The Mas’a: The Sa’y Corridor as a Building — History, Architecture and Ziyarah Guide to the Passage Between Safa and Marwa

Every pilgrim who performs sa’y walks through a building. This is easy to forget, because the building does not look like one from the inside. It looks like a long, cool, marble-floored hall, brightly lit, filled with the murmur of dhikr and the shuffle of hundreds of thousands of feet, bounded at each end by a low rise of stone under glass. But it is a building all the same — one of the largest single-purpose pedestrian structures on earth, engineered, air-conditioned, re-poured in concrete and marble, expanded twice in living memory, and still expanding. This guide is about that building: the Mas’a, sometimes transliterated Masaa or Mas’aa, the enclosed corridor that now stands where an open street once ran between two low hills on the eastern edge of Makkah.

The guide’s companion article on Safa and Marwa tells the religious story properly: Hagar’s search for water, the Qur’anic sanction of sa’y in Surah al-Baqarah 2:158, the way the rite recalls a mother’s desperation and God’s mercy, and the classical jurisprudence of the sevenfold walk. That story is not repeated here in any detail, and readers who want it should turn to that article first. What concerns this one is a narrower and, in its own way, equally striking subject: what pilgrims are physically walking through when they perform sa’y today, how that physical structure came to look nothing like what existed for the first thirteen centuries of Islam, and the serious, unresolved argument among scholars over whether the modern building’s boundaries still count as the ritually valid Mas’a at all.

That argument is not settled in this guide, and it should not be settled by any single source. It is presented here as what it is: a live disagreement between credentialed scholars, argued with real evidence on both sides, that has never been resolved by universal consensus. The reader is entitled to know the dispute exists before performing a rite that both sides agree is obligatory, even though they disagree, in part, about where its boundaries now lie.

History of the Mas’a: An Ordinary Makkan Street

For most of Islamic history, the Mas’a was not a religious building at all. It was a public thoroughfare — a market street, called in some sources Suq al-Mas’a, running through the middle of Makkah with houses on both sides, shops selling grain, meat, dates, ghee and fruit, and everyday foot, animal and cart traffic sharing the space with pilgrims performing the rite. The distinction matters enormously for understanding the modern building, because almost everything that has happened to the Mas’a since 1926 has been an attempt to convert an ordinary urban street into a dedicated liturgical structure capable of handling twentieth- and twenty-first-century pilgrim volumes — a conversion with no precedent in the mosque’s first thirteen hundred years.

The clearest first-hand description of the old street comes from the Swiss orientalist Johann Ludwig Burckhardt, who travelled to Makkah in 1814 disguised as a Muslim pilgrim and left the most detailed European eyewitness account of the pre-modern Hijaz in his Travels in Arabia. Burckhardt described the Mas’a as a long, commercially active street, roofed in places in Ottoman style and lined with shops, where pilgrims performing sa’y moved through the same space as merchants and their customers — an urbanised corridor in which ritual and daily commerce coexisted without any physical separation between them, a description corroborated by later compilations such as the Madain Project’s entry on al-Masa’a. Later in the century, the account known as Mekka in the Latter Part of the 19th Century — compiled from the observations of the Dutch scholar Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje and his associates — records the same street as a place where, for weeks at a time during the pilgrimage season, one could hardly pass for the crowds moving between Safa and Marwa, while at quieter times of year the same lane held only “a quiet mass of humanity making their purchases in the many booths here and in the neighbouring markets of Suweiqah and Suq al-Layl,” according to the digitised edition of Mekka in the Latter Part of the Nineteenth Century held by the Internet Archive.

The most vivid account in English is Sir Richard Francis Burton’s. Burton performed the pilgrimage in disguise in 1853 and recorded his impressions of the Mas’a in his Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al-Madinah and Meccah. He described Safa itself as barely deserving the name “mountain,” closed off at one end by “a mean-looking building, composed of three round arches, with a dwarf flight of stairs leading up to them out of a narrow road.” From there, Burton and his party “descended Safa, and walked slowly down the street Al-Massa, towards Marwah” — his spelling of Mas’a — through a street he measured, by his own estimate, at between eight and nine hundred feet long, with a distinct bowstring curve when seen from above, “with high houses on both sides, and small lanes branching off from it.” Burton noted that classical authorities disagreed even then on the exact length: Ibn Jubayr, the twelfth-century Andalusian traveller, gave the distance as 893 paces, while other authorities put it at 780 “short cubits, the size of an average man’s forearm” — an early example of the same kind of measurement disagreement that runs through the Mas’a’s entire recorded history, right down to the conflicting modern figures discussed later in this guide.

Burton also recorded that the house of a companion of the Prophet ﷺ, known in the sources as Rubat al-Abbas, stood on the slope of Marwa, with houses clustered “in amphitheatre shape above it,” and that Marwa’s summit was reached from the street below by “a short flight of steps to a platform, bounded on three sides like a tennis-court, by tall walls without arches” — a description that gives some sense of how thoroughly built-up the hill had become by the mid-nineteenth century. Saudi state media confirms the same basic picture from the other side of the historical record: a Saudipedia account of the site notes that the Mas’a “was a busy market where grains, meat, dates, ghee, and fruit were sold,” that the house of al-Abbas ibn Abd al-Muttalib, the Prophet’s uncle, stood between the two hills in a neighbourhood populated by local residents, and that pilgrims performing sa’y in that period had to climb steps at both hills — twelve at Safa and fifteen at Marwa in the era of the Abbasid caliph Abu Ja’far al-Mansur — in order to see the Ka’bah from the high point of each, according to Saudipedia’s entry on Safa and Marwa. The same source states that stairway arrangement dated at least to the Abbasid period and that the Mas’a’s built environment continued to evolve for centuries afterward, shaped by successive dynasties in the way ordinary Makkan streets were shaped by growth, fire, flood and rebuilding.

None of this should surprise anyone who has read the classical fiqh on sa’y closely, because the jurists themselves wrote as if the Mas’a were an urban space with landmarks, not a purpose-built liturgical hall. Fatwa literature discussed later in this guide quotes commentators such as al-Ramli instructing pilgrims to place their heels against the wall of Safa and the tips of their toes against the wall of Marwa — language that only makes sense if the hills were bounded by built structures with walls a person could physically touch, exactly as Burton and Burckhardt describe.

Islamic History of the Mas’a: What the Street Looked Like Before Concrete

Historians of Makkah’s built environment name two authorities as the essential reference points for how the Mas’a and the area around Safa and Marwa looked in different centuries: al-Azraqi, the ninth-century historian of Makkah whose Akhbar Makkah is the earliest substantial topographical record of the sanctuary, and later scholars such as al-Fakihi and, for the Mamluk and early Ottoman period, al-Qutb al-Nahrawali, referred to in some sources as al-Qutb, the Hanafi scholar whose al-I’lam bi A’lam Bayt Allah al-Haram discusses the Mas’a’s shifting width directly. Egypt’s Dar al-Ifta, in a formal fatwa on the modern widening discussed at length below, cites al-Azraqi, al-Fakihi and al-Qutb together as having documented pre-modern expansions of the Mas’a’s width, including one attributed to the Abbasid caliph al-Mahdi — evidence that the corridor’s boundaries were never static even in the earliest centuries, according to the fatwa published by Dar al-Ifta. Al-Qutb himself, in a passage the same fatwa quotes to represent the objecting position, went so far as to ask: “The current place for sa’y is not from the Mas’a where the Prophet ﷺ used to make sa’y. So how is it valid to make sa’y in it when it has been transposed, as mentioned by trustworthy historians?” — a six-hundred-year-old version of the same question that resurfaced, much more publicly, in 2008.

What changed permanently, and what makes the modern Mas’a a fundamentally different kind of place from anything that preceded it, was the decision by the newly established Saudi state to remove the private buildings from the corridor altogether. According to the Dar al-Ifta fatwa, in 1357 AH (1938–39 CE) Saudi authorities removed the houses and shops that had narrowed the Mas’a over the centuries, after compensating their owners, so that the corridor would be “designated for worship” alone rather than shared with commerce and residence. Saudipedia’s account gives an earlier date for the first state intervention: in 1926, under the kingdom’s founder King Abdulaziz ibn Abdulrahman Al Saud, the Mas’a was paved and tiled with square stones for the first time in its history, specifically to protect pilgrims from dust, and its surrounding doors were repainted while its ceiling was renewed to provide shade, according to Saudipedia. In 1947, the same source records, King Abdulaziz ordered the complete shading of the Mas’a and the installation of canopies along its entire length from Safa to Marwa, commemorated with a brass inscription mounted on a four-metre iron sheet that was removed before the 1956 expansion began, briefly reinstalled on a nearby street, and then permanently taken down in 2001. These two sources do not fully agree on dating or sequence — one implies a single clearance in the late 1930s, the other a longer process of paving, shading and eventual demolition stretching from 1926 into the 1950s — and this guide reports that discrepancy rather than resolving it, since neither source is more clearly primary than the other on this specific point.

