: “You must hold fast to my Sunnah and the Sunnah of the rightly-guided caliphs who come after me.”
The Muslims are unanimously agreed that this is one of the appointed pilgrimage miqats; praise be to Allah.

In Muḥarram 1402 AH I travelled from Mecca to this miqat, accompanied by the Sharif Muḥammad ibn Fawzān al-Ḥārithī, a man well acquainted with the area and its history. My purpose was to examine the camel route of the Hajj from al-Duraybah to Mecca. I found the miqat to be a valley lying between low hills, three kilometres in length from east to west and half a kilometre in width from south to north. Hills bound it on the north and south; on the east lies Riʿ Inkhil, and on the west Wadi al-Duraybah, which empties into Wadi Marr. This miqat belongs to the Ḥijāz—neither Najd nor Tihāmah—yet it is a low-lying Ḥijāzi tract, almost a lava field, without lofty mountains.

Roughly ten kilometres to the east is Wadi al-ʿAqīq; beyond al-ʿAqīq to the east spreads the broad desert of Rakbah, where the lands of Najd begin. The Shīʿah assume iḥrām at al-ʿAqīq, contrary to ʿUmar (may Allah be pleased with him), who designated Dhāt ʿIrq as the miqat. The distance from the miqat of Dhāt ʿIrq to Mecca is one hundred kilometres.

The most prominent places along this road are al-Riqqah near Mecca—which still contains ruins and a great, ancient cistern dating back to the Abbasids—then Wadi Nakhlah al-Shāmiyyah, followed by al-Mudayyiq, al-Barūd, Sharāʾiʿ al-Mujāhidiyyah, and finally al-ʿAdl. This miqat is now deserted; no one assumes iḥrām there because the paved roads from Najd and the eastern regions bypass it, passing instead through Ṭāʾif and al-Sayl al-Kabīr, the site of Qarn al-Manāzil.

Note: All the iḥrām stations are sizeable valleys, so as a precaution the pilgrim should enter iḥrām from the bank of the valley that lies away from the Meccan side, lest he be deemed to have passed the miqat.

Benefit: Decision no. 5730 of the Council of Senior Scholars, dated 21/10/1399 AH, states in summary: Shaykh ʿAbdullāh ibn Zayd Āl Maḥmūd, Chief of the Sharia Courts and Religious Affairs in Qatar, sent King Khālid ibn ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz Āl Saʿūd a letter proposing that Jeddah be made a miqat for air travellers and sea passengers. The matter was referred to the Council, which examined the fatwa and concluded: after studying the points raised in the letter, the Council holds that the evidences cited are invalidated by the scriptural texts and by the consensus of the early generations of the ummah. Having reviewed the proofs, the statements of the scholars on the geographical miqats and considered the subject from every angle, the Council unanimously resolves as follows:

First: that the fatwa issued by His Eminence Shaykh ʿAbdullāh ibn Zayd Āl Maḥmūd, Chief Judge