The Ajyad Fortress: History, the 2002 Demolition and What Stands There Now in Makkah

South of the Grand Mosque, where the Abraj Al Bait towers now throw their shadow across the Mataf each afternoon, there was once a hill. It was called Jabal Bulbul, a spur of the larger Jabal Khalifah (also written Jabal Kuda), and for roughly two and a quarter centuries it carried on its summit a stone fortress built to do one job: watch over Makkah and the pilgrims who came to it. The Ajyad Fortress — Qal’at Ajyad in Arabic, Ecyad Kalesi in Turkish — was raised under Ottoman authority in the late eighteenth century, garrisoned for most of its life by Ottoman and later Sharifian troops, and named for the two ravines, Ajyad al-Kabir and Ajyad al-Saghir, that ran below it toward the Haram. It saw out the end of Ottoman rule in the Hejaz, survived a real siege in 1916, passed into the custody of the Saudi state in 1925, and stood — increasingly forgotten, increasingly encircled by the growing city — until the first days of January 2002, when it was demolished within roughly a week to clear the hill for a commercial and hotel development that is today one of the tallest building complexes on Earth.

This is not a ziyarah guide in the ordinary sense, because there is no fortress left to visit and no act of worship was ever attached to this hill. It is, instead, a history of what stood there, an honest account of how and why it came down, and a fair record of an argument that has never really been settled — between a government that describes the demolition as a sovereign decision made in the interest of pilgrims, and a government, together with a body of historians and heritage professionals, that describes it as an avoidable act of cultural destruction. Readers coming to this guide’s other articles on Umrah historical sites and the Islamic heritage of Makkah and Madinah will find that Ajyad is one of the plainer, harder chapters: a nineteenth-century military structure, a real international incident, and a stretch of empty engineering platform where a hill used to be. The aim here is the same as everywhere else in this guide — to say clearly what is verifiable, to name who said what, and not to adjudicate a dispute that belongs to historians, diplomats and theologians rather than to a travel guide.

Historical Background: Jabal Bulbul and the Defence of Makkah

Geography of the Site

Makkah sits in a narrow valley hemmed in on most sides by bare granite hills, and for centuries the city’s rulers treated those hills as a defensive asset. Jabal Bulbul rose on the southern side of the valley, on the left side of what is now the Ajyad district, directly overlooking the Masjid al-Haram from a position historians and later journalists would repeatedly describe as commanding — high enough to see over the whole of central Makkah and any approach to it, and close enough to the Haram that a garrison stationed there could, in principle, bring fire to bear on the mosque itself, a fact that would matter a great deal in 1916. Ottoman and Saudi-era accounts converge on a height for the hill of roughly 150 metres above the surrounding city, and a fortress footprint most commonly given as approximately 23,000 square metres, or about 250,000 square feet, though a minority of sources put the enclosed built area at a much smaller 800 square metres, a discrepancy this guide flags below rather than resolves (Wikipedia, “Ajyad Fortress”; Aroundus, “Ajyad Fortress”).

The fortress formed part of a wider defensive system for the city. Ottoman-era Makkah was ringed by three principal citadels guarding its approaches: Ajyad to the south, overlooking the road from Yemen and the direction of Jeddah’s inland routes; Jiyad’s western counterpart at Jarwal, known as the Qishla, a barracks-fortress on the western side of the city that was likewise demolished by the Saudi government to build hotels facing the Haram (Wikipedia, “Qishla of Mecca”); and forts known in Arabic sources as Lala and Hindi guarding the western and northern approaches (IslamicLandmarks.com, “Ajyad Fortress”). Ajyad was, by every account, the most important of these, both because of its height and its direct line of sight into the Haram courtyard.

Why Makkah Needed a Fortress

The eighteenth century was not a settled time for the Hejaz. Bedouin raiding on the pilgrimage routes was a recurring danger to caravans arriving from Syria, Egypt and Yemen, and the Ottoman authorities — who held nominal and, through the Sharifs of Makkah, practical sovereignty over the holy cities — periodically found it necessary to garrison troops in and around Makkah to protect both the population and the arriving hujjaj. By the second half of the century a new and more specific anxiety had also emerged: the rise of the Wahhabi–Saudi alliance in the Najd, which by the turn of the nineteenth century would grow strong enough to seize Makkah and Madinah outright between 1803 and 1805, holding the holy cities until an Ottoman-Egyptian expeditionary force under Muhammad Ali Pasha’s son Ibrahim Pasha recovered them by 1818. Several modern accounts describe Ajyad’s construction as having been intended, at least in part, to help keep Wahhabi forces and other raiders out of the city (World Socialist Web Site, “Saudi government demolishes historic Ottoman castle”; Castles in the World, “Castello di Ajyad”). Arabic-language sources, drawing on local Makkan historians, instead trace the initial impulse to a period of general insecurity in the city around 1186 AH (1772–1773 CE) that prompted the Sharif of Makkah of the day to order a defensive citadel built on the hill (al-Watan, “Qal’at Ajyad: ‘Ayn Makkah al-Harisa”). Both strands of explanation point to the same underlying reality: Makkah in this period needed a garrisoned strongpoint, and the hill overlooking the Haram from the south was the obvious place to build one.

Construction: An Ottoman Fortress on Jabal Bulbul, 1780

The Building of Ajyad

The date most widely given in English-language sources for the fortress’s construction is 1780, under the reign of the Ottoman Sultan Abdul Hamid I, whose long rule (1774–1789) coincided with a period of renewed Ottoman attention to Hejazi security (Wikipedia, “Ajyad Fortress”; IslamicLandmarks.com, “Ajyad Fortress”). Several encyclopaedic and travel sources give the year as 1777 or 1781 instead (German Wikipedia, “Adschyad-Festung”; Isla Voyages, “Forteresse d’Ajyad”), and this guide treats the exact year as approximate rather than settled to the month — the surviving record supports “around 1777–1781,” with 1780 the figure most often repeated. Wikipedia’s structured category data lists the fortress’s formal establishment as 1781 (Wikipedia, “Ajyad Fortress”).

A more significant discrepancy exists between this Ottoman-attribution narrative and the account preserved in Arabic-language Saudi press reporting, which credits the original citadel not to an Ottoman sultan directly but to Sharif Surur ibn Musa’id, the Sharif of Makkah, acting during a period of local insecurity in 1186 AH (1772–1773 CE). According to this account, carried by the Saudi newspaper al-Watan and citing the historian Dr Adel Nour Ghubashi of Umm al-Qura University, Sharif Surur ordered masons, workers and craftsmen brought to Makkah specifically to build a fortress on Jabal Ajyad; when the first structure did not meet the standard he wanted, he had it demolished and rebuilt more solidly. Sharif Surur died in 1202 AH (1787–1788 CE) before the fortification system was finished, and construction continued after his death (al-Watan, “Qal’at Ajyad: ‘Ayn Makkah al-Harisa wa-Muntalaq Midfa’ Ramadan”; Arabic Wikipedia, “Qal’at Ajyad”). Both traditions can be true without contradiction — a Sharif ruling under Ottoman suzerainty ordering the fortress built, with an Ottoman sultan’s reign providing the wider political frame most English sources use for dating — but readers should understand that “built under Sultan Abdul Hamid I” and “built by order of Sharif Surur ibn Musa’id” describe the same event from two different administrative vantage points, Ottoman-imperial and Sharifian-local, and the sources do not fully reconcile who initiated it. This guide reports both attributions rather than picking one.

What is not disputed is the result: a stone citadel on the summit of Jabal Bulbul, its walls reported at roughly three metres high in some accounts (Aroundus, “Ajyad Fortress”), enclosing artillery halls, an ammunition store, and quarters sufficient — according to the reconstruction-era Ottoman figures discussed below — to house several hundred men. Craftsmen are recorded as having come from Damascus, Egypt and Anatolia to work on the fortress (Islam Today, “Krepost, kotoraya zashchishchala Kaabu i Masdzhid al-Kharam”), consistent with a project of imperial rather than purely local scale.

