background: The Mosque Without a Pulpit

When the Prophet ﷺ arrived in Madinah in 622 CE (1 AH) after the Hijrah from Makkah, the mosque he built beside his new home was a plain enclosure: a walled courtyard of sun-dried brick, a shaded area of palm trunks and palm-leaf thatch on the qibla side, and bare ground everywhere else. There was no pulpit. For the first years of his mission in Madinah, when the Prophet ﷺ addressed the congregation — teaching, warning, announcing revelation, settling disputes — he did what any speaker without furniture does: he stood. Specifically, according to the hadith literature examined in detail below, he stood beside one of the palm-trunk pillars that held up the shaded prayer area, leaning against it as he spoke.

This arrangement lasted for years. It was not an oversight. Early Madinah was materially poor; the mosque itself was unadorned, and a raised speaking platform was not an obvious priority against that backdrop. What changed the arrangement, according to the sources, was not architectural ambition but two converging pressures: the Prophet’s ﷺ own advancing years and increasing bulk making standing through a long address more taxing, and the practical difficulty of a growing congregation seeing and hearing a speaker who was on the same level as they were. The minbar, when it came, was solved for both problems at once — and, unusually for an object introduced for practical reasons, it became one of the most theologically loaded pieces of furniture in Islamic history within days of being built, because of what happened to the wood it replaced.

Geographically, the minbar’s location has never moved in any meaningful sense. It stands today where it stood in the Prophet’s ﷺ lifetime, in the same relative position against the qibla wall, inside what is now the oldest surviving section of the mosque. Everything around it — the walls, the roof, the pillars, the mihrab beside it — has been rebuilt, expanded, and rebuilt again across fourteen centuries of Rashidun, Umayyad, Abbasid, Mamluk, Ottoman and Saudi construction. The minbar’s footprint is one of the few fixed points in that long architectural history, which is part of why later builders treated its replacement as an act requiring royal sponsorship rather than routine maintenance.

The Story Behind the Place: A Trunk, a Carpenter, and a Sound Nobody Forgot

The story, as the hadith collections preserve it, unfolds in a small number of connected scenes. The first scene is the years of preaching against the palm trunk. The second is the moment someone — the sources disagree about who — proposes building a proper seat. The third, and by far the most consequential, is what happened on the first Friday the Prophet ﷺ used the new minbar instead of the old trunk.

According to the version narrated by Jabir ibn Abdullah, preserved in Sahih al-Bukhari 3584, an Ansari man or woman came to the Prophet ﷺ and asked: “Shall we make a pulpit for you?” He agreed. When the minbar was finished and put in its place, and the Prophet ﷺ stood on it to deliver the sermon instead of standing at the old trunk, the trunk cried out. Jabir’s own words, as transmitted, are stark: the trunk cried “like a child,” loud enough that the whole mosque heard it. The Prophet ﷺ came down from the minbar, went to the trunk, and took hold of it, embracing it, and it moaned “like a child being soothed until it quietens down.” He then explained, in the words the hadith attributes to him, that it was crying “for what it used to hear of remembrance (dhikr) of God near it.”

A second telling, from Ibn Umar and recorded as Sahih al-Bukhari 3583, is more compressed: the Prophet ﷺ used to deliver his sermons standing beside a palm trunk; when the minbar was made for him, he used it instead; the trunk cried out, and the Prophet ﷺ went to it and passed his hand over it, and it fell silent. A third version, transmitted from Anas ibn Malik through Jabir and preserved as Sahih al-Bukhari 3585, uses an even more vivid simile: the trunk made a sound like a pregnant she-camel groaning (al-‘ishar, a specific Arabic term for a camel in the last stage of pregnancy, known for its low, urgent moan), and it did not stop until the Prophet ﷺ put his hand on it.

The proposal itself — the offer to build the minbar — is recorded with more logistical detail in the version narrated by Jabir and preserved as Sahih al-Bukhari 449, under a chapter heading in the collection itself about “employing the carpenter and the skilled hand in making the wooden pulpit.” Here a woman says to the Prophet ﷺ: “Shall I have something made for you to sit on? I have a carpenter, a slave of mine.” The Prophet ﷺ answers simply: “Yes, if you wish.” Bukhari’s chapter title is doing quiet interpretive work here: it treats the episode primarily as evidence that hiring a skilled craftsman is permissible and unremarkable, which tells us something about how the earliest scholars categorised the story before its miraculous dimension became the point most later readers remember it for.

Additional narrations outside the two Sahihs sharpen the emotional register further. Reports from Ubayy ibn Ka’b, preserved in Musnad Ahmad 21252 and in Sunan al-Darimi 36, describe the trunk’s sound as being like the lowing of a bull, loud enough that the entire mosque shook, and attribute to the Prophet ﷺ an oath: “By the One in Whose hand is the soul of Muhammad, if I had not embraced it, it would have carried on like that until the Day of Resurrection.” Muhammad Nasir al-Din al-Albani, evaluating this wording in his collection of authenticated hadith (al-Silsilah al-Sahihah 3/175), judged its chain of transmission “good” (jayyid) and said it meets the conditions Muslim uses for authenticity in his own Sahih.

What makes this episode different from most miracle reports in the Seerah is not any single narration but their number and spread. This is the subject of the next section.

The Prophet ﷺ and This Place: The Weeping of the Hannana

The Hadith in Full, By Collection

Pulling the strands together: at least ten named Companions are credited across the hadith literature with transmitting some version of the crying-trunk report. The clearest listing of them comes from the Andalusian judge and hadith scholar Qadi Iyad (d. 544 AH / 1149 CE) in his celebrated work on the Prophet’s ﷺ virtues, al-Shifa bi Ta’rif Huquq al-Mustafa. Discussing the episode, he writes that “the hadith of the crying trunk is widely known; its narrations are mutawatir,” and lists the Companions who narrated versions of it: Ubayy ibn Ka’b, Jabir ibn Abdullah, Anas ibn Malik, Abdullah ibn Umar, Abdullah ibn Abbas, Sahl ibn Sa’d, Abu Sa’id al-Khudri, Buraydah ibn al-Hasib al-Aslami, Umm Salamah, and al-Muttalib ibn Abi Wada’ah al-Sahmi.

Three of these — Ibn Umar, Jabir, and Anas (via Jabir) — supply the versions preserved in Sahih al-Bukhari and already quoted above: Bukhari 3583, 3584, and 3585. A fourth, Ubayy ibn Ka’b, supplies the version in Musnad Ahmad 21252 and Sunan al-Darimi 36. The remaining names — Ibn Abbas, Sahl ibn Sa’d, Abu Sa’id al-Khudri, Buraydah, Umm Salamah, and al-Muttalib ibn Abi Wada’ah — are cited by Qadi Iyad and by later scholars discussing the episode’s transmission as additional independent chains, dispersed across other hadith collections and biographical works rather than concentrated in the two Sahihs.

What “Mutawatir” Means Here, and Why Scholars Use the Word for This Report

The technical term mutawatir describes a report transmitted, at every generation of its chain, by such a large number of independent narrators that collusion in fabrication becomes practically inconceivable, a standard the weeping-trunk narrations at Bukhari 3583 and 3584 are repeatedly said to meet. It is the highest grade of certainty in the Islamic sciences of hadith, normally reserved for a small set of reports — the preservation of the Qur’an’s text, a handful of doctrinal statements, and a short list of miracle narrations. Scholars who apply the word to the weeping-trunk episode are not claiming that any single wording is mutawatir; the accounts differ in detail — some describe a sound like a crying child, others like a groaning camel, others like the lowing of a bull; some have the Prophet ﷺ descending to embrace the trunk, others have him merely placing a hand on it. What is claimed to be mutawatir is the core event itself: that the trunk made an audible sound of distress when the Prophet ﷺ stopped preaching beside it, heard by a large congregation, independently reported by numerous Companions through numerous separate chains.

This distinction has a name in the hadith sciences: mutawatir ma’nawi, “mutawatir in meaning,” as opposed to mutawatir lafzi, “mutawatir in exact wording.” Both the Andalusian scholar al-Suhayli (d. 581 AH), in al-Rawd al-Anf, and later Imam al-Nawawi (d. 676 AH), commenting on Sahih Muslim, make this same judgment: the reports converge on one occurrence even though their wording varies, and that convergence, given the number and independence of the transmitting Companions, is what earns the label. Ibn Taymiyyah (d. 728 AH), in al-Jawab al-Sahih, reaches the identical conclusion. Ibn Kathir (d. 774 AH), in his Qur’anic commentary, goes further, describing it as a mutawatir report that yields qat’i — definite, certain — knowledge, on the same epistemic footing as historical facts nobody seriously disputes. The Central Asian and Hijazi hadith master al-Bayhaqi (384–458 AH), in his Dala’il al-Nubuwwa (Proofs of Prophethood), states that the hadiths on this event — among them the narrations recorded at Bukhari 3585 — are all sound (sahih) and so well known that citing each individual chain is almost superfluous — itself a comment on how uncontroversial the core report was considered within a few centuries of the event.

Not every early scholar treated the matter identically. The Mu’tazili theologian and judge Abd al-Jabbar al-Hamadhani (d. 415 AH), whose school took a more rationalist and sometimes skeptical approach to reports of physical miracles, is recorded in different places arguing in apparently inconsistent directions on this specific episode — in one discussion questioning whether the crying of an inanimate object should even count as the sort of event that establishes prophethood, since it might in principle be replicated by other causes, while elsewhere citing it among reports he accepts as widely transmitted. This inconsistency is worth naming rather than smoothing over: it shows that even a report later scholars call mutawatir was not free of theological argument about how such reports should be classified and what weight they should carry, particularly among scholars committed to a stronger role for rational proof in matters of doctrine.

