Masjidu-hu wa masākinu-hu ‘His Mosque and His Dwellings’, New Perspectives in the Study of ‘the House of the Prophet’ in Medina

The paper proposes a discussion on the nature, plan and function of the building traditionally known as the “House of the Prophet” in Medina, with the aim to contribute to the understanding of the role of the mosque in the urban space during the earliest stage of the Islamic history. According to historical and literary Islamic sources the “House of the Prophet” was the very first building acting as a mosque, intended not only as a place where prostrating in adoration of God, but primarily as a well-defined locus in the urban context where the most important instances of the very first Islamic community were carried out. Until recently, the approach taken by Western scholars about the function and nature of such a building was characterized, on the one side, by a sceptical attitude about the reliability of traditional Islamic sources, on the other side by a tendency to identify the mosque, also in this early stage, as a place devoted exclusively or primarily to religious purposes. These attitudes ended up in the idea that the building erected in Medina by the Prophet Muḥammad had to be regarded as nothing else but his own private house. The aim of this paper is to provide an alternative and more reliable reconstruction both of the function and of the plan of the ensemble through an accurate review of the Islamic sources, in an attempt to clarify some issues of central importance. The following topics in particular will be addressed: • The actual arrangement of the dwelling units related to the mosque, with a particular emphasis on the location of the ḥujrat of ʿĀʾisha and its possible connection with the courtyard through the so-called bāb al-rabi; • The structural and logistic interaction between the housing nucleus and the primitive mosque; • To what extent the need to safeguard the privacy of the Prophet family influenced the layout of the complex; • How far the importance of the privacy of the domestic sphere stressed in the Quran was determined by the situation of the Medina complex aftermath the Hegire and viceversa; • The influence of some specific pre-Islamic items on the process that led to the creation of the Prophet mosque. Namely, the role acted by the political institution of the dār al-Nadwa in Mecca and of the saqīfa in Medina in the definition of the political and public components of the mosque; the influence of the concept of ḥimā and ḥarām in establishing the boundaries of the area intended to be the central nucleus of the Islamic community. An exhaustive assessment of the situation of the mosque of Medina in relation to the dwelling quarter of Muḥammad and his family should provide an important perspective for a better understanding of the conception of public and private space in the very early stage of the Islamic history, with important implications also for the study of the successive Muslim urbanization.