Pre-Muslim times The ground on which the structure stands, northwest of Yibna, has been used by residents for burial since at least the Roman period. and the
Marāṣid al-ʾiṭṭilāʿ (, an abridgement of Yaqut's work by
Safi al-Din 'Abd al-Mu'min ibn 'Abd al-Haqq, d.1338), mention that in Yubna there was a tomb said to be that of Abu Hurayra, the companion of the Prophet. Yavne's population at the time was a mixture of Muslims,
Samaritans, and - during the Crusader period - Christians, with
Benjamin of Tudela (12th century) finding no Jewish inhabitants there. During the Middle Ages, apart from Muslims (and Christians in the Crusader period), Samaritans continued to inhabit Yibna. The
Tolidah, a Samaritan chronicle written sometime during the 12th−14th centuries, mentions a Samaritan family that moved from
Ashkelon to Yibna, called here "Iamma", and other Samaritans that moved from the city to Egypt. According to Ben-Zvi, this event occurred when Yibna fell to the
Ayyubids in 1187 (1976: 108). The Samaritan presence in Yavneh was continuous and lasted from the late Roman period at least until the 12th century. As mentioned previously, there are no records from the early Islamic period about a Jewish presence in Yavneh, yet no records exist to refute such a presence. On the other hand, Benjamin of Tudela (12th century), who passed through Yavneh on his way from Jaffa to Ashkelon, clearly states that no Jews were living there (Benjamin of Tudela 43). The following century, another Jewish traveler,
Ishtori Haparchi, described Abu Hurayra's mausoleum as 'a very fine memorial to Rabbi Gamliel.' In 1882, Conder and Kitchener described it: "The mosque of Abu Hureireh is a handsome building under a dome, and contains two inscriptions, the first in the outer court, the second in the wall of the interior." and the structure was thereafter appropriated by
Haredi Judaism and transformed into a tomb of the righteous. Gideon Bar cites it as one of many cases of the
Judaization of Muslim holy places, where the Jewish heritage of a site has been showcased at the expense of other local cultural traditions. ==Architecture==