A frequently repeated comparison, attributed to Imam al-Shafi’i (d. 204 AH) and recorded in biographical works on him such as Adab al-Shafi’i wa Manaqibuhu, makes the theological stakes explicit: al-Shafi’i is reported to have said that the miracle of the weeping trunk is greater than the Qur’anic miracle of Jesus (Isa), peace be upon him, reviving the dead, because Jesus’s miracle acted upon something already alive, whereas Muhammad’s ﷺ trunk was entirely inanimate matter — dead wood — before it responded. Whatever one makes of the comparison, it signals how seriously classical scholars took this report, not as a charming legend on the margins of the Seerah but as a central plank in arguments for the Prophet’s ﷺ prophethood.

What Became of the Trunk: Competing Reports, Left Open

Here the sources genuinely diverge, and no single report commands the kind of overwhelming, cross-collection support that the weeping itself does. At least three distinct accounts of the trunk’s later fate circulate in the tradition, and they are not easily reconciled with one another.

The most commonly repeated version holds that Ubayy ibn Ka’b — one of the Companions credited with narrating the weeping episode itself — took the trunk into his own house after it was removed from the mosque, where it eventually decayed, reportedly consumed by termites or wood-boring insects until nothing remained of it. This version threads through later Islamic historical writing and is frequently cited alongside the Bukhari narrations, though the decay-and-disappearance detail itself sits in additional reports transmitted via Musnad Ahmad 21252 and related collections rather than in the Sahih al-Bukhari texts quoted above, which stop at the moment the trunk falls silent.

A second, competing account holds that the Prophet ﷺ himself ordered the trunk buried — some versions say beneath the minbar itself, others say near its base, and at least one strand of reporting places it specifically beneath or beside the pillar later known as the Hannana, discussed below. This account is transmitted through chains involving al-Muttalib ibn Abi Wada’ah, Sahl ibn Sa’d, and a narration reaching back to Anas ibn Malik via Ishaq ibn Abdullah.

A third account, more elaborate and dramatic than the other two, appears in additional narrations transmitted via Buraydah ibn al-Hasib and is preserved in later devotional and biographical literature rather than in the core Sahih collections. In this telling, the Prophet ﷺ, having quieted the trunk, offers it an explicit choice: it could be returned to the garden it came from and grow again as a living palm tree, or it could be planted instead in Paradise, where it would bear fruit for the friends of God. The trunk, in this account, chooses Paradise, and is heard by those present to make this preference known, whereupon the Prophet ﷺ grants the request. Later tradition holds that when this narration was retold to Ali ibn Abi Talib’s son al-Hasan ibn Ali, he wept, and told those listening that they ought to long for the Prophet ﷺ more intensely than a piece of wood had.

These three accounts cannot all be literally true in every detail — a trunk cannot simultaneously decay in Ubayy’s house, lie buried under the minbar, and be transplanted whole into Paradise. Modern scholars and hadith researchers who have examined the question directly generally draw a distinction similar to the one applied above to the weeping itself: the core event of the trunk’s audible distress and the Prophet’s ﷺ response to it rests on exceptionally strong, widely corroborated transmission, while the various “afterlife of the trunk” narratives rest on comparatively weaker, less corroborated, and sometimes later material. Given that division in the strength of the source material, and in line with the instruction not to adjudicate between competing reports where the sources themselves do not converge, this account leaves the question of the trunk’s ultimate fate open rather than asserting any one version as established fact.

What survives today, in name at least, is the location. A pillar inside the old section of Masjid an-Nabawi, near the Prophet’s ﷺ mihrab, is known as Ustuwanat al-Hannana — the Pillar of the Hannana, “hannana” being an Arabic word for a yearning or moaning sound, of the kind a female camel makes for a lost calf, chosen precisely because it echoes the description of the trunk’s own cry. The same pillar is also referred to in some sources as al-Mukhallaqah, “the perfumed one,” from a separate tradition that the Prophet ﷺ had the spot scented. This guide’s companion article on the pillars of Masjid an-Nabawi covers the full set of named columns in the mosque in detail; here it is enough to note that the Hannana pillar marks, as closely as the tradition can fix it, the ground the weeping trunk once occupied — not the trunk itself, which by every competing account had ceased to exist as a physical object well before the mosque reached its present form.

Qur’anic Connections

Unlike many sites covered in this guide, the minbar has no direct Qur’anic verse describing its construction or its miracle — the weeping-trunk narrative belongs entirely to the hadith and sirah literature, not to revealed text. The Qur’an does, however, supply the underlying theological vocabulary that later commentators used to explain why an inanimate object could respond emotionally to its Creator’s messenger. Surah al-Isra states:

﴿تُسَبِّحُ لَهُ السَّمَاوَاتُ السَّبْعُ وَالْأَرْضُ وَمَن فِيهِنَّ ۚ وَإِن مِّن شَيْءٍ إِلَّا يُسَبِّحُ بِحَمْدِهِ وَلَٰكِن لَّا تَفْقَهُونَ تَسْبِيحَهُمْ﴾

“The seven heavens and the earth and whatever is in them exalt Him. And there is not a thing except that it exalts [Allah] by His praise, but you do not understand their [way of] exalting. Indeed, He is ever Forbearing and Forgiving” (Qur’an 17:44). Classical commentators, including al-Tabari and Ibn Kathir in their respective works of tafsir on Surah al-Isra, verse 44, cite this verse in precisely this context: as textual grounding for the idea that inanimate creation is not, in fact, inert with respect to its Creator, and that human beings are simply deaf to a form of praise and awareness that pervades all created things, tree trunks included. A second, frequently paired verse comes from Surah al-Hashr, describing how even mountains would be humbled by the weight of revelation:

﴿لَوْ أَنزَلْنَا هَٰذَا الْقُرْآنَ عَلَىٰ جَبَلٍ لَّرَأَيْتَهُ خَاشِعًا مُّتَصَدِّعًا مِّنْ خَشْيَةِ اللَّهِ﴾

“If We had sent down this Qur’an upon a mountain, you would have seen it humbled and coming apart from fear of Allah” (Qur’an 59:21). Neither verse was revealed about the minbar or the trunk specifically — there is no recorded asbab al-nuzul (occasion of revelation) tying either passage to the episode — and readers should not take the pairing as an implied claim that the Qur’an is describing this event. Rather, later scholars invoked these general principles about creation’s responsiveness to God as the doctrinal backdrop that makes an otherwise startling report intelligible within an Islamic cosmology, in the same way they invoked the Qur’an’s accounts, in Surah an-Naml 27:16, of Solomon (Sulayman) understanding the speech of ants and birds, or stones falling from the heavens, as evidence that the created order is not assumed to be as inert and mute as ordinary human experience suggests. This is, in the terminology used throughout this guide, a matter of classical exegetical framing rather than a direct Qur’anic connection, and it is presented here as such.

Hadith References: The Minbar in the Authentic Collections

This section consolidates, in one place, every hadith already discussed — including the weeping-trunk narrations at Bukhari 3583, 3584 and 3585 — and several more that concern the minbar directly rather than the weeping-trunk episode alone, each graded according to the assessments of the scholars who examined its chain of transmission.

The Weeping Trunk

• Sahih al-Bukhari 3583 (Ibn Umar): Authentic (sahih) by virtue of inclusion in Sahih al-Bukhari. Full text and chain available via sunnah.com.
• Sahih al-Bukhari 3584 (Jabir ibn Abdullah): Authentic (sahih). sunnah.com.
• Sahih al-Bukhari 3585 (Anas ibn Malik, via Jabir): Authentic (sahih). sunnah.com.
• Sahih al-Bukhari 449 (Jabir ibn Abdullah, on the commissioning of the minbar): Authentic (sahih). sunnah.com.
• Musnad Ahmad 21252 and Sunan al-Darimi 36 (Ubayy ibn Ka’b): graded jayyid (good, meeting Muslim’s conditions) by al-Albani in al-Silsilah al-Sahihah. Available via sunnah.com and sunnah.com.

A note on authenticity: the core weeping episode rests on multiple sound chains across at least two of the six canonical collections, independently narrated by several Companions, which is why classical scholars including Qadi Iyad, al-Suhayli, al-Nawawi, Ibn Taymiyyah and Ibn Kathir describe it as mutawatir ma’nawi. The subsequent narrations about the trunk being buried, decaying in Ubayy’s house, or being offered a place in Paradise are comparatively weaker and less consistently corroborated, and are presented in this guide as competing, unresolved reports rather than established fact.

The Three Steps and the Construction of the Minbar

• Sahih Muslim 544a (Sahl ibn Sa’d): Authentic (sahih). The fullest account of the minbar’s construction, its wood, and the Prophet’s ﷺ demonstration of prayer from it. sunnah.com.
• Sahih al-Bukhari 377 (Sahl ibn Sa’d, via Abu Hazim): Authentic (sahih). A parallel telling of the same episode, with an added scholarly discussion appended by the collection’s narrators about whether an imam may stand higher than those praying behind him. sunnah.com.
• Sunan Abi Dawud 1081 (Ibn Umar, on Tamim al-Dari’s proposal): commonly cited as authentic or hasan in the context of Tamim al-Dari’s role; discussed further in the section on the minbar’s builders below.

“A Garden From the Gardens of Paradise”

• Sahih Muslim 1391 (Abu Hurayrah): Authentic (sahih). “That which is between my house and my minbar is a garden from the gardens of Paradise, and my minbar is upon my cistern (hawd).” sunnah.com.
• Sahih al-Bukhari 1196 (Abu Hurayrah): Authentic (sahih), a parallel wording of the same hadith with the “cistern” clause; this hadith also appears at other reference points within Bukhari’s arrangement, reflecting the practice of citing the same narration in more than one thematic chapter.
• Sahih al-Bukhari 1195 (Abdullah ibn Zayd al-Mazini): Authentic (sahih), a shorter version naming the garden without the cistern clause, also preserved with slight wording variation as Sahih Muslim 1390a.

The False Oath by the Minbar

• Sunan Ibn Majah 2325 (Jabir ibn Abdullah): “Whoever swears a false oath near this pulpit of mine, let him take his place in Hell, even if it is for a green twig.” Graded sahih. sunnah.com.
• Sunan Abi Dawud 3246 (Jabir ibn Abdullah): “One should not take a false oath at this pulpit of mine even on a green tooth-stick; otherwise he will make his abode in Hell, or Hell will be certain for him.” Graded sahih by al-Albani. sunnah.com.

