---

slug: uitbreiding-moskeeen title: The Expansion of the Masjid al-Haram and the Masjid an-Nabawi arabicName: توسعة المسجدين language: en eventDate: 646-01-01 wordCountTarget: 3000

The Expansion of the Masjid al-Haram and the Masjid an-Nabawi

Two houses that grew too small

In the third year of his rule, in the year twenty-six of the Hijra, ʿUthman ﵁ gave the order for a building project that none of his predecessors had undertaken on the same scale, for he had the Masjid al-Haram in Mecca enlarged, and three years later, in the year twenty-nine, he did the same with the Masjid an-Nabawi in Medina. These were not the first enlargements of these two houses, for ʿUmar ﵁ had already, before him, purchased mosque land in both cities and enlarged the prayer halls. Yet the expansions of ʿUthman ﵁ were of a different order: they were more extensive, they made use of more durable building materials, and they gave the two sacred mosques a form whose ground plan would continue to shape them far into the Umayyad and Abbasid eras.

What led to these expansions was a simple reality: the community of Islam was growing faster than its prayer spaces could accommodate. After the openings of Iraq, Syria, Egypt and the Persian provinces, more pilgrims streamed to Mecca every Hajj season than ever before. The Masjid al-Haram, an open courtyard around the Kaʿbah that in the time of the Prophet ﷺ had barely been able to admit a few hundred believers at once, could no longer cope with the growing flood. In Medina the problem lay somewhat differently. The Masjid an-Nabawi was not the central site of a pilgrim multitude, but it was the mosque of a capital. The inhabitants of Medina themselves, together with the delegations that arrived continually from every corner of the community, together with the students of the Sahabah ﵃ who came to take their lessons there, meant that the weekly jumuʿah gathering no longer fit within the old walls.

ʿUthman ﵁, a man who throughout his entire life had understood the relationship between wealth and piety as one of mutual service, saw in these two expansions no work of prestige. He saw a duty that rested upon the shoulders of the khalifah. It was his office to make the mosques in which Allah ﷻ was worshipped suitable for those who visited them, for whoever had preserved the Book ought also to preserve the house in which the Book was recited.

The expansion of the Masjid al-Haram

Suyuti ﵀ records the expansion of the Masjid al-Haram in his characteristically dry style:

Within this single sentence lie several administrative decisions. First, the actual expansion: the mosque was extended, its walls were set outward, its inner surface was enlarged. Second, the purchase of adjoining plots of land: this means that the expansion was not brought about by confiscation, but by purchase, with the consent of the owners and from the treasury of the khalifah. What stands between these lines is that a number of owners did not wish to sell their land. As the tradition preserves for us in detail, it happened that several owners refused to accept the sale. They demanded more than ʿUthman ﵁ was willing to pay, or they did not wish to sell at all. In such cases ʿUthman ﵁, so it is reported, gave them a choice: either they sold at the reasonable market price, or he would hand them a compensation held in the community treasury while their objection stood and would incorporate their land into the expansion regardless. It was a form of legal enforcement that in the years afterward would be invoked as a precedent for expropriation in the public interest, albeit with full financial compensation.

What was introduced in the building method of the expansion says something about the materials that were available in Mecca at this time. The old Masjid al-Haram had known pillars of palm trunks, with roofs of palm branches covered in clay, in the same style as the Masjid an-Nabawi in its original form. The expansion of ʿUthman ﵁ used stone for the outer walls, and it received pillars that were no longer bound together from palm trunks but hewn from dressed stones or from more durable wood. It was, for those who had known the old mosque, a changed sight. Some of the old Sahabah ﵃ complained that the gentle form of the mosque of the Prophet ﷺ had been replaced by a more formal building style. ʿUthman ﵁ answered, as the tradition preserves, that the expansion did not alter the Sunnah but raised the capacity; that it was the believers in prayer who were being served, not the walls.

In the same year, as Suyuti ﵀ notes in an adjoining sentence, the Persian city of Sabur, possibly Shahpur, was opened to Islam. This does not appear to be directly connected to the mosque expansion, but for those who read Suyuti ﵀ in context, the juxtaposition is telling. The khalifah expanded the Masjid al-Haram in the very years in which his armies were adding new provinces to the community. The prosperity of the openings was put to work for the sanctuaries. The spoils of Persia built the columns of Mecca.

