Fadak was an agricultural village in the northern Ḥijāz somewhere near Khaybar, which is about one hundred fifty kilometres from Medina. Fadak was the centre of a long-running dispute between the reigning caliphs and the family of the prophet Muḥammad, which continued through the first three Islamic centuries. After this period, Fadak recedes from view and by the ninth/fifteenth century it was possible for two experts on Ḥijāzī geography-al-Fīrūzābādī (d. 817/1415) and al-Samhūdī (d. 911/1506)-to express, albeit with some surprise, that its