What both agree on is the outcome: by the middle of the twentieth century, an open Makkan street with houses, shops, stairs and market stalls had been cleared of its private buildings and prepared for incorporation into the mosque itself. The market was gone. What replaced it was not yet the enclosed building pilgrims walk through today, but the raw, cleared ground on which that building would be constructed.

What Survives of the Hills: Safa and Marwa Under the Marble

This is the point at which many pilgrims form a mistaken picture of what they are looking at, and it is worth being direct about it. Safa and Marwa were, in the plainest sense, hills — rocky outcrops at the base of two larger mountains, Abu Qubays for Safa and Qu’ayqi’an for Marwa, prominent enough to be visible landmarks in a landscape without tall buildings. Almost none of that original topography is visible today. Both hills have been cut back, levelled, built over and finally enclosed within air-conditioned architecture, and what a pilgrim actually sees at each end of the modern Mas’a is a small, glass- or panel-protected remnant of natural rock, set into a wall or floor, surrounded on every side by twentieth- and twenty-first-century construction.

The scale of what has been removed is documented in the same 2008 fatwa literature that argued for the corridor’s expansion, because the case for expansion depended on demonstrating exactly how much of the hills had already been cut away. The Dar al-Ifta fatwa records that in 1375 AH (1955–56 CE) the slopes of Safa were levelled and a road was built across the site to allow the passage of cars, and that in 1401 AH (1980–81 CE) that road was itself demolished and the mountain was cut again, this time separating the small remaining piece of the original hill from the larger mass of Abu Qubays behind it, in order to create a new, wide pedestrian passage between the surviving rock and the wall of Safa. The fatwa states plainly that “the size of the mountain was changed considerably from what it was at the time of the Prophet ﷺ,” and argues — on the authority of the Maliki jurist Ahmad al-Dardir‘s discussion of what would happen if the Ka’bah itself were ever demolished and its exact site forgotten — that removing part of the boulders of the two mountains does not change the legal validity of walking between them, “even if they were levelled to the ground,” according to the fatwa’s own reasoning as published by Dar al-Ifta. Whatever one makes of the legal argument, the factual claim embedded in it is stark: the authorities defending the modern Mas’a’s validity did so partly by conceding, in formal legal language, that the hills themselves have been cut down twice in living memory.

Popular travel accounts converge on the same physical description, even where they lack the formal sourcing of a fatwa. One widely read Tripadvisor account of a 2025 visit describes the situation bluntly: the hills are “well protected inside air conditioned Haram masjid,” the exposed rock area at Safa “is not accessible by foot as it covered by glass,” and the corresponding rock at Marwa “is coated with some thick chemical coating” — an amateur but consistent observation, corroborated by other visitor accounts on the same platform describing “what’s left of these two mountains” as a “remaining part” visible but clearly reduced, according to Tripadvisor’s Safa to Marwa attraction page and a separate Tripadvisor review thread on the same site. The reference site Madain Project reaches the same conclusion for Safa specifically, stating that “not much remains of the original hill as it is now covered and part of the Masjid Haram, only a few rocks of the tip are visible,” a description consistent with the Madain Project entry on al-Safa. The French-language Wikipedia article on Safa and Marwa summarises the long-term process in similar terms: over centuries of pilgrimage, the passage of millions of pilgrims progressively wore down the original rocky elevations until, today, they are reduced to two rocky mounds that barely break the surface of the ground, a characterisation given in the article’s own words as available on the French Wikipedia entry for Safâ et Marwa.

So what does a pilgrim standing at Safa or Marwa in 2026 actually see? At each end of the corridor, set into the architecture, is a small outcrop of the natural bedrock — greyish, weathered stone quite different in colour and texture from the polished marble that surrounds it on every side — visible through a glass or reinforced panel, at a scale that a first-time visitor sometimes finds startlingly modest given the immense religious weight the two names carry. It is not a hill one climbs, or even a hill one can properly see the shape of; it is a fragment, a sample, a surviving witness kept under protective covering, exactly the treatment given to comparably sensitive relics elsewhere in the Haram, such as the Station of Ibrahim. This is not a matter of neglect or disrespect — it is the unavoidable outcome of building an air-conditioned, multi-storey structure over a site that pilgrim volumes made impossible to leave in its natural state. But it means that the honest description of what is on view, given plainly, is this: a small, carefully preserved sample of rock, not a mountain, and not even most of what once stood there.

Visiting Umrah Historical Sites: The Ziyarah-Legitimacy Question

Because Safa and Marwa are two of the small number of places in Makkah with an explicit basis in the Qur’an for the act performed there — sa’y is commanded, not merely permitted, and forms part of the valid rites of hajj and umrah — they sit outside the general caution that applies to other historical sites in this guide. Scholars such as Ibn Taymiyyah and Ibn Uthaymeen, and bodies such as Saudi Arabia’s Standing Committee for Islamic Research and Fatwas, hold that only a short list of places around Makkah and Madinah has a genuine basis in the sunnah for intentional devotional visitation, and that this list is considerably shorter than popular practice suggests — a position explained in detail at IslamQA’s discussion of visiting historical sites. Safa and Marwa are squarely within that short list; the concern this guide raises is not whether sa’y itself is legitimate, which is not in question, but a separate, narrower architectural and legal question: whether the specific physical corridor built and rebuilt by the Saudi state since 1926 still corresponds, in every part of its current width, to the historically and legally valid Mas’a. That is a question about a building, not about the sanctity of a rite, and it is treated at length later in this guide.

History of Al-Masa’a: The First Saudi Enclosure, 1950s–1970s

The transformation from cleared street to enclosed building took place in stages, and the sources disagree somewhat about exact dates, which this guide reports rather than smooths over. Saudipedia states that the Mas’a “was first architecturally integrated” into the Grand Mosque structure in 1956, during the reign of King Saud ibn Abdulaziz Al Saud, when the existing facilities in the Ajyad and Mas’a areas — the last of the houses and shops — were finally removed to make way for new construction, according to Saudipedia’s history of Safa and Marwa. The Madain Project’s separate account places the key roofing and enclosure of the Mas’a and the two hills within the mosque’s structure at “circa 1960 CE,” during what it calls the First Saudi expansion of Masjid al-Haram, a dating that is broadly consistent with Saudipedia’s but not identical to it, as recorded on the Madain Project page on al-Masa’a. Both sources agree on the substance even where the exact year differs by a few: during King Saud’s reign, construction began on the first and second floors of the Mas’a, converting what had been a single-level open street into a multi-storey enclosed gallery for the first time in its history.

This first Saudi-era Mas’a building was air-conditioned — a detail of real engineering consequence given Makkah’s climate, and one of the earliest large-scale mechanical cooling installations in the sanctuary. It gave pilgrims, for the first time, a sheltered, shaded, cooled route between the two hills, replacing centuries of walking the distance in direct sun with only cloth awnings for relief, of the kind installed by King Abdulaziz in 1947. The corridor at this stage still followed roughly the historic footprint of the old street — narrow by later standards, but now roofed, floored in stone, and structurally continuous with the rest of the mosque rather than a separate public thoroughfare running past its perimeter.

Further work followed under King Fahd ibn Abdulaziz Al Saud, whose reign saw the Safa side of the ground floor expanded and further demolition of buildings around the Marwa end, bringing the total area at that stage to approximately 375 square metres of additional space — figures that, as recorded, appear to describe a fairly modest incremental widening rather than the wholesale reconstruction that followed later, according to the same Saudipedia account. New doors were added on the ground and first floors on the Marwa side to improve pilgrim entry and exit. By the end of the King Fahd-era work, the Mas’a was a two-storey, air-conditioned, roofed corridor — recognisably a building, in a way the nineteenth-century market street never was, but still a modest structure by the standards of what would come after 2007.

Historical Development: The King Abdullah Expansion and the Widening of 2007–2015

The Mas’a that pilgrims walk through today is overwhelmingly a product of a single sustained building campaign carried out under King Abdullah ibn Abdulaziz Al Saud, continued and completed under his successor King Salman ibn Abdulaziz Al Saud. This is the expansion that gives the corridor its current width, its four floors, and its vastly increased capacity — and it is also the expansion that triggered the fiqh controversy discussed in the next section.

