Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 30 (2022): 79-147

Introduction

According to the Imāmī historian ʿAlī b. Muḥammad al-Nawfalī (d. mid- to late third/
ninth century), as the era of Umayyad rule was drawing to a close, the Jaʿfarid Talibid 
Muḥammad b. ʿAbd Allāh Abī al-Karrām had a dream:1

I had a vision, as dreamers do, near the end of the Umayyads’ rule, as if I had entered 
the mosque of the messenger of God (ṣ). I raised my head and looked at the mosaic 

* I am very grateful to Alain George and Mehdy Shaddel for the time they took to read and comment on an 
earlier draft of this article. I would also like to thank the peer reviewers for their extremely helpful comments 
and advice.

1.  For al-Nawfalī, see Sebastian Günther, “Al-Nawfalī’s Lost History: The Issue of a Ninth-Century Shiʿite 
Source Used by al-Ṭabarī and Abū l-Faraj al-Iṣfahānī,” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 36, no. 2 (2009): 
241–66; for Muḥammad b. ʿAbd Allāh Abī al-Karrām b. Muḥammad b. ʿAlī b. ʿAbd Allāh b. Jaʿfar b. Abī Ṭālib,  
a loyal supporter of the Abbasids during the rebellion of the Hasanid Talibid Muḥammad b. ʿAbd Allāh “al-Nafs 
al-Zakiyya,” see Amikam Elad, The Rebellion of Muḥammad al-Nafs al-Zakiyya in 145/762: Ṭālibīs and Early 
ʿAbbāsīs in Conflict (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 257–58, 377.

The Umayyad and Early Abbasid Inscriptions  
in the Prophet’s Mosque in Medina*

Harry Munt
University of York

(harry.munt@york.ac.uk)

Abstract
This article offers a translation and discussion of a chapter of a relatively little known late third/ninth- or 
early fourth/tenth-century text that contains a transcription of the inscriptions that could be seen around the 
Prophet’s Mosque in Medina after the renovation work undertaken there on the orders of the third Abbasid 
caliph, Muḥammad al-Mahdī. This text thus adds significantly to our corpus of known inscriptions from early 
Abbasid imperial monuments. The article discusses the sources of information about these inscriptions in the 
Prophet’s Mosque, the fate of the Umayyad-era inscriptions in the early Abbasid period, and what the new 
Abbasid-era inscriptions have to tell us about the Abbasids’ claims to authority in the decades immediately 
following their seizure of power.

© 2022 Harry Munt. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License, 
which allows users to copy and distribute the material in any medium or format in unadapted form only, for noncommercial purposes only, and only so long 
as attribution is given to the original authors and source.



Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 30 (2022)

inscription in the mosque, which includes, “[This is] among that which the commander 
of the faithful al-Walīd b. ʿAbd al-Malik ordered.” All of a sudden someone said, “A man 
from the Banū Hāshim called Muḥammad is going to efface this inscription and write 
his own name in its place.” I said, “I’m Muḥammad and I’m from the Banū Hāshim. Son 
of whom?”
- “Son of ʿAbd Allāh.”
- “I’m the son of ʿAbd Allāh. The son of whom?”
- “Son of Muḥammad.”
- “I’m the son of Muḥammad. The son of whom?”
- “The son of ʿAlī.”
- “I’m the son of ʿAlī. The son of whom?”
- “The son of ʿAbd Allāh.”
- “I’m the son of ʿAbd Allāh. The son of whom?”
- “The son of ʿAbbās.”
And even though I could not reach al-ʿAbbās, I had no doubt that this was about me. I 
told people about this dream at that time, though I did not know about al-Mahdī. But 
he spoke to people about it, so when he entered the mosque of the messenger of God 
(ṣ), he raised his head, took a look, and saw the name of al-Walīd. He said, “I see the 
name of al-Walīd is in the mosque of the messenger of God (ṣ) to this day.” He asked for 
a chair, and one was brought to him in the courtyard of the mosque. He said, “I’m not 
going anywhere until it has been effaced and my name has been inscribed in its place.” 
He had workmen, scaffolding, and all that was necessary summoned and did not leave 
until it had been altered and his name had been inscribed.2

This anecdote fits well within the genre of reports that display the trope of confused 
apocalyptic expectations of the role to be played by a member of the family of the prophet 
(here identified as Banū Hāshim) who carries the prophet’s own name, Muḥammad  
b. ʿAbd Allāh.3 For the purposes of this article, it highlights the significance of inscriptions in 
major caliphal, imperial monuments. Just as his grandson and the future caliph al-Maʾmūn  
(r. 198–218/813–33) was to do with the Umayyad caliph ʿAbd al-Malik b. Marwān’s  
(r. 65–86/685–705) name in the inscriptions of the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, the 
third Abbasid caliph Muḥammad al-Mahdī (r. 158–69/775–85) here had the name of the 
Umayyad caliph al-Walīd b. ʿAbd al-Malik (r. 86–96/705–15) in the foundation inscription 
of the Prophet’s Mosque in Medina effaced and his own name inscribed in its place.4 

2.  Al-Ṭabarī, Taʾrīkh al-rusul wa-l-mulūk, ed. M. J. de Goeje et al. (Leiden: Brill, 1879–1901), 3:534–35.
3.  See, for example, the discussion in Amikam Elad, “The Struggle for the Legitimacy of Authority as Reflected 

in the Ḥadīth of al-Mahdī,” in ʿAbbasid Studies II: Occasional Papers of the School of ʿAbbasid Studies, ed. John 
Nawas, 39–96 (Leuven: Peeters, 2010).

4.  For al-Maʾmūn and the Dome of the Rock, see, among many discussions, Marcus Milwright, The Dome 
of the Rock and Its Umayyad Mosaic Inscriptions (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), 51, 65. For an 
introduction to foundation inscriptions across the premodern Islamic world, see Sheila Blair, Islamic Inscriptions 

80  •  Harry Munt



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The Umayyad and Early Abbasid Inscriptions in the Prophet's Mosque  •  81

Al-Mahdī reigned, as this anecdote reminds us, at a time when Umayyad rule was still 
within living memory and the Abbasids and their supporters were still working to articulate 
precisely the reasons why they were the legitimate caliphal family in the face of numerous 
opponents’ challenges.5 Monumental, commemorative construction projects were one way 
of articulating the necessary messages of legitimacy, and the Abbasids seem to have jumped 
at the chance to highlight their victory over their Umayyad predecessors by ostentatiously 
effacing their names from these imperial monuments.

This suggests, in turn, that the epigraphic programs in such major imperial monuments 
might have quite a bit to tell us about the nature of Umayyad and early Abbasid rule.6 Indeed, 
such programs, together with other aspects of these monuments’ form and decoration, have 
formed the basis of important studies on Umayyad caliphs’ political agendas.7 These studies 
have focused, perfectly understandably, on a fairly small number of monuments, especially 
the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem and the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus; when it comes 
to the early Abbasids’ articulation of political messages through epigraphic programs in 
explicitly caliphally patronized monuments, there has been less work. This is in large 
part due to the relative paucity of texts that remain physically extant, although for the 
Umayyad period the inscriptions from the Dome of the Rock are a particularly important 
survival.8 From the early Abbasid period, there is, for example, a milestone found near 

(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998), 29–42.
5.  Among many studies, see, for example, ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz al-Dūrī, “al-Fikra al-mahdiyya bayn al-daʿwa 

al-ʿabbāsiyya wa-l-ʿaṣr al-ʿabbāsī al-awwal,” in Studia Arabica et Islamica: Festschrift for Iḥsān ʿAbbās on His 
Sixtieth Birthday, ed. Wadād al-Qāḍī, 123–32 (Beirut: American University of Beirut, 1981); Jacob Lassner, Islamic 
Revolution and Historical Memory: An Inquiry into the Art of ʿAbbāsid Apologetics (New Haven, CT: American 
Oriental Society, 1986); Patricia Crone, “On the Meaning of the ʿAbbāsid Call to al-Riḍā,” in The Islamic World: 
From Classical to Modern Times, ed. C. Edmund Bosworth et al., 95–111 (Princeton, NJ: Darwin Press, 1989); 
idem, Medieval Islamic Political Thought (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004), 87–98; Muhammad 
Qasim Zaman, Religion and Politics under the Early ʿAbbāsids: The Emergence of the Proto-Sunnī Elite (Leiden: 
Brill, 1997); and Deborah G. Tor, “The Parting of Ways between ʿAlid Shiʿism and Abbasid Shiʿism: An Analysis 
of the Missives between the Caliph al-Manṣūr and Muḥammad al-Nafs al-Zakiyya,” Journal of Abbasid Studies 
6, no. 2 (2019): 209–27.

6.  For the purposes of this article, “the early Abbasid period” refers to the reigns of the first three Abbasid 
caliphs: Abū al-ʿAbbās al-Saffāḥ (r. 132–36/749–54), Abū Jaʿfar al-Manṣūr (r. 136–58/754–75), and Muḥammad 
al-Mahdī (r. 158–69/775–85). The Umayyad period is often divided into three periods, and that discussed in this 
article is almost always the Marwanid era, from 64/684 to 132/749; see further Andrew Marsham, “Introduction: 
The Umayyad World,” in The Umayyad World, ed. Andrew Marsham, 1–20 (London: Routledge, 2021), 14–15.

7.  A large number of studies on the Dome of the Rock are relevant here, but for use of the inscriptions, see 
Gülru Necipoğlu, “The Dome of the Rock as Palimpsest: ʿAbd al-Malik’s Grand Narrative and Sultan Süleyman’s 
Glosses,” Muqarnas 25 (2008): 17–105, at 45–56; and Milwright, Dome of the Rock (which also provides references 
to important earlier studies). See also Finbarr Barry Flood, The Great Mosque of Damascus: Studies on the 
Makings of an Umayyad Visual Culture (Leiden: Brill, 2001); Alain George, “Paradise or Empire? On a Paradox 
of Umayyad Art,” in Power, Patronage, and Memory in Early Islam: Perspectives on Umayyad Elites, ed. Alain 
George and Andrew Marsham, 39–67 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018); idem, The Umayyad Mosque of 
Damascus: Art, Faith and Empire in Early Islam (London: Gingko, 2021).

8.  For the lack of extant monumental inscriptions from the early Abbasid period, see, for example, Blair, 
Islamic Inscriptions, 59. A good example of the problem can be seen in Sheila Blair, The Monumental Inscriptions 
from Early Islamic Iran and Transoxiana (Leiden: Brill, 1992): of the seventy-nine inscriptions/bunches of 



82  •  Harry Munt

Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 30 (2022)

Mafraq in northern Jordan, which mentions that it was constructed at the command of one 
“al-Mahdī” in the year 135/752–53;9 a text from Baysān/Scythopolis commemorating the 
construction or renovation of an unspecified building during the reign of Abū al-ʿAbbās 
al-Saffāḥ in 135/753;10 an inscription from the mosque in Sanaa recording work patronized 
by the caliph in 136/753–54;11 an inscription from the Masjid al-Bayʿa near Mecca dated to 
144/761–62;12 an inscription recording work on a minaret (miʾdhana) and mosque in Ascalon 
in 155/771–72;13 an inscription from the Masjid al-Ḥarām in Mecca dated to 167/783–84;14 
and one of the milestones discovered so far along the Darb Zubayda, the major route that 
connected Baghdad/Kufa and Mecca, undated but certainly early Abbasid, that mentions 
the patronage of a caliph.15

inscriptions datable to the first five centuries aH included in this work, none dates to the first century, one 
to the second century, and one small collection of graffiti to the third century. For a quick overview of extant 
Umayyad-era inscriptions from caliphally patronized monuments, see Beatrice Gruendler, The Development of 
the Arabic Scripts: From the Nabatean Era to the First Islamic Century according to Dated Texts (Atlanta: Scholars 
Press, 1993), 15–21 (the relevant texts are E4, E9–10, E12–16); and Ilkka Lindstedt, “Arabic Rock Inscriptions up 
to 750 CE,” in Marsham, Umayyad World, 411–37, at 428. Some of these can be consulted in Étienne Combe et 
al., eds., Répertoire chronologique d’épigraphie arabe (Cairo: Institut français d’archéologie orientale, 1931–91) 
[henceforth RCEA], within 1:8–24 (nos. 9–12, 14–17, 25, 27–28).

9.  Khaled Al-Jbour, “The Discovery of the First Abbasid Milestone in ‘Bilād ash-Shām,’” Studies in the History 
and Archaeology of Jordan 8 (2004): 171–76. Since the text is curtailed, the only word visible in the patron’s title 
is al-mahdī, but as Al-Jbour notes, since the caliph Abū al-ʿAbbās al-Saffāḥ is called “al-Mahdī” in other texts (see 
nn. 10–11), the title here probably refers to that caliph.

10.  See Amikam Elad, “The Caliph Abūʾl-ʿAbbās al-Saffāḥ, the First ʿAbbāsid Mahdī: Implications of 
an Unknown Inscription from Bet-Shean (Baysān),” in Masʾat Moshe: Studies in Jewish and Islamic Culture 
Presented to Moshe Gil, ed. Ezra Fleischer, Mordechai A. Friedman and Joel A. Kramer, 9–55 (Heb.), with Eng. 
summary at v–vi (Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 1998), esp. 9 for this text; and Moshe Sharon, Corpus inscriptionum 
arabicarum palaestinae (Leiden: Brill, 1997–) [henceforth CIAP], 2:214–19, esp. 215 for the text.

11.  This is perhaps the most frequently discussed to date of these early Abbasid caliphal foundation 
inscriptions. A photograph and transcription were first published by Eugen Mittwoch, “Eine arabische 
Bauinschrift aus dem Jahre 136 H.,” Orientalia 4 (1935): 235–38. Since then, the text has also been provided in 
al-Dūrī, “al-Fikra al-mahdiyya,” 124; Robert B. Serjeant and Ronald Lewcock, “The Architectural History and 
Description of Ṣanʿāʾ Mosques: The Great Mosque,” in Ṣanʿāʾ: An Arabian Islamic City, ed. Ronald Lewcock and 
Robert B. Serjeant, 323–50 (London: World of Islam Festival Trust, 1983), 345 (photograph) and 348 (edition and 
translation); and Elad, “Caliph Abūʾl-ʿAbbās al-Saffāḥ,” 16 (with further discussion in idem, “Struggle,” 39–40, 
42). There is also a brief but misleadingly inaccurate citation of the text in Muḥammad al-Ḥajrī, Masājid Ṣanʿāʾ: 
ʿĀmiruhā wa-muwaffīhā (Sanaa: Maṭbaʿat Wizārat al-Maʿārif, 1361/1942), 26.

12.  Saʿd b. ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz al-Rāshid et al., Āthār minṭaqat Makka al-mukarrama (Riyadh: Wizārat al-Maʿārif, 
Wikālat al-Āthār wa-l-Matāḥif, 1423/2003), 122. There is another nearby but undated inscription that may be 
related to this one; see ibid., 122–25. A new edition and study of the known early Abbasid inscriptions from 
Mecca is currently being prepared by Mehdy Shaddel. I am very grateful to him for discussing these with me.

13.  Another oft-discussed early Abbasid inscription; see RCEA, 1:32–33 (no. 42); CIAP, 1:144–47; Elad, 
“Struggle,” 58 (with references to further discussions).

14.  Al-Rāshid et al., Āthār minṭaqat Makka al-mukarrama, 111–13. There is another inscription nearby that 
seems closely associated with this text and probably comes from the same period; see ibid., 113–14. Mehdy 
Shaddel’s forthcoming publication will also include a third text dating to al-Mahdī’s caliphate from the Masjid 
al-Ḥarām.

15.  See Saʿd b. ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz al-Rāshid, “Arbaʿat aḥjār mīliyya min al-ʿaṣr al-ʿabbāsī: Dirāsa wa-taḥqīq,” 



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The Umayyad and Early Abbasid Inscriptions in the Prophet's Mosque  •  83

The paucity of physically surviving texts makes the study of those epigraphic programs 
whose traces are preserved in literary sources all the more important. The study of apparent 
documentary evidence that is preserved in premodern Arabic literary sources has a long 
history among scholars interested in the early Islamic period.16 Such study does not appear 
to be receding, and ever more studies are published on “documents” that are preserved only 
in later Arabic texts.17 As far as epigraphic programs are concerned, that which accompanied 
al-Walīd b. ʿAbd al-Malik’s new mosque in Damascus, relatively well known among modern 
historians of the Umayyad era, can be studied only on the basis of discussions in Arabic 
literary sources. It is, for example, the famous Damascene historian Ibn ʿAsākir (d. 571/1176) 
who tells us that on narrow bands in blue and gold along the qibla wall could be found the 
Throne Verse (Q 2:255) followed by al-Walīd’s foundation inscription as well as sūras 1 and 
79–81 of the Qurʾan.18

Reports of the inscriptions that could be found in the Prophet’s Mosque in Medina 
after the building projects of al-Walīd b. ʿAbd al-Malik between 88/706–7 and 91/709–10 
and of a few Abbasid caliphs, especially that of Muḥammad al-Mahdī between 162/778–79 
and 165/781–82, can provide modern historians with some of the most extensive such 
material.19 Some aspects of the epigraphic programs known from this mosque over the 

al-ʿUṣūr 5, no. 1 (1990): 123–42, at 124, 130–31; there is also a very brief note on this inscription in idem, “A New 
ʿAbbāsid Milestone from al-Rabaḏa in Saudi Arabia,” Arabian Archaeology and Epigraphy 3, no. 2 (1992): 138–43, 
at 139. For further discussion of this particular inscription, see the Appendix to this article.

16.  A number of the texts included in the early volumes of RCEA, for example, are attested only in premodern 
Arabic literary sources. Another well-studied example is the so-called Constitution of Medina, on which see 
Michael Lecker, The “Constitution of Medina”: Muḥammad’s First Legal Document (Princeton, NJ: Darwin Press, 
2004). For an example of recent reluctance (though in this case perhaps appropriate) to use texts of inscriptions 
from the Abbasid period preserved in literary sources, see Hagit Nol, “Dating Early Islamic Sites through 
Architectural Elements: A Case Study from Central Israel,” Journal of Islamic Archaeology 6, no. 1 (2019): 41–80, 
at 57.

17.  For just four examples, see Wadād al-Qāḍī, “An Umayyad Papyrus in al-Kindī’s Kitāb al-Quḍāt?,” Der 
Islam 84, no. 2 (2007): 200–245; Andrew Marsham and Chase F. Robinson, “The Safe-Conduct for the Abbasid 
ʿAbd Allāh b. ʿAlī (d. 764),” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 70, no. 2 (2007): 247–81; Andrew 
Marsham, “The Pact (Amāna) between Muʿāwiya ibn Abī Sufyān and ʿ Amr ibn al-ʿĀṣ (656 or 658 CE): ‘Documents’ 
and the Islamic Historical Tradition,” Journal of Semitic Studies 57, no. 1 (2012): 69–96; and Milka Levy-Rubin, 
“The Surrender Agreements: Origins and Authenticity,” in Marsham, Umayyad World, 196–215.

18.  Ibn ʿAsākir, Taʾrīkh madīnat Dimashq, vols. 1 and 2, ed. Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn al-Munajjid (Damascus: al-Majmaʿ 
al-ʿIlmī al-ʿArabī, 1951–54), 2/i:37. His source for this information is Abū Yūsuf Yaʿqūb b. Sufyān al-Fasawī  
(d. 277/890), but it cannot be found in the extant parts of the latter’s Kitāb al-Maʿrifa wa-l-taʾrīkh. The editor 
of the latter work included it in his edition on the basis of Ibn ʿAsākir’s citation; see al-Fasawī, Kitāb al-Maʿrifa 
wa-l-taʾrīkh, ed. Akram Ḍiyāʾ al-ʿUmarī, 3rd ed. (Medina: Maktabat al-Dār, 1410/1989–90), 3:433–34. Other 
sources provide a text for the foundation inscription as well; see, in general, Barbara Finster, “Die Mosaiken der 
Umayyadenmoschee von Damaskus,” Kunst des Orients 7, no. 2 (1970–71): 83–141, at 119; Flood, Great Mosque, 
247–54; and George, Umayyad Mosque, 76–77, 175–78, 206–7.

19.  For studies of these two building programs in Medina (al-Walīd’s is much better studied than al-Mahdī’s), 
see esp. Jean Sauvaget, Le mosquée omeyyade de Médine: Étude sur les origines architecturales de la mosquée 
et de la basilique (Paris: Vanoest, 1947); K. A. C. Creswell, Early Muslim Architecture: Umayyads, A.D. 622–750, 
2nd ed., vol. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), 142–49; Ghazi Izzeddin Bisheh, “The Mosque of the Prophet 
at Madīnah Throughout the First-Century a.H. with Special Emphasis on the Umayyad Mosque” (PhD diss., 



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second/eighth century have been discussed before, especially the evidence for al-Walīd’s 
inscriptions.20 The Abbasid-era texts have received less attention, although they were 
subjected to a fairly thorough study by Jean Sauvaget based on a good range of sources that 
were available to him at the time.21 Renewed study of these inscriptions is, however, long 
overdue. The most significant reason for this is that no detailed study to date has made 
use of the most important source for research into these inscriptions: a late third/ninth- 
or early fourth/tenth-century work known as Kitāb al-Manāsik wa-amākin ṭuruq al-ḥajj 
wa-maʿālim al-jazīra.22 Sauvaget’s study, upon which most other historians have relied, was 
written before the publication of this Kitāb al-Manāsik and so was based primarily on the 
inscriptions discussed by Ibn Rusta, who visited the mosque in 290/903, supplemented by 
material provided by the later local historian of Medina Ibn al-Najjār (d. 643/1245) and the 
very brief discussions provided by Ibn Qutayba (d. 276/889), Ibn ʿAbd Rabbih (d. 328/940), 
and Ibn al-Nadīm (d. before 388/998).23 Sauvaget also made some use of another local history 
of Medina, that of al-Samhūdī (d. 911/1506), although he mostly used the briefer of the 
extant histories by that author; a much more detailed work also survives, and although it 
does not provide a full survey of the inscriptions, it does offer important supplementary 
material that is crucial to their interpretation.24

University of Michigan, 1979), 201–48; Marcel Behrens, “Ein Garten des Paradieses”: Die Prophetenmoschee von 
Medina (Würzburg: Ergon, 2007), 85–90; and Harry Munt, The Holy City of Medina: Sacred Space in Early Islamic 
Arabia (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 105–11, 115–17.

20.  For discussion of al-Walīd’s inscriptions, see Sauvaget, Mosquée omeyyade, 78–80; Finster, “Mosaiken,” 
132; Bisheh, “Mosque of the Prophet,” 218; Estelle Whelan, “Forgotten Witness: Evidence for the Early Codification 
of the Qurʾān,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 118, no. 1 (1998): 1–14, at 8–13; Flood, Great Mosque, 
196–97, 204–5; Elias Khamis, “Two Wall Mosaic Inscriptions from the Umayyad Market Place in Bet Shean/
Baysān,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 64, no. 2 (2001): 159–76, at 171; and Alain George, 
“Calligraphy, Colour and Light in the Blue Qurʾan,” Journal of Qurʾanic Studies 11, no. 1 (2009): 75–125, at 97.

21.  Sauvaget, Mosquée omeyyade, 54–68; see also, more recently, George, “Calligraphy, Colour and Light,” 
98–101.

22.  See Kitāb al-Manāsik wa-amākin ṭuruq al-ḥajj wa-maʿālim al-jazīra, ed. Ḥamad al-Jāsir (Riyadh: Dār 
al-Yamāma, 1389/1969), 385–95 for the discussion of the inscriptions. The authorship of this work is discussed 
further below. For some discussion of this source’s provision of the text of early Abbasid inscriptions from the 
Prophet’s Mosque, see Elad, “Struggle,” 39, n. 4; Munt, Holy City of Medina, 115–16, 167–68; and now Bea Leal, 
“The Abbasid Mosaic Tradition and the Great Mosque of Damascus,” Muqarnas 37 (2020): 29–62, at 31–32.

23.  For these sources’ discussions of the inscriptions, see Ibn Qutayba, al-Maʿārif, ed. Tharwat ʿUkāsha, 4th 
ed. (Cairo: Dār al-Maʿārif, n.d.), 562–63; Ibn Rusta, al-Mujallad al-sābiʿ min Kitāb al-Aʿlāq al-nafīsa, ed. M. J. de 
Goeje (Leiden: Brill, 1891), 70–71, 73–75; Ibn ʿAbd Rabbih, al-ʿIqd al-farīd, ed. Aḥmad Amīn, Aḥmad al-Zayn, 
and Ibrāhīm al-Abyārī (Cairo: Maṭbaʿat Lajnat al-Taʾlīf wa-l-Tarjama wa-l-Nashr, 1359–72/1940–53), 6:260–63; 
Ibn al-Nadīm, Kitāb al-Fihrist, ed. Ayman Fuʾād Sayyid (London: Muʾassasat al-Furqān li-l-Turāth al-Islāmī, 
1430/2009), 1/i:15–16 (future references are to this edition unless otherwise stated); Ibn al-Najjār, al-Durra 
al-thamīna fī taʾrīkh al-Madīna, ed. Muḥammad ʿAzab (Cairo: Maktabat al-Thaqāfa al-Dīniyya, 1416/1995), 
176–77, 179. The inscriptions as provided by Ibn Rusta were also included in RCEA, 1:29–30, 35–38, 65–66 (nos. 
38, 46–47, 83); and 2:265 (no. 786); and that provided by Ibn Qutayba partially (possibly via al-Samhūdī, who also 
provides it partially in his Wafāʾ al-wafā bi-akhbār dār al-muṣṭafā, ed. Qāsim al-Sāmarrāʾī [London: Muʾassasat 
al-Furqān li-l-Turāth al-Islāmī, 1422/2001], 2:296) in RCEA, 1:98 (no. 122).

