does not oblige us to assume that the sense of miḥrābs in the ḥadīth of Anas—namely, the front seats of an assembly—is the intended meaning in every report that contains the word, including the ḥadīth at hand.

What inclines me to judge that the two ḥadīths do in fact share the same meaning is that, in the present ḥadīth, a demonstrative pronoun appears: “these madhābiḥ,” meaning the miḥrābs. This shows that the items referred to—the miḥrābs—were already in existence during his ﷺ lifetime, whereas prayer-niche miḥrābs in the technical sense did not yet exist, as al-Suyūṭī himself concedes. How, then, can one plausibly interpret the ḥadīth as referring to something that was not there, when it explicitly points to what actually was there? It therefore follows that the miḥrābs mentioned in this ḥadīth are the front seats of gatherings, exactly as in the ḥadīth of Anas. Allah knows best.

Furthermore, there is a narration suggesting that miḥrābs inside mosques were unknown in his ﷺ era. Al-Ṭabarānī relates in both al-Awsat and al-Kabīr, from Jābir ibn Usāma al-Juhanī, who said:

“I met the Messenger of Allah ﷺ with his Companions in the marketplace and asked, ‘Where is the Messenger of Allah ﷺ going?’ They replied, ‘He intends to mark out a mosque for your people.’ When I arrived, he had already traced the outline of a mosque for them and had driven a piece of wood into its qibla side, setting it upright as the indicator of the direction of prayer.”

Al-Haythamī comments in al-Majmaʿ:
“In its chain is Muʿāwiya ibn ʿAbd Allāh ibn Ḥabīb, and I have found no biographical entry for him.”

To the best of my recollection, some scholars who permit the construction of a miḥrāb in