prayers offered in any other mosque—except for the Sacred Mosque—as is authentically reported from him, ﷺ? It is also known that he made this statement before he was buried in the Noble Chamber and before that chamber was incorporated into the Prophet’s Mosque. Does the mere presence of the blessed grave there today oblige us to claim that the excellence of praying in the mosque derives from the grave itself? Certainly not; only uninformed laypeople would say such a thing. In the same way, the merit attached to praying near the grave of Ishmael or any other grave does not arise because of the graves. How could that be, when he, ﷺ, forbade turning graves into places of worship and cursed those who do so? All of this is said while granting, for argument’s sake, that those graves are actually located there—something the hadith scholars do not confirm.

Shaykh ʿAlī al-Qārī states in al-Mawḍūʿāt: “The eminent scholar Shaykh Muḥammad ibn al-Jazarī said: ‘It is not sound to identify the grave of any prophet other than our Prophet, ﷺ. Yes, our master Abraham, peace be upon him, was in that region, but not in that exact spot.’ ” End quote.

I (the author) say: Shaykh al-Islām reports the same idea in al-Iqtiḍāʾ from several scholars, and then adds: “The Muslims are unanimously agreed—by knowledge that is necessarily derived from the religion of the Messenger of Allah, ﷺ—that praying beside a grave, any grave, carries no special virtue whatsoever. There is no added goodness in performing the prayer at that spot; on the contrary, it brings an element of evil.” One page earlier he said: “Know that some jurists held that the sole reason for deeming prayer in a cemetery disliked is that it is presumed impure because the soil is mixed with the discharge of the deceased, and on that basis they built…”