Scholarship has argued that the formation of Islamic identity/-ies in the first centuries after the Hijra was closely connected to the differentiation of Muslims from surrounding religious groups, especially Jews and Christians. As M. J. Kister writes, ‘The main concern of the religious leaders of the Muslim society was to establish some barrier between the Muslim community and the communities of the Jews, Christians and Magians. This separation was to be upheld in the various spheres of social relations, as well as in rites and customs.’ In a variety of social arenas, Muslim religious authorities attempted to clarify (or create) the distinction between Muslims and non-Muslims by prescribing differences in dress, places of worship and forms of ritual performance.

Among these zones of differentiation, sacred spaces were simultaneously physical and ideological sites, where Muslims both materialised and idealised the distinctions between Muslims and non-Muslims. The Arabian Peninsula – specifically its north-western region, the Ḥijāz, the location of the holy cities of Mecca and Medina – offered a notable site for such early Islamic boundary formation. Drawing in part on the prohibition at Qurʾān 9:28 against nonbelievers approaching al-Masjid al-Ḥarām (‘the Holy Mosque’, interpreted to mean the site of the Kaʿba in Mecca), Muslim thinkers pronounced that Jews and Christians should be barred from entering this Islamic holy land. Even more explicitly than in the Qurʾān, this geographic and sectarian demarcation was enshrined in statements ascribed to the Prophet Muḥammad's final days. ‘If I survive’, the Prophet states in one account, ‘I will expel the Jews and the Christians from the Arabian Peninsula, in order to leave only Muslims in it.’ With these words, Muḥammad literally maps out the difference between Muslims and their others, and the Islamic holy land is imagined as purely Muslim from (ideally) the time of the Prophet Muḥammad onwards.

In several versions of his deathbed statements, Muḥammad connects the expulsion of Jews and Christians with condemnation of a specific practice and type of sacred space: the veneration of the tombs of prophets. According to a report attributed to the Umayyad caliph ʿUmar b. ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz (r. 99–101/717–20), ‘the last thing that the Prophet said was, “God fight the Jews and the Christians, who took the tombs of their prophets as places of worship! Let there not remain two religions in the land of the Arabs!”’