Mecca: The Sacred City by Ziauddin Sardar review – ‘The pilgrimage is now an adjunct to the retail’

Mecca is the shrine of Islam, with the Ka’bah, a cube of black stone, at its centre. Growing up in Punjab and London in the 1960s, Ziauddin Sardar turned to the Ka’bah not only when he prayed in its direction five times daily, but also to interrogate himself morally. “There was never a doubt,” he writes in a sentence that shows the amplitude of the Muslim identity, “that I must always look to Mecca if I was to amount to anything worthwhile in the world”, and in another, suggestive of the human need both for solitude and togetherness, “to be at Mecca is the taproot of individual identity and the common link of an entire worldwide community”.

In the early seventh century Mecca was the locus for the only miracle on which all Muslims concur – the revelation of the Qur’an to the Prophet Muhammad – and after that the city contrived to be both conceptually vital and geographically marginal to the earthly empires founded in his name. A Mecca-less Islam would have no justification and an otherwise icon-hating creed would be without its icon, the Ka’bah. And so the life of the city, conveniently located far from the interstices of Eurasian history, in scalding, wind-whipped western Arabia, became the alternative life of Islam itself.

In 629 Muhammad went to Mecca from his capital, Medina, making the first pilgrimage of the Muslim era, and ever since the faithful have been drawn to the religion’s birthplace, politics and pestilence permitting. From their courts at Damascus, Baghdad and Cairo, the medieval caliphs strove both to control the city, whose inhabitants and rulers –the so‑called Sharifs – had a strong sense of entitlement and self-worth. Vast sums were spent to embellish the sanctuary around the Ka’bah and secure the city’s water supply. Gorgeous offerings from as far afield as Tibet and Mali testified to Islam’s global reach.

Always hazardous, open at the best of times only to a small proportion of affluent Muslims, the pilgrimage brought a taste of high Islamic civilisation to a provincial trading town. Medieval travel writers such as the Persian Naser Khosro and the Tunisian Ibn Battuta described the city’s brackish water and perfume-steeped women – “of rare and surpassing beauty,” trilled the North African, “pious and chaste”. They traipsed round the tourist traps (starting with the birthplace of the Prophet), building up to the hajj itself, when the compass of the city expanded, in a splendid contemporary phrase, like “a uterus for the foetus”.

Mecca did not generate wealth; it accepted pilgrim taxes and expenditure as its birthright. The rival Sharifian families competed for control of the city but come the next hajj season the dinars flowed and all was well. “We sow not wheat or sorghum,” ran a local saying; “the pilgrims are our crops.”

The free money had predictable results, with the 17th-century Ottoman traveller Evliya Çelebi portraying a large number of Meccans as dossers living on handouts; they spent their days idling or going from one coffee house to another, “dressed in their fine clothes, with henna in their beards and feet”.

With the arrival in the 19th century of linguistically gifted impostors such as the Swiss John Lewis Burckhardt and John Keane of Calcutta (who discovered an Englishwoman, who had probably been enslaved during the Indian Mutiny of 1857, and drank tea with her), the city’s travel literature was spiced up. Burckhardt wrote about the city’s “public women” (many of them Abyssinian slaves), and of raisin hooch in the booze shops.

One of the liveliest hajis was the Nawab Sikander Begum, ruler of Bhopal, in central India, who was robbed blind by the Meccans and subjected to an ordeal by hospitality by the Sharif, who besieged her with food without extending her the courtesy of an invitation. At length she deplored the holy city’s “miserly and covetous” inhabitants, and regretted that it had become a magnet for every dubious type from her own country.

“Whatever has been best in Muslim civilisation has had to be brought from Mecca,” Sardar says, in another thoughtful passage, “and has had a transitory acquaintance with the Holy City, but has not taken root.” A crucial point here is that Islamic civilisation had been sharpened and provoked by contact with Christians and Jews, while non-Muslims were (and remain) barred to Mecca. Every so often, such as when Vasco da Gama reached the Indian Ocean in 1498, or following Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt exactly 300 years later, the citizenry stirred themselves to confront an infidel invader that never materialised. So Mecca survived, a bastion of purity.

The religious bar came into effect long after the Prophet’s death and had a profoundly damaging effect on what Sardar describes as the “moral heart of his mission … peaceful coexistence”. The city’s tendency to insularity and complacency was aggravated, as well as the recondite scholasticism of its learned men. The Meccans rose against Ottoman law reforms that gave equality to minorities in the mid-19th century, one of the first phonographs to enter the city ended up in smithereens, and in the 1900s the English pilgrim Mahmoud Churchward was alarmed at neither hearing music nor seeing women. Slavery was not abolished until – wait for it – 1962.

By that time, of course, the Ottoman empire was dead and the House of Saud had formed a new state encompassing most of the Arabian peninsula. Sardar devotes his final, devastating chapters to Mecca under a puritanical regime awash in oil money, and receiving up to 3 million pilgrims a year.

In the name of icon-smashing, the Saudis have almost completely destroyed the city’s built culture, making instead a steel and glass “haven of consumerism”. The luxurious Royal Makkah Clock Tower, an unfeasibly silly and vertiginous development overlooking the massively expanded holy sanctuary, symbolises this “eruption of architectural bling”, though in truth “even the relatively poor are incited to shop at every available moment”. Shopping has always been part of Mecca but now, Sardar says, the pilgrimage is an adjunct to the retail, not the other way around.

For the young man who grew up with the Ka’bah on the living room wall, and who spent part of the 1970s trying to promote a more sustainable hajj under the auspices of a Saudi university, the comedown has been terrible. Now Sardar, one of Britain’s most prominent liberal Muslims, is appalled by the Saudi state’s institutionalised discrimination against non-Saudi residents, its treatment of women “as chattels”, the beheadings that quietly happen on Friday, and the effluent that swills with apt symbolism around parts of the holy city. The House of Saud will not like this book.