Part One
Mecca with High-Rises Overlooking the Grand Mosque
What happens when cities that owe their prominence and wealth to religion undergo uncontrolled growth, proposed redesign, or decline? Muslims around the world have asked serious questions over the past three years about the future of Mecca and Medina, the two holiest cities in Islam. Mecca, the birthplace of the Prophet Muhammad, is where Muslims turn in prayer, and is the object of a pilgrimage (hajj), obligatory, at least once, for every Muslim who can afford it.
But residents of Mecca and Medina have both been repeatedly disturbed, over the past 200 years, by the precepts of Wahhabism, a totalitarian interpretation of Islam and the state sect in Saudi Arabia. Wahhabi beliefs, which are new in Islam, are so odd that explaining them to non-Muslims is a demanding task. Acolytes of Saudi-Wahhabi doctrine condemn the preservation of historic sites associated with Muhammad, arguing that prayer at structures associated with the prophet and his companions, as well as the maintenance of grave markers, shrines, and tombs, are forbidden "idol-worship." In the words of a Saudi official who requested anonymity, Wahhabi clerics want to be assured that architectural remnants of early Islam "don't become places of worship." Stimulated by this conviction, the Wahhabis sacked and destroyed Mecca in the 19th century, causing extensive physical devastation and killing many people.
Similarly, when the Saudi royal family and their Wahhabi partisans seized Mecca and Medina in the 1920s, they demolished the Jannat al-Baqi or Orchard of Heaven, a cemetery in the latter city where most of Muhammad's family and companions were buried. This act of vandalism continues to grate, especially on adherents of Shia Islam. In 2007 some thousand Muslim protesters rallied at the Royal Saudi Embassy in Washington, denouncing the condition of the famous cemetery, as well as "Wahhabi fascism" (www.weeklystandard.com) Another such demonstration in Washington is currently being planned.
Wahhabi attacks on old Islamic architecture are prolific. Another demand incomprehensible to Westerners is repeatedly heard - that the mausoleum of Muhammad in Medina be partly or wholly razed as an "idol." The house where Muhammad was born was turned into a cattle market, then a library. But recently something new was announced: the prophet's birthplace would be rebuilt as modern, Western-style hotel space, timeshares, and parking facilities. These structures would be operated as the Le Meridien Towers, financed by the well-known international hotel chain.
Mecca has already become, thanks to Wahhabi "purification," a holy city with few holy monuments. But Saudi developers are bent on a "Manhattanization" of Mecca and Medina that would surround the religious monuments in both cities with elaborate and intrusive construction. The main project in Mecca, known as the Jabal Omar Towers, will comprise seven apartment blocks (each of 35 stories), two 50-floor hotels, a four-level retail concourse, and four more 15-story hotel blocks. Promotional material from the Malaysian design firm responsible for it, T. R. Hamzah and Yeang (www.trhamzahyeang.com), specifically advertises accessibility and residential views overlooking Mecca's Grand Mosque (www.tcsdaily.com)
Is the transformation of Mecca and Medina motivated by a distorted desire to modernize the Saudi kingdom? More progressive actions would include proclamation of general religious freedom for the Christians, Jews, Hindus, and Buddhists who, as expatriates, now make up a quarter of the Saudi populace. Christians are only allowed to pray in their own homes, but Jews remain banned from the country, except for a few invited by the Saudi authorities for purposes of "dialogue." And Christians in the kingdom are not limited to highly-paid energy technicians from the U.S., Britain, and Canada. They also include great numbers of domestic workers from the Philippines and South Korea.
By contrast, the countries known to Saudi dissidents as "the crescent of normality," extending from Kuwait to Yemen, include Christian churches and Hindu and Buddhist temples. Bahrain and Yemen even shelter Jewish synagogues with small Arabic-speaking congregations
Part Two
The Future of Medina? (Part II)
For Muslims themselves, significant reform measures in the Saudi domain would include ending the Wahhabi monopoly in religious life, abolishing the so-called "religious police" or mutawiyin who terrorize the public in the name of morals, and lifting oppressive measures taken against non-Wahhabi Muslims, including both the large Saudi Shia minority and Sufi or spiritual Muslims, who may be either Sunnis or Shias.
Freedom of expression, an elected legislature, and other political and economic reforms would do much more to improve the bad image of Saudi Arabia, among Muslims as well as non-Muslims, than building Western-style high-rises overlooking the sacred precincts in Mecca and Medina. Some of the proposed new construction less resembles Manhattan than it does the grandiose vision of Moscow under Stalinism. Saudi authorities claim the redevelopment of the holy cities is necessary to alleviate congestion during the annual hajj. But the numbers who go to Mecca for the pilgrimage are already restricted to those (except for some Iranians and a few other, marginal examples) who are approved by Wahhabi clerics.
For that reason, out of more than a billion Muslims in the world, in an age when air travel is cheap and tourism, both religious and recreational, has expanded to an extraordinary degree, only about two million Muslims perform the annual hajj. Luxury hotels and timeshares will benefit a small number of rich devotees, but will not alleviate crowding, which has repeatedly led to fires and mass deaths by panic and trampling in Mecca. The current financial downturn has, predictably, cut back on the number of hajj trips to Mecca.
The Manhattanization of Mecca and Medina seems driven by the three most visible aspects of Saudi-Wahhabi rule: the aforementioned "purification of Islam" by liquidating its cultural legacy, glorification of their own power, and simple greed. Who could imagine such a policy in Jerusalem, a holy city for all three monotheistic faiths, and which is protected by its municipal authorities from any construction that would change its sacred character?
Or in Rome, at St. Peter's Square? Or, in the secular realm, surrounding the U.S. Capitol with high-rises? A Mecca in the image of Manhattan would, it appears, change the city's Grand Mosque into something more like a religious mall than an ancient temple. Muslim religious architecture has also been a source of different contentions in the West. Some Western European communities object to the erection of mosques, on the argument, among others, that minarets will change the architectural profile of Christian cities. A considerable controversy has taken place in London, where a fundamentalist "mega-mosque" (www.spectator.co.uk) has been planned to open near the facilities of the 2012 Olympics (www.tcsdaily.com) Another case involving Christians has recently illustrated the unpredictable fate of urban development associated with religious worship. Since 1981, a year after the death of former Yugoslavia's Communist dictator Tito, a remote place in southeast Bosnia-Hercegovina, Medjugorje, has attracted millions of Christian visitors. There, a group of visionary Croatian Catholic children, who by now have grown into adults, have reported apparitions and messages by the Virgin Mary, daily except Mondays and Fridays, when they occur twice. Medjugorje, once a dusty hamlet, grew into a major aggregate of rapidly-built guest houses, along with numerous souvenir shops and a large church (www.sffaith.com)
Unfortunately, however, the Catholic authorities never accepted the authenticity of the Medjugorje visions, and at the end of July 2009 Pope Benedict XVI ordered Tomislav Vlasic, the original booster of the phenomenon, removed from the priesthood and expelled from the Franciscan order. That will probably do as much to reduce travel to Medjugorje as the economic slump, but it may also improve the Pope's image with Bosnian and other Balkan Muslims, who viewed the Medjugorje affair as a pretext for Croatian ultranationalism.
The clash of faith and unbelief have lately produced widespread and acerbic public polemics around the world. Faith and commerce have often been found in conflict. But the contradictions between faith, architectural legacy, and urban development may prove a more serious challenge to religion today.
Stephen Schwartz, a frequent contributor to TCS Daily, is executive director, and Irfan Al-Alawi is international director, of the Center for Islamic Pluralism