The Expansions and Demolitions of Makkah: What Was Lost

Every pilgrim who circles the Kaaba today stands inside a building that is, in engineering terms, almost entirely new. The marble under bare feet was cut and laid within living memory. The columns overhead were poured in concrete, not carved in stone. The domes, the arcades, the gates, the minarets — nearly all of it dates from the second half of the twentieth century or the first quarter of the twenty-first. This is not a controversial statement; it is a matter of public record, documented in the Saudi government’s own histories of the three great expansions of Masjid al-Haram. What is contested is not whether the mosque was rebuilt, but what that rebuilding required, what it removed, and whether what it removed should be mourned, defended, or simply accepted as the necessary cost of housing a rite that now draws close to two million people into a single valley on a single set of days each year.

This article sets out the history of Makkah’s built environment as it can be documented, and it sets out — without adjudicating between them — the two arguments that have formed around that history for more than half a century. One argument, made by conservation architects, heritage foundations and international journalists, holds that the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has erased the physical fabric of early Islamic history in the city of the revelation, and that a version of this erasure amounting to nearly the whole of the pre-modern built environment has taken place with little public accounting. The other argument, made by the Saudi state, its religious establishment, and many pilgrims and engineers who have worked on the mosque’s expansion, holds that the growth of Masjid al-Haram was not optional: that a valley mosque built for tens of thousands could not safely hold the millions now performing Hajj and Umrah, that the historical record of stampedes and fires proves this beyond doubt, and that the theological tradition of the Arabian Peninsula regards the veneration of buildings and grave-sites as a road toward the very idolatry the Kaaba was built to abolish. A reader who wants a full and factual understanding of the history of Islamic sites in Makkah — the Umrah historical sites that pilgrims travel to see, and the ones they no longer can — needs both arguments stated fully and fairly, because both are held with sincerity by identifiable people, and because the historical record supports elements of each.

What follows is organised in nine parts: the chronological building history of the mosque from before Islam to the present; an item-by-item account of what has been altered, moved, or demolished, with pointers to this guide’s separate articles on subjects covered there in depth; the conservation case in full, in the words and findings of its principal advocates; the state and scholarly case in full, including the engineering, statistical, and theological grounds on which it rests; an honest interrogation of the headline statistics that circulate in this debate; the current direction of policy under Vision 2030 as it stood in July 2026; an account of what has been preserved and where a visitor can see it; a practical guide to reading the layers of the modern mosque; and a closing section addressing the common misconceptions that surround this subject. Because this is a guide for pilgrims performing Umrah and Hajj, and because this is one of several places where the history of the two mosques bears on how a person visits them, hadith and Qur’anic material relevant to the story are cited in the sections where they arise, with full references.

Part One: The Mosque Before the Kingdom — A Chronological History

Before Islam and the First Muslim Century

Before the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ, the Kaaba stood in an open space in the valley of Makkah, surrounded not by a purpose-built mosque but by the houses of the Quraysh, whose owners were said to leave narrow lanes between their walls and the sacred structure for people to walk around it. There was, in this earliest period, no defined masjid as later generations would understand the term — no enclosing wall, no colonnade, no roofed prayer hall. The sanctuary was the open ground around the Kaaba itself, bounded loosely by the surrounding houses. This is consistent with the accounts of Ibn Ishaq and later historians of Makkah such as al-Azraqi, whose ninth-century history of the city, Akhbar Makkah, remains the single most important early source for the mosque’s building history and is drawn on by nearly every later account, including modern academic ones.

The Qur’an itself records the sanctuary’s foundation in the account of Ibrahim and Ismail raising the House: “And [mention] when Ibrahim was raising the foundations of the House and [with him] Ismail, [saying], ‘Our Lord, accept [this] from us. Indeed You are the Hearing, the Knowing'” (Qur’an 2:127). The mosque that would eventually enclose the Kaaba did not exist in Ibrahim’s time in the architectural sense pilgrims recognise today; it grew, wall by wall and expansion by expansion, over more than thirteen centuries of Islamic history, a process this article traces in full.

The first specifically Islamic enlargement of the sacred precinct is attributed to the caliph Umar ibn al-Khattab, who in 17 AH (638 CE) purchased and demolished neighbouring houses to create a formal boundary wall around the area of circumambulation, marking the first time the mataf was given a defined architectural edge rather than being bounded informally by private property. Sources differ on the precise area this added: one widely cited figure puts Umar’s addition at roughly 1,500 square metres (Wikipedia, “Masjid al-Haram”), while the Arabic-language history of the mosque’s expansions gives a smaller figure of approximately 560 square metres for this stage (Arabic Wikipedia, “Expansion of Masjid al-Haram”) — a discrepancy this article flags rather than resolves, since neither source offers primary documentation sufficient to adjudicate between them. What is agreed is that Umar’s wall was low, without a roof, and did not yet include the porticoes that later became characteristic of the mosque.

The caliph Uthman ibn Affan extended the mosque further in 26 AH (647 CE) and, significantly, is credited with adding the first covered porticoes (riwaqs) around the perimeter of the courtyard — colonnaded walkways with a roof, offering the first shaded, structurally distinct prayer space attached to the open mataf (Archnet, “Masjid al-Haram”). This is the first architectural ancestor of the colonnades that would come to define the mosque’s appearance for the next thirteen centuries, culminating in the Ottoman arcade discussed below and treated at length in this guide’s separate article on the Ottoman colonnades.

Ibn al-Zubayr, the Umayyads, and the Abbasid Century

During the second civil war of early Islam, Abdullah ibn al-Zubayr, who held Makkah against Umayyad forces, rebuilt the Kaaba itself following damage from fighting and fire in 64 AH (683–684 CE), and separately expanded the surrounding mosque, bringing its area to approximately 7,465 square metres according to widely repeated figures (Wikipedia, “Masjid al-Haram”). After Ibn al-Zubayr’s defeat, the Umayyad caliph Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan reversed some of his rebuilding of the Kaaba’s structure itself in 74 AH (693 CE), restoring it closer to the pre-Ibn al-Zubayr form, though the mosque’s expanded perimeter was generally retained. The Umayyad caliph al-Walid I later added marble columns and gold mosaic decoration to the mosque’s porticoes, a decorative programme that drew explicitly on Byzantine and Damascene craftsmanship of the kind also used at the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus.

The Abbasid period saw two further significant interventions. The caliph al-Mansur enlarged the mosque in the 750s CE, adding further porticoes and, according to several sources, introducing decorative mosaic work continuing the Umayyad programme. The most architecturally significant Abbasid intervention, however, came under the caliph al-Mahdi, whose expansion — carried out in two stages across roughly 775 to 785 CE, according to one widely cited account (IslamicCity, “The History of Al-Masjid al-Haram”) — is credited with a decisive architectural achievement: bringing the mosque’s outer walls to a rough rectangle of approximately 196 by 142 metres and, crucially, positioning the Kaaba at the geometric centre of the courtyard for the first time, rather than off to one side as earlier, more organic expansions had left it (Archnet, “Masjid al-Haram”). Al-Mahdi’s expansion also added three minarets, at the gates known as Bab al-Salam, Bab Ali, and Bab al-Wada, establishing minarets as a permanent feature of the mosque’s silhouette for the first time. Later Abbasid caliphs, including al-Mu’tadid and al-Muqtadir, made further additions to the mosque’s northern and eastern sides into the tenth century, but the al-Mahdi-era plan — a centred Kaaba within a rectangular colonnaded enclosure — remained the mosque’s basic geometry for well over a thousand years afterward, surviving in essence through the Mamluk period and into the Ottoman era discussed next.

The Ottoman Reconstruction After the Flood of 1629

Makkah passed under Ottoman suzerainty in 1517, following the Ottoman conquest of Mamluk Egypt and the transfer of guardianship of the Two Holy Mosques to the Ottoman sultans, who adopted the title Khadim al-Haramayn al-Sharifayn, Servant of the Two Noble Sanctuaries. For more than a century afterward, the Ottomans largely maintained the existing Mamluk-era structure rather than rebuilding it wholesale. That changed under Sultan Selim II, who in 1571 commissioned the empire’s chief architect, Mimar Sinan — already responsible for the Suleymaniye and Selimiye mosques — to renovate Masjid al-Haram. Sinan’s intervention, completed after Selim’s death under his successor Murad III in 1576–77 according to one detailed architectural history (German Wikipedia, “Al-Haram Mosque”), replaced the mosque’s flat wooden roof with a system of small stone domes carried on additional columns — the same domed-arcade profile that would come to define the mosque’s appearance for the following three and a half centuries and that is treated in architectural detail in this guide’s article on the Ottoman colonnades.

This Sinan-era structure suffered severe flood damage on more than one occasion in the early seventeenth century, notably in 1611 and again, catastrophically, in 1629, when floodwater is recorded as having risen high enough inside the sanctuary to threaten the Kaaba’s structure itself. Sultan Murad IV ordered a full reconstruction in response to the 1629 flood, a project that went beyond repair to a substantial rebuilding: the Kaaba’s own masonry was renewed, the mosque’s marble paving was relaid, and four additional minarets were added, bringing the total to seven — a number that would remain unmatched by any other mosque in the Islamic world and that carried its own symbolic weight, since seven is repeated throughout the rites of Hajj and Umrah, from the seven circuits of tawaf to the seven traversals of Safa and Marwah. This Murad IV-era mosque, completed in 1629–30, is the structure that multiple sources describe as having remained essentially unchanged “for nearly three centuries” (The Daily Observer, “History of Masjid al-Haram”; Suara.com, “History of the Construction and Renovation of Masjid al-Haram”) — the mosque that appears in the earliest photographs of Makkah taken in the late nineteenth century, the mosque that Ottoman pilgrims and generations of pilgrims from across the Muslim world knew as the Grand Mosque, and the mosque whose colonnades, domes, and gate structures form the principal subject of what this article’s later sections describe as having been progressively dismantled across the twentieth century.

By the end of Ottoman rule over the Hijaz, following the Arab Revolt of 1916 and the eventual Saudi conquest of the region in the 1920s, the mosque’s outer enclosure is recorded as measuring approximately 192 by 132 metres, an area of roughly 25,000 square metres, according to one architectural history (French Wikipedia, “Al-Haram Mosque”). This is the mosque — Ottoman in its domes, its colonnades, its seven minarets, and its gates — that the newly established Kingdom of Saudi Arabia inherited when Abdulaziz ibn Saud took control of Makkah in 1924 and was later recognised as king of the unified Saudi state in 1932.