24.  Sauvaget used al-Samhūdī’s Khulāṣat al-wafā bi-akhbār dār al-muṣṭafā; for an edition, see ed. ʿAlī 
Muḥammad ʿ Umar (Cairo: Maktabat al-Thaqāfa al-Dīniyya, 1427/2006). The more important work is al-Samhūdī’s 



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Ibn Rusta’s catalog of inscriptions from the Prophet’s Mosque was the most comprehensive 
to have been published when Sauvaget was at work on his study, but Ibn Rusta noted at 
the end of his survey of some of the texts, “There are many texts in places around the 
mosque and its entrances, inside and outside, which I have not transcribed, preferring 
concision.”25 The Kitāb al-Manāsik includes also the texts that Ibn Rusta omitted. Several 
other Mamluk-era local histories of Medina that have been published since Sauvaget’s study 
are also useful, especially that by al-Fīrūzābādī (d. 817/1414), which also provides the text 
of a number of the inscriptions contained in the Kitāb al-Manāsik but not in other works.26

After a brief survey of what is known about work in general on the Prophet’s Mosque 
over the Marwanid and early Abbasid periods, this article offers a discussion of the Kitāb 
al-Manāsik’s sources for its transcription of the mosque’s inscriptions as well as the sources 
of some of the other relevant premodern authors and a translation of the section of the 
Kitāb al-Manāsik that deals with those inscriptions. This, then, forms the basis for further 
discussion of what these inscriptions can tell us about several issues relevant to modern 
research into early Islamic history. I focus more heavily on texts from the early Abbasid 
period, since it is these that the Kitāb al-Manāsik reproduces more fully than any other 
source does, but I also give some consideration to the Umayyad-era texts. It is my hope that 
this article can help bring the Prophet’s Mosque in Medina more fully into discussions of 
Umayyad, and especially early Abbasid, imperial building programs to grant it a place in 
modern scholarship more fitting of its clear importance to caliphs and other Muslims in the 
second/eighth century.

Construction Work in the Prophet’s Mosque in the Marwanid and Early Abbasid Periods

Although various developments in the structure of the Prophet’s Mosque in Medina are 
said to have taken place during the era of the Rāshidūn caliphs, it is really with the work 
ordered by al-Walīd b. ʿAbd al-Malik that the building came to take much of the shape that 
defined it throughout the premodern period.27 This caliph is known for ordering significant 
construction work on a number of major mosques around the caliphate, including in 
Jerusalem (the Aqṣā Mosque), Damascus, Mecca, Sanaa, Homs, and al-Fusṭāṭ, as well as in 
Medina.28 The work he ordered in Medina was carried out by the governor of that town, his 

Wafāʾ al-wafā. For more on this author, see Ḥamad al-Jāsir, “al-Samhūdī: Ashhar muʾarrikhī al-Madīna,” Majallat 
al-ʿarab 7 (1392/1972): 161–78; al-Sāmarrāʾī’s introduction to his edition of the Wafāʾ al-wafā, at 1:7–47; 2:5–23; 
and Harry Munt, “Mamluk Historiography outside of Egypt and Syria: ʿAlī b. ʿAbd Allāh al-Samhūdī and His 
Histories of Medina,” Der Islam 92, no. 2 (2015): 413–41.

25.  Ibn Rusta, al-Aʿlāq al-nafīsa, 75.
26.  Al-Fīrūzābādī, al-Maghānim al-muṭāba fī maʿālim Ṭāba, ed. Ḥabīb Maḥmūd Aḥmad et al. (Medina: Markaz 

Buḥūth wa-Dirāsāt al-Madīna al-Munawwara, 1423/2002), 1:425–35.
27.  Much of this section is summarized from the discussion in Munt, Holy City of Medina, 105–11, 115–17, 

where further references are given. For discussion of the literary accounts of the pre-Marwanid mosque, see 
Thallein Antun, The Architectural Form of the Mosque in the Central Arab Lands, from the Hijra to the End of 
the Umayyad Period, 1/622–133/750 (Oxford: British Archaeological Reports, 2016), 50–70.

28.  For discussion, see Finster, “Mosaiken,” 127–39; and Flood, Great Mosque, esp. 184–92. See also Rafi 
Grafman and Myriam Rosen-Ayalon, “The Two Great Syrian Umayyad Mosques: Jerusalem and Damascus,” 



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cousin and the future caliph ʿUmar b. ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz, and Ṣāliḥ b. Kaysān between 88/706–7 
and 91/709–10.29 As part of this project, the mosque was substantially enlarged to the east, 
north, and west. As Sauvaget noted, it is impossible to provide exact measurements for 
the size of the new mosque, since the building itself does not, of course, survive and the 
figures given in literary sources vary.30 One such set of numbers gives 167.5 cubits for the 
southern wall, 135 cubits for the northern wall, and 200 cubits for the eastern and western 
walls.31 Within these walls, a central courtyard was surrounded by arcades comprising 
numerous columns. This enlargement work brought the prophet’s grave, now within a 
dedicated chamber, within the walls of the mosque for the first time (it was located near 
the southeast corner), and other features classically associated with mosques, including a 
concave miḥrāb and corner towers later identified as minarets, were apparently introduced 
at the same time.32 The building work was accompanied by a lavish program of decoration, 
most famously a series of mosaics that, according to a well-known report transmitted by the 
early Medinan local historian Ibn Zabāla (more on this figure below), depicted “the trees 
and villas (quṣūr) of Paradise.”33 It has often been suggested that these mosaics perhaps 
resembled those that can still be seen in the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus.34 Famously, this 
work was apparently carried out with the assistance of laborers and resources sent by the 
Byzantine emperor Justinian II (r. 685–95, 705–11 CE).35

After al-Walīd’s work, not much more appears to have been done during the remaining 
years of Umayyad rule. As we will soon see, however, some inscriptions recorded in the Kitāb 

Muqarnas 16 (1999): 1–15; and especially now Alain George, “A Builder of Mosques: The Projects of al-Walīd I, 
from Sanaa to Homs” in Fruit of Knowledge, Wheel of Learning: Essays in Honour of Robert Hillenbrand, ed. 
Melanie Gibson, 16–49 (London: Gingko, 2022).

29.  These, at least, are the dates given by the early local historian of Medina Ibn Zabāla (on whom see below), 
as cited in Ibn Rusta, al-Aʿlāq al-nafīsa, 71–72; and al-Samhūdī, Wafāʾ al-wafā, 2:273–74.

30.  Sauvaget, Mosquée omeyyade, 70; see also Antun, Architectural Form, 66–67.
31.  Bisheh, “Mosque of the Prophet,” 211. Various lengths for cubit (dhirāʿ) were known in the early Islamic 

centuries; they were usually somewhere around half a meter, give or take, though sometimes varied more 
considerably. Umayyad-era buildings were apparently built with a cubit equivalent to 0.56m; see Grafman 
and Rosen-Ayalon, “Two Great Syrian Mosques,” 5–6; George, Umayyad Mosque, 136. This equivalence gives 
us 112 m for the western and eastern walls, 75.6 m for the northern wall, and 93.8 m for the southern wall. 
Sauvaget (Mosquée omeyyade, 91) offers a reconstruction of al-Walīd’s mosque that agrees roughly with these 
measurements, although it has the northern and southern walls more similar to one another in length.

32.  For these features of the mosque, see also Sauvaget, Mosquée omeyyade, 69–92; Bisheh, “Mosque of the 
Prophet,” 201–48; Munt, Holy City of Medina, 106–11. For other discussions of their origins, see, for example, 
Estelle Whelan, “The Origins of the Miḥrāb Mujawwaf: A Reinterpretation,” International Journal of Middle East 
Studies 18, no. 2 (1996): 205–23; Nuha N. N. Khoury, “The Mihrab: From Text to Form,” International Journal of 
Middle East Studies 20, no. 1 (1998): 1–27; Jonathan M. Bloom, The Minaret (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University 
Press, 2013). For two other features closely associated with the mosque in Medina, see Heba Mostafa, “The Early 
Mosque Revisited: Introduction of the Minbar and Maqṣūra,” Muqarnas 33 (2016): 1–16.

33.  For the quotation, see Kitāb al-Manāsik, 364–65; Ibn Rusta, al-Aʿlāq al-nafīsa, 69; Ibn al-Najjār, al-Durra 
al-thamīna, 176; al-Samhūdī, Wafāʾ al-wafā, 2:270.

34.  For a recent note of the link, see George, “Paradise or Empire,” 53.
35.  For a discussion of this with reference to earlier scholarship, see Bisheh, “Mosque of the Prophet,” 

201–11; George, Umayyad Mosque, 87–88.



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al-Manāsik and other sources suggest that work was undertaken in the mosque during the 
reigns of the first two Abbasid caliphs, Abū al-ʿAbbās al-Saffāḥ and Abū Jaʿfar al-Manṣūr.36 
It was, however, the construction work ordered by the third Abbasid caliph, Muḥammad 
al-Mahdī that gave the Prophet’s Mosque the general form it would have down to the 
nineteenth century.37 Between 162/778–79 and 165/781–82, according to some sources, 
this caliph had the mosque expanded northward by 100 cubits (ca. 56 m) and made several 
changes to the interior decoration. He also apparently wished to remove the additional 
steps that an Umayyad caliph had added to the prophet’s minbar in the mosque to return it 
to its original form, but eventually decided against doing so out of fear that the necessary 
work would damage the wood of the original steps. As part of his renovations to the interior 
decoration of the mosque, al-Mahdī established a program of inscriptions that incorporated 
some earlier texts around the courtyard and the entrances to the mosque. It is this program 
of inscriptions about which the Kitāb al-Manāsik provides much more information than can 
be found in almost any other extant source.

Sources for the Texts of the Inscriptions

Although the extant works discussed above preserve the texts of numerous inscriptions 
from al-Mahdī’s epigraphic program in Medina, very few offer eyewitness descriptions by 
their authors; almost all of the authors relied on earlier witnesses to these inscriptions. 
(There are no extant sources authored by eyewitnesses to the Umayyad-era texts.)  
This raises the question of when the inscriptions disappeared. Our most reliable terminus 
post quem for their disappearance is provided by Ibn Rusta, who did apparently see at least 
some of the texts himself when visiting Medina during the ḥajj season of 290/903, a date 
that falls after the death of the Kitāb al-Manāsik’s principal source, Abū al-Ḥusayn Yaḥyā b. 
al-Ḥasan al-ʿAqīqī, in 277/890 (see further discussion of this figure below).38 After this date, 
the precise circumstances of their disappearance are hard to pin down. For what it is worth, 
the Andalusī writer Ibn ʿAbd Rabbih, when discussing the Prophet’s Mosque, notes within 
his description of the layers of decoration along the internal qibla wall that “above that 
there is a marble band (izār) as well, within which is a sky-blue strip (ṣanīfa39 samāwiyya) 
over which are five lines inscribed with gold in a thick script, roughly a finger’s width, 
which contain the short sūras at the end of the Qurʾan (qiṣār al-mufaṣṣal).”40 Since, as we 
will shortly see, the Umayyad-era qibla wall inscription is said to have included sūras 91 
to 114, Ibn ʿAbd Rabbih’s comment might suggest that this element, at least, could still be 
seen in the early fourth/tenth century, although there is some debate over the relationship 
between Ibn ʿAbd Rabbih’s description and the actual appearance of the mosque in Medina 

36.  See also Munt, Holy City of Medina, 115–16.
37.  Ibid., 116, with further references.
38.  Ibn Rusta, al-Aʿlāq al-nafīsa, 73. For a brief discussion of Ibn Rusta’s trip to the Ḥijāz, see Zayde Antrim, 

Routes and Realms: The Power of Place in the Early Islamic World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 
69–70.

39.  Sauvaget (Mosquée omeyyade, 78) reads this as ṣuffa.
40.  Ibn ʿAbd Rabbih, al-ʿIqd al-farīd, 6:261.



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in his time.41 Al-Samhūdī noted that some remnants of mosaic from the time of al-Mahdī’s 
expansion of the mosque could still be found in his day by the northwest minaret and 
along the western wall near that minaret, but that these were subsequently destroyed in 
the devastating fire that broke out in the mosque in Ramaḍān 886/November 1481.42 It is 
unclear whether these surviving mosaic fragments included any epigraphy.

The inscriptions were certainly still visible throughout the third/ninth century, however, 
and may have been restored in the middle of that century along with other features of 
the mosque’s decoration: according to al-Balādhurī (d. before 279/892), the caliph Jaʿfar 
al-Mutawakkil (r. 232–47/847–61) ordered repairs to be undertaken on the Prophet’s 
Mosque in 246/860–61, for which purpose he sent “plenty of mosaic” there.43 The two best 
known sources from the late second and third/ninth centuries cited as eyewitnesses to the 
Abbasid-era inscriptions are Ibn Zabāla (wr. 199/814) and Yaḥyā al-ʿAqīqī. Al-Samhūdī says 
explicitly that “he [Yaḥyā] and Ibn Zabāla recounted the inscriptions, inside and outside 
[the mosque], as well as around its entrances. We have left them out because they have 
not survived.”44 When al-Samhūdī does actually provide the text of a handful of these 
inscriptions, mostly in his chapter discussing the entrances to the mosque, he almost always 
credits Ibn Zabāla and/or Yaḥyā as his source.45 The author of the Kitāb al-Manāsik is quite 
clear that his source was Yaḥyā (both this work and Yaḥyā are discussed below). There is no 
reason not to accept Ibn Rusta’s claim that he read at least some of these texts himself—the 
fact that he is the only source to reproduce an inscription recording work ordered by the 
caliph al-Muʿtaḍid (r. 279–89/892–902) in 282/895–96 seems to confirm this46—although 
it is clear that he otherwise made heavy use of Ibn Zabāla’s Akhbār al-Madīna as a source 
for his account of Medina; it is also clear that Ibn al-Najjār made heavy use of Ibn Zabāla’s 
work, so the latter may well have been the ultimate source for Ibn al-Najjār’s discussion of 
the inscriptions.47 Qāsim al-Sāmarrāʾī seems convinced that Ibn Zabāla was the source for 
al-Fīrūzābādī’s discussion of these inscriptions. Although I cannot see that clearly stated in 
 

41.  Sauvaget made heavy use of this passage in his reconstruction of the Prophet’s Mosque; see his Mosquée 
omeyyade, 31, 69–92; and Finster, “Mosaiken,” 132. Nuha Khoury, however, has discussed this passage in a 
particularly interesting way that questions its relationship to a Medinan reality; see her “The Meaning of the 
Great Mosque of Cordoba in the Tenth Century,” Muqarnas 13 (1996): 80–98, esp. 89–94. That said, Flood (Great 
Mosque, 193–94) has argued in favor of taking Ibn ʿAbd Rabbih’s description seriously.

42.  Al-Samhūdī, Khulāṣat al-wafā, 1:317; idem, Wafāʾ al-wafā, 2:296. For this fire and its consequences, see 
al-Samhūdī, Wafāʾ al-wafā, 2:413–30; Sauvaget, Mosquée omeyyade, 46–47; Behrens, “Garten des Paradieses,” 
93–96.

43.  Al-Balādhurī, Kitāb Futūḥ al-buldān, ed. M. J. de Goeje (Leiden: Brill, 1866), 7.
44.  Al-Samhūdī, Wafāʾ al-wafā, 2:274.
45.  See, for example, ibid., 2:291; 3:8, 14, 23.
46.  Ibn Rusta, al-Aʿlāq al-nafīsa, 74: “Abū al-ʿAbbās, the imam al-Muʿtaḍid bi-llāh, the commander of the 

faithful, may God lengthen his remaining time, ordered the building’s restoration in the year 282 [895–96 CE].” 
See also RCEA, 2:265 (no. 786); and discussion in Sauvaget, Mosquée omeyyade, 57–58.

47.  For these (and other) sources’ reliance on Ibn Zabāla, see Harry Munt, “Writing the History of an Arabian 
Holy City: Ibn Zabāla and the First Local History of Medina,” Arabica 59, no. 1–2 (2012): 1–34, at 2–3, 13, 15, 19, 
23–27.



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the latter’s work, given the considerable overlap between material in al-Fīrūzābādī’s history 
and that attributed elsewhere to Ibn Zabāla, the claim is certainly plausible.48

Ibn Zabāla’s Akhbār al-Madīna (probably known through at least one later recension) 
was without doubt the single most important source for the history of Medina’s early 
Islamic topography, population, and monuments for many later authors, especially those 
active in the Ayyubid and Mamluk periods. This work has, however, been discussed in detail 
elsewhere.49 Here, we will focus on the Kitāb al-Manāsik and that work’s main source for the 
inscriptions, Yaḥyā al-ʿAqīqī.

The Kitāb al-Manāsik is not a work particularly interested in the rites of the ḥajj and the 
ʿumra but rather a very important source of geographical and topographical information on 
the Arabian Peninsula. It is particularly concerned, as its full given title suggests, with the 
routes that pilgrims used to travel from regions across the caliphate to the Ḥijāz. It survives 
in a single manuscript held in Mashhad.50 That manuscript is missing its introduction, and 
consequently there has been some debate over the identity of its author. The text’s editor, 
Ḥamad al-Jāsir, argued forcefully that the author was Abū Isḥāq Ibrāhīm b. Isḥāq al-Ḥarbī 
(d. 285/898–99), and others have often followed this identification when citing the work.51 
The identification has, however, been challenged by Abdullah al-Wohaibi, who has instead 
argued for the work’s attribution to Muḥammad b. Khalaf Wakīʿ (d. 306/918), otherwise 
well known, especially for his extant history of the judiciary in the early Islamic centuries.52 
Some aspects of al-Wohaibi’s case are convincing, particularly the overlap he points to 
between the sources used and the manner of their citing in the Kitāb al-Manāsik, on the one 
hand, and in Wakīʿ’s Akhbār al-quḍāt, on the other. Al-Wohaibi also notes that Ibn al-Nadīm 
credits Wakīʿ with a Kitāb al-Ṭarīq, which apparently contained “reports about regions 
and routes,” although Ibn al-Nadīm also reports that the work remained unfinished.53  

48.  Al-Sāmarrāʾī in al-Samhūdī, Wafāʾ al-wafā, 2:274, n. 8.
49.  See most recently (with references to further discussions) Ṣalāḥ ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz Zayn Salāma, Akhbār 

al-Madīna li-Muḥammad b. al-Ḥasan b. Zabāla (Medina: Markaz Buḥūth wa-Dirāsat al-Madīna al-Munawwara, 
1424/2003); Munt, “Writing the History.”

50.  MS Mashhad, al-Maktaba al-Riḍawiyya, no. 5751. The manuscript is undated, but its most prominent 
student, Ḥusayn ʿAlī Maḥfūẓ, suggested that it was copied approximately in the early sixth/twelfth century; it 
was certainly owned by someone in 899/1493–94. I have been unable to consult Maḥfūẓ’s studies directly, but 
see the summary in al-Jāsir’s lengthy introduction to his edition of the Kitāb al-Manāsik, 9–273 (henceforth 
JāsMuq.), at 271.

51.  For al-Jāsir’s argument, see JāsMuq., esp. 262–70; and idem, “Makhṭūṭ ʿan maʿālim jazīrat al-ʿarab 
li-l-imām al-Ḥarbī (198–285 H)” (part 2), Majallat al-ʿarab 3, no. 3 (1388/1968): 193–98.

52.  Abdullah al-Wohaibi, The Northern Hijaz in the Writings of the Arab Geographers, 800–1150 (Beirut: 
Al-Risalah, 1973), 450–53. Al-Wohaibi refers to the Kitāb al-Manāsik by the title Manāzil ṭarīq Makka. For 
discussion of Wakīʿ’s Akhbār al-quḍāt, see Mathieu Tillier, L’invention du cadi: La justice des musulmans, des 
juifs et des chrétiens aux premiers siècles de l’Islam (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2017), esp. 154–55.

53.  Ibn al-Nadīm, Fihrist, 1/ii:353. Wakīʿ was an important source for al-Khaṭīb al-Baghdādī’s (d. 463/1071) 
topographical discussion of Baghdad, and Jacob Lassner speculated that the latter may have taken material from 
Wakīʿ’s Kitāb al-Ṭarīq, but there is nothing in the extant Kitāb al-Manāsik that (if this work were by Wakīʿ) could 
confirm this; see Jacob Lassner, The Topography of Baghdad in the Early Middle Ages: Text and Studies (Detroit: 
Wayne State University Press, 1970), 30–31.



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Whatever the author’s precise identity, the studies of al-Jāsir and al-Wohaibi have firmly 
established, largely on the basis of the authorities cited, that the Kitāb al-Manāsik is a work 
of the late third/ninth or early fourth/tenth century.

The Kitāb al-Manāsik’s direct source for discussion of the inscriptions in the Prophet’s 
Mosque is cited at least thirty-three times throughout the work as a whole. Abū al-Ḥusayn 
Yaḥyā b. al-Ḥasan b. Jaʿfar b. ʿUbayd Allāh b. al-Ḥusayn al-Aṣghar b. ʿAlī Zayn al-ʿĀbidīn  
b. al-Ḥusayn b. ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib, known as al-ʿAqīqī, was, according to al-Samhūdī, one of the 
first, along with Ibn Zabāla, to compose a history of Medina.54 We know a fair amount about 
his life, his ancestors, and his descendants, mainly thanks to notices in ʿAlid genealogies.55 
Yaḥyā was born in Medina in 214/829, seven years before the death of his father at the age 
of thirty-seven in 221/835–36.56 His grandfather Jaʿfar is said to have been recognized as 
an imam by some Zaydīs and was known as al-Ḥujja, “the Proof.”57 Jaʿfar was presumably 
seen as a threat by the Abbasid caliphs, because he was arrested by Hārūn al-Rashīd’s 
last governor of Medina, Abū al-Bakhtarī Wahb b. Wahb, and held for eighteen months.58  
The family does not seem to have been permanently at odds with the Abbasids, but many 
of them are reported to have been imprisoned or to have come to otherwise nasty ends.59  
There is, for example, a suggestion that the Abbasids’ revolutionary commander Abū Muslim 
tried to poison Abū Jaʿfar ʿUbayd Allāh b. al-Ḥusayn al-Aṣghar.60 The family also appears to 
 

54.  Al-Samhūdī, Wafāʾ al-wafā, 2:65.
55.  Abū Naṣr al-Bukhārī, Sirr al-silsila al-ʿalawiyya, ed. Muḥammad Ṣādiq Baḥr al-ʿUlūm (Najaf: al-Maktaba 

al-Ḥaydariyya, 1382/1963), passim; al-Najāshī, Fihrist asmāʾ muṣannifī al-shīʿa al-mushtahar bi-Rijāl al-Najāshī, 
ed. Mūsā al-Shabīrī al-Zanjānī (Qum: Muʾassasat al-Nashr al-Islāmī al-Tābiʿa li-Jamāʿat al-Mudarrisīn, 1407/1986), 
64 (no. 149), 441–42 (no. 1189); al-Ṭūsī, al-Fihrist, ed. Muḥammad Ṣādiq Āl Baḥr al-ʿUlūm, 2nd ed. (Najaf: 
al-Maṭbaʿa al-Ḥaydariyya, 1380/1961), 208 (no. 801). Extracts from these and several other premodern sources 
on Yaḥyā’s life and works are also usefully collated in the editor’s introduction [henceforth KāẓMuq] to Yaḥyā 
al-ʿAqīqī, Kitāb al-Muʿaqqibīn min wuld al-imām amīr al-muʾminīn, ed. Muḥammad al-Kāẓim (Qum: Maktabat 
Āyat Allāh al-ʿUẓmā al-Marʿashī al-Najafī, 1422/2001), 6–9. Modern discussions include Ṣāliḥ Aḥmad al-ʿAlī, 
“al-Muʾallafāt al-ʿarabiyya ʿ an al-Madīna wa-l-Ḥijāz,” Majallat al-Majmaʿ al-ʿilmī al-ʿirāqī 11 (1384/1964): 118–57, 
at 129–30; Fuat Sezgin, Geschichte des arabischen Schrifttums (Leiden: Brill, 1967–) [henceforth GAS], 1:273; 
Ḥamad al-Jāsir, “Muʾallafāt fī taʾrīkh al-Madīna,” Majallat al-ʿarab 4 (1389–90/1969–70): 97–100, 262–66, 327–34, 
385–88, 465–67, at 386; Sebastian Günther, Quellenuntersuchungen zu den “Maqātil aṭ-Ṭālibiyyīn” des Abūʾl-
Farağ al-Iṣfahānī (gest. 356/967): Ein Beitrag zur Problematik der mündlichen und schriftlichen Überlieferung 
in der mittelalterlichen arabischen Literatur (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1991), 226–28; Kazuo Morimoto, “The 
Formation and Development of the Science of Talibid Genealogies in the 10th and 11th Century Middle East,” 
Oriente Moderno 18, no. 2 (1999): 541–70, at 544–45; Teresa Bernheimer, The ʿAlids: The First Family of Islam, 
750–1200 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), esp. 18–19.

56.  Ibn al-Ṭiqṭaqā, as cited in KāẓMuq., 8; see also KāẓMuq., 11.
57.  For detailed discussion of the significance of the Shiʿi use of the term ḥujja to describe the imam, albeit 

in Imāmī rather than Zaydī circles, see Mohammad Ali Amir-Moezzi, La preuve de Dieu: La mystique shiʿite à 
travers l’œuvre de Kulaynî IXe–Xe siècle (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 2018).

58.  Abū Naṣr al-Bukhārī, Sirr al-silsila, 71–72.
59.  See the discussion in Bernheimer, ʿAlids, 19.
60.  Abū al-Faraj al-Iṣfahānī, Maqātil al-ṭālibiyyīn, ed. Aḥmad Ṣaqr, 4th ed. (Beirut: Muʾassasat al-Aʿlamī li-l-

Maṭbūʿāt, 1427/2006), 159.



