The Expansion of the Two Sanctuaries under ʿUmar ﵁

Two Walls That Had to Carry More People

In the year 17 after the Hijra, the Gregorian year 638, the young Muslim state stood at a frontier that became visible in stone. It was the year in which the Khalifah set out from Medina to receive Bayt al-Maqdis, the year in which the khutbah of al-Jabiyyah was spoken and the Treaty of ʿUmar was written. It was also the year in which the Hijri calendar was first put into use, and in which the first signs of an expanding ummah became visible in the numbers that streamed to the two Holy Mosques. Suyuti ﵀ records it in a single sentence, short and concise, on the page where he introduces the year 17 AH: “In the year 17 AH ʿUmar ﵁ enlarged the area of the Mosque of the Prophet ﷺ.” Ten words in translation, a statement that to the eye is no more than a note of a building deed. And yet behind that single sentence lies a development that marks the whole character of the caliphate in that year.

The community that, after the Hajj of Abu Bakr ﵁ in 12 AH, had committed itself to one caliphate and one Mushaf, had in the years under ʿUmar ﵁ become a community that gathered across two continents. The Battle of Yarmuk had opened the Levant, the Battle of al-Qadisiyyah had opened Iraq, and in the year 16 AH Madāʾin Kisra itself had fallen. Bayt al-Maqdis was about to open its gates, and amid this outflowing history the two mosques of the Hijaz, Masjid al-Haram in Makkah and Masjid an-Nabawi in Medina, remained the innermost heart to which everything won beyond the horizon sooner or later returned to be reported. To the pilgrim who came from Egypt or Syria or Iraq, the Khalifah had one duty: that the heart had room to receive him.

The Mosque of the Prophet ﷺ in Its Oldest Form

Whoever wishes to picture the Masjid an-Nabawi of the first days must let go of much of what he knows later. When the Prophet ﷺ arrived in Yathrib in Rabīʿ al-Awwal of the year of the Hijra, there was as yet nothing that was called a mosque. The camel knelt on the ground of two orphans, Sahl and Suhayl ﵃, and the place was bought for ten dinars. The Prophet ﷺ and his Companions ﵃ laid the stones themselves, mixed the clay themselves, and ʿAmmar ibn Yasir ﵁ carried double loads. The mosque they built was an open courtyard of about thirty by thirty-five cubits, surrounded by clay walls that barely rose above the height of a man. On the northern side stood a canopy of palm trunks and palm leaves, on the eastern side the hujurat, the chambers of the Mothers of the Believers ﵂, and on the southern side, after the change of the qiblah, the direction of prayer towards Makkah. In the middle stood a few palm stumps that served as pillars. It was, in all simplicity, a house for whoever was without a house, a shelter for the Ahl as-Suffah who slept on the bench against the northern wall, and above all a place for prayer.

In the sixth year of the Hijra the Prophet ﷺ had enlarged it once, after the return from Khaybar, to make room for the new believers who streamed in from every direction. Under Abu Bakr ﵁ it had remained otherwise untouched, for the Khalifah of a peninsula at war had no time for the raising of walls; he had turned the sword towards the apostates and taken the loose leaves of the Qur’an into his own keeping. For three years the mosque stood as the Prophet ﷺ had left it, with its humble walls, its palm stumps and its canopy.

And then came the time when it no longer sufficed. The years under ʿUmar ﵁ were the years of the great influx: pilgrims from the north, envoys from Yemen, soldiers who marched to the Sham and paused in Medina on the way back, freed slaves from Khaybar and Wadi al-Qura who settled around the mosque. At the Friday prayer the community no longer fitted within the walls of the Prophet ﷺ, and pilgrims stood praying far out on the streets of Medina, in the dust of horses’ hooves and the shadow of caravan walls. The Khalifah, who led the people every Friday, saw it swell week by week.

The Decision of the Khalifah

Suyuti ﵀ does not give us the deliberation of ʿUmar ﵁ in this passage word for word; he gives us only the fact: in the year 17 AH he enlarged the area of the Mosque of the Prophet ﷺ. But the reasoning of a Khalifah who on other pages of that same Suyuti ﵀ speaks so clearly is not hard to reconstruct within the bounds of what the source allows. He who in the first khutbah of his caliphate had said “Whoever is present here, we shall handle their affairs in person, and those who are not with us, over them we shall appoint strong and trustworthy men”, could never accept that a man who had undertaken the hard journey to Medina found no place in the mosque of his Prophet ﷺ.

He had not touched the hujurat of the Mothers of the Believers ﵂; they remained standing on the eastern side as the Prophet ﷺ had let them stand. He had not disturbed the part in which the Prophet ﷺ and Abu Bakr ﵁ rested. What he widened was what the community needed in order to pray within the walls of its mosque: the northern wall moved northward, the western wall moved westward, and the canopy was reinforced and extended with new palm trunks brought from Aliya. The foundations remained of clay and stone. The Khalifah refused marble, refused fired brick, refused everything that would break the simplicity of the original building. What the Prophet ﷺ had built of clay and palm, ʿUmar ﵁ built of clay and palm, only wider.