The First Saudi Expansion, 1955–1973

The first Saudi-era expansion of Masjid al-Haram was ordered by King Abdulaziz and, following his death in 1953, carried out under his son King Saud, with the foundation stone reportedly laid on 5 April 1956 according to the Arabic-language history of the project (Arabic Wikipedia, “Expansion of Masjid al-Haram”), and completed in stages continuing into the reigns of King Faisal and King Khalid, with most sources dating its substantial completion to 1973. Before this expansion, the mosque’s area is most commonly cited at approximately 28,000 square metres, with a normal-day capacity of around 50,000 worshippers, though variant figures exist: Encyclopaedia Britannica and other reference sources put the pre-expansion figure closer to 27,000 square metres, while the London office of the Muslim World League cites 29,127 square metres (Muslim World League London, “Expansion of the Holy Mosque”) — a range this article reports rather than resolves, since the underlying survey methods are not published in any of these sources.

The project required demolishing the mosque’s two outer courtyards along with the residential and commercial buildings that had accumulated immediately around the sanctuary over the centuries — approximately 1,700 buildings, apartments and shops, according to the German-language architectural history of the mosque, with compensation to owners reported at close to 240 million Saudi riyal (German Wikipedia, “Al-Haram Mosque”). This first expansion also extended the mosque’s covered area to enclose the mas’a, the corridor between Safa and Marwah used for the sa’i, or rite of walking, bringing it under a permanent roof for the first time in its architectural history — a project examined in more detail in this guide’s article on the Masa gallery.

On completion, the most frequently cited post-expansion figures put the mosque’s total area at 160,168 square metres, with normal-day capacity above 300,000 and peak Hajj-season capacity above 400,000 (Saudipedia, “Expansions of the Grand Mosque”; Arabic Wikipedia; Muslim World League London). A minority of sources, including some editions of Encyclopaedia Britannica and heritage-tourism references, instead cite approximately 152,000 square metres and a capacity of 500,000 — a divergence this article flags as unresolved. The expansion added four new minarets, bringing the mosque’s total, together with the Ottoman-era seven, to a widely reported eleven for a time before later expansions altered the count again; other sources describe this stage as bringing the minaret total to seven newly built ones alongside surviving Ottoman towers, illustrating how even the minaret count is not consistently reported across sources. Sixty-four gates are recorded in the expanded structure, the most prominent being Bab al-Malik Abdulaziz, Bab al-Umrah, and Bab al-Salam — the last of these a name carried forward from the historic Ottoman-era gate of the same name but applied to a new structure, a distinction addressed in this guide’s dedicated article on Bab al-Salam.

The King Fahd Expansion, 1988–2005

A second major expansion, commissioned under King Fahd, had its foundation stone laid on 13 September 1988 according to multiple sources, and has been described in Saudi government material as the largest building project undertaken in the mosque’s history up to that point — “the biggest expansion in fourteen centuries,” a phrase used in several accounts of the project. The expansion added a new wing to the mosque’s western side, between the gate known as Bab al-Umrah and the gate known as Bab al-Malik (King’s Gate), comprising three levels — basement, ground floor and first floor — providing approximately 76,000 square metres of new covered floor space with a stated capacity of around 152,000 additional worshippers. Beyond the covered wing, the project added extensive paved courtyards around the mosque’s perimeter: figures for this open-air addition range from 85,800 to 86,000 square metres across different sources, with capacity estimates for these courtyards ranging from 130,000 to as high as 195,000 people depending on the source consulted — again, a range this article reports rather than collapses into a single figure.

Saudipedia, the Saudi government’s own reference encyclopaedia, gives the mosque’s total area following the King Fahd expansion as 366,168 square metres, up from the 160,168 square metres left by the first Saudi expansion (Saudipedia, “Expansions of the Grand Mosque”); other sources cite a total closer to 356,000 or 356,800 square metres for the same stage. Normal-day capacity figures for the completed King Fahd-era mosque range from 770,000 to 820,000 across different accounts, with peak Hajj and Ramadan capacity cited at over one million in some sources and as high as 1.5 million in others. This expansion also added a system of escalators, air conditioning, and, for the first time, a below-ground level intended partly for the mosque’s Zamzam water distribution infrastructure — a subject covered separately and in depth in this guide’s article on the modern Zamzam engineering project.

The King Abdullah Expansion, 2011–Present

The third and largest Saudi-era expansion was announced under King Abdullah in 2008 and formally launched in 2011, with construction continuing through King Abdullah’s reign and, following his death in January 2015, under his successor King Salman, whose government has continued and in places extended the project into further phases lasting into the 2020s. Time magazine’s 2014 reporting on the project put its cost at that stage at $21 billion and described it as designed explicitly to meet the challenge of housing pilgrim numbers that Saudi officials, at the time, forecast could reach 17 million annually by 2025 across Hajj and Umrah combined (Time, “Saudi Arabia Bulldozes Over Its Heritage,” Carla Power, 2014). Other sources give substantially different cost figures at later stages of the project: About Islam reported an initial project cost of 40 billion Saudi riyal, approximately $10.6 billion, for an earlier phase (About Islam, “Historic Masjid al-Haram Extension Launched”), while Asharq Al-Awsat’s later account of the project’s full scope, spanning King Abdullah’s launch through King Salman’s completion of major phases, cites a total cost of 300 billion Saudi riyal, approximately $80 billion, and a final area of 750,000 square metres with capacity for more than 2.5 million worshippers (Asharq Al-Awsat, “Third Expansion of the Grand Mosque: Launched by King Abdullah, Completed by King Salman”). The scale of divergence between the $10.6 billion and $80 billion figures reflects, in large part, genuine differences in scope and date — early reporting captured only an initial phase of a project that expanded considerably over more than a decade — but this article reports both figures with their sources rather than treating either as definitive, since no single audited total for the entire multi-phase project appears in the public record consulted for this piece.

The expansion added new construction principally to the mosque’s north and northwest, on land cleared in the area historically known as Jabal Omar and its surrounding quarters — ground whose clearance is treated at length in this guide’s separate article on Jabal Umar. Reported figures for the added area itself range from approximately 400,000 to 456,000 square metres depending on the source and the phase being described. A separate and much-covered element of the project was the expansion of the mataf, the paved circumambulation area immediately around the Kaaba, which began on 15 November 2012 according to the Saudi Gazette’s contemporary reporting, and which added new levels — a ground floor and a basement — beneath and around the historic open mataf, intended to triple the number of pilgrims who could perform tawaf simultaneously. The Saudi Gazette’s account puts the resulting hourly tawaf capacity at 150,000, up from a prior capacity of 48,000 per hour (Saudi Gazette, “Mataf Expansion”); other sources give different figures for the same expanded capacity, including 107,000 per hour and 130,000 per hour, figures that likely reflect different phases of the multi-year mataf project or different points in its completion rather than a single disputed fact, though this article cannot fully reconcile them from the sources available and reports the range accordingly.

As of July 2026, the King Abdullah/King Salman-era expansion remains, in parts, an ongoing project rather than a fully completed one. Saudi planning documents and press coverage discussed in Part Six of this article, on Vision 2030 and current direction, describe further stages intended to extend the mosque’s ultimate area toward figures as high as 1.5 million square metres with a stated goal of accommodating up to 30 million pilgrims across a Hajj season under full build-out, according to forward-looking reporting (Ummid, “How Makkah Grand Mosque Will Look in 2030”) — a target this article treats explicitly as a stated plan rather than a completed fact, since public reporting available as of mid-2026 does not confirm that this final scale has been reached. What can be stated with confidence is that the mosque a pilgrim enters today is, in virtually every structural respect except the Kaaba itself and a small number of preserved fragments discussed later in this article, a late-twentieth and twenty-first century construction built in phases across seventy years of Saudi rule, layered over — and in the process of removing — a mosque that had itself been substantially an Ottoman construction of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which was in turn built over successive Abbasid, Umayyad, and early Islamic enlargements reaching back to the seventh century.

Part Two: What Was Lost, Item by Item

The chronological account above describes area and capacity. It does not describe what stood on the ground before each expansion, or what happened to it. This section addresses that directly, site by site, drawing on the most specific documentation available for each. Several of these sites have their own dedicated articles elsewhere in this guide, covering their history, their demolition, and their surviving fragments in far greater depth than is possible here; where that is the case, this section summarises briefly and directs the reader onward rather than duplicating that material.

The Ottoman Colonnades and the Fabric of Bab al-Salam

The single most documented case of demolition affecting fabric from before the Saudi period is the progressive removal of the Ottoman-era colonnade — the domed arcade built under Sinan’s direction in the 1570s and rebuilt after the 1629 flood under Murad IV — which had stood, essentially unaltered in its basic form, for roughly three and a half centuries before the Saudi expansions began. The first two Saudi expansions, in 1955–1973 and 1969–1976, removed the mosque’s outer Ottoman-era courtyards; a further, more direct phase of demolition affecting the inner Ottoman arcade immediately around the mataf became a matter of international reporting in 2011, when photographs obtained by the British newspaper The Independent documented mechanical excavation of columns on the mosque’s eastern side, some of them, according to the report, inscribed with the names of the Prophet’s companions and marking specific sites of historical memory. This guide’s article on the Ottoman colonnades sets out that episode, the criticism it drew, and the fate of salvaged material in full detail, and readers seeking the complete history of the colonnades’ construction, decline, and removal should turn to that article rather than this summary.

Bound up with the colonnades is the fate of the historic gate known as Bab al-Salam, the Gate of Peace, one of the oldest-named entrances to the mosque, associated in tradition with the route by which pilgrims are recommended to enter the sanctuary. The name Bab al-Salam has been carried forward through successive rebuildings of the mosque, applied to different physical structures in different eras, a fact that has generated some confusion among pilgrims about whether the gate they pass through today has any connection to the historic fabric associated with the name. This guide’s dedicated article on Bab al-Salam addresses that question directly, including the important distinction between the Makkah gate of this name and a separate Bab al-Salam in the Prophet’s Mosque in Madinah, and should be consulted for the full history.