A note on authenticity: both narrations converge on the same core warning — that swearing falsely specifically beside the Prophet’s ﷺ minbar in Madinah carries an especially severe threat, illustrated by the image of something as trivial as a green twig — and both are graded sound by the scholars who examined their chains.

Historical Development: From a Slave-Carpenter’s Bench to Ottoman Marble

Who Built the First Minbar? The Sources Name Several Candidates

Ask “who built the Prophet’s ﷺ minbar” and the honest answer is that the tradition offers several names, transmitted through different chains, and no clean way to rule any of them out in favour of the others. This guide sets each candidate out with its source and leaves the question open, as the classical sources themselves do.

The most textually secure account, because it comes through Sahih Muslim, does not actually give the carpenter’s name. In Sahih Muslim 544a, Sahl ibn Sa’d is asked directly what wood the minbar was made from, and answers: “None remains alive among the people who knows more about it than I do. It is made of tamarisk wood from al-Ghabah. So-and-so, the freed slave of so-and-so, made it for the Messenger of Allah ﷺ.” The parallel version in Sahih al-Bukhari 377 preserves the identical formula: “amilahu fulanun mawla fulanatin” — “so-and-so, freedman of a certain woman, made it.” The names have simply not survived in the wording Abu Hazim transmitted from Sahl, even though Sahl insists, twice, that he personally knows exactly who made it and what it was made from. This is an unusual and instructive gap: the single most authoritative hadith on the minbar’s construction is emphatic about its own reliability and yet withholds the one detail modern readers most want.

Other traditions fill the gap with specific names, but they do not agree with one another. One widely repeated identification names a carpenter called Baqum (sometimes transliterated Baqul), described as a Roman or Byzantine (rumi) craftsman. Ma’rifat al-Sahabah and related biographical dictionaries of the Companions preserve a chain through Ibrahim ibn Abi Yahya from Salih, the freedman of al-Tawamah, stating: “Baqum, the freedman of al-‘As ibn Umayyah, made the minbar of the Messenger of Allah ﷺ from tarfa’ (tamarisk), with three steps.” Some versions of this tradition identify Baqum as a mawla of Banu Umayyah generally rather than of al-‘As ibn Umayyah specifically, and a separate strand of reporting, discussed by Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani in his commentary on Sahih al-Bukhari, credits a carpenter of the same name with having built the Ka’bah’s roof for the Quraysh before the Prophet’s ﷺ mission began — raising the question of whether these are the same craftsman working across two different projects decades apart, or two different men whose names were conflated by later copyists. Ibn Hajar discusses the variant names attached to the minbar’s builder at some length precisely because the sources do not converge, and suggests as one possible reconciliation that Baqum, if he is the same man, may have come into the service of the Ansari woman named in Sahl’s report after settling in Madinah — a plausible but unproven harmonisation rather than an established fact.

A second tradition names the Companion Tamim al-Dari (Tamim ibn Aws al-Dari), a convert from Christianity who had emigrated from the Levant, as the one who proposed and arranged for the minbar to be built. A hadith preserved in Sunan Abi Dawud 1081, narrated from Ibn Umar, states that when the Prophet ﷺ grew heavier with age, Tamim al-Dari said to him: “Shall I make you a minbar that will carry your body, O Messenger of Allah?” and the Prophet ﷺ agreed; Tamim then made a pulpit of two steps. Other sources credit Tamim with having seen similar raised platforms used in churches in Syria and suggesting the idea to the Prophet ﷺ on that basis, which — if accurate — would make the minbar one of a small number of features in Madinan mosque architecture whose origin the tradition itself traces to a non-Arabian, pre-Islamic model. Tamim al-Dari is separately credited, in other hadith, with introducing oil lamps into the mosque, with the Prophet ﷺ reportedly remarking to him, “You have illuminated Islam” — a detail that, while not about the minbar directly, reinforces the tradition’s broader portrait of Tamim as a Companion associated with practical innovations to the mosque’s fabric and lighting.

A third strand, and arguably the version with the most circumstantial detail, credits a slave belonging to a woman of the Ansar. This is essentially the Sahih Muslim and Sahih al-Bukhari account with the blank filled in by later historians: some sources name the woman’s slave-carpenter as a man called Kilab, or Sabah, in the service of al-Abbas ibn Abd al-Muttalib, the Prophet’s ﷺ uncle — a narration preserved in early historical compilations describing al-Abbas offering the Prophet ﷺ “a slave of mine named Kilab; he is the most skilled of men in this craft,” who was then sent to cut wood from a forest and built a minbar of two steps and a seat. Other, less widely repeated candidates cited in the historical literature include a slave named Maymun — identified by some later scholars, including a fatwa attributed to al-Hafiz Ibn Hajar and repeated on the Saudi reference site Saudipedia, as possibly “the most correct” of the several names in circulation — as well as a slave called Qabisah al-Makhzumi, and a slave referred to only as belonging to an Ansari woman of Banu Salamah or Banu Sa’adah, tentatively named “Meena” in at least one modern compilation, though that specific identification is presented there as probable rather than certain.

No single name commands the kind of cross-collection consensus the weeping-trunk hadith enjoys. Baqum, Tamim al-Dari, Kilab or Sabah, Maymun, and Qabisah al-Makhzumi all appear in the sources as candidates, sometimes proposed as complementary rather than competing figures — for instance, one harmonisation suggests Tamim al-Dari may have proposed and funded the minbar while Baqum or another named craftsman did the actual joinery. This guide presents every named candidate with its source rather than adjudicating between them, in keeping with the state of the underlying scholarship.

The Wood: Tamarisk From al-Ghabah

On the material itself, the sources are considerably more unanimous. Sahih Muslim 544a states explicitly, in Sahl ibn Sa’d’s own words, that the minbar was made “min tarfa’ al-Ghabah” — from the tamarisk (athl or tarfa’, a hardy desert shrub or small tree) of al-Ghabah, a wooded area outside Madinah associated in other hadith with grazing land and with the valley of al-Aqiq. The parallel Bukhari narration confirms the same detail, as does the Baqum tradition cited above, and the account crediting al-Abbas’s slave Kilab, who is said to have been sent specifically to cut tamarisk for the purpose. Modern historical summaries of the mosque’s architecture, including the Encyclopaedia Britannica’s entry on the minbar and the architectural survey published by Madain Project, likewise identify tamarisk from al-Ghabah as the consistent report. A minority of secondary sources mention palm wood as an alternative material, but this claim is far less well attested and appears to rest on conflating the minbar’s wood with the palm-trunk pillars that made up the rest of the mosque’s structure at the time, rather than on any independent hadith describing the minbar itself as being built from palm. Tamarisk from al-Ghabah should be treated as the well-verified report; palm wood as an unverified, minority variant.

Whichever carpenter built it, the object itself was modest. Early descriptions, including those summarised in Saudi and Islamic reference works discussing the minbar’s original dimensions, put it at roughly fifty centimetres wide and a little over a metre tall — small, unadorned, with no carving, inlay, or expensive ornament. A minbar built to those proportions with two or three shallow steps and a narrow seat was a functional speaking platform, not a monument; the monument came later, and came from other hands entirely.

Three Steps, and Who Was Permitted to Stand on the Top One

The clearest and most detailed account of how the minbar was actually used comes again from Sahl ibn Sa’d in Sahih Muslim 544a and its parallel in Sahih al-Bukhari 377. Sahl describes the minbar as having three steps, placed exactly where the Prophet ﷺ instructed. When it was finished and set in place, the Prophet ﷺ mounted it, faced the qibla, and said the takbir; the congregation stood behind him and did likewise. He recited, bowed, and the people bowed with him; then he raised his head, stepped backward down the minbar (Sahl uses the Arabic term qahqara, walking backward rather than turning around), and prostrated on the ground at its base, before returning to the minbar to complete the second unit of prayer the same way. Sahl reports the Prophet’s ﷺ own explanation for the demonstration: “O people, I have done this so that you may follow me and learn my prayer.” Appended to the Bukhari version is a later scholarly exchange in which the jurist and hadith scholar Ahmad ibn Hanbal is recorded asking Ali ibn al-Madini about this very hadith, drawing from it the ruling that there is no harm in an imam standing on a level higher than the congregation praying behind him — one of the earliest recorded uses of the minbar hadith as a source of practical jurisprudence rather than simply historical description.

Three steps, then, is the well-attested original configuration, and IslamQA’s scholarly summary of the minbar’s history states plainly that it remained a three-step minbar throughout the era of the four Rightly Guided Caliphs. During this period, a specific etiquette developed, reported widely in the historical and hadith-adjacent literature, though not itself preserved as a single canonical hadith with an isnad of its own: the Prophet ﷺ delivered his sermons standing on, or immediately below, the highest step, and after his death, out of reverence, Abu Bakr declined to occupy that same top step, delivering his sermons one step lower; Umar, in turn, is reported to have stepped down one further level out of the same deference to both the Prophet ﷺ and to Abu Bakr. When Uthman became caliph, according to this tradition, he broke the pattern and stood on the highest step once more, and when questioned about it, is reported to have explained his reasoning by saying that had he stood on the middle step people might have thought he considered himself equal to Abu Bakr, and had he stood on the lowest, equal to Umar — so he chose the position that admitted no such comparison at all.

A note on authenticity: this account of graduated deference among the first three caliphs is widely repeated in Islamic historical writing, but different modern summaries describe the step-counting inconsistently — some treat the Prophet’s ﷺ own step as the topmost of the three, others describe it as the step nearest the seat, and the exact step each caliph is said to have used varies slightly between accounts depending on whether steps are counted from the ground upward or from the seat downward. The underlying tradition — that later caliphs progressively deferred to the Prophet’s ﷺ memory by not occupying his exact position, until Uthman broke the pattern for reasons of his own — is consistent across sources even where the precise step numbers describing it are not, and this guide reports the tradition with that inconsistency flagged rather than resolved.