Dimensions, Towers and Layout

The two figures repeated most consistently across sources are a total site area of approximately 23,000 square metres and a hill elevation of roughly 150 metres above the surrounding city (IslamicLandmarks.com, “Ajyad Fortress”; al-Watan, “Qal’at Ajyad”). Beyond that headline figure, the historical record is thinner than a reader might expect for a structure that stood into living memory. No source consulted for this guide gives a precise, sourced tower count, an architect’s name, or an internal ground plan of the kind available for better-documented Ottoman fortifications elsewhere. Descriptions instead speak in general terms of “watchtowers and cannons” mounted on the fortress (a phrase used in Hindi-language video coverage of the site, whose specifics could not be independently corroborated against a primary source and are therefore reported here only as a general characterisation rather than a verified count), of high perimeter walls, and of subsidiary structures — described in the Arabic sources as qusur (“palaces” or large houses) and ahwash (walled courtyard compounds) — that stood on the lower slope of the hill below the citadel proper (al-Watan, “Qal’at Ajyad”). Readers should treat any claim of an exact number of towers with caution: this guide has not found a primary architectural survey, Ottoman or Saudi, that documents the fortress plan in the kind of measured detail available for comparable structures, and says so plainly rather than inventing a number.

Garrison and Armament: The Ottoman Reconstruction of 1885

By the later nineteenth century the original eighteenth-century structure had deteriorated toward ruin. The most detailed and specific account of the fortress’s garrison and armament available in the sources gathered for this guide concerns not the original 1780s building but its rebuilding under Ottoman authority roughly a century later. According to al-Watan, citing the historian Muhammad Amin al-Makki, the Wali (Ottoman governor) of the Hejaz, Osman Nuri Pasha, rebuilt the fortress in 1302 AH (1884–1885 CE) after it had fallen into disrepair. This reconstruction was designed, according to the same account, to accommodate one full column (tabur) of infantry — given as roughly 800 men — in addition to housing capacity for some 300 further personnel, together with dedicated artillery rooms and an ammunition depot (al-Watan, “Qal’at Ajyad”; Arabic Wikipedia, “Qal’at Ajyad”). A separate English-language tally gives a similar total, describing accommodation for 800 soldiers plus 300 additional personnel, though it places this capacity within a much smaller stated built area of 800 square metres rather than the 23,000 square metres reported elsewhere — evidently a confusion between the enclosed barracks floor area and the total hilltop site, and one this guide has not been able to resolve from the sources available (Aroundus, “Ajyad Fortress”).

The fortress’s most famous peacetime role, recorded in multiple Saudi sources, was ceremonial and civic rather than strictly military: cannon mounted at Ajyad were fired to mark the times of prayer and, especially, to signal the start and end of the daily fast during Ramadan — the origin of the phrase describing Ajyad as “the starting point of the Ramadan cannon” (midfa’ Ramadan) still used in Saudi press retrospectives on the fortress (al-Watan, “Qal’at Ajyad: ‘Ayn Makkah al-Harisa wa-Muntalaq Midfa’ Ramadan”). This practice is reported to have continued, in one account, until as late as 1360 AH (1941 CE), decades into Saudi rule, before the custom was moved elsewhere or discontinued at that specific site.

Beyond this reconstruction-era snapshot, no source consulted gives a continuous, year-by-year account of the size of the garrison or its armament across the fortress’s full 220-year history. What can be said with confidence is that the fortress was a functioning, continuously garrisoned military installation for most of its existence, that it mounted artillery, and that it was taken seriously enough as a military asset that a 1916 attacking force could not take it by direct infantry assault and required field artillery to reduce it — a point covered in full below.

The Fortress Under the Sharifs and Into the Twentieth Century

From Ottoman Garrison to Sharifian Asset

For most of the nineteenth century Ajyad functioned as it had been built to function: a garrisoned strongpoint under Ottoman military authority, exercised locally through the Sharif of Makkah, defending the city and its pilgrims against the recurring threat of raiding and, during the Wahhabi–Saudi wars of the early 1800s, against outright conquest. The Ottoman Empire’s authority over the Hejaz, always more indirect than in its Anatolian and Balkan provinces, persisted through the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth, with the Sharifs of Makkah — a Hashemite line claiming descent from the Prophet ﷺ — governing under the Sultan’s suzerainty and controlling installations such as Ajyad on the empire’s behalf.

1916: The Siege of Ajyad Fort

The most dramatic episode in the fortress’s documented history is also the best-attested militarily. On 10 June 1916, Sharif Hussein bin Ali, the Emir of Makkah, launched the Arab Revolt against Ottoman rule by firing a single shot from the window of his house in Makkah, the signal for his supporters to attack the Ottoman garrison across the city (Wikipedia, “Arab Revolt”; The Past, “A sideshow to a sideshow: The Great Arab Revolt, 1916–1918”). Most of the Ottoman garrison of Makkah — reckoned in various accounts at around 1,000 to 1,400 men — was caught off guard, and several positions fell quickly to Hussein’s roughly 5,000 tribal fighters. But two positions held: the Jirwal barracks on the road to Jeddah, and Ajyad Fort, overlooking the Haram, where the Ottoman garrison was reported to be “heavily armed… with artillery and machine guns” (The Hejaz Railway, “The Arab Revolt”).

What followed was, by multiple independent accounts, a genuine siege lasting into July 1916. The Ottoman garrison at Ajyad, lacking the numbers to break out but well enough supplied with artillery to hold their position, shelled parts of the city in the course of the fighting — an act that, as several historians note, did lasting damage to the Ottoman position’s religious legitimacy even among Muslims who might otherwise have been unmoved by an intra-Ottoman political dispute, since it meant Turkish guns firing on the Haram itself, or in its immediate vicinity, to suppress an Arab rebellion (The Hejaz Railway, “The Arab Revolt”; MegaMilitary, “Arabia during World War I: The Arab Revolt, Part 3”). Sharif Hussein’s lightly armed tribal forces could not reduce the fortress on their own; the deadlock was broken only when a British-dispatched Egyptian Army artillery battery, ferried across the Red Sea by the Royal Navy, arrived in July and began shelling Ajyad directly. According to one detailed secondary account, the fortress walls were breached and the garrison surrendered; the same Egyptian battery then turned its guns on the Jirwal barracks, which fell on 9 July 1916, more than 300 of the Ottoman garrison having died in the course of the fighting across the two sieges (MegaMilitary, “Arabia during World War I: The Arab Revolt, Part 3”). A Jordanian armed forces account of the campaign similarly lists “the Citadel of Ajyad” among the first objectives besieged on the opening day of the revolt, and records that after its capture the fortress was repurposed by the new Sharifian authorities as a military school (Jordan Armed Forces, “Great Arab Revolution Battles”; Jordan Armed Forces, “Declaration of the Great Arab Revolution”). This 1916 episode is the single best-documented military action ever fought around the fortress, and it establishes beyond doubt that Ajyad was, at least as late as the First World War, a real and formidable defensive position rather than a decorative or symbolic structure.

From the Kingdom of Hejaz to the Saudi State

Following the Arab Revolt, Sharif Hussein’s Kingdom of Hejaz controlled Makkah until the mid-1920s, when the forces of Abdulaziz Ibn Saud (the future King Abdulaziz), advancing from the Najd, brought the Hejaz under Saudi control. King Abdulaziz entered Makkah in 1924, and the last Hashemite ruler of the Hejaz, King Hussein’s son Ali, surrendered in December 1925, ending the Kingdom of Hejaz and folding the holy cities into what would become the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in 1932 (Wikipedia, “Hussein, King of Hejaz”).

Under the new Saudi administration, Ajyad Fortress lost any active military function but was not immediately demolished. Saudi and Islamic-heritage sources record that King Abdulaziz designated the fortress and its surrounding land as a waqf — an Islamic religious endowment — attached to the Grand Mosque, meaning its upkeep and any revenue derived from it were to serve the Haram (Arabic Wikipedia, “Qal’at Ajyad”; IslamicLandmarks.com, “Ajyad Fortress”). For the rest of the twentieth century the fortress stood, increasingly hemmed in by the growing city around it, no longer garrisoned in any military sense, its role reduced to that of an old stone landmark on the skyline above the Haram. No systematic architectural survey, condition assessment or restoration campaign from this period — the 1930s through the 1990s — appears in the sources available to this guide; the record simply goes quiet on the building’s physical state until the controversy of 2001–2002 brings it back into the news, at which point Saudi officials themselves would describe the fortress’s historical importance in strikingly minimal terms, discussed in full below.

Architecture: What Is Known and What Is Not

Set against the wealth of documentation available for many Ottoman-era military structures elsewhere in the empire, the architectural record of Ajyad Fortress is notably thin, and this guide states that plainly rather than filling the gap with invented specificity. What can be established from the sources gathered here: a stone-built citadel of roughly 23,000 square metres occupying the summit of a 150-metre hill; defensive walls reported at approximately three metres in height; artillery emplacements and rooms specifically described as being for artillery use; an ammunition magazine; and, from the 1885 Ottoman reconstruction, barracks capacity for a full infantry column of roughly 800 men plus additional personnel (al-Watan, “Qal’at Ajyad”; Aroundus, “Ajyad Fortress”). Below the citadel, on the lower slope of the hill, stood ancillary structures described in Arabic sources as large houses or “palaces” with courtyard compounds and their own high perimeter walls (al-Watan, “Qal’at Ajyad”).