Ajyad Fortress

Overlooking the mosque from the hills to the southeast stood Ajyad Fortress, an Ottoman military structure built in 1780 under the reign of Sultan Abdul Hamid I to defend Makkah and control access to the sanctuary valley. The fortress survived for more than two centuries, through the end of Ottoman rule and the first seven decades of Saudi governance, until it was demolished in January 2002 to clear ground for the Abraj Al Bait complex, the hotel and tower development that now stands immediately adjacent to the mosque’s southeastern side. The demolition drew a formal diplomatic protest from Turkey, whose government regarded the fortress as part of its own historical heritage in the former Ottoman lands; a Turkish cultural official, Istihan Tal, was quoted by the New York Times describing the demolition as a “cultural massacre” (The New York Times, “Jidda Journal: Where the Prophet Trod, He Begs, Tread Lightly,” 2002). This guide’s dedicated article on Ajyad Fortress sets out the building’s full military and architectural history, the demolition itself, the Turkish protest and the Saudi response, and the fortress’s replacement by the Abraj Al Bait towers, and should be read in full for this episode; it is summarised here only to place it within the wider pattern this article as a whole describes.

Ottoman-Era Makkan Housing Quarters

Less individually documented than the fortress or the colonnades, but larger in cumulative extent, is the loss of the residential quarters that had grown up in the streets immediately surrounding the mosque over the Ottoman centuries and into the early twentieth century. These were working districts of the old city — narrow lanes, courtyard houses, shops and quarters with names recorded in nineteenth-century travellers’ accounts and in the topographical histories of Makkah, including neighbourhoods such as Suq al-Layl, She’b Ali, and She’b Amir, which stood in the area immediately north and northwest of the mosque later cleared for the King Abdullah expansion and the Jabal Omar development. The scale of demolition required to build the modern mosque and its surrounding hotel and infrastructure zone has been estimated at approximately 1,700 buildings, apartments and shops for the first Saudi expansion alone, according to the German-language architectural history of the mosque cited earlier in this article, with further, less precisely quantified clearances accompanying each subsequent expansion. A 1989 phase of expansion work alone required demolishing more than sixty older houses in the immediate vicinity of the mosque according to heritage-advocacy accounts of that period, discussed further below in connection with the house associated with Khadijah bint Khuwaylid. The cumulative effect, described by critics discussed in Part Three below, was the disappearance of an entire historic urban fabric — not a single monument but a townscape — that had stood in continuous use since the Ottoman period and, in places, since the Abbasid and Mamluk eras before it.

A 2020 UN-Habitat report on Makkah’s urban development gives one of the more specific, non-advocacy figures available for the scale of this loss, stating that thirteen of Makkah’s fifteen historic old neighbourhoods have been razed to make room for hotels and commercial space, citing the studies of the Hajj Research Centre — the same institution Sami Angawi founded in 1975, discussed in Part Three below — as its source for the finding that thousands of homes and entire neighbourhoods have been destroyed to make way for the city’s expansion (UN-Habitat, “Makkah: A Brief Urban Overview”). The same report notes that the resulting concentration of high-rise hotel and commercial development in place of the old neighbourhood fabric has itself created new environmental risks, including impacts on the local groundwater table and geological stability, and records that Makkah’s built-up urban area grew by more than 300 percent between 1989 and the date of the report, against a population increase of only 150 percent over the same period — a divergence the report attributes largely to the low-density, land-intensive character of the hotel and tower development that replaced the dense, traditional urban fabric of the old quarters. This UN-Habitat figure of thirteen out of fifteen historic neighbourhoods is a specific, sourced number distinct from the more general destruction percentages discussed in Part Five below, and this article treats it as a separate, independently attributed data point rather than conflating it with the advocacy-derived 90, 95, and 98 percent figures discussed there.

The House Identified as the Prophet’s ﷺ Birthplace

Islamic tradition locates the house in which the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ was born in the quarter of Makkah known as She’b Bani Hashim, near what later became the Suq al-Layl market area, not far from the mosque itself. The house is recorded as having belonged to his father, Abdullah ibn Abd al-Muttalib. Following the Hijra, the house passed to Aqil ibn Abi Talib, the Prophet’s cousin, who had not yet embraced Islam at the time and who sold or otherwise transferred the property; it later came into the possession of Muhammad ibn Yusuf al-Thaqafi, brother of the Umayyad governor al-Hajjaj ibn Yusuf. In the Abbasid period, the site was acquired by Al-Khayzuran, mother of the caliph Harun al-Rashid, who converted the house into a mosque commemorating the Prophet’s birth. A major reconstruction of this commemorative structure, adding a dome and a minaret, is recorded as having taken place in 1009 AH, corresponding to 1600–1601 CE, according to one detailed history of the site (WikiHaj, “Birthplace of the Holy Prophet”).

In 1951, under King Abdulaziz and following consultation with senior religious scholars, the birthplace mosque was converted into a public library, now known as the Makkah Al Mukarramah Library, a use it retains (Wikipedia, “Makkah Al Mukarramah Library”). This conversion reflected the same theological position discussed at length in Part Four of this article: a concern that a structure explicitly commemorating the Prophet’s birth risked becoming a site of veneration inconsistent with the doctrine of tawhid, the oneness of God, as understood by the Saudi religious establishment. Reporting by The Independent in the mid-2000s and again in later years described recurring threats to redevelop the site further, including plans said to have been obtained by the newspaper for a royal building project on the same ground; Time magazine’s 2014 reporting likewise stated that plans for a new palace for King Abdullah threatened the library standing atop the traditionally identified birthplace site (Time, “Saudi Arabia Bulldozes Over Its Heritage,” 2014). As of the research underlying this article in 2026, the library continues to be referenced in current sources as standing at this location, though this article was not able to locate a definitive, dated, primary confirmation of the site’s precise present-day status beyond continued listing of the library at this address in reference sources; readers planning a visit should treat the site’s accessibility as a detail to confirm locally rather than to rely on any single published account, consistent with this guide’s general practice for contested or fast-changing site information.

The House of Khadijah bint Khuwaylid

The house of Khadijah bint Khuwaylid, the Prophet’s ﷺ first wife, in which tradition holds that several of his children were born and in which the earliest revelations are associated, stood in a quarter of old Makkah near the mosque. The site was reportedly rediscovered during excavation work connected to a Haram extension project in 1989, a phase of construction that required demolishing more than sixty older structures in the surrounding area according to heritage-documentation sources from the period (“The House of Sayyida Khadija,” Age of Jahiliyah). Accounts describe the excavated remains as including two mihrabs, prayer niches suggesting the site had already been used as a place of prayer or commemoration in earlier centuries. Following the excavation, the site was reportedly reburied under sand and later built over; multiple advocacy and heritage sources, repeated across several publications including Time magazine’s 2014 account, state that public toilets were subsequently constructed above the location (Time, “Saudi Arabia Bulldozes Over Its Heritage,” 2014). This specific claim — that toilets now occupy the site — is widely repeated across advocacy and journalistic sources but this article was not able to identify an independent, neutral, primary confirmation distinguishing it clearly from the alternative claim, made in some other discussions of the site, that the location is now enclosed within a general-purpose extension of the mosque precinct used in part as a women’s prayer area. Given this, the claim is reported here with its sourcing made explicit, and readers should treat the precise current use of the site as contested rather than settled.

The Site Associated With Abu Bakr’s House

The house of Abu Bakr al-Siddiq, the Prophet’s ﷺ closest companion and the first caliph, is widely reported in both journalistic and heritage-advocacy sources to have stood on ground now occupied by a Hilton hotel forming part of the Makkah Towers complex near the mosque (Middle East Eye, “Saudi ‘Cultural Vandalism’: Muslim Heritage Continues to Disappear”; Time, 2014). Some Indonesian-language travel and pilgrimage sources report that a commemorative space referred to informally as “Masjid Abu Bakr” has been recreated on an upper floor of the Hilton building, though this article was not able to verify this specific claim against an English-language primary source and reports it accordingly as an unverified secondary claim rather than an established fact.

This site in Makkah should not be confused with a separate and distinct location in Madinah: a small mosque associated with Abu Bakr, one of several historic prayer sites linked to the Prophet’s ﷺ companions in that city, which a communication filed with the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights states was demolished to make way for an automated teller machine, part of a wider pattern of small historic mosque closures and demolitions in Madinah described in the same communication (UN OHCHR, Communication on Cultural Heritage Sites). The Makkah house-site and the Madinah mosque-site are two separate locations bearing the same companion’s name, and conflating them — as some secondary summaries of this subject do — risks overstating or misattributing specific claims; this article treats them as distinct throughout.

The Ottoman-Era Zamzam Building

For centuries, access to the Zamzam well was organised around a dedicated Ottoman-era building standing within the mosque courtyard near the Kaaba, housing the well-head, stairs leading down to the water, and space for pilgrims to draw and drink from it directly. This structure was removed during the Saudi-era expansions in favour of the modern, subterranean water-distribution system that now supplies Zamzam water to coolers throughout the mosque and to bottling and distribution networks serving pilgrims across the site and beyond it. The engineering history of this transition, the reasoning behind it, and the modern infrastructure that replaced the historic building are treated in full in this guide’s dedicated article on the Zamzam engineering project, which should be consulted for a complete account; this section notes it here only to record it within the wider inventory of what the historic mosque contained and no longer does.

The Four Maqams of the Schools of Law

Until the early twentieth century, the mataf area contained four small freestanding structures, known as the four maqams, each associated with one of the four Sunni schools of Islamic jurisprudence — Hanafi, Maliki, Shafi’i, and Hanbali — at which imams of the respective schools would lead prayer for their own followers at the same time, a practice that had developed over preceding centuries as the four schools became institutionally distinct within the mosque’s own ritual life. These structures were removed by Saudi authorities in the years following King Abdulaziz’s establishment of control over the Hijaz, as part of a broader policy of unifying prayer leadership in the mosque under a single imam rather than four parallel ones, consistent with the theological emphasis on unity discussed in Part Four below. This guide’s dedicated article on the four maqams sets out their architectural form, their history, the reasoning behind their removal, and the scholarly reception of that decision in full detail, and should be consulted for the complete account of this episode, which is summarised only briefly here.

Historic Gates

The Ottoman-era mosque is recorded as having had multiple named gates, several dating in name and tradition to the Abbasid period or earlier — including Bab al-Salam, Bab Ibrahim, Bab Ali, Bab al-Wada, Bab al-Umrah, and others recorded in al-Azraqi’s ninth-century history and in later Ottoman-period descriptions of the mosque. As with Bab al-Salam, discussed above, most of these gate names have been preserved and carried forward through successive rebuildings, applied to new structures in new locations as the mosque’s outer perimeter has moved outward with each expansion. The physical fabric of the historic gates themselves — their carved stone surrounds, their inscriptions, and in some cases their exact former locations — has not, in general, survived in situ; where fragments were preserved, they are most likely to be found today in the collections described in Part Six of this article, on what has been preserved and where it can be seen, rather than in their original architectural context.

