There is no spot on this earth more honored than the patch of ground we are about to stand beside. It is a grave, and it is a home, and for fourteen centuries it has been the place a believer's heart turns toward after the Kaaba itself. Today, near the very end of our hundred-day walk with him ﷺ, Dr. Yasir Qadhi does something he has never quite done before: he takes us inside the house, shows us the bed, and then tells us what happened to that bed, and to the body laid to rest in it, across the long centuries that followed.
It is a strange and beautiful way to say goodbye. Not with a battle or a sermon, but with a room: ten feet by twelve, a roof of palm leaves that let the rain in, and inside it the most beloved human being who ever lived.
A house you could touch the walls of
إِنَّ الَّذِينَ يُنَادُونَكَ مِن وَرَاءِ الْحُجُرَاتِ أَكْثَرُهُمْ لَا يَعْقِلُونَ
“Indeed, those who call you, [O Muḥammad], from behind the chambers, most of them do not use reason.”
Surah al-Hujurat 49:4 Read 49:4 with tafsir
When the Prophet ﷺ came to Madinah, he built his mosque, and against its back wall he built homes for his family: small chambers of unbaked clay, one for Sawda, one for Aisha, and as the years passed, more for the rest of the mothers of the believers, with the house he gave his daughter Fatima and Ali close beside them. When the qibla was later turned, the houses that had stood behind the mosque now stood in front of it. Only Aisha's chamber opened directly into the mosque itself, its doorway shared with the house of Allah.
Do not picture anything grand. The Sheikh asks you to measure it honestly: the room was about three by three and a half meters, ten feet by twelve. That is the size of a rug you would roll out in a living room, and inside that single room was the sleeping, the cooking, the storing, the whole of a life. The roof was woven palm leaves, never sealed, so the rain came through and the bitter desert cold came through, and the man Allah had honored above all creation was not sheltered from either. A solid roof was only built over those houses after he ﷺ had died.
Around the chambers there seems to have been a low clay wall, a barrier for the privacy of his wives, and it is to this that Allah points when He speaks of those who would rudely call out to the Prophet ﷺ from behind the apartments. The wall let him move from one wife's house to the next without stepping out among strangers. There is even a gentle dispute among scholars, the Sheikh notes, over whether a narrow alleyway ran between Aisha's wall and the mosque or whether the two walls were one. He calls it what it is: a trivial question, pleasant to wonder about, impossible to settle, and Allah knows best.
Buried where he slept
The bed was a mattress stuffed with the fibers of date palm, resting on a frame of stripped branches, set against the wall that the mosque shared. There was no kitchen, no second room, no plumbing; a small chamber pot served at night, and for the rest they walked out beyond the city every two or three days, eating so little that they needed no more. This is the house the Sheikh wants burned into your memory before he tells you what came next.
When the Prophet ﷺ passed away, the companions were unsure where to lay him, until Abu Bakr radiyallahu anhu remembered that the Prophet ﷺ had told him every prophet is buried where he dies. So his bed was lifted, and they dug his grave in that very spot, in the floor of Aisha's chamber. They dug it as a lahd: a shaft down, then a niche cut into the side toward the qibla, the body laid into the niche, the opening sealed with bricks so that no earth would fall upon him. The majority of scholars hold the lahd to be the sunnah, and one of their proofs is simply this, that Allah would have chosen only the best for His Prophet ﷺ. He was not undressed; over his garments they placed three white cloths, and they laid him down.
The woman who lived beside the graves
Aisha radiyallahu anha went on living in her own house, with the grave of her husband ﷺ resting in one part of it. When her father Abu Bakr died, he asked to be buried beside his companion, and she gave the space gladly; now there were two graves in her home, and she lived on beside them for years.
Then Omar radiyallahu anhu was stabbed, and knowing he was dying, he sent his son Abdullah with a message framed with breathtaking humility: tell Aisha that Omar, not the caliph, but a man named Omar, asks permission to be buried with his two companions. If she hesitates at all, said Omar, leave, and do not press her; it is her house and her right. She had been keeping that last space for herself, and she gave it away without a pause: I will prefer him over my own self. So a third grave was opened in her room, and now Aisha hung a curtain and lived in the small space that remained.
Sit with what the Sheikh lingers on here, because it moved him visibly. For roughly twelve years this woman ate and slept and prayed in a single room while, just on the other side of a curtain, lay the graves of her husband the Messenger of Allah ﷺ and her own father. When she herself was dying, far later, in the time of Muawiyah, she asked not to be buried there but among the other wives of the Prophet ﷺ in al-Baqi. Perhaps out of deference to Omar, perhaps because she felt it more fitting to rest with the women; we are not told, and the Sheikh does not guess for her.
Walls raised over the chamber
For ninety years the houses simply stood there, empty after the wives had passed, tended by the family of the Prophet ﷺ. Then the caliph al-Walid ibn Abd al-Malik resolved to expand the mosque in all four directions, and that meant absorbing the chambers of the mothers of the believers into it. Why he insisted on this, the Sheikh weighs carefully and refuses to flatten. One reading is that he was simply a ruler doing what rulers do, leaving his mark with a magnificent mosque and caring little for what stood in the way. The other reading, which the Sheikh says he finds the more persuasive, is political: the family of the Prophet ﷺ was deeply loved, and Ali ibn Husayn, that gentle survivor of Karbala, would sit and even teach in his ancestor's house, which opened onto the mosque. To a nervous throne, the simplest answer was to remove the house. The Sheikh names this plainly as the corrupting pull of power, and asks Allah to protect us all from ever sitting in such a seat.
