A Mosque of Palm Trunks

The first institution of the new society was its mosque. On the date-drying plot, the Prophet ﷺ and the Companions built a simple structure: walls of mud brick, pillars of palm trunks, a roof of palm fronds that let the rain through, a floor of earth. He worked with his own hands among them, carrying bricks, and they sang as they laboured: O Allah, there is no good but the good of the Hereafter, so forgive the Ansar and the Muhajirun.

It was a mosque, but it was also the parliament, the court, the school, the treasury, and the welfare house of Madinah. Along one side a shaded bench, the Suffah, housed the poorest emigrants who had no family in the city, men who devoted themselves to learning, the People of the Bench. Beside the mosque rose simple rooms for the Prophet's ﷺ household, no grander than the mosque itself.

There was no minaret, no dome, no decoration; its dignity was entirely in its purpose. From a pulpit of three steps, added later, the guidance of a civilisation went out. When the Prophet ﷺ once left a palm-trunk he used to lean on while preaching, for the new pulpit, the trunk was heard to weep until he came and embraced it, and it stilled, a sign the Companions witnessed and never forgot.

That a homeless, hunted community's first act, on arriving at last in safety, was to build a place to prostrate to Allah, tells you what they understood themselves to be. Not refugees seeking comfort, but a people whose first need, before houses and markets and walls, was a house for the worship of their Lord.