Islam’s second city was once called Yathrib
Medina—al-Madinah al-Munawwarah—is capital of Medina Province in Saudi Arabia and widely called the cradle of Islamic culture. Second among Islam’s three holiest cities, it hosted Muhammad’s Hijrah from Mecca and became capital of an expanding early caliphate after more than 1,500 years as a pre-Islamic town.
The name Yathrib appears as early as an inscription at Harran belonging to the Babylonian king Nabonidus in the 6th century BCE, and the Quran uses it in the chapter on the Confederates. Tradition says Muhammad later forbade it, renaming the town Taybah and Tabah, both meaning good or kind; the folk song Ya Taybah keeps that name alive. Official usage settled on al-Madinah al-Munawwarah, the Illuminated City, shortened to Madinah, which Saudi road signs use interchangeably.
People lived here from roughly the 9th century BCE. Three Jewish tribes, the Banu Qaynuqa, Banu Qurayza and Banu Nadir, dominated before the Arab tribes Aws and Khazraj arrived, first as allies and then as rebels who took control late in the 5th century. Muslim sources say the Jewish tribes became their clients, though the historian William Montgomery Watt argued they kept some independence. Ibn Ishaq tells of a Himyarite king who spared the oasis after two rabbis warned that a prophet would one day settle there.
Control later passed from the early caliphs to the Umayyads, Abbasids, Fatimids, Ayyubids and Egypt's Mamluks, then to the Ottomans from 1517, with interludes under the first Saudi state and Muhammad Ali of Egypt, then the Hashemite sharifs, before the Saudi kingdom took over in 1925.
Muhammad built the Prophet's Mosque in 622 and is buried there; Quba Mosque is considered the oldest in Islam. Visitors also go to Mount Uhud, the Seven Mosques and al-Baqi' cemetery, while the King Fahd complex prints most modern Qurans. The city had about 1.48 million residents in 2022, some 41.5 percent of them foreigners, spread over 589 square kilometres that include mountains and dormant volcanoes, and it joined UNESCO's network of learning cities in 2024.
Source: Medina