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have had some problems with other ʿAlids; Yaḥyā’s brother, ʿUbayd Allāh b. al-Ḥasan  
b. Jaʿfar, for example, is said to have been killed by al-Ḥasan b. Zayd in Ṭabaristān.61

Of Yaḥyā himself we know relatively little. Apart from his birth date, noted above, we 
know that he died in Mecca in 277/890 and that the Abbasid governor of Mecca at the 
time, Hārūn b. Muḥammad, prayed over him.62 He may have studied with Ibn Zabāla in 
Medina, since according to al-Samhūdī’s citations he is Yaḥyā’s most frequently cited direct 
source.63 However, what we know of Ibn Zabāla’s life suggests that this would be highly 
unlikely for chronological reasons; it is more probable that Yaḥyā simply used Ibn Zabāla’s 
Akhbār al-Madīna as a source or studied it with one of the latter’s students. This suggestion 
is supported by four isnāds in the Kitāb al-Manāsik that have Yaḥyā transmit Ibn Zabāla’s 
material with the latter’s best-known transmitter (rāwī), al-Zubayr b. Bakkār (d. 256/870), 
as an intermediary between the two.64 Yaḥyā apparently had seven sons, one of whom, 
Ṭāhir, was allegedly murdered.65 As al-Samhūdī mentions, Yaḥyā’s descendants came to be 
the local rulers of Medina for centuries;66 the first to have held this position seems to have 
been Yaḥyā’s great-great-grandson Ṭāhir b. Muslim b. ʿUbayd Allāh b. Ṭāhir b. Yaḥyā.67

The premodern biobibliographical sources attribute four works to Yaḥyā: Akhbār 
al-Madīna,68 Ansāb āl Abī Ṭālib,69 Kitāb al-Manāsik ʿan ʿAlī b. al-Ḥusayn,70 and Kitāb 
al-Masjid.71 Of these four titles, only one, Ansāb āl Abī Ṭālib, survives, and that possibly 

61.  Ibid., 558.
62.  Ibn Funduq al-Bayhaqī, al-Marwazī and Ibn al-Ṭiqṭaqā, as cited in KāẓMuq., 7–8.
63.  See also al-ʿAlī, “al-Muʾallafāt al-ʿarabiyya,” 129–30.
64.  Kitāb al-Manāsik, 365, 367, 369, 379. For al-Zubayr b. Bakkār as a rāwī of Ibn Zabāla, see Munt, “Writing 

the History,” 14–18, 24–25.
65.  For Yaḥyā’s seven sons, see Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī, cited in KāẓMuq., 7; on Ṭāhir’s murder, see Abū al-Faraj, 

Maqātil, 551.
66.  Al-Samhūdī, Wafāʾ al-wafā, 1:424.
67.  See Richard Mortel, “The Origins and Early History of the Ḥusaynid Amirate of Madīna to the End of the 

Ayyūbid Period,” Studia Islamica 74 (1991): 63–78, at 64–66; though cf. the slightly different version of events 
in Ella Landau-Tasseron, “Arabia,” in The New Cambridge History of Islam, vol. 1: The Formation of the Islamic 
World, Sixth to Eleventh Centuries, ed. Chase F. Robinson, 397–447 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 
2010), 411.

68.  Al-Sakhāwī, al-Iʿlān bi-l-tawbīkh li-man dhamma al-taʾrīkh, ed. Franz Rosenthal and Ṣāliḥ Aḥmad al-ʿAlī 
(Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, n.d.), 274; al-Samhūdī, Wafāʾ al-wafā, 1:424; 2:65, 159; 3:141; 5:27, 61, 107; Ḥājjī 
Khalīfa, Kashf al-ẓunūn ʿan asāmī al-kutub wa-l-funūn, ed. Şerefettin Yaltkaya and Rifat Bilge (Istanbul: Maarif 
Matbaası, 1360–62/1941–43), 1:29. Modern discussions include al-ʿAlī, “al-Muʾallafāt al-ʿarabiyya,” 129–30; Ṣalāḥ 
al-Dīn al-Munajjid, Muʿjam mā ullifa ʿan rasūl Allāh (ṣ) (Beirut: Dār al-Kitāb al-Jadīd, 1402/1982), 93–94; ʿAbd 
Allāh ʿUsaylān, al-Madīna al-munawwara fī āthār al-muʾallifīn wa-l-bāḥithīn qadīman wa-ḥadīthan (Medina: ʿAbd 
Allāh ʿUsaylān, 1418/1997), 32–33.

69.  Al-Najāshī, Rijāl, 442; al-Ṭūsī, Fihrist, 208; also discussed in GAS, 1:273; Morimoto, “Formation and 
Development,” 544–45; KāẓMuq.

70.  Al-Ṭūsī, Fihrist, 208.
71.  Al-Najāshī, Rijāl, 442; al-Ṭūsī, Fihrist, 208; Ibn Shahrāshūb, cited in KāẓMuq., 7. The title is said to refer 

to the Prophet’s Mosque. Muḥammad al-Kāẓim also mentions (KāẓMuq., 12) four other works by Yaḥyā, but 
these do not appear in the premodern biobibliographical literature that I consulted: Akhbār al-fawāṭim, Akhbār 



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only partially.72 As for the other three, there is some evidence to suggest that they should 
actually be regarded as one and the same work and that the different titles were attached 
to different recensions of this one work during the long process of transmission. We can 
be reasonably confident that Akhbār al-Madīna and Kitāb al-Masjid refer to the same 
work. The three extant sources that quote a significant number of traditions from Yaḥyā—
the Kitāb al-Manāsik (at least thirty-three citations), al-Marāghī’s (d. 816/1414) Taḥqīq 
al-nuṣra (at least thirty-six citations),73 and al-Samhūdī’s Wafāʾ al-wafā (approximately 280 
citations)—use him as a source for the Prophet’s Mosque much more frequently than they 
do for any other subject: thirty-two citations in the Kitāb al-Manāsik, twenty-four in the 
Taḥqīq al-nuṣra, and just over three-quarters of the citations in the Wafāʾ al-wafā.74 Many 
of the other citations from Yaḥyā in these works concern subjects that might reasonably 
be included in a discussion of the Prophet’s Mosque, including Medina’s distinctive merits 
(faḍāʾil),75 the prophet’s hijra,76 the prophet’s death,77 the performance of ziyāra (pilgrimage 
or pious visit) to the prophet’s tomb,78 and other mosques in which the prophet was believed 
to have prayed.79 It seems likely, therefore, that Yaḥyā’s Akhbār al-Madīna and Kitāb 
al-Masjid were originally one and the same work that came to be transmitted via different 
routes under different titles.80 Such a conflation would hardly be unique, since many works 
from the earliest Islamic centuries were transmitted to later periods under multiple titles, 
most likely because they never originally had a single specific title.

Although the author of the Kitāb al-Manāsik appears to be citing Yaḥyā directly,  
we know from al-Samhūdī that there were several recensions of Yaḥyā’s Akhbār al-Madīna; 
he had seen at least two, maybe three, and possibly, although less likely, four.81 He may 
have had one recension from an unnamed transmitter and certainly had one from Yaḥyā’s 
grandson Abū Muḥammad al-Ḥasan b. Muḥammad b. Yaḥyā, known as Ibn Akhī Ṭāhir  

al-zaynabāt, Kitāb fī al-khilāfa, and al-Makr fī man kunniya bi-Abī Bakr.
72.  Yaḥyā, Muʿaqqibīn.
73.  Al-Marāghī, Taḥqīq al-nuṣra bi-talkhīṣ maʿālim dār al-hijra, ed. ʿAbd Allāh ʿUsaylān (Medina: ʿAbd Allāh 

ʿUsaylān, 1422/2002).
74.  The editor of al-Marāghī’s Taḥqīq assumed that all mentions of a “Yaḥyā” refer to one Yaḥyā b. Saʿīd. 

However, since most of the relevant passages are either near parallels to material quoted from Yaḥyā al-ʿAqīqī 
in al-Samhūdī’s Wafāʾ al-wafā or show a reliance on similar sources, I think that the editor was incorrect, except 
in the few cases in which al-Marāghī gives the full name Yaḥyā b. Saʿīd for his source.

75.  Al-Samhūdī, Wafāʾ al-wafā, 1:154; 3:320–21, 323.
76.  Ibid., 1:414, 424–25, 425–26, 433, 442–44, 447–48, 453, 456.
77.  Al-Marāghī, Taḥqīq al-nuṣra, 146–47; al-Samhūdī, Wafāʾ al-wafā, 1:526, 528; 3:390.
78.  Al-Marāghī, Taḥqīq al-nuṣra, 172, 193–94; al-Samhūdī, Wafāʾ al-wafā, 5:27, 29, 42–43, 61, 77, 101, 107–8.
79.  Kitāb al-Manāsik, 425; al-Marāghī, Taḥqīq al-nuṣra, 56; al-Samhūdī, Wafāʾ al-wafā, 3:147, 152, 169, 175, 

177, 178, 182, 183, 195–96, 215, 228, 231, 240, 249, 250, 253, 421, 426, 428, 432, 433–34, 440.
80.  Since it seems that Sunni sources were more likely to know the work as Akhbār al-Madīna and Shiʿi 

sources as Kitāb al-Masjid (see references in nn. 68 and 71), there appears to have been a sectarian divide in the 
work’s transmission.

81.  Al-Jāsir (“Muʾallafāt,” 386) and al-Sāmarrāʾī (in the introduction to his edition of al-Samhūdī, Wafāʾ 
al-wafā, 1:36) thought he had access to three; al-ʿAlī (“al-Muʾallafāt al-ʿarabiyya,” 129) suggested four.



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(d. 358/969).82 At least one more recension was available to al-Samhūdī, via Yaḥyā’s son 
Abū al-Qāsim Ṭāhir; al-ʿAlī has suggested that Ṭāhir transmitted two different recensions, 
but this is probably incorrect.83 We also know that one of the transmitters of Abū al-Qāsim 
Ṭāhir’s recension of his father’s work was called Ibn Firās.84 Yaḥyā’s grandson Ibn Akhī Ṭāhir 
also appears in some sources as a transmitter of Yaḥyā’s Ansāb āl Abī Ṭālib.85 Abū al-Qāsim 
Ṭāhir’s recension of his father’s work appears to have been the most widely used. It is the 
one that al-Samhūdī mentions most frequently, and when later local historians of Medina 
such as Ibn al-Najjār and al-Marjānī (d. after 770/1368–69) cite Abū al-Qāsim Ṭāhir b. Yaḥyā, 
they are presumably referring to his recension of Yaḥyā’s work.86

There may have been one more recension of Yaḥyā’s work on Medina, since al-Sakhāwī 
notes that one Muḥammad b. Yaḥyā al-ʿAlawī composed a book on the history of Medina.87 
Since there is no mention of Yaḥyā’s son Muḥammad’s writing a work on Medina anywhere 
else, this probably refers to al-Ḥasan b. Muḥammad b. Yaḥyā’s (Ibn Akhī Ṭāhir’s) recension 
of Yaḥyā’s history, although it could be yet another recension of its own.88 As can be said of 
many other works from the third/ninth century, neither the existence of several recensions 
of Yaḥyā’s work(s) on Medina nor the lack of a uniform title means that Yaḥyā did not 
compile a work on Medina for dissemination with a relatively fixed form.89 Again, however, 
we have to assume that the nature of the transmission of texts in this period would have left 
its mark on Yaḥyā’s original. For example, al-Samhūdī notes a minor difference between the 
recensions of Abū al-Qāsim Ṭāhir and Ibn Akhī Ṭāhir and tells us that Ibn Firās added to his 
recension of Ṭāhir’s recension some information that he had received orally from Ṭāhir.90

82.  Al-Samhūdī, Wafāʾ al-wafā, 1:447; 2:239.
83.  Ṭāhir’s recension is noted in ibid., 1:155, 424; 2:239, 256, 314, 3:215, 5:29. Al-ʿAlī’s argument for a fourth 

recension stems from the fact that, at one point, al-Samhūdī says (Wafāʾ al-wafā, 2:256), “Such is in the copy that 
his son transmitted on the authority of Abū al-Ḥasan al-Madāʾinī.” Al-ʿAlī suggested (“al-Muʾallafāt al-ʿarabiyya,” 
129) that this means that Ṭāhir transmitted another copy of Yaḥyā’s work, this time not directly from his father 
but rather on the authority of one Abū al-Ḥasan al-Madāʾinī, who had, in turn, taken it from Yaḥyā. However, 
this Abū al-Ḥasan al-Madāʾinī is almost certainly the famous Abū al-Ḥasan ʿAlī b. Muḥammad al-Madāʾinī  
(d. between 225/839–40 and 235/849–50), who predeceased Yaḥyā by quite some time. A more likely explanation 
is that al-Madāʾinī is the source of this particular report in Yaḥyā’s work.

84.  Al-Samhūdī, Wafāʾ al-wafā, 2:314.
85.  For example, in al-Ṭūsī, Fihrist, 208; and in the works of al-ʿUmarī and Ibn ʿInaba, as cited in KāẓMuq., 

6, 8.
86.  See Ibn al-Najjār, al-Durra al-thamīna, 63, 205; al-Marjānī, Bahjat al-nufūs wa-l-asrār fī taʾrīkh dār hijrat 

al-nabī al-mukhtār, ed. Muḥammad ʿAbd al-Wahhāb Faḍl (Beirut: Dār al-Gharb al-Islāmī, 2002), 1:209.
87.  Al-Sakhāwī, Iʿlān, 273; followed by al-Munajjid, Muʿjam, 93–94; and ʿUsaylān, al-Madīna al-munawwara, 

33.
88.  Incidentally, yet another confusing title, an Akhbār al-Madīna of one Yaḥyā b. Jaʿfar al-Nassāba, is 

thrown into the mix in al-Munajjid, Muʿjam, 93–94. This Yaḥyā, however, is clearly our Yaḥyā b. al-Ḥasan b. 
Jaʿfar al-ʿAqīqī, the author of a work entitled Ansāb āl Abī Ṭālib, hence also al-Nassāba, “the genealogist.”

89.  For a similar argument concerning Ibn Zabāla’s Akhbār al-Madīna, see Munt, “Writing the History,” 
14–18.

90.  Al-Samhūdī, Wafāʾ al-wafā, 2:239, 314.



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Since we know that Yaḥyā was a descendant of the Husaynid imam ʿAlī Zayn al-ʿĀbidīn 
(d. ca. 95/713–14) and the author of a genealogical work on the descendants of Abū Ṭālib, it 
is only to be expected that his works display some pro-ʿAlid inclinations. His genealogical 
work shows that Yaḥyā was concerned with the persecution faced by the descendants of 
Abū Ṭālib. In the surviving manuscript, a list of ʿAlids who came to an unfortunate end as 
the result of persecution is provided, besides the usual genealogical material. The list covers 
topics such as descendants of ʿAlī who were poisoned, Hasanids who were killed during 
the reign of Abū Jaʿfar al-Manṣūr, and ʿAlids who died in prison during the reign of Hārūn 
al-Rashīd (r. 170–93/786–809).91 The citations from his work on the history of Medina also 
show that he was interested in traditions concerning Fāṭima and the ʿAlids. For example, 
he is the main source of the Kitāb al-Manāsik and al-Samhūdī for discussion of Fāṭima’s 
apartment and tomb chamber in the Prophet’s Mosque, and al-Samhūdī cites a prophetic 
ḥadīth from Yaḥyā to the effect that on the Day of Resurrection, Muḥammad, Fāṭima, ʿAlī, 
al-Ḥasan, and al-Ḥusayn will be in the same position.92 In line with the earlier noted title 
of Yaḥyā’s own work on pilgrimage rites (manāsik), quotations of his guidance about how 
to perform the pilgrimage to the tomb of the prophet include examples of how prominent 
ʿAlids, especially ʿAlī b. al-Ḥusayn Zayn al-ʿĀbidīn, acted when visiting the tomb.93 He had a 
specific interest in how ʿAlids undertook visits to another mosque closely associated with 
the prophet’s career in Medina, the mosque in Qubāʾ to the south of the town.94 There are 
also a number of traditions cited on Yaḥyā’s authority with isnāds of prominent ʿAlids, often 
including the imams ʿAlī al-Riḍā (d. 203/818), Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq (d. 148/765), and Muḥammad 
al-Bāqir (d. 115/733).95 However, Yaḥyā by no means restricted his interests to pro-ʿAlid 
material. Reports that either display a clear pro-ʿAlid inclination or feature prominent 
ʿAlids in their isnāds are very much in the minority among extant material cited from 
Yaḥyā; and although he may have been al-Samhūdī’s key source for the tomb of Fāṭima, he 
was also an important authority on the tombs of the first two caliphs, Abū Bakr and ʿUmar 
b. al-Khaṭṭāb.96

Yaḥyā’s work on Medina seems to have received early acceptance as an important source, 
as he is the Kitāb al-Manāsik’s most often cited source for the history of the Prophet’s 
Mosque. Although he was little used in Medinan local histories over the next several 
centuries, this changed with al-Marāghī, in whose work he is the second most frequently 
cited Medinan historian from the first three Islamic centuries, behind Ibn Zabāla. Similarly, 
he is al-Samhūdī’s most important source for matters concerning the Prophet’s Mosque up 
to the mid-third/ninth century.

91.  Yaḥyā, Muʿaqqibīn, 116–17, 117–23, 125–30.
92.  Kitāb al-Manāsik, 366–67; al-Samhūdī, Wafāʾ al-wafā, 2:207–10.
93.  Al-Marāghī, Taḥqīq al-nuṣra, 146–47; al-Samhūdī, Wafāʾ al-wafā, 5:61, 77.
94.  Al-Samhūdī, Wafāʾ al-wafā, 3:152.
95.  Kitāb al-Manāsik, 367; al-Samhūdī, Wafāʾ al-wafā, 2:44, 337–38; 3:323; 5:27–29, 61.
96.  Al-Samhūdī, Wafāʾ al-wafā, 2:309–18.



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Before we move on to look more closely at the Kitāb al-Manāsik’s section on the 
inscriptions, it is worth considering briefly one of Yaḥyā’s sources for his material about 
the Umayyad-era inscriptions, as preserved in the former. The isnād given for that material 
mentions one Muḥammad b. Yaḥyā, almost certainly the figure otherwise known as Abū 
Ghassān al-Kinānī (d. between 201/816–17 and 210/825–26).97 He was the single most 
important source for the Iraqi ʿUmar b. Shabba’s (d. 262/876) history of Medina, appearing 
as the latter’s direct source in the isnāds of 278 out of 1,065 reports that make up the 
first part of the extant manuscript of this work.98 The vast majority of the discussion of 
the Prophet’s Mosque is missing from this manuscript, but Abū Ghassān is cited in the 
portion of that discussion that does survive, and he also appears as a source on seventeen 
occasions (all bar one through one or two intermediaries) in the Kitāb al-Manāsik.99  
Some have considered whether, in light of this prolific activity, he may have penned a 
work of his own on Medina’s history. Al-Jāsir, for example, has drawn attention to the fact 
that Abū Ghassān descended from a long line of administrators (kuttāb) and noted that 
we should not, therefore, be surprised if he had committed his knowledge to writing.100  
Tilman Nagel has also suggested that Abū Ghassān had likely written down the reports on the 
revolt of Muḥammad b. ʿAbd Allāh “al-Nafs al-Zakiyya” that were then transmitted by Ibn 
Shabba and cited by al-Ṭabarī (d. 310/923).101 Abū Ghassān was a source for a large quantity 
of written documents, including a letter by ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib and the famous correspondence 
that passed between Abū Jaʿfar al-Manṣūr and al-Nafs al-Zakiyya, and this does indicate 
that he valued written material and sought to ensure its transmission.102 Ibn Shabba also 
stated at least twice that he had found something written on Abū Ghassān’s authority that 
he had not heard from him.103 Elsewhere, he cited a piece of writing (kitāb) by Abū Ghassān 
for a report but added that he had read over the report in question with him.104 Taken 
together, these pieces of information make it likely that Abū Ghassān possessed at least 
 

97.  See, for example, al-Mizzī, Tahdhīb al-Kamāl fī asmāʾ al-rijāl, ed. Bashshār ʿAwwād Maʿrūf (Beirut: 
Muʾassasat al-Risāla, 1402–13/1982–92), 26:636–39; al-Dhahabī, Taʾrīkh al-islām wa-wafayāt al-mashāhīr wa-l-
aʿlām, ed. ʿUmar ʿAbd al-Salām Tadmurī (Beirut: Dār al-Kitāb al-ʿArabī, 1407–24/1987–2004), 14:379.

98.  Ibn Shabba, Taʾrīkh al-Madīna al-munawwara, ed. ʿAlī Muḥammad Dandal and Yāsīn Saʿd al-Dīn Bayān 
(Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, 1417/1996), 1:7–344.

99.  On seven of those occasions, the intermediaries are Hārūn b. Mūsā and Yaḥyā al-ʿAqīqī, as in the section 
translated below; see Kitāb al-Manāsik, 359, 363, 369, 381, 383, 385–86, 403.

100.  Al-Jāsir, “Muʾallafāt,” 328; see also Elad, Rebellion of Muḥammad al-Nafs al-Zakiyya, 415–18.
101.  Tilman Nagel, “Ein früher Bericht über den Aufstand von Muḥammad b. ʿAbdallāh im Jahre 145h,” Der 

Islam 46 (1970): 227–62, at 236–38; see also the thoughts in Elad, Rebellion of Muḥammad al-Nafs al-Zakiyya, 418.
102.  For ʿAlī’s letter, see Ibn Shabba, Taʾrīkh, 1:139–41; for the letters between al-Manṣūr and al-Nafs 

al-Zakiyya, see al-Ṭabarī, Taʾrīkh, 3:207–15, with discussion in Nagel, “Ein früher Bericht”; Zaman, Religion 
and Politics, 44–45; Elad, Rebellion of Muḥammad al-Nafs al-Zakiyya, 171–93; and Tor, “Parting of Ways.” 
For some other documents transmitted by Abū Ghassān, see Ibn Shabba, Taʾrīkh, 1:96; and Michael Lecker, 
“The Preservation of Muḥammad’s Letters,” in his People, Tribes and Society in Arabia Around the Time of 
Muḥammad, no. 10 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 12, n. 60.

103.  Ibn Shabba, Taʾrīkh, 1:72, 80.
104.  Ibid., 1:365.



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personal notebooks containing traditions and copies of documents dealing with the history 
of Medina, which were distributed to his students.

The upshot of all this is that, in general terms at least, we have reason to be relatively 
confident about the transcription of the inscriptions provided in the Kitāb al-Manāsik, 
at least those that were added in the early Abbasid period. Between Ibn Zabāla, Yaḥyā 
al-ʿAqīqī, the author of the Kitāb al-Manāsik, Ibn Rusta, and perhaps (although this is far 
less certain) Abū Ghassān, we have several avenues of relatively early written testimonies 
to them (compiled between the late second/early ninth and early fourth/tenth centuries), 
involving figures of different backgrounds and with different scholarly interests. Of course, 
as the notes to the translation below show, there are some differences in the readings of 
some of the inscriptions offered in the various sources, and sometimes those differences 
are meaningful. This does make it more difficult for us to establish what the actual text of 
the inscription was, but it does not mean there was no original text. Such discrepancies 
could easily come down to the nature of the reception of such epigraphic schemes among 
visitors/readers, a topic that will be taken up again briefly later in this article.

I do not want the arguments of this article to become circular, and since the evidence 
of the protocols for referring to the caliphs in these texts will be picked up later in the 
discussion, we should not place too much emphasis on them when verifying the general 
accuracy of the transcribed texts. It can be pointed out, however, that many aspects of the 
texts given for these inscriptions, and particularly the protocols for referring to caliphs, 
are generally in line with what can be expected on the basis of extant inscriptions from 
the second/eighth century, as well as of similar protocols on other objects, such as coins.105 
Many of the relevant inscriptions offer variations on one of two standard phrases: either

amara ʿabd allāh [ism]   “The servant of God, [name],
amīr al-muʾminīn bi-. . .    the commander of the faithful, ordered . . .”

Or, slightly less commonly,

mimmā amara bihi    “[This is] among that which 
ʿabd allāh [ism]     the servant of God, [name],  
amīr al-muʾminīn . . .   the commander of the faithful, ordered . . .”

In other texts, other titles are added to the early Abbasid inscriptions, but this is where 
things get more interesting; I will pick up this discussion later on.

105.  For references to extant inscriptions, see above, nn. 8–15. Some early Abbasid coins with similar rules 
for providing titles and names for a reigning caliph are discussed in Michael L. Bates, “Khurāsānī Revolutionaries 
and al-Mahdī’s Title,” in Culture and Memory in Medieval Islam: Essays in Honour of Wilferd Madelung, ed. 
Farhad Daftary and Josef W. Meri, 279–317 (London: I. B. Tauris, 2003). For the point that ʿabd allāh [ism] 
amīr al-muʾminīn was the standard way of referring to Umayyad caliphs, see Aram Aldo Shahin, “Struggling 
for Communitas: Arabian Political Thought in the Great Century of Change (ca. 560–ca. 660 aD)” (PhD diss., 
University of Chicago, 2009), 410.



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The Umayyad and Early Abbasid Inscriptions in the Prophet's Mosque  •  97

The Kitāb al-Manāsik on the Inscriptions in the Prophet’s Mosque

The following is a translation of the section of the Kitāb al-Manāsik that deals with the 
inscriptions that could be seen in the Prophet’s Mosque.106 This work records texts inscribed 
between the caliphates of al-Walīd b. ʿAbd al-Malik and Hārūn al-Rashīd. The notes provide 
references to the same texts in other sources. Those that can also be found in the surviving 
section of Ibn Rusta’s al-Aʿlāq al-nafīsa have been the basis for almost all existing discussions 
to date. The one other source that provides almost (but not quite) as complete an account 
of these inscriptions as the Kitāb al-Manāsik’s is al-Fīrūzābādī’s al-Maghānim al-muṭāba fī 
maʿālim Ṭāba. Although some use will be made of the latter work in this article, it is the 
Kitāb al-Manāsik’s account around which my discussion will center.

Translation: Kitāb al-Manāsik 

[p. 385] This is an account of the inscriptions (al-kitāb)  
that run around the mosque

Yaḥyā b. Ḥasan b. Jaʿfar Abū al-Ḥusayn al-ʿAlawī107 — Hārūn b. Mūsā108 — Muḥammad b. 
Yaḥyā109 — Ḥusayn b. Muṣʿab:110

ʿUmar b. ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz had the texts (kutub) inscribed in the mosque, and [he is] the one 
who inscribed the text (kitāb) that is along the qibla [wall] of the Prophet’s (ṣ) Mosque; 
it starts with the whole of Umm al-Qurʾān, and then “By the sun and its brightness in 
the forenoon,” down to finishing with “Say, ‘I seek refuge with the Lord of men.’”111  
It runs from opposite you to the right when you enter the mosque from the entrance 
next to Dār Marwān along to Bāb ʿAlī.112

106.  Kitāb al-Manāsik, 385–95. The page numbers from al-Jāsir’s edition are given in square brackets in the 
translation. I have numbered the inscriptions for ease of cross-referencing.

