a form of visitation prescribed by Islamic law and a religiously innovated form of visitation.

The prescribed visitation is intended to convey greetings of peace to them and supplicate for them, just as one offers the funeral prayer for someone who has died. This is the prescribed form of visitation.

The second is to visit their graves as the polytheists and people of religious innovation do: to invoke the dead and ask them to fulfil one’s needs; or because one believes that supplication at the grave of one of them is better than supplication in mosques and homes; or that adjuring Allah by them and petitioning Him, glorified be He, by them is prescribed and entails one’s supplication being answered. Such visitation is a prohibited religious innovation.

If, therefore, the term “visitation” is ambiguous and admits both a true and a false meaning, it is set aside in favour of an unambiguous expression, such as “greeting him with peace.” No one could challenge Mālik on the basis of reports about visiting the Prophet’s grave or visiting him after his death, for all these hadiths are weak—indeed, fabricated—and none may be used as evidence for rulings of Islamic law.

What is authentically established from him, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, is that he said:

“Between my house and my pulpit is a garden from the gardens of Paradise.”

This is the wording established in the Sahīh. Some, however, narrated it by meaning and said, “my grave.” When he uttered these words, he had not yet been buried; may Allah’s blessings and peace be upon him. For this reason, none of the Companions cited this as evidence when they disagreed over where he should be buried. Had they known such a wording, it would have been an explicit text settling the disputed point. Rather, he was buried in ʿĀʾisha’s chamber, in the place where he died—may my father and mother be his ransom, and may Allah’s blessings and peace be upon him.

Then, when the mosque was expanded during the caliphate of al-Walīd ibn ʿAbd al-Malik, and his governor in Medina was