—you are still within the Haram.
B. The incident of Saʿd ibn Abī Waqqāṣ, when he took the belongings of the man he found cutting a tree in al-ʿAqīq. Al-ʿAqīq is not a lava plain; it is a valley cut off from the western lava field and lies even farther from Medina than that field. Yet its upper section faces Mount ʿAyr from the north-west.
C. The ḥadīth that declares unlawful what lies between its two lava fields and its jām, and the three jamarāt are well known; they lie beyond al-ʿAqīq and beyond the western lava field, as can be plainly seen.
D. The western lava field begins at Bāb al-ʿAnbariyyah and stretches westward, while the eastern lava field begins about two hundred meters past the end of Abū Dharr Street on the airport road. If we were not to count the two lava fields as part of the Haram, a large number of Medina’s houses would fall outside it—something none of the scholars whose statements we have reviewed has ever asserted.
E. The scholars describe the sanctuary’s extent as one barīd by one barīd, citing the reports that mention this measure. That distance can only be applied if both lava fields are included, because they are close to the Haram, whereas the two mountains are extremely distant when compared with the nearness of the two lava plains.
Accordingly, the committee measured the area from four directions: from the Mosque to ʿAyr in the south; from the Mosque to Thawr in the north; from the Mosque to the western lava field at the point aligned with ʿAyr in the west; and from the Mosque to the eastern lava field at the point aligned with Thawr in the east. In every case the distance was nearly the same—about eleven kilometres according to the car’s odometer, even though the vehicle could not travel in a straight line and had to veer right and left along the easiest route. This nonetheless provides an approximate sense of the distance on all four sides, and it is close to the twelve miles mentioned in the ḥadīth of Abū Hurayrah ﵁ recorded by Muslim: “The Messenger of Allah ﷺ declared inviolable what lies between the two lava plains of Medina and established a reserve of twelve miles around the city.” This is one of the proofs cited by those who say the Haram measures a barīd by a barīd, because a barīd