107.  This is Yaḥyā al-ʿAqīqī, discussed above.
108.  Hārūn b. Mūsā b. Abī ʿ Alqama al-Farwī al-Madīnī (d. in 252/866–67 or 253/867), a student of Abū Ghassān 

and a teacher of Yaḥyā al-ʿAqīqī; see al-Mizzī, Tahdhīb al-Kamāl, 26:637; 30:113–15.
109.  This is almost certainly Abū Ghassān Muḥammad b. Yaḥyā al-Kinānī, discussed above.
110.  He is listed by al-Mizzī among those from whom Ibn Zabāla narrated (Tahdhīb al-Kamāl, 25:62), although 

not among Abū Ghassān’s teachers. Ibn Zabāla and Abū Ghassān, however, belonged to the same generation of 
Medinan scholars, and many topics discussed on the authority of both are very similar, so it makes sense that 
they shared many sources.

111.  I.e., Q 1 and 91–114. All translations of verses from the Qurʾan are slightly adapted from those of 
Alan Jones, The Qurʾān (Cambridge: Gibb Memorial Trust, 2007), unless otherwise specified. (I regularly make 
alterations to the capitalization of certain words.)

112.  Al-Mahdī’s mosque seems to have had a large number of entrances, with some twenty-odd regularly 
listed in the sources; see the overview in al-Samhūdī, Wafāʾ al-wafā, 3:5–31; and also see below, Fig. 1. It is less 
clear how many there were in the Umayyad period; see Sauvaget, Mosquée omeyyade, 75–78. The entrance by 
Dār Marwān would be that near the southwest corner of the mosque along the western wall, which came to be 
known as Bāb al-Salām and does seem to have existed in al-Walīd’s structure; see al-Samhūdī, Wafāʾ al-wafā, 
3:28–30; Sauvaget, Mosquée omeyyade, 77. I follow al-Samhūdī (Wafāʾ al-wafā, 3:7–8) in identifying Bāb ʿAlī as 
the southernmost entrance along the eastern wall of the mosque, so probably loosely opposite the entrance by 



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He said: It was inscribed by a mawlā of Āl Ḥuwayṭib b. ʿ Abd al-ʿUzzā, called Saʿd Ḥaṭaba.113

He said: ʿUmar b. ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz is the one who put up the lead that runs around the 
mosque and the waterspouts that are made of lead. Only two waterspouts of those put 
up by ʿUmar b. ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz remain; one is in the place where funeral prayers take 
place (mawḍiʿ al-janāʾiz),114 and the other is over the entrance through which [p. 386] 
the people from the east (ahl al-mashriq115) enter and which is known as Bāb ʿĀtika. The 
mosque had no merlons (shurafāt) before those constructed by ʿAbd al-Wāḥid b. ʿAbd 
Allāh al-Naṣrī,116 who was the governor of Medina in the year 104 [722–23 CE].

The ḥarūriyya destroyed the inscription that was in the mosque’s courtyard, though 
ʿAbd al-Malik b. Muḥammad b. ʿAṭiyya al-Saʿdī restored it when he was governor of 
Medina in the year 130 [747–48 CE].117 Then Dāwūd b. ʿAlī destroyed it when he came as 
governor for Abū al-ʿAbbās in the year 132 [749–50 CE]. Ṣāliḥ b. Kaysān118 helped him 
restore it, but Dāwūd passed away before he could complete it; Ziyād b. ʿAbd Allāh [sic] 
al-Ḥārithī finished it.119 One of the mawālī of the Medinans, who was called Ibn Ghazāla, 
was summoned to him, and he is the one who altered it and completed it.

Dār Marwān. These two entrances thus corresponded roughly to the Bāb al-Salām and Bāb al-Baqīʿ as identified 
on the plan of the Prophet’s Mosque following the Saudi work of 1949–55 in ʿAbd Allāh al-Ḥusaynī, al-Kharīṭa 
al-athariyya li-l-Madīna al-munawwara (Cairo: Majmūʿat Najjār li-l-Tijāra wa-l-Ṭibāʿa, 2005).

113.  An important and renowned early copyist of the Qurʾan. He is the individual also identified as responsible 
for these inscriptions in Ibn al-Nadīm, Fihrist, 1/i:15–16. He was apparently known as “Saʿd ṣāḥib al-maṣāḥif”; 
see Ibn Abī Ḥātim, Kitāb al-Jarḥ wa-l-taʿdīl (Beirut: Dār Iḥyāʾ al-Turāth al-ʿArabī, 1371–73/1952–53), 3:550.

114.  This was by Bāb ʿAlī; see below and al-Samhūdī, Wafāʾ al-wafā, 3:8.
115.  Ibn al-Najjār (al-Durra al-thamīna, 176) has “people from the marketplace” (ahl al-sūq).
116.  Many other sources have al-Naḍrī instead, although al-Naṣrī seems to be correct; see al-Jāsir’s note in 

Kitāb al-Manāsik, 386, n. 1. He was governor of Medina and also, seemingly, of Mecca and Taif from 104/722–23 
to 106/724–25; see al-Ṭabarī, Taʾrīkh, 2:1449–52, 1471, 1487.

117.  The ḥarūriyya here are the followers of Abū Ḥamza al-Mukhtār b. ʿAwf, who led an army from South 
Arabia that briefly occupied Mecca and Medina in 129–30/747; for discussion with further references to their 
activities in the Ḥijāz, see Harry Munt, “Caliphal Imperialism and Ḥijāzī Elites in the Second/Eighth Century,” 
al-Masāq 28, no. 1 (2016): 6–21, at 6–7, 12–13. Ibn Rusta (al-Aʿlāq al-nafīsa, 70) gives the date of the inscription’s 
restoration as 128/745–46, but this is clearly a mistake.

118.  A well-known figure closely associated with al-Walīd’s and ʿ Umar b. ʿ Abd al-ʿAzīz’s work on the Prophet’s 
Mosque; see Munt, Holy City of Medina, 106–7. He died in 140/757–58; see Ibn Saʿd, Kitāb al-Ṭabaqāt al-kabīr, ed. 
ʿAlī Muḥammad ʿUmar (Cairo: Maktabat al-Khānjī, 1421/2001), 7:513.

119.  Dāwūd b. ʿAlī died in 133/750. He is famously associated with having taken other, violent measures 
against members of the Umayyad family in the Ḥijāz during his brief tenure in the region; see Chase F. Robinson, 
“The Violence of the Abbasid Revolution,” in Living Islamic History: Studies in Honour of Professor Carole 
Hillenbrand, ed. Yasir Suleiman, 226–51 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), 239. Ziyād b. ʿUbayd 
Allāh was governor of Medina (and also at times Mecca, Taif, and al-Yamāma) from 133/750 to 141/758–59; see 
al-Ṭabarī, Taʾrīkh, 3:73, 81, 84, 90–91, 121, 124, 127, 129, 137–38, 161. He apparently oversaw the work that Abū 
Jaʿfar al-Manṣūr ordered to be undertaken in the Masjid al-Ḥarām in Mecca; see al-Azraqī, Akhbār Makka wa-mā 
jāʾa fīhā min al-āthār, ed. Rushdī al-Ṣāliḥ Malḥas (Mecca: al-Maṭbaʿa al-Mājidiyya, 1352–57/1933–38), 2:58.



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We have made a copy of what was inscribed along the qibla and what was inscribed 
after it in its place, letter by letter. When Ibn Ghazāla had finished, he came to Ziyād 
b. ʿAbd Allāh asking him for his pay. Ziyād said, “Ibn Ghazāla, when you see us act in 
accordance with what has been written, then come and take your pay.”
Abū al-Ḥusayn said: This is the inscription that Ibn Ghazāla wrote and finished:

[§1] In the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful. There is no god but God, 
Who is One and has no companion. Muḥammad is His servant and His messenger, 
whom He sent “with the guidance and the religion of truth, to cause it to prevail 
over all [other] religion, even though the polytheists dislike that.”120 [p. 387] The 
servant of God, ʿAbd Allāh, the commander of the faithful, has commanded fear of 
God and obedience to Him as well as action in accordance with the Book of God and 
obedience to it/Him as well as the sunna of His prophet (ṣ). [The caliph commands] 
doing right by one’s family, the magnification/veneration of God’s ordinances that 
the tyrants belittled, and the belittling of the falsehoods that they magnified; [he 
commands] the revival of the rights that they killed off, and the killing off of the 
enmity and oppression that they revived. [He commands] that God be obeyed and 
that servants be disobeyed [when necessary] out of obedience to God. Obedience is 
owed to God and to those who obey God; no obedience is due to anyone acting in 
disobedience to God. We call for the Book of God and the sunna of His prophet (ṣ) and 
for justice in governing the affairs of the Muslims, the equitable division of the fayʾ 
among them, and the appropriate expenditure of the “fifths” that God commanded 
[be distributed] to “kinsmen, orphans, the destitute, [and] travelers.”121

When Ibn Ghazāla had finished, he came to Ziyād asking for his pay. Ziyād, who was 
irrationally angry with him, said to him, “Ibn Ghazāla, when you see us act in accordance 
with what is in it, then come and take your pay.”122

The inscriptions of al-Mahdī  
(May God have mercy upon him)

Abū al-Ḥusayn said: Immediately after this [i.e., the above inscription] is this inscription, 
which al-Mahdī had written in the year 162 [778–79 CE]:123

120.  Q 9:33.
121.  Cf. Q 2:177. For other versions of this story and this inscription, sometimes abbreviated or with a 

slightly different text, see Ibn Rusta, al-Aʿlāq al-nafīsa, 70–71; Ibn al-Najjār, al-Durra al-thamīna, 176–77 (with a 
very important variant, discussed further later in this article); al-Fīrūzābādī, al-Maghānim al-muṭāba, 1:436–38; 
RCEA, 1:29–30 (no. 38). For discussion, see Sauvaget, Mosquée omeyyade, 54–56. Ibn Rusta also provides a second 
version of the inscription, with slightly different wording; see Ibn Rusta, al-Aʿlāq al-nafīsa, 73; RCEA, 1:36–38 (no. 
47); Sauvaget, Mosquée omeyyade, 56–57.

122.  It is a bit strange that this anecdote is repeated here, with very slightly different wording. Perhaps there 
has been a change of source?

123.  Given what follows in the inscription, it cannot actually have been written before 165/781–82, although 
it refers to the period of building work that began in 162/778–79.



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[§2] The servant of God, al-Mahdī, the commander of the faithful, may God ennoble 
him and glorify his victory, ordered the expansion and strengthening of the mosque 
of the messenger of God (ṣ) out of desire for God alone and the last abode—may God 
grant him the greatest recompense—and to make it more spacious for his family 
and his descendants among all the Muslims who pray there. May God magnify the 
reward of the commander of the faithful for the pious work he intended [p.388] and 
make great his recompense.124

[§3] In the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful. **Then he had the whole 
of Umm al-Qurʾān inscribed.**125 **Inscribed after that was “The only ones to visit 
God’s places of worship . . .”, the whole verse.**126 **Then he had written:** The 
expansion of the mosque of the messenger of God (ṣ) that the servant of God, al-Mahdī 
Muḥammad, the commander of the faithful—may God ennoble him—ordered was 
started in the year 162 [778–79 CE]. It was completed in the year 165 [781–82 CE]. The 
commander of the faithful—may God make him thrive—lavishes praises upon God 
for permitting him the distinction of (re)constructing the mosque of the messenger 
of God (ṣ) and making it more spacious. We praise God, the Lord of the Worlds, at 
all times.127

Next to this inscription is another, written during the reign of Abū al-ʿAbbās, which this 
inscription [i.e., the one given above] reaches. It is:

[§4] The servant of God, ʿAbd Allāh, the commander of the faithful, ordered that this 
mosque be decorated, that its adornments be put in order (tartībihi), and that the 
mosque of the messenger of God (ṣ) be made more spacious in the year 132 [749–50 
CE], desiring God’s pleasure and reward. For with God is “the reward of both this 
world and the next. God is Hearing and Observing.”128

124.  See also Ibn Rusta, al-Aʿlāq al-nafīsa, 73–74; Ibn al-Najjār, al-Durra al-thamīna, 179. Ibn Rusta presents 
this text as a continuation of his repeat of the previous inscription (§1) without any intervening words, so some 
have considered it part of the previous text; see, for example, RCEA, 1:36–38 (no. 47). The Kitāb al-Manāsik, 
however, clearly supports Sauvaget’s earlier argument (Mosquée omeyyade, 56–57) that it was originally a 
separate text.

125.  I.e., Q 1. The paired asterisks mark text in which the Kitāb al-Manāsik—or its source(s)—is summarizing 
the content rather than providing it in full transcription.

126.  Q 9:18.
127.  See also Ibn Rusta, al-Aʿlāq al-nafīsa, 74; Ibn al-Najjār, al-Durra al-thamīna, 179; RCEA, 1:35–36 (no. 46); 

Sauvaget, Mosquée omeyyade, 58–59. Between the preceding text and this one, Ibn Rusta inserted an inscription 
commemorating work undertaken during al-Muʿtaḍid’s caliphate (r. 279–289/892–902) in 282/895–96; see Ibn 
Rusta, al-Aʿlāq al-nafīsa, 74; RCEA, 2:265 (no. 786); Sauvaget, Mosquée omeyyade, 57–58. Both Ibn al-Najjār and 
the Kitāb al-Manāsik omit this inscription, which makes sense since it postdates the deaths of their stated or 
likely sources (discussed above).

128.  A slight rearrangement of the wording of Q 4:134. For alternative versions of the text, see Ibn Rusta, 
al-Aʿlāq al-nafīsa, 74 (where the date is given as 162/778–79); al-Samhūdī, Wafāʾ al-wafā, 2:291. This inscription 
is sometimes discussed as a continuation of the previous one; see RCEA, 1:35–36 (no. 46). This text is discussed 
in more detail later in this article.



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[p. 389] Abū [al-]Ḥusayn said: There is a marker (ʿalāma) of the first mosque of the 
messenger of God (ṣ) on the ceiling, crescent moons in gold, next to the interior wall 
opposite the first mosque of the messenger of God (ṣ). [Another] marker of the mosque 
of the messenger of God (ṣ), next to the courtyard on the western side, is four arches 
finished with mosaic, all of them dark green/blue (khuḍr). The upper parts of the 
arches of the mosque of the messenger of God (ṣ) along the qibla [side] are blocked with 
teak, which is twisted (muḥarraf).129 There are small openings along the eastern [side] 
together with arches blocked with teak. Above them are panels with no openings.130

In the eastern corner of the inside of the mosque is written:

[§5] In the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful. O God! Your servant and 
Your caliph (khalīfataka), ʿAbd Allāh, (son of)131 the commander of the faithful, 
praises You for permitting him to (re)build this mosque and to adorn it. The servant 
of God, ʿ Abd Allāh, the commander of the faithful, commanded the decoration of this 
mosque, the ordering of its adornments, and making the mosque of the messenger 
of God (ṣ) more spacious in the year 133 [750–51 CE], desiring God’s pleasure, His 
reward, and His generosity. For with God is “the reward of both this world and the 
next. God is Hearing and Observing.”132 There is no god but God, Who is one and has 
no companion. “We serve only God and we associate nothing with Him.”133 God be 
praised and exalted. Moreover, may God be praised and exalted high above what 
the unbelievers say.134 There is no power or strength save with God the High, the 
Magnificent.

Between Bāb al-Nabī135 and Bāb ʿUthmān136 is inscribed the following on a broad panel 
(ṣafḥa) on the interior wall in mosaic, between it and the marble:

[§6] Among what the servant of God, Hārūn, the commander of the faithful—may God 
lengthen his remaining time—ordered to be carried out by Ibrāhīm b. Muḥammad,137 

129.  Perhaps this should be read as mujawwaf, “hollow” or “concave,” instead.
130.  This is quite a confusing passage. An abridged version, which removes the more confusing portions, 

can be found in Ibn Rusta, al-Aʿlāq al-nafīsa, 74. An alternative, likewise less confusing description of the known 
spots that mark sections of the original mosque built by the prophet after his arrival in Medina can be found in 
Kitāb al-Manāsik, 360; and al-Samhūdī, Wafāʾ al-wafā, 2:54 (followed by detailed further discussion).

131.  The text has a “bn” here, but it is unclear whether it should be there or not. It does not appear in the 
list of titles in the following sentence.

132.  A slight rearrangement of the wording of Q 4:134.
133.  Part of Q 3:64.
134.  Cf. Q 17:43.
135.  I follow al-Samhūdī (Wafāʾ al-wafā, 3:7–8) in identifying Bāb al-Nabī as the second entrance along the 

eastern wall of the mosque heading north from the qibla wall.
136.  Also known as Bāb Jibrīl; see al-Samhūdī, Wafāʾ al-wafā, 3:8–12; Sauvaget, Mosquée omeyyade, 76.
137.  Ibrāhīm b. Muḥammad was one of Hārūn al-Rashīd’s governors of Medina, according to al-Ṭabarī, 

Taʾrīkh, 3:739. It is not precisely clear when he served in this position, but al-Ṭabarī lists him as the fifth out of 
ten governors of Medina during Hārūn’s caliphate.



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may God make him thrive. It is the work of people from Jerusalem.138

To the left of the arch of Bāb al-Nabī (ṣ):

[§7] This is where the work carried out by the people of Jerusalem ended.

Along the qibla [wall] on the outside, at the place where the funeral prayers are held 
(mawḍiʿ al-janāʾiz), where the dead are prayed over [p. 390], by Bāb ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib 
(may God be pleased with him), is inscribed:139

[§8] In the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful. “God and His angels bless 
the prophet. O you who believe, bless him and salute him.”140 O God, bless Muḥammad 
(ṣ). The mercy of God and His benedictions.

Over Bāb al-Nabī (ṣ) is inscribed on the outside:

[§9] “In the creation of the heavens and the earth,” **the whole verse**.141

Over Bāb ʿUthmān is inscribed:

[§10a] In the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful. “God and His angels,” 
**the whole verse**.142 O God, bless Muḥammad the prophet (ṣ), make him blameless, 
increase his standing, ennoble his structure, honor his lodging places/stations, and 
reward him with the best reward You could give to a prophet, as he brought us Your 
message and strove to carry out Your command so that he made Your religion clear 
and Your authority was manifest, Your words were finished, and he made lawful 
what You had made lawful and forbade what You had forbidden. That did not deviate 
from Your oneness;143 You have no companion. May peace be upon the prophet, and 
the mercy of God, and His benedictions.

To the right of Bāb ʿUthmān is inscribed:

[§10b] The work of the people of Homs.

And to its left is inscribed:

[§10c] The work of the people of Homs.

138.  See also Ibn Rusta, al-Aʿlāq al-nafīsa, 74–75; RCEA, 1:65–66 (no. 83); Sauvaget, Mosquée omeyyade, 67. 
Sauvaget assumes, probably correctly, that this inscription commemorates only small restoration work to the 
decoration on this wall.

139.  For Bāb ʿAlī, see above, n. 112.
140.  Q 33:56.
141.  Q 3:190. Al-Samhūdī (Wafāʾ al-wafā, 3:8) has this text by Bāb ʿAlī and not by Bāb al-Nabī.
142.  Q 33:56. 
143.  Al-Jāsir was obviously unsure what to make of this in his edition. I read: wa-lam yaʿul dhālika waḥdaka.



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On the outside of Bāb ʿUthmān is inscribed:

[§10d] In the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful. “A messenger has come 
to you from among yourselves,” **to the end of the sūra**.144

On the inside of the entrance facing (Bāb)145 Dār Rayṭa is inscribed:

[§11a] In the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful. “God, there is no god 
but Him, the Living, the Eternal,” **up to** “Hearing and Knowing.”146

On the outside of the entrance facing Dār Rayṭa:

[§11b] In the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful. “The only ones to visit 
God’s places of worship,” **the whole verse**.147

On the inside of the entrance facing (Bāb)148 Asmāʾ bt. al-Ḥasan [sic] is inscribed:

[§12a] In the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful. “O man, fear your Lord, 
and be afraid of a day,” **to the end of the sūra**.149

[p. 391] On it [the same entrance] on the outside is inscribed:

[§12b] In the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful. “O you who believe, fear 
God and speak straight speech.”150

On the inside of the entrance opposite Dār Khālid151 is inscribed: 

144.  I.e., Q 9:128–29; see also al-Fīrūzābādī, al-Maghānim al-muṭāba, 1:426; al-Samhūdī, Wafāʾ al-wafā, 3:12.
145.  This second “bāb” is clearly written in the edition, but the text would make more sense without it. The 

text should here be describing Bāb Dār Rayṭa, which, according to al-Samhūdī (for example, Wafāʾ al-wafā, 3:8), 
is the next entrance along the eastern wall after Bāb ʿUthmān. The Rayṭa in question was the daughter of Abū 
al-ʿAbbās al-Saffāḥ and Bāb Rayṭa/Bāb Dār Rayṭa is also known as Bāb al-Nisāʾ; see al-Samhūdī, Wafāʾ al-wafā, 
3:12–13; Sauvaget, Mosquée omeyyade, 76.

146.  Q 2:255–56. Q 2:255 is, of course, the famous Throne Verse, which al-Samhūdī (Wafāʾ al-wafā, 3:13) also 
noted was inscribed on this entrance (though he has it on the outside) on a mosaic panel before it was destroyed 
in the second major fire. According to al-Fīrūzābādī (al-Maghānim al-muṭāba, 1:426), the verse was inscribed on 
the outside of this entrance. Two other later Medinan local historians, al-Maṭarī (d. 741/1340) and al-Marjānī 
(d. after 770/1368–69), both also mention that the verse was inscribed on a mosaic panel over the outside of this 
entrance: see al-Maṭarī, al-Taʿrīf bimā ansat al-hujra min maʿālim dār al-hijra, ed. Saʿīd ʿAbd al-Fattāḥ (Riyadh: 
Maktabat Nizār Muṣṭafā al-Bāz, 1417/1997), 89; and al-Marjānī, Bahjat al-nufūs, 1:545.

147.  Q 9:18. This verse is also included in another inscription cited above (§3). According to al-Fīrūzābādī 
(al-Maghānim al-muṭāba, 1:426), it was inscribed on the inside of this entrance.

148.  This seems to be a mistake and should read “dār,” since the entrance opposite Dār Asmāʾ is the next 
entrance after Bāb Rayṭa as discussed in al-Samhūdī’s survey of the entrances (see Wafāʾ al-wafā, 3:13–14), still 
along the eastern wall. According to him, the Asmāʾ in question is Asmāʾ bt. al-Ḥusayn b. ʿAbd Allāh b. ʿUbayd 
Allāh b. al-ʿAbbās b. ʿAbd al-Muṭṭalib.

149.  I.e., Q 31:33–34; see also al-Fīrūzābādī, al-Maghānim al-muṭāba, 1:427.
150.  Q 33:70; see also al-Fīrūzābādī, al-Maghānim al-muṭāba, 1:427.
151.  On this entrance, opposite Dār Khālid b. al-Walīd, still in the eastern wall of the mosque, see al-Samhūdī, 



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[§13a] In the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful. “Your God is One God,” 
**the two verses**.152

Immediately following it is:

[§13b] “When My servants question you about Me . . . ,” **the verse**.153

On the outside of it [the same entrance] is inscribed:

[§13c] “They say, ‘Praise belongs to God, Who has removed grief from us,’”  
**the verse**.154

On the border (ḥāf)155 of the entrance, on the inside, is inscribed: 

[§13d] O God, bless156 Muḥammad the prophet (ṣ). [This is] among [the things] that 
al-Mahdī Muḥammad, the commander of the faithful, commanded and is among 
what the Basrans carried out in the year 162 [778–79 CE].157

It is the place where al-Mahdī’s enlargement of the mosque began.158

On the inside of the entrance facing Zuqāq al-Manāṣiʿ159 is inscribed:

[§14a] In the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful. “Your Lord is God Who 
created the heavens and the earth,” **the two verses**.160

And on the outside of it is inscribed:

[§14b] In the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful. “Rivalry in worldly gain 
has distracted you,” **to the end of the sūra**.161

Wafāʾ al-wafā, 3:14.
152.  This could be Q 2:163–64 or Q 16:22–23. It is probably the former, since Q 2:163 begins with a wāw, 

which this inscription apparently included. That this text was inscribed here is also noted by al-Fīrūzābādī, 
al-Maghānim al-muṭāba, 1:428 (the editor of this text suggests that the verses cited were Q 2:163–64).

153.  Q 2:186; see also al-Fīrūzābādī, al-Maghānim al-muṭāba, 1:428.
154.  Q 35:34; see also al-Fīrūzābādī, al-Maghānim al-muṭāba, 1:428.
155.  Al-Samhūdī (Wafāʾ al-wafā, 3:14) reads “lintel” (nijāf), which may make more sense.
156.  Reading ṣalli instead of ṣallā.
157.  See also al-Samhūdī, Wafāʾ al-wafā, 3:14.
158.  I have assumed that this is a comment by the Kitāb al-Manāsik’s author (or his source), rather than part 

of the text of inscription §13d.
159.  For this entrance, still in the eastern wall, see al-Samhūdī, Wafāʾ al-wafā, 3:14–15.
160.  This could be either Q 7:54–55 or Q 10:3–4. Given the general tenor of the Qurʾanic verses used in 

Umayyad and early Abbasid mosques, the latter is perhaps more likely. That this text was inscribed here is 
also noted by al-Fīrūzābādī, al-Maghānim al-muṭāba, 1:428 (this text’s editor suggests that the inscription is Q 
7:54–55).

161.  Q 102; see also al-Fīrūzābādī, al-Maghānim al-muṭāba, 1:428.



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On the inside of the entrance next to al-Ṣawāfī is inscribed:162

[§15a] In the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful. **From the start of 
Āl ʿImrān down to** “as He wishes. There is no god but Him, the Mighty and the 
Wise.”163 O God, bless Muḥammad, Your servant and Your prophet.164

And on the outside of it is inscribed:

[§15b] In the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful. “There will be a blast on 
the trumpet, and all who are in the heavens and all who are on earth will swoon,” 
**the two verses**.165

At the back of the mosque in the direction of Syria on the inside of the first entrance 
is inscribed:166

[§16a] In the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful. “Those who repent and 
act righteously turn to God in repentance,” **to the end of the sūra**.167

And on the outside is inscribed:

[§16b] “God. There is no god but Him. He will indeed gather you to the Day of 
Resurrection,” **the verse**.168 O God, bless Muḥammad, Your servant and Your 
messenger, imam of the God-fearers and seal of the prophets.169

On the inside of the second entrance is inscribed:

[§17a] In the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful. “In houses [p. 392] that 
God has allowed to be raised,” **to the end of the three verses**.170

And inscribed on the outside:

[§17b] In the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful. O God, bless Muḥammad, 
Your servant and Your messenger, and reward him with the best reward You grant 
to the prophets and the best of what you give to the messengers. The servant of God,  
 
 

162.  On this entrance, apparently the northernmost along the eastern wall, see al-Samhūdī, Wafāʾ al-wafā, 
3:15–16. Al-Ṣawāfī were also known as Abyāt Quhṭum; see Ibn Shabba, Taʾrīkh, 1:158; al-Samhūdī, Wafāʾ al-wafā, 
3:59.