Part Three: The Conservation Case, Stated in Full

The argument that Saudi Arabia has destroyed an unacceptable proportion of Makkah’s and Madinah’s historic built fabric is made by a specific, identifiable set of architects, historians, activists, and journalists, over a period stretching back at least to the 1970s and continuing into the present. This section sets out who they are, what they have said, and on what evidence, in enough detail that a reader who shares this view should recognise their own position stated fairly.

Sami Angawi and the Hajj Research Centre

The most credentialed and longest-standing critic of Saudi demolition policy is Sami Angawi, a Saudi architect trained at the University of Texas and holding a doctorate from the University of London with a specific research focus on the traditional architecture of Makkah and Madinah. Angawi founded the Hajj Research Centre in Jeddah in 1975, an institution established with government backing to study the built environment and infrastructure of the pilgrimage, and he resigned from it in 1988 amid disagreements over the direction of development policy. In an extensively quoted 2002 interview with the New York Times, conducted after the demolition of Ajyad Fortress, Angawi compared the pace and manner of demolition in Makkah to the Taliban’s destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas the previous year, and described the experience in personal terms: “It felt like watching my children die every day” (The New York Times, “Jidda Journal: Where the Prophet Trod, He Begs, Tread Lightly,” 2002).

Angawi’s most extensive statement of his position appeared in a 2005 investigation by The Independent’s Daniel Howden, in which he stated: “What we are witnessing are the last days of Mecca and Medina” (The Independent, “The Destruction of Mecca: Saudi Hardliners Are Wiping Out Their Own Heritage,” Daniel Howden, 2005). In the same report, Angawi located the cause of the demolitions specifically in the religious current dominant within the Saudi state: “At the root of the problem is Wahhabism,” he told the newspaper, arguing that the strict interpretation of tawhid promoted by the Saudi religious establishment regards historical sites associated with the Prophet ﷺ and his companions as inherent risks of idolatrous veneration, and is therefore structurally inclined toward their removal rather than their preservation. In the same interview, Angawi estimated that as few as twenty structures remained standing in Makkah from the lifetime of the Prophet ﷺ, a figure that has since been repeated, with varying precision, across much of the subsequent reporting on this subject.

Irfan al-Alawi and the Islamic Heritage Research Foundation

Irfan al-Alawi is the executive director of the Islamic Heritage Research Foundation, a London-based organisation whose stated purpose is the preservation, protection, documentation, surveying, and photographing of historic Islamic sites, with a particular focus on the Hijaz region of Saudi Arabia (ICIT Digital Library, “Meccahattan”). Al-Alawi has been quoted extensively in Western press coverage of this subject over more than a decade. In 2011, photographs he provided or helped obtain for The Independent documented mechanical demolition of Ottoman and Abbasid-era columns forming part of the mosque’s arcade, a specific episode covered in full in this guide’s article on the Ottoman colonnades. In Time magazine’s 2014 report, al-Alawi stated that the house of Hamza ibn Abd al-Muttalib, the Prophet’s ﷺ uncle, had recently been flattened to make way for a hotel, and separately warned against a then-circulating proposal, reported in a sixty-one-page document published in Saudi Arabia’s Journal of the Royal Presidency, to physically separate the Prophet’s ﷺ tomb from the Prophet’s Mosque in Madinah — a proposal al-Alawi told Time “would amount to its destruction,” adding, “You can’t move it without destroying it” (Time, “Saudi Arabia Bulldozes Over Its Heritage,” 2014). In 2017 reporting by The Express Tribune on Saudi efforts to promote religious tourism, al-Alawi maintained a critical position, stating that there was “scant sign of any restoration in Makkah so far” and describing continued restrictions by religious authorities on visits to historic sites, including warnings against what officials regarded as behaviour resembling idolatry (The Express Tribune, “Saudi Arabia Seeks Islamic Tourism Boost in Test for Heritage, Tradition,” 2017).

Ziauddin Sardar

Ziauddin Sardar, a British-Pakistani writer and scholar, is the author of Mecca: The Sacred City, published in 2014, a book-length history combining personal memoir with an argument that Saudi development policy has, in his account, “nearly obliterated the city’s architectural heritage” while transforming the city into what a Guardian review by Christopher de Bellaigue characterised as “a haven of consumerism” (The Guardian, “Mecca: The Sacred City by Ziauddin Sardar – Review,” 2014). In a separate essay published by New Age Islam, Sardar wrote of personally witnessing the demolition of the Bilal Mosque in the mid-1970s and argued that the Makkah Royal Clock Tower complex, discussed further below, was built on ground he estimated had contained some four hundred sites of cultural and historical significance (New Age Islam, “The Destruction of Mecca,” Ziauddin Sardar). In Time’s 2014 report, Sardar offered a specific account of Saudi motivation distinct from the purely theological explanation offered by other critics, arguing that the pace of development reflects financial calculation as much as religious doctrine: “We have Hajj, and we’re going to exploit it to the max,” he said, framing the kingdom’s pilgrimage infrastructure investment as a hedge against an eventual decline in oil revenue, comparable to the diversification strategies pursued by Dubai and Qatar (Time, “Saudi Arabia Bulldozes Over Its Heritage,” 2014).

Ali al-Ahmed and the Institute for Gulf Affairs

Ali al-Ahmed is the founder and director of the Institute for Gulf Affairs, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank and human rights advocacy organisation, formerly named the Saudi Institute, focused on Gulf politics, Saudi domestic affairs, and United States–Gulf relations (Wikipedia, “Institute for Gulf Affairs”). Al-Ahmed, a Saudi-born analyst and long-standing critic of the Saudi monarchy who has testified before the United States Congress, has made some of the most forceful public statements on this subject: in 2005 reporting by The Independent, an official then associated with what the newspaper described as the Gulf Institute stated that the destruction of Islamic landmarks in the Hijaz region was “the largest in history” and “worse than the desecration of the Koran,” a striking formulation given that the comparison invokes the gravest possible category of religious offence to characterise the scale of physical loss (The Independent, “The Destruction of Mecca,” 2005). In Time’s 2014 reporting, al-Ahmed was quoted more concisely: “It’s as if they wanted to wipe out history” (Time, “Saudi Arabia Bulldozes Over Its Heritage,” 2014).

Academic and Journalistic Documentation

Beyond these named advocates, the conservation case has been advanced through sustained reporting by major international newspapers over more than two decades: the New York Times’s 2002 coverage of the Ajyad Fortress demolition, The Independent’s 2005 and 2011 investigations, and Time magazine’s 2014 feature all treat the pattern of demolition as a documented, ongoing phenomenon rather than an isolated event, and each draws on a combination of named critics, photographic evidence, and, in some cases, Saudi government planning documents obtained by journalists. Academic architectural historians studying the vernacular and Ottoman-era built heritage of the Hijaz — a body of scholarship that includes work published through Archnet, the MIT-affiliated architecture archive, and through university presses covering Islamic art and architecture — have separately documented the historic form of the mosque and its surrounding city in ways that provide much of the comparative baseline against which the scale of change can be assessed, even where individual scholars in this tradition have not always framed their work explicitly as advocacy.

A recurring theme across this reporting is the description of demolitions taking place with limited public notice. Time’s 2014 report quoted the Saudi activist, poet, and photographer Nimah Ismail Nawwab, who has worked with a small group of historians and activists to document threatened sites by photograph and, more recently, through social media: “Everything happens at night,” Nawwab told Time, describing a pattern in which sites marked for demolition are cleared overnight, with construction crews at work by the following morning (Time, “Saudi Arabia Bulldozes Over Its Heritage,” 2014). Nawwab is further quoted describing the effort to preserve a photographic record as “a losing battle, despite the fact that what’s being lost is not just Muslim history, but human history.”

Academic Architectural Historians and the Documentary Record

Beyond the named advocates and journalists discussed above, a body of peer-reviewed academic scholarship, produced largely by architecture and urban-planning researchers working at Saudi and international universities, has independently documented the scale of change to Makkah’s historic urban fabric using planning records, satellite and aerial mapping, and interviews with officials and residents, in some cases explicitly citing Angawi’s own figures. A 2024 doctoral thesis submitted to Newcastle University, examining the historical development of Makkah’s urban form, cites Angawi as having stated that at least three hundred important historical buildings in Makkah were demolished over the course of fifty years, and separately records, drawing on the same body of planning-history research, that traditional houses across the city were demolished to create space for new, modern buildings as each successive mosque expansion required additional land in the Masa and Ajyad areas (Newcastle University, doctoral thesis on the urban development of Makkah, Alfelali, 2024). A separate peer-reviewed study published in the Springer journal Environment, Development and Sustainability similarly concludes that Makkah’s central area has lost a substantial portion of its architectural fabric and the majority of its historic architectural monuments as a direct result of a development policy that prioritised maximising economic return over preserving distinctive historical character, and calls for new regulatory standards requiring documentation of heritage buildings before any future demolition (Springer, “Strengthening the Architectural Identity of Makkah Al-Mukarramah’s Buildings”). This body of academic research is significant for the purposes of this article because, unlike the advocacy-derived percentage figures discussed in Part Five below, it is produced through the ordinary peer-review process of architecture and urban-planning scholarship, and it corroborates, through independent methodology, the general scale and pattern of loss described by the named conservation critics above, even where it does not always adopt their same advocacy framing.

The International Response, and Its Absence

Critics have also pointed to the comparative international silence surrounding these demolitions, particularly when set against the global condemnation that followed the Taliban’s destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan in 2001. UNESCO’s own position, as stated by its spokesman Roni Amelan in Time’s 2014 report, is that Makkah’s status is “a Saudi question,” reflecting the fact that Saudi Arabia has never submitted the city for consideration as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and that UNESCO’s mandate requires respecting the sovereignty of member states over sites not formally nominated or inscribed (Time, “Saudi Arabia Bulldozes Over Its Heritage,” 2014). The Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, representing fifty-six Muslim-majority states, has likewise been described in this reporting as “noticeably quiet” on the subject, with the notable exception of Turkey, whose government has raised concerns specifically about the loss of Ottoman-era heritage. In September 2014, Mehmet Gormez, then head of Turkey’s Diyanet, the state Directorate of Religious Affairs, was reported by the Turkish newspaper Hurriyet Daily News as telling Saudi Arabia’s Hajj minister directly that the Makkah Royal Clock Tower complex, which now overshadows the Kaaba, “destroys history,” adding: “History is being destroyed in the Holy Land each day” (Time, “Saudi Arabia Bulldozes Over Its Heritage,” 2014). This is consistent with Turkey’s earlier formal protest over the demolition of Ajyad Fortress in 2002, discussed above, and reflects a broader pattern in which Turkish officials and commentators — heirs to the Ottoman administration that built much of what has since been removed — have been more willing than officials of other Muslim-majority states to criticise the Saudi government publicly on this specific issue.

