WHEN Malcolm
X visited Mecca in 1964, he was enchanted. He found the city “as ancient
as time itself,” and wrote that the partly constructed extension to the Sacred
Mosque “will surpass the architectural beauty of India’s Taj Mahal.”
Fifty years
on, no one could possibly describe Mecca as ancient, or associate beauty with
Islam’s holiest city. Pilgrims performing the hajj this week will
search in vain for Mecca’s history.
The dominant
architectural site in the city is not the Sacred Mosque, where the Kaaba, the
symbolic focus of Muslims everywhere, is. It is the obnoxious Makkah Royal
Clock Tower hotel, which, at 1,972 feet, is among the world’s tallest
buildings. It is part of a mammoth development of skyscrapers that includes
luxury shopping malls and hotels catering to the superrich. The skyline is no
longer dominated by the rugged outline of encircling peaks. Ancient mountains
have been flattened. The city is now surrounded by the brutalism of rectangular
steel and concrete structures — an amalgam of Disneyland and Las Vegas.
The
“guardians” of the Holy City, the rulers of Saudi Arabia and the
clerics, have a deep hatred of history. They want everything to look brand-new.
Meanwhile, the sites are expanding to accommodate the rising number of
pilgrims, up to almost three million today from 200,000 in the 1960s.
The initial
phase of Mecca’s destruction began in the mid-1970s, and I was there to witness
it. Innumerable ancient buildings, including the Bilal mosque, dating from the
time of the Prophet Muhammad, were bulldozed. The old Ottoman houses, with
their elegant mashrabiyas — latticework windows — and elaborately carved doors,
were replaced with hideous modern ones. Within a few years, Mecca was
transformed into a “modern” city with large multilane roads, spaghetti
junctions, gaudy hotels and shopping malls.
The few
remaining buildings and sites of religious and cultural significance were
erased more recently. The Makkah Royal Clock Tower, completed in 2012, was
built on the graves of an estimated 400 sites of cultural and historical
significance, including the city’s few remaining millennium-old buildings.
Bulldozers arrived in the middle of the night, displacing families that had
lived there for centuries. The complex stands on top of Ajyad Fortress, built
around 1780, to protect Mecca from bandits and invaders. The house of Khadijah,
the first wife of the Prophet Muhammad, has been turned into a block of
toilets. The Makkah Hilton is built over the house of Abu Bakr, the
closest companion of the prophet and the first caliph.
Apart from
the Kaaba itself, only the inner core of the Sacred Mosque retains a fragment
of history. It consists of intricately carved marble columns, adorned with
calligraphy of the names of the prophet’s companions. Built by a succession of
Ottoman sultans, the columns date from the early 16th century. And yet plans
are afoot to demolish them, along with the whole of the interior of the Sacred
Mosque, and to replace it with an ultramodern doughnut-shaped building.
The only
other building of religious significance in the city is the house where the
Prophet Muhammad lived. During most of the Saudi era it was used first as a
cattle market, then turned into a library, which is not open to the people. But
even this is too much for the radical Saudi clerics who have repeatedly called
for its demolition. The clerics fear that, once inside, pilgrims would pray to
the prophet, rather than to God — an unpardonable sin. It is only a matter of
time before it is razed and turned, probably, into a parking lot.
The cultural
devastation of Mecca has radically transformed the city. Unlike Baghdad,
Damascus and Cairo, Mecca was never a great intellectual and cultural center of
Islam. But it was always a pluralistic city where debate among different Muslim
sects and schools of thought was not unusual. Now it has been reduced to a
monolithic religious entity where only one, ahistoric, literal interpretation
of Islam is permitted, and where all other sects, outside of the Salafist brand
of Saudi Islam, are regarded as false. Indeed, zealots frequently threaten
pilgrims of different sects. Last year, a group of Shiite pilgrims
from Michigan were attacked with knives by extremists, and in August,
a coalition of American Muslim groups wrote to the State Department asking for
protection during this year’s hajj.
The erasure of Meccan history has had a tremendous
impact on the hajj itself. The word “hajj” means effort. It is through the
effort of traveling to Mecca, walking from one ritual site to another, finding
and engaging with people from different cultures and sects, and soaking in the
history of Islam that the pilgrims acquired knowledge as well as spiritual
fulfillment. Today, hajj is a packaged tour, where you move, tied to your
group, from hotel to hotel, and seldom encounter people of different cultures
and ethnicities. Drained of history and religious and cultural plurality, hajj
is no longer a transforming, once-in-a-lifetime spiritual experience. It has
been reduced to a mundane exercise in rituals and shopping.
Mecca is a
microcosm of the Muslim world. What happens to and in the city has a profound
effect on Muslims everywhere. The spiritual heart of Islam is an ultramodern,
monolithic enclave, where difference is not tolerated, history has no meaning,
and consumerism is paramount. It is hardly surprising then that literalism, and
the murderous interpretations of Islam associated with it, have become so
dominant in Muslim lands.