163.  I.e., Q 3:1–6.
164.  See also al-Fīrūzābādī, al-Maghānim al-muṭāba, 1:429.
165.  I.e., Q 39:68–69; see also al-Fīrūzābādī, al-Maghānim al-muṭāba, 1:429.
166.  We have now moved on to the northern wall of the mosque.
167.  I.e., Q 25:71–77; see also al-Fīrūzābādī, al-Maghānim al-muṭāba, 1:429.
168.  Q 4:87.
169.  See also al-Fīrūzābādī, al-Maghānim al-muṭāba, 1:429.
170.  I.e., Q 24:36–38; see also al-Fīrūzābādī, al-Maghānim al-muṭāba, 1:429.



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al-Mahdī Muḥammad, the commander of the faithful, ordered work to build this 
mosque and make it more spacious.171

On the inside of the third entrance is inscribed:

[§18a] In the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful. “Prosperous are the 
believers,” **down to** “Those are the inheritors.”172

And inscribed on the outside:

[§18b] There is no god but God. He is the Living, Who cannot die. May God be praised 
and exalted high above what they associate with Him.173 It is He “Who has not taken 
to Himself a son.”174 “He is the High and the Great.”175

On the inside of the fourth entrance176 is inscribed:

[§19a] In the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful. “The companions of 
the Garden and the companions of the Fire are not equal. The companions of the 
Garden are the winners,” **down to** “High above what they associate [with Him]” 
(wa-taʿālā ʿammā yushrikūn).177

And inscribed on the outside:

[§19b] God is the Mighty and the Wise.178 He has permitted, with His grace and 
distinction, the servant of God and His caliph (khalīfatihi) al-Mahdī Muḥammad, 
the commander of the faithful, to enlarge the mosque of the messenger of God (ṣ), 
to make it more spacious, and to adorn it. May God magnify his reward, perfect for 
him His grace, let him enjoy His generosity, and glorify his victory.179

171.  See also al-Fīrūzābādī, al-Maghānim al-muṭāba, 1:429, albeit with a slight variant: “The servant of God, 
al-Mahdī Muḥammad, the commander of the faithful, ordered work to adorn this mosque and make it more 
spacious.”

172.  I.e., Q 23:1–10; see also al-Fīrūzābādī, al-Maghānim al-muṭāba, 1:430.
173.  This passage recalls many verses of the Qurʾan, but see in particular Q 17:43, also alluded to in an earlier 

inscription (§5).
174.  Cf. Q 17:111 and 25:2 (the inscription is slightly closer in language to the former).
175.  See Q 22:62, 31:30, 34:23 and 40:12. That this text was inscribed here is also noted by al-Fīrūzābādī, 

al-Maghānim al-muṭāba, 1:430, with a slight variant: “He is the Living Who has not taken to Himself a son . . .”
176.  Al-Samhūdī mentions four entrances along the northern wall of the mosque; see his Wafāʾ al-wafā, 

3:16–17.
177.  This presumably refers to Q 59:20–23, but in the ʿUthmanic text, the end of Q 59:23 reads “subḥān Allāh 

ʿammā yushrikūn.” I assume that the text here contains a mistake that has crept in at some stage; its wording 
does not appear among the variants recorded by Arthur Jeffery in his Materials for the History of the Text of 
the Qurʾān: The Old Codices (Leiden: Brill, 1937). The wording does appear in several other Qurʾanic verses. 
That this text was inscribed here is also noted by al-Fīrūzābādī, al-Maghānim al-muṭāba, 1:430 (where the more 
“standard” Qurʾanic text for the final verse’s ending is given).

178.  These two epithets appear together on twenty-nine occasions in the Qurʾan, including Q 62:3.
179.  See also al-Fīrūzābādī, al-Maghānim al-muṭāba, 1:430, with a very minor variant: “His servant and His 



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On the inside of the last of the entrances to the mosque along the western side,  
near Dār Munīra,180 is inscribed:

[§20a] In the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful. “In the creation of the 
heavens and the earth,” **down to** “You will not break the tryst.”181

And on the lintel of the entrance, on the inside of the arch, is inscribed:

[§20b] O God, bless Muḥammad, Your servant and Your messenger. [This is] among 
what the servant of God, al-Mahdī Muḥammad, the commander of the faithful, 
ordered. It is the work of the people of Basra.182

Between there and the next entrance there is a manjanīq,183 used when necessary to 
sweep the roof of the mosque;184 there is another manjanīq to the east of the maqṣūra. 
On the outside of this is inscribed:

[§21] “The smiter,” **until the end**.185

[p. 393] On the inside of the entrance that is also opposite Dār Munīra186 is inscribed:

[§22a] In the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful. “Muḥammad is the 
messenger of God,” **to the end of the sūra**.187

And on its outside is inscribed:

[§22b] “O my servants, who have been prodigal against yourselves.”188

caliph” instead of “the servant of God and His caliph.”
180.  This is the first of the entrances along the western wall, starting from the north, discussed in al-Samhūdī, 

Wafāʾ al-wafā, 3:17–18. Al-Samhūdī notes that the Munīra in question was a mawlā of Umm Mūsā; Ibn Shabba 
(Taʾrīkh, 1:144) has Munīra as a mawlā of the commander of the faithful. Presumably, therefore, she was a mawlā 
of al-Khayzurān, the mother of Mūsā al-Hādī, who along with one of her slaves, called Muʾnisa, was responsible 
for some work on the Prophet’s tomb enclosure in 170/787; see Munt, Holy City of Medina, 117.

181.  I.e., Q 3:190–94; see also al-Fīrūzābādī, al-Maghānim al-muṭāba, 1:430.
182.  See also al-Fīrūzābādī, al-Maghānim al-muṭāba, 1:430 (although he leaves out the caliph’s name 

Muḥammad). He also notes more specifically that it could be found “on the lintel of the entrance, inside, below/
aside from (dūn) the arch.”

183.  This word usually refers to a device for flinging stones, such as an onager or a mangonel, but here it 
presumably refers to some form of scaffolding or crane.

184.  The existence of this manjanīq used for sweeping the roof is noted also by al-Fīrūzābādī, al-Maghānim 
al-muṭāba, 1:430, although he does not discuss the text inscribed on it.

185.  I.e., Q 101.
186.  Al-Samhūdī, following Ibn Zabāla and Yaḥyā (so perhaps on the basis of this same passage), notes that 

there was a second entrance along the west wall opposite Dār Munīra; see his Wafāʾ al-wafā, 3:18.
187.  Q 48:29.
188.  Part of Q 39:53. The Kitāb al-Manāsik does not mention in this instance that the whole verse was 

inscribed, but perhaps this is an accidental omission. It would certainly make more sense with the rest of the 
verse.



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On the inside of the entrance facing Dār Nuṣayr189 is inscribed:

[§23a] In the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful. “He will say,  
‘How long have you remained on earth, by number of years?,’” **down to the end of 
the sūra**.190 O God, bless Muḥammad, Your servant and Your prophet.191

And inscribed on the outside:

[§23b] “Praise belongs to God, Who has been true to us in His promise,” **the two 
verses**.192

On the inside of the entrance opposite Dār Jaʿfar b. Yaḥyā193 is:

[§24a] In the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful. “Praise belongs to God, 
Who has not taken to Himself a son,” **the verse**.194 O God, bless Muḥammad, Your 
servant and Your messenger, in the best way You have blessed any of Your prophets 
or Your messengers. O God, send him to the blessed station that You promised him 
so the ancients and those who followed them can emulate him there, just as he 
delivered Your message, advised Your servants, and recited Your verses.195

On the arch underneath this is inscribed:

[§24b] In the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful. “Your Lord [is God] Who,” 
**down to** “Lord of all beings.”196 May the blessings of God be upon Muḥammad, 
and greetings, the mercy of God, and His benedictions.197

Inscribed on its outside is:

[§24c] In the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful. “Have we not expanded 
for you your breast,” **down to the end**.198

189.  For this entrance, see al-Samhūdī, Wafāʾ al-wafā, 3:18. Nuṣayr was a mawlā of al-Mahdī and in charge of 
the prayer ground to the west of the Prophet’s Mosque (ṣāḥib al-muṣallā).

190.  I.e., Q 23:112–18.
191.  See also al-Fīrūzābādī, al-Maghānim al-muṭāba, 1:430–31.
192.  I.e., Q 39:74–75; see also al-Fīrūzābādī, al-Maghānim al-muṭāba, 1:431.
193.  For this entrance, see al-Samhūdī, Wafāʾ al-wafā, 3:18–19. The onetime owner of the dār is Jaʿfar b. 

Yaḥyā b. Khālid b. Barmak.
194.  Q 17:111.
195.  See also al-Fīrūzābādī, al-Maghānim al-muṭāba, 1:431.
196.  Q 7:54. In the text of the Kitāb al-Manāsik, the word “Allāh” is missing from the opening text of this 

sūra: inna rabbakum Allāh alladhī . . . The omission of Allāh does not appear as a variant among those noted by 
Jeffery in his Materials, and I assume it is a copyist’s mistake or a typographical error in the edition.

197.  See also al-Fīrūzābādī, al-Maghānim al-muṭāba, 1:431 (although he omits the basmallah).
198.  I.e., Q 94. The text of the Kitāb al-Manāsik here has “a-lam tashraḥ laka ṣadraka,” instead of the more 

“standard” nashraḥ. Here, too, I assume the wording to be a typographical or copying error, since this variant 
makes little sense and does not appear among the variants noted by Jeffery in his Materials. That this text (with 
the “standard” nashraḥ) was inscribed here is also noted by al-Fīrūzābādī, al-Maghānim al-muṭāba, 1:431. The 



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On the inside of Bāb ʿĀtika199 is inscribed:

[§25a] In the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful. “The messenger 
believes,” **to the end of the sūra**.200

The inscription (kitāb) on the arch201 comes to an end [with]:

[§25b] In the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful. “A messenger has come 
to you [p. 394] from among yourselves,” **the two verses**.202 “Say, ‘He is God, One,’” 
**to the end**.203 May God bless Muḥammad the prophet and may greetings, the 
mercy of God, and His benedictions be upon him.204

Inscribed outside it is:

[§25c] In the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful. “God enjoins justice, 
doing good and giving to kinsfolk,” **the verse**.205 The servant of God, ʿAbd Allāh, 
the commander of the faithful, ordered building work in this mosque.206

On Bāb Ziyād207 there is a teak plaque nailed up and inscribed on the outside of the 
mosque and another inscription (kitāb) on the inside:208

[§26] In the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful. “God. There is no god 
but Him,” **the verse**.209 Muḥammad is the messenger of God, whom He sent  

editor of al-Fīrūzābādī’s text assumes the inscription contained only Q 94:1, but the Kitāb al-Manāsik makes it 
clear the whole sūra is meant.

199.  ʿĀtika bt. ʿAbd Allāh b. Yazīd b. Muʿāwiya. For this entrance, see al-Samhūdī, Wafāʾ al-wafā, 3:19–21; 
Sauvaget, Mosquée omeyyade, 76–77. The entrance has also been known as Bāb al-Sūq and Bāb al-Raḥma and is 
supposedly one of the entrances given to the mosque in the original building of the prophet himself (although 
al-Samhūdī offers an interesting investigation of this claim).

200.  I.e., Q 2:285–86; see also al-Fīrūzābādī, al-Maghānim al-muṭāba, 1:431.
201.  Al-Fīrūzābādī simply places this inscription “beneath it [the entrance or the previous text] on the arch”; 

see his al-Maghānim al-muṭāba, 1:431–32.
202.  I.e., Q 9:128–29.
203.  I.e., Q 112.
204.  See also al-Fīrūzābādī, al-Maghānim al-muṭāba, 1:431–32.
205.  Q 16:90.
206.  See also al-Fīrūzābādī, al-Maghānim al-muṭāba, 1:432.
207.  This entrance is named after the aforementioned early Abbasid governor of Medina, Ziyād b. ʿUbayd 

Allāh. For a discussion of this entrance, see al-Samhūdī, Wafāʾ al-wafā, 3:21–27.
208.  It is unclear whether this inscription is found on one side of this entrance, runs between the two sides, 

or is repeated once on each side. Al-Samhūdī notes only (Wafāʾ al-wafā, 3:23), citing Ibn Zabāla and Yaḥyā, that 
it was inscribed on the outside, and al-Fīrūzābādī (al-Maghānim al-muṭāba, 1:432) reports the same. It is quite a 
lengthy text, especially if it does include the Throne Verse, so perhaps it started on the outside of the entrance 
and was continued on the inside.

209.  There are several verses this could refer to, but the obvious candidate is the Throne Verse, Q 2:255, 
also used elsewhere in the mosque (§11a). Al-Fīrūzābādī’s text of this inscription mentions explicitly that it was 
indeed the Throne Verse; see his al-Maghānim al-muṭāba, 1:432–33.



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“with the guidance and the religion of truth.”210 The servant of God, ʿAbd Allāh,211 
the commander of the faithful, may God ennoble him, ordered building work on the 
mosque of the messenger of God (ṣ) and the construction of this courtyard, to make 
the mosque of the messenger of God (ṣ) more spacious and for those Muslims who 
come to it, in the year 151 [768–69 CE], out of desire for God alone and the last abode. 
The commander of the faithful, may God ennoble him, is the most worthy of men to 
oversee that because of his close kinship to the messenger of God (ṣ) and because of 
his caliphate (khilāfatihi) with which he/He distinguished him.212 May God magnify 
the reward of the commander of the faithful and make great his recompense.213

There is no inscription on the khawkha, neither inside nor outside.214

On the inside of the entrance that is by Dār Marwān215 is inscribed:

[§27a] In the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful. “God and His angels 
bless the prophet. O you who believe, bless him and salute him.”216 O God, bless 
Muḥammad the prophet (ṣ) and salute him, make him blameless, increase his 
standing, ennoble his structure, honor his lodging places/stations, and reward him 
with the best reward You could give to a prophet to/on behalf of/away from his 
community (ʿan ummatihi). For he brought Your message and strove to carry out 
Your command so that Your religion was mighty and [p 395] Your authority was 
manifest, Your word was finished, what You had made lawful was made lawful, and 
what You had forbidden was forbidden. He commanded [in line with] Your justice 
Your oneness, You have no companion.217 May peace be upon him and the mercy 
of God and His benedictions.218 The servant of God, ʿAbd Allāh, the commander 
of the faithful, ordered work on the mosque of the messenger of God (ṣ) in the  

210.  Part of Q 9:33. Al-Fīrūzābādī’s text gives a slightly fuller quotation from this verse.
211.  Al-Fīrūzābādī omits the second ʿabd allāh.
212.  Al-Fīrūzābādī has “because of his close kinship to the messenger of God (ṣ) and because of his caliphate 

with which God distinguished him.”
213.  Al-Samhūdī provides the text of this inscription from “The servant of God” to “the last abode” in his 

Wafāʾ al-wafā, 3:23. Al-Fīrūzābādī offers the whole text in his al-Maghānim al-muṭāba, 1:432–33. There are some 
other variations between the versions of this inscription offered by the Kitāb al-Manāsik and al-Fīrūzābādī, but 
I have here noted only those that may alter the meaning. For some discussion of this text, see Munt, Holy City 
of Medina, 167–68; and further below in this article.

214.  For this statement and a discussion of this khawkha, “small opening,” also known as Khawkhat Abī Bakr 
al-Ṣiddīq, see also al-Samhūdī, Wafāʾ al-wafā, 3:27–28 (citing Ibn Zabāla for this statement).

215.  See above, n. 112, on this entrance.
216.  Q 33:56.
217.  Al-Fīrūzābādī’s text reads alternatively: “With You that enforced Your oneness, You have no companion” 

(wa-bika naffadha dhālika waḥdaka lā sharīk laka).
218.  Up to this point the inscription is very similar to that on the loosely opposite entrance, Bāb ʿUthmān 

(§10a).



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year 160 [776–77 CE],219 a [sign of] generosity from God through which He ennobled 
his caliphate, a treasury that those before him stored away for him, and a gift that 
He gave to him over those who come after him.220 Praise be to God, Who brought the 
commander of the faithful to rule after others221 and whom He ennobled with the 
[. . .] of his community,222 the spreading of his customs (sunan) and purifying him/
it.223 May God magnify the reward of the commander of the faithful and multiply his 
good deeds.224

And inscribed on the outside:

[§27b] There is no god but God, Who is One and has no companion. Muḥammad is 
the messenger of God, whom He sent “with the guidance and the religion of truth,” 
**the verse**.225 O God, grant forgiveness to your prophets and the caliphs of the 
believers (khulafāʾ al-muʾminīn), alive and dead. O God, bless Muḥammad, Your 
servant and Your prophet, You, Your angels, and all of the believers.226 The servant 
of God, ʿAbd Allāh, the commander of the faithful, ordered work on the mosque of 
the messenger of God, the restoration of what had been brought into disrepair, and 
its (re)construction in the year 152 [769–70 CE].227

The inscription that was written for ʿUmar b. ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz along the qibla [wall] of the 
mosque, the one that Saʿd Ḥaṭaba inscribed,228 begins:

[§28] In the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful. “Praise belongs to God,” 
**to its end**,229 and “By the sun and its brightness in the forenoon,” **to its end**.230

219.  There is a potential date/name problem here since the reigning caliph in 160/776–77 was Muḥammad 
al-Mahdī (r. 158–69/775–85), although this seems not to be an error (see further discussion later in this article). 
Al-Fīrūzābādī has the year as 130/747–48, which is equally (and in fact more) problematic.

220.  Al-Fīrūzābādī has “through which God ennobled his caliphate from a treasury that He had stored for 
him apart from those who came before him and a gift that He gave to him over those who come after him.” In 
some ways, this makes a little bit more sense.

221.  Al-Fīrūzābādī has “Who put the commander of the faithful in charge of making it more spacious after 
others.”

222.  The edition reads b*l*s*r millatihi; al-Jāsir suggests reading the first word as bi-naṣr, thus giving “with 
the victory of his community.”

223.  This makes little sense. Al-Fīrūzābādī has the more meaningful “and whom He ennobled with adorning 
and purifying it.”

224.  For this text, see also al-Fīrūzābādī, al-Maghānim al-muṭāba, 1:433–34. I have noted only the variants 
that alter the meaning of the inscription.

225.  Q 9:33.
226.  A clear reference to Q 33:56.
227.  See also al-Fīrūzābādī, al-Maghānim al-muṭāba, 1:434.
228.  The edited text here reads Saʿd Khaṭaba, but the earlier Saʿd Ḥaṭaba is surely correct.
229.  I.e., Q 1.
230.  I.e., Q 91. Since we were told at the beginning of this section of the Kitāb al-Manāsik that this qibla 

inscription included all the verses from Q 91 to the end of the Qurʾan, that is presumably what is meant here as 
well.



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*              * *
In total, the Kitāb al-Manāsik reports fifty separate inscriptions in the Abbasid mosque 

after al-Mahdī’s renovations, one of which (§28) had survived from the Umayyad period. 
The Kitāb al-Manāsik reproduces the texts of these inscriptions in a fairly straightforward 
and logical manner. It begins with the courtyard inscriptions, starting with that along 
the qibla side of the courtyard and proceeding all the way around the courtyard in order. 
Then it reports the texts of the remaining inscriptions, mostly but not exclusively around 
entrances to the mosque, running from the southeast corner along the eastern, northern, 
and western sides to the southwest corner and finally ending where it began with the text 
of the Umayyad inscription that remained along the qibla wall of the mosque. See Figure 1 
for an approximate plan of the locations of the courtyard inscriptions and the entrances to 
the Abbasid mosque.

The Umayyad-Era Inscriptions and Their Fate in the Abbasid Period

The Kitāb al-Manāsik adds little that is completely new to our understanding of the 
form and content of the epigraphic program that accompanied al-Walīd b. ʿAbd al-Malik’s 
construction of the Prophet’s Mosque in Medina, although it does help clarify some issues. 
It is also clear from this source that Marwanid inscriptions ran along the length of the qibla 
wall of the mosque and that they comprised the Qurʾanic sūras 1 and 91 to 114; there had 
also been at least one inscription in the mosque’s courtyard.231 There was presumably a 
foundation inscription as well; that would be expected, and the existence of one is necessary 
to understand al-Nawfalī’s anecdote with which this article began. There are no surviving 
inscriptions from any of al-Walīd’s mosques, and they may not all have had any to begin 
with.232 Two other mosques that he had constructed, however, are reported to have had 
inscriptions, and the reported contents of these are loosely in line with those reported for 
the Prophet’s Mosque. We have seen above that Abū Yūsuf al-Fasawī (d. 277/890) observed 
in the Great Mosque of Damascus inscriptions on narrow bands in blue and gold along 
the qibla wall containing the Throne Verse (Q 2:255) followed by al-Walīd’s foundation 
inscription as well as sūras 1 and 79–81 of the Qurʾan.233 There is also said to have been an 
inscription in al-Walīd’s mosque in al-Fusṭāṭ on green plaques (“tables vertes”), although the 
original has been lost and is known only through a French translation published by Pierre 

231.  Other sources to note some of these inscriptions include Ibn Rusta, al-Aʿlāq al-nafīsa, 70; and Ibn 
al-Nadīm, Fihrist, 1/i:15–16. That at least one (and maybe more) of the early Abbasid inscriptions around the 
courtyard seems to have replaced an earlier Umayyad-era text is discussed below. 

232.  One description of al-Walīd’s mosque in Sanaa provides some information about the decoration of the 
qibla wall but does not seem to note the existence of inscribed texts; see al-Rāzī, Taʾrīkh madīnat Ṣanʿāʾ, ed. 
Ḥusayn b. ʿAbd Allāh al-ʿAmrī, 3rd ed. (Damascus: Dār al-Fikr, 1409/1989), 135–37. Cf., however, Serjeant and 
Lewcock, “Architectural History,” 323, 347, where it is noted (citing al-Rāzī) that the miḥrāb al-Walīd installed 
in the mosque in Sanaa contained inscriptions. Al-Rāzī states that “nuqūsh waraqāt” could be seen as part of the 
decoration in this miḥrāb, but this need not mean inscribed texts.

233.  Ibn ʿAsākir, Taʾrīkh madīnat Dimashq, 2/i:37; see also Finster, “Mosaiken,” 119; Flood, Great Mosque, 
247–54; George, Umayyad Mosque, 175–78.



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The Umayyad and Early Abbasid Inscriptions in the Prophet's Mosque  •  113

Vattier in 1666.234 According to that translation, the inscription, dated to 92/711, seems to 
have contained several verses from the Qurʾan (Q 3:18, 4:172, 9:33, and 57:2) and called for 
various blessings for the prophet and the caliph. That caliph is recorded as ordering the 
expansion of the mosque and is addressed as “the servant of God, al-Walīd, the commander 
of the faithful” (“Gabdolle le valide Commandeur des fidelles”). It also seems that at one 
point in this text al-Walīd was referred to as “caliph” or deputy (khalīfa): “en le faisant 
vostre Lieutenant.” The work is recorded as having been carried out by al-Walīd’s governor 
of Egypt from 90/709 to 96/714, Qurra b. Sharīk (“Corras fils de Serique”).

Like the texts from Damascus and al-Fusṭāṭ, the Umayyad inscriptions in the Prophet’s 
Mosque appear to have been set in gold letters against a blue/dark green background. 
The only source, however, to state this explicitly is Ibn ʿAbd Rabbih, whose testimony has 
been questioned and is in any case relatively late and may refer to the qibla wall’s post-
Umayyad decoration.235 Different materials seem to have been used for the Umayyad-era 
inscriptions: Ibn ʿAbd Rabbih has the qibla inscriptions in marble, while other sources 
describe inscriptions from al-Walīd’s time in mosaic. Al-Nawfalī’s anecdote, for example, 
is explicit that the foundation inscription it refers to was in mosaic, and it can be inferred 
from al-Samhūdī’s discussion, as well, that the other texts were inscribed in mosaic:  
“From the discussion of Ibn Zabāla on the inscriptions (kitāba) around the entrances to 
the mosque in the time of al-Mahdī, it can be ascertained that it had been decorated with 
mosaic (bi-l-fusayfisāʾ), just as al-Walīd had done.”236 Since gold letters on a dark blue/green 
background was the setting of choice for other Umayyad caliphal inscriptions in mosaic, 
including those in the Dome of the Rock and at the marketplace patronized by Hishām b. 
ʿAbd al-Malik at Baysān/Scythopolis, it does seem reasonable to assume that this scheme 
was also applied to the epigraphic program in Medina.237 Others have discussed the imperial 
connotations of such a color scheme in the late antique Roman and early Islamic empires.238

One problem concerning the Umayyad inscriptions that the Kitāb al-Manāsik does help 
us clear up is the identity of the figure responsible for the design of the inscriptions: a 
mawlā of Āl Ḥuwayṭib b. ʿAbd al-ʿUzzā called Saʿd Ḥaṭaba. A figure called Saʿd has previously 
been identified as having played a role in the creation of these texts, but often only as the 
patron of another Qurʾanic copyist, called Ibn Abī al-Hayyāj. The source for this supposed 

234.  Gaston Wiet, Matériaux pour un Corpus inscriptionum arabicarum, première partie: Égypte, vol. 2 
(Cairo: Imprimerie de l’Institut français d’archéologie orientale, 1930), 6–9; RCEA, 1:17–18 (no. 19).

235.  See above, nn. 40–41. Ibn al-Nadīm (see below, n. 243) confirms that the letters were in gold but does 
not mention the color of the background.