Part Four: The State and Scholarly Case, Stated in Full

The case for expansion and for the removal of historic structures within the mosque precinct rests on three distinct grounds, advanced by different sets of actors: a demographic and safety argument grounded in the documented growth of pilgrim numbers and the historical record of crowd disasters; an engineering argument grounded in the physical constraints of the site; and a theological argument, grounded in the doctrine of tawhid and articulated by the Saudi religious establishment, holding that certain forms of historical commemoration risk leading believers toward practices the Islamic tradition classifies as shirk, the association of partners with God. This section sets out each in turn, in enough detail that a reader who holds these views should recognise them stated fairly and without caricature.

The Growth of Pilgrim Numbers

Saudi Arabia’s General Authority for Statistics has published pilgrim counts for the Hajj season going back to 1970, the first year for which official figures are systematically available. In that year, 1,079,760 pilgrims performed Hajj, according to Saudipedia’s timeline of pilgrim numbers compiled from official statistics (Saudipedia, “Timeline of the Number of Pilgrims from 1970 to 2025”). Numbers grew across the following decades, reaching a historic peak of 3,161,573 pilgrims in 2012, the highest figure ever recorded for a single Hajj season. The COVID-19 pandemic produced a collapse in these numbers unlike anything in the preceding fifty years of record-keeping: only around 10,000 pilgrims, all resident in Saudi Arabia, performed Hajj in 2021, rising to 58,745 in 2022 as restrictions eased. Numbers have since recovered substantially; Saudi Arabia’s General Authority for Statistics reported a total of 1,707,301 pilgrims for the most recent Hajj season covered in its release, comprising 1,546,655 pilgrims arriving from outside the kingdom and 160,646 from within it (General Authority for Statistics, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia). The same release states that Saudi Arabia has hosted and served more than ninety-five million Hajj pilgrims over the preceding fifty years, with a separate compilation putting the cumulative total pilgrim count since 1970 at over 106 million (Emirates 24|7, “Over 106 Million Pilgrims Recorded Since Hajj Statistics Began in 1970”). These figures cover Hajj alone; Umrah, performed year-round and not subject to the same fixed calendar window, has grown into an even larger annual flow of visitors to the same mosque, though it is measured separately and is not included in the Hajj totals above.

The significance of this growth for the argument in favour of expansion is straightforward and is stated explicitly by Saudi officials in the sources discussed throughout this article: a mosque built, in its Ottoman-era form, to accommodate a Hajj season numbering in the low hundreds of thousands cannot safely hold a Hajj season numbering in the millions without physical enlargement, regardless of how that enlargement is achieved or what it displaces. Time’s 2014 reporting noted that Saudi officials at that time projected pilgrim numbers reaching seventeen million annually by 2025 across Hajj and Umrah combined, a projection cited explicitly as the rationale for the scale of the King Abdullah-era expansion (Time, “Saudi Arabia Bulldozes Over Its Heritage,” 2014).

The Historical Record of Crowd Disasters

The state’s safety argument is not abstract; it rests on a documented history of fatal crowding incidents connected to the Hajj, a number of which occurred at or near the sites this article discusses. In 1975, a fire in a pilgrim tent camp killed more than two hundred people. In 1987, clashes connected to a political demonstration by Iranian pilgrims resulted in more than four hundred deaths. The deadliest single incident in modern Hajj history took place in 1990, when a pedestrian tunnel connecting Makkah to Mina, at a site known as Al-Ma’aisim, experienced a ventilation failure and stampede that killed 1,426 pilgrims, a toll consistently reported across sources including the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s retrospective timeline of Hajj disasters (CBC News, “A Timeline of Deadly Events During the Hajj Pilgrimage”).

Further fatal incidents followed at intervals over the subsequent quarter-century: a stampede at the Jamarat pillars in 1994 killed 270 people; a fire that swept through the tent city at Mina in 1997 killed 343 people and prompted the subsequent construction of the fireproof tent infrastructure now used at Mina; a stampede on the Jamarat Bridge in 1998 killed approximately 118 to 119 people; further, smaller incidents occurred in 2001 and 2003; a stampede in 2004 killed 251 people; and a further Jamarat Bridge stampede in 2006 killed 362 to 364 people, according to figures reported across this same body of sources. In September 2015, two separate disasters struck within the same Hajj season: a crane collapsed onto the Grand Mosque itself, killing 107 to 111 people, and, at Mina, a stampede occurred whose death toll became the subject of significant dispute — Saudi authorities gave an official figure of 769 deaths, while an Associated Press count compiled from the reported national death tolls of pilgrims’ countries of origin put the figure at 2,110 or higher, with some subsequent compilations citing totals as high as 2,411, a discrepancy this article reports without resolving, since no single reconciled figure has been accepted by all parties (BBC News, “Hajj Stampede: Saudi Toll of 769 Disputed by Other Countries”; Wikipedia, “2015 Mina Stampede”). If the higher, AP-compiled figure is accurate, the 2015 Mina stampede would represent the deadliest single Hajj disaster on record, surpassing the 1990 tunnel disaster — a possibility that itself illustrates the scale of the crowd-management challenge the Saudi state cites as central to its expansion policy.

This history of repeated, large-scale fatal incidents — spanning tunnels, tent fires, and pedestrian stampedes at bridges and pillars across five decades — forms the empirical core of the state’s argument that expansion of pilgrim infrastructure, including the mosque itself, its surrounding pedestrian routes, and the Jamarat complex, is a matter of preventing large-scale loss of life rather than simply a matter of accommodating growth for its own sake. Government and engineering accounts of the King Abdullah-era mataf expansion, discussed in Part One, explicitly framed the tripling of tawaf capacity as intended to reduce the crush risk around the Kaaba itself during peak circumambulation periods, a risk that had been separately documented in academic crowd-dynamics research into the physical mechanics of tawaf crowding published in connection with the Hajj Research Centre’s work, the same institution Sami Angawi founded in 1975 before his departure in 1988 over disagreements about the direction development policy was taking.

The Engineering Constraints of the Site

Beyond pilgrim numbers and safety history, Saudi planners and engineers have pointed to the physical geography of Makkah itself as a constraint shaping the form the expansions have taken. The mosque sits in a narrow valley hemmed in by hills on multiple sides, a topography that limits the directions in which the precinct can grow without either tunnelling, terracing hillsides, or demolishing the built-up urban fabric that has historically occupied the flatter ground immediately around the sanctuary. Amir Pasic of IRCICA, the Research Centre for Islamic History, Art and Culture — described in Time’s 2014 report as the cultural organisation of the fifty-six-nation Organisation of Islamic Cooperation — was quoted in that report observing that the logistical scale of managing the Hajj dwarfs that required for a Olympic Games or a World Cup, a comparison offered specifically in the context of explaining why Saudi planners have treated large-scale reconstruction, rather than incremental adaptation, as the only viable response to demand (Time, “Saudi Arabia Bulldozes Over Its Heritage,” 2014). The clearance of the Jabal Omar hillside, discussed in this guide’s dedicated article on that subject, and the demolition of Ajyad Fortress, standing as it did on high ground directly overlooking the sanctuary, are both cases in which the site’s constrained topography — not solely religious or commercial motivation — has been cited by planners as a reason those specific sites were targeted for clearance and redevelopment as hotel and infrastructure capacity, given the acute shortage of flat, buildable land within walking distance of the mosque.

The scale of this demographic pressure on the city as a whole, not only on the mosque itself, is documented in a 2020 UN-Habitat report on Makkah’s urban development, which records that the city’s permanent population reached approximately 2,017,793 residents, concentrated mainly within a three-kilometre radius of the mosque, and that this resident population effectively doubles during the Hajj period to a combined total of 4,369,915 people, more than doubling the average population density of the urban area for the duration of the pilgrimage (UN-Habitat, “Makkah: A Brief Urban Overview”). The same report records that Makkah received 2,352,122 Hajj pilgrims in the year covered by its data and more than twelve million visitors across the year for Umrah, and projects that Makkah’s permanent population could reach three million by 2030. Saudi urban planners charged with managing this combination of a large, growing resident population and a seasonal pilgrim influx numbering in the millions have consistently cited this demographic reality, rather than religious doctrine alone, as a central justification for large-scale infrastructure and mosque-capacity expansion, a position that finds independent support in the UN-Habitat figures cited here, which were compiled for general urban-planning purposes rather than to advance either side of the heritage debate addressed in this article.

The Theological Argument, Rooted in Tawhid

The third and most distinctive strand of the state’s case is theological, and it deserves to be stated with the same precision and internal coherence with which its proponents themselves understand it, so that a reader who holds this view recognises their own position rather than a caricature of it. The doctrine at issue is tawhid, the oneness of God, understood within the Hanbali legal tradition and its later Salafi and Wahhabi articulations as requiring not merely a theoretical affirmation of God’s singularity but the active avoidance of any practice that might, even unintentionally, direct devotion, supplication, or a sense of blessing-bearing power (baraka) toward a created thing — a building, a grave, a tree, or a stone — rather than toward God alone.

The intellectual foundation for this position within the specific context of grave and site veneration is most closely associated with the thirteenth- and fourteenth-century jurist Ibn Taymiyyah, whose writings, including his treatise on the rites of Hajj, Manasik al-Hajj, argued against forms of travel undertaken specifically to visit graves, shrines, or historical sites for the purpose of seeking blessing, a practice he classified as bid’ah, a reprehensible innovation without basis in the practice of the Prophet ﷺ or his companions, and, in its more extreme forms, as bordering on or constituting shirk (Wikipedia, “Views of Ibn Taymiyya”). It is worth noting, in the interest of stating this position accurately, that scholarship on Ibn Taymiyyah’s writing in this area describes a more nuanced position than a blanket prohibition on visiting graves altogether: he distinguished between visiting graves to pray for the deceased, which he permitted and indeed practised, and visiting graves or historical sites to pray to the deceased or to seek blessing from the physical location itself, which he opposed, and he is described in this same scholarship as showing empathy toward ordinary believers drawn to grave veneration even while regarding the practice as dangerous, since he saw uneducated devotion to physical sites as the primary historical mechanism by which populations sliding toward idolatry had done so in the pre-Islamic and late antique Near East.