What is not established, in any source consulted for this guide, is a measured architectural plan, a named architect or master builder, a photographed or drawn elevation from the Ottoman period itself, or a documented interior layout. English-language secondary sources uniformly repeat the same handful of facts — location, area, general purpose, demolition date — without adding architectural detail, which suggests those facts trace back to a small number of underlying references rather than to independent documentation. The most specific technical claims in circulation, such as the exact number of towers or a specific wall thickness, could not be traced to a verifiable primary source in the course of this guide’s research and have accordingly been omitted rather than repeated on the authority of undated tourism copy or unsourced video narration. Readers should treat any confident claim of an exact tower count encountered elsewhere with appropriate caution.

The most valuable surviving visual record of the fortress and its setting is photographic rather than architectural: the Yıldız Albums, the vast photographic survey of the Ottoman Empire commissioned in the 1880s by Sultan Abdulhamid II, included Makkah and Madinah among the subjects documented, producing images of the two holy cities as they appeared in the late nineteenth century (Google Books, “The Yıldız Albums of Sultan Abdulhamid: Mecca-Medina”). This guide has not been able to confirm from available sources whether Ajyad Fortress itself is individually identifiable within the surviving Yıldız photographs of Makkah, as distinct from the wider cityscape, and states that uncertainty here rather than asserting a specific image exists.

Archaeological and Documentary Findings: What Was and Was Not Recorded

On the specific question of what formal record was made of Ajyad Fortress before its demolition, the honest answer, based on the sources available to this guide, is: very little, and this absence is itself a documented part of the criticism levelled at the demolition. No source consulted describes a pre-demolition archaeological survey, a measured drawing campaign, or a structural documentation project carried out by Saudi authorities, Ottoman-Turkish institutions, or any independent body in the months before the fortress came down in late 2001 and January 2002. This is a consistent pattern across the wider demolition programme in Makkah, not unique to Ajyad: reporting on later demolitions of Ottoman and Abbasid-era fabric within the Grand Mosque precinct itself, for instance, has specifically noted “no plans to preserve or move” threatened structures “or to commission archaeological digs before they are pulled down,” and has quoted heritage advocates describing this as a source of “considerable concern… among the few academics who are willing to speak out” (Heidelberg Asia and Africa in World Reference Guide, reproducing Independent reporting on Masjid an-Nabawi expansion).

What does survive is fragmentary. A one-twenty-fifth scale physical model of the fortress is held at the Miniatürk miniature park in Istanbul, alongside other models of historic Ottoman buildings, offering a three-dimensional if necessarily approximate impression of its form (Wikipedia, “Ajyad Fortress”). Photographs of the fortress from the twentieth century, taken by visitors, pilgrims and news agencies rather than as part of any systematic survey, are held in scattered private and stock-photography collections and circulate widely online, including through general-purpose commercial image libraries (Alamy, “Ajyad fortress hi-res stock photography and images”) and community-contributed archives such as Wikimedia Commons (Wikimedia Commons, “Category: Ajyad Fortress”). The Ottoman imperial photographic record broadly — the Abdulhamid II collection housed today partly in the Istanbul University Library and partly in international collections such as the Library of Congress, and digitised in part by projects like George Mason University’s World History Sources initiative — includes material from the Hejaz in the same decades Ajyad stood, though this guide has not been able to confirm a specific, individually catalogued photograph of the fortress within that collection (George Mason University, “Abdul-Hamid II Collection Photography Archive”). Beyond these scattered materials, this guide found no evidence of a systematic archaeological or architectural record made either before or during the fortress’s demolition. That gap is not a small technical footnote; it is one of the specific points conservationists raise when discussing Ajyad, precisely because it means later historians and architects must reconstruct the fortress’s exact form from secondary description and casual photography rather than from a professional survey.

The 2002 Demolition: Sequence and Immediate Reactions

The Lead-Up

By the start of the twenty-first century, the site of Ajyad Fortress had been earmarked for a large commercial and hospitality development intended to serve the rapidly growing numbers of Hajj and Umrah pilgrims arriving in Makkah each year — from under two million annual pilgrims in the mid-1990s toward a figure that had already passed three million by the early 2000s and would continue rising (BBC World News, interview with Irfan al-Alawi, Islamic Heritage Research Foundation). In December 2001, King Fahd bin Abdulaziz approved a large-scale construction project on the site, to be funded and overseen through the King Abdulaziz Endowment for the Holy Haram, and awarded principally to the Saudi Binladin Group, the kingdom’s largest construction conglomerate (The New York Times, “World Briefing: Middle East: Saudi Arabia: Historic Fortress Destroyed”). According to Turkish officials, they had received assurances during 2001 that the fortress itself would be preserved even as the surrounding area was redeveloped (The Independent, “Destroying Ottoman castle to build hotel is ‘cultural massacre'”; RFE/RL, “Saudi Arabia Rejects Criticism Over Citadel Demolition”).

The Demolition Itself

Demolition work began in the closing weeks of 2001 and proceeded rapidly. Arab News, reporting from Jeddah on 9 January 2002, described authorities as having “started demolishing the Ajyad fortress” in order “to make way for a multibillion riyal commercial project,” noting that the plan had already drawn domestic objections from some Makkah residents calling for the historic site to be preserved (Arab News, “Historic Makkah fortress demolished”). The most detailed chronology places the core demolition and the levelling of most of Jabal Bulbul within the first nine days of January 2002, following preparatory work in the final days of December 2001, a sequence corroborated across the Wikipedia entries in multiple languages and by contemporary press coverage from The New York Times, which reported on 9 January 2002 that the “230-year-old fortress… has been dismantled” (Wikipedia, “Ajyad Fortress”; The New York Times, “World Briefing: Middle East: Saudi Arabia: Historic Fortress Destroyed”). The demolition contractor was, again, the Saudi Binladin Group (The New York Times, “World Briefing: Middle East: Saudi Arabia: Historic Fortress Destroyed”).

The scale of the associated works went beyond the fortress walls themselves: most of Bulbul mount, the hill on which the citadel stood, was levelled as part of the same operation, to create a construction platform for the towers that would follow (Wikipedia, “Ajyad Fortress”). Cost estimates for the resulting project, reported at the time, ranged as high as 15 billion US dollars in some later retrospectives and as low as 533 million US dollars in contemporary 2002 reporting — a very wide range that this guide has not been able to fully reconcile, and which likely reflects the difference between the initial phase of construction reported in 2002 and the eventual, much larger and longer-running Abraj Al Bait complex completed a decade later (World Socialist Web Site, “Saudi government demolishes historic Ottoman castle”; Wikipedia, “Ajyad Fortress”).

Turkey’s Reaction: İstemihan Talay and the Turkish Government

The Turkish government’s response was immediate, sustained and delivered at the highest levels. Turkey’s Minister of Culture, İstemihan Talay, who held that post from 1997 to 2002, condemned the demolition in the strongest terms available to him. In a formal statement issued through his ministry, Talay said the destruction of Ecyad Castle was “an act of barbarism” and stated: “This is not only disrespect to history, but is also a move to eliminate Turkish culture from their world and history” (Republic of Türkiye Ministry of Culture and Tourism, “The Minister of Culture Condemns Saudi Arabia for Pulling Down Ecyad Castle”). He explicitly compared the demolition to the Taliban’s destruction of the Buddhas of Bamiyan earlier the same year, telling reporters: “The destruction of the al-Ajyad fort, part of the common cultural heritage of humanity, is an act equivalent to the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddha statues in Afghanistan,” and separately: “This is a crime against humanity and Unesco should expose this disgraceful and ugly destruction and cultural massacre” (The Independent, “Destroying Ottoman castle to build hotel is ‘cultural massacre'”). In a further statement he framed the demolition as an attempt “to erase the Turkish period from [Saudi Arabian] history and [the Saudi] world” (RFE/RL, “Saudi Arabia Rejects Criticism Over Citadel Demolition”; World Socialist Web Site, “Saudi government demolishes historic Ottoman castle”).

