From sacred city to concrete disaster

Mecca: The Sacred City is a journey-through-time through a city that Muslims across the world revere and yearn to visit at least once in their lifetimes, but most importantly to find the Divine presence. Ironically, while suffused with the spirit of a genuine believer, what the author, Ziauddin Sardar, finds in the end is any other holy city that is virtually bereft of any spiritualism. Sardar describes how his idea to traverse the desert on foot to reach the Ka’aba does not quite generate the feeling he had hoped for, how he had to endure livid Bedouins, foaming at the mouth, accuse his “deviant” donkey, Genghis, of abusing their male donkey. The closest he could come to the feeling was when he encountered the serene face of a dying pilgrim who had come to breathe his last in the Holy Land during Hajj.

Barring a temporary tranquility after its fall to Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) till the death of the cunning Umayyad ruler, Muawiya, the history of Mecca is bloody, full of treachery, opportunism and old-fashioned tribalism. Imam Hussein, not wholly satisfied with the wave of discontent and anger among the puritan Kharji’ites of Mecca at Yazid’s ascension to the throne, decided to accept the invitation of his followers in Kufa. Sardar describes that moment as one of the biggest “what if” moments in Islamic history. What if Abdullah Ibn Zubair (the grandson of Abu Bakr) had convinced Hussein to stay on rather than leave Mecca? Ibn Zubair himself became another high-profile casualty of the chilling, blood-soaked history of Mecca when he was mercilessly murdered by the Umayyad governor Al-Hajjaj bin Yousuf; his body was crucified upside down for added effect. Asma, the daughter of Abu Bakr and mother of Ibn Zubair (more than 100 years old at the time), took his body down and buried him in Medina near the Prophet (pbuh), not in Mecca.

Here, the quest for the Divine and 21st-century consumerism sit comfortably alongside

Sardar tells us in his scholarly history of Mecca how the undercurrent of the Kharji’ite belief in their inflexible interpretation of Islam gradually became the defining character of the city as we know it today. Mecca became the transitory destination of many a scholar, which is why it could not develop its own school of thought. Holy men, jurists and mystics only sojourned in the city – and that too at best for a few years – attracted by the pull of the Ka’aba, soaking up the “Presence” in the Sanctuary and leaving to philosophize elsewhere.

The Umayyads changed the multi-faith character of Mecca with the stroke of a pen by making it a Muslim-only city, creating a misplaced sense of superiority among the Meccans who started to believe they were now living on a patch of Paradise. It might not be an overstatement to say that the effect of this feeling has multiplied to grotesque levels over the centuries and attained a pernicious irreversibility, which may be impossible to wish away in times to come.

Although enormous amounts of time, wealth and energy were spent on expanding the Sacred Mosque architecturally, the Umayyad rulers chose to turn their attention to more opulent, culturally rich and diverse and interesting cities such as Jerusalem and Damascus, leaving the Meccans to their own devices. The Abbasid Empire, on the other hand, unleashed a “cultural revolution” in the Holy City, according to Sardar. Islam was canonized in the 9th century and the Sanctuary was host to a number of travelers, mystics and scholars who had journeyed (some on foot) from distant places like the Nile, North Africa, Persia and India. Imam Bukhari compiled his Sahih Bukhari during this period while he stayed for years in Mecca. Sermons, talks and lectures were well attended but with literally no emphasis on reason or philosophy. For example, Imam Shafii stayed in Mecca for nine years and taught his students to reject logical deduction and steer well clear of philosophy and rational conjecture. When in doubt, analogy with the times of the Prophet (pbuh) was deemed the primary source for developing Islamic law.

This rigidity meant there was no movement towards ijtihad. The Prophet’s (pbuh) inclusive message was set aside and the Muslims became a species apart – exalted beings above followers of all other religions. The uncouth, ruthless Najdi Wahabis – literalists when it came to religion – who were obsessed with cleansing Islam of all impurities, took the “spirit” of Islam to unprecedented levels when they replaced the cosmopolitan Hijazis and their Sufi leanings after the fall of the Ottomans. The city of Karbala faced their wrath twice in the 18th and 19th centuries, resulting in the plunder of its treasures and the massacre of its citizens. During the Safavid reign in Iran, the Ottoman sultan had a golden opportunity to recognize Shia Islam’s right to have a separate station for prayer at slightly different times along with the Shafii, Hanbali, Maliki and Hanfi sects. In another “what if” moment, the opportunity was missed as he feared a mass conversion to Shi’ism, similar to what happened in Iran later, giving rise to the lethal Takfiri doctrine gladly deployed by present-day extremist organizations like the IS, Al-Qaeda and the TTP.

Sardar is bitterly critical of the mindless and relentless construction of skyscrapers, which have made Mecca equivalent to a Muslim Las Vegas, where men and women pray and shop amid gaudy, tasteless architecture in the worst nouveau-riche way possible. Like any city, where plenty of wealth and influence is up for grabs, the death of a Sharif Mecca invariably led to the customary bloodletting between his heirs, where its administrators hired poorer pilgrims to carry the city’s sewage to the outskirts (despite mega-buildings and glitzy hotels, it still does not have a sewage system). Mecca has never been part of Paradise as perceived by most Muslims around the globe. And yet, despite the construction of infrastructure at a phenomenal level, Sardar reckons the Saudi era is undoubtedly the darkest in the city’s history.

Twenty-first century Mecca is an unmitigated environmental disaster: the Al-Muala cemetery where members of the Prophet’s (pbuh) family are also buried, is virtually drowned in the sewage effluent discharged by Meccans and visitors to the city. The Saudis, despite protests from many countries, have systematically denuded Mecca of its architectural heritage. Almost all the houses, palaces and elegant villas belonging to the Ottoman era have disappeared, giving way to an eerie concrete jungle desperately seeking an identity, to say nothing of the demolition of houses built during the Prophet’s (pbuh) time. The house owned by Hazrat Khadija, his wife, is now a public toilet. The clock tower is now the second tallest building in the world after the Burj al-Khalifa in Dubai. Mecca is where the quest for the Divine and 21^st-century consumerism sit comfortably side by side.

Tariq Bashir is a Lahore-based lawyer. Follow him @Tariq_Bashir