It was the humility of the man who had let the founders of Kufa know that their city was to be built only with reed and clay, and who later, when Saʿd ibn Abi Waqqas ﵁ had had a gate set up of fired clay against the noise of the street, had summoned him in person to break that gate down again. For ʿUmar ﵁ the splendour of the building was never the splendour of the mosque; the splendour of the mosque were the faces that brought their foreheads to the earth in it.

Masjid al-Haram on the Other Side of the Hijaz

In those same years the pressure rose also on the other sanctuary, the oldest. The Masjid al-Haram in Makkah had, in the time of the Prophet ﷺ, been little more than the Kaʿbah itself and the courtyard space that surrounded it. There were no walls around the court, and the houses of the Quraysh stood right up against the place of the tawaf. The pilgrim in the time of ʿUmar ibn al-Khattab ﵁ walked his seven rounds about the Kaʿbah, and then almost at once struck against the wall of a dwelling that had once belonged to Abu Sufyan ﵁, or to Abu Jahl, or to one of the other clans of Quraysh.

Suyuti ﵀ does not name in this passage the expansion of Masjid al-Haram explicitly as one of the building deeds of ʿUmar ﵁ in the year 17 AH. We must be cautious in this, and we remain within the bounds of what the source gives. What Suyuti ﵀ does mention several times on the pages about the caliphate and the governance of Makkah is that ʿUmar ﵁ personally led the Hajj in every year of his office, that he entered Makkah as a pilgrim and as a ruler, and that he undertook measures around the Kaʿbah meant to protect the access for the streaming believer. The pilgrim of the year 17 AH stood in a space around the Kaʿbah that had been spacious for the old inhabitants of Makkah, but became cramped for the community of the whole ummah.

What the Khalifah did in Medina for the Mosque of the Prophet ﷺ thus echoed also in Makkah. The surrounding houses were, with consent and with payment from the bait al-mal, bought back and demolished, the free space around the Kaʿbah was widened, and a low wall was raised, not to enclose the pilgrim within, but to mark off the sacred space from the profane street life of Makkah. The Khalifah followed in this the same line as in Medina: no marble, no splendour, no pillars of fired stone. The pilgrim who came to Makkah in 17 AH found more room around the Kaʿbah than his father had found there a generation earlier, but he found no palace; he found a wider court, with the same Kaʿbah in the middle, and with the same Black Stone in its eastern corner.

The Symbolism of Two Walls at Once

It is not without significance that it was precisely the year 17 AH that became the year in which the Khalifah took both mosques in hand. It was the same year in which the Hijri calendar was established, on the counsel of ʿAli ibn Abi Talib ﵁, on the page where Suyuti ﵀ records “In Rabīʿ al-Awwal the dating from the Hijra was begun on the counsel of ʿAli ﵁.” It was the same year in which Bayt al-Maqdis fell and the Treaty of ʿUmar was drawn up under the hand of the Khalifah in person. The ummah that in 11 AH had nearly fallen apart was in 17 AH a world community with a calendar, a capital in Medina, and two holy cities whose walls were widened to be able to receive the believers who came from every direction.

The Khalifah who had laid his hand on two mosques at once was the same Khalifah who in the stillness of the night walked the streets of Medina to see whether a hungry widow sat in her clay house, the same Khalifah who would say, in Suyuti’s tradition from Aslam ﵁, “I was the harshest of people towards the Messenger of Allah ﷺ”. He who had been so harsh towards the Prophet ﷺ in the years before his conversion had after his conversion become the harsh protector of his mosque, and in his caliphate that harshness was forged into a care for the pilgrim. The walls he had widened were a form of his humility, not of his pride.

The Prophet ﷺ Among the Palm Stumps

Whoever stepped into Masjid an-Nabawi after the expansion of ʿUmar ﵁ did not enter the place where Bilal ﵁ had once first called the adhan from the roof. He entered a more spacious space, but the old mosque was still there. The palm stumps against which the Prophet ﷺ had leaned during his khutbah still stood, the ground on which he had stood during the prayer was still the same ground, and the minbar that consisted of three steps, fashioned by a Roman freedman at the request of the Prophet ﷺ in his later years, still stood in its old place. ʿUmar ﵁ had touched none of it; he had only made room for those who came from further away.

He knew, as no other, what it meant to pray in this mosque. He had heard the Prophet ﷺ recite from the Qur’an here, he had stood beside him here in the row of prayer, he had performed the funeral prayer over his master ﷺ here in Rabīʿ al-Awwal of 11 AH, and he had received his own baiʿah from the people here, in Jumādā al-Akhirah of 13 AH, when Abu Bakr ﵁ had passed away after a very short illness. Every palm trunk bore a memory of an event for which the whole community now gathered. The walls he had widened were thus not only walls of clay; they were the expression in stone of a faith that does not throw away the past, but only encloses it with more room.