236.  Al-Samhūdī, Wafāʾ al-wafā, 2:296.
237.  Khamis, “Two Wall Mosaic Inscriptions”; Milwright, Dome of the Rock; see also George, “Calligraphy, 

Colour and Light,” 97.
238.  Flood, Great Mosque, 102; George, “Calligraphy, Colour and Light,” 95–104; Lawrence Nees, “Blue behind 

Gold: The Inscription of the Dome of the Rock and Its Relatives,” in And Diverse Are Their Hues: Color in Islamic 
Art and Culture, ed. Sheila Blair and Jonathan Bloom, 152–73 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011); 
Milwright, Dome of the Rock, 197–99. For a wide-ranging discussion of the use of gold letters in late antique 
mosaics, see Sean V. Leatherbury, Inscribing Faith in Late Antiquity: Between Reading and Seeing (Abingdon: 
Routledge, 2020), 42–56.



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outsourcing of the work is a brief passage in Ibn al-Nadīm’s Fihrist.239 However, thanks to the 
Kitāb al-Manāsik’s provision of a crucial piece of information—namely, that this Saʿd was 
known as Saʿd Ḥaṭaba—we now know that Saʿd himself was responsible for the execution 
of the texts and that Ibn Abī al-Hayyāj had nothing to do with them. This fact clears up a 
difficult reading in Ibn al-Nadīm’s Fihrist and reveals that the common (mis)understanding 
of the latter passage was caused by a variant that happened to appear in the manuscript 
that formed the basis of Gustav Flügel’s edition of the text.240 The relevant passage can now 
be read as follows:

The first to write out a muṣḥaf at the very beginning and to be known for the beauty 
of [his] calligraphy was Khālid b. Abī al-Hayyāj. I have seen a muṣḥaf in his hand.  
Saʿd Ḥaṭaba241 used to write out maṣāḥif, poetry, and anecdotes (akhbār) for al-Walīd b. 
ʿAbd al-Malik; it is he who carried out the inscription (kitāb) that is on the qibla [wall] of 
the Prophet’s (ṣ) Mosque in gold, from “By the sun and its brightness in the forenoon” 
to the end of the Qurʾan.242 It is said that ʿUmar b. ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz said to him, “I want 
you to write a muṣḥaf for me along this model.” So he wrote for him a muṣḥaf with the 
utmost care. ʿUmar came to inspect it and praised it highly, but he set a high price for 
it, so he refused [to buy] it.243

This rereading confirms the identity of the figure who executed the epigraphic program 
in al-Walīd’s Prophet’s Mosque in Medina. It helpfully clarifies who this otherwise randomly 
appearing and unidentified Saʿd in Ibn al-Nadīm’s text is and explains why Saʿd Ḥaṭaba is 
elsewhere referred to as a noted copyist of the Qurʾan.244 Finally, it removes the problem, 
first identified by Nabia Abbott, caused by the fact that Ibn Abī al-Hayyāj is elsewhere in the 
Fihrist identified as a companion of ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib and would, therefore, have had to be 
either a very young associate of ʿAlī or a very old designer of the inscriptions in al-Walīd’s 
mosque and copyist for ʿUmar b. ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz.245

239.  Ibn al-Nadīm, Fihrist, 1/i:15–16; translations offered in Sauvaget, Mosquée omeyyade, 79–80; Alain 
George, The Rise of Islamic Calligraphy (London: Saqi, 2010), 74–75. For discussion, see Nabia Abbott, The Rise of 
the North Arabic Script and Its Ḳurʾānic Development, with a Full Description of the Ḳurʾān Manuscripts in the 
Oriental Institute (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1939), 54; Khamis, “Two Wall Mosaic Inscriptions,” 171; 
Whelan, “Forgotten Witness,” 10–13.

240.  Ibn al-Nadīm, Kitāb al-Fihrist, ed. Gustav Flügel (Leipzig: F. C. W. Vogel, 1871–72), 1:6.
241.  This is the word that caused the confusion. Sayyid’s edition of Ibn al-Nadīm has Saʿd Ḥuṣṣah, but this 

must surely be the same person as the Saʿd Ḥaṭaba mentioned in the Kitāb al-Manāsik. Ibn al-Nadīm, al-Fihrist, 
ed. Riḍā Tajaddud (Tehran: Maktabat al-Jaʿfarī, 1391/1971), 9, has Saʿd Khuṣṣah. So the text in these editions 
reads wa-kāna Saʿd Ḥuṣṣah/Khuṣṣah yaktubu al-maṣāḥif. Sayyid’s edition notes that a variant in a surviving 
manuscript reads instead wa-kāna Saʿd naṣabahu li-katb al-maṣāḥif, “Saʿd had commissioned him to compose 
maṣāḥif . . . ,” and, as Tajaddud mentions in a note, Flügel’s edition has this text as well, which is presumably why 
previous translations have followed this alternative reading. Saʿd Ḥaṭaba is clearly the correct reading.

242.  I.e., Q 91–114.
243.  Translation based on Ibn al-Nadīm, Fihrist (ed. Sayyid), 1/i:15–16.
244.  See above, n. 113.
245.  Ibn al-Nadīm, Fihrist, 1/i:107; Abbott, Rise of the North Arabic Script, 54.



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Before we turn to the inscriptions added to the mosque in the early Abbasid period, 
it is worth considering the fate of these Umayyad texts after the fall of that dynasty. 
Many Umayyad inscriptions from the major imperial monuments founded during ʿAbd 
al-Malik’s and al-Walīd’s reigns seem to have been either destroyed or appropriated by 
Abbasid rulers and their representatives, a process that Flood has labeled “epigraphic 
mutilation.”246 Al-Maʾmūn famously had ʿAbd al-Malik’s name in the Dome of the Rock’s 
foundation inscription replaced with his own and also had extra inscriptions bearing his 
name added to the copper panels bearing Umayyad inscriptions by the entrances to that 
same building.247 In Damascus, it seems to have been the Qurʾanic texts that were effaced 
by al-Maʾmūn, according to al-Fasawī.248 The anecdote with which this article opens depicts 
al-Mahdī having al-Walīd’s name in the foundation inscription of the Prophet’s Mosque 
replaced with his own.

Sauvaget thought he had identified in the extant notices about the Abbasid inscriptions 
in the Prophet’s Mosque evidence of such a replacement of the name of the Umayyad 
caliph by an Abbasid ruler, and his argument is in some ways persuasive.249 His argument 
concerns Ibn Rusta’s version of an inscription explicitly credited in the Kitāb al-Manāsik 
to the first Abbasid caliph, Abū al-ʿAbbās al-Saffāḥ (§4). Sauvaget’s interest was raised by 
the fact that in Ibn Rusta’s account, this inscription is credited to a ruler designated “the 
servant of God, ʿAbd Allāh, the Commander of the Faithful” but is then dated to 162/778–79. 
The date would place the text during the construction work of al-Mahdī, but that caliph was 
called Muḥammad, not ʿAbd Allāh. He also noted the significant overlap in content with 
the first part of an inscription not reported by most of the sources discussed here—its text 
is provided by Ibn Qutayba—which credits work on the Prophet’s Mosque to al-Maʾmūn.  
Ibn Qutayba records the following text:

The servant of God [or: ʿAbd Allāh] ordered work on the mosque of the messenger of 
God (ṣ) in the year 202 [817–18 CE], desiring recompense from God, reward from God, 
 

246.  Flood, Great Mosque, 125–26; see also idem, “Signs of Silence: Epigraphic Erasure and the Image of 
the Word,” in The Image Debate: Figural Representation in Islam and across the World, ed. Christiane Gruber, 
46–71 (London: Gingko, 2019), esp. 49–56 on the Abbasid era. This is, of course, not a feature unique to the 
early Abbasid Islamic world; see, for example, the discussion of pre-Islamic Iranian epigraphic practices in 
Matthew P. Canepa, “Inscriptions, Royal Spaces and Iranian Identity: Epigraphic Practices in Persia and the 
Ancient Iranian World,” in Viewing Inscriptions in the Late Antique and Medieval World, ed. Antony Eastmond, 
10–35 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015); and, in the same volume, Jonathan M. Bloom, “Erasure 
and Memory: Aghlabid and Fatimid Inscriptions in North Africa,” 61–75. The months surrounding the Abbasid 
takeover of power from the Umayyads also witnessed many episodes of revolutionary violence targeted at 
relatives and supporters of the deposed ruling family; see further Robinson, “Violence.” Later decades saw, 
alongside “epigraphic mutilation,” extensive efforts to rewrite the memory of the Umayyad era and Umayyad 
rulers; see esp. Antoine Borrut, Entre mémoire et pouvoir: L’espace syrien sous les derniers Omeyyades et les 
premiers Abbassides (v. 72–193/692–809) (Leiden: Brill, 2011).

247.  For the latter, see Milwright, Dome of the Rock, 76.
248.  Ibn ʿAsākir, Taʾrīkh madīnat Dimashq, 2/i:37; Flood, Great Mosque, 126, 253; cf. now in part George, 

Umayyad Mosque, 175–76.
249.  Sauvaget, Mosquée omeyyade, 58–67.



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and God’s generosity. For with God is “the reward of both this world and the next.  
God is Hearing and Observing.”250

The servant of God, ʿAbd Allāh, has commanded fear of God and awe of Him as well 
as doing right by one’s family and action in accordance with the Book of God and the 
sunna of His messenger (ṣ). [He commands] the magnification/veneration of God’s 
ordinances that the tyrants belittled and the revival of the justice that they killed off;  
[he commands] the belittling of the enmity and oppression they magnified.  
[He commands] that God be obeyed and that those who obey God be obeyed and that 
those who disobey God be disobeyed. No obedience is due to any creature acting in 
disobedience to God. [He commands] the equitable division of the fayʾ among them and 
the appropriate expenditure of the “fifths.”251

The second part of this text is clearly a version of the Ibn Ghazāla inscription discussed 
by the Kitāb al-Manāsik (§1) and other sources. The first part does indeed heavily overlap 
in content with §4, although of course the date is completely different. For inscription 
§4, then, we do seem to have three different readings of the same text, and it is worth 
emphasizing that it can be inferred from Ibn Rusta’s account of the Abbasid texts, which 
he places around the courtyard of the Prophet’s Mosque, that §4 would have been followed 
by §1.252 The main difference is the dates: the Kitāb al-Manāsik and al-Samhūdī (both citing 
Yaḥyā al-ʿAqīqī) have 132/749–50; Ibn Rusta has 162/778–79; and Ibn Qutayba has 202/817–
18. There has been scepticism about Ibn Qutayba’s reading of the text for centuries, and 
Sauvaget followed al-Samhūdī’s precedent in, correctly, rejecting it; Sauvaget astutely 
assumed that Ibn Qutayba had tried to make the date match a caliph he knew to have been 
called ʿAbd Allāh.253 Sauvaget ended up arguing that the discrepancy between the name of 
the caliph and the date—recall that he was basing his discussion on Ibn Rusta’s version of 
the inscription—is the end result of an Abbasid rewriting of an originally Umayyad text: the 
name al-Walīd was replaced, for reasons of calligraphic fit, with the name ʿAbd Allāh and 
the date was altered.254

Since Sauvaget was working with Ibn Rusta’s account of the early Abbasid inscriptions, 
his argument made some sense of a confusing text. Other texts, however, remove the 
need for such a convoluted argument. The fact that Yaḥyā al-ʿAqīqī (according to both the  

 

250.  A slight rearrangement of the wording of Q 4:134; see also RCEA, 1:98 (no. 122).
251.  Ibn Qutayba, Maʿārif, 562–63.
252.  See below, Fig. 1, and the plan in Sauvaget, Mosquée omeyyade, 64. (§1 is Sauvaget’s “A” and §4 is 

Sauvaget’s “E.”) That inscriptions §§1–4 were located “around the courtyard of the mosque” is mentioned in Ibn 
Rusta, al-Aʿlāq al-nafīsa, 73.

253.  For al-Samhūdī’s scepticism, see his Wafāʾ al-wafā, 2:296.
254.  There is a reconstruction of what the relevant sections of both texts might have looked like in Sauvaget, 

Mosquée omeyyade, 66.



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Kitāb al-Manāsik and al-Samhūdī) dated the text to 132/749–50 removes the problem of the 
discrepancy between the date of the text and the name of the caliph. Alternatively, if Ibn 
Rusta’s reading of the date as 162/778–79 were correct, there are other extant inscriptions 
(§27a, for example, and see the discussion below) that suggest that the caliph Muḥammad 
al-Mahdī might have been referred to in inscriptions as ʿabd allāh ʿabd allāh, “the servant 
of God, ʿAbd Allāh.” Finally, Sauvaget’s argument has always begged the question of why 
al-Mahdī would have replaced the name al-Walīd with ʿAbd Allāh for reasons of calligraphic 
fit: after all, al-Maʾmūn’s reworking of the inscription in the Dome of the Rock suggests that 
Abbasid caliphs could be content with fairly crude alterations to Umayyad texts.255

This particular inscription, then, may not turn out to be a case of Abbasid-era “epigraphic 
mutilation” of an originally Umayyad text. That such mutilation happened, however, seems 
clear enough. Al-Nawfalī’s anecdote suggests that it did happen in the Prophet’s Mosque, 
and there is other evidence, too. Both the Kitāb al-Manāsik and Ibn Rusta, in their respective 
narratives of events leading up to the composition of inscription §1, state that this text was 
the result of early Abbasid reworking of a text originally put in place by ʿUmar b. ʿAbd 
al-ʿAzīz during the construction work in al-Walīd’s reign. In another version of inscription 
§1, provided by Ibn al-Najjār, the name of the caliph in the text is actually given as “the 
servant of God, the commander of the faithful, al-Walīd.”256 This seems to represent Ibn 
al-Najjār’s attempt to restore an original Umayyad text and it is a logical enough attempt at 
restoration, even though, as will be discussed below, the language of §1 as a whole is much 
more aligned with Abbasid than with Umayyad political vocabulary.

Despite the evidence for early Abbasid “epigraphic mutilation” in the Prophet’s Mosque, 
however, it does seem to be the case that the Umayyad-era Qurʾanic texts along the qibla 
wall remained. Ibn Rusta does not explicitly confirm that they were among the inscriptions 
he read on his visit in 290/903—in fact, he refers (albeit vaguely) to other sources to note 
their existence257—but Ibn ʿAbd Rabbih’s testimony, if accurate, supports their continuing 
existence. So does the Kitāb al-Manāsik’s author’s decision to repeat their content at the 
very end of the survey of inscriptions around the entrances to the mosque (§28). That 
survey began near the southern corner of the eastern wall and ended near the southern 
corner of the western wall. The notice of the Umayyad inscriptions along the qibla wall, 
therefore, completes a full circuit and suggests that those texts were still in situ after 
al-Mahdī’s work on the mosque.

255.  For the crude nature of al-Maʾmūn’s replacement of ʿAbd al-Malik’s name with his own, see the 
transcription of the relevant part of the text in Christel Kessler, “ʿAbd al-Malik’s Inscription in the Dome of the 
Rock: A Reconsideration,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (1970): 2–14, at 9; there is also an image in Blair, 
Islamic Inscriptions, 30. The most important transcription of the Dome of the Rock’s mosaic inscriptions can 
now be found in the foldouts at the front and back of Milwright, Dome of the Rock, but in the relevant place he 
restores ʿAbd al-Malik’s name.

256.  Ibn al-Najjār, al-Durra al-thamīna, 177.
257.  Ibn Rusta, al-Aʿlāq al-nafīsa, 73: “More than one scholar has reported that . . .”



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The Early Abbasid Inscriptions

The Kitāb al-Manāsik provides a fair amount of information about the forty-nine texts 
it describes that were added to the Prophet’s Mosque in the early Abbasid period, although 
some details remain frustratingly obscure. Perhaps the most frustrating such detail is the 
material used to create the inscriptions. A few texts are explicitly said either by the Kitāb 
al-Manāsik or by another source to have been in mosaic, and one seems to have been 
written on a teak plaque.258 There is also the aforementioned notice from al-Samhūdī to 
the effect that according to Ibn Zabāla’s account of the inscriptions, al-Mahdī used mosaic 
in the Prophet’s Mosque just as al-Walīd had done.259 The way this comment is phrased 
suggests, as Alain George has also noted, that many of the early Abbasid inscriptions in 
the mosque were executed in mosaic, perhaps—although there is no explicit evidence for 
this—in the caliphal/imperial color scheme of gold on blue.260 We can, therefore, study 
these texts on the basis of their locations and content alone, since we have so little evidence 
of other aspects of their nonverbal communication.261 We have, for example, no indication 
of the script(s) used. It would be interesting to compare these texts with those that have 
survived in Mecca and are dated to the early Abbasid period, although these await a full 
study. What has been published so far indicates that two texts from the Masjid al-Ḥarām, 
one dated to 167/783–84 during al-Mahdī’s caliphate and the other probably linked to this 
text, both located close to that mosque’s Bāb al-Ṣafā, are in raised Kufic script on marble 
columns.262 Another inscription from the Masjid al-Bayʿa in Mecca, dated to 144/761–62,  
is in what its editor has labeled a “Ḥijāzī” script on a rectangular granite pane.263 It is possible 
that some of the inscriptions around the entrances to the Prophet’s Mosque may have been 
similar, but there is little indication that this was the case. It would also be possible to 
consider other extant examples of Arabic architectural inscriptions in mosaic, wood, and 
stone from the second/eighth and third/ninth centuries to gain some indication of what 
the visual effect of the Prophet’s Mosque’s inscriptions may have been. Since, however,  

258.  Mosaic: §6; Ibn Rusta, al-Aʿlāq al-nafīsa, 74–75; al-Samhūdī, Wafāʾ al-wafā, 3:13 (which corresponds to 
§11a). Teak plaque: §26; al-Samhūdī, Wafāʾ al-wafā, 3:23. See also Leal, “Abbasid Mosaic Tradition,” 32. Al-Marjānī 
and al-Maṭarī also note that §11a was on a mosaic panel, although they date it to the caliphate of al-Walīd b. ʿ Abd 
al-Malik: see al-Maṭarī, Taʿrīf, 89; al-Marjānī, Bahjat al-nufūs, 1:545. Since, however, they both also, confusingly, 
seem to attribute all the entrances in al-Mahdī’s mosque, including those in the portions added to the structure 
by al-Mahdī, to al-Walīd, they may well have been wrong about this, too; see below, n. 270, for reference to their 
confusion over the entrances.

259.  See above, n. 236. For further discussion of the use of mosaics to decorate Abbasid monuments over the 
first Abbasid century or so, see Leal, “Abbasid Mosaic Tradition,” esp. 30–34 for the use of mosaic in the Ḥijāz.

260.  George, “Calligraphy, Colour and Light,” 98. That said, a mosaic inscription added to one of the entrances 
to the Masjid al-Ḥarām in Mecca by Abū Jaʿfar al-Manṣūr, recording work undertaken between 137/754 and 
140/758, was apparently actually in the reverse color scheme, “in black mosaic on gold mosaic”; see al-Azraqī, 
Akhbār Makka, 2:58–59; also Sheila Blair, “Inscribing the Hajj,” in The Hajj: Collected Essays, ed. Venetia Porter 
and Liana Saif, 160–68 (London: British Museum, 2013), 161–62.

261.  For the importance of nonverbal, visual evidence in interpreting epigraphic schemes, see the essays 
collected in Eastmond, Viewing Inscriptions.

262.  Al-Rāshid et al., Āthār minṭaqat Makka al-mukarrama, 111–14.
263.  Ibid., 122.



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any comparison would have to remain almost entirely conjectural, it seems more 
appropriate to focus our attention here on what we do know about these texts.

The Kitāb al-Manāsik and Ibn Rusta between them allow us to pinpoint quite clearly the 
locations of most of the early Abbasid inscriptions. According to the latter, several of these 
texts (§§1–4) were “around the courtyard of the mosque, above the arches and beneath 
the merlons (shurafāt).”264 Sauvaget offered a credible plan of their arrangement around 
the courtyard, and nothing in the Kitāb al-Manāsik suggests his plan is incorrect.265 Of the 
additional early Abbasid texts discussed by the Kitāb al-Manāsik, one was in the “eastern 
corner of the inside of the mosque” (§5), presumably, given the context, by the southeast 
corner; one was along the outside of the qibla wall by the southeast corner (§8); and one 
was on the manjanīq next to the northern end of the western wall (§21). The remaining 
inscriptions (§§6–7, 9–20, 22–27) were located around the entrances to the mosque,  
both inside and outside, and sometimes on connected arches and lintels (see Fig. 1).266

There is some dispute surrounding the number of entrances to the Prophet’s Mosque 
in the second/eighth century. Sauvaget noted that the state of the entrances to al-Walīd’s 
mosque is very difficult to ascertain, although he made a valiant effort.267 Ibn Zabāla 
mentions four entrances, all in the western wall, that were apparently there in the very early 
Abbasid period, before al-Mahdī’s expansion.268 Most of our sources are more interested in 
discussing the entrances to the mosque after al-Mahdī’s expansion of the building, but they 
nonetheless disagree over their total number and sometimes over their location. The main 
dispute surrounds any entrances that may or may not have been found along the qibla wall 
of al-Mahdī’s mosque. Ibn Zabāla apparently gave the mosque twenty-four entrances, eight 
along each of the eastern and western walls and four each along the northern and southern 
walls.269 Al-Samhūdī, however, disputed that some of these were really entrances and in his 
own survey discusses only twenty, those along the eastern, northern, and western walls.270 
Ibn Rusta says he counted twenty-two entrances when he visited the Prophet’s Mosque  
in 290/903.271 The Kitāb al-Manāsik mentions twenty entrances in its survey of the 

264.  Ibn Rusta, al-Aʿlāq al-nafīsa, 73.
265.  Sauvaget, Mosquée omeyyade, 64.
266.  The relatively extensive use of inscriptions to decorate the mosque is not particularly surprising in 

an Abbasid-era context. The (admittedly a century or so later) mosque of Ibn Ṭūlūn in Cairo famously had an 
inscription two kilometers long on wood; see K. A. C. Creswell, A Short Account of Early Muslim Architecture, 
rev. James W. Allan (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 1989), 402.

267.  Sauvaget, Mosquée omeyyade, 75–78, 91.
268.  Al-Samhūdī, Wafāʾ al-wafā, 3:24.
269.  Ibid., 3:6–7.
270.  Ibid., 3:7–31. Al-Fīrūzābādī’s survey of the entrances (see his al-Maghānim al-muṭāba, 1:425–35) differs 

slightly in places from al-Samhūdī’s, but the latter in his own survey argues persuasively for his reconstruction, 
which agrees fully with the Kitāb al-Manāsik’s arrangement. Al-Maṭarī and al-Marjānī both discuss twenty 
entrances, which they claim were put into the mosque by al-Walīd b. ʿAbd al-Malik, but since they include 
entrances found only in the extension built on the instructions of al-Mahdī, they were clearly confused: see 
al-Maṭarī, Taʿrīf, 88–91; and al-Marjānī Bahjat al-nufūs, 1:543–48.

271.  Ibn Rusta, al-Aʿlāq al-nafīsa, 75.



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inscriptions, which starts in the southeast corner (along the eastern wall) before progressing 
in order along the eastern, northern, and western walls; these are the same twenty discussed 
by al-Samhūdī, who seems to have based his discussion on Yaḥyā al-ʿAqīqī’s and Ibn Zabāla’s 
surveys of the inscriptions. Texts are located on or around all of them except one, the small 
opening (khawkha) in the western wall.272 Of the inscriptions around the entrances, those 
from §§13 or 14 up to §§23 or 24 were in the new section of the mosque added as part of 
al-Mahdī’s enlargement.273

The contents of the texts are fairly regular and fall under four main themes (more than 
one theme can appear in one inscription). First of all, there are texts commemorating 
building projects commissioned by particular caliphs. Fourteen of the inscriptions mention 
such work, with three identifying Abū al-ʿAbbās as the commissioning caliph (§§1, 4, 5),  
two al-Manṣūr (§§26, 27b), one Hārūn al-Rashīd (§6), and seven al-Mahdī (§§2, 3, 13d, 17b, 
19b, 20b, and almost certainly 27a); one (§25c) names the caliph as “the servant of God, ʿAbd 
Allāh, the commander of the faithful” but provides no other identifying information or 
date. These texts are often associated with thanks to God, praise for the prophet, and calls 
for God’s blessings and rewards for the caliph.274

Second, there are texts that identify the origins of the craftsmen who worked 
on those sections of the mosque:275 two texts credit craftsmen from Jerusalem (§§6, 7),  
two workers from Homs (§§10b, 10c), and two Basrans (§§13d, 20b). No craftsmen are named 
individually—the sole inscription that mentions the agency of an individual other than the 
caliph (§6) refers to a local official who oversaw the work—but such identification would 
be uncommon for architectural epigraphy in this period.276 Mention of the geographical 
origins of groups of craftsmen, however, seems to have been relatively common in the 
Ḥijāz around this time. Two extant early Abbasid texts from the Masjid al-Ḥarām in Mecca 

272.  Although the only text located near Bāb ʿAlī is §8, and it is not entirely clear how close to the entrance 
it was.

273.  The Kitāb al-Manāsik is clear that texts §13a–d were around the entrance that marked the place along 
the eastern wall where al-Mahdī’s expansion began, but it is unclear whether this entrance was at the limit of 
al-Walīd’s mosque or in a section of the wall that existed only after the early Abbasid expansion. There is no 
such explicit information about the western wall, but from its relative location Bāb Dār Jaʿfar b. Yaḥyā seems 
likely to mark the corresponding spot there. The next entrance heading south, Bāb ʿĀtika, is one thought to 
have been in al-Walīd’s mosque.

274.  As Blair notes, “in a typical foundation inscription, far more space was given over to the patron than to 
what he built”; see her Islamic Inscriptions, 35.

275.  This, at least, is what appears to be meant. It is just about possible that the inscriptions commemorate 
sections paid for by the communities identified, but it is more likely that they refer to specific craftsmen.

276.  For this phenomenon in later periods, see Sheila Blair, “Place, Space and Style: Craftsmen’s Signatures 
in Medieval Islamic Art,” in Eastmond, Viewing Inscriptions, 230–48; idem, Islamic Inscriptions, 49–52. For 
artisans’ individual signatures on portable objects from the first four centuries aH, see Fanny Bessard, Caliphs 
and Merchants: Cities and Economies of Power in the Near East (700–950) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 
2020), 221–26. Some architectural inscriptions from the early Islamic centuries do give the names of their 
inscribers, but not of those who undertook work on the wider decorative schemes; see, for example, Bilha Moor, 
“Mosque and Church: Arabic Inscriptions at Shivta in the Early Islamic Period,” Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and 
Islam 40 (2013): 73–141, at 79, 80, 87, 90.



