One day in the late seventh century, the governor of Medina, Marwān b. al-Ḥakam, came to the Prophet's Mosque and found a man pressing his body against the wall of the Prophet's tomb. Indignant at this sight, Marwān grabbed the man by the neck and demanded, ‘Do you know what you are doing?’ ‘Yes’, the man replied, looking up, ‘I have come to the Messenger of God, not to the stone or the curtain.’ The man was Abū Ayyūb al-Anṣārī, a Companion of the Prophet, who had fought bravely in many of the Muslim community's early battles. Eyeing Marwān, Abū Ayyūb said, ‘I heard the Messenger of God say, “Do not mourn for the religion (al-dīn) when its people govern, but rather mourn for it when other people do.”’

A similar story is told of a meeting at the Prophet's tomb between Marwān and another Companion: Usāma b. Zayd, the son of the Prophet Muḥammad's adopted son Zayd b. Ḥāritha. When Marwān saw Usāma praying beside the tomb, he yelled, ‘You are praying at the Messenger of God's tomb?’ Usāma responded ‘I love him’, prompting Marwān to swear at him with ‘vile words’ (qawlan qabīḥan). With his back turned, Usāma then said, ‘O Marwān, I heard the Messenger of God say, “God hates both the obscene and the foul”, and you are the obscenest of the foul.’

In these two stories, prominent Muslims face off at the Prophet's tomb, with several themes on display in their narrativised encounters. One key theme is the piety of political rulers. After his tenure as the governor of Medina, Marwān b. al-Ḥakam was a short-reigned caliph (r. 64–5/684–5), whose rule initiated the Marwānid Umayyad dynasty that dominated much of the Islamic world until the ʿAbbāsid revolution. In a not-so-subtle critique of the Marwānids and their infamous impieties, Abū Ayyūb cites a Prophetic warning about the rule of people ‘other than’ the righteous followers of Islam: implicitly, that is, Marwān and his reprobate successors. Indeed, Usāma b. Zayd explicitly connects the Prophet's censorious words to Marwān, and places him in the category of those ‘hated’ by God. Circulated by proto-Sunnī and Shīʿī transmitters in the eighth to ninth centuries, these reports take part in the wider vilification of Umayyad rule (and of Marwān more specifically) that appears in many sources from this period.