According to a contemporaneous report from the Hajj information service hajinformation.com, the Saudi authorities announced in May 2008 what was then described as “the largest ever expansion of the Haram in Makkah” with the Mas’a project at its centre. Construction had in fact begun somewhat earlier: the same source states that “the latest expansion started on February 9, 2007 and is expected to take three years,” with the project’s initial phase covering the ground, first and second floors, plus a mezzanine level intended specifically to spread pilgrim volume across more floors and reduce crowd density at any single point. The plan, as reported at the time, was to expand the Mas’a’s total area from approximately 29,400 square metres to 87,000 square metres — very close to a threefold increase — raising hourly sa’y capacity from roughly 44,000 pilgrims to a projected 118,000, and raising the number who could pray within the Mas’a area itself from about 42,000 to 115,600.

Contemporary Saudi press coverage from 2008 confirms the phased opening of this new structure: Arab News reported in September 2008 that “the full commissioning of the ground floor of the Masaa and partial opening of the first and second floors this month have been greatly helpful to pilgrims,” adding that once construction was complete on all three floors the Mas’a would cover “a total area of 89,000 sq. meters with a capacity for 120,000 pilgrims per hour” — figures close to, but not identical with, the earlier projections, illustrating how the exact final numbers shifted slightly as construction proceeded, according to Arab News’s 2008 report on the Grand Mosque courtyard expansion.

The dimensional core of the modern Mas’a, as most consistently reported across Saudi state sources, is this: the corridor’s width was doubled from twenty metres to forty metres, using space taken from areas of the mosque adjacent to the old corridor; the number of floors rose to four; and the total floor area rose to just over 87,000 square metres, up from about 29,000 square metres before the widening — a more than threefold increase, according to the official account published by the Presidency of the Two Holy Mosques Affairs and corroborated by Saudipedia’s dedicated article on al-Masa’a. Including service areas and every level, the total constructed floor area across the whole Mas’a structure is reported at approximately 125,000 square metres. The resulting hourly capacity is reported with unusual consistency across sources as 118,000 pilgrims per hour, up from roughly 44,000 before the expansion — a figure repeated by Gulf News, by the Presidency’s own account, and by Saudipedia alike, though at least one Arab News report from 2015 gives a slightly different combined mosque-wide capacity figure of 114,000 an hour for a related but not identical measurement, illustrating that even official Saudi figures are not perfectly uniform across years and contexts, according to a 2015 report via Sailan Muslim.

The length of the corridor between the two hills is reported, again with some variation, at approximately 394 metres by the Presidency of the Two Holy Mosques Affairs and by Saudipedia, while other reputable tallies put the figure closer to 394.5 metres, or note that “some say” 405 metres and others 375 metres — a spread the travel-reference site Ibn Battuta Travel records candidly rather than resolving, observing that seven full laps at the 394.5-metre figure total approximately 2,761.5 metres, according to Ibn Battuta Travel’s page on Safa and Marwa. This numerical untidiness is not new — recall that Burton, writing in 1853, already recorded two incompatible classical measurements for the same distance, Ibn Jubayr’s 893 paces against the 780-cubit figure given by other authorities. The Mas’a has never had a single, uncontested length in the historical or the modern record, and this guide reports the range rather than picking a winner.

The Third Saudi Expansion of the Grand Mosque, of which the Mas’a widening formed a part, was launched by King Abdullah in 2011 and formally inaugurated by King Salman in 2015, according to Saudipedia’s account of the Third Saudi Expansion, though — as with the Mas’a’s own opening — the practical, phased handover of usable space had already been under way for several years before that formal date, and continued to be refined afterward. Within that larger project, Saudipedia separately records that the Mas’a area was expanded to approximately 57,000 square metres with capacity for 70,000 worshippers as a standing-room prayer space, distinct from its sa’y-lap capacity of 118,000 an hour — two different capacity figures measuring two different uses of the same structure, which should not be confused with one another. A 2013 Saudi Gazette report likewise confirms that “expansion of masaa (between Safa and Marwa) was completed earlier” than other elements of the same broader project, and that this alone had already increased capacity “from 44,000 to 118,000 pilgrims per hour,” according to Saudi Gazette’s 2013 coverage.

Two further figures are worth recording for the general reader assembling a mental model of the Mas’a’s scale. According to the 2013 account published by the Muslim World League London Office, once King Abdullah’s expansion was substantially complete, “pilgrims can perform Sa’ie very easily and comfortably from all five levels” of the combined mosque and Mas’a structure — “basement, which is fully air-conditioned, ground, first floor, second, third floor and from the roof” — a count of five usable levels that is higher than the “four floors” figure quoted by Saudipedia and other sources, most probably because the Muslim World League’s count includes the roof and a basement level as additional sa’y-capable surfaces on top of the four principal architectural floors. This is one of several places where sources disagree on how many levels the Mas’a “has,” depending on whether the roof and a service basement are counted as full sa’y levels or as separate categories, and this guide flags rather than resolves the discrepancy.

The 2008 Widening Controversy: A Serious and Unresolved Fiqh Dispute

The engineering achievement described above did not proceed without objection, and the objection was not a fringe or marginal one. When Saudi authorities widened the Mas’a from twenty to forty metres — pushing the eastern boundary of the corridor roughly twenty metres beyond where the marble-marked historic Mas’a had stood — a genuine and serious dispute broke out among Islamic scholars over whether sa’y performed in the new, wider area was religiously valid at all. This is not a settled question with one right answer that this guide can simply report; it is a live disagreement between credentialed scholars, still cited on both sides today, and it deserves to be laid out fairly rather than resolved.

The Objecting Position

The core objection is straightforward: sa’y is one of the fixed rites of hajj and umrah, tied by name to two specific, named landmarks — Safa and Marwa — and, in the view of those who objected, its physical location is one of the group of ritual sites whose boundaries are fixed by revelation and precedent rather than by administrative convenience, comparable to the boundaries of Arafat, Muzdalifah and Mina. On this reasoning, a pilgrim who walks outside the boundaries of the historically attested Mas’a has not performed sa’y “between Safa and Marwa” in the sense the Qur’an and the Prophet’s ﷺ practice require, no matter how sincerely intended.

A Malaysian government fatwa portal, drawing on records of the dispute compiled by scholars researching the episode afterward, names specific figures who objected, at least in the expansion’s early stages: Sheikh Salah al-Luhaidan, then chairman of the Supreme Judicial Council of Saudi Arabia; Sheikh Salih al-Fawzan, a senior member of the Council of Senior Scholars of Saudi Arabia; and Sheikh Abd al-Rahman Nasir al-Barrak, among other scholars, according to the account summarised at Malaysia’s Mufti of the Federal Territory portal. The same source states that the objecting position drew on an older fatwa attributed to a former Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia, Sheikh Muhammad ibn Ibrahim Al al-Sheikh, and that within Saudi Arabia’s own Council of Senior Scholars, a majority reportedly opposed the specific plan to widen the Mas’a eastward, preferring instead that any increase in capacity be achieved by building additional floors upward rather than expanding the ground-level footprint — a position also recorded in an Indonesian academic thesis on the dispute held by the State Islamic University of Malang, which states that “the majority of the Council of Senior Scholars rejected the plan to expand the Mas’a” on the grounds that the existing Mas’a, as expanded under King Saud, already encompassed the whole of the legitimate corridor, according to the thesis Perluasan Mas’â (Tempat Sa’i). Separate reporting from the Hajj news outlet TwoCircles.net, filed in real time in 2008, confirms that the expansion proceeded “amid a hot debate among prominent Islamic scholars from within the Kingdom and abroad,” with “some scholars” voicing “their criticism over the expansion with the argument that the religious ritual of Sa’i shall be strictly restricted to the area between Safa and Marwa hills,” according to TwoCircles.net’s June 2008 report. A separate TwoCircles.net dispatch from earlier that year reports that Sheikh Abdurrahman al-Sudais, head of the Presidency for the Affairs of the Two Holy Mosques, felt it necessary to publicly appeal for calm over the dispute, describing the expansion as “one of the issues involving Ijtihad that were discussed by some people without careful consideration” and stressing that the ruling authorities had consulted eminent scholars from around the world before proceeding, according to TwoCircles.net’s May 2008 report — itself a sign of how publicly contested the question had become.

