Place · Islamic holy city · Saudi Arabia
Medina
The city of Medina in Saudi Arabia — named alongside Mecca in the Sikh Janamsakhi accounts of Guru Nanak's westward udasi (c.1518-1521). Medina was the city where the Prophet Muhammad established the first Muslim community after the Hijra of 622 CE. The Janamsakhi accounts describe Nanak visiting Medina after Mecca and engaging in theological discussions with the local ulama about the relationship between God, prophecy, and human spiritual experience. As with the Mecca visit, no independent Arabic record of Nanak's visit exists, which is standard for the Janamsakhi tradition's westward udasi. The modern Saudi state restricts non-Muslim access to the Masjid an-Nabawi (Medina's Prophet's Mosque); Sikh pilgrims cannot visit the Medina sites. The 1522 Nanak-era documents at the Kartarpur gurdwara include manuscript references to the Mecca-Medina journey.
- Date
- 1500–1524
- Function
- Travel & migration
- Tradition
- Janamsakhi tradition (Puratan, Bhai Bala, Miharban)
- Confidence
- Mixed / layered — Traditional / narrative attribution — janamsakhi, not independently attested
- Location
- 24.467, 39.611
Disputed. The janamsakhis place Nanak here; no independent record of the visit survives, and scholarship treats the janamsakhi travel accounts as hagiography rather than itinerary. Mapped as what the tradition claims, not as an established fact.
Connections (2)
- Route adjacencyMecca
Medina is named alongside Mecca in the janamsākhi accounts of the western journey and given no story of its own. The fourth udāsi is at once the most famous of the five and the least corroborated, and Medina is the point at which that gap is widest — a place-name with nothing attached.
- Life routeMuʿīnuddīn Chishtī
Chishti tradition associates Khwaja Moinuddin Chishti with Medina, where he visited the Prophet Muhammad's tomb at the Masjid an-Nabawi during his Hajj pilgrimage in the 1180s. According to the standard Chishti hagiographical tradition, he received further spiritual direction at the Prophet's tomb to travel toward Hindustan — linking Medina directly to the subsequent establishment of his Sufi centre at Ajmer around 1192. The Mecca-Medina direction and the Medina pilgrimage are preserved as foundational elements of the Chishti silsila's self-narrative in Mir Khurd's Siyar al-Awliya (c.1385) and later Mughal-era hagiographical collections.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Medina”. The Janamsākhī tradition; W.H. McLeod, Guru Nanak and the Sikh Religion (1968).
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