This theological position was given direct, documented institutional expression in connection with the demolition programme discussed throughout this article. The New York Times’s 2002 reporting, by Elaine Sciolino, states that the newspaper obtained a copy of a 1994 fatwa, numbered 16626, issued by the Saudi Council of Senior Scholars and never publicly disclosed by the Saudi government, which explicitly permitted the demolition of historical sites where necessary to prevent the risk of idolatry. Sami Angawi, discussed in Part Three above as the leading conservationist critic of Saudi demolition policy, confirmed the document’s authenticity to the New York Times. The fatwa is quoted in that reporting as stating, in translation: “It is not acceptable to glorify buildings and historical sites… Such actions could lead to polytheism, as individuals might attribute spiritual significance to these places” (The New York Times, “Jidda Journal: Where the Prophet Trod, He Begs, Tread Lightly,” 2002). This document is one of the few instances in which the theological reasoning behind specific demolition decisions has been documented in the state’s own words, rather than inferred by outside observers, and it directly corroborates the account given by critics such as Angawi that religious doctrine, and not solely commercial or infrastructural motivation, has shaped specific decisions about which sites to preserve and which to remove.

The institutional body issuing this fatwa, the Council of Senior Scholars, was established in 1971 and formalised by royal decree in 1972, and has functioned since a 2010 royal decree under King Abdullah as the kingdom’s sole body authorised to issue fatwas of this character (Wikipedia, “Council of Senior Scholars (Saudi Arabia)”). Signage at the site associated with the Prophet’s ﷺ birthplace, quoted in Time’s 2014 reporting, illustrates how this doctrine is communicated directly to pilgrims in the built environment itself: signs in four languages state that there is no proof the Prophet ﷺ was born at that precise location, and that “it is forbidden to make this place specific for praying, supplicating or get [sic] blessing” (Time, “Saudi Arabia Bulldozes Over Its Heritage,” 2014). This is the theological logic, stated in the state’s own terms, that a reader sympathetic to it should recognise: the concern is not a dismissal of Islamic history as unimportant, but a specific doctrinal anxiety that marking, monumentalising, or formally commemorating historical sites associated with the Prophet ﷺ and his household creates conditions under which ordinary worshippers, over time and across generations, drift from remembering these sites’ historical significance into treating them as sources of blessing or intercession in their own right — precisely the pattern this theological tradition identifies as the historical mechanism by which earlier religious communities fell into polytheism.

Proponents of this position frequently trace its scriptural root to the Qur’anic account of the pre-Islamic idols Wadd, Suwa, Yaghuth, Ya’uq, and Nasr, named in Surah Nuh as objects worshipped by the people of Nuh in preference to God: “And they said, ‘Never leave your gods and never leave Wadd or Suwa’ or Yaghuth and Ya’uq and Nasr'” (Qur’an 71:23). A hadith recorded by al-Bukhari on the authority of Ibn Abbas explains that these five names had originally belonged to righteous men among the people of Nuh, and that after their deaths, their communities were prompted to erect statues of them and name the statues after these men, at first only to remember them and their good works, and that it was only in a later generation, once the original reason for the statues had been forgotten, that the images came to be worshipped as gods in their own right (Sahih al-Bukhari 4920). This hadith is frequently cited by Saudi religious scholars, including in institutional explanations of the kingdom’s position on grave and site veneration, as the paradigmatic case for how commemoration of righteous individuals, however well-intentioned in its first generation, can slide into outright idolatry within a few generations — and it is this specific historical mechanism, rather than a claim that today’s pilgrims are at risk of consciously worshipping stones or buildings, that the theological argument set out in this section rests upon.

Part Five: Interrogating the Numbers

A small number of statistics dominate public discussion of this subject, above all a claim that a specific, very high percentage of Makkah’s and the wider Hijaz region’s historic buildings have been destroyed. These figures circulate widely, are frequently repeated without their original source, and deserve to be traced back to their origin and reported with the precision their advocacy-based methodology actually supports, which is the purpose of this section.

The 90, 95, and 98 Percent Claims

Three distinct percentage figures appear across the sources consulted for this article, each attributed to a different originating body, and each describing a somewhat different claim. The Independent’s 2005 investigation by Daniel Howden attributes a figure of 95 percent — specifically, “95 per cent of millennium-old buildings” in Makkah demolished over the preceding two decades — to the Washington-based Gulf Institute, the organisation associated with Ali al-Ahmed discussed in Part Three (The Independent, “The Destruction of Mecca,” 2005). Time magazine’s 2014 report attributes a higher figure — “over 98%… of the Kingdom’s historical and religious sites” destroyed since 1985 — to the Islamic Heritage Research Foundation, the organisation headed by Irfan al-Alawi (Time, “Saudi Arabia Bulldozes Over Its Heritage,” 2014). A communication filed with the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights cites a figure of “more than 90 per cent” in describing the same general pattern of loss (UN OHCHR, Communication on Cultural Heritage Sites).

These figures are frequently conflated in secondary and tertiary reporting — including in some encyclopaedia articles — into a single, undifferentiated “95 percent” statistic applied loosely to “Islamic heritage sites” in Makkah and Madinah generally, without reproducing the important differences in what each originating body actually measured, over what time period, and by what method. None of the three organisations behind these figures — the Gulf Institute (Institute for Gulf Affairs), the Islamic Heritage Research Foundation, or the unnamed source behind the OHCHR communication’s ninety percent figure — has published, in any source reviewed for this article, a methodologically transparent survey instrument, a defined universe of sites counted as the denominator, or a site-by-site inventory supporting the numerator. This does not mean the underlying concern these figures point to is unfounded — the item-by-item documentation in Part Two of this article, together with the scale of demolition acknowledged in the Saudi government’s own expansion histories in Part One, independently supports the conclusion that a very large proportion of pre-twentieth-century built fabric in the immediate vicinity of the mosque no longer exists. It means, specifically, that the precise percentage figures of 90, 95, and 98 percent are best understood and reported as advocacy estimates produced by heritage and human-rights organisations with an explicit conservationist mission, not as findings from an independent, audited, or peer-reviewed survey, and this article reports them on that basis, attributed individually to their originating organisations, rather than presenting any single figure as an authoritative or agreed statistic.

Area and Capacity Figures Across the Expansions

Part One of this article already flagged, at each stage, the specific instances where sources diverge on the mosque’s area and capacity following each expansion — Umar’s original addition (1,500 versus 560 square metres), the pre-expansion baseline in the 1950s (27,000 to 29,127 square metres, depending on source), the area following the first Saudi expansion (160,168 square metres per most sources, against 152,000 square metres in some reference works), the area and capacity following the King Fahd expansion (356,000 to 366,168 square metres; capacity variously stated between 770,000 and 820,000 on ordinary days), and the area and cost of the King Abdullah-era expansion, where reported figures range from an early $10.6 billion, 400,000-square-metre project description to a later, fuller accounting of $80 billion and 750,000 square metres. This spread of figures likely reflects a genuine mixture of causes: different snapshots taken at different points in a project that unfolded, in the case of the King Abdullah expansion, across more than a decade and multiple design revisions; differing definitions of what counts as “the mosque” (covered prayer halls only, versus covered halls plus paved courtyards, versus the entire precinct including service basements); and, in a small number of cases, simple transcription or translation drift between the original Arabic-language Saudi government sources and the English-language secondary sources that cite them. This article has reported the range in each case rather than selecting a single figure, because no single source consulted resolves the discrepancy with citable underlying data.

Disputed Death Tolls

The clearest and most consequential example of disputed statistics in this subject area is the death toll of the September 2015 Mina stampede, discussed in Part Four: an official Saudi figure of 769 against an Associated Press compilation, built from the reported national death tolls announced by the home countries of foreign pilgrims, of 2,110 or more. This is not a case of advocacy estimate against official record in the same sense as the destruction percentages discussed above; both figures in this instance come from documentable sources — Saudi government statements on one side, and the aggregated public statements of dozens of national governments reporting their own citizens’ deaths on the other — and the size of the discrepancy is itself widely regarded, including in the BBC’s and Wikipedia’s own framing of the episode, as one of the most significant unresolved factual disputes connected to the modern management of the Hajj (BBC News, “Hajj Stampede: Saudi Toll of 769 Disputed by Other Countries”).

What This Article Excludes as Unverifiable

In the course of this research, several claims were encountered that this article has chosen not to state as fact, because no source consulted offered adequate independent corroboration. These include: the specific claim that a commemorative “Masjid Abu Bakr” has been physically recreated inside the Hilton hotel built on the site associated with Abu Bakr’s house in Makkah, sourced only to an Indonesian-language secondary account; the precise current physical condition and public accessibility of the Makkah Al Mukarramah Library building as of mid-2026, since available sources describe its status as of the mid-2010s but this article could not locate a dated, primary confirmation of conditions in 2025 or 2026 specifically; and the exact resolution of whether the site associated with the house of Khadijah is presently used as a public toilet facility, a sanitation area, or a general women’s prayer extension, given the conflicting and inconclusively sourced claims on this point discussed in Part Two. Each of these is noted in its relevant section above with the specific reason for treating it as unverified, consistent with this guide’s general practice of declining to state contested claims as settled fact.

Part Six: Vision 2030 and the Current Direction, as of July 2026

Since 2016, Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 programme has introduced a substantially different public framing of the kingdom’s relationship to its own pre-modern heritage than the framing that dominated Saudi cultural policy across the preceding decades of demolition documented in this article. The Vision 2030 planning document itself states, in language addressed to heritage generally rather than to religious sites specifically: “We recognize the importance of preserving this sophisticated heritage in order to promote national unity” (Vision 2030, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia). This represents a marked shift in official rhetoric from the framing associated with the demolition programme of the 1980s through the 2010s, and it has been accompanied by a series of concrete institutional and touristic initiatives, described below, though this article treats the question of how far this rhetorical shift has translated into a substantively different policy toward historic sites specifically associated with the Prophet ﷺ and his companions as genuinely open, rather than resolved, based on the evidence available.