The Supporting Position

The case for the expansion’s validity, made at length by Egypt’s Dar al-Ifta and echoed by a substantial number of other muftis, rests on several distinct arguments, each worth stating in its own terms rather than compressed into a single line.

First, a linguistic and textual argument: the Qur’anic verse commanding sa’y, Surah al-Baqarah 2:158, names Safa and Marwa as “symbols of God” without specifying a width for the space between them, and neither the Prophet ﷺ nor his Companions are recorded as having marked out or restricted a particular lane’s width when performing the rite. Because “nothing was reported from him or from any of his Companions that specified a certain locus between al-Safa and al-Marwa in which sa’y is to be made,” the argument runs, restricting the space to a fixed width was never a legal requirement in the first place — a position the fatwa attributes explicitly to the Yemeni hadith scholar Abd al-Rahman ibn Yahya al-Mu’allami, who died in 1386 AH and who observed that if width had mattered legally, it would have been fixed with the same precision applied to the boundaries of Arafat, Muzdalifah and Mina — and it was not, according to the fatwa published by Dar al-Ifta.

Second, an argument from classical fiqh commentary: the fatwa cites the Shafi’i jurist Shams al-Din al-Ramli, who, when asked directly whether the width of the Mas’a had ever been demarcated, replied that he had “not come upon anyone who has done so,” because the scholars’ silence reflected the fact that there was no need to specify it — what mattered was that a pilgrim traverse the full linear distance between the two hills, touching heel to the wall of Safa and toe to the wall of Marwa on each pass. Al-Ramli’s own commentary, Nihayat al-Muhtaj, is quoted stating that a slight deviation causes no harm, a leniency also attributed to al-Shafi’i himself. A separate commentator, Abd al-Hamid al-Sherwani, is quoted giving a customary figure of “approximately 35 arm spans” for the width of the historic Mas’a, but explicitly describing this as a description of what was observed rather than a legal boundary — a distinction the supporting scholars treat as decisive, and the objecting scholars, implicitly, do not.

Third, and most consequential for the specific 2008 dispute, an evidentiary argument grounded in surveying and eyewitness testimony. According to the Dar al-Ifta fatwa, Saudi authorities — anticipating exactly this objection — commissioned two separate lines of evidence before proceeding. They gathered sworn testimony from a group of elderly Makkan residents, the youngest of whom was reportedly more than seventy years old, who had lived around Safa and Marwa before the earlier Saudi-era clearances and who testified before a judge in Makkah that the two hills had historically extended significantly farther than the ground they occupied at the time of testimony — by a distance corresponding to the new expansion. Separately, the Saudi survey authority took physical rock samples from Safa and from the area proposed for the eastern expansion, and reported finding that Safa’s natural formation projected some 30 metres east of the pre-2007 Mas’a boundary, and that Marwa’s did likewise by 31 metres — figures the fatwa presents as corroborating the elderly witnesses’ testimony almost exactly. An Indonesian academic source citing the same episode gives a similar account, noting that the case for the expansion’s permissibility rested in part on “testimony from around thirty trustworthy people who knew the condition of the Mas’a before the 1955 widening” together with “geological research” and the absence of any explicit textual limit on the Mas’a’s width in the Prophet’s ﷺ era, according to the Malay-language fatwa portal cited above. This evidentiary approach also drew a specific objection of its own, which the Dar al-Ifta fatwa addresses directly: that using geological survey methods to establish a ritual boundary amounts to intruding into concealed or hidden matters beyond what worship requires. The fatwa’s answer is that the surveys sought only visible, physical evidence of a boundary that had once been visible and known before being removed by later construction — not hidden knowledge, but recovered knowledge.

A range of prominent muftis outside Saudi Arabia endorsed the expansion publicly in 2008, adding international weight to the supporting position: the account collected by Indonesia’s Detikcom names Egypt’s Grand Mufti Dr Ali Jum’ah, Lebanon’s Dr Muhammad Rashid Qabbani and Dr Muhammad Ali al-Juzu, and Palestine’s Dr Ikrima Sabri as having issued statements affirming the expansion’s validity, according to Detikcom’s 2008 report, while the same report notes that Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi likewise raised no objection, citing the Prophet’s ﷺ general practice of accommodating hardship in the rites during his own farewell pilgrimage. The Jordanian government’s own Iftaa Department also weighed in, concluding cautiously that “if the expansion lies within the width of both mountains, then the sa’y is valid; if not, then the sa’y is invalid” — explicitly making the validity question turn on a factual, geological determination rather than resolving it outright, and recommending that the matter ultimately rests with specialists in geology rather than jurists alone, according to Jordan’s General Iftaa Department. This is a genuinely different position from Dar al-Ifta’s more confident conclusion, and it illustrates that even among scholars broadly sympathetic to the expansion, the reasoning and the degree of certainty varied.

Where the Dispute Stands

What can be said fairly is this. The dispute was real, it involved senior, credentialed scholars on both sides — including, at least in its early stages, a reported majority of Saudi Arabia’s own Council of Senior Scholars — and it was never resolved by a single universally accepted ruling that silenced the other position. The Saudi state proceeded with the expansion, backed by testimony and survey evidence and by fatwas from a number of prominent scholars inside and outside the kingdom, including formal statements from Egypt’s Dar al-Ifta reissued more than once in the years since. Some senior Saudi scholars who had reportedly opposed the plan in its early stages did not, as far as the public record indicates, sustain an organised public campaign against the completed building once it opened; whether this reflects a change of position, a decision to defer to state authority on a matter of public order, or simply the passage of time is not something this guide can establish from the available sources, and no claim is made here about which explanation is correct. What is verifiable is that specific, named scholars occupying the most senior religious positions in Saudi Arabia’s own religious establishment are on the public record as having initially rejected the eastward widening of the Mas’a, and that this position has not been retracted in any statement this guide was able to locate. Some later fatwa-answering platforms serving specific national audiences report a degree of ongoing uncertainty among pilgrims themselves — one contemporary Hanafi fatwa service, for instance, answers a reader’s question about the new Mas’a’s validity by first stating an understanding that the new area is built as an additional floor above the old Mas’a rather than as a lateral extension beside it, and only then concluding that sa’y performed there is valid on that understanding, while inviting further correspondence if the physical facts are different — a hedge that itself suggests the underlying factual question has not been uniformly and clearly communicated to pilgrims even years later, according to IslamQA.org’s Hanafi fatwa desk.

This guide takes no position on which side of the dispute is correct. It reports, as plainly as the sources allow, that prominent scholars objected to the 2008 widening on the grounds that sa’y’s boundaries are fixed by precedent rather than administrative discretion; that the Saudi Fiqh establishment and a number of internationally respected muftis defended the widening on textual, juristic and evidentiary grounds, including sworn eyewitness testimony and geological survey; and that the disagreement, so far as the public record shows, was never closed by a single ruling accepted by all parties. A pilgrim walking the full forty-metre width of the modern Mas’a today is, in a strict sense, walking through a live and unresolved scholarly disagreement — a fact this guide considers the reader is entitled to know before, not after, performing the rite.

Architecture and Engineering: How the Modern Mas’a Actually Works

Set the fiqh dispute aside for a moment and look at the Mas’a purely as a piece of crowd-handling infrastructure, because on that level it is a genuinely sophisticated building, engineered to solve a problem that has no real precedent elsewhere in religious architecture: moving well over a hundred thousand people an hour, on foot, in both directions, along a single fixed route, in extreme heat, without the kind of turnstile or timed-ticket control that would be normal in any other mass-transit context.

The Green Markers and the Valley Floor

The single most distinctive engineering feature of the Mas’a, and the one every pilgrim notices immediately, is the pair of green fluorescent lights suspended above the corridor partway between Safa and Marwa on each level. These mark the lowest-lying stretch of the route — the historic valley floor between the two hills, described in Saudi sources as “the deepest depression within Mas’a, situated at the valley’s lowest point nestled between the two hills,” according to Saudipedia’s account of the site’s topography. This is the stretch across which, according to the tradition behind the rite of sa’y, Hagar broke into a run when she lost sight of her infant son in the low ground between the two hills — a detail belonging properly to the companion article on the ritual itself, but relevant here because the green lights are a purely architectural solution to a purely religious instruction: they tell a pilgrim, without requiring them to identify a natural landmark that survives nowhere in visible form, exactly where the sunnah pace begins and ends. Sources differ slightly on the precise length of this marked stretch — a Tripadvisor account citing on-site information gives approximately 55 to 60 metres, and a devotional guide from Hajj Umrah Planner gives 50 metres between the two sets of lights — a minor but real discrepancy consistent with the pattern of small measurement disagreements that runs throughout this corridor’s history, according to a Tripadvisor review citing official signage and Hajj and Umrah Planner’s guide to Safa, Marwa and sa’y. Within this marked zone, men are expected to quicken their pace to a brisk walk or light jog — women are not expected to do so, and continue at a normal walking pace throughout — while outside the marked zone, on every level, both sexes walk normally. The lights exist on every one of the Mas’a’s levels, meaning a pilgrim performing sa’y on the roof is given exactly the same positional guidance as one on the ground floor, a detail of some importance to the accessibility discussion below.

