According to legend, after the caliph ʿUmar b. al-Khaṭṭāb's (r. 13–23/634–44) conquest of Jerusalem in the year 16/637, one of his soldiers, a man named Shurayk b. Khabāsha al-Numayrī, went to fetch water from a well on the Temple Mount. As al-Wāsiṭī (d. ca. 360/970), a preacher in the al-Aqṣā mosque, relates in his hagiography of Jerusalem, The Virtues of the Holy City (Faḍāʾil Bayt al-Muqaddas),

Shurayk is said to have kept the leaves he brought from his subterranean visit to paradise, guarding them in his personal copy of the Qurʾān until his death, and to have been buried with them, placed delicately between his chest and the burial shroud covering his corpse, when he was laid to rest in the Syrian village of al-Salamiyya. Some thirteen centuries later, between 1938 and 1942, archaeologists excavated what appeared to be the remains of the well inside the al-Aqṣā mosque. To this day, one can see, to the left of the entrance to the mosque, the stairway leading down into the vast system of tunnels below the Temple Mount, a mysterious subterranean maze in which, according to Muslim tradition, flow the rivers of paradise.

The “Story of the Leaves” (ḥadīth al-waraqāt), as it is known, encapsulates a tension that underpins conceptualisations of the otherworld across a wide spectrum of Islamic religious discourses. The idea that the boundary between this world (al-dunyā) and the hereafter (al-ākhira) cannot be traversed, except after death, is etched deeply into Muslim thought. ʿUmar's reticence is a case in point.