called the Ṣuffa, attached to the mosque. The Ṣuffa was situated in the northern part of the mosque, covered with a roof but with open sides, from which those students received the name of ahl al-Ṣuffa or aṣḥāb al-Ṣuffa, i.e., the dwellers of the Ṣuffa. It is a mistake to think that homeless people were lodged in it, for among those mentioned as having lived there are men like Sa‘d ibn Abī Waqqāṣ,9 while there were many poor immigrants who never lived there. The fact is that those who wanted to acquire knowledge of the Holy Qur’ān and the religion of Islām were lodged there, and their number is said to have reached four hundred at times. It was out of these that missionaries were sent sometimes in batches of ten or twelve, and once, even in a batch of seventy, to educate the people in the country. Almost every mosque to this day has to some extent, arrangements for the education of students, the maktab or the madrasah (the school), being a necessary adjunct to the mosque. Many important mosques have also some trust property attached to them, their income going towards the upkeep of the students and their teachers. In later times, libraries, some of them very large, were also kept in parts of the mosque.
But this is not all. In the time of the Holy Prophet and his early successors, the mosque was the centre of all kinds of Muslim activities. Here all important national questions were settled. When the Muslim community was forced to take up arms in self-defence, it was in the mosque that measures of defence and expeditions were concerted. It was, again, to the mosque that the people were asked to repair when there was news of importance to be communicated, and the mosque also served as the council hall of the Muslims. In the time of ‘Umar, when two councils were appointed to advise the Caliph, it was in the mosque that these councils met. Deputations from Muslim as well as non-Muslim tribes were received in the mosque, and some of the more important deputations were also lodged there, as in the case of the famous Christian deputation from Najrān, and the deputation of Thaqīf, a polytheist tribe; and for this purpose tents were set up in the yard of the mosque.10 Indeed, once on the occasion of a festival,
10 In the Holy Qur’ān it is said: “The idolaters have no right to frequent the mosques of Allāh while bearing witness to unbelief against themselves” (9:17). This verse does not mean that a non-Muslim cannot be allowed to pay a visit to a mosque. By “the mosques of Allāh”, here in fact is meant the Masjid al-Ḥarām, the Sacred Mosque of the Ka‘bah, which is really a centre of all the mosques of the world; and as the words of the verse show, the polytheists who had long been in possession of the Ka‘bah were told that they had now no right to frequent that mosque, as it had been cleared of all traces of polytheism. Moreover, for the non-Muslims to have a right to pay visits to mosques is quite different from the Muslims allowing them to come into the mosques.
9 One of the prominent Companions of the Holy Prophet, who belonged to a comparatively well-to-do family.