Mu’awiyah’s Minbar: A Controversy Over Height, and a Three-Way Disagreement Over the Numbers

The minbar’s original modest height did not survive the Umayyad period intact. The clearest single account of what happened comes from the historian al-Tabari, in his History, and is repeated by Ibn Kathir in his account of the Umayyad caliphate: Mu’awiyah ibn Abi Sufyan, ruling as caliph from Damascus, wished to have the Prophet’s ﷺ own minbar physically removed from Madinah and brought to Syria, along with the Prophet’s ﷺ staff. According to this account, the Companions Abu Hurayrah and Jabir ibn Abdullah confronted him over the plan, reportedly saying: “O Commander of the Faithful, we remind you of God — it is not right to remove the Prophet’s ﷺ minbar from the place he set it, nor his staff to Syria.” Mu’awiyah relented on relocating the minbar itself, but, in al-Tabari’s account, went ahead and added six steps to it, so that — in al-Tabari’s own wording — “today it has eight steps.” Ibn Kathir’s version of the same episode likewise describes Mu’awiyah adding six steps, and adds the detail that Mu’awiyah later apologised to the people for having done so, suggesting the change provoked genuine controversy at the time rather than passing unremarked.

Other sources describing the same event give a different final count. Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani, in Fath al-Bari, his commentary on Sahih al-Bukhari, states that the minbar remained at three steps “until it was increased to six steps by Marwan, during the caliphate of Mu’awiyah” — attributing the physical work to Marwan ibn al-Hakam, acting as governor of Madinah under Mu’awiyah’s authority, and describing the new total as six steps rather than six steps added to the original three. A third figure circulates in some modern summaries of the mosque’s history, which state that the number of steps was increased to nine during Mu’awiyah’s caliphate.

A note on authenticity: the sources disagree, in a straightforward and citable way, on the final step count after Mu’awiyah’s alteration — al-Tabari and Ibn Kathir’s accounts imply eight steps total (three original plus six added); Ibn Hajar’s account in Fath al-Bari describes six steps total; and other summaries state nine steps total. This guide has not found a way to reconcile these figures and reports the disagreement openly rather than asserting any one of the three as the correct total. What all three accounts agree on is the underlying fact: that Mu’awiyah, or his governor Marwan acting in his name, substantially raised the height of the Prophet’s ﷺ minbar, that this was controversial enough to draw direct objection from senior Companions, and that some report of an apology followed. Later historical notes add that the additional steps were covered in ebony, and that Uthman, during his own caliphate, had already placed a cloth covering over the step associated with the Prophet ﷺ — a detail treated in the sources as secondary to the step-count controversy itself.

The First Fire: 1 Ramadan 654 AH / 28 September 1256 CE

The minbar associated with the Rashidun and Umayyad periods did not survive into the modern era, because the mosque itself was struck by two catastrophic fires within a little over two centuries of each other, each of which destroyed the minbar of the day.

The first fire broke out on 1 Ramadan 654 AH, corresponding to 28 September 1256 CE. Classical historians who documented it in detail include al-Samhudi in his monumental history of Madinah, Wafa’ al-Wafa; Abu Shama; the Shafi’i biographical historian Taj al-Din al-Subki, in Tabaqat al-Shafi’iyyah al-Kubra; and Qutb al-Din al-Qastallani, who devoted an entire short work, ‘Urwat al-Tawthiq fi al-Nar wa al-Hariq, to the disaster. According to these accounts, a mosque servant named Abu Bakr ibn Awhad al-Farrash entered a storeroom on the western side of the mosque to retrieve lamps in preparation for Ramadan, left a lit taper unattended, and the flame caught the mats, curtains, and reed fittings stored there. The fire spread rapidly through the roof structure, and because many of the mosque’s supporting columns had cores or reinforcing elements of lead, the intense heat melted the lead and brought columns crashing down, which in turn caused parts of the roof to collapse — including, according to these accounts, a section that fell onto the graves in the area of the sacred chamber.

The fire destroyed the minbar entirely, along with the mosque’s doors, cabinets, and windows, eleven curtains hung around the Prophet’s ﷺ chamber, the mosque’s copy of the original Uthmanic-era Qur’an manuscript, its library of books, and most of its columns. The central dome over the treasury and the sacred chamber and graves themselves were reported to have survived. Contemporary chroniclers also connect the fire to a volcanic eruption at Harrat Rahat, south of Madinah, which sent lava flowing for roughly three months around the same period — some writers linking the two events as fulfilling a hadith in which the Prophet ﷺ is reported to have foretold “a fire in the Hijaz.”

Rebuilding After the First Fire: A Contested Sequence of Patrons

The rebuilding effort that followed the 654 AH fire involved several rulers in quick and, in places, overlapping succession, and the sources do not agree cleanly on exactly which patron supplied which replacement minbar. The Abbasid caliph in Baghdad, al-Musta’sim Billah, sent materials and craftsmen in 655 AH (1257 CE), but this effort was cut short the following year by the Mongol conquest of Baghdad in 656 AH, which ended the Abbasid caliphate there. The ruler of Egypt, Sultan Rukn al-Din, sent iron and wood in 658 AH, and other Mamluk-era rulers, including al-Mansur Nur al-Din Ali and Sayf al-Din Qutuz, are recorded contributing to the restoration in the years immediately following. According to several sources, the actual replacement minbar in the years right after the fire was supplied not by Egypt at all but by the ruler of Yemen, al-Malik al-Muzaffar Shams al-Din, who sent a new minbar in 656 AH (1258 CE).

A more comprehensive restoration of the mosque followed under the Mamluk Sultan al-Zahir Baybars in 668 AH (1269–70 CE), who sent a substantial team of artisans to Madinah under the eunuch emir Jamal al-Din Muhsin al-Salihi, and who rebuilt the enclosures around the graves in the sacred chamber. Some sources state that Baybars also supplied a new minbar as part of this broader renovation. Whether this represents a second, later replacement of the Yemeni sultan’s 656 AH minbar, or whether later writers have simply conflated the Yemeni minbar with Baybars’s more famous and better-documented restoration project, is not something this guide’s sources allow it to resolve, and the possibility of conflation is noted here rather than silently assumed away. Subsequent Mamluk sultans continued incremental work on the mosque: Sultan Qalawun added a wooden dome over the Prophet’s ﷺ tomb, dated by different sources to either 668 AH or 679 AH (the two figures corresponding to roughly 1269–70 CE and 1280 CE respectively — a minor date discrepancy this guide flags rather than resolves), and Sultan Sayf al-Din Jaqmaq undertook roofing repairs in 853 AH (1449 CE).

The Second Fire: 13 Ramadan 886 AH / 1481 CE, and Sultan Qaytbay’s Marble Minbar of 888 AH

A second major fire struck the mosque roughly two centuries after the first, on 13 Ramadan 886 AH (14 November 1481 CE, with a small number of sources giving a date one or two days earlier in the same week). This fire was caused by a lightning strike on the minaret during the call to the Isha prayer; the muezzin performing the call was killed, and the blaze spread through the roof, destroying most of the mosque’s structure once again, with total casualties across the incident reported at around seventeen people in some accounts. In the immediate aftermath, before a proper royal replacement could be organised and shipped from Egypt, local residents of Madinah are reported to have built a rough, temporary minbar out of brick and plaster simply so that Friday prayers and sermons could continue without interruption.

The proper replacement came from Sultan al-Ashraf Qaytbay, the eighteenth Mamluk sultan of Egypt, who reigned from 873 to 904 AH (1468–1498 CE). Qaytbay had, in fact, already begun a broader renovation of Masjid an-Nabawi five years before the fire, in 881 AH (1476 CE); after the 886 AH fire, this renovation was extended to cover the roof, minaret, and dome, with the roofing work completed by Ramadan 888 AH (1483 CE) and further work on the minaret and dome continuing until 891 AH (1486 CE). Qaytbay’s marble minbar was installed in 888 AH (1483 CE), replacing the temporary brick-and-plaster structure the townspeople had improvised, and it remained in continuous use in the Prophet’s ﷺ mosque for just over a century.

Sultan Murad III’s Minbar, 998 AH / 1589–90 CE — The One Standing Today

The minbar in use in Masjid an-Nabawi today was a gift of the Ottoman Sultan Murad III, installed in 998 AH, corresponding to 1589–90 CE. Made and ornamented in Istanbul before being shipped to the Hijaz, it is built of white marble, rises in a straight free-standing flight of steps rather than the earlier wooden staircases, and is capped with a distinctive small conical dome finished in green — an Ottoman architectural signature repeated across Murad III’s other religious commissions. When the new minbar was installed, Qaytbay’s marble minbar of 888 AH was removed from Masjid an-Nabawi and relocated roughly five kilometres away to the Mosque of Quba, where, according to the sources that track it, it remained. This displacement-and-relocation sequence — Qaytbay’s minbar replacing the fire-damaged predecessor in 1483, then itself being displaced to Quba by Murad III’s minbar in 1589–90 — is corroborated across multiple independent architectural and historical sources and represents one of the more clearly documented handovers in the minbar’s long history, even where other links in the earlier chain remain contested.

The doors of Murad III’s minbar were, until relatively recently, the original sixteenth-century Ottoman doors, described in some architectural surveys as green with gold inlay; the doors in place on the minbar today date from the Saudi era, and the original Ottoman doors are preserved separately in the Exhibition of the Two Holy Mosques’ Architecture. This is the minbar a visitor to Masjid an-Nabawi sees today, standing at the western edge of Riyad al-Jannah, immediately beside the Ottoman-era mihrab associated with Sultan Qaytbay’s earlier renovation — a mihrab this guide’s companion article covers in full and does not repeat here.

