Özet:

Although first muhajirs, dispatched to Yasrib to prepare the city for the forthcoming hijrah and the leading figures of ansar, including chieftains, reserved some places to prayer, masjids in Madinah were built literally after The Prophet Muhammad's emigration. The first masjid built-in Madina through the Prophet Muhammad's full support including providing the companions with the things that they need such as carrying adobes, is the Masjid al-Quba and the second is the Masjid al-Nabawi. In ten years after hijrah, reserving places for prayer limitedly continued. After a while, the local masjids, belonging to the area where the tribes live, began to be constructed by the companions and later generations. There is a strong connection between The Prophet's prayer locations and the constructions of masjids in Madinah throughout decades after his passing. In the reign of the Prophet Muhammad, when a companion needed to reserve a place for prayer, he would invite the Prophet and ask him to pray there. From the year that The Prophet passed away forth, the companions found themselves searching for the Prophet's prayer locations and during the period of the Umayyad dynasty, this process was turned to be a huge construction activity for Madinah masjids with the great efforts of Madinah governor Omar ibn Abd al-Aziz. Most of the masjids in Madinah are dated back to this construction process maintained by Omar ibn Abd al-Aziz under the patronage of Al-Walid ibn Abd al-Malik. Even though the local masjids, belonging to different types of tribes were thin on the ground, they were mentioned in the books of Madinah history with enormous numbers. The fact that there were no structures on most of The Prophet's prayer places is seemed to have been forgotten in history books related to Madinah either intentionally or unintentionally. Ibn Zabalah is the first who wrote about masjids. However, Ibn Zabala’s book upon the early history of Madinah called Akhbar al-Madinah is lost. Crucially its narrations are available through later sources like Ibn al-Najjar, al-Matari and al-Samhudi, the greatest of all the historians of Madinah. So, and one of the most famous examples of anachronism related to masjids could be determined through Ibn Zabala's detailed records of incidents. Because the scholars of the history of Madinah aimed to quote all narrations that they reach and because they interpreted the narrations from the view of their centuries, which means at least two hundred years after hijrah, anachronism is inevitable to some extent. The author of this paper will survey the anachronistic narrates of Ibn Zabalah through those later sources and depend on a comparison of the narrations claiming to explain the position of the masjids between the age of the Prophecy and the beginning of the Umayyad period. Instead of searching already built structures in Madinah, this article examines the places like gardens, houses, or war headquarters that the Prophet Muhammad had prayed on. Because the contemporary books written on masjids in Madinah aimed to recognize the ones that are still solid or at least have ancient ruins, they seemed to forget The Prophet's prayer places on which masjids were built once and not existing any more. Muhammad Ilyas Abdul Ghani’s master thesis about ancient Masjids in Madinah is one them. This article intends to make a strong distinction between the places and the later built masjids. Besides, this paper offers an original classification for prayer places as Aliyah and Safilah. So Safilah, the lower Madinah, extends from Sunh to the north of Masjid al-Nabawi and while Aliyah, the upper Madinah, extends from Sunh to the south of Masjid al-Nabawi and after to Quba. The division of Madinah into Safilah and Aliyah, started in the Age of Ignorance (Jahiliyyah) continued in the reign of the Prophet Muhammad and clearly, remain valid for a while after his death. So, this article has one important limitation. It analyses only the prayer places in Aliyah beginning with the ones so close to Masjid al-Nabawi and examines them within a historical context. The aim of this article can thus be summarized as criticizing the books written on Madina history for anachronic records related to local tribe Masjids built in the early Islamic history in Medina. Mainly the article indicates that in the reign of the Prophet Muhammad, most of the so-called tribe masjids in the Aliyah area were not already built structures but only places like garden, house or war headquarters that the Prophet Muhammad had prayed on. Yet this should not diminish the value of the sources written on Madinah, which usually contain valuable narrations and insights. On the contrary, they are foundational to the early history of Islam with their variety of witnesses and detailed records of incidents.

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