to Allah are the mosques,’ as has already been quoted. The Prophet ﷺ also prohibited travelling to Mount Sinai, which Allah Himself called ‘the sacred valley.’ If that journey is barred, then forbidding travel to any other site is even more fitting—especially when the destination is the grave of a prophet or a righteous person, for building mosques over graves has been forbidden, as noted earlier. How could going to such graves be permitted when even travelling to mosques founded upon piety was not allowed? By Allah’s grace, this point is clear and needs no further proof.

The two additional replies cited by the ḥāfiẓ are likewise weak, and you shall now see why.

As for the first reply: although the ḥadith is worded in the negative, it carries the sense of prohibition, exactly as the ḥāfiẓ himself reported from al-Ṭayyibī. Two considerations support this reading:

First, the second version of the narration comes in explicit prohibitive form: ‘Do not set out…’

Second, this is how the Companions understood it, for they forbade travelling to Mount Sinai, as already mentioned.

A third point reinforces the same conclusion: in the two Ṣaḥīḥs and elsewhere, the report of Abū Saʿīd forms part of a longer ḥadith that contains prohibitions of four matters:
(a) setting out with mounts for travel,
(b) a woman’s journey without a maḥram,
(c) fasting on the two festival days,
(d) and performing prayer after Fajr and after ʿAṣr.

In that context the prohibition is one of outright unlawfulness; therefore, to single out the ban on setting out with mounts and judge it merely mildly disliked would