Medina's standing rests on what happened in its first Islamic decade. This is where the faith found a home after Mecca rejected it, where Muhammad built the first Muslim community into a society with its own laws and defenses, and where he lived out the rest of his life. Two mosques he founded himself anchor the city: Quba, on the outskirts, and al-Masjid an-Nabawi, the Prophet's Mosque, at its heart. Islamic tradition holds Medina to be sacred ground, a sanctuary, citing a saying of the Prophet that its trees should not be cut and no wrong committed within it. To walk its streets is to move through the setting of the earliest chapters of Islam, even though, as scholars note, almost nothing physical survives from Muhammad's own time beyond the remains of a few old defensive towers.

Religious tourism shapes nearly everything about Medina. More than seven million visitors arrive each year, most of them performing the Hajj in season or the lesser pilgrimage, the Umrah, throughout the year, and the city has reorganized itself around them. The Prophet's Mosque sits within a ring road and broad marble plazas built to move enormous crowds; according to tradition a single prayer offered there is worth a thousand elsewhere. Out of reverence for the sanctity of the central district, non-Muslims may not enter the Haram zone around the mosque, a boundary marked by gates on the approaching roads. Beyond that core, the wider city is a working metropolis of more than a million people, home to a Sunni majority of several legal schools and a long-established Shia minority such as the Nakhawila.

Medina has long been a center of Islamic scholarship, and that tradition continues in its institutions. The Islamic University of Madinah, founded in 1961, draws students from around the world to study the Quran, hadith, law, and Arabic, while the larger Taibah University serves the region's general higher education. Nearby stands the King Fahd Complex for the Printing of the Holy Quran, established in 1985, the largest publisher of the Quran on Earth, where hundreds of thousands of visitors a year tour the presses and leave with a free copy. The city also keeps its memory in museums, including one housed in the old Hejaz Railway station, and nurtures the living art of Arabic calligraphy through dedicated centers and annual forums.

For all its sacred weight, Medina is also a thoroughly modern Saudi city, knitted into the kingdom by road and rail. It sits at the junction of major highways linking it south to Mecca and north toward Tabuk and Jordan. The Ottoman-era Hejaz Railway that once ran here was abandoned after the First World War and its terminus turned into a museum, but in 2018 a new line, the Haramain High Speed Railway, opened to connect Medina and Mecca at three hundred kilometers an hour. Overhead, Prince Mohammad bin Abdulaziz International Airport, one of the busiest in the country, swells with traffic during the Hajj. Ancient sanctuary and twenty-first-century hub at once, Medina remains what it has been since 622: a city defined by the people who travel great distances to reach it.