Architecture: What the Minbar Is Made Of, and What It Symbolises

The minbar standing in Masjid an-Nabawi today is, physically, an Ottoman marble structure from the reign of Sultan Murad III, dated to 998 AH (1589–90 CE), and it bears little resemblance in scale or material to the original tamarisk-wood platform of three shallow steps that Sahl ibn Sa’d described from personal memory. It stands as a free-standing staircase structure — steps without a supporting wall behind them, open on both sides — carved from white marble, with a small conical dome at its summit finished in green, echoing the colour of the much larger, and much later, Green Dome that marks the Prophet’s ﷺ tomb chamber several metres to its east. The two green domes are separate structures from separate periods: the dome on the minbar is part of Murad III’s sixteenth-century Ottoman commission, while the mosque’s famous Green Dome over the burial chamber was not built, or painted green, until the nineteenth century, under Sultan Mahmud II. Visitors and even some secondary sources sometimes conflate the two; they are architecturally and historically distinct, and this guide treats them as such.

Surface ornamentation on the current minbar includes gold calligraphy, with panels reported to carry verses from the Qur’an and the shahadah; the minbar has no seat back or ornamental canopy of the kind found on some later minbars elsewhere in the Muslim world, and it is used, in accordance with the tradition of the Prophet ﷺ delivering the khutbah while standing rather than seated for its duration. The doors currently fitted to the minbar are Saudi-era replacements; the original sixteenth-century Ottoman doors, described as green with gold-inlaid patterns, have been removed and are preserved and displayed in the Exhibition of the Two Holy Mosques’ Architecture rather than left in place.

Positionally, the minbar occupies the western boundary of the small, rectangular area known as Riyad al-Jannah — a name drawn directly from the hadith discussed above (Sahih Muslim 1391) describing the ground between the Prophet’s ﷺ house and his minbar as a garden from the gardens of Paradise. The eastern boundary of the same rectangle is the screened chamber containing the graves of the Prophet ﷺ, Abu Bakr, and Umar. The Ottoman-era mihrab known as the Mihrab Nabawi, marking the direction the Prophet ﷺ prayed, sits close beside the minbar within this same small zone. Modern measurements of Riyad al-Jannah put its accessible area at approximately twenty-two metres by fifteen metres, with a small additional portion of the historically defined area lying inside the screened chamber itself and therefore inaccessible to the general public. The minbar is, by several accounts, the single largest freestanding object within this compact and intensely visited space.

Symbolically, later Islamic architecture treated the raised minbar not merely as a practical speaking aid but as a visible marker of religious authority and continuity, and the physical history traced above — plain wood, then Mamluk marble, then Ottoman marble, each new minbar a royal commission rather than a routine repair — reflects how seriously successive Muslim dynasties took the act of maintaining and periodically renewing the pulpit associated with the Prophet ﷺ himself. What was lost in that long sequence of fires and reconstructions is, by definition, mostly unrecoverable: the original tamarisk wood the Prophet ﷺ himself stood on did not survive either of the two mosque fires that struck Masjid an-Nabawi, and no source claims otherwise. What survives is the location, the dimensions of the small sacred rectangle it anchors, and an unbroken institutional insistence, across roughly fourteen centuries, that this particular spot in this particular mosque should always have a minbar standing on it.

Archaeological Findings

There are, as of this writing, no published archaeological excavation findings specifically concerning the minbar of Masjid an-Nabawi. This is not unusual for a site that remains in continuous religious use: the sacred core of the mosque, including the Rawdah, the mihrab, and the minbar’s footprint, has never been made available for archaeological excavation in the sense of stratigraphic digging, and Saudi authorities have generally prioritised preservation and continued function over investigative excavation in the mosque’s oldest and most sensitive areas. What exists instead is a body of architectural documentation and survey work — descriptions of the minbar’s materials, dimensions, and decorative program compiled by historians, heritage bodies, and specialist reference projects such as Madain Project — rather than findings generated by ground-penetrating investigation or object recovery. Readers looking for physical, excavated evidence of the original tamarisk minbar, the weeping trunk, or the sequence of Mamluk-era replacements should understand plainly that no such evidence has been published; what this guide draws on instead is textual and art-historical documentation of a still-functioning religious structure.

Stories of the Companions

The minbar’s history is unusually rich in named Companions, because the hadith literature surrounding both the weeping trunk and the minbar’s construction preserves so many individual voices rather than a single anonymous chain.

Sahl ibn Sa’d al-Sa’idi is the Companion whose testimony anchors the most authoritative account of the minbar’s construction and use, preserved in Sahih Muslim 544a and its parallel at Sahih al-Bukhari 377. Sahl was a young Companion at the time — hadith scholars generally place his birth a handful of years before the Hijrah, meaning he would have been a child or young boy when the minbar was built — and he lived to a very old age, dying around 88 AH, which made him one of the last surviving Companions and a valuable living link to the earliest years of Madinan Islam for the generation that followed. His insistence, transmitted through his student Abu Hazim, that he alone among his contemporaries still knew the details of the minbar’s wood and maker, reflects the way later generations of Muslims in Madinah treated direct memory of the Prophet’s ﷺ mosque as a form of prestige and responsibility.

Jabir ibn Abdullah al-Ansari, one of the most prolific narrators of hadith among the Companions generally, supplies the fullest surviving account of the weeping trunk itself, in Sahih al-Bukhari 3584 and 449. Jabir was present in Madinah through most of the Prophet’s ﷺ mission there and became, in later life, one of the principal teachers of the following generation on matters of both hadith and jurisprudence.

Abdullah ibn Umar, son of the second caliph, supplies the version at Sahih al-Bukhari 3583, and separately the narration behind Sunan Abi Dawud 1081 concerning Tamim al-Dari’s proposal to build a minbar that could bear the Prophet’s ﷺ weight as he aged. Ibn Umar’s reputation among later hadith critics for extreme caution and precision in transmission is one reason his versions of these episodes are treated as particularly reliable anchors.

Anas ibn Malik, who served the Prophet ﷺ personally as a young attendant from the time of the Hijrah onward, contributes the third canonical version of the weeping trunk, preserved via Jabir as Sahih al-Bukhari 3585, using the vivid image of a pregnant she-camel’s groan to describe the trunk’s sound. Anas’s decades of close proximity to the Prophet’s ﷺ household make him one of the most frequently cited eyewitness narrators across the entire hadith corpus.

Ubayy ibn Ka’b, one of the Companions most closely associated with the compilation and recitation of the Qur’an, is separately credited with narrating the more dramatic bull-like version of the trunk’s cry, preserved in Musnad Ahmad 21252 and Sunan al-Darimi 36, and is also the Companion most commonly named in the tradition holding that the physical trunk was taken to his own house after its removal from the mosque, where it eventually decayed. If that tradition is accurate, Ubayy would have had a personal, decades-long custodianship of one of the most theologically significant physical objects associated with the Prophet’s ﷺ ministry — though, as discussed above, this custodianship-and-decay account is one of several competing and unresolved reports about the trunk’s fate, not an established fact.

Tamim al-Dari, a comparatively late convert to Islam who had been a Christian monk or notable in the Levant before his conversion, occupies an unusual place in this history: a Companion credited, in some traditions, with introducing to the Prophet’s ﷺ mosque a piece of furniture modelled, at least according to some accounts, on structures he had seen in churches — making him a figure through whom this guide’s readers can see the Madinan community absorbing a practical architectural idea from outside the Arabian tradition and putting it directly into the service of Islamic worship.

Abu Hurayrah, whose narrations dominate the hadith corpus more broadly, supplies the primary chain for the “garden of Paradise” hadith discussed above, preserved as Sahih Muslim 1391 and in parallel Bukhari versions, and is also a narrator behind the false-oath warning at Sunan Ibn Majah 2325. Abu Hurayrah arrived in Madinah relatively late, in the year of the Battle of Khaybar (7 AH), and was therefore not present for the minbar’s original construction some years earlier — a detail worth noting plainly, in keeping with this guide’s commitment to being explicit about which Companions were present for which events and which were not.

Among the caliphs, Abu Bakr and Umar ibn al-Khattab are both credited, in the historical rather than strictly hadith literature, with the tradition of declining to occupy the Prophet’s ﷺ own step on the minbar out of reverence for his memory, while Uthman ibn Affan is credited with breaking that pattern and explaining his reasoning directly, as set out above. Mu’awiyah ibn Abi Sufyan, ruling as caliph a generation later, is the figure associated with the minbar’s disputed height increase, and the Companions Abu Hurayrah and Jabir ibn Abdullah — the same Jabir whose earlier narration preserves the weeping-trunk episode at Sahih al-Bukhari 3584 — are credited, according to al-Tabari and Ibn Kathir, with confronting Mu’awiyah directly over his initial plan to remove the minbar from Madinah altogether.

Stories of Great Islamic Scholars

Imam al-Shafi’i (d. 204 AH / 820 CE), founder of the Shafi’i school of jurisprudence, is reported in biographical works such as Adab al-Shafi’i wa Manaqibuhu to have ranked the miracle of the weeping trunk above the Qur’anic account of Jesus reviving the dead, on the reasoning that Jesus’s miracle acted on something already living, while the trunk began as inert matter. This comparison, whatever view one takes of it, reflects how central the episode was to Shafi’i-era arguments for the evidentiary weight of the Prophet’s ﷺ miracles.

Qadi Iyad ibn Musa (d. 544 AH / 1149 CE), the Andalusian Maliki judge and hadith scholar, produced in al-Shifa bi Ta’rif Huquq al-Mustafa the single most cited scholarly discussion of the weeping trunk’s transmission, explicitly naming ten Companions as narrators and applying the term mutawatir to the episode’s overall attestation — a judgment later scholars overwhelmingly followed rather than revised.

Al-Suhayli (d. 581 AH / 1185 CE), in al-Rawd al-Anf, his extended commentary on Ibn Hisham’s biography of the Prophet ﷺ, reinforced the mutawatir classification and is one of the earliest scholars to make the specific distinction between mutawatir in wording and mutawatir in meaning as applied to this report.

Imam al-Nawawi (d. 676 AH / 1277 CE), in his commentary on Sahih Muslim, examined the various wordings of the weeping-trunk hadith side by side and confirmed the mutawatir ma’nawi classification, treating the variation in detail between narrations as consistent with, rather than a threat to, the episode’s overall reliability.

