Development in Mecca creates unholy furor

Mecca, Saudi Arabia, usually conjures up images of a sea of Muslim worshipers and the annual Hajj pilgrimage, not cranes and metropolitan sprawl. But in the midst of a major construction boom, the holiest city of Islam is fast resembling the high-rise Manhattan skyline.

Controversy is swelling as hotel towers spring up. Even Islam’s “holy of holies” now has malls and buildings close to its edges: The Kaaba, a black-draped cubic structure within the Grand Mosque, houses the Black Stone—the spiritual focal point towards which all Muslims pray. The space radiating out from it for up to 12 miles on all sides used to be considered a restricted and holy precinct. And it is this area now most affected by cranes.

“It’s not Mecca. It’s Mecca-hattan,” said Sami Angawi. He voices what many see in the overhaul of Mecca: desecration. “This tower and the lights in it are like Vegas,” said the architect, who has devoted years to studying the Hajj. “The truth of the history of Mecca is wiped out … with bulldozers and dynamite. Is this development?”

Other critics echo Angawi, saying Mecca’s sense of spirituality is being cleared away. Commercialization of the city’s Grand Mosque area is unprecedented. The money to be made from wealthy foreign pilgrims means there are now international chains, including such incongruities as a Paris Hilton store and a sex-segregated Starbucks.

Authorities said the construction craze is to accommodate between 1.5 and 3 million Hajj pilgrims at one time. But long-time Meccans say official Wahhabi doctrine is partly behind the mania, restyling Mecca to fit its code: It outlaws traditional practices of venerating saints’ tombs or holy and historic sites—even to do with Muhammad—because to venerate anything other than God is forbidden. (A similar zeal guides militants from the Islamic State to blow up traditional Muslim shrines in Iraq and Syria.) Now Mecca hardly has any sites left associated with Muhammad. Some met with destruction during previous Grand Mosque expansions in the 1980s and 1990s. New development is taking away what remains: In 2008 the house of Abu Bakr, who followed Muhammad as leader of the Muslim community, was demolished to create space for a Hilton hotel.

“The removal of such things within the expansion is necessary,” said the country’s top religious authority, Grand Mufti Abdul-Aziz Al-Sheik.

But historic domes and pillars dating back to the Ottoman Empire are being pulled down in the hustle for pilgrim business. Old souk shops selling holy water or spices have disappeared.

Entire Mecca neighborhoods have been cleared. The Jabal Sharashif project will sit on the site now occupied by a slum mostly inhabited by Asian and African migrants. The latest expansion of the already-mammoth Grand Mosque will nearly double the area for pilgrims to pray around the Kaaba. Almost half its $60 billion cost involved buying about 5,800 homes that had to be removed for the expansion, said Mecca Mayor Osama al-Bar.

Another vast project is Jabal Omar, a barren hill abutting the Grand Mosque area. The hill, now leveled, was once a landmark in the city. In its place are sprouting 40 high-rise towers—mostly luxury hotels, giving Mecca another 11,000 rooms.

Like a massive symbol of the ravages of time, on the mosque’s south side stands the third tallest building in the world, a clock atop a skyscraper 1,972 feet high. It is the jewel in a seven-tower complex built after razing an Ottoman-era fort.

Mecca’s changes raise hackles in a way construction around St Peter’s Square in Rome might never do, because Islam is more concerned with territory and use of spiritual spaces than modern Christianity.

Mecca could try the homely American solution for cities whose annual visitor surge exceeds hotel capacity: Airbnb.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.