Lanes and the One-Way Flow System

Unlike tawaf, which moves in a single rotational direction around the Kaaba, sa’y is inherently bidirectional: seven lengths alternating between Safa and Marwa mean that, at any given moment, roughly half the pilgrims on the corridor are walking in each direction. Managing two opposing streams of pedestrian traffic at six-figure hourly volumes, inside a fixed-width corridor, is one of the harder problems in crowd engineering, and the modern Mas’a’s answer is lane separation. The corridor is divided into multiple parallel lanes running the full length between the hills — most descriptions give four lanes across the width of each level, with directional lanes assigned to each flow of pilgrim traffic and the innermost lanes reserved for pilgrims with mobility needs, according to the Madain Project’s description of al-Masa’a’s circulation system, which states that “the walkway is entirely covered by a gallery and is divided into four one-way lanes, of which the inner two are reserved for the elderly and disabled” — a description echoed independently by Tripadvisor’s own summary of the site. Directional signage, floor markings and, during peak periods, physical barriers and marshals enforce the lane discipline; pilgrims who have performed sa’y at very different times of day and year consistently report that the experience varies enormously depending on how strictly the one-way system is being enforced at that particular hour, a point taken up in the practical guidance below.

Wheelchair, Cart and Mobility Provision

Because sa’y — like tawaf — must be completed on one continuous level per attempt, and because it involves a fixed linear distance that not every pilgrim can walk unaided, the Mas’a’s accessibility provision is built into its architecture rather than added as an afterthought. The ground floor carries a dedicated accessible lane running the full length of the corridor, generally positioned toward the centre or inner side of the lane structure, according to a description of Hajj and Umrah accessibility services published by Halalbooking’s Umrah help guide, which states that “the Mas’a…has a dedicated accessible lane on the ground level, with attendants stationed throughout.” Paid manual wheelchair-pushing services and, where operating, electric wheelchairs and carts are available at several points around the corridor: as of the most recent operator listings, paid manual cart stations sit on the ground floor near Gate 14 and on the first floor near the Al-Arqam staircase by Gate 16, while free manual carts are available at the eastern courtyard near Bab al-Salam (Gate 19) and the western courtyard at the Al-Shubaika Bridge (Gate 64), according to The Islamic Information’s 2026 guide to Grand Mosque carts. Electric wheelchairs can be pre-booked for home delivery in Makkah through the Ministry-linked platform assist.haramain.com, with a full charge reported to last approximately 20 kilometres — comfortably enough for a full tawaf and sa’y in a single outing. The Grand Mosque’s mobility services department has reported deploying as many as 9,000 wheelchairs for pilgrim use, with designated gathering points for licensed wheelchair-pushing attendants at the Ajyad entrance near King Abdulaziz Gate, on the ground floor near King Fahd Gate, and on the first floor of the Mas’a itself, according to Arab News’s 2023 report on Grand Mosque wheelchair provision. Larger electric carts and golf-cart-style vehicles, intended primarily for elderly pilgrims and those with more significant mobility needs, are booked through a separate official platform and depart from stations at the Ajyad Bridge and the Al-Shubaika Bridge rather than from within the Mas’a corridor itself, reflecting the fact that these larger vehicles operate on wider approach routes rather than inside the pedestrian lanes, according to Labbaik Hajj Umrah’s 2026 transport booking guide, which records that this cart service is free for pilgrims aged 65 and older and for pilgrims with disabilities, plus one companion, with a fee of 300 Saudi riyals otherwise applying.

Upper-level access for wheelchairs and strollers is provided by a network of ramps, lifts and escalators connecting all four principal floors, a detail confirmed independently by several accessibility-focused travel guides, including one that describes the upper floors as “fully accessible via elevators” with wheelchair paths continuing onto every level of the sa’y corridor, according to IhramOS’s wheelchair accessibility guide. A note of genuine engineering interest here: because the green-light markers exist identically on every floor, a wheelchair user or a pilgrim walking with a stroller on an upper level receives exactly the same guidance about the brisk-walking zone as a pilgrim on the ground floor — the ritual instruction has been replicated architecturally at every level of the building rather than existing only once, at grade.

Cooling and Climate Engineering

Makkah’s climate is the ultimate reason the Mas’a is enclosed and mechanically cooled at all — Burton, Burckhardt and Snouck Hurgronje all describe pilgrims performing sa’y in direct heat, under nothing more than cloth awnings at best, a condition that would be regarded as a serious safety hazard under modern crowd-management standards given the volumes involved today. The current building is air-conditioned throughout all four floors, a feature present since the earliest Saudi-era enclosure of the 1950s and expanded with each subsequent phase of construction; the 2013 account from the Muslim World League’s London office specifically credits the King Abdullah-era expansion with providing “air conditioning systems and electric stairs” as part of the same package of works that widened the corridor, according to the Muslim World League London Office’s account.

Cooling engineering across the wider Haram complex and the pilgrimage sites has continued to expand well beyond the Mas’a’s own air conditioning. As of the most recent reporting ahead of the 2026 Hajj season, Saudi authorities operate five dedicated misting stations delivering more than 6,000 individual mist columns, and five chilled-water stations connected to more than 25,000 drinking-water taps across the holy sites, with a combined cooling and hydration production capacity of approximately 1,500 cubic metres per hour, according to a report on Hajj 2026 service improvements published in May 2026. It should be stated plainly, however, that this specific figure describes cooling infrastructure across the holy sites broadly — Arafat, Mina, Muzdalifah and the approach routes between them — rather than infrastructure inside the Mas’a corridor specifically, and the same source does not break out a separate cooling capacity figure for the Grand Mosque interior. This guide has not been able to verify a Mas’a-specific cooling capacity figure as distinct from the mosque’s general air-conditioning system, and states that limitation honestly rather than attributing the broader holy-sites figure to the corridor by implication.

Crowd Safety After Past Incidents

The Mas’a’s current lane-separated, marshal-supervised, heavily signed design reflects decades of accumulated experience with what happens when very large pedestrian crowds move through a confined space without adequate control — experience gained, in the most serious cases, at severe human cost elsewhere in the pilgrimage infrastructure. The Grand Mosque complex itself was the site of a serious structural failure in September 2015, when high winds brought down a construction crane onto the mosque during renovation work associated with the same King Abdullah-era expansion programme that produced the modern Mas’a; more than a hundred people were killed and over two hundred injured, according to contemporaneous coverage from The Guardian’s reporting on the crane collapse. That incident was a construction and structural-engineering failure rather than a crowd-crush event inside the completed Mas’a itself, and this guide has found no evidence connecting it specifically to the sa’y corridor’s own design or operation — it is recorded here because it took place at the same mosque, during the same expansion project, and because it is part of the wider context of engineering risk that has shaped Saudi authorities’ more recent emphasis on redundancy, phased openings and structural caution in mosque construction generally. Separately, the far larger-scale crowd disasters associated with the Hajj pilgrimage in the modern era — including the 2015 crush at Mina, which is well documented in the peer-reviewed medical literature — took place at Mina rather than at the Mas’a, and this guide does not attribute them to the sa’y corridor; they are noted only to make clear that Saudi crowd-engineering doctrine across the whole pilgrimage infrastructure, including the Mas’a’s one-way lanes, marshalled flow and phased capacity increases, has developed in direct response to well-documented crowd-safety failures elsewhere in the pilgrimage system, not as an abstract design preference. Today, the Mas’a’s mixture of lane separation, one-way enforcement, mezzanine and roof-level dispersal, marshal staffing and real-time crowd-density monitoring reflects that accumulated caution. The Presidency for the Affairs of the Two Holy Mosques has introduced a public crowd-density viewing service allowing pilgrims and planners to check congestion levels at different points in the mosque, including the Mas’a, before travelling to a given area at a given time, according to the Two Holy Mosques Authority’s announcement of the crowd density viewing service.

