Majma al-Zawaid — Hadith 995

Sayyiduna Bilal bin al-Harith (may Allah be pleased with him) narrates: We were on a journey with the Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him). He (peace and blessings be upon him) went out to relieve himself, and he used to go far away to relieve himself. I came to him with a vessel of water, but he had gone. I heard the sound of some people arguing and a clamour; I had never heard such a sound before. When he came, he said: "Are you Bilal?" I said: "I am Bilal." The Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him) asked: "Do you have water with you?" I said: "Yes!" The Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him) said: "You did well." Then he took the water from me and performed ablution. I said: "O Messenger of Allah! I heard near you the sound of some people arguing and a clamour; I have never heard their language from anyone." The Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him) said: "The Muslim jinn and the polytheist jinn were arguing in my presence. They asked me to assign them places to live, so I assigned 'al-Jals' to the Muslims and 'al-Ghawr' to the polytheists."
The narrator says: I asked (my teacher) Kathir: "What is meant by al-Jals, and what is meant by al-Ghawr?" He replied: "Al-Jals means villages and mountains, and al-Ghawr means the land between the mountains and the seas." Kathir says: We have seen that whoever suffers any harm in al-Jals remains safe, and whoever suffers harm in al-Ghawr is rarely safe.
(Allamah al-Haythami says:) I say: Ibn Majah recorded only this part of the narration: When the Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him) intended to relieve himself, he would go far away. The chain of this narration contains a narrator, Kathir bin Abdullah bin Amr bin Awf; the hadith scholars agree that he is da'if (weak), though al-Tirmidhi declared a hadith narrated by him hasan (good).