The intervening three years

Between the expansion of the Masjid al-Haram in twenty-six and the expansion of the Masjid an-Nabawi in twenty-nine lay three years in which the community witnessed a number of great military successes. In twenty-seven the first Islamic naval expedition to Cyprus took place. In that same year Ifriqiya was opened by ʿAbdallah ibn Saʿd ﵁, and shortly afterward al-Andalus. In twenty-nine Persepolis was opened to Islam, and in thirty the Khurasanian provinces would fall. These openings brought enormous wealth to Medina. The khalifah, who in these years administered a treasury that his predecessors had not known, had for the first time the means to undertake building projects on a scale that in the time of the Prophet ﷺ would have been unthinkable.

In the same breath with which Suyuti ﵀ records the expansion of the Masjid an-Nabawi, he mentions that in that year Persepolis was opened, in a turn that once again underscores the connection between conquest and construction:

The expansion of the Masjid an-Nabawi

The passage from Suyuti ﵀ is, in comparison with the one about the Masjid al-Haram, strikingly detailed. He names the building materials, he names the dimensions, he names the kind of stone and the kind of wood. This is, in the style of his work, an unusual fullness, and it betrays something of the lasting impression that the expansion of Medina had left upon the community.

The old Masjid an-Nabawi was, in its form from the time of the Prophet ﷺ, a rectangular courtyard with walls of sun-dried mud brick and pillars of palm trunks, with a roof of palm branches covered in clay that leaked through in every rain. It had been enlarged twice: once by the Prophet ﷺ himself after the battle of Khaybar, and once by ʿUmar ﵁ after the openings of Iraq and Syria. Yet in the essence of its building materials it had remained the same: mud brick, palm trunks, clay.

ʿUthman ﵁ broke with this tradition. He had the mosque rebuilt, not merely enlarged, and he had it done with other materials. The pillars became of dressed stone, no longer of palm trunks. The roof became of teak, a hardwood imported from India or East Africa that no longer leaked the way the palm branches had. The walls became of mortared dressed stone, no longer of sun-dried mud brick.

In dimensions the mosque became, as Suyuti ﵀ notes, one hundred and sixty cubits long and one hundred and fifty cubits broad. The cubit, a measure of length that in this time amounted to roughly half a meter, means that the mosque became roughly eighty meters long and seventy-five meters broad. It was a building of considerable scale for the Arabia of that time, and although in its dimensions it did not match the Byzantine Hagia Sophia or the Sasanian palace ruins of al-Madaʾin, it ranked among the largest interior spaces in the Hijaz of its day.

What stood out in this rebuilding was the care with which ʿUthman ﵁ respected the place of the old Sunnah. The graves of the Prophet ﷺ, of Abu Bakr ﵁ and of ʿUmar ﵁ in the chamber of ʿAʾishah ﵂ were left untouched. The qiblah wall, oriented toward Mecca, was maintained in its original position. The minbar of the Prophet ﷺ remained standing where it had stood; ʿUthman ﵁ had it extended by a few steps, but its essential form and its place remained the same. What he enlarged was the capacity; what he preserved was the identity of the mosque as the house that the Prophet ﷺ himself had planted.

The criticism and the answer

As with every change to a beloved house, this expansion of the Masjid an-Nabawi too did not come about without criticism. A number of the old Sahabah ﵃, men who had known the mosque of the time of the Prophet ﷺ in its palm-trunk form, gave expression to an unease. They feared that the splendor of dressed stone and teak brought into the mosque a form of worldliness that the Prophet ﷺ had not desired. They pointed to the saying of the Messenger ﷺ about the mark of the end times, namely that people would outdo one another in building lofty mosques. They asked whether the expansion was not a sign that the community had already shifted in that direction.