Turkey did not confine its response to rhetoric. Talay announced that his ministry had formally protested to UNESCO’s Turkish National Committee and asked the organisation to press Saudi Arabia on the matter, and Turkey’s Foreign Ministry separately raised the demolition with UNESCO as the relevant international body responsible for cultural heritage protection (The Globe and Mail, “Turkey blasts Saudi Arabia for demolishing castle”; Los Angeles Times, “Turks Protest Destruction of Castle in Mecca”). Turkey’s Foreign Minister, İsmail Cem, went further still, describing the demolition as “cultural genocide”: “The Saudi administration’s tearing down the historical al-Ajyad fortress in Mecca was nothing but a cultural genocide. I share reaction of our deputies against the demolition of the fortress.” Cem also acknowledged the limits of Turkish influence, saying, “Sometimes, your power cannot be influential in another country,” while pledging that Turkey would “continue to monitor all the developments and react against any action targeting its historical assets” (People’s Daily, “Turkish FM Accuses Saudis for Demolition of Ottoman Castle”). The Deputy Speaker of the Turkish Parliament, Murat Sökmenoğlu, added a religious framing to the criticism, telling the BBC that “a Muslim country’s destruction of another country’s historic heritage on holy soil is a sinful behaviour in breach of the moral values of Islam, religious brotherhood and common sense” (World Socialist Web Site, “Saudi government demolishes historic Ottoman castle”). A member of the Turkish Democratic Left Party, Ertuğrul Kumcuoğlu, went so far as to suggest a boycott of travel to Saudi Arabia (Wikipedia, “Ajyad Fortress”). Turkish public anger was expressed on the street as well as in government: on 12 January 2002, roughly 300 demonstrators burned pictures of King Fahd outside the Saudi Embassy in Ankara, chanting “We will make them pay the price for Al Ajyad” and carrying banners equating the Saudi and Taliban leaderships, while Turkish travel agents said they intended to protest what they called Saudi Arabia’s “cultural massacre” at international trade fairs (Los Angeles Times, “Turks Protest Destruction of Castle in Mecca”).

Saudi Arabia’s Response: Sovereignty and Pilgrim Interest

Saudi officials responded within days, and their response rested on two consistent arguments repeated across multiple statements: that the demolition was a matter of national sovereignty in which no outside government had standing to interfere, and that it served the practical interest of expanding capacity for pilgrims. Saudi Arabia’s Minister of Islamic Affairs and Endowments, Saleh bin Abdul-Aziz Al ash-Sheikh, said in a press statement: “The Kingdom was only exercising its sovereignty over its territory,” and added, “No one has the right to interfere in what comes under the state’s authority” (Arab News, “Saudi Arabia defends fort demolition”). He stated that the fort would eventually “be rebuilt by experts in the same traditional way it was first built and at the same site, albeit not on the Bulbul Hill,” and asserted that the demolition did “not violate Vienna, Paris or Islamabad agreements on heritage sites” (Arab News, “Saudi Arabia defends fort demolition”). Elsewhere, quoted by Agence France-Presse, al-Sheikh said the housing component of the project was intended to accommodate Hajj pilgrims and argued “this is in the interest of Muslims all over the world” (Wikipedia, “Ajyad Fortress”). According to RFE/RL, al-Sheikh separately expressed “astonishment” at reports the fortress had been “destroyed,” describing the action instead as “an act of preservation” undertaken by a government “acting within its sovereign rights,” and a Saudi Foreign Ministry official defended the move as being made “in the interest of pilgrims” travelling to Makkah (RFE/RL, “Saudi Arabia Rejects Criticism Over Citadel Demolition”).

Saudi officials also directly disputed the applicability of international heritage law to the case. A Turkish Foreign Ministry spokesman, Hüseyin Dirioz, confirmed that Turkey had “urged Saudi officials not to demolish the fort and preserve their common historical heritage” and said, “We have expressed our sorrow and stressed our sensitivity on the issue… We will continue to follow this matter” (Arab News, “Saudi Arabia defends fort demolition”). In Paris, a UNESCO spokesman confirmed that the fortress was not on any UNESCO World Heritage list, a point the Saudi side repeatedly cited as evidence that Turkey had no formal standing to object under international heritage instruments (Arab News, “Saudi Arabia defends fort demolition”). Saudi Arabia’s representative to UNESCO, named in French press coverage as Fouad (also transliterated Feda) al-Adel, rejected the Turkish protest on the same grounds and, according to the Arabic-language daily Okaz, went further, stating that “Turkey has no right to protest because the fortress is not historic nor a registered antiquity” (Le Monde, “Arabie saoudite: démolition de la forteresse ottomane d’Ajyad”; Elaph, “al-Sa’udiyya: Izalat Qal’at Ajyad ‘Sha’n Yakhussu Siyadat al-Mamlaka'”).

A Saudi Foreign Ministry source, quoted anonymously by Okaz in early 2002, was still more direct about the fortress’s perceived historical standing, stating that removal of “the fortress, which is not sacred,” was “a matter concerning the Kingdom’s sovereignty,” and describing Turkish claims about the site as “an attempt to overcome its internal problems.” A separate official at the antiquities department of the Saudi Ministry of Education was quoted as saying the fortress “was built to protect the Grand Mosque from aggressors and its role ended after security was established in the Saudi era” (Elaph, “al-Sa’udiyya: Izalat Qal’at Ajyad ‘Sha’n Yakhussu Siyadat al-Mamlaka'”). Taken together, these statements are the clearest available record of the Saudi government’s own case: that Ajyad’s historical value was limited, that its practical military and civic role had already ended decades earlier, that expanding capacity for pilgrims took precedence over preserving the structure in place, and that no binding international instrument obliged Saudi Arabia to act otherwise. This guide reports that position in the words used by the officials who held it, without adjudicating whether the fortress’s historical value was in fact as limited as they described it.

The Saudi Press and Regional Commentary

Saudi and Gulf newspapers at the time carried editorial commentary considerably sharper than the government’s own formal statements. Okaz is reported to have argued that Turkey, having itself “decided to abolish its history and erase its identity” through Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s secularising reforms, was in a poor position to lecture others on heritage preservation, and dismissed the comparison to the Bamiyan Buddhas as showing “ignorance and confusion” about the fortress’s actual religious insignificance (Elaph, “al-Sa’udiyya: Izalat Qal’at Ajyad”). A commentary carried in the London-based, Saudi-owned daily Al-Hayat by the writer Dawood al-Shuryan argued that the Turkish media campaign was less about the fortress itself than about “marketing the colonial legacy of Turkey when it ruled as an empire,” and contended that since modern Turkey came into existence only decades after Ajyad was built, the fortress was properly “an Islamic monument and not Turkish” (Gulf News, “Turkey manoeuvres over internal Saudi affairs draws condemnation”). The Saudi daily Al Jazeera (unrelated to the Qatari broadcaster of the same name) argued in an editorial that the demolition was consistent with a long pattern of compensated demolition of privately owned Makkan property for the sake of Haram expansion, and characterised the campaign against the Kingdom as touching directly on Saudi sovereignty (Gulf News, “Turkey manoeuvres over internal Saudi affairs draws condemnation”). The Islamic Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (ISESCO) also weighed in on the Saudi side, describing the matter as “an internal matter that concerns Saudi Arabia alone” and noting, as the Saudi government had, that Ajyad was not on any internationally recognised heritage list (Gulf News, “Turkey manoeuvres over internal Saudi affairs draws condemnation”).

A Note on the “Reconstruction” Announcement

One element of this dispute deserves particular care, because it has been reported inconsistently. Saudi officials stated more than once, both before and immediately after the demolition, that the fortress would be rebuilt — either on its original site or nearby — using traditional methods and materials. According to a statement attributed to King Fahd via his minister, “King Fahd has given his approval for the King Abdul Aziz Endowment for the Holy Haram and for the preparation of the project site by removing the hill and the castle. The king instructed that the castle should be preserved in full by rebuilding it” (Wikipedia, “Ajyad Fortress”; this same royal instruction, dated to 2001, is also reported in Portuguese Wikipedia, “Fortaleza de Ajyad” and Castles in the World, “Castello di Ajyad”). Minister Saleh Al-Sheikh repeated a version of this pledge on 10 January 2002, saying the fort would be “rebuilt by experts in the same traditional way it was first built and at the same site, albeit not on the Bulbul Hill” (Arab News, “Saudi Arabia defends fort demolition”). As of the most recent sources available to this guide, no such reconstruction of Ajyad Fortress, on its original site, on Bulbul Hill, or elsewhere in Makkah, appears to have taken place in the more than two decades since the demolition. Multiple retrospective sources, including IslamicLandmarks.com’s own summary of the episode, note that “this plan was subsequently dropped” (IslamicLandmarks.com, “Ajyad Fortress”). This guide treats the reconstruction pledge as a documented statement of intent at the time, not as a project that was carried out, and flags the gap between announcement and outcome as part of the honest record.