The Bait al-Mal and the Building Costs

How was all this paid for. Suyuti ﵀ does not name the sum, nor any specific financial arrangements for this one building. What he does give us is a pattern of how the Khalifah dealt with public resources. He was the first to establish the diwan, the systematic pay register, in Muharram of 20 AH. “ʿUmar ﵁ established the register in al-Muharram of the year 20 AH.” He was the first to gather the war spoils and the tribute monies centrally in one place and to disburse them again to the community according to a fixed scale by precedence in Islam. The bait al-mal in Medina, in the years 16, 17, 18 AH, received the tribute monies from Sham and from Iraq, and it was from those resources that the Mosque of the Prophet ﷺ could be widened without a single Medinan household having to bear an extra levy for it.

The Khalifah was known for his exactness in every dirham he let flow from the bait al-mal. Suyuti ﵀ transmits later, in the tradition from Salman ﵁, the deep principle by which he measured every expenditure: “If you levy a dirham from the land of the Muslims, whether less or more, and you put it to an unlawful purpose, then you are a king, not a khalifah.” For ʿUmar ﵁ the expansion of a mosque was a lawful purpose. He held nothing of it back, he gave the order, he had the building materials brought, he had the men work, and he watched that no dinar was wasted on ornament that did not serve the mosque.

Whoever came to the mosque in Medina in 17 AH sometimes saw the Khalifah himself standing by the walls, clad in the same woollen cloak that he wore in every other context of his days, and with the whip that he was wont to carry in his right hand not to punish people, but to startle the dogs at the market. He spoke with the workmen without distinction of rank, he asked whether the wood was of good quality, and he had the design explained to him. And then he walked on to the market to check the prices, or to the gate to listen to the messengers from the north.

The Spiritual Meaning of the Two Widenings

What ʿUmar ﵁ did in the year 17 AH was, to the eye, a building deed. What it carried within it was a confession. Islam was no longer the religion of the narrow mosque in the narrow town of an encircled peninsula; it had become the religion of the wide ummah, from Bayt al-Maqdis to Madāʾin, from Egypt to Khurasan in the years that came, and the two Sanctuaries that stood at its centre had to be so wide that no pilgrim need remain outside them.

At the same time it was a confession against splendour. The Khalifah had the means to set the mosque in marble. The spoils from Madāʾin Kisra, the treasure of Khosrau, had only recently been disbursed in the same city among the Companions ﵃, and gold and silver and silk were in these years present in abundance in Medina. A ruler who wished to inscribe his name in stone had material enough. ʿUmar ﵁ refused; he widened with clay and palm trunks, he had the walls whitewashed and did not have them clad. He knew, and it was the wisdom that marked his whole caliphate, that the glory of Allah ﷻ does not dwell in marble and that the Hijaz, set in marble, would lose its soul of the desert.

He has thereby been the Khalifah who guarded the hinge-moment of the architecture of Islam. After him ʿUthman ﵁ would expand the Mosque again, with somewhat more costly materials, and under the Umayyads al-Walid ibn ʿAbd al-Malik would set the Mosque of the Prophet ﷺ in stone and marble and mosaic, and the Masjid al-Haram would be brought into a form that resembled more a palace. But in the year 17 AH the wall still stood of clay, and the pilgrim who entered touched the same earth in which the Prophet ﷺ had laid his forehead. That was what ʿUmar ﵁ wished to preserve, and that he preserved.

A Last Look at the Two Walls

When the year 17 AH drew to a close, the walls of the expanded Masjid an-Nabawi stood drying in Medina under the sun of the Hijaz, and in Makkah the court around the Kaʿbah stood wider than it had ever stood since the days of Ibrahim ﵇. The Khalifah had in that year received Bayt al-Maqdis, established the Hijri calendar, and widened two mosques. None of those three would he himself have listed as his work; he would have said that the Hand of Allah ﷻ did everything, and that he was no more than the servant who was permitted to carry out what was charged to him.

In the following article we follow him back within those walls, to see how he ruled in the ordinary days of his caliphate. Not as the Khalifah who had the walls built, but as the man who walked through the streets of Medina in a woollen cloak with patches, who patrolled at night to hear whether somewhere there was a weeping child, and who prayed on the minbar: O Allah, I am harsh, make me gentle; I am weak, strengthen me; I am miserly, make me generous.

Sources

• Jalal ad-Din as-Suyuti ﵀, Tarikh al-Khulafa (trans. Abdassamad Clarke, Ta-Ha Publishers, 3rd ed. 1995), p. 135 (expansion of Masjid an-Nabawi), p. 143 (first khutbah), p. 145 (Salman on king vs. khalifah), p. 150 (establishment of the diwan).