Mecca today is a microcosm of its own history replayed as tragedy
‘Makkah’ may be blessed, but the more spiritually oriented Meccans, the descendants of the old and established families of the city, find nothing particularly ‘holy’ in the recycled designation of ‘Makkah’. What is evident to them is a city of proliferating bling, a haven of consumerism and opulent tourism that have usurped spirituality as the city’s raison d’être. They call it ‘Saudi Las Vegas’.
Like the American city famed for its gambling casinos and gaudy architecture, Mecca has become a playground for the rich. For most of the year, it plays host to religious tourists who arrive partly to pray in the Sacred Mosque but also to shop in its countless opulent malls. Many have bought property around the Sacred Mosque not just as a financial investment but in the hope that it will translate into real estate in paradise. For rich Muslims the world over—most notably the Gulf, Malaysia, India, Turkey, and among the diaspora in Europe and the US—a quick visit to Mecca for Umra (the lesser pilgrimage) or ziyarat (the religious term for visit) has become routine. Indeed, for many it’s a badge of prestige: the more visits you make to Mecca the more pious and dedicated you appear.
.. As anyone who has been to Mecca for me Hajj can testify, black skin tone is not appreciated in the Holy City. One can see Black African men and women being treated abominably by the local citizens in front of the Sacred Mosque. The expatriate Muslims, who work and live in the city and have actually built the gigantic structures surrounding the Haram, are treated with equal contempt. Slavery may have been abolished, but in Mecca it is alive and well, although now it goes under the rubric of ‘labour laws’.
.. How would it be possible to make the transformation from beacon to the world to the place that belongs to the whole world? Could Mecca ever become truly an international city, the heart that belongs to the whole body of believers, rather than the Arabian backwater compliant with the grand imaginings of its chance rulers? I have heard people assert as much. The question is what would such a transformation consist of, and what kind of difference would it make in Mecca and throughout the Muslim world? The factionalism and dissension, the intolerance of differences, so prevalent in history, have by no means disappeared from Muslim existence. Yet to internationalize Mecca would be a grand idea. All the grander for requiring urgent and informed thought about what it means to be Muslim now and wherever one happens to live in this all too real world.