there acts with a righteous intention, he will be rewarded for that; and every place in which a servant is more obedient to Allah is a better place for him to remain. Sound hadiths have indeed affirmed the excellence of Syria and its people, and the Qur’an indicates that blessing is found in four locations. There is no doubt that the manifestation of Islam and its supporters there—by heart, hand, and tongue—is stronger than elsewhere, and that within it faith is more apparent and disbelief and hypocrisy are more forcefully suppressed than in other lands. As for the report about breaking the fast and fasting, and about blessing being divided into seventy-one portions—seventy in Syria and one in Iraq—this has never reached us from any scholar. Allah knows best.” (al-Fatāwā) (1/311)

I say: Even if it were established that the aforementioned prophets are buried there, that would in no way entail the virtue of deliberately heading there to pray, as some people suppose. On the contrary, it is strictly prohibited, for it falls under taking graves as places of worship, something from which we have been emphatically forbidden, as noted earlier. For this reason Shaykh al-Islām ﵀ also said in (al-Fatāwā) (4/310):

“Whatever some people do in making a point of performing prayer and supplication at what is said to be the grave of a prophet, or the grave of one of the Companions or the Prophet’s relatives, or anything similar; or in pressing their bodies—or part of their bodies—against the grave, or against something adjacent to it, such as a piece of wood, and the like—such as those who single out the south-eastern section of the Umayyad Mosque of Damascus to pray and supplicate at the spot alleged to be the grave of Hūd, whereas the scholars hold that it is the grave of Muʿāwiyah ibn Abī Sufyān, or those who stop at the wooden model under which they claim lies the head of John, son of Zechariah, and similar sites—then such a person is mistaken, an innovator, acting contrary to the Sunnah. Neither prayer nor supplication in these places carries any special merit according to any of the early generations of the ummah or their leading scholars; they themselves never did such a thing, but rather forbade the likes of…"