illustrious men, and at how their resting-places have slipped from the sight of chroniclers and recorders of antiquities, despite the lofty rank of those interred there and the fame that has filled every horizon and every soul with veneration for their stature and acknowledgment of the merit of their precedence in faith and their propagation of the Qur’an’s message.

Indeed, the very least that occurs to a reflective reader is that the graves of such men should have been precisely identified, with towering domes upheld by columns erected over them—if not out of esteem for their well-known piety, god-fearingness, sincerity of faith, and companionship of the Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, then for the monumental deeds they accomplished, deeds at which even the greatest of men would falter. How, then, could their graves have vanished from the historians’ view? How were the tombs that contain the foremost Companions and Successors effaced, so that the masters of biography dispute their very locations and nearly every trace of them has been erased, save what was later discerned through conjecture and surmise and then made visible by building over it—despite the observable practice among Muslims of lavishing care on the graves of the deceased to an extent that reaches