The cemetery beside the Prophet's Mosque is the clearest place to see a dispute that runs through modern Islam and that outsiders routinely miss, because it is not a dispute between Muslims and anyone else.
Buried at Jannat al-Baqi are daughters and wives of Muhammad, his uncle Abbas, his grandson Hasan, and, for Twelver Shia, four of the Imams: Ali al-Sajjad, Muhammad al-Baqir, Jafar al-Sadiq, and Hasan. For centuries the graves carried domes, markers and shrines.
Today it is flat, unmarked ground.
What happened
- 1806: Wahhabi forces took Medina and demolished the tombs.
- Ottoman authority returned and the structures were rebuilt over the nineteenth century.
- From April 1926: under Ibn Saud, the Ikhwan demolished them again, with a formal ruling from the Saudi religious judiciary authorising it. This time the destruction was thorough, down to plain headstones.
Calls to rebuild have been made ever since, by Shia governments, by Sunni bodies, and by individual scholars. The Saudi state has refused them all.
The reasoning on each side
The Wahhabi and Salafi position draws on Ibn Taymiyya (d. 1328) and holds that raising structures over graves, praying at them, and travelling to them for blessing are steps on a road that ends in worshipping created things instead of God. Because shirk, associating partners with God, is the one sin the Quran describes as unforgivable, the argument is not that shrine veneration is unwise but that it is the gravest danger in religion, and that removing the occasion for it is an act of mercy rather than vandalism. Hadith forbidding the raising of graves are cited directly.
Twelver Shia, most Sunni traditionalists, and the Sufi orders reject this. Their position is that ziyara, visitation to prophets and the righteous, is a recommended act with its own textual warrant; that asking a saint to intercede is asking, not worshipping, and the distinction is not subtle; and that Muslims maintained these tombs for a thousand years without anyone concluding that the community had lapsed into idolatry. For Shia in particular the Imams are not merely pious dead but designated guides, and the demolition of their graves reads as a doctrinal attack.
Shia communities mark the anniversary as Yaum-e Gham, the Day of Sorrow.
Why it matters beyond Medina
This is the same argument, with the same texts on both sides, that destroyed the mausoleums of Timbuktu in 2012, that has been used to justify bombing shrines in Pakistan and Iraq, and that burned a small mausoleum in a Tunisian tourist village in 2013. Treating it as extremism alone misses that it is a genuine theological position with a serious lineage, held by a minority and rejected by the large majority of Muslims, and that the disagreement is about what Islam requires, argued from inside it.