Overall meaning:

Umm Salamah and Umm Ḥabībah were among the women who had emigrated to Abyssinia before the Messenger of Allah ﷺ married them. During the illness from which he would pass away, they told him about a church they had seen on that first migration—how beautifully it was adorned and the images it contained. His sickness did not distract him from clarifying the religious dangers that lay in what those people did inside their churches and with regard to their dead.

So he raised his head and said: “Those people you are talking about exceeded the limits and went to extremes concerning their deceased. Whenever a righteous man among them died they built a mosque over his grave and fashioned those images.”

Because such conduct contradicts tawḥīd (pure monotheism)—the most binding of all obligations—and because its harm is not confined to the doers themselves but extends to other gullible, ignorant people, those who engage in it are the worst of creation in Allah’s sight.

Takeaways from the ḥadīth:

1. It is forbidden to build over graves; it imitates the polytheists and is a pathway that leads to idolatry.
2. It is forbidden to depict any being that possesses a soul, especially the pious, whose images may become a source of temptation.
   • Ibn Daqīq al-ʿĪd said: This ḥadīth proves the prohibition of such acts, and the evidence of the Sharīʿah converges in forbidding images and image-making. Far, far off the mark is the one who claims that the ruling is merely disliked (makrūh) and that the severity applied only in that era because people were still close to idol-worship, whereas our time—now that Islam has spread and its foundations are firm—does not share that circumstance and therefore need not share the severity. That view, in our judgment, is categorically false. Al-Ṣanʿānī endorsed Ibn Daqīq al-ʿĪd’s position.
   • Al-Nawawī said: Depicting living creatures is one of the major sins, for a stern threat has been issued against it; only images that have no shadow (i.e., are not three-dimensional) are exempt, while those that cast a shadow are prohibited. Al-Ṣanʿānī replied that this view is untenable, for the curtain the Prophet ﷺ denounced undoubtedly contained images without any shadow. Ibn Ḥajar likewise deemed both kinds—those with volume and those without—impermissible, citing the report collected by Aḥmad in which the Prophet ﷺ said, “Which of you will go to Madinah and leave no image there without erasing it?”
3. Whoever does these deeds is among the worst of Allah’s creation, because of the many dangers and grievous consequences they entail for himself and for others.
4. The narration displays the perfection of the Prophet’s sincere counsel: the pain he was enduring did not keep him from giving guidance.