ʿUthman ﵁ answered, as the tradition preserves, that his building did not exceed the Sunnah but expanded it to serve the growing community. He pointed out that the Prophet ﷺ himself had in his days enlarged the mosque when the community had grown, and that ʿUmar ﵁ after him had done the same; that the expansion of his own time was no different from the expansions of his predecessors, except in the building materials that had become accessible with greater prosperity. He preserved, so he explained, the height and the simplicity of the design; he refused, so he explained, ornamented decorations that would distract the attention of the worshipper; he set up no marble, no mosaic, no gilding. The dressed stone was austere stone, the teak was austere wood. It was an enlargement in capacity, not a change in spirit.

In the years afterward this answer would linger in the tradition. The later expansions under the Umayyads, in particular that of al-Walid ibn ʿAbd al-Malik, would in marble and mosaic go far beyond what ʿUthman ﵁ had permitted. Whoever surveys the expansion of ʿUthman ﵁ from the perspective of what came later sees in it rather a restrained modernization than an exuberant luxury. In its own time, however, for the old Sahabah ﵃ who had known the palm trunks, the transition to dressed stone was already considerable.

Two houses, one purpose

For whoever surveys the two expansions together, that of twenty-six in Mecca and that of twenty-nine in Medina, it is striking that ʿUthman ﵁ within a span of three years brought the two most important mosques of Islam to equal standing in capacity and in building standard. The Masjid al-Haram and the Masjid an-Nabawi had in the time of the Prophet ﷺ been two very different houses: the first was the courtyard around the Kaʿbah, a sacred site that had already been maintained by the Quraysh in the time of the jahiliyyah; the second was the mosque that the Prophet ﷺ himself had founded in Medina after the Hijra. Under ʿUmar ﵁ both had been enlarged, but each in its own form. Under ʿUthman ﵁ they came to equal standing in capacity and in building material. Both were rebuilt in stone. Both received roofs of durable wood. Both were made such that they could serve the community of an empire, no longer only the community of an Arabian town.

This was, in a manner that the tradition does not record as an ideological program, part of a broader transition. The community that under Abu Bakr ﵁ had held firm in its Arabian homeland, and that under ʿUmar ﵁ had completed its victorious march into Iraq, Syria and Egypt, now lived under ʿUthman ﵁ as the community of a vast realm. The mosques that it had inherited from its Prophet ﷺ ought to grow along with the community they served. The khalifah had made this possible with the treasury that his armies had brought him.

For the pilgrim who in twenty-six or twenty-nine traveled to Mecca or Medina, the difference was visible. The mosque in which he prayed was larger, higher, drier in the rain, and cooler in the heat. The khalifah who had built these houses did not drink from their abundance; he did not eat at their expense; he received no worldly honor for what he had had raised. He completed the work and returned to the administrative affairs of Medina. But the work remained, and in the centuries afterward whoever entered the two mosques would recognize in the dressed stone and the teak the work of ʿUthman ﵁.

A final building

In the tradition it is sometimes related that ʿUthman ﵁, in his final year of life, once again considered an expansion of the Masjid an-Nabawi. His treasury was fuller than ever; the community was larger than ever. But the fitnah, which in thirty-four had begun in Kufa and which in thirty-five moved toward Medina, made further building plans impossible. The khalifah who had enlarged the two sanctuaries of Islam would be besieged and killed in his own house by the community he had served. But this too belongs to the story that is continued in the later articles.

At the moment of his death the two mosques in which the community of Islam gathered stood in the form that he had given them in these two building projects. Whoever in later generations prayed in Mecca or Medina prayed beneath the columns he had had erected and beneath the roof he had had laid. The Umayyads would, after him, expand again; the Abbasids would take them in hand again; the Ottomans would, into the modern age, make their own additions. But the foundation that ʿUthman ﵁ had laid in twenty-six and twenty-nine would remain recognizable beneath every later layer of construction.

It was, in his own eyes, no great deed. It was what the khalifah was meant to do, and he did it. But for the community that in the centuries afterward entered these two houses, it was the lasting contribution of a man who had preserved not only the Book, but also the houses in which the Book was recited.

Sources

• Jalal ad-Din as-Suyuti ﵀, Tarikh al-Khulafa (trans. Abdassamad Clarke, Ta-Ha Publishers, 3rd ed. 1995), pp. 165–166.