RasoolAllah (peace and blessings be upon him and his family) is telling us to not take the graves as places of worship. Have i got it right so far? Now lets proceed:
1.
Thus did We make their case known to the people, that they might know that the promise of Allah is true, and that there can be no doubt about the Hour of Judgment. Behold, they dispute among themselves as to their affair. (Some) said, “Construct a building over them”: Their Lord knows best about them: those who prevailed over their affair said,“Let us surely build a place of worship over them.” (Quran 18:21)
As I have explained in the earlier
post, Allah has called those who built the mosque at the sight of ashab-e-kahf (people of the cave) believers. See the tafasir of this verse in my post.
3. Muhammad said: Abu hanifa informed us saying that Ata ibn as saib narrated to us saying
the graves of Prophet Hud, Salih and Shuaib [aleh islam] is in Masjid Al Haram
[In pg 150,Kitab al-Athar of Imam al-Shaybani as published by Turath Publishing in London]
should it (Masjid al Haram) be demolished? Or is everyone committing shirk there?
4. What about the fact that RasoolAllah (peace and blessings be upon him and his family) was buried inside a room? And why did no one called it a bidda when Abu Bakr (Allah's mercy be on him) was buried in the same room? And what about Umar (Allah's mercy be upon him)? Did no one see the biddah happening there? People being buried under a physical structure?
These Quranic verses and ahadith (narrations) have been reconciled by Imam Ibn Hajr al-Asqalani (rha). He writes in his magnificent Fath ul Bari:
In view of the fact that the Jews and Christians were taking the graves of their Prophets as their qibla for the purpose of respect, and were paying attention towards them at the time of their prayers, their graves took the position of idols. For this reason the Muslims have been forbidden from this action. However, if someone constructs a mosque near the grave of a pious person for the prupose of seeking tabarruk and not for prostration or paying attention towards them, he will never be included in this prohibition.( Ibn Hajr al-‘Asqalani, Fath al-bari, vol. 3, p. 208)
Similarly the narration in which RasoolAllah (peace and blessings be upon him and his family) asked Ali bin abi Talib (Allah's mercy be upon him) to go and destroy certain graves was because those were being worshiped as objects by the disbelievers.
The problem with the wahabi mindset is that they pick up everything which applies to disbelievers and start applying it to believers without accommodating the other side of the argument.