Al-Masjid an-Nabawī

The Prophet's Mosque in Medina is the second holiest site of Islam after the Sacred Mosque of Mecca. Muhammad built it in 622, after the hijra; the original open-air building of palm trunks and beaten clay served as a place of prayer, a law court and a school.

The Umayyad caliph al-Walid I rebuilt it between 705 and 715, bringing the graves of Muhammad and of the first two caliphs, Abu Bakr and Umar within its walls.

In 1279 the Mamluk sultan Qalawun raised a wooden dome over the prophet's tomb, rebuilt in stone under Qaitbay in the fifteenth century and again under the Ottoman sultan Mahmud II in 1817; this is the Green Dome, the mosque's most famous landmark. When Wahhabi forces held Medina between 1805 and 1813 they stripped the tomb of its ornaments but spared the dome.