Ibn Taymiyyah (d. 728 AH / 1328 CE), in al-Jawab al-Sahih li man Baddala Din al-Masih, his lengthy polemical response to Christian theology, invoked the weeping-trunk episode as part of a broader argument for the evidentiary status of the Prophet’s ﷺ miracles, affirming the same mutawatir ma’nawi judgment reached by al-Suhayli and al-Nawawi before him.

Ibn Kathir (d. 774 AH / 1373 CE), in his Qur’anic commentary, went further than his predecessors in stating that the episode yields qat’i, or definite, certain knowledge — placing it, epistemically, in the same category as historical facts that admit no reasonable doubt.

Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani (d. 852 AH / 1449 CE), in Fath al-Bari, his monumental commentary on Sahih al-Bukhari, addressed both the weeping-trunk narrations and the separate question of the minbar’s builder, discussing the variant names attached to the carpenter and offering possible ways to reconcile them, and separately recorded the account of the minbar’s height being increased to six steps under Marwan during Mu’awiyah’s caliphate — one of the two competing figures this guide has flagged as an open disagreement above, a disagreement also summarised at IslamQA.

Nur al-Din al-Samhudi (d. 911 AH / 1506 CE), whose Wafa’ al-Wafa bi Akhbar Dar al-Mustafa remains the single most detailed classical history of Madinah and its mosque, is the primary source underlying much of the destruction-and-rebuilding narrative set out above, including the account of the 654 AH fire and the successive Mamluk-era restorations that followed it. His work is treated by later historians, including many of the modern academic sources cited in this guide’s closing section, as the essential starting point for any serious history of the mosque’s physical fabric.

Muhammad Nasir al-Din al-Albani (d. 1420 AH / 1999 CE), the twentieth-century hadith critic whose systematic re-examination of hadith chains reshaped much of modern Salafi scholarship, graded the Ubayy ibn Ka’b narration of the weeping trunk preserved in Musnad Ahmad and Sunan al-Darimi as jayyid — good, meeting the conditions Muslim applies in his own Sahih — in his multi-volume as-Silsilah as-Sahihah, extending the classical mutawatir judgment into modern hadith-critical method.

The Minbar as an Institution: Khutbah, Staff, and a Model Copied Across the Muslim World

Why a Raised Place for the Khutbah

The practical origin of the minbar, as the hadith literature presents it, was straightforwardly functional: a growing congregation needed to see and hear a speaker who was ageing and finding it more tiring to stand through a long address at ground level. But the minbar quickly became something more than a stepladder. Sahih Muslim 544a preserves the detail that the Prophet ﷺ himself explained his use of the minbar during prayer in explicitly pedagogical terms — “so that you may follow me and learn my prayer” — treating elevation as a teaching tool, a way of making his movements visible to everyone present, not a mark of status set apart from the congregation. Ahmad ibn Hanbal’s recorded discussion of the same hadith, appended within Sahih al-Bukhari 377, draws from this the specific jurisprudential principle that an imam may licitly stand at a higher level than those praying behind him — a ruling with obvious relevance to every raised minbar and every stepped imam’s platform built afterward across the Muslim world.

Over time, the minbar’s function widened beyond the khutbah itself. It became the place from which the Friday sermon was delivered, but also, in the early Islamic period, where major public announcements were made, where allegiance (bay’ah) was sometimes pledged to a new caliph, and where a ruler’s authority over a given city could be symbolically expressed — control of the minbar, in early Islamic political culture, functioned as one practical marker of who held authority to lead public prayer and, by extension, public address in a given place. This is part of why Mu’awiyah’s proposal to physically relocate the Prophet’s ﷺ own minbar to Damascus, discussed above, provoked the direct objection it did from Abu Hurayrah and Jabir ibn Abdullah: it was never simply furniture.

The Staff: Al-Asa and Al-Anaza

Alongside the minbar, the historical and hadith literature associates the Prophet ﷺ with the use of a staff or short spear-like implement while delivering sermons, variously described in the sources as an asa (staff) or anaza (a short spear or javelin with an iron point, sometimes planted in the ground in front of the speaker as a sutrah, a physical marker delineating the direction of prayer). The tradition that Mu’awiyah sought to remove not only the minbar but also “the Prophet’s ﷺ staff” from Madinah to Syria — the same episode recorded by al-Tabari and Ibn Kathir in connection with the disputed step increase — indicates that this staff, whichever specific object the sources mean by it, was regarded by the community in Madinah as inseparable, in prestige and symbolic weight, from the minbar itself. Some later minbars built elsewhere in the Muslim world, following the model set at Masjid an-Nabawi, preserved a similar convention, incorporating a staff, spear-rest, or similar fitting into their design, a detail that later khatibs (sermon-givers) sometimes held while speaking, echoing the reported Madinan practice.

How the Madinan Minbar Shaped Every Minbar That Followed

Once the Prophet ﷺ delivered sermons from a raised minbar, the pattern spread with the expansion of Islam itself, and every congregational mosque built afterward, in every region Islam reached, eventually incorporated some form of minbar as a matter of basic religious infrastructure, not architectural fashion. The oldest surviving physical minbar anywhere in the Muslim world today is not in Madinah — none of the Prophet’s ﷺ original wooden minbars survived the two mosque fires described above — but in Kairouan, in modern Tunisia, where the Great Mosque of Kairouan preserves a carved teakwood minbar dated to the ninth century CE, roughly two centuries after the Prophet’s ﷺ death, making it the earliest minbar to survive to the present day anywhere in the Islamic world. Its survival, and its clear formal debt to the Madinan model of a stepped, staircase-like speaking platform facing the congregation, illustrates how quickly and how far the basic Madinan template travelled: from a slave-carpenter’s modest tamarisk platform in a small Arabian mosque to a design vocabulary repeated, with regional variation in material and ornament, in congregational mosques across North Africa, the Levant, Anatolia, Persia, the Indian subcontinent, and beyond. In every one of those later buildings, the minbar occupies functionally the same relative position it occupies in Masjid an-Nabawi: beside or near the mihrab, on the qibla wall, raised above the congregation, reserved for the Friday khutbah — a layout convention traceable, in the last analysis, to the specific arrangement Sahl ibn Sa’d described from personal memory in Madinah in the first decade of Islam.

Spiritual Reflection

Stand, if you are able to during your own visit, somewhere within sight of the minbar, and consider what you are actually looking at. It is not, strictly speaking, an ancient object — the marble in front of you dates to the sixteenth century, not the seventh, and the wood the Prophet ﷺ himself stood on did not survive even a few centuries. What you are looking at is a place that has never, in fourteen hundred years, gone without a minbar standing on it. Fires destroyed it twice. Caliphs argued over its height. Sultans a thousand miles away in Baghdad, Cairo, and Istanbul each took it as their responsibility, in turn, to replace what had burned. That continuity — not the specific marble, not the specific wood — is what has actually endured, and it is worth letting that distinction settle rather than rushing past it in search of an object to photograph.

Consider, too, the trunk. However you weigh the competing reports of what became of it afterward, the core report — that a piece of wood grieved, audibly, when a source of remembrance of God was withdrawn from beside it — is asking something specific of you as a listener. If a palm trunk could feel loss at losing proximity to dhikr, what does that suggest about a soul built with far greater capacity for closeness to its Creator, and how does it sit with you that many hearts, unlike that trunk, do not visibly ache when they drift from remembrance? The Companions who heard the sound did not treat it as a curiosity. Multiple, independent chains of transmission — Bukhari 3583, 3584, 3585, and Ahmad 21252 among them — preserve their evident astonishment, their careful attention to exactly what they heard and exactly what the Prophet ﷺ did in response. You are not asked to manufacture the same astonishment on command. You are asked, standing near the ground that trunk once occupied, to notice what your own heart does and does not respond to, and to ask God, honestly, for a share of the sensitivity that piece of wood apparently had.

There is also something to sit with in the minbar’s ordinary function, easy to overlook amid its miracle stories and its royal patrons: it was, first and always, a place for teaching. The Prophet ﷺ used it to demonstrate prayer, not merely to describe it. Whatever your own posture toward learning — whether you come to Madinah already deeply versed in the tradition or as someone encountering much of this history for the first time — the minbar’s own history argues for learning by watching closely, by standing where you can actually see, and by valuing a teacher’s visible example over a merely verbal instruction. Ask God, as you stand near this place, for the humility to keep learning in that same posture, and for a portion of the reverence the earliest generation of Muslims in Madinah clearly held for the exact spot their Prophet ﷺ once stood to speak to them.

Practical Visitor Guide: Seeing the Minbar in July 2026

Where It Stands, and What You Will Actually See

The minbar occupies the western edge of Riyad al-Jannah, the small green-and-white carpeted rectangle inside the oldest section of Masjid an-Nabawi, with the screened chamber of the Prophet’s ﷺ grave marking the rectangle’s eastern edge roughly twenty-two metres away. The Ottoman-era Mihrab Nabawi sits immediately beside the minbar within this same compact zone. You will recognise Riyad al-Jannah by its distinct carpet, historically green against the red used elsewhere in the mosque, though in recent years much of the wider mosque has itself been recarpeted in green, making the Rawdah’s white-bordered green-and-gold pattern the more reliable visual marker today. The minbar itself is fenced and barriered; it is not open to touch, and visitors are not permitted to approach or climb it. It is, however, clearly visible from the edges of Riyad al-Jannah and from the side aisles near the khutbah area during quieter periods, and it remains, according to multiple visitor accounts, the largest single object within the Rawdah’s boundaries, difficult to miss even amid heavy crowds.

The Nusuk Permit System for Riyad al-Jannah

As of July 2026, entry to pray inside Riyad al-Jannah — the area where the minbar stands — requires a free digital permit booked in advance through the official Nusuk app, administered by the General Authority for the Care of the Affairs of the Two Holy Mosques, a system described in detail in The Hajj Guide’s 2026 Rawdah permit explainer. No walk-in access is permitted; every visitor must present a valid QR code at the entrance, and each permit is tied to an individual identity rather than issued for a group. According to the most current available guidance, booking slots typically open seven to ten days in advance, often on Friday afternoons at noon Saudi time, and fill quickly given the limited capacity of the space. Current reporting also indicates a general limit of one Rawdah permit per visitor within any 365-day period, though pilgrims should treat all such rules as subject to change and verify current terms directly within the app before travelling, since access policies for this specific area have been revised more than once in recent years as visitor numbers have grown.