Zamzam Water Distribution Along the Corridor

The Mas’a is one of the most heavily served Zamzam-water locations in the entire Haram, and the distribution network reaching it is itself a substantial piece of infrastructure. Zamzam water is drawn from a well roughly 20 metres east of the Kaaba, at a depth of around 30 metres, using electric pumps that have replaced the traditional rope-and-bucket method entirely; the well itself is not accessible to pilgrims, but its water reaches every part of the mosque, including the Mas’a, through a network of underground pipes, storage reservoirs and cooling stations, according to Al Jazeera’s illustrated guide to Zamzam water. Water drawn from the well is pumped to large stainless-steel storage tanks at a facility outside the city at Kudai, then passed through cooling stations that bring its temperature down to a drinkable range before it is distributed by underground pipeline and, where needed, refrigerated tanker to dispensing points throughout the mosque, according to a detailed Arabic-language account of the distribution process published by the charitable organisation Jam’iyyat Ri’ayat Fuqara al-Haram, which states that the Presidency for the Affairs of the Two Holy Mosques operates specialised refrigerated trucks equipped with GPS tracking to deliver water to some 90 major dispensing points distributed across the mosque’s ground and upper floors, prioritising rapid resupply to areas of high pilgrim density — of which the Mas’a, given its capacity figures, is unambiguously one.

Within the Mas’a itself, Zamzam is available in two main forms: large mobile or fixed coolers, generally holding chilled water with a smaller number of room-temperature units clearly marked “not cold” for pilgrims who prefer or medically require unchilled water, and fixed taps set into the walls or columns along the corridor. One detailed account of the distribution system notes that most of the fixed Zamzam taps inside the entire Grand Mosque — as opposed to portable coolers, which are spread throughout — are specifically located between Safa and Marwa, making the Mas’a proportionally the best-served single stretch of the mosque for direct tap access rather than cooler access, according to A Muslim Traveller’s account of Zamzam distribution in the Haramain. Disposable cups are supplied at cooler stations in dedicated holders, with unused cups stacked upside down and used cups placed upside up as an informal but consistently observed hygiene convention. As of mid-2025, official figures put daily Zamzam supply at a minimum of roughly 950,000 litres on ordinary days, rising to as much as 1.6 million litres daily during Hajj and Ramadan, with consumption during peak periods reaching approximately 2 million litres a day, according to Al Jazeera’s reporting, while an older but more granular estimate from the General Administration of Service Affairs recorded more than 1.2 million litres — around six million bottles’ worth — distributed in the first quarter of a single year using more than fifty mobile Zamzam carts deployed across the ground and first floors of the tawaf area alone, each cart carrying 80 litres of chilled and unchilled water, according to a 2021 report on Zamzam distribution volumes. These carts serve the tawaf area specifically in that report, but the same fleet and refill infrastructure supplies the Mas’a, given the shared underground network described above.

As of July 2026, one operational change is worth flagging directly for visitors: signage and staff guidance at several Grand Mosque gates have begun restricting pilgrims from bringing personal water coolers and large bags into the mosque, a measure reported as intended to ease congestion and security screening at entry points, according to a 2025 report on new visitor instructions for Masjid al-Haram, which also confirms that the internal Zamzam cooler network inside the mosque, including in the Rawdah area of Masjid an-Nabawi in Madinah, is continuously refilled by dedicated teams working to ensure the coolers are never left empty. Refilling personal containers directly from the coolers inside the Mas’a is generally discouraged by on-site staff, and pilgrims wishing to take Zamzam water away in bulk are directed to dedicated filling taps — commonly cited near Gate 79 and on the roof level — rather than to the drinking coolers used for immediate hydration during sa’y, according to a range of pilgrim-reported accounts collected on a discussion thread on Zamzam access in Makkah. None of this affects the free, unrestricted availability of Zamzam for drinking while performing sa’y itself, which remains, as of July 2026, exactly as open as it has always been.

Visiting the Mas’a: A Practical Guide for 2026

The Mas’a’s engineering gives pilgrims a genuine and consequential choice that did not exist before the King Abdullah-era expansion: which of several usable levels to perform sa’y on. That choice is not merely one of comfort. It has real consequences for time, physical exertion, and — for pilgrims who are elderly, disabled, travelling with small children, or simply exhausted after a long tawaf — for whether the rite is completed safely and without unnecessary hardship.

Choosing a Level

The ground floor is the historic route in spirit, if not in exact width, and it is invariably the most crowded level at almost every hour of the day, because it is the level closest to the Mataf and the most intuitive route for pilgrims moving directly from tawaf into sa’y without seeking out stairs, lifts or escalators. Its principal advantage is that it requires no additional navigation; its principal disadvantage is congestion, particularly in the hours after Maghrib and Isha prayers and throughout the day during Ramadan and Hajj season, when the one-way lane discipline is tested hardest and progress along the green-marked jogging zone can slow to a shuffle.

The first and second floors, and the mezzanine levels introduced during the King Abdullah-era construction specifically to spread pilgrim density across more surfaces, generally carry lighter foot traffic than the ground floor at most hours, according to the pattern described in several accessibility and family-travel guides that specifically recommend the upper floors for wheelchair users, stroller-pushing families and pilgrims seeking a calmer pace, including a guide to upper-level sa’y for Singaporean pilgrims, which observes that Al-Masaa “now spans multiple levels to ease congestion” and that the upper floors and rooftop pathway open “during busy periods” specifically to relieve pressure on the ground floor. The trade-off is navigational: reaching an upper floor requires using lifts, escalators or ramps sited at specific gates, and a pilgrim unfamiliar with the building’s layout may spend real time simply locating the correct access point, particularly on a first visit.

The roof level, when open, offers the most spacious walking conditions of any level, with wider lanes and — because it sits above the enclosed structure — natural light and, at night, open air, though it remains within the same climate-engineered building envelope in terms of shading and, at many points, misting or cooling provision. Roof access is not constant: it is opened and closed according to crowd levels and season, and a pilgrim planning to use it should expect to confirm on arrival, via signage or mosque staff, whether it is currently in operation rather than assuming it will be, consistent with reporting that the Grand Mosque’s rooftop is prepared and opened “upon directive” from the Presidency according to seasonal need, as described in Saudi Gazette’s 2022 report on rooftop readiness. The roof level’s Sa’i lanes carry the same green-light markers as every other floor, so the ritual guidance a pilgrim receives is identical regardless of which level is chosen — a design feature worth restating because it removes any practical disadvantage to choosing a higher, quieter floor over the crowded ground level purely for reasons of comfort or safety.

Distance and Time, Level by Level

Because every level of the Mas’a follows the same 394-metre span between Safa and Marwa — the structure was built as a set of stacked, vertically aligned floors rather than as routes of different lengths — the total distance of seven complete lengths is essentially the same on every level: approximately 2,761.5 metres, or a little over 2.7 kilometres, using the widely cited 394.5-metre single-length figure, per Ibn Battuta Travel’s calculation. Given the range of reported single-length figures discussed earlier in this guide — from as low as 375 metres to as high as 405 metres, depending on the source — the honest range for total sa’y distance is roughly 2.6 to 2.85 kilometres, and pilgrims should not be alarmed if a fitness tracker or phone pedometer returns a figure somewhat different from any single number quoted online.

Time taken varies enormously with crowd density rather than with level chosen, since walking pace rather than distance is the variable that changes most. A pilgrim performing sa’y on an uncrowded floor at a normal walking pace, pausing briefly for dua at each hill as is customary, can expect to complete seven lengths in roughly 45 minutes to just over an hour; the same distance in heavy ground-floor congestion during Hajj season, Ramadan, or the hours immediately following Maghrib, can take two hours or considerably longer, with progress through the green-marked zone in particular slowing to far below a normal walking pace when lanes are at capacity. Pilgrims using a wheelchair or being pushed by an attendant should expect their own pace to be set primarily by the pusher and by lane congestion rather than by the green-marker guidance, which — as noted above — is not obligatory for wheelchair users in any case.

Best Hours

Consistent with patterns reported across the wider Haram, the calmest conditions in the Mas’a are generally found in the period immediately after Fajr prayer and before the heat and crowds of the day build, and — during Ramadan specifically — in the hours before Suhoor, when congestion is reported as roughly half of the post-Dhuhr peak, according to the account of Zamzam-collection timing patterns published by Jam’iyyat Ri’ayat Fuqara al-Haram, whose observations about congestion patterns around water collection are consistent with general Haram crowd behaviour rather than being specific to Zamzam alone. The period directly after Jumu’ah prayer is consistently reported as one of the most congested times across the whole mosque, including the Mas’a, and is generally best avoided by pilgrims with flexibility in their schedule.