A great scholar of Madinah objected, Saeed ibn al-Musayyib among them. But notice precisely why, because the Sheikh corrects a common misreading: Saeed did not object on some theological ground about graves inside a mosque. He objected because he wanted the people to keep seeing the rough, bare simplicity of the Prophet's ﷺ houses, so that their hearts would stay soft. Within ninety years, civilization had already come to Madinah: two-story homes, fine fabric, money flowing in from conquered empires. Saeed wanted a living reminder of how the Messenger of Allah ﷺ had actually lived, and the ruler did not care to keep it.
So the chambers were demolished, all but Aisha's. Around her grave-chamber they raised a solid structure of thick black blocks, the same stone the Kaaba is built from, with no door at all. And as they worked, a workman cried out in fright: two feet were protruding from the wall, fresh after ninety years, and they feared these were the feet of the Prophet ﷺ himself. A scholar of the family was called, and he reassured them: these are the feet of our grandfather Omar. They covered them and built on.
The pentagon, the thefts, and the fires
It was Omar ibn Abd al-Aziz, then the young governor of Madinah, who oversaw the building, and the structure he raised around the chamber was a pentagon, five-sided on purpose. The scholars give two reasons: so that no one would face it in prayer as though it were a qibla, and so that no newcomer to Islam would mistake a black cube in Madinah for a second Kaaba. That pentagon would stand for some five hundred years, and to this day no one has entered the innermost chamber it guards.
The books then carry stories of attempts to steal the body of the Prophet ﷺ. The most famous tells of two men posing as devout worshippers near the chamber, secretly digging a tunnel toward it, until the ruler Nur al-Din Zangi, warned in a dream, rode to Madinah, found them out, and poured molten lead around the grave to seal it. The Sheikh tells the story and then, honestly, sets it down: he has researched it and cannot believe it. The earliest reference appears more than two centuries after the supposed event, and a man responsible for the sanctuary today told him plainly there is no such lead barrier around the grave. He treats it as a later invention to glorify a beloved figure, and Allah knows best. Two fires, however, are certain. In 654 after the Hijra a lamp-keeper's oil caught a curtain and the whole mosque burned, the very year Baghdad fell to the Mongols, so no answer ever came from a caliph who was about to lose his life. The mosque was rebuilt around the chamber out of sheer reverence, no one daring to disturb what had fallen inside. A second great fire came in 886, when lightning struck the minaret on a stormy night and the mosque burned again.
The green dome and the grille
Out of those rebuildings came the shapes a visitor sees today. After the first fire, the sultan Baybars raised a square wall around the chamber and, for the first time in the history of Islam, a dome over the grave; there had never been one before. After the second fire, the great scholar al-Samhudi was sent into the inner chambers to clean and restore them, the first human in some five centuries to enter, and the last for the centuries since. He wrote of it in trembling first-person: he stepped only to the rear threshold, would go no further out of awe, and caught a fragrance unlike anything he had ever known. He stood as long as he could, sending salam upon the best of the prophets ﷺ and his two companions, and made all the dua he could. He found the graves settled almost flat, a little reddish gravel upon them, the earth still moist as if freshly dug. From his time the wooden enclosure became the metal lattice, the green grille, that pilgrims see to this day, six hundred years old.
And the dome itself: Baybars's wooden dome was rebuilt in solid form by later sultans, and for most of its life it was not green at all. It was bare metal, then blue, then white. Only around 1837, in the reign of Sultan Mahmud, was it painted green for the first time. The famous green dome of Madinah, the Sheikh reminds us, is barely a century and a half old, and there is no religious meaning to the color itself. A curtain hung around the grave, a custom begun in early Abbasid times and never stopped, and the cloth that covers it is woven in the same Makkah workshop that weaves the cover of the Kaaba, changed once in ten years.
Where we stand and give salam
So when you finally come, and may Allah let every one of us come, here is what is real and what is imagined. From outside the grille you give your salam: peace to the Messenger of Allah ﷺ, then to Abu Bakr beside him, then to Omar. You stand perhaps ten feet from him ﷺ. Through the lattice you will see only the curtain; there is no house to see, no graves to glimpse. Anyone who claims to have seen more, the Sheikh says firmly, is imagining it. No one enters the innermost chamber. There are no keys to it, and no one should ever try.
Keep the adab the companions kept. The body of the Prophet ﷺ was left exactly where he died, out of the utmost respect, and that reverence is the inheritance every generation has guarded, through fire and flood and the schemes of kings. You do not need to touch a wall or peer through a grille to be near him. You were near him from the first day of this journey, every time his name crossed your lips and you sent your salawat after it.
We began this seerah, a hundred days ago, with a question: who is he ﷺ? We end it standing quietly outside a small room in Madinah, having walked his whole life, and the answer is no longer a list of his specialities. It is love. So send your salam the way al-Samhudi sent his, the way his ummah has always sent it, and carry him with you out of these hundred days and into the rest of your life.