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also identify the geographical origin of those who worked on sections of the mosque,  
in both cases Kufa.277 Moreover, the mid- to late fourth/tenth-century traveler al-Muqaddasī, 
who visited Mecca at least twice, in 356/967 and 367/978, noted that the outsides of the 
walls of the arcades of the Masjid al-Ḥarām were decorated in mosaic, executed by workers 
from Syria and Egypt whose names could be seen there.278 That caliphal projects in the 
Marwanid and early Abbasid periods could involve large numbers of craftsmen and laborers 
moved around the empire and perhaps even brought in from outside the empire has been 
well established, thanks largely to papyrological evidence from Egypt and some literary 
evidence for al-Walīd’s building projects.279 These Meccan and Medinan inscriptions seem 
to provide further corroboration of such migrations of laborers to work on major imperial 
monuments. We also should not be surprised to see different teams of craftsmen at work 
on different sections of the mosque, since it also seems to have been the case that several 
teams of mosaicists worked on monuments such as the Dome of the Rock and al-Walīd’s 
mosque in Damascus.280

Third, many of the texts include demands for praises, blessings, and greetings for the 
prophet from either God, His angels, or the Muslims in general. The mosque in Medina does, 
of course, contain the prophet’s grave, but there is little in these inscriptions in praise of 
Muḥammad that would be out of place anywhere in the Islamic world. Some texts do call on 
Muslims to pray for or greet the prophet, which could be related to ideas about pilgrimage 
to the prophet’s grave in the mid-second/eighth century, but discussions in favor of such 
pilgrimage from that period are relatively difficult to uncover.281 In any case, calls of this 
kind are also frequently found in inscriptions elsewhere in the Islamic world.282

The fourth theme is, of course, citations from the Qurʾan. Clear direct citations from the 
Qurʾan can be identified in forty of the inscriptions, and still more texts contain obvious 
allusions to the Qurʾan or make use of Qurʾanic vocabulary, even if they do not quote it 
directly. Twenty-three of the texts contain only quotations from the Qurʾan, often following 
a basmallah.283 There is a clear preference for extracts of a verse or several verses from a 
longer sūra rather than full citations of short sūras. The latter, of course, is what apparently 

277.  Al-Rāshid et al., Āthār minṭaqat Makka al-mukarrama, 111–14.
278.  Al-Muqaddasī, Aḥsan al-taqāsīm fī maʿrifat al-aqālīm, ed. M. J. de Goeje, 2nd ed. (Leiden: Brill, 1906), 73; 

see 101 for the dates of his visits to Mecca. It is not clear when these mosaics were first put in place, as noted by 
Leal, “Abbasid Mosaic Tradition,” 31.

279.  Recent discussion in George, Umayyad Mosque, 77–91.
280.  See the discussions in George, Rise of Islamic Calligraphy, 60–68; idem, Umayyad Mosque, 146; Milwright, 

Dome of the Rock, 111–14.
281.  See the discussion in Munt, Holy City of Medina, 123–47.
282.  Similar calls appear, famously, in the Dome of the Rock’s inscriptions, for example. To give just one 

further example, they can also be seen in one of the texts (probably early Abbasid) from Mecca; see Al-Rāshid et 
al., Āthār minṭaqat Makka al-mukarrama, 113–14.

283.  §§9, 10d, 11a, 11b, 12a, 12b, 13a, 13b, 13c, 14a, 14b, 15b, 16a, 17a, 18a, 19a, 20a, 21, 22a, 22b, 23b, 24c, 25a. 
For some discussion of the use of Qurʾanic verses to adorn entrances to mosques throughout the premodern 
Islamic world, see Erica Cruikshank Dodd and Shereen Khairallah, The Image of the Word: A Study of Quranic 
Verses in Islamic Architecture (Beirut: American University of Beirut, 1981), 1:73–80.



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dominated the Umayyad mosque’s epigraphic program, but among the early Abbasid 
inscriptions only sūras 1, 94, 101, 102 and 112 were cited in full. Some verses were cited 
twice: this was certainly the case for Q 2:255, 3:190, 9:18, 9:33, and 9:128–29, and Q 33:56 was 
cited directly three times. Q 7:54 was probably cited twice (although one of these may have 
been another verse instead); Q 17:111 was cited directly once and alluded to on another 
occasion; and Q 4:134 and 17:43 seem to have been alluded to twice. The citation of or 
allusion to these particular verses, including those referenced more than once, is not really 
surprising in this context: many invoke Qurʾanic references to the prophet/messenger, 
to “mosques” (masājid), or to the superiority and triumph of Islam over other faiths.  
As Robert Hillenbrand has noted, “the choice of Quranic inscriptions for use in a mosque 
was only theoretically wide. In practice it was narrow.”284 It is, therefore, not surprising to 
see significant overlap between the verses used in al-Mahdī’s mosque in Medina and those 
used in other premodern mosques. Of the sūras that Hillenbrand identified as those most 
commonly drawn upon in architecture—Q 2, 3, 9, 17, 24, 48, 112, and 114—verses from all 
bar the last were used in al-Mahdī’s inscriptions in Medina (and, of course, Q 114 may well 
still have been visible in the Umayyad qibla wall inscription).285 And of the verses from sūra 
9 that were most commonly used in architectural settings—Q 9:18, 21–22, and 33—verses 18 
and 33 were both cited twice in Medina.286 That said, it is a point of interest that Q 9:33 is 
apparently cited frequently on funerary stelae, so its use here, in the mosque that contained 
the prophet’s grave, is possibly notable.287 The appearance twice of the so-called Throne 
Verse (Q 2:255) also fits that verse’s regular use in other monuments associated with caliphal 
patronage.288 Two of the verses cited or referenced more than once (Q 33:56 and 17:111)  

284.  Robert Hillenbrand, “Qurʾanic Epigraphy in Medieval Islamic Architecture,” Revue des études islamiques 
54 (1986): 171–87, at 172. That said, sometimes specific verses not commonly used elsewhere were used to fit 
specific monuments, such as Q 3:96–97, which was used in the mosaic inscription erected above an entrance to 
the Masjid al-Ḥarām in Mecca by Abū Jaʿfar al-Manṣūr; see al-Azraqī, Akhbār Makka, 2:58–59; Blair, “Inscribing 
the Hajj,” 160–61.

285.  Hillenbrand, “Qurʾanic Epigraphy,” 172; Hillenbrand’s data is drawn from Dodd and Khairallah, Image of 
the Word. There is also some overlap with the Qurʾanic inscriptions, perhaps dating to the early to mid-second/
eighth century, in the mosque at Shivta (al-Subayṭā); for these, see Moor, “Mosque and Church.”

286.  Q 9:18 is apparently “by far the most common Koranic text used in the decoration of a mosque,” and it 
is often found in foundation inscriptions, as in §3 here; see Dodd and Khairallah, Image of the Word, 1:63.

287.  Hillenbrand, “Quranic Epigraphy,” 173. That said, Q 9:33 does appear in another (this time extant) 
early Abbasid inscription in Sanaa, dated to 136/753–54, which commemorates the restoration/construction of 
mosques; see Mittwoch, “Eine arabische Bauinschrift,” 235, 237; al-Dūrī, “al-Fikra al-mahdiyya,” 124; Serjeant 
and Lewcock, “Architectural History,” 348; Elad, “Caliph Abūʾl-ʿAbbās al-Saffāḥ,” 16. It also apparently featured 
in al-Manṣūr’s inscription in the Masjid al-Ḥarām in Mecca; see al-Azraqī, Akhbār Makka, 2:58–59; Blair, 
“Inscribing the Hajj,” 161.

288.  See, for example, Flood, Great Mosque, 247–48; Milwright, Dome of the Rock, 74–79; Milka Levy-Rubin, 
“Why Was the Dome of the Rock Built? A New Perspective on a Long-Discussed Question,” Bulletin of the School 
of Oriental and African Studies 80, no. 3 (2017): 441–64, at 462. Gülru Necipoğlu suggests (“Dome of the Rock,” 
46) that the Throne Verse was also displayed in the dome of the Umayyad Dome of the Rock, although the 
earliest witness is from the sixth/twelfth century, after the Fatimids had rebuilt the dome and renovated its 
decoration. For the verse’s use in other mosques across the premodern Islamic world, see Dodd and Khairallah, 
Image of the Word, 1:64–65. In light of the fairly common use of this verse in Umayyad and early Abbasid 



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also appeared on the outer face of the Umayyad mosaic inscription in the Dome of the Rock,  
as did Q 112, which was used once in the early Abbasid inscriptions in the Prophet’s Mosque 
(§25b).289 Although many of these Qurʾanic citations and blessings for the prophet of course 
had a specific significance for the message the inscriptions’ patrons were attempting to 
promote, the decoration of a mosque with such texts in and of itself would presumably have 
contributed to the sanctity of the space.

This article will end with a discussion of what these inscriptions from the Prophet’s 
Mosque can tell us about early Abbasid messages concerning the legitimacy of their rule. 
Before we get there, however, it is important to consider how visitors to the mosque might 
have reacted to the texts. They were clearly designed to be visible, although that does not 
necessarily mean they were designed to be easily legible;290 we cannot say much about how 
difficult it was to read them without knowing much more about their precise locations 
(including how they faced the light) and their material. That said, their location around 
the entrances and the courtyard seems significant. On the one hand, these locations may 
have ensured that at least some of the texts did receive as much light as possible. And on 
the other hand, inscribed scriptural passages were often used to decorate (and perhaps to 
sanctify) entrances to many late antique religious buildings, as well as certain locations in 
the interior of such buildings, and this significance may have been apparent to visitors to 
the Prophet’s Mosque even if they could not always read the texts of the inscriptions.291

The various extant sources reporting the inscriptions’ contents do disagree over 
their wording. Sometimes the divergence is a matter of minor variations, but sometimes 
significant portions are read differently, notably (as we have seen) the dates of some of the 
texts. The differences could, of course, simply be a result of errors in transcription or by 
later copyists of the manuscripts. I have also discussed some cases in which the dates or the 
names of caliphs may have been altered to make the data fit better with a later scholar’s 
knowledge (Ibn Qutayba) or in an effort to reconstruct a more original text (Ibn al-Najjār). 
They could also, however, reflect engagement with these texts by visitors and readers 
who appreciated the general gist of the message and perhaps often recognized specific 

imperial monuments, it is interesting that Greek biblical inscriptions displaying comparable messages of divine 
dominion and God’s throne over the Roman triple gate in the southern wall of the temenos in Damascus were 
left in situ in the new mosque there; see George, Umayyad Mosque, 95.

289.  This may actually account for all of the Qurʾanic inscriptions used in the outer-face text in the Dome of 
the Rock. Others have also identified references there to Q 57:2 and 64:1, which do not appear in the Prophet’s 
Mosque, but Scott Lucas has argued intriguingly that these may have been incorrectly identified and that the 
inscription in that location is actually citing a prophetic ḥadīth instead; see his “An Efficacious Invocation 
Inscribed on the Dome of the Rock: Literary and Epigraphic Evidence for a First-Century Ḥadīth,” Journal of 
Near Eastern Studies 76, no. 2 (2017): 215–30.

290.  See, for example, Hillenbrand, “Qurʾanic Epigraphy,” 178: “Even if inscriptions are visible they do not 
need to be legible.” The ways in which late antique inscriptions in religious buildings were supposed to be read 
and engaged with features heavily in the recent discussion in Leatherbury, Inscribing Faith; see, for example, 
the comments at 14–18.

291.  Leatherbury, Inscribing Faith, 262–71. Irene Bierman has made a similar point about the use of 
inscriptions to adorn entrances in city walls; see her Writing Signs: The Fatimid Public Text (Berkeley: University 
of California Press, 1998), 31–32, 35, 73.



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Qurʾanic verses but were not necessarily familiar with the precise names, dates, and other 
information the inscriptions may have contained. Those who cared more about precision on 
such details, including the authors of our surviving sources, tried to make them out, albeit 
with varying results. But we might assume that many visitors were largely unconcerned 
with the details of the texts, principally marking (but not, of course, necessarily accepting) 
their messages of prophetic authority and obedience to God, adherence to which could be 
demonstrated by recognizing the legitimacy and philanthropic generosity of the reigning 
“servant of God” and “commander of the faithful.”292

As modern scholars have long understood “one of the main reasons to erect a monumental 
inscription was propaganda and advertising, to broadcast a ruler’s good name and works or 
to mark his sovereignty.”293 Even if the texts in Medina were not designed to be legible, 
aspects of their setting may have emphasized their imperial message; this would be the 
case, for example, with any texts that may have been executed in the gold-on-blue scheme. 
It is also worth noting that the appearance of inscriptions around all the entrances to the 
mosque as well as along the qibla wall and around the courtyard would have meant that 
texts encircled large sections of the mosque, and encircling texts have been identified as 
conveying important messages of imperial rule in late antique and early Islamic contexts.294

What the inscriptions actually said is, of course, still important, and some of the texts 
provide an indication of how these early Abbasid caliphs expected visitors to the mosque 
to understand the nature of their sovereignty and the reasons for the legitimacy of their 
authority. The details of the early Abbasids’ justifications for overthrowing the Umayyads 
and of their own claims to caliphal authority have long been a matter of debate among 
historians, who have attempted to track the developments in their claims to rule on the 
basis of being members, in a more or less particular fashion, of Banū Hāshim, the family of 
the prophet.295 The early Abbasid inscriptions from the Prophet’s Mosque in Medina provide 
some examples of already generally well-known strategies and claims, but also evidence of 
some less-known efforts.

Among the better-known claims found in these inscriptions are those that fit nicely 
the context of the years that followed the Abbasids’ successful seizure of power from the 
Umayyads. These come, appropriately, in the text supposedly installed by Ibn Ghazāla to 

292.  There is an interesting discussion of the necessity of the readability of royal inscriptions in pre-Islamic 
Iran in Canepa, “Inscriptions,” for example at 13: “Even if their contents were not exactly known, inscriptions’ 
tangible presence extended the power and presence of the royal patron beyond the palace into the landscape.” 
See also the discussion in Jeremy Johns, “Arabic Inscriptions in the Cappella Palatina: Performativity, Audience, 
Legibility and Illegibility,” in Eastmond, Viewing Inscriptions, 124–47.

293.  Blair, Islamic Inscriptions, 41.
294.  See, for example, Milwright, Dome of the Rock, 197, 254; see also the wider discussion of inscriptions 

that encircled religious buildings in late antiquity in Leatherbury, Inscribing Faith, 148–55, and the comments 
about inscriptions encouraging viewers to move around monuments at 248–53, 259, 286.

295.  See above, n. 5, for some relevant studies. That “Hāshimī” was a label used already in the Umayyad 
period to describe members of the family of the prophet more broadly than was the case with the labels 
“Talibids” or “ʿAlids” was observed by Wilferd Madelung, “The Hāshimiyyāt of al-Kumayt and Hāshimī Shiʿism,” 
Studia Islamica 70 (1989): 5–26.



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replace an earlier Umayyad text (§1). First, we see here calls to action in accordance with 
the Book of God and the sunna of His prophet as well as an emphasis on the necessity of 
disobeying and overturning the false practices of tyrants. Anti-Umayyad rebels, including 
those leading the movement that brought the Abbasids to power, apparently made frequent 
and somewhat generic use of calls for action in accordance with “the Book of God and 
the sunna of His prophet.”296 Other texts (for example, §27a) also emphasize that it is the 
Abbasid caliph who is the guardian of the sunna. The Ibn Ghazāla inscription (§1) also calls 
for just caliphal oversight of fiscal matters, principally through the “equitable division 
of the fayʾ” and the “appropriate expenditure of the ‘fifths.’” This call, too, fits well in 
the context of rulers who had recently seized power from the Umayyads, since the latter 
family’s supposed mismanagement of the empire’s finances was a major complaint of rebels 
against their rule.297 This inscription thus offers a symbolic rewriting of an Umayyad-era 
text with many of the key messages proclaimed by the rebels whose actions had eventually 
brought the Abbasids to power.

The more interesting language revealed in these inscriptions includes the relatively 
common reference to the Abbasids as “caliphs” or as possessors of “caliphate,” in two 
cases within a list of titles (see §§5 and 19b) and in three cases in other parts of the text 
(see §§26, 27a, and 27b). This may seem innocuous enough, since we are well aware that 
the title “caliph” was applied to all these rulers. The debate about the precise meaning of 
this title continues, however, and it also remains the case that relatively few caliphs from 
the Umayyad and early Abbasid periods are known to have made use of this specific title 
in public media.298 Although the title al-khalīfa does appear occasionally on coins during 

296.  Patricia Crone and Martin Hinds, God’s Caliph: Religious Authority in the First Centuries of Islam 
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 58–96. For the existence of various different ideas in the early 
Abbasid period about the meaning of “the sunna of the prophet” and the identity of its most appropriate 
guardians, see also Zaman, Religion and Politics, esp. within 70–118.

297.  See, for example, the accusations leveled in the sermon of the anti-Umayyad rebel Abū Ḥamza 
al-Mukhtār b. ʿ Awf in 129–30/747, in Crone and Hinds, God’s Caliph, 131–32; more generally, see Crone, Medieval 
Islamic Political Thought, 52; Andrew Marsham, “Fayʾ,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam, 3rd ed.

298.  The classic study is Crone and Hinds, God’s Caliph. In line with trends in scholarship on the early 
Islamic centuries over the past couple of decades, many more discussions have been published on Umayyad 
caliphs’ titles and political thought than have appeared on those of the early Abbasids; see, for example, Wadād 
al-Qāḍī, “The Religious Foundation of Late Umayyad Ideology and Practice,” in Saber religioso y poder político 
en el islam: Actas del Simposio Internacional (Granada, 15–18 Octubre 1991), 231–73 (Madrid: Agencia Español 
de Cooperación Internacional, 1994); Shahin, “Struggling for Communitas”; Luke Treadwell, “The Formation 
of Religious and Caliphal Identity in the Umayyad Period: The Evidence of the Coinage,” in A Companion to 
Islamic Art and Architecture, ed. Finbarr Barry Flood and Gülru Necipoğlu, 1:89–108 (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley, 
2017); Andrew Marsham, “‘God’s Caliph’ Revisited: Umayyad Political Thought in Its Late Antique Context,” in 
George and Marsham, Power, Patronage, and Memory, 3–37; Sean W. Anthony, “Prophetic Dominion, Umayyad 
Kingship: Varieties of Mulk in the Early Islamic Period,” in Marsham, Umayyad World, 39–64. Some discussions 
of early Abbasid titles and political thought are referenced in footnotes throughout this article (esp. but not 
exclusively in n. 5); in addition, particularly useful among recent studies are the relevant sections of Andrew 
Marsham, Rituals of Islamic Monarchy: Accession and Succession in the First Muslim Empire (Edinburgh: 
Edinburgh University Press, 2009), 183–249; and Linda T. Darling, “‘The Viceregent of God, from Him We Expect 
Rain’: The Incorporation of the Pre-Islamic State in Early Islamic Political Culture,” Journal of the American 
Oriental Society 134, no. 3 (2014): 407–29.



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the reigns of Muḥammad al-Mahdī, Mūsā al-Hādī (r. 169–70/785–86), Hārūn al-Rashīd, and  
ʿAbd Allāh al-Maʾmūn, often in conjunction with another title or laqab, it is hardly known on 
public media other than coins.299 This fact makes the five apparent uses of the title around 
one building by the late second/eighth century quite remarkable. It is also important to 
point out that in the two cases in which the word forms part of the caliph’s titles, it is 
explicit that he is God’s caliph; this is entirely to be expected given the conclusions of 
earlier studies on this question.300

One text, in particular, is worth looking at in a bit more detail: the inscription from 
Bāb Ziyād toward the southern end of the western wall commemorating Abū Jaʿfar 
al-Manṣūr’s work, dated to 151/768–69 (§26).301 In this text, the Abbasid caliph makes the 
explicit point that “the commander of the faithful, may God ennoble him, is the most 
worthy of men to oversee that because of his close kinship to the messenger of God (ṣ) 
and because of his caliphate with which he/He distinguished him.” It is the juxtaposition 
of al-Manṣūr’s caliphate (khilāfa) with his “close kinship to the messenger of God” that is 
particularly notable here. It has long been pointed out that the rebellion of the Hasanid 
ʿAlids Muḥammad b. ʿAbd Allāh “al-Nafs al-Zakiyya” and his brother Ibrāhīm in 145/762, 
while not necessarily a serious military threat to early Abbasid rule, presented the new 
ruling family with a major challenge to the claims underpinning their authority from 
members of a family that felt it had a better claim to rule on the basis of the closeness of its 
relationship to the prophet.302 This inscription from Medina suggests that in the aftermath 
of the revolt, al-Manṣūr saw the public patronage of work on the Prophet’s Mosque as a 
way of countering the claims of rivals within the wider family of the prophet.303 Quite how 
successful such claims were in heading off opposition and winning over Muslims who were 
not members of the family of the prophet is not obvious. Among the interesting surviving 
letters said to have passed between the Syrian legal scholar ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Awzāʿī  
(d. 157/773–74) and Abbasid caliphs or their representatives or family members there is 
a set of three letters that can be dated to 138–39/755–57 and are addressed to al-Manṣūr, 
urging him to ransom Muslims captured by the Romans/Byzantines in Qālīqalā (modern 
Erzurum). In one of these, al-Awzāʿī urges the caliph to see following the prophet’s sunna as 
more important for appropriate rulership than the closeness of the ruler’s relationship to 
the prophet.304

299.  The title was perhaps also used on coins by ʿAlid rebels of this period; see George C. Miles, “Al-Mahdī 
al-Ḥaqq, Amīr al-Muʾminīn,” Revue numismatique, 6th ser., 7 (1965): 329–41; Michael Bonner, “Al-Khalīfa 
al-Marḍī: The Accession of Hārūn al-Rashīd,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 108, no. 1 (1988): 79–91.

300.  See esp. Crone and Hinds, God’s Caliph.
301.  Much of this paragraph repeats an argument made originally in Munt, Holy City of Medina, 167–68.
302.  See especially Elad, Rebellion of Muḥammad al-Nafs al-Zakiyya; and Tor, “Parting of Ways.”
303.  The undated but probably early Abbasid inscription from the Masjid al-Bayʿa in Mecca also attempts to 

emphasize the significance of the Abbasids’ eponymous ancestor, al-ʿAbbās b. ʿAbd al-Muṭṭalib, in the Muslim 
community’s history by celebrating his role in the oath of allegiance (bayʿa) to the prophet that that mosque 
was built to commemorate; see al-Rāshid et al., Āthār Minṭaqat Makka al-Mukarrama, 122–25.

304.  For the letter, see Ibn Abī Ḥātim, al-Jarḥ wa-l-taʿdīl, 1:195–97 (the relevant section is at 195–96); and 
for discussion, see Rana Mikati, “Missives from the Frontier (130–152/747–769): Al-Awzāʿī and the Abbasids,” 



Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 30 (2022)

The Umayyad and Early Abbasid Inscriptions in the Prophet's Mosque  •  127

The final contribution the inscriptions from Medina make to our understanding of the 
nature of early Abbasid rule concerns the public use of titles by reigning caliphs. There 
are probably at least six extant inscriptions commemorating caliphally sponsored building 
work from the early Abbasid period that both mention a reigning caliph and provide a date 
that can help us to identify him specifically. There are two others that are not dated but 
that can, thanks to other information provided by the inscriptions, be dated fairly securely 
to the early Abbasid period, and one more that can perhaps be linked to a nearby dated text. 
Table 1 provides information about how these nine texts refer to the reigning caliph.305

Table 1

Location Date (AH) Titles (Arabic) Titles (English)

Mafraq306 135 al-mahdī [. . .]307 “the mahdī”

Baysān/Scythopolis308 135 al-mahdī ʿabd allāh 
ʿabd allāh amīr 

al-muʾminīn

“the mahdī, the servant 
of God, ʿAbd Allāh, 

the commander of the 
faithful”

Sanaa309 136 al-mahdī ʿabd allāh 
ʿabd allāh amīr 
al-muʾminīn310

“the mahdī, the servant 
of God, ʿAbd Allāh, 

the commander of the 
faithful”

Journal of Abbasid Studies 7, no. 1 (2020): 1–32, esp. 13–18.
305.  I am leaving aside references to reigning caliphs on coins and other media and types of inscriptions, 

although these can provide interesting parallels; see, for example, Bates, “Khurāsānī Revolutionaries.” There is, 
however, one interesting item that could be considered here as well. An Arabic inscription on an ivory casket 
held in the treasury of the Basilica of St Gereon in Cologne notes that it was produced in (or perhaps imported 
to) Aden (in today’s Yemen) and calls on God’s blessing for “the servant of God, ʿAbd Allāh, the commander of 
the faithful” (ʿabd allāh ʿabd allāh amīr al-muʾminīn). Given that the inscription also mentions the governor 
of Yemen, ʿAbd Allāh b. al-Rabīʿ, the caliph in question would be either Abū al-ʿAbbās al-Saffāḥ or Abū Jaʿfar 
al-Manṣūr. For this text, see J. Gildemeister, “Zwei arabische Inschriften auf Elfenbeinbüchsen,” Zeitschrift der 
deutschen morgenländischen Gesellschaft 25, no. 1–2 (1871): 248–50; RCEA, 1:32 (no. 41). It is briefly discussed 
in Elad, “Struggle,” 39–40, n. 5; and in Noelia Silva Santa-Cruz, “The Siculo-Arabic Ivories and Their Spreading 
to al-Andalus,” Journal of Transcultural Medieval Studies 4, no. 1–2 (2017): 147–90, at 153 (with several further 
references). For the suggestion that this casket was imported to Yemen rather than produced there (as the 
inscription suggests), see Ralph Pinder-Wilson, “Ivory Working in the Umayyad and Abbasid Periods,” Journal 
of the David Collection 2, no. 1–2 (2005): 13–23, at 15. It has been suggested that the casket could be dated 
slightly later on the basis of the governor’s name, to sometime in the reign of Muḥammad al-Mahdī, but the 
reasoning behind this suggestion is flawed; see Avinoam Shalem, The Oliphant: Islamic Objects in Historical 
Context (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 26.

