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Medina
The City of the Prophet, burial place of Muhammad and Islam's second-holiest city
When the Prophet Muhammad left Mecca in 622, he settled in an oasis town called Yathrib, and it became known as Madinat al-Nabi, the City of the Prophet. Medina is where the first Muslim community took shape as a society and a state, where Muhammad built his mosque beside his home, and where he died and was buried in 632. Muslims regard the Prophet's Mosque as the second-holiest site in Islam after the Grand Mosque in Mecca. Visiting it is not one of the rites of the Hajj, but it is a cherished act for the millions of pilgrims who travel on from Mecca each year. The sacred central district around the mosque is open only to Muslims.
Medina sits on a high volcanic plateau in the Hejaz region of western Saudi Arabia, about 340 kilometers north of Mecca, ringed by black lava fields and the ridge of Mount Uhud. The Prophet's Mosque, al-Masjid an-Nabawi, has grown from a courtyard of palm trunks and mud brick into one of the largest mosques on Earth, with ten minarets, sliding roof domes, and a vast marble piazza shaded by 250 giant umbrellas that open in the heat of the day. Beneath its Green Dome lie the tombs of Muhammad and of the first two caliphs, Abu Bakr and Umar. Nearby are al-Baqi cemetery, where many of the Prophet's family and companions are buried, and the Quba Mosque, which Muslim tradition holds was the first mosque ever built.
Before the Hijra, Yathrib was a farming oasis shared by Arab and Jewish tribes. Under Muhammad and the first three caliphs, Medina was the capital of a rapidly expanding Muslim state, until the political center moved to Kufa and then to Umayyad Damascus in the 650s and 660s. Later rulers, from the Umayyads to the Mamluks and Ottomans, rebuilt and enlarged the mosque, and the Ottomans brought the Hejaz Railway to the city in 1908. Saudi forces took Medina in 1925. Modern expansions have multiplied the mosque's capacity many times over, and the 2022 census counted about 1.4 million people in the city. Most Hajj and Umrah pilgrims add a visit, and a high-speed railway opened in 2018 links Medina with Jeddah and Mecca.