to it is like going out to another part of the town. In a large town extending more than a barīd, someone going from one end to the other is not a traveller. People distinguish between someone moving about among dwellings and their dependencies and a traveller departing from all of them. Thus, the inhabitants of the Prophet’s city (peace and blessings be upon him) would go to their orchards without being travellers. Medina had no wall; rather, it consisted of separate tribal quarters and clusters of houses, with a considerable distance between its two sides. Someone going from one tribal quarter to another was not a traveller, even if each tribe had its orchards and fields around it, for the name Medina encompassed all of this.
Hence Allah Most High says:
“Among the Bedouins around you are hypocrites, and among the people of Medina are those entrenched in hypocrisy.”
People are thus divided into two groups: desert dwellers, who are the Bedouins, and the people of Medina. All those living in mud-brick dwellings were therefore people of Medina. This includes Qubā’ and other places, showing that the name Medina encompassed all of them. For it did not have a wall as it does today, with gates that are opened and closed. It merely had approaches. Even if those approaches lay inward of Qubā’ and other places, the name Medina could encompass the town’s settled area.
This is familiar in every city. Someone says, “I went to Damascus, Misr, Baghdad, or elsewhere; I lived there and stayed there for a time,” or something similar, although he was living outside the walls. The city’s name encompasses all those dwellings, even though the interior