The cemetery's history begins with grief. As Muhammad and his followers built the Prophet's Mosque after the migration from Mecca in 622, one of his companions, As'ad ibn Zurarah, fell ill and died. Muhammad chose this nearby ground for his burial, and As'ad became the first of the Ansar, the people of Medina who had welcomed the new community, to be interred at al-Baqi. Soon others followed. While Muhammad was away at the Battle of Badr in 624, his daughter Ruqayyah died of fever and was buried here, the first member of his own household to rest in the cemetery. The field is named Baqi al-Gharqad, after the boxthorn shrubs that once grew across this stretch of Medina, their thorned branches the only canopy over the graves.

Walk the perimeter and the litany of those buried within reaches back to the founding generation of a world religion. Here lie three of the Prophet's daughters and his small son Ibrahim, who died in infancy. Here too rest most of his wives, the Mothers of the Believers, among them Aisha and Hafsa. The companions gathered nearby read like a roll call of early Islam: Uthman ibn Affan, the third caliph; Abd al-Rahman ibn Awf, a wealthy merchant who gave much of his fortune away; Abu Hurayra, who preserved more sayings of the Prophet than almost any other. For Shia Muslims, al-Baqi is holier still, for four of their revered Imams are believed to lie within the family enclosure: Hasan ibn Ali, Ali Zayn al-Abidin, Muhammad al-Baqir, and Ja'far al-Sadiq.

For most of its long history, al-Baqi did not look as it does now. Over the centuries the Umayyads, Mamluks, and Ottomans raised domes and shrines above the most honored graves, and travelers described a skyline of cupolas rising over the family of the Prophet. That skyline is gone. The structures were demolished in 1806, rebuilt, and then leveled again in 1925-26, when the cemetery's domes and even its simplest gravestones were removed in keeping with a strict reading of Islamic law that holds the veneration of tombs to be a danger to the worship of God alone. The decision divided Muslims then and divides them still. For many Sunni and Salafi believers it restored an austere purity; for many Shia, the loss remains a deep and continuing sorrow, marked each year as Yaum-e Gham, the "Day of Sorrow."

Today al-Baqi is an open expanse enclosed by a low wall, its surface a sea of small unmarked mounds. Pilgrims are not permitted to walk among the graves but gather at the western fence to recite greetings and prayers for the dead, a practice rooted in reports that the Prophet himself came here to do the same. There is a particular stillness to the place, the kind that settles over ground where the famous and the forgotten lie side by side under identical earth. Whatever one believes about the domes that once stood, al-Baqi endures as it began: a quiet field beside the mosque, holding the first generation of a faith that now spans the globe.