The Makkah Route Initiative

The Makkah Route Initiative, launched by Saudi Arabia’s Ministry of Interior in 2017 and formally activated in 2019 as part of the Vision 2030 “Guests of God” pilgrim service programme, allows eligible pilgrims from participating countries to complete immigration, customs, and baggage-handling procedures in their country of departure rather than on arrival in Saudi Arabia, intended to reduce congestion and processing time at Saudi airports during the Hajj season. According to a report published by the Saudi government’s Pilgrim Experience Program in May 2026, the initiative served 388,694 pilgrims across seventeen ports of departure in ten countries during the 1447 AH Hajj season, with Senegal and Brunei added as new participating countries for that season (Pilgrim Experience Program, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia). This initiative is a logistics and border-processing programme rather than a heritage-conservation one, and it is included here specifically because it represents the clearest, most concretely documented example, as of mid-2026, of a Vision 2030 pilgrim-service programme in active operation, illustrating the kind of infrastructure investment the Saudi state continues to prioritise in this area.

The Royal Commission for Makkah City and Holy Sites

A more directly heritage-relevant institutional development is the work of the Royal Commission for Makkah City and Holy Sites, a body whose activities since early 2024 have been described in Saudi and regional press coverage as constituting a genuine expansion of state investment in historic-site development and public access. According to reporting by Asharq Al-Awsat, the Commission has, since early 2024, developed and rehabilitated twenty-eight historical sites, documented sixty sites in total, opened twenty-seven sites to public visitation, and established seven visitor service centres, with a cumulative total of 17.5 million visitors recorded to these sites and a reported visitor satisfaction rate of 97.5 percent (Asharq Al-Awsat, “Royal Commission Draws 17.5 Million Visitors to Makkah’s Historical Sites”). This reporting explicitly situates the Commission’s work within the Vision 2030 framework and frames it as evidence of a genuine directional shift toward heritage tourism.

An important caveat belongs alongside this reporting. The specific sites named in connection with the Royal Commission’s work in the sources available for this article are predominantly natural and topographical sites associated with events in the Prophet’s ﷺ life — locations such as the Cave of Hira on Jabal al-Nour, where the first revelation is traditionally held to have occurred, and the Cave of Thawr, where the Prophet ﷺ and Abu Bakr are traditionally held to have sheltered during the Hijra — rather than the built, architectural fabric discussed throughout Part Two of this article: the Ottoman colonnades, the historic housing quarters, or the specific house-sites associated with the Prophet’s ﷺ birth, with Khadijah, or with Abu Bakr. This article was not able to confirm, from the sources reviewed, that the Royal Commission’s rehabilitation programme extends to reconstructing, marking, or opening to visitors any of the specific built-heritage losses catalogued in Part Two. The shift in framing and investment is real and documented; whether it represents a change in the underlying position on commemorating specific historic buildings and house-sites, as opposed to natural sites connected to the Seerah, is a distinction this article flags as unresolved rather than answered by the evidence currently available.

Has the Direction Changed?

Taken together, the evidence available as of July 2026 supports a specific and limited conclusion, stated as precisely as the sources allow: Saudi Arabia’s public rhetoric and a portion of its institutional investment have shifted toward valuing and publicising heritage and historic sites as part of the Vision 2030 tourism and national-identity agenda, a shift reflected in the scale of visitor numbers reported by the Royal Commission for Makkah City and Holy Sites and in the explicit heritage language of the Vision 2030 planning document itself. At the same time, this article did not find evidence, in the sources reviewed, of any reversal of the specific past decisions catalogued in Part Two — no reported reconstruction of the Ottoman colonnades removed from the mataf, no reported restoration of the four maqams, no reported redesignation of the Makkah Al Mukarramah Library back to a commemorated birthplace site, and no reported change to the theological position articulated in the 1994 fatwa discussed in Part Four, which remains, so far as this article’s sources indicate, the operative doctrinal basis for decisions of this kind. The honest description of the current direction, therefore, is one of continuity in substance and change in framing and investment emphasis — a description this article offers as the most precise summary the available evidence supports, while noting plainly that a fuller picture may depend on developments not yet reflected in the sources available at the time of writing.

Part Seven: What Is Preserved, and Where to See It

Despite the scale of demolition documented in this article, a meaningful body of salvaged material, archival photography, and documentary record does survive, distributed across a small number of named institutions. This section identifies them directly, so that a pilgrim or researcher who wants to see genuine surviving fabric or record — rather than the modern mosque alone — knows specifically where to look.

The Exhibition of the Two Holy Mosques Architecture

The single most important physical collection of salvaged architectural fabric from the historic Haramayn is housed in the Exhibition of the Two Holy Mosques Architecture, established under King Fahd and opened to the public on 1 February 2000, according to the exhibition’s own historical accounts, though some sources attribute its initial establishment a year earlier under Prince Abdul Majeed, then governor of Makkah. The exhibition occupies a purpose-built hall of approximately 1,200 square metres in the Umm al-Joud area, near the King Abdulaziz Complex for the Kiswa of the Holy Kaaba, roughly an hour’s drive from central Makkah, and is organised into seven halls (Saudipedia, “Exhibition of the Two Holy Mosques Architecture”; Wikipedia, “The Two Holy Mosques Architecture Exhibition”).

Among the objects held in the collection are a wooden pillar from the Kaaba dating to around 65 AH, from the era of Abdullah ibn al-Zubayr’s rebuilding of the structure discussed in Part One; the Mizab al-Rahma, an earlier gilded rainwater spout from the roof of the Kaaba, dated to 1021 AH and donated during the reign of the Ottoman sultan Mahmud Khan; an old wooden ladder used to access the Kaaba’s interior, dated to 1240 AH; a historic door of the Kaaba dated to 1363 AH; a teak ceremonial staircase reported by some sources to be more than two hundred years old and by others to date specifically from 1825; a carved wooden door from the minbar of the Prophet’s Mosque in Madinah dating to the Ottoman period, inscribed with a date corresponding to 1590 CE; a copy of the Uthmanic mushaf, one of the historic manuscript copies of the Qur’an associated with the codification undertaken under the caliph Uthman ibn Affan, reported to be around 1,400 years old; and a body of historical photographs documenting the mosque’s appearance across successive stages of its rebuilding (Madain Project, “Exhibition of the Two Holy Mosques Architecture”; Visit Saudi, “Exhibition of the Two Holy Mosques Architecture”). Arab News reported that the exhibition underwent a renovation introducing modern, interactive displays, part of a wider effort to present the collection to a contemporary visiting public rather than as a static archive (Arab News).

Reported access arrangements for this exhibition vary across sources in a way this article flags explicitly rather than resolves. Visit Saudi’s official tourism listing states the exhibition is open Sunday through Thursday from 8:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. (Visit Saudi), a schedule also given by the travel-discovery site Aroundus. A separate hotel-operator travel guide, however, states that operating hours vary considerably and that the exhibition is usually open only on Fridays and Saturdays during Ramadan and the Hajj season, with a permit required to enter at other times (Accor Makkah & Madinah Guide, “Exhibition of the Two Holy Mosques Architecture”). A February 2026 report by Asharq Al-Awsat, describing the exhibition’s operations around that year’s Founding Day celebrations, states that the exhibition was, at that time, open daily from 10:00 a.m. to 1:30 a.m., a notably different and more expansive schedule than either of the other two accounts (Asharq Al-Awsat, “Two Holy Mosques Exhibition Welcomes Visitors for Founding Day Celebrations,” February 2026). Given these three materially different accounts of the exhibition’s hours, drawn from an official tourism board, a hotel-operator travel guide, and a February 2026 news report, this article’s practical advice to readers is to treat none of them as fixed, and to confirm current opening hours and any permit requirement directly, through an official Saudi tourism channel or a licensed Hajj or Umrah tour operator, before planning a visit around this destination specifically.

The Darah Exhibition on the Architecture of the Two Holy Mosques and Holy Sites

A separate and more recent exhibition, distinct from the Umm al-Joud collection described above, was presented by the King Abdulaziz Foundation for Research and Archives, known as Darah, as part of the Hajj Conference and Exhibition in 2025, under the title “Architecture of the Two Holy Mosques and the Holy Sites.” According to Asharq Al-Awsat’s coverage, this exhibition specifically traced the expansion of the two mosques through history using archival material held by Darah, one of the Saudi state’s principal historical-documentation institutions (Asharq Al-Awsat, “‘Architecture of the Two Holy Mosques’ Exhibition Traces Expansion Through History of Hajj,” 2025). This exhibition illustrates that the Saudi state itself maintains and periodically displays archival material documenting the mosque’s pre-modern appearance, even where, as discussed in Part Six, this documentary and exhibition activity has not been accompanied by a reported change in policy toward the physical sites themselves.

Ottoman Photographic Archives Held Outside Saudi Arabia

The single richest surviving photographic record of the Ottoman-era mosque and city is not held in Saudi Arabia at all, but in Istanbul, in the archives of the Research Centre for Islamic History, Art and Culture, known by its Turkish and English acronym IRCICA, the same organisation whose representative, Amir Pasic, is quoted in Part Four of this article. IRCICA’s core photographic holdings on this subject derive from two nineteenth-century sources: the Yıldız Albums, a vast photographic survey of the Ottoman Empire commissioned by Sultan Abdulhamid II in the 1880s and including detailed documentation of Makkah and Madinah, and the personal collection of Fahreddin Pasha, the Ottoman military governor of Madinah known as the “Defender of Madina” for his role in the city’s defence during the First World War. IRCICA published a major compilation of this material, titled Haremeyn: Makka al-Mukarrama and al-Madina al-Munawwara in Photographs from the Ottoman Period, drawing specifically on the Yıldız Albums and the Fahreddin Pasha collection (IRCICA, “Haremeyn: Makka al-Mukarrama and al-Madina al-Munawwara in Photographs from the Ottoman Period”). A related volume, The Yildiz Albums of Sultan Abdulhamid: Mecca-Medina, published by Tughra Books, similarly draws on this collection and is described by its publisher as showing, through more than eighty photographs, “what these blessed cities looked like in the 19th century and what they have lost over the course of time” (Google Books, “The Yildiz Albums of Sultan Abdulhamid: Mecca-Medina”).