Men’s entry windows have most recently been reported, per the same 2026 permit guidance, as early morning, broadly between 7:00 and 10:00 AM, and again after the Isha prayer until around midnight, with men typically directed to enter via Gate 37. Women’s entry windows have most recently been reported as late morning, broadly between 9:00 and 11:00 AM, and again after Isha, with women typically directed to enter via Gate 25 (Bab Uthman ibn Affan). These specific hours have shifted over past years and should be confirmed inside the Nusuk app close to your travel dates rather than assumed from any single published source, including this one. Visitors are generally allotted a short window inside Riyad al-Jannah itself — commonly cited as around ten minutes, per practical guidance summarised at Hajj Umrah Planner — enough time for two units of voluntary prayer and brief supplication, and stewards actively manage the flow of people through the space to allow subsequent groups their own turn.

Crowd Timing and Practical Advice

Demand for entry into Riyad al-Jannah consistently exceeds the space’s physical capacity, particularly during Umrah season generally and especially during Ramadan, when the disparity between demand and available slots is at its most extreme. Pilgrims who have visited recently consistently report that the calmer windows tend to fall outside the standard congregational prayer times and outside Thursday-night-into-Friday periods, when Madinah’s population of visitors swells sharply. If your schedule allows flexibility, booking a slot for the very early morning hours, well before Fajr congregational prayer, or late at night after Isha, tends to correspond to comparatively lower demand than mid-morning or evening slots, though this varies by season and cannot be guaranteed. Arrive at the mosque courtyard well ahead of your booked slot, since queuing and security screening take time, and be prepared for the possibility that your allotted window may run later than scheduled if the mosque is unusually full that day.

What Women’s Access Looks Like

Women visiting Riyad al-Jannah and, by extension, the area around the minbar, use a separate booking category within the Nusuk app, a separate designated entrance (most recently reported as Gate 25, Bab Uthman ibn Affan), and a distinct daily time window from the one allocated to men, generally concentrated in the late morning and again after Isha. Women are not permitted to enter during the windows designated for men, and mixed-gender access to the space at the same time is not part of the current system; the separation is managed at the level of scheduling and entry points rather than by a physical partition within Riyad al-Jannah itself. As with the men’s timings, women should treat the specific hours cited in this guide as indicative rather than fixed, and confirm current details directly within the Nusuk app before their visit, since the precise windows have been adjusted more than once in recent years in response to changing visitor volumes.

Etiquette, Photography, and Common Mistakes

Because the minbar sits within Riyad al-Jannah, the etiquette that applies to the wider Rawdah applies equally to your time near it: keep voluntary prayers and supplication brief so that others waiting behind you have their own opportunity, avoid loud conversation, and do not attempt to linger at the barrier around the minbar itself in the hope of touching it, which is not permitted and is addressed directly in the misconceptions section below, in line with the position summarised at IslamLand’s fatwa on the subject. Security staff in recent years have increasingly discouraged photography inside Riyad al-Jannah, both to keep the flow of visitors moving and out of consideration for the concentration required for sincere worship in a small, crowded space; if you do wish to photograph the minbar, doing so from the wider mosque outside the Rawdah’s restricted entry points, where such restrictions are generally more relaxed, is the more reliable option. Visitors bringing children should be aware that the crowding inside Riyad al-Jannah at peak times can be intense and disorienting for a young child, and some pilgrims choose to visit with children specifically during the quieter windows described above, or to leave young children with another family member during their own turn inside the barrier. A common mistake worth naming directly: some visitors assume they can simply queue at the entrance to Riyad al-Jannah without a Nusuk booking; as of July 2026 this is not the case, and arriving without a valid permit will result in being turned away regardless of how long you have waited.

Common Misconceptions

Seeking Barakah by Touching the Minbar or Its Surrounds

Because the minbar is inside Masjid an-Nabawi itself, visiting it does not raise the same legitimacy question this guide addresses for sites outside the small list of locations with an established sunnah basis for intentional devotional visitation — the Prophet’s ﷺ grave, the graves of Abu Bakr and Umar, al-Baqi, the martyrs of Uhud, and the Mosque of Quba, alongside Masjid an-Nabawi itself, as set out in the widely cited fatwa collected on IslamQA. The minbar sits inside a mosque a pilgrim is already there, legitimately, to pray in, a point the same IslamQA discussion makes explicitly. The misconception this guide needs to address instead concerns something visitors do once they are standing near it: reaching out to touch, rub, or press against the minbar, its railing, or the surrounding fixtures of Riyad al-Jannah, in the hope of drawing barakah (blessing) from physical contact.

A body of fatwa material from contemporary Saudi scholarship treats this practice as an unwarranted innovation. A representative statement, discussed in a fatwa compiled by IslamLand, distinguishes between two categories of tabarruk (seeking blessing): seeking blessing from things that had direct contact with the Prophet’s ﷺ own body during his lifetime — his ablution water, his sweat, his hair, his clothing — which the Companions are recorded doing and which the Prophet ﷺ himself is reported to have permitted or tolerated; and seeking blessing from the physical fabric of a building associated with him today — its doors, its walls, its windows, or, by direct extension, its minbar — which this position holds has no comparable basis in the practice of the earliest generation. On this view, acts of worship are tawqifi, meaning they must be established by revealed instruction rather than devised through personal reasoning or sentiment, and no revealed instruction establishes touching the minbar, its railing, or the walls of the Rawdah as a means of drawing blessing, a position set out at length in the IslamLand fatwa cited above.

Shaykh Muhammad ibn Salih al-Uthaymeen (d. 1421 AH / 2001 CE), one of the most widely read Saudi jurists of the twentieth century, addressed a closely related practice directly in his work on innovations, al-Bid’ wal-Muhdathat wa ma la Asla lahu: commenting on visitors who circle the Prophet’s ﷺ burial chamber and touch, kiss, or press their cheeks against its grille and walls, he described the practice as a detestable innovation (bid’ah mustaqbahah), stating that it “does not increase a person in anything except distancing himself from Allah.” The Permanent Committee for Islamic Research and Ifta (commonly called the Standing Committee) in Saudi Arabia has issued fatwas taking a consistent position on the wider category of touching or rubbing stones, trees, railings, or structural fixtures at religious sites in search of blessing, treating the practice as lacking basis in revealed text and as a potential gateway to more serious theological error if left unaddressed.

This is a position, not a universally shared consensus, and this guide names it as such rather than presenting it as the only view within the wider Muslim tradition. Sufi and other traditionalist scholars have historically held, and in various communities continue to hold, a broader conception of tabarruk that extends the Companions’ recorded practice of seeking blessing from objects and places connected to the Prophet ﷺ by analogy to later sites, relics, and structures associated with him or with the righteous more generally — a position academic surveys of the debate describe as a genuine and long-running disagreement between Salafi-oriented scholarship, which generally restricts tabarruk narrowly to what is textually established, and more traditionalist or Sufi-oriented scholarship, which allows a wider scope for it grounded in analogy and continuous practice. This guide does not adjudicate between these positions. What it reports plainly is that if you visit the minbar and feel the impulse to reach out and touch it, you should know in advance that doing so sits within a live and unresolved scholarly disagreement, that a significant and influential body of contemporary Saudi scholarship — including Ibn Uthaymeen and the Standing Committee — holds the practice to be an unwarranted innovation without basis in revealed text, and that the physical barriers placed around the minbar today are consistent with, and likely reflect, that same official position being put into practice at the site itself.

The Minbar Is Not the Original Object

A separate, more straightforwardly factual misconception worth correcting: some visitors assume, understandably, that the marble minbar standing in Masjid an-Nabawi today is in some sense the same minbar the Prophet ﷺ stood on, simply restored or refurbished over time. It is not. As set out in detail above, the original tamarisk minbar did not survive either of the two major mosque fires that struck Masjid an-Nabawi, in 654 AH and 886 AH, and every minbar that has stood in the mosque since the second fire — Qaytbay’s marble minbar of 888 AH, followed by Sultan Murad III’s marble minbar of 998 AH, which remains in place today — is a later royal replacement built after the original was lost, not a repaired or renovated version of the Prophet’s ﷺ own furniture.

The Weeping Trunk Is Sometimes Presented as Weaker Than It Is

A less common but occasionally encountered misconception runs in the opposite direction from most weak-narration errors covered elsewhere in this guide: rather than a weak story being treated as stronger than it is, the weeping-trunk episode is sometimes dismissed by unfamiliar readers, on first encountering it, as a folkloric legend comparable to less well-attested miracle stories that circulate more loosely in popular preaching. As set out in detail in the Hadith References section above, this dismissal does not match the actual state of the sources: the core episode is preserved across multiple sound chains in more than one of the six canonical hadith collections, independently narrated by numerous named Companions, and classified by a long line of major scholars — from Qadi Iyad in the sixth Islamic century through Ibn Taymiyyah and Ibn Kathir in the eighth — as mutawatir ma’nawi, among the strongest attestation categories the hadith sciences recognise. It is, in short, one of the better-attested miracle reports in the entire Seerah, not a marginal or folkloric one, even though the later stories about what became of the trunk afterward are, by contrast, genuinely weaker and less settled.