Honest Advice for Elderly and Disabled Pilgrims

The single most useful piece of practical advice this guide can offer such pilgrims is this: do not default to the ground floor out of habit or a sense that it is the “real” or more authentic route. The ground floor is objectively the most congested level at nearly every hour, its accessible lane notwithstanding, and a pilgrim who is frail, recovering from illness, travelling with young children, or managing a chronic condition is generally far better served by using the lifts and heading to an upper floor, where lane discipline is easier to maintain, seating and rest points are less contested, and the same ritual markers and requirements apply in full. Free manual wheelchairs are provided at major gates on a first-come, first-served basis, and given consistently high demand, pilgrims who can reasonably do so are advised to bring a lightweight wheelchair or arrange one through their hotel or hajj operator in advance rather than relying solely on availability on the day, a point made plainly in several accessibility guides, including thehajj.guide’s practical accessibility guide, which recommends renting privately if a free wheelchair cannot be secured, at a typical cost of 50 to 150 Saudi riyals per day as of the guide’s most recent update. Paid attendants who push wheelchairs through both tawaf and sa’y can be engaged on the spot at rates that vary with demand and season, and it is reasonable, and not considered impolite, to negotiate the fee before beginning. Pilgrims who intend to use an electric wheelchair or scooter should be aware that these are generally treated as a paid service tied to specific counters and levels rather than as freely available equipment, with reported rates in the range of 50 to 200 Saudi riyals depending on seating capacity and duration, according to a 2025 guide to wheelchair services in Masjid al-Haram. Finally, and simply: there is no religious requirement, in any school of jurisprudence represented in the sources consulted for this guide, that sa’y be performed at speed, in discomfort, or on a single “correct” floor. A pilgrim who completes all seven lengths slowly, on the quietest available level, seated in a wheelchair the entire way, has performed the same rite as one who walks briskly on the ground floor — a point worth holding onto amid a building whose scale can otherwise feel intimidating.

Common Misconceptions About the Mas’a

A number of misunderstandings recur often enough among pilgrims and casual readers to be worth addressing directly and calmly.

The first is the belief that the hills of Safa and Marwa are still, in any meaningful physical sense, hills. They are not. As described earlier in this guide, both have been cut, levelled and built over repeatedly since the 1950s, and what remains visible to a pilgrim today is a small, protected sample of the original bedrock at each end of the corridor — not a climbable elevation, and not most of what once stood there. This is not a matter of opinion or a point on which sources disagree; it is a plainly documented fact, confirmed by Saudi state sources themselves in the course of justifying the modern expansion.

The second is the assumption that because the Saudi authorities carried out the 2008 widening, the question of its religious validity must therefore be settled and uncontroversial. It is not. As this guide has set out at length, a real and, so far as the public record shows, unresolved disagreement exists among credentialed scholars — including senior figures within Saudi Arabia’s own religious establishment — over whether sa’y performed across the full forty-metre width of the modern Mas’a is valid in every part of that width. Pilgrims are, of course, entitled to rely on the position taken by the overwhelming majority of contemporary fatwa bodies that the expansion is valid; the point of including this dispute here is simply that it exists, and that presenting the modern Mas’a as though no scholar ever questioned its boundaries would be inaccurate.

The third misconception concerns the ziyarah status of Safa and Marwa relative to other historical sites covered elsewhere in this guide. Because sa’y is a commanded rite with explicit Qur’anic sanction, Safa and Marwa are not subject to the general caution that Ibn Taymiyyah, Ibn Uthaymeen and Saudi Arabia’s Standing Committee apply to sites whose only claim on a pilgrim’s attention is historical association rather than ritual instruction. It would be a mistake to import that broader caution — appropriate for, say, visiting a cave associated with an event in the Prophet’s ﷺ life purely for the sake of the association — into a discussion of a site where the act being performed is itself part of the pilgrimage. The concern this guide raises about the Mas’a is architectural and juristic, about where the building’s boundaries now sit relative to the historically attested corridor, not a concern about whether visiting Safa and Marwa at all has any basis in the sunnah — it self-evidently does.

The fourth misconception, more minor but frequently repeated in casual pilgrim accounts, is that sa’y performed on an upper floor or the roof is somehow a lesser or less authentic version of the rite than sa’y performed at ground level. Every source consulted for this guide that addresses the question directly — including devotional guides written specifically to reassure pilgrims on this point — treats sa’y on any of the Mas’a’s levels as equally valid, provided the pilgrim begins at Safa, ends at Marwah on the seventh length, and remains within the marked lanes throughout. There is no basis in the sources for treating the upper floors as a compromise or a lesser option; if anything, as this guide’s practical section argues, they are often the more sensible choice.

Lesser-Known Facts About the Mas’a

• The pre-modern Mas’a was measured by classical authorities in units that have no fixed modern equivalent — Ibn Jubayr’s 893 paces against a separate tradition of 780 “short cubits,” each cubit defined as the length of an average man’s forearm — meaning that even the most basic question of how long the corridor is has never had a single, universally agreed answer at any point in its recorded history, a fact recorded by Burton’s own footnotes to his pilgrimage narrative.
• The house known as Dar al-Arqam, where the Prophet ﷺ is reported to have secretly taught early converts to Islam and where, according to a hadith transmitted through Yahya ibn ‘Umran and recorded by al-Hakim in al-Mustadrak, ‘Umar ibn al-Khattab embraced Islam, stood on the slope of Safa itself — a detail cited in the 2008 fatwa literature specifically because a 1947 survey by the Egyptian Survey Authority allowed its location to be fixed with some precision relative to the later Saudi expansion boundary, according to the fatwa published by Dar al-Ifta.
• The brass inscription plate commemorating King Abdulaziz’s 1947 shading of the Mas’a — a sheet of iron four metres long and 1.4 metres wide — survived the demolition that preceded the 1956 rebuilding, was reinstalled on a nearby street in the Judairiyah district of Makkah, and was only permanently removed from public display in 2001, according to Saudipedia’s history of the site.
• The Mas’a’s four floors are not, by some counts, the whole story: at least one contemporaneous account from the Muslim World League describes pilgrims being able to perform sa’y across five distinct levels once the King Abdullah-era works were substantially finished — ground, first, second, third and roof, plus a fully air-conditioned basement — a higher count than the “four floors” figure most commonly quoted by Saudi state media, and this guide has not been able to reconcile the two counts with certainty.
• Most of the fixed Zamzam taps in the entire Grand Mosque — as distinct from portable coolers, which are spread throughout the building — are concentrated specifically between Safa and Marwa, making the Mas’a proportionally the best-served stretch of the mosque for direct tap access to Zamzam water.
• The green fluorescent lights marking the historic valley floor are replicated identically on every level of the Mas’a, meaning the architectural cue for the sunnah pace exists in four or five separate physical locations stacked vertically above one another rather than in a single place.