The Wider Argument: Two Cases, Fully Stated

The demolition of Ajyad Fortress cannot be understood in isolation from a much larger and longer-running argument about how Saudi Arabia manages the physical fabric of Islam’s two holiest cities. That argument has two sides, both resting on claims that are, in their own terms, serious and sincerely held. This guide sets out each in full, names who holds it, and does not attempt to declare a winner.

The Saudi Case: Capacity, Safety and a Theological Position on Structures

The first and most frequently repeated element of the Saudi case is practical rather than doctrinal: the number of people performing Hajj and Umrah has grown by orders of magnitude across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, from roughly tens of thousands in the earliest years of Saudi rule to several million annually by the 2000s, and the physical infrastructure of Makkah — roads, the Haram itself, accommodation, sanitation, and crowd-management space — has had to expand correspondingly or risk the kind of crush disasters that have periodically killed pilgrims in the modern Hajj. Saudi officials framed the Ajyad decision explicitly in these terms: Minister Saleh Al-Sheikh’s description of the project as being “in the interest of pilgrims” and “in the interest of Muslims all over the world” reflects a genuine and serious state responsibility — the safety and accommodation of a pilgrimage population that a fortress occupying a commanding hilltop directly over the Haram could not itself help to solve, and arguably obstructed simply by occupying land that could otherwise house or serve pilgrims (RFE/RL, “Saudi Arabia Rejects Criticism Over Citadel Demolition”; Arab News, “Saudi Arabia defends fort demolition”).

The second element of the Saudi case is theological, and this guide names it accurately rather than describing it only through its critics’ framing. The kingdom’s official religious establishment follows a doctrinal position, generally associated with the eighteenth-century scholar Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab and with the broader current of thought often called Wahhabism or Salafism, which holds that physical structures — particularly graves, domes, shrines and, by extension, other buildings that might attract veneration, sanctity or superstitious attachment not grounded in explicit textual evidence — pose a real risk of leading ordinary believers toward shirk, the association of partners with God, which is regarded in this school of thought as the gravest possible sin in Islam. This is not a fringe or informally held view within Saudi religious institutions: a 1994 fatwa by Sheikh Abdulaziz bin Baz, at the time the kingdom’s Grand Mufti and one of the most senior religious authorities in the Wahhabi tradition, stated plainly that “it is not permitted to glorify buildings and historical sites… such action would lead to polytheism” (cited in multiple secondary sources including Religion Wiki, “Destruction of sites associated with early Islam,” drawing on reporting of the 1994 fatwa). The doctrinal foundation for this position traces further back still, to the medieval scholar Ibn Taymiyyah and his student Ibn al-Qayyim, both of whom held that structures built over graves were religiously impermissible and that it was obligatory to remove them where the authority to do so existed; Ibn al-Qayyim wrote in Zad al-Ma’ad that “it is obligatory to destroy the structure constructed over the grave, and after gaining power for their destruction it is not permissible to reinstate them even for one day” (cited in al-Islam.org, “Wahhabis and the Renovation of Graves of Awliya’ Allah,” a Shia-perspective source critical of this position but accurately quoting the underlying text). Saudi Arabia’s Permanent Committee for Islamic Research and Fatwas (al-Lajna al-Da’ima), the country’s standing body of senior scholars, has issued rulings in this same vein, describing building over graves as “a disagreeable heresy (bid’a)… and leads to polytheism (shirk)” (cited in Brandeis University Crown Center, Crown Paper 2).

It is important to state precisely what this doctrinal position does and does not directly say about Ajyad Fortress specifically. The theological argument, in its clearest and most frequently cited form, concerns graves, tombs, shrines and structures that could plausibly become sites of devotional veneration — not military fortifications as such. This guide has not found a specific fatwa or scholarly ruling naming Ajyad Fortress itself as an object of concern on shirk-related grounds; the Saudi government’s own public justifications for the Ajyad demolition, quoted above, were framed in terms of sovereignty and pilgrim capacity, not in terms of idolatry risk. Critics of the wider demolition programme, however — most prominently the architect Sami Angawi and the historian Irfan al-Alawi, both discussed below — argue that Ajyad’s removal belongs to the same underlying pattern that does explicitly invoke this theology elsewhere in Makkah and Madinah, citing, for example, the demolition of the domed tombs at Jannat al-Baqi in Madinah under explicitly stated anti-shirk reasoning. Readers should understand the distinction: the theological case against “structures overlooking the Haram” or against monumentalising the past more broadly is real, sincerely held by named Saudi religious authorities, and documented in the sources above; whether it was the operative reasoning specifically behind the Ajyad decision, as opposed to the stated reasoning of sovereignty and capacity, is a matter on which this guide has found no official Saudi statement making that theological link explicit, and it does not assert one.

The Conservation Case: Named Academics and Bodies

The case against the wider pattern of demolition, and against the Ajyad decision specifically, has been made most consistently and publicly by two figures. Dr Sami Angawi, a Saudi architect trained at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, founded the Hajj Research Center at King Abdulaziz University in Jeddah in 1975, later moved to Umm al-Qura University in Makkah, and after losing control of that centre in 1988 founded the independent Amar Center for Architectural Heritage in Jeddah, which he has led since (Encyclopedia.com, “Angawi, Sami (1948–)”; ArchNet, “Sami Angawi”). Angawi has spent five decades documenting and arguing against the destruction of historic fabric in Makkah and Madinah, and has been explicit in tying that destruction to the theological current described above: “At the root of the problem is Wahhabism,” he told The Independent. “They have a big complex about idolatry and anything that relates to the Prophet” (Middle East Forum, “Dissident Watch: Sami Angawi”). Angawi has separately estimated that at least 300 historical buildings were levelled in Makkah and Madinah over the fifty years preceding his remarks, and warned in comments to Reuters that “we are witnessing now the last few moments of the history of Mecca… its layers of history are being bulldozed for a parking lot” (Center for Islamic Pluralism, “Dr. Sami Angawi on Wahhabi Desecration of Makkah”).

Dr Irfan al-Alawi, executive director and co-founder of the Islamic Heritage Research Foundation, based in the United Kingdom and later the United States, has been the most prominent international voice cataloguing specific losses, including Ajyad. Speaking to the BBC’s Global programme, al-Alawi noted that Ottoman-era columns and fortifications dating back some 330 years, some attributed in his account to the Ottoman architectural tradition associated with the great sixteenth-century architect Mimar Sinan, had been dismantled under the justification of expansion (BBC World News, “The damage to Mecca,” interview with Irfan al-Alawi). Al-Alawi has told The Independent that the removal of historic columns and structures within and around the Haram means “the historical record is being deleted. A new Muslim would never have a clue because there’s nothing marking these locations now” (The Independent, “The photos Saudi Arabia doesn’t want seen”). He has also stated to the Middle East Eye that “we do not deny that expansion is needed but there are ways they could expand while still preserving” heritage (Middle East Eye, “Saudi ‘cultural vandalism’ of Muslim heritage continues”), a formulation that captures the conservation case at its most measured: not an argument against expansion as such, but an argument that expansion and preservation were never, in fact, mutually exclusive, and that the trade-off was a choice rather than a necessity.

Beyond these two figures, the criticism has drawn support from wider institutional and academic quarters, though generally in relation to the broader pattern rather than to Ajyad by name. World heritage experts convened at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London have called on Saudi authorities to halt destruction of sites connected to early Islamic history (IslamiCity, “Saudis Accused of Razing Islamic Sites,” reporting on a SOAS meeting). The German National Committee of ICOMOS (the International Council on Monuments and Sites), in its “Heritage at Risk” report series, specifically named Ajyad Fortress among the losses in Makkah, stating that “to build” the Jabal Omar and related developments, “the Saudi authorities destroyed the Ottoman era Ajyad Fortress and the hill it stood on,” alongside other losses including the site associated with the Prophet’s ﷺ birthplace and the site associated with the house of Khadijah بنت خويلد رضي الله عنها (ICOMOS Germany, “Heritage at Risk”). This guide has not found a comparably specific statement on Ajyad by name from UNESCO itself, beyond the confirmation, cited above, that the site was never on a World Heritage list; UNESCO’s institutional engagement with Hejazi heritage in the years since has run mainly through Saudi Arabia’s own Tentative List submissions — which include the Hejaz Railway system and its associated fortifications, submitted by Saudi Arabia itself in 2015, but do not include Ajyad Fortress, which no longer exists to be nominated (UNESCO World Heritage Centre, “Hejaz Railway,” Tentative List entry; UNESCO World Heritage Centre, “Saudi Arabia”).

