Walid Khalidi writes that it is believed that the shrine for al-Nabi Rubin was built in the same place where a Canaanite temple had once stood, and that the mawsim ("religious festival") itself was pagan in origin.

In 1184, it held a fair where Arab merchants from Damascus traded slaves, Persian and Kurdish-bred horses, weapons, and blades from Yemen and India, with Christians from Acre.

[10] Since at least the 17th century, Muslims from Jaffa, Ramla, Lydda, and the towns and villages surrounding these cities, flocked to Nabi Rubin to celebrate the mawsim.

[12] In 1816, an English traveler, Charles Leonard Irby, visited "Sheik Rubin's tomb, surrounded by a square wall, inclosing some trees".

[13] In 1863, Victor Guérin noted: "A square compound wall encloses a courtyard planted with about ten old mulberries, which form, in this desert and sandy place, a kind of small oasis.

At any rate, at the feast of Neby Roubin, a crowd of Muslims hastened on pilgrimage to this place, and this solitary koubbeh becomes the rendezvous of a multitude of more or less considerable pious visitors.

[12] Temporary coffeehouses, restaurants, and stalls selling food and other merchandise were set up, and people sang popular songs, — both religious and nationalist — and danced the traditional dabka.

Sufi dervishes held dhikr sessions, and pilgrims also watched horse races, magic shows and listened to sermons from imams and poets.

City wives, who virtually never socialized outside households, in particular "craved participation in the festival," and Tawfiq Canaan writes that they would announce to their husbands "Either you take me to Nabi Rubin, or you divorce me.

The writer S. Yizhar, who as a child sneaked over the sands from his home in Rehovot, later described: "One finally arrives at Nabi Rubin and its mosque in the center, to watch by the light of bonfires...or even electricity from portable generators, the performance of the dances, the whirling of the dervishes, the colorful candy wrappers,...the pot-bellied swaying Gypsy woman ....while on the side, the singing keeps sawing away all time, not ceasing until the depths of night..."[22]The village's land area, most of which was covered by sand dunes, was the second largest in the district after that of Yibna, and was designated as an Islamic waqf ("pious endowment").

[3] Nabi Rubin was located in a region which was targeted by Haganah's Operation Barak during the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, which aimed to force the Arab inhabitants to move.

On 24 August, the Giv'ati Brigade HQ issued the order for Operation Cleaning, aiming at 'cleansing' [letaher] the newly conquered area, which included Nabi Rubin.

"[28] The shrine of Reuben remained abandoned by most of the 20th century[dubious – discuss] and deteriorated gradually; by 1991, the minaret of the mosque was torn down, as were centuries-old mulberry trees that had been located in the courtyard.