it is prohibited according to the leading imams, as the textual evidence indicates.

Fifth: The mosque beside his grave is his Mosque, which was founded upon piety. It is the best of all mosques apart from the Sacred Mosque, and a prayer in it is equivalent to a thousand prayers. By contrast, establishing mosques over the graves of the prophets and the righteous, and praying in them, have been forbidden, as explained earlier. How much more, then, does this apply to travelling to them?

Sixth: Travelling to his Mosque—which is called travelling to visit his grave—is something upon which Muslims have agreed generation after generation. Travelling to other graves, however, is not known to have been practised by any of the Companions or the Successors who followed them in righteousness, or even by the Successors’ followers. Nor did any of the four imams or other imams recommend it. How, then, can the two be treated as analogous?

From his time until the present, Muslims have continued to travel to his Mosque, either in conjunction with Hajj or independently of it. During the Companions’ time, they did not come to it in conjunction with Hajj—as they travelled to Mecca—for the roads were safe, and undertaking a journey specifically to it was better than making it subsidiary to the Hajj journey.

Umar ibn al-Khattāb instructed them to devote one journey to ‘umrah and another to Hajj. By agreement of the four imams and others, this is better than tamattu‘ (performing ‘umrah followed by Hajj, leaving the state of consecration between them) or qirān (combining ‘umrah and Hajj in a single state of consecration). For those who preferred tamattu‘ and qirān—as Ahmad preferred tamattu‘ for someone who had not brought a sacrificial animal and qirān for someone who had, according to his expressly recorded position, and explicitly stated in more than one place that the Prophet, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, performed qirān—