The Scale of the Loss: Ajyad in the Wider Pattern

Ajyad Fortress is one loss within a much larger and longer documented pattern, and readers deserve both the scale of that pattern and an honest account of how solid the most commonly cited figures actually are. The number most frequently repeated in press coverage — that some 95 percent of Makkah’s buildings older than roughly a thousand years have been demolished over the past two to three decades — originates with the Washington-based Gulf Institute (also referred to in some reporting as the Institute for Gulf Affairs), an advocacy and research organisation, and has been repeated by numerous outlets including The Independent, Middle East Eye, and the islamicpluralism.org research project (The Independent, “The destruction of Mecca: Saudi hardliners are wiping out their own heritage”; Middle East Eye, “Saudi ‘cultural vandalism’ of Muslim heritage continues”; Center for Islamic Pluralism, “Mecca under threat”). A related but distinct figure — that 98 percent of Saudi Arabia’s religious and historical sites nationwide were demolished between 1985 and 2014 — is attributed by multiple outlets to the London-based Islamic Heritage Research Foundation, the organisation co-founded and led by Dr Irfan al-Alawi (Americans for Democracy and Human Rights in Bahrain, “The Destruction of Religious and Cultural Sites”; TIME, “Saudi Arabia Bulldozes Over Its Heritage”). A submission to the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, by contrast, cites research estimating “more than 90 per cent” of the kingdom’s historical landmarks and archaeological heritage as already demolished (OHCHR, “Internal Communication Clearance Form”).

This guide reports these figures because they are the ones in wide circulation and because they come from named, identifiable organisations rather than anonymous sources — but it also states plainly what these figures are and are not. They are not the product of an independent, peer-reviewed architectural census of Makkah and Madinah conducted by a neutral body with access to comprehensive historical building records; no such audited count exists in the sources available to this guide. They are estimates produced by advocacy and heritage-research organisations that are themselves parties to the argument, most prominently the Gulf Institute and the Islamic Heritage Research Foundation, both of which campaign explicitly against the demolition programme they are measuring. That does not make the figures false — the underlying trend of extensive, well-documented losses is corroborated independently by named individual cases across decades of reporting from outlets including The New York Times, The Independent, The Los Angeles Times, TIME and the Los Angeles Times’ own on-the-ground Makkah reporting — but it does mean the specific percentage, 95 percent or 98 percent, should be understood as an advocacy estimate rather than an audited statistic, and this guide presents it as such rather than repeating it as a settled fact (The Los Angeles Times, “Mecca’s ancient heritage is under attack”).

Named losses cited alongside Ajyad across these sources, and reported with reasonable independent corroboration, include: the site associated with the house of Khadija bint Khuwaylid رضي الله عنها, the Prophet’s ﷺ first wife, reported to have been replaced by a public toilet and ablution block; the site associated with the house of Abu Bakr al-Siddiq رضي الله عنه, reported to have been redeveloped as a Hilton hotel; the library structure built over what is identified by some historians as the birthplace of the Prophet ﷺ, which has itself faced repeated threat of demolition; the house associated with Hamza ibn Abdul-Muttalib رضي الله عنه, the Prophet’s ﷺ uncle, reported flattened for a Makkan hotel; and, in Madinah, the domed tombs of Jannat al-Baqi, demolished under explicitly stated Wahhabi anti-shirk doctrine in 1925 and covered in full in this guide’s article on Jannat al-Baqi (Middle East Eye, “Saudi ‘cultural vandalism’ of Muslim heritage continues”; TIME, “Saudi Arabia Bulldozes Over Its Heritage”; Wikipedia, “Demolition of al-Baqi”). Ajyad Fortress belongs to this same broad pattern by chronology and by method — rapid demolition, limited or no prior documentation, justified publicly on grounds of capacity and sovereignty — while remaining distinct from it in one important respect: unlike the sites associated with the Prophet’s ﷺ family, Ajyad was never a site of religious veneration or devotional significance in Islamic law, and the controversy over its loss is a heritage and diplomatic dispute rather than a specifically theological one in the way the Jannat al-Baqi demolitions were.

What Stands There Now: The Abraj Al Bait Complex

The site of Ajyad Fortress and the hill it stood on now lie beneath the southern portion of the Abraj Al Bait complex, also known as the Clock Towers or, informally, the Makkah Royal Clock Tower complex, a government-owned mixed-use development of seven towers standing directly across the road from the Grand Mosque’s southern precinct (Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Abraj al-Bayt”; Wikipedia, “The Clock Towers”). Construction began in 2002, immediately following the demolition, and the complex opened in phases through 2011 and 2012 (Wikipedia, “The Clock Towers”). The central and tallest of the seven towers, the Makkah Clock Royal Tower, rises 601 metres and remains among the tallest buildings in the world, with the four faces of its clock — at 43 metres in diameter each — recognised as the largest clock faces anywhere (Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Abraj al-Bayt”). Both this tower and the surrounding retail, hotel and residential complex are covered in full in this guide’s separate companion articles on the Makkah Royal Clock Tower and on the Abraj Al Bait shopping and hotel complex, which describe their scale, facilities and role in the modern Hajj and Umrah infrastructure in detail this article does not repeat.

For the purposes of this guide, the relevant fact is simply this: the fortress’s footprint, and the greater part of the hill it stood upon, no longer exist as a distinguishable landform. Jabal Bulbul was levelled to create the construction platform on which the towers now stand, and the site today reads, to any visitor, as an extension of the paved plaza and podium structures surrounding the Haram rather than as a hilltop of any kind (Wikipedia, “Ajyad Fortress”). Britannica’s own summary of the complex notes drily that “critics of the complex have complained that the massive structure alters the ambiance of the city’s holy sites” — a comment that applies to the general visual and spatial transformation of the area rather than to the fortress specifically, but which captures something of the scale of change involved (Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Abraj al-Bayt”).

Common Misconceptions

A number of claims about Ajyad Fortress circulate in casual retelling that deserve correction or qualification. First, the exact construction date is often stated with more precision than the sources support: readers will encounter 1777, 1780 and 1781 all presented as definite, when the honest position is that the fortress was built in a range spanning the mid-to-late 1770s into the early 1780s, most likely beginning under the Sharifian initiative recorded in Arabic sources around 1772–1773 and completed within the following decade (al-Watan, “Qal’at Ajyad”; Wikipedia, “Ajyad Fortress”). Second, some retellings state or imply that Saudi authorities denied outright that any demolition took place; the more accurate record, per RFE/RL’s contemporary reporting, is that a senior minister expressed “astonishment” at press characterisations of the event as “destruction” and preferred the framing of “an act of preservation” pending eventual reconstruction — a semantic dispute over characterisation, not a denial that the fortress had been physically removed (RFE/RL, “Saudi Arabia Rejects Criticism Over Citadel Demolition”). Third, some accounts state as settled fact that the fortress will be or is being rebuilt; as discussed above, that pledge was made at the time by Saudi officials but does not appear, from any source available to this guide, to have been carried out in the more than two decades since.

Fourth, and most important for a guide of this kind: readers should not treat Ajyad Fortress, had it survived, as a site with any basis in Islamic law for intentional devotional visitation, nor should its loss be mourned in specifically religious terms in the way losses connected to the Prophet’s ﷺ family or companions might be. Scholars including Ibn Taymiyyah, Muhammad ibn Salih al-Uthaymeen and Saudi Arabia’s Standing Committee for Issuing Fatwas hold that only a short, specific list of places around Makkah and Madinah carries a basis in the sunnah for ziyarah undertaken with the intention of religious reward: the two Sacred Mosques and al-Masjid al-Aqsa as destinations to which travel itself is prescribed, the grave of the Prophet ﷺ and the graves of Abu Bakr and Umar رضي الله عنهما, the graves of the martyrs of Uhud, the people of Jannat al-Baqi, and Masjid Quba (IslamQA, “Going to visit places and mosques in which the Prophet stayed”). Shaykh Muhammad ibn Uthaymeen is quoted on that same page stating explicitly, of Madinah, that “there are no places in Madinah to be visited apart from these… as for other sites, there is no basis for visiting them,” and the Standing Committee has separately ruled it impermissible to climb to the Cave of Hira for devotional purposes, cautioning against exactly the kind of veneration-by-association this guide’s other articles on Jabal al-Nur and Jabal Thawr discuss at greater length (IslamQA, “Going to visit places and mosques in which the Prophet stayed”). Ajyad Fortress, an eighteenth-century military structure with no Prophetic or Companion-era connection at all, falls even further outside this list than the historically significant but non-devotional sites discussed elsewhere in this guide. Learning its history is a matter of understanding Ottoman-era Makkah and a documented modern controversy — an educational and historical interest, not a devotional one — and this guide presents it on exactly that basis. It should also be said, in fairness to a broader current within the Muslim world, that many Sufi and traditionalist scholars take a wider view of tabarruk, seeking blessing through proximity to places and objects associated with righteous history, and would not necessarily draw the line in the same place as the Standing Committee. This guide states both positions and does not adjudicate between them; the decision belongs to the reader and their own scholarly guidance.