Timeline of the Mas’a

• Pre-Islamic and early Islamic era: Safa and Marwa exist as natural rocky outcrops at the base of Abu Qubays and Qu’ayqi’an respectively, with the intervening ground developing over time into a settled Makkan street.
• Abbasid period, including the reign of Abu Ja’far al-Mansur (r. 754–775 CE): Pilgrims climb stairs — twelve at Safa, fifteen at Marwa, according to Saudi sources — to view the Kaaba from each hill; the caliph al-Mahdi is credited by classical historians including al-Azraqi and al-Fakihi with an early recorded widening of the Mas’a’s width.
• 1814 CE: Johann Ludwig Burckhardt visits Makkah and records the Mas’a as a shop-lined, commercially active market street.
• 1853 CE: Richard Francis Burton performs the pilgrimage in disguise and leaves the most detailed English-language description of the pre-modern Mas’a as an urban street between eight and nine hundred feet long, lined with houses.
• 1926: King Abdulaziz ibn Abdulrahman Al Saud orders the paving and tiling of the Mas’a with square stones for the first time, to protect pilgrims from dust.
• 1947: King Abdulaziz orders the complete shading of the Mas’a with canopies along its full length, commemorated with a brass inscription.
• 1357 AH / 1938–39 CE (per Dar al-Ifta) or the mid-1950s (per Saudipedia): The remaining private houses and shops along the Mas’a are removed by the Saudi state, after compensation, ending the corridor’s centuries-long function as a mixed residential and commercial street.
• 1956: Under King Saud ibn Abdulaziz Al Saud, the Mas’a is architecturally integrated into the structure of Masjid al-Haram for the first time; construction begins on its first and second floors (the Madain Project dates the equivalent roofing and enclosure works to circa 1960).
• 1375 AH / 1955–56 CE: The slopes of Safa are levelled and a road built across the site to permit vehicle access.
• Reign of King Fahd ibn Abdulaziz Al Saud (1982–2005): The Safa-side ground floor is expanded and further buildings around Marwa are demolished, adding roughly 375 square metres and new entry and exit doors on the Marwa side.
• 1401 AH / 1980–81 CE: The vehicle road built across Safa in the 1950s is itself demolished, and the mountain is cut a second time to separate the surviving fragment of original rock from the mass of Abu Qubays, creating a wide new pedestrian passage.
• 9 February 2007: Construction begins on the King Abdullah-era widening of the Mas’a, described at the time as the largest expansion of the Haram to that date.
• May 2008: Saudi authorities publicly announce the Mas’a expansion project in detail; a serious and public fiqh dispute over the widening’s validity breaks out among scholars inside and outside Saudi Arabia.
• June 2008: The first phase of the expansion — ground floor commissioned, first and second floors partially opened — nears completion amid continuing scholarly debate, according to contemporaneous Hajj-season reporting.
• September 2008: The ground floor is fully commissioned and the first and second floors partially opened to pilgrims, per Arab News’s reporting from that month.
• 2011: King Abdullah formally launches the wider Third Saudi Expansion of the Grand Mosque, of which the completed Mas’a widening forms a part.
• 2013: Saudi press confirms that the Mas’a expansion itself is already complete, ahead of related mataf and courtyard works, with capacity risen to 118,000 pilgrims per hour.
• 2015: A construction crane collapses onto the Grand Mosque during storm winds associated with the same expansion programme, killing more than a hundred people; King Salman formally inaugurates the completed Third Saudi Expansion the same year.
• 2022: The Grand Mosque’s roof level, including its Mas’a-adjacent sections, is reported as prepared and periodically opened to worshippers and Umrah performers according to seasonal crowd levels.
• 2026: The Mas’a operates as a four-level, fully air-conditioned, one-way-laned corridor with capacity for approximately 118,000 pilgrims performing sa’y per hour, alongside continued expansion of cooling and hydration infrastructure across the wider Haram and holy sites ahead of that year’s Hajj season.

Practical Takeaways

The Mas’a of 2026 is a large, modern, mechanically cooled pedestrian building constructed almost entirely within the last seventy years, standing on the site of a Makkan market street that existed for well over a millennium before it. Almost nothing of the original hills of Safa and Marwa remains visible; what a pilgrim sees at each end of the corridor is a small, protected fragment of natural rock rather than a hill. The corridor’s current width — forty metres across four principal floors, with additional roof and mezzanine capacity — is the product of a 2007–2015 building campaign that more than tripled the Mas’a’s area and raised its hourly sa’y capacity from roughly 44,000 to approximately 118,000 pilgrims. That widening remains the subject of a genuine, unresolved disagreement among credentialed Islamic scholars, some of whom, including senior figures within Saudi Arabia’s own religious establishment, publicly objected to it in 2008 on the grounds that it extended beyond the historically attested boundaries of the rite; others, including Egypt’s Dar al-Ifta and a range of internationally prominent muftis, defended it on textual, juristic and evidentiary grounds, including sworn testimony from elderly Makkan residents and geological survey evidence. This guide takes no position on that dispute and presents it so that the reader can decide how to weigh it.

Practically, pilgrims visiting in 2026 should know that all four principal levels of the Mas’a carry the same total sa’y distance of roughly 2.6 to 2.85 kilometres over seven lengths, the same green-light markers indicating the historic valley floor, and the same ritual requirements regardless of level chosen; that the ground floor is consistently the most congested and the upper floors and roof — when open — offer calmer conditions with identical validity; that dedicated wheelchair lanes, paid and free cart services, and pre-bookable electric wheelchairs are available and should be arranged in advance where possible, especially for elderly or disabled pilgrims; that Zamzam water is abundantly available throughout the corridor via both fixed taps and coolers, with most of the mosque’s fixed taps concentrated specifically in this stretch; and that the calmest hours are generally just after Fajr and, during Ramadan, in the hours before Suhoor, with the period after Jumu’ah prayer best avoided if timing allows. All figures in this guide are dated to their sources and should be reconfirmed against current Presidency for the Affairs of the Two Holy Mosques announcements before travel, since capacity figures, accessibility arrangements and cooling infrastructure continue to be adjusted from one pilgrimage season to the next.

Sources

Historical travellers’ accounts: John Lewis Burckhardt, Travels in Arabia (Project Gutenberg edition); Richard F. Burton, Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al-Madinah and Meccah, chapter 32; Mekka in the Latter Part of the Nineteenth Century (Internet Archive digitisation).

Saudi official and state-affiliated sources: Saudipedia, “Safa and Marwa”; Saudipedia, “What Is al-Masa’a?”; Saudipedia, “The Third Saudi Expansion of the Grand Mosque”; Presidency of the Two Holy Mosques Affairs news release on Mas’a capacity; Presidency of the Two Holy Mosques Affairs, crowd density viewing service.

Fiqh sources on the 2008 widening dispute: Egypt’s Dar al-Ifta, “Expanding the Mas’a”; Dar al-Ifta follow-up statement on the new Mas’a; Jordan’s General Iftaa Department, “The New Expansion of the Mas’a”; Mufti of the Federal Territory of Malaysia, ruling on the widening of the sa’y area; Universitas Islam Negeri Maulana Malik Ibrahim Malang, thesis on the Mas’a expansion dispute; Detikcom, report on supporting muftis’ statements; IslamQA.org Hanafi fatwa desk on the new Mas’a.

Contemporaneous press coverage of the expansion: Hajinformation.com, “Largest ever expansion of the Haram in Makkah (2008)”; TwoCircles.net, May 2008, Sheikh Sudais on the controversy; TwoCircles.net, June 2008, first phase nearing completion; Arab News, September 2008, courtyard and Mas’a expansion; Saudi Gazette, 2013, mataf and Mas’a progress; Gulf News on Mas’a capacity increase; Muslim World League London Office, expansion account; Sailan Muslim, 2015, fourth mataf floor report; The Guardian, September 2015, crane collapse report; Saudi Gazette, 2022, rooftop readiness report.

Architectural and reference sources: Madain Project, “al-Masa’a (Masjid al-Haram)”; Madain Project, “al-Safa”; French Wikipedia, “Safâ et Marwa”; Ibn Battuta Travel, “Safa and Marwa”.

Zamzam water distribution: Al Jazeera, “The water of Hajj: A simple illustrated guide to Zamzam”; Jam’iyyat Ri’ayat Fuqara al-Haram, Zamzam distribution explainer; A Muslim Traveller, “Zamzam Water in Haramain”; Wired2Tech, Zamzam distribution volumes report; Bhatkallys, 2025 report on new visitor instructions.

Accessibility and practical 2026 sources: Halalbooking, Umrah help and support guide; The Islamic Information, 2026 guide to Grand Mosque carts; Arab News, 2023, Grand Mosque wheelchair provision; IhramOS, wheelchair accessibility guide; thehajj.guide, practical accessibility guide; Taxi Service KSA, 2025 wheelchair services guide; Labbaik Hajj Umrah, 2026 transport booking guide; Hisar Travel Singapore, upper-level sa’y guide; The Siasat Daily, May 2026, Hajj service improvements report; Tripadvisor, Safa to Marwa visitor reviews; Hajj and Umrah Planner, Safa Marwa and Sa’i guide.

The ziyarah-legitimacy caveat: IslamQA, on the legitimate basis for visiting historical sites in Makkah and Madinah.

A note on method: this guide draws on classical travellers’ accounts, Saudi state encyclopaedic sources, formal fatwa literature from Egypt’s Dar al-Ifta and Jordan’s General Iftaa Department, academic theses, contemporaneous press coverage from 2007–2015, and current pilgrim-facing accessibility and travel guides currently in circulation as of July 2026. Where sources disagree on a measurement, a date, or a capacity figure — as they frequently do for this particular building — this guide has reported the disagreement rather than silently choosing one figure. Several claims relating to precise cooling capacity inside the Mas’a specifically, as opposed to across the wider holy sites, could not be independently verified and are flagged as such in the text rather than presented as established. The 2008 fiqh dispute over the Mas’a’s widening is presented from primary fatwa texts and contemporaneous reporting on both sides; this guide does not adjudicate between the positions and encourages readers with specific concerns to consult a qualified scholar directly.