It is not permitted to glorify buildings and historical sites,” proclaimed Sheikh Abdulaziz bin Baz, then the kingdom’s highest religious authority, in a much-publicized fatwa in 1994. “Such action would lead to polytheism. … [S]o it is necessary to reject such acts and to warn others away from them.”
A pamphlet published last year by the Ministry of Islamic Affairs, endorsed by Abdulaziz Al Sheikh, the Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia, and distributed at the Prophet’s Mosque, where Mohammed, Abu Bakr, and the Islamic Caliph Umar ibn Al Khattab are buried, reads, “The green dome shall be demolished and the three graves flattened in the Prophet’s Mosque,” according to Irfan Al Alawi, executive director of the London-based Islamic Heritage Research Foundation. This shocking sentiment was echoed in a speech by the late Muhammad ibn Al Uthaymeen, one of Saudi Arabia’s most prominent Wahhabi clerics, who delivered sermons in Mecca’s Grand Mosque for over 35 years: “We hope one day we’ll be able to destroy the green dome of the Prophet Mohammed,” he said, in a recording provided by Al Alawi.
Sami Angawi, the founder and former director of Mecca’s Hajj Research Center and the most vocal opponent of the destruction of Mecca’s historic sites … estimates that over 300 antiquity sites in Mecca and Medina have already been destroyed [by 2008], such as the house of the first caliph, Abu Bakr, which was leveled to make room for the Mecca Hilton Hotel. (According to Ivor McBurney, a spokesman for Hilton, “We saw the tremendous opportunities to tap into Saudi Arabia’s religious tourism segment.”)
Over protests by groups like the Islamic Supreme Council of America and the Muslim Canadian Congress, Saudi authorities have authorized the destruction of hundreds of antiquities, such as an important eighteenth-century Ottoman fortress in Mecca that was razed to make way for the Abraj Al Bait Towers– a move the Turkish foreign minister condemned as “cultural genocide.” An ancient house belonging to Mohammed was recently razed to make room for, among other developments, a public toilet facility. An ancient mosque belonging to Abu Bakr has now been replaced by an ATM machine. And the sites of Mohammed’s historic battles at Uhud and Badr have been, with a perhaps unconscious nod to Joni Mitchell, paved to put up a parking lot. The remaining historical religious sites in Mecca can be counted on one hand and will likely not make it much past the next hajj, Angawi says: “It is incredible how little respect is paid to the house of God.”
When I questioned Habib Zain Al Abideen, the Saudi deputy minister of municipal and rural affairs, head of all the kingdom’s hajj-related construction projects, about the destruction of historical sites in Mecca, he seemed unconcerned about their religious significance. More important to him was that the hajj was “a good opportunity to visit Mecca and Medina, do some shopping, make a vacation out of it.”-from the Atlantic
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