Lesser-Known Facts

The fortress gave its name, rather than took it from, the two ravines below it: Ajyad al-Kabir and Ajyad al-Saghir, whose waters historically drained toward the Haram area and eventually into Wadi Ibrahim, and which today survive only as the names of Makkan districts rather than as visible watercourses (al-Watan, “Qal’at Ajyad”).
A one-twenty-fifth scale model of the fortress is preserved at the Miniatürk miniature park in Istanbul, alongside models of other historic Ottoman structures across the empire’s former territory — making it, in effect, the fortress’s most complete surviving physical representation anywhere in the world (Wikipedia, “Ajyad Fortress”).
The fortress held out for weeks against the opening assault of the 1916 Arab Revolt and was reduced only by imported field artillery, making it — by a wide margin — the most militarily significant engagement fought at any single site now covered by this guide’s articles on twentieth-century Hejazi history (The Hejaz Railway, “The Arab Revolt”).
After its capture in 1916, Sharifian forces are reported to have repurposed the fortress as a military school rather than demolishing or abandoning it outright, meaning it continued in state service for years under the new Hashemite administration of the Hejaz (Jordan Armed Forces, “Declaration of the Great Arab Revolution”).
Cannon fire from Ajyad is reported to have marked the times of prayer and the opening and closing of the Ramadan fast in Makkah for well over a century, a civic role distinct from its military one and one still remembered in Saudi retrospective press coverage of the site (al-Watan, “Qal’at Ajyad: ‘Ayn Makkah al-Harisa wa-Muntalaq Midfa’ Ramadan”).
The demolition of Ajyad was not an isolated act even within its own moment: the Qishla of Mecca, a separate eighteenth-century Ottoman barracks-fortress in the Jarwal district on the western side of the city, was likewise demolished by the Saudi government to build hotels facing the Grand Mosque, a fact that receives far less attention than Ajyad but forms part of the same underlying pattern (Wikipedia, “Qishla of Mecca”).

Timeline

1186 AH / 1772–1773 CE: Sharif Surur ibn Musa’id of Makkah orders the construction of a defensive fortress on Jabal Ajyad amid a period of local insecurity, according to Arabic-language historical accounts (al-Watan, “Qal’at Ajyad”).
Circa 1777–1781 CE (most commonly cited as 1780): Construction of Ajyad Fortress on Jabal Bulbul is completed under Ottoman authority, in the reign of Sultan Abdul Hamid I (Wikipedia, “Ajyad Fortress”).
1202 AH / 1787–1788 CE: Sharif Surur ibn Musa’id dies before the fortress complex is fully finished; construction is completed after his death (Arabic Wikipedia, “Qal’at Ajyad”).
1218–1220 AH / 1803–1805 CE: Wahhabi-Saudi forces briefly capture Makkah and Madinah; Ottoman-Egyptian forces under Ibrahim Pasha recover the Hejaz by 1818.
1302 AH / 1884–1885 CE: Ottoman Wali of the Hejaz Osman Nuri Pasha rebuilds the deteriorated fortress, establishing capacity for roughly 800 infantry plus 300 additional personnel, with dedicated artillery and ammunition facilities (al-Watan, “Qal’at Ajyad”).
10 June – early July 1916: Sharif Hussein bin Ali launches the Arab Revolt in Makkah; the Ottoman garrison at Ajyad Fort holds out under siege, shelling parts of the city, until Egyptian Army artillery support arrives and breaches the fortress, forcing its surrender (MegaMilitary, “Arabia during World War I: The Arab Revolt, Part 3”).
1924–1925: Forces of Abdulaziz Ibn Saud take control of Makkah and the Hejaz; the Kingdom of Hejaz under the Hashemites comes to an end.
Mid-20th century: King Abdulaziz designates Ajyad Fortress and its land as a waqf endowment attached to the Grand Mosque (Arabic Wikipedia, “Qal’at Ajyad”).
2001: King Fahd bin Abdulaziz approves a large commercial and hotel development for the Jabal Bulbul site; Turkish officials say they receive assurances the fortress itself will be preserved (The Independent, “Destroying Ottoman castle to build hotel is ‘cultural massacre'”).
Late December 2001 – 9 January 2002: Demolition of Ajyad Fortress and levelling of most of Jabal Bulbul takes place (Wikipedia, “Ajyad Fortress”).
7–13 January 2002: Turkish Culture Minister İstemihan Talay and Foreign Minister İsmail Cem publicly condemn the demolition; Turkey lodges a protest with UNESCO; Saudi ministers Saleh Al-Sheikh and others defend the demolition as a matter of sovereignty and pilgrim interest; protests take place outside the Saudi Embassy in Ankara (Arab News, “Saudi Arabia defends fort demolition”; Los Angeles Times, “Turks Protest Destruction of Castle in Mecca”).
2002–2011: Construction of the Abraj Al Bait complex proceeds on the levelled site.
2012: The Abraj Al Bait complex, including the Makkah Clock Royal Tower, opens fully to the public (Wikipedia, “The Clock Towers”).

Key Lessons

Historical

Ajyad Fortress demonstrates that Ottoman Makkah was, in a very literal sense, a fortified city, with a defensive system of citadels — Ajyad, the Qishla at Jarwal, and the forts of Lala and Hindi — built to protect the Haram and the pilgrimage route rather than to project imperial power outward. Its 1916 siege is a reminder that the transition from Ottoman to Hashemite to Saudi control of the holy cities was not a peaceful administrative handover but a sequence of real military and political ruptures, each of which left the built environment of Makkah changed.

Spiritual

The fortress’s history offers a way of thinking honestly about attachment to place. Its stones held no sanctity in Islamic law, yet their loss provoked grief, anger and a genuine sense of severed continuity in people who had never worshipped there and had no religious obligation to mourn it — a useful case study in the difference between historical attachment, which is a natural and permissible human response to loss, and religious veneration, which Islamic scholarship reserves for a much narrower and more carefully bounded set of places.

Personal

Confronting a site that no longer exists, and an argument that has not been resolved, asks something different of the visitor than a standing monument does. It asks for patience with incomplete information, comfort with the fact that two named, serious parties can each state a case that is coherent on its own terms, and a willingness to hold the historical record open rather than closing it prematurely around whichever account arrived first.

Practical

For anyone using this guide to plan a Hajj or Umrah itinerary, the lesson is straightforward: verify, before travelling, whether a place named in older guidebooks, blog posts or family stories about Makkah still exists in the form described. As this guide’s treatment of Ajyad Fortress, the Qishla of Mecca, and the sites associated with the Prophet’s ﷺ family all show, the built environment of Makkah has changed enough within living memory that outdated information is not a minor inconvenience but a real source of confusion for pilgrims trying to orient themselves.

Practical Visitor Guide: There Is Nothing to Visit

There is nothing to visit. Ajyad Fortress no longer exists in any form — no ruin, no partial wall, no marked footprint, no plaque — and no part of the Abraj Al Bait complex that now occupies its site has been set aside to commemorate or interpret it. A visitor arriving in Makkah in 2026 hoping to see the fortress, or even to stand where it stood with any confidence about the exact spot, will not be able to do so in any meaningful sense, because the hill itself — Jabal Bulbul — was levelled along with the structure it carried, and the ground level, contours and orientation of the site have all been altered by the construction that followed (Wikipedia, “Ajyad Fortress”).

What a visitor can do is orient themselves approximately. The fortress stood on high ground south of the Masjid al-Haram, on the left side of the Ajyad district as approached from the Haram, in the general area now occupied by the southern towers of the Abraj Al Bait complex and the podium and plaza structures connecting the complex to the Haram precinct (IslamicLandmarks.com, “Ajyad Fortress”). If you are staying in or visiting the Clock Tower complex — covered in full in this guide’s companion article on the Makkah Royal Clock Tower and its shopping and hotel facilities — you are, in a general sense, standing on or very near ground that was once part of Jabal Bulbul’s summit, though the precise footprint of the fortress walls relative to any specific tower cannot be established from the sources available to this guide, and no marker on site will help you locate it more exactly. There is no viewing platform, museum room, or interpretive signage anywhere in the current complex, as far as this guide has been able to determine, dedicated to the fortress that once stood there; the Clock Tower Museum housed in the upper floors of the central tower focuses on astronomy, timekeeping and the history of the clock itself rather than on the site’s Ottoman-era predecessor.