This archive has travelled internationally as a touring exhibition. In 2022, the Islamic Arts Museum Malaysia hosted a version of this material, titled Al-Haramayn: Hejaz During the Ottoman Period, presented jointly with IRCICA and displaying forty-seven black-and-white photographic reproductions from the Fahreddin Pasha and Yıldız Palace archives, running from 7 February to 9 May 2022 at the museum’s Open Space Gallery in Kuala Lumpur (Islamic Arts Museum Malaysia, “Al-Haramayn: Hejaz During the Ottoman Period”). Separately, in 2005, the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris presented an exhibition of historic photographs of Makkah and Madinah dated 1880–1947, organised in collaboration with the King Abdulaziz Public Library in Saudi Arabia (German Archaeological Institute Library Catalogue Record, Institut du Monde Arabe Exhibition, 2005). Additional Abdulhamid II-era photographic material, encompassing the wider Ottoman Empire and including Hijaz material, is held and digitised by the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., as the Abdul Hamid II Collection, comprising approximately 1,800 photographs across fifty-one albums from 1880 to 1893 (University of California San Diego Library, “Middle East Studies: Image Collections”).

Other Named Collections

Salvaged fragments of the Ottoman colonnade itself — the columns, capitals, and inscribed stones discussed at length in this guide’s dedicated article on the Ottoman colonnades — are, according to that article’s detailed research, understood to have been dispersed among several storage and display locations following their removal, rather than concentrated in a single named museum; readers seeking the specific, itemised account of where individual salvaged colonnade elements are known or believed to be held should consult that article directly, since this article’s scope does not permit repeating that material here. The King Abdulaziz Complex for the Kiswa of the Holy Kaaba, located adjacent to the Exhibition of the Two Holy Mosques Architecture in the Umm al-Joud area, separately documents and displays the historic and contemporary manufacture of the Kaaba’s ceremonial covering, and is covered in this guide’s dedicated article on the Kiswah.

Part Eight: A Practical Guide to Reading the Layers of the Mosque Today

A pilgrim standing in the mataf today, performing tawaf around the Kaaba, is standing inside a structure built almost entirely within the past seventy years, layered over a mosque that was itself substantially rebuilt in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which was in turn built over successive early Islamic and Abbasid enlargements reaching back to the century after the Hijra. This section offers concrete, practical guidance for a visitor who wants to understand, while physically present, what they are looking at and where the historical layers of the building can and cannot be perceived.

The Kaaba itself is the one element of the site whose location has not changed since the time of the Prophet ﷺ, though its masonry has been rebuilt more than once, most significantly following the flood damage addressed in the Ottoman reconstruction of 1629–30 described in Part One. Standing in the mataf and looking outward from the Kaaba, a visitor is looking at surfaces and structures that are overwhelmingly modern: the white marble paving of the mataf itself dates from the successive Saudi-era expansions, most recently the post-2012 mataf enlargement described in Part One; the surrounding multi-storey arcades, escalators, and air-conditioned prayer halls are King Fahd- and King Abdullah-era construction; and the towering minaret cluster visible from within the precinct includes both surviving numbered positions dating in concept to the Ottoman seven-minaret scheme and physically rebuilt Saudi-era towers occupying those positions.

A visitor specifically interested in seeing genuine pre-Saudi architectural fabric, rather than the modern mosque, should understand plainly that very little such fabric remains accessible within the mosque precinct itself. The most reliable way to see salvaged elements of the historic mosque is to visit the Exhibition of the Two Holy Mosques Architecture in the Umm al-Joud area, described in Part Seven above, where objects including a Kaaba door, the historic Mizab al-Rahma water spout, and an Ottoman-era minbar door from Madinah are on public display, subject to the access caveats described in that section. A visitor who cannot travel to that exhibition, or who visits during a period when it is not accessible, should expect that no comparable historic fabric is visible within the mosque itself, and should not expect to identify surviving Ottoman columns, historic gate fabric, or pre-Saudi decorative stonework by casual observation while performing tawaf or sa’i, since — as described in Part Two — the great majority of this material was removed during the twentieth-century expansions and what survives is, with rare exceptions, in storage or off-site display rather than in situ.

For a visitor who wants a physical sense of the mosque’s changing scale — what this article has called “standing for the expansion rings” — the clearest vantage points are found at the outer edges of each successive building phase, where the architectural style changes visibly from one expansion era’s finishes to the next: the transition from the King Fahd-era western wing to the King Abdullah-era northern and northwestern halls is generally perceptible in the differing floor materials, column spacing, and ceiling treatments between these sections, though the exact administrative boundary between construction phases is not signposted for pilgrims. Visitors interested in the mosque’s surrounding topography — the hills that once held Ajyad Fortress, now occupied by the Abraj Al Bait towers, and the cleared slope of Jabal Omar to the northwest, now occupied by the Jabal Omar development — can observe these locations from outside the mosque itself; this guide’s dedicated articles on Ajyad Fortress and on Jabal Umar provide the detailed history of what stood on each site and should be read before or after visiting to give the view its full historical context.

Part Nine: Common Misconceptions

Several misunderstandings recur often enough, in conversation among pilgrims and in less careful published accounts, that they are worth addressing directly and separately from the two full cases stated above.

“Nothing About the Mosque Has Changed”

Some pilgrims, particularly those visiting for the first time and without prior exposure to the history set out in this article, assume that the mosque they see is substantially the same building described in classical accounts of the Prophet’s ﷺ life and the early caliphs. This is not accurate. As Part One of this article documents in detail, the mosque’s area, capacity, gate structure, minaret count, and roofline have all changed repeatedly across Islamic history, and the overwhelming majority of the physical structure a pilgrim encounters today — the marble underfoot, the columns, the domes, the escalators, the multi-level arcades — was built within the past seventy years, during the three Saudi-era expansions. The Kaaba’s location has not moved, and its general cubic form has been continuous since pre-Islamic times, but even the Kaaba’s own masonry has been rebuilt more than once, most significantly following the 1629 flood described in Part One.

“Everything Old Is Gone”

The opposite misconception is equally common, particularly among readers who encounter only the conservation case set out in Part Three of this article without the fuller inventory in Parts Two and Seven. It is not accurate to say that nothing of the pre-Saudi mosque survives at all. The Kaaba’s location and general form continue an unbroken tradition reaching back to the Qur’anic account of its construction by Ibrahim and Ismail. Salvaged architectural elements — a Kaaba door, the historic Mizab al-Rahma water spout, an Ottoman-era wooden ladder, an inscribed minbar door from Madinah, and a historic manuscript copy of the Uthmanic mushaf — are documented as held and, subject to the access caveats described in Part Seven, displayed at the Exhibition of the Two Holy Mosques Architecture. Extensive Ottoman-era photographic documentation of the historic mosque survives and is held, published, and periodically exhibited internationally through IRCICA’s archives in Istanbul and related collections, as described in Part Seven. The accurate statement is neither “nothing changed” nor “everything is gone,” but the more specific and more demanding claim this article has tried to substantiate throughout: that the architectural fabric of the mosque itself has been almost entirely rebuilt across three Saudi-era expansions, that a large and only partially quantifiable proportion of the surrounding historic city was demolished in the process, and that a specific, identifiable, and visitable body of salvaged material and documentary record survives outside the mosque precinct, principally in the collections named in Part Seven.

Confusing the Mosque With the City

A further recurring confusion involves conflating losses within the mosque precinct itself — the colonnades, the four maqams, the historic gates — with losses in the wider city of Makkah beyond the mosque’s boundary walls — the historic housing quarters, Ajyad Fortress, and the various house-sites associated with the Prophet ﷺ and his household discussed in Part Two. These are related but analytically distinct categories, and the two cases set out in Parts Three and Four apply somewhat differently to each. Losses within the mosque precinct itself are most directly connected to the engineering and crowd-safety arguments discussed in Part Four, since expanding the mosque’s own covered and open prayer area was the explicit purpose of removing the colonnades, the maqams, and the historic gates. Losses in the wider city — the housing quarters, the fortress, the house-sites — are more directly connected to the combination of commercial hotel and infrastructure development and theological site-veneration concerns discussed in Parts Three and Four, since these sites did not, in most cases, occupy ground required for the mosque’s own prayer capacity, but rather ground made valuable by proximity to the mosque, and their removal has been criticised on grounds that are not answered by the pilgrim-safety argument that most directly justifies the removal of the colonnades and the four maqams. A reader trying to evaluate either case fairly should keep this distinction in view, since arguments that are genuinely strong in one category — safety and crowd capacity, most obviously — do not automatically transfer to the other, where the removal of a historic house-site to build a hotel is not obviously required by the same crowd-safety logic that justifies enlarging the mataf.

Assuming a Single, Settled Death or Destruction Figure Exists

Finally, as Part Five of this article sets out at length, several of the most commonly repeated statistics in this subject area — the “95 percent” destruction figure above all, but also the death toll of the 2015 Mina stampede — are genuinely disputed between sources that have not been reconciled in any publication reviewed for this article. Readers encountering a single, confidently stated figure for either of these should treat it as one source’s estimate rather than an agreed fact, and should look for the attribution behind it, following the approach this article has taken throughout of naming the specific organisation or government body behind each number rather than presenting any of them as self-evidently authoritative.

Closing Note

The history set out in this article does not resolve into a single verdict, and this article has deliberately avoided offering one. The chronological record in Part One is not seriously disputed: the mosque has been rebuilt repeatedly across fourteen centuries, and the version a pilgrim enters today is very largely a product of the past seventy years. What is disputed — genuinely, and by people who have devoted careers and, in some cases, personal risk to their respective positions — is how that rebuilding should be judged. Sami Angawi, Irfan al-Alawi, Ziauddin Sardar, and Ali al-Ahmed have each, in their own words quoted in Part Three, described the process as a loss approaching the irreplaceable, rooted in a specific reading of Wahhabi doctrine they regard as historically and theologically mistaken in its application to physical sites. The Saudi Council of Senior Scholars, in the 1994 fatwa quoted in Part Four, and the government bodies that have executed the expansions across three reigns, have described the same process as a necessary application of tawhid combined with an unavoidable response to a fiftyfold growth in pilgrim numbers and a documented history of fatal crowd disasters that a pre-modern mosque could not physically accommodate without loss of life on a still larger scale. Both positions are held by named, identifiable people and institutions on the basis of evidence this article has tried to state fully and attribute precisely. A pilgrim visiting Masjid al-Haram today — for Umrah, for Hajj, or simply to pray — stands at the convergence of both histories: a rite performed today in almost exactly the same form set out in the seventh century, inside a building that has been almost completely rebuilt to make that continued performance possible for a Muslim population now measured in the billions rather than the thousands who could gather in the Prophet’s ﷺ own lifetime.