from Abū Hurayrah, who said: The Messenger of Allah (peace and blessings be upon him) declared, “If this mosque were built all the way to Ṣanʿāʾ, it would still be my mosque.” Abū Hurayrah would also say, “By Allah, were this mosque stretched until it reached my house, I would still do no more than pray inside it.”

Muḥammad narrated to us; ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz b. ʿImrān narrated to us, from Falīḥ b. Sulaymān, from Ibn ʿUmrah, who said: “ʿUmar expanded the mosque on its Shāmī (northern) side and then said, ‘If we enlarged it until it reached the open ground (al-jabānah), it would still be the Mosque of the Messenger of Allah (peace and blessings be upon him).’”

Shaykh al-Islām said:

“The reports that have reached us accord perfectly with the statements and practice of the early imams. They maintained that performing the obligatory prayer behind the imam is superior, and this is exactly what the Sunnah affirms. The same held true in the days of ʿUmar and ʿUthmān, for both of them enlarged the mosque on its qiblah side; their place for the five daily prayers was in that extension, as was the first row—which, by Sunnah and unanimous agreement, is the most virtuous place to stand. If this is the case, it is impossible that prayer outside his mosque could be better than prayer inside it, or that the caliphs and those in the first rows were praying anywhere but his mosque. I have never heard of any Muslim who disagreed with this, except that I found some later scholars (he seems to refer to al-Nawawī) who claimed that the additions are not part of his mosque, and I know of no predecessor among the scholars who said such a thing. We have highlighted these matters here because people need to understand them; most people do not know how events actually transpired, nor the ruling of Allah and His Messenger concerning many of these issues.”

This concludes the words of Shaykh al-Islām, as cited by Ḥāfiẓ Ibn ʿAbd al-Hādī in his book al-Ṣārim al-Munkī (pp. 139–140).

As for the prophetic (marfūʿ) narration from Abū Hurayrah that ʿUmar b. Shabbah transmitted, its chain of transmission is weak, for