Lesser-Known Facts

• The single most authoritative hadith on the minbar’s own construction, Sahih Muslim 544a, does not actually preserve the name of the carpenter who built it — Sahl ibn Sa’d names him only as “so-and-so, freedman of so-and-so,” despite insisting he personally knew exactly who the man was.
• At least six distinct names circulate in the wider historical literature for the minbar’s builder — Baqum or Baqul, Tamim al-Dari, Kilab or Sabah, Maymun, and Qabisah al-Makhzumi — and no single name commands anything close to scholarly consensus.
• The Mu’tazili theologian Qadi Abd al-Jabbar is recorded arguing in apparently different directions on whether the weeping trunk should count as the kind of proof that establishes prophethood, illustrating that even a report later called mutawatir was not free of genuine theological debate about how such reports should be classified.
• Imam al-Shafi’i reportedly ranked the weeping-trunk miracle above the Qur’anic account of Jesus reviving the dead, on the grounds that the trunk began as inanimate matter while Jesus’s miracle acted on something already alive.
• The exact number of steps added to the minbar by Mu’awiyah, or by his governor Marwan acting in his name, is disputed even among classical sources: al-Tabari’s account implies a total of eight steps, Ibn Hajar’s Fath al-Bari describes six, and other summaries cite nine — a genuine three-way disagreement this guide leaves open rather than resolving.
• Sultan Qaytbay’s fifteenth-century marble minbar, displaced from Masjid an-Nabawi when Sultan Murad III’s minbar was installed in 998 AH, was not discarded but relocated to the Mosque of Quba, roughly five kilometres away, where it is reported to have remained.
• The oldest surviving physical minbar anywhere in the Islamic world is not in Madinah at all, but in the Great Mosque of Kairouan in modern Tunisia, a ninth-century carved teakwood structure predating any minbar currently standing in Masjid an-Nabawi by many centuries.
• The pillar known today as the Hannana, marking the approximate site of the weeping trunk, carries a second name, al-Mukhallaqah (“the perfumed one”), from a separate tradition that the Prophet ﷺ had the spot scented — a detail sometimes confused with, but historically distinct from, the trunk episode itself.
• The green conical dome atop today’s minbar and the much larger Green Dome over the Prophet’s ﷺ tomb are separate Ottoman-era structures from different centuries — the minbar’s dome dates to Murad III’s 998 AH commission, while the tomb’s Green Dome was not built, or painted green, until the nineteenth century under Sultan Mahmud II.

Timeline

• Before the minbar (622 CE onward, early years AH): The Prophet ﷺ delivers sermons standing beside a palm-trunk pillar inside the newly built mosque in Madinah.
• Year uncertain, within the Prophet’s ﷺ lifetime: A minbar of three steps is built at the Prophet’s ﷺ request, made from tamarisk wood of al-Ghabah, by a carpenter the sources name variously as Baqum, a slave of an Ansari woman, or credit to a proposal by Tamim al-Dari. The palm trunk the Prophet ﷺ had stood beside cries out audibly when he uses the new minbar instead, an episode witnessed by the congregation and preserved through numerous independent chains, per Sahih al-Bukhari 3583, 3584, and 3585.
• 11 AH / 632 CE onward, Rashidun period: Abu Bakr and Umar reportedly decline to occupy the Prophet’s ﷺ own step on the minbar out of reverence; Uthman later breaks this pattern and explains his reasoning.
• Mid-first century AH, during Mu’awiyah’s caliphate (r. 41–60 AH / 661–680 CE): Mu’awiyah proposes relocating the minbar to Damascus, is dissuaded by Abu Hurayrah and Jabir ibn Abdullah, and instead has its height increased — by a disputed number of steps, variously reported as six, eight, or nine in total.
• 1 Ramadan 654 AH / 28 September 1256 CE: A fire, caused by an unattended lamp in a storeroom, destroys the mosque’s roof, most of its columns, and the minbar entirely.
• 655–658 AH / 1257–1260 CE: Multiple rulers, including the Abbasid caliph al-Musta’sim Billah, the Yemeni ruler al-Malik al-Muzaffar Shams al-Din, and Mamluk-era sultans in Egypt, contribute materials and, in the Yemeni case, a replacement minbar, in the years immediately following the fire.
• 668 AH / 1269–70 CE: Sultan al-Zahir Baybars undertakes a comprehensive restoration of the mosque, reportedly including a minbar of his own provision, though its exact relationship to the earlier Yemeni minbar is unclear in the sources.
• 13 Ramadan 886 AH / 14 November 1481 CE: A second major fire, caused by a lightning strike on the minaret, destroys most of the mosque a second time; local residents build a temporary brick-and-plaster minbar in the immediate aftermath.
• 888 AH / 1483 CE: Sultan al-Ashraf Qaytbay’s marble minbar is installed, replacing the temporary structure, as part of a broader renovation begun in 881 AH and completed in stages through 891 AH.
• 998 AH / 1589–90 CE: Sultan Murad III’s marble minbar, made and ornamented in Istanbul, is installed in Masjid an-Nabawi, and Qaytbay’s minbar is relocated to the Mosque of Quba. Murad III’s minbar remains in place in Masjid an-Nabawi today.
• 2020s–2026: Access to Riyad al-Jannah, where the minbar stands, is managed through the Nusuk digital permit system, with separate booking categories, entrances, and time windows for men and women.

Key Lessons

Historical

The minbar’s fourteen-century history is a history of loss and replacement rather than survival: the original tamarisk platform did not endure, nor did the minbar Qaytbay commissioned to replace the second fire’s damage, at least not in Madinah. What has endured is a location and an institutional insistence, renewed by caliphs, sultans, and governments across four different dynasties, that this particular spot must always hold a minbar. Reading the minbar’s history — traceable from Sahih Muslim 544a through the Mamluk and Ottoman replacements — teaches a wider lesson about Islamic sacred architecture generally: continuity of function and place has mattered more, across the tradition, than continuity of the physical object itself.

Spiritual

The weeping trunk’s best-attested lesson is not really about the trunk. It is about what it means for a created thing, right down to a piece of wood, to register loss when cut off from remembrance of God, and what that implies about hearts that do not register the same loss. The mutawatir-level attestation behind the episode — Bukhari 3583, 3584, 3585, and the additional chains at Ahmad 21252 and Darimi 36 — exists, in the assessment of the scholars who examined it across many centuries, precisely so that this lesson could not be waved away as a single narrator’s embellishment.

Personal

Sahl ibn Sa’d’s insistence that he alone still remembered the details of the minbar’s construction, transmitted faithfully by his student decades later even though the carpenter’s actual name did not survive the transmission, is a small but pointed reminder that personal memory of sacred events is worth preserving carefully and precisely, even when some details will inevitably be lost regardless of how careful the effort. What survived is what mattered enough to insist on transmitting exactly; what did not survive simply was not held with the same insistence.

Practical

Visiting the minbar in 2026 means working within a permit system, fixed time windows, and physical barriers that did not exist for pilgrims a generation ago. None of that changes what the site itself represents; it changes how much patience and advance planning a visitor needs to bring in order to stand near it. Booking a Nusuk slot well in advance, choosing off-peak windows where your schedule allows, and treating the ten minutes or so you may be given inside Riyad al-Jannah as sufficient rather than as too brief, are the practical disciplines this guide’s research points to most consistently.

Authentic Sources

Primary Islamic Sources

The hadith collections cited throughout this guide — Sahih al-Bukhari, Sahih Muslim, Musnad Ahmad, Sunan al-Darimi, Sunan Ibn Majah, and Sunan Abi Dawud — are treated here as the primary textual basis for the events described, each cited by collection and number, with links to sunnah.com provided wherever the specific hadith number could be directly verified. Early historical and biographical works, including al-Samhudi’s Wafa’ al-Wafa, al-Tabari’s History, Ibn Kathir’s al-Bidayah wa’l-Nihayah, and Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani’s Fath al-Bari, supply the detail behind the minbar’s later architectural and political history. Readers should approach the historical (as opposed to hadith) material transmitted through early narrators and historians such as Ibn Ishaq, al-Waqidi, and al-Tabari with the caution these sources themselves generally receive within the Islamic historical sciences: all three preserve valuable material unavailable elsewhere, and all three also transmit reports of varying and sometimes weak reliability, without always making that variation explicit, so their accounts of specific dates, patrons, and step-counts in this guide are presented as historical reports rather than as hadith-grade authenticated fact.

Classical Scholars

Qadi Iyad’s al-Shifa bi Ta’rif Huquq al-Mustafa; al-Suhayli’s al-Rawd al-Anf; al-Nawawi’s commentary on Sahih Muslim; Ibn Taymiyyah’s al-Jawab al-Sahih li man Baddala Din al-Masih; Ibn Kathir’s Qur’anic commentary and his section on the Umayyad caliphate in al-Bidayah wa’l-Nihayah; Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani’s Fath al-Bari; and al-Samhudi’s Wafa’ al-Wafa together form the classical scholarly backbone of this guide’s treatment of both the weeping-trunk hadith’s authenticity and the minbar’s architectural and political history across the Rashidun, Umayyad, and Mamluk periods.

Modern Academic and Reference Sources

This guide has also drawn on a range of contemporary reference and fatwa material to verify current practical detail and to represent live scholarly disagreement fairly, including IslamQA’s discussion of sunnah-sanctioned ziyarah sites, IslamQA’s discussion of the minbar’s original three-step design and later alterations, IslamLand’s fatwa on seeking blessing from relics and mosque fixtures, and the architectural documentation compiled by Madain Project’s entry on the Minbar Nabawi and its companion entry on Riyad al-Jannah. Current practical guidance on the Nusuk permit system was drawn from The Hajj Guide’s 2026 report on Rawdah permit rules and from Hajj and Umrah Planner’s guide to the Rawdah.

A Note on Method

This guide has tried, throughout, to separate three distinct categories of claim: hadith preserved in the canonical collections and graded according to established hadith-critical method; historical reports transmitted by early Muslim historians whose reliability varies report by report; and contemporary practical information about visiting the site today, which is itself subject to change without notice by the Saudi authorities responsible for managing the mosque. Where sources genuinely disagree — on the minbar’s builder, on the exact number of steps Mu’awiyah added, on the fate of the weeping trunk, and on the permissibility of seeking blessing by touching the minbar’s surrounds — this guide has tried to name every position and its holders rather than silently choosing one, in keeping with the state of the underlying scholarship itself. Where no reliable information exists at all, as with archaeological findings specific to the minbar, this guide has said so directly rather than filling the gap with speculation.