For those who want to see what the fortress looked like, the most accessible options are, in descending order of completeness: the one-twenty-fifth scale model at the Miniatürk park in Istanbul, which offers the fullest three-dimensional impression available anywhere (Wikipedia, “Ajyad Fortress”); the photographs held in general stock-image and community archives such as Wikimedia Commons, which preserve at least the exterior appearance of the fortress from the twentieth century (Wikimedia Commons, “Category: Ajyad Fortress”); and, for the wider Ottoman-era visual context of Makkah in the same period, the Yıldız Albums commissioned under Sultan Abdulhamid II, published in various modern reprint editions (Google Books, “The Yıldız Albums of Sultan Abdulhamid: Mecca-Medina”). None of these require or justify travel to Makkah specifically to view; they are archival and museum resources accessible independently of a pilgrimage itinerary.

If your reason for reading this article is to understand the ground you are walking on during Umrah, the honest advice is this: treat the area around the base of the Clock Tower complex as historically significant in the same way you would treat any site of a documented and contested demolition — worth knowing about, worth reflecting on, but not a place that requires or rewards a special detour, a photograph, or any devotional gesture. There is no religious merit attached to visiting this location, and the Standing Committee’s general caution against seeking out historical sites with anything resembling ziyarah intent, discussed above, applies here as clearly as anywhere in this guide. Your time in Makkah is better spent, as it always is, in the Haram itself.

Authentic Sources

Primary and Contemporary News Sources

The most reliable record of the demolition and the diplomatic exchange it produced comes from contemporary news reporting filed in January 2002, when the events were unfolding and officials were speaking on the record. This guide has drawn on: Arab News, “Historic Makkah fortress demolished” (9 January 2002); Arab News, “Saudi Arabia defends fort demolition” (10 January 2002); RFE/RL, “Saudi Arabia Rejects Criticism Over Citadel Demolition” (11 January 2002); The New York Times, “World Briefing: Middle East: Saudi Arabia: Historic Fortress Destroyed” (9 January 2002); The Independent, “Destroying Ottoman castle to build hotel is ‘cultural massacre'”; The Los Angeles Times, “Turks Protest Destruction of Castle in Mecca” (13 January 2002); The Globe and Mail, “Turkey blasts Saudi Arabia for demolishing castle”; People’s Daily, “Turkish FM Accuses Saudis for Demolition of Ottoman Castle”; Le Monde, “Arabie saoudite: démolition de la forteresse ottomane d’Ajyad”; and World Socialist Web Site, “Saudi government demolishes historic Ottoman castle”. The official Turkish government statement by Minister İstemihan Talay is preserved on the website of Türkiye’s Ministry of Culture and Tourism at ktb.gov.tr, “The Minister of Culture Condemns Saudi Arabia for Pulling Down Ecyad Castle”. Arabic-language contemporary coverage, including the account of the Saudi Foreign Ministry’s internal position, is drawn from Elaph, “al-Sa’udiyya: Izalat Qal’at Ajyad ‘Sha’n Yakhussu Siyadat al-Mamlaka'” and from Gulf News, “Turkey manoeuvres over internal Saudi affairs draws condemnation”, which surveys Saudi and Gulf press editorial reaction. A note of caution applies to all contemporary news reporting of a fast-moving diplomatic dispute: initial figures (project cost, exact demolition dates) varied between outlets in the days immediately following the event, and this guide has flagged the specific discrepancies it could not resolve rather than silently picking one figure.

Historical and Encyclopaedic Sources

Background on the fortress’s construction, dimensions and role draws on the English, Arabic, German, Spanish, Portuguese and French Wikipedia articles on the subject, cross-checked against one another and against independent sources rather than relied upon alone: English Wikipedia, “Ajyad Fortress”; Arabic Wikipedia, “Qal’at Ajyad”; German Wikipedia, “Adschyad-Festung”; and Spanish Wikipedia, “Fortaleza de Ajyad”. The detailed Arabic-language historical account of the fortress’s Sharifian-era origins and Ottoman-era reconstruction, citing named historians Dr Adel Nour Ghubashi of Umm al-Qura University and Muhammad Amin al-Makki, is drawn from the Saudi newspaper al-Watan: al-Watan, “Qal’at Ajyad: ‘Ayn Makkah al-Harisa wa-Muntalaq Midfa’ Ramadan”. The IslamicLandmarks.com and Haramain Archives summaries, while not academic sources in themselves, were used as secondary aggregators and cross-checked against primary press reporting: IslamicLandmarks.com, “Ajyad Fortress”; Haramain Archives, “Ajyad Fortress (Castle)”.

1916 Arab Revolt Sources

The account of the siege of Ajyad Fort during the 1916 Arab Revolt draws on The Hejaz Railway, “The Arab Revolt”; MegaMilitary, “Arabia during World War I: The Arab Revolt, Part 3”; Wikipedia, “Arab Revolt”; Wikipedia, “Battle of Mecca (1916)”; and the Jordanian Armed Forces’ own official historical account at Jordan Armed Forces, “Great Arab Revolution Battles” and Jordan Armed Forces, “Declaration of the Great Arab Revolution”.

Conservation, Theological and Academic Sources

Biographical and career information on Dr Sami Angawi is drawn from Encyclopedia.com, “Angawi, Sami (1948–)” and ArchNet, “Sami Angawi”, with direct quotations drawn from Middle East Forum, “Dissident Watch: Sami Angawi” and Center for Islamic Pluralism, “Dr. Sami Angawi on Wahhabi Desecration of Makkah”. Direct quotations from Dr Irfan al-Alawi are drawn from The Independent, “The photos Saudi Arabia doesn’t want seen”, Middle East Eye, “Saudi ‘cultural vandalism’ of Muslim heritage continues”, and the BBC interview archived at YouTube, “The damage to Mecca,” BBC World News. The theological background on Wahhabi doctrine regarding graves, shrines and veneration draws on al-Islam.org, “Wahhabis and the Renovation of Graves of Awliya’ Allah” (a source critical of this position, used here only for its accurately quoted primary citations), Brandeis University Crown Center, Crown Paper 2, and the Harvard graduate thesis Harvard DASH, “Exploring the Perspectives of the Saudi State’s Destruction of Heritage Sites”. The German ICOMOS National Committee’s specific reference to Ajyad Fortress is drawn from ICOMOS Germany, “Heritage at Risk”. Estimates of the wider scale of heritage loss are drawn from The Independent, “The destruction of Mecca: Saudi hardliners are wiping out their own heritage”, Americans for Democracy and Human Rights in Bahrain, “The Destruction of Religious and Cultural Sites”, TIME, “Saudi Arabia Bulldozes Over Its Heritage”, and the UN submission at OHCHR, “Internal Communication Clearance Form”.

Sources on Islamic Rulings and Ziyarah

The ruling on which sites carry a basis in sunnah for intentional devotional visitation is drawn from IslamQA, “Going to visit places and mosques in which the Prophet stayed”, which itself cites Ibn Taymiyyah, Ibn Waddah al-Qurtubi’s transmission of the view of Imam Malik, Shaykh Abd al-Aziz ibn Baz, Shaykh Muhammad ibn Salih al-Uthaymeen, and Saudi Arabia’s Standing Committee for Issuing Fatwas.

Sources on the Abraj Al Bait Complex

Details of the complex now standing on the site are drawn from Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Abraj al-Bayt” and Wikipedia, “The Clock Towers”, cross-checked against the French, German and Portuguese Wikipedia articles on the same subject for consistency of dates and figures.

A Note on Method

This article treats the Ajyad Fortress as a case in which the historical and architectural record is genuinely thinner than the diplomatic and press record. Where sources gave consistent, corroborated figures — the 2002 demolition dates, the named officials and their direct quotations, the dimensions of the site, the 1916 siege — this guide states them with confidence and cites them directly. Where sources conflicted and could not be reconciled — the exact founding date, the exact founder, the exact demolition cost, the precise built area versus total site area — this guide has said so explicitly rather than silently selecting the most repeated figure and presenting it as fact. Where no source offered verifiable information at all — an architect’s name, a precise tower count, a measured plan, a confirmed individual photograph of the fortress within the Yıldız Albums — this guide has stated that absence plainly rather than filling it with invented detail drawn from the general conventions of Ottoman military architecture elsewhere. Direct quotations from named officials, ministers and scholars are reproduced as recorded in the contemporary press and archival sources cited above; no dialogue, statement or event in this article has been invented.

The Ajyad Fortress