his governor in the Prophet’s city, instructing him to enlarge the mosque. He purchased the chambers of the Prophet’s wives, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, which lay to the east of the mosque and on its qiblah side, and incorporated them into the mosque. The chamber thus became part of the mosque. They built its enclosure in a pointed shape, out of alignment with the qiblah, so that no one would pray towards it.

Likewise, when the Muslims conquered the land, the “grave of Abraham, the Friend of Allah” was surrounded by the Solomonic wall. No one entered it or prayed beside it. Rather, the Muslims prayed in a mosque in the village of Hebron. This remained the case during the time of the Rightly Guided Caliphs and their successors, until that wall was breached and then fitted with a doorway.

It is said that the Christians were the ones who breached it and made it a church. Then, when the Muslims took the land from them, it was made into a mosque. For this reason, the righteous Muslim scholars would not pray in that place.

This is so even when the grave is genuine. How much more so when most graves attributed to the prophets are falsely identified? One example is the grave said to be the “grave of Noah”: this is undoubtedly a false attribution, put forward by ignorant people only relatively recently. The same applies to other such graves.

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As for “Ascalon,” it was one of the Muslims’ frontier strongholds. The righteous among