Tabuk's place in Islamic memory dates to the ninth year after the Hijrah (around 630 CE), when the Prophet Muhammad led a large army north after reports of Byzantine forces massing near the Arabian Peninsula's northern frontier, in what became known as the Battle of Tabuk, his final military expedition. No actual fighting took place, but the expedition cemented the young Islamic state's reach into the far north, and gave rise to what's known today as the Mosque of Repentance (Al-Tawbah Mosque), said to be where the Prophet prayed — still standing today as one of the city's oldest religious landmarks.

Centuries later, Tabuk re-emerged as a strategic stop on the Levantine pilgrimage route linking Greater Syria to the Hejaz. Tabuk Castle was built in 1559 during the Ottoman era to protect pilgrim caravans and secure drinking water for them, a role it served for centuries before becoming the museum it is today.

The most notable chapter in Tabuk's modern history was the construction of the Hejaz Railway between 1900 and 1908, ordered by Ottoman Sultan Abdul Hamid II to connect Damascus to Madinah, shortening the pilgrimage from weeks by camel to just days by train. Tabuk's station was one of the line's most important stops, but the project was short-lived; during the Great Arab Revolt in World War I, the line suffered repeated attacks that partially destroyed it, and train traffic ceased entirely in the following decades.

Tabuk's station sat abandoned for decades before undergoing comprehensive restoration into an 80,000-square-metre museum complex of 13 buildings, including a workshop, a handicrafts centre, and a building displaying a locomotive, a freight car, and other historical artefacts — making it today one of the best-preserved Hejaz Railway sites on the entire line from Damascus to Madinah.

Away from the city, the oasis of Tayma, southeast of Tabuk, carries a far deeper history reaching back thousands of years before Islam; archaeological findings point to continuous settlement dating at least to the mid-first millennium BCE. Taken together, the whole of Tabuk region forms a multi-layered historical fabric — from ancient civilisations through early Islam and the Ottoman era to the modern urban transformation unfolding today.