306.  Al-Jbour, “Discovery.”
307.  The text breaks off at this point.
308.  Elad, “Caliph Abūʾl-ʿAbbās al-Saffāḥ,” 9; CIAP, 2:215.
309.  Mittwoch, “Eine arabische Bauinschrift”; al-Dūrī, “al-Fikra al-mahdiyya,” 124; Serjeant and Lewcock, 

“Architectural History,” 348; Elad, “Caliph Abūʾl-ʿAbbās al-Saffāḥ,” 16. Since Abū al-ʿAbbās al-Saffāḥ died 
midway through the last month (Dhū al-Ḥijja) in the year 136, he is almost certainly the caliph mentioned in 



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Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 30 (2022)

Mecca310  
(Masjid al-Bayʿa)311 

144 ʿabd allāh  
(ʿabd allāh)312 amīr 

al-muʾminīn

“the servant of God,  
(ʿAbd Allāh), the 

commander of the 
faithful”

Mecca  
(Masjid al-Bayʿa)313 

no date (perhaps 
connected to the above)

ʿabd allāh (ʿabd 
allāh)314 amīr 
al-muʾminīn

“the servant of God,  
(ʿAbd Allāh), the 

commander of the 
faithful”

Ascalon315 155 al-mahdī amīr 
al-muʾminīn316

“the mahdī, the 
commander of the 

faithful”

Mecca (al-Masjid 
al-Ḥarām)317 

167 ʿabd allāh 
muḥammad al-mahdī 

amīr al-muʾminīn

“the servant of God, 
Muḥammad, the mahdī, 
the commander of the 

faithful”

Mecca  
(al-Masjid al-Ḥarām)318 

undated  
(but presumably 

connected to the above)

ʿabd allāh al-mahdī 
muḥammad amīr 

al-muʾminīn

“the servant of God, 
the mahdī, Muḥammad, 
the commander of the 

faithful”

Darb Zubayda 
milestone (held today 
in Jedda)319 

undated  
(but perhaps from 

al-Mahdī’s caliphate)

al-mahdī ʿabd allāh 
ʿabd allāh amīr 

al-muʾminīn

“the mahdī, the servant 
of God, ʿAbd Allāh, 

the commander of the 
faithful”

this text; see al-Ṭabarī, Taʾrīkh, 3:87. Cf., however, Serjeant and Lewcock, “Architectural History,” 348 (who 
assume that the caliph in question was al-Manṣūr).

310.  Al-Ḥajrī, Masājid Ṣanʿāʾ, 26, mistakenly reads amīr al-muʾminīn ʿabd allāh al-mahdī, “the commander 
of the faithful, the servant of God [or ʿAbd Allāh], the mahdī.”

311.  Al-Rāshid et al., Āthār Minṭaqat Makka al-Mukarrama, 122.
312.  Al-Rāshid’s edition of the text omits one ʿabd allāh, but it is clearly there in the photograph he 

provides.
313.  Al-Rāshid et al., Āthār Minṭaqat Makka al-Mukarrama, 122–25.
314.  Al-Rāshid’s edition of the text omits one ʿabd allāh, but it is clearly there in the photograph he 

provides.
315.  RCEA, 1:32–33 (no. 42); CIAP, 1:144.
316.  It has been suggested that this should read al-mahdī [bn] amīr al-muʾminīn, “al-Mahdī, [son of] the 

commander of the faithful”; see Elad, “Struggle,” 58, n. 91; Moshe Gil, A History of Palestine, 634–1099, trans. 
Ethel Broido (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 193. That would certainly overlap with usage 
on coinage, for which see Jere L. Bacharach, “Laqab for a Future Caliph: The Case of the Abbasid al-Mahdī,” 
Journal of the American Oriental Society 113, no. 2 (1993): 271–74; Bates, “Khurāsānī Revolutionaries.” It is 
not, however, what this inscription actually says, so I am inclined to follow Sharon (CIAP, 1:146–47) and read 
it without the added “bn.”

317.  Al-Rāshid et al., Āthār Minṭaqat Makka al-Mukarrama, 111–13.
318.  To be included in Mehdy Shaddel’s forthcoming publication on the extant early Abbasid inscriptions 

from Mecca.
319.  See the Appendix.



Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 30 (2022)

The Umayyad and Early Abbasid Inscriptions in the Prophet's Mosque  •  129

The early Abbasid inscriptions from the Prophet’s Mosque reported in the Kitāb 
al-Manāsik provide another fourteen texts that contain formal titles for reigning caliphs. 
Listed in Table 2, these extend the list substantially:320

Table 2

§§ Caliph Titles (Arabic) Titles (English)

§§1, 4, 5 Abū al-ʿAbbās 
al-Saffāḥ

ʿabd allāh ʿabd allāh 
amīr al-muʾminīn

“the servant of God, ʿAbd Allāh, 
the commander of the faithful”

§5 Abū al-ʿAbbās 
al-Saffāḥ

(inna) ʿabdaka 
wa-khalīfataka ʿabd allāh 
(bn)321 amīr al-muʾminīn

“Your servant and Your 
caliph, ʿAbd Allāh, (son of) the 

commander of the faithful”

§§26, 27b Abū Jaʿfar 
al-Manṣūr

ʿabd allāh ʿabd allāh 
amīr al-muʾminīn

“the servant of God, ʿAbd Allāh, 
the commander of the faithful”

§2 Muḥammad 
al-Mahdī

ʿabd allāh al-mahdī amīr 
al-muʾminīn

“the servant of God, the mahdī, the 
commander of the faithful”

§§3, 17b, 20b Muḥammad 
al-Mahdī

ʿabd allāh al-mahdī 
muḥammad amīr 

al-muʾminīn

“the servant of God, the mahdī, 
Muḥammad, the commander of the 

faithful”

§13d Muḥammad 
al-Mahdī

al-mahdī muḥammad 
amīr al-muʾminīn

“the mahdī, Muḥammad, the 
commander of the faithful”

§19b Muḥammad 
al-Mahdī

(li-)ʿabd allāh 
wa-khalīfatihi al-mahdī 

muḥammad amīr 
al-muʾminīn

“the servant of God and His caliph, 
the mahdī, Muḥammad, the 
commander of the faithful”

§27a Muḥammad 
al-Mahdī322 

ʿabd allāh ʿabd allāh 
amīr al-muʾminīn

“the servant of God, ʿAbd Allāh, 
the commander of the faithful”

§6 Hārūn al-Rashīd ʿabd allāh hārūn amīr 
al-muʾminīn

“the servant of God, Hārūn, the 
commander of the faithful”

§25c not clearly 
identifiable

ʿabd allāh ʿabd allāh 
amīr al-muʾminīn

“the servant of God, ʿAbd Allāh, 
the commander of the faithful”

320.  Neither of these lists is comprehensive. There are certainly more extant texts out there, either awaiting 
discovery or in publications I have not seen; and there are plenty more relevant inscriptions reported in other 
literary sources for other towns and regions of the caliphate. These two lists, however, suffice for the analysis 
here.

321.  See above, n. 131, for the oddity of the “bn,” “son of,” here.
322.  Given the placement of this inscription in the epigraphic program, it is possible that the Kitāb 

al-Manāsik has incorrectly recorded the date of the text and that it could be a text dating to al-Manṣūr’s 
caliphate, just as §§26 and 27b are.



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Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 30 (2022)

There are three initial observations worth making here. The first is a reiteration of 
the fact that the word caliph, khalīfa, was apparently used within titles in the Prophet’s 
Mosque inscriptions in Medina, although use of that title is not attested on extant building 
inscriptions that commemorate caliphal patronage from the early Abbasid period. Second, 
although in every extant text dating to the caliphate of Abū al-ʿAbbās al-Saffāḥ (from Mafraq, 
Baysān/Scythopolis and Sanaa) he is referred to with the title al-mahdī, as seemingly is  
Abū Jaʿfar al-Manṣūr on one occasion (in Ascalon), the two caliphs are not given this title in 
the Medinan texts. Only the third caliph, the one most commonly identified as “al-Mahdī,”  
is called al-mahdī here, as he also is in a great many other extant objects and documents.323 
The Medina texts (specifically §27a) do, however, suggest, especially in combination with an 
extant inscription (that held currently in Jedda), that the caliph Muḥammad al-Mahdī could 
be designated, just as his father and uncle had been, as ʿabd allāh ʿabd allāh, “the servant 
of God, ʿAbd Allāh,” despite the latter not being his given name. This, in turn, allows us to 
consider the possibility that this particular repeated phrase/theophoric name could have 
been a more broadly used early Abbasid title for a reigning caliph, not only for those who 
carried the given name ʿAbd Allāh (as the brothers Abū al-ʿAbbās al-Saffāḥ and Abū Jaʿfar 
al-Manṣūr both apparently did).

Although there are ways in which these titles all seem to fit a somewhat standard 
pattern, particularly in the regular use of at least one ʿabd allāh, “servant of God,”  
and amīr al-muʾminīn, they also display significant variation at times. There appears to have 
been a set of standard vocabulary for protocols for early Abbasid caliphs in official texts, 
but it seems that elements of that vocabulary could be selected and arranged in different 
ways. This suggests that there was some experimentation in the early Abbasid period 
with how caliphs were given titles, perhaps reflecting some recognition of the necessity 
to develop the ways in which the Abbasids argued for the legitimacy of their authority. 
This apparent fluidity contrasted with the situation in the late Umayyad period, when the 
formula ʿabd allāh [ism] amīr al-muʾminīn, “the servant of God, [name], the commander of 
the faithful,” seems to have been the official standard on building inscriptions.324 It might 
also be contrasted with inscriptions commemorating building work by Abbasid caliphs in 
the third/ninth century, which typically offer only minor variations on the basic formula 

323.  For discussion of Abū al-ʿAbbās al-Saffāḥ being given the title “al-Mahdī,” see especially al-Dūrī, “al-Fikra 
al-mahdiyya,” 128; Elad, “Struggle”; Al-Jbour, “Discovery,” 173; and Borrut, Entre mémoire et pouvoir, 83–84, 
369–71. For the use of the title “al-Mahdī” on coins and in documents referring to Muḥammad, the son of Abū 
Jaʿfar al-Manṣūr, including during his time as heir apparent (walī al-ʿahd), see the references above in n. 316; and 
Geoffrey Khan, Arabic Documents from Early Islamic Khurasan (London: Nour Foundation, 2007), 96 (no. 3), 132 
(no. 21), and discussion at 35–37. For further discussion of al-Mahdī being designated heir apparent and given 
this title, see, for example, al-Dūrī, “al-Fikra al-mahdiyya,” 129–32; Muhammad Qasim Zaman, “Routinization 
of Revolutionary Charisma: Notes on the ʿAbbāsid Caliphs al-Manṣūr and al-Mahdī,” Islamic Studies 29, no. 3 
(1990): 251–75; Marsham, Rituals of Islamic Monarchy, 193–202; Elad, “Struggle”; and Borrut, Entre mémoire et 
pouvoir, 374–76.

324.  See the references with directions to finding extant texts above, n. 8. Foundation inscriptions as 
reported in literary texts for Marwanid caliphs also offer this fairly standard formula; see, for example, Flood, 
Great Mosque, 252. And see also the discussion above (references in n. 234) of the inscription from the mosque 
in al-Fusṭāṭ known only though Vattier’s seventeenth-century French translation.



Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 30 (2022)

The Umayyad and Early Abbasid Inscriptions in the Prophet's Mosque  •  131

ʿabd allāh [ism] al-imām [laqab] amīr al-muʾminīn, “the servant of God, [name], the imam, 
[personal title], the commander of the faithful”; see Table 3 for examples.

Table 3

Location Date (AH) Titles (Arabic) Titles (English)

Jerusalem  
(Dome of the Rock)325 

216326 ʿabd allāh ʿabd allāh 
al-imām al-maʾmūn 
amīr al-muʾminīn

“the servant of God, ʿAbd Allāh, 
the imam, al-Maʾmūn, the 

commander of the faithful”

near Mecca  
(at a resting stop for 
pilgrims, found near 
ʿArafa)327 

245 ʿabd allāh jaʿfar 
al-imām al-mutawakkil 

ʿalā allāh amīr 
al-muʾminīn

“the servant of God, Jaʿfar, the 
imam, al-Mutawakkil ʿalā Allāh, 
the commander of the faithful”

Medina  
(Prophet’s Mosque)328

282 abū al-ʿabbās al-imām 
al-muʿtaḍid bi-llāh 
amīr al-muʾminīn

“Abū al-ʿAbbās, the imam, 
al-Muʿtaḍid bi-llāh, the 

commander of the faithful”

This form of Abbasid caliphal titles continued to be used in inscriptions in the later third 
and fourth/tenth centuries.329

Conclusions

The texts that could be seen around the Prophet’s Mosque by the end of the caliphate of 
Muḥammad al-Mahdī, preserved most fully in the late third/ninth- or early fourth/tenth-
century Kitāb al-Manāsik, reveal a significant corpus of architectural inscriptions from the 
early Abbasid period. Perhaps first and foremost, therefore, the study of this corpus can 
help narrow down an appropriate methodology for the use of extant literary descriptions 
of inscriptions, and perhaps of monuments and objects more broadly, that themselves have 
long since disappeared. Premodern Arabic texts about Mecca and Medina actually offer 
abundant descriptions of buildings in those two towns’ early Islamic history, a material 

325.  On the mosaic inscription: Kessler, “ʿAbd al-Malik’s Inscription,” 9. On the copper plates: Milwright, 
Dome of the Rock, 53, 76.

326. Since the texts that al-Maʾmūn had added to the copper plaques by the entrances were dated to 
216/831, the replacement of ʿAbd al-Malik’s name in the mosaic inscription was presumably undertaken at 
this time as well.

327.  Al-Rāshid et al., Āthār Minṭaqat Makka al-Mukarrama, 125–26.
328.  Reported in Ibn Rusta, al-Aʿlāq al-nafīsa, 74; RCEA, 2:265 (no. 786). The lack of an ʿabd allāh at the start 

is perhaps Ibn Rusta’s (or a later copyists’) accidental omission
329.  See, for example, the texts from the caliphates of Abū Muḥammad al-Muktafī (r. 289–95/902–8) and 

Jaʿfar al-Muqtadir (r. 295–320/908–32) published in George C. Miles, “ʿAli b. ʿĪsâ’s Pilgrim Road: An Inscription 
of the Year 304 H. (916–917 a.D.),” Bulletin de l’Institut d’Égypte 36 (1955): 477–87; Solange Ory and Dominique 
Sourdel, “Une inscription ʿabbaside en Syrie du nord,” Bulletin d’études orientales 18 (1963–64): 221–40; and 
Amikam Elad, “Two Identical Inscriptions from Jund Filasṭīn from the Reign of the ʿ Abbāsid Caliph, al-Muqtadir,” 
Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 35, no. 4 (1992): 301–60.



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Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 30 (2022)

culture of which, as is well known, very little has survived.330 This article has focused on 
one small example of such available literary material, but it is an example with potentially 
wide-ranging implications. Since so few inscriptions in monuments commissioned by 
early Abbasid caliphs have survived, the testimony of literary sources to the existence of 
several dozen others is important for modern research into second/eighth-century Arabic 
epigraphic practices and, especially, the use of inscriptions by caliphs to promote their 
authority and legitimacy.

We certainly have to be careful when studying inscriptions of the early Islamic centuries 
that survive only in quotations of their texts in extant literary sources. There is often much 
that we would like to know about such inscriptions that no sources were interested in telling 
us. We can rarely use the extant descriptions to gain much of an understanding of the visual 
impressions these inscriptions would have made on their viewers. Similarly, we cannot 
often learn much about how these texts’ contents may have engaged with other elements in 
their buildings’ decorative schemes. Both these problems apply to the inscriptions analyzed 
here. For the Prophet’s Mosque in Medina, however, we do have relatively early testimonies, 
with a seemingly good history of written transmission, regarding the contents and locations 
of a large number of inscriptions. Through a study of this information, we can learn quite 
a bit about the messages that the early Abbasid caliphs wished to convey to visitors to this 
imperial monument.

The inscriptions in the Prophet’s Mosque in Medina after al-Mahdī’s renovation work 
have much to add to our perspective on early Abbasid claims to legitimacy, their reuse 
and/or “epigraphic mutilation” of Umayyad-era texts, and the ways in which particular 
verses and sūras from the Qurʾan were used in the decoration of mosques in the second/
eighth century. Their study is important in part simply because the early Abbasid mosque 
in Medina is much more poorly understood than its Umayyad predecessor is. In large 
part, of course, this is thanks to the important work of Sauvaget and his successors in 
revealing the history of the latter. As this article has demonstrated, however, there is 
considerably more material available on the early Abbasid mosque and al-Mahdī’s work 
there than is often appreciated. The study of the Prophet’s Mosque in the second half of 
the second/eighth century is important because Medina was a particularly important place 
for early Abbasid caliphs to articulate the legitimacy of their rule. By this time it held an 
emerging significance among many Muslims as a ḥaram and as a holy city;331 and it had 
been the site of the major ʿAlid revolt against early Abbasid rule during the caliphate of 
Abū Jaʿfar al-Manṣūr. That the caliph responsible for most of the inscriptions supplied 
by the Kitāb al-Manāsik was al-Mahdī adds a further significance, since his reign is often 
considered to have been a period in which the precise reasons the Abbasids and their 
followers were giving to underpin their legitimacy were being altered.332 Muhammad Qasim 
Zaman has suggested briefly that the mosques in Mecca and Medina played an important 

330.  See, for example, the discussions of two local histories of Medina in Munt, “Writing the History”; and 
idem, “Mamluk Historiography.”

331.  This, at least, is the argument of Munt, Holy City of Medina.
332.  See, for example, Zaman, Religion and Politics, 45–48; Crone, Medieval Islamic Political Thought, 92–93.



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role in al-Mahdī’s efforts to emphasize his and his family’s connections to the prophet and 
to contribute to religious discourse.333 The inscriptions discussed here provide much more 
evidence for what, exactly, these efforts entailed and reveal the importance of the Prophet’s 
Mosque in Medina specifically as a site of early Abbasid imperial commemorative efforts 
and as a place of experimentation as they tried to find the most effective way of expressing 
the legitimacy of their authority in the face of various opponents, Umayyads and ʿAlids 
among many others.

333.  Zaman, Religion and Politics, 205–6.



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Appendix: An Early Abbasid Milestone from (near) the Darb Zubayda

This milestone discovered near the Darb Zubayda is currently held in Jedda in the King 
Abdulaziz Center, no. 33. Its inscription is particularly important for understanding the 
usage of caliphal titles in the early Abbasid period. Since the only current edition of the text 
known to me is in a publication that is not widely accessible, it seems helpful to provide 
an edition and brief discussion here.334 The inscription has been referred to in a handful 
of other publications, often simply as a milestone dating to the caliphate of al-Mahdī.335  
It consists of eight lines in a clearly legible Kufic script:336

١ – هذا ما امر به ا
٢ – لمهدي عبد هللا
٣ – عبد هللا امير ا

٤ – لمومنين على يدي
٥ – يقطين بن موسى
٦ – هذا على اثني

٧ – عشر ميال من بريد
٨ – اسود العشاريـ

This was ordered by al-Mahdī ʿAbd Allāh, the servant of God, the commander of the 
faithful, to be carried out by Yaqṭīn b. Mūsā. This is twelve miles from the post station 
(barīd) at Aswad al-ʿUshāriyy[āt].337

Despite the lack of a date and the fact that the caliph seems to be given titles that 
otherwise accord with the designation of the first Abbasid caliph, Abū al-ʿAbbās al-Saffāḥ, 
in extant inscriptions, Saʿd al-Rāshid assumed without further discussion that the caliph 
mentioned in this text is Muḥammad al-Mahdī.338 It does actually seem at least possible 
that this is correct, although it is certainly a suggestion that requires further justification. 

334.  Al-Rāshid, “Arbaʿat aḥjār mīliyya,” edition of this inscription at 124.
335.  See, for example, al-Rashid, “New ʿ Abbāsid Milestone,” 139; Ahmad bin ʿ Umar Al-Zaylaʿi, “Les inscriptions 

arabo-islamiques sur pierre,” in Routes d’Arabie: Archéologie et histoire du Royaume d’Arabie Saoudite, ed. Ali 
Ibrahim Al-Ghabban et al., 486–87 (Paris: Musée du Louvre and Somogy, 2010), 487.

336.  This is my reading based on the best photograph known to me, that provided in Al-Zaylaʿi, “Inscriptions 
arabo-islamiques,” 487. My reading agrees entirely with Saʿd al-Rāshid’s (“Arbaʿat aḥjār mīliyya,” 124), whose 
article also provides a photograph and facsimile of the text (ibid., 137, 139).

337.  Aswad al-ʿUshāriyyāt is approximately 200 km southwest of Fayd, on the route between Fayd and 
Medina. That it was the location of a post station (barīd) is also confirmed in Kitāb al-Manāsik, 518–19. For 
further discussion of this location, see al-Rāshid, “Arbaʿat aḥjār mīliyya,” 130–31 (and see also its location on 
the map at 135). The term barīd had several usages in the Abbasid period, but for this particular meaning, 
see Manfred Ullmann, Zur Geschichte des Wortes Barīd “Post” (Munich: Verlag der Bayerischen Akademie der 
Wissenschaften, 1997), 43. For discussion of the communications network in the Marwanid and early Abbasid 
empires, see Adam Silverstein, Postal Systems in the Pre-Modern Islamic World (Cambridge: Cambridge 
University Press, 2007), 59–84.

338.  Al-Rāshid, “Arbaʿat aḥjār mīliyya,” 123, 130. This assertion of al-Rāshid’s was accepted without comment 
by Al-Zaylaʿi (see above, n. 335).



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The main reason for thinking that the caliph in question might be Muḥammad al-Mahdī is 
the reference to Yaqṭīn b. Mūsā (d. 186/802) as the overseer of the work. This figure served 
several Abbasid caliphs and had apparently been around already in Kufa during the Abbasid 
movement’s revolutionary phase;339 he was, however, particularly well known for his work 
on behalf of Muḥammad al-Mahdī, by this stage of his career primarily in the Ḥijāz. He was, 
for example, put in charge of al-Mahdī’s work on the expansion of the Masjid al-Ḥarām;340 
he was held responsible for problems with the water supply for pilgrims;341 and, most 
significantly, al-Mahdī charged him in 161/777–78 with making significant improvements 
to various aspects of the infrastructure—including milestones—of the pilgrim route to 
Mecca, work that he continued until 171/787–88.342 It is possible that al-Mahdī put him in 
charge of such work because he had previous experience overseeing similar projects for 
an earlier caliph. We are told, for example, that the first Abbasid caliph, Abū al-ʿAbbās, 
ordered the placement of milestones (amyāl), together with beacons (manār), along the 
route from Kufa to Mecca in 134/751–52.343 However, another passage indicates that the 
work ordered by Abū al-ʿAbbās on the route to Mecca—although here the only structures 
mentioned specifically are quṣūr and not milestones—covered only the northeast section 
of the route from al-Qādisiyya to Zubāla, so it would not have reached anywhere close to 
the location of this extant milestone.344 It is, of course, possible that the caliph mentioned 
in this text is nonetheless Abū al-ʿAbbās al-Saffāḥ, but given the fairly sparse state of our 
extant evidence for early Abbasid caliphs’ titles on building inscriptions, together with the 
potential evidence from the Prophet’s Mosque inscriptions that Muḥammad al-Mahdī could 
be referred to with similar titles (§27a), we should perhaps keep all possibilities open for 
now. This is an area where we might reasonably hope that future discoveries can provide 
greater clarity.

339.  See, for example, Akhbār al-dawla al-ʿabbāsiyya wa-fīhi akhbār al-ʿAbbās wa-waladihi, ed. ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz 
al-Dūrī and ʿAbd al-Jabbār al-Muṭṭalibī, 2nd ed. (Beirut: Dār al-Ṭalīʿa, 1997), 231; al-Dīnawarī, Kitāb al-Akhbār 
al-ṭiwāl, ed. ʿAbd al-Munʿim ʿĀmir and Jamāl al-Dīn al-Shayyāl (Cairo: Wizārat al-Thaqāfa wa-l-Irshād al-Qawmī, 
1960), 358, 379; al-Yaʿqūbī, al-Taʾrīkh, ed. M. Th. Houtsma (Leiden: Brill, 1883), 2:439–40; al-Ṭabarī, Taʾrīkh, 
3:103, 390, 567; al-Fasawī, al-Maʿrifa wa-l-taʾrīkh, 1:119; al-Rāzī, Akhbār Fakhkh wa-khabar Yaḥyā b. ʿAbd Allāh 
wa-akhīhi Idrīs b. ʿAbd Allāh, ed. Maher Jarrar (Beirut: Dār al-Gharb al-Islāmī, 1995), 147, 185.

340.  Al-Fasawī, al-Maʿrifa wa-l-taʾrīkh, 1:156; al-Yaʿqūbī, Taʾrīkh, 2:476–77; al-Ṭabarī, Taʾrīkh, 3:520; see also 
al-Azraqī, Akhbār Makka, 2:62, 203; and al-Fākihī, Akhbār Makka fī qadīm al-dahr wa-ḥadīthihi, ed. ʿ Abd al-Malik 
b. ʿAbd Allāh b. Duhaysh, 2nd ed. (Beirut: Dār Khiḍr and Mecca: Maktabat wa-Maṭbaʿat al-Nahḍa wa-l-Ḥadītha, 
1414/1994), 2:169. He is also mentioned in one of the extant inscriptions commemorating al-Mahdī’s work in the 
Masjid al-Ḥarām, discussed above; see al-Rāshid et al., Āthār Minṭaqat Makka al-Mukarrama, 111–13.

341.  Al-Ṭabarī, Taʾrīkh, 3:502.
342.  Ibid., 3:486.
343.  Ibid., 3:81.
344.  Ibid., 3:486.



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Figure 1

This figure provides a rough outline (not accurately to scale) of the Prophet’s Mosque 
after al-Mahdī’s renovation work to offer an indication of the approximate location of the 
courtyard inscriptions (§§1–4) and the entrances to the mosque discussed in the Kitāb 
al-Manāsik (twenty in total, including four unnamed entrances along the northern wall). 
Apart from the courtyard inscriptions, almost all of the texts mentioned by the Kitāb 
al-Manāsik can be located loosely in relation to one of these entrances.



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