The Historic Quarters of Makkah: A Ziyarah Guide to the City’s Vanished Neighbourhoods and Social Geography

Every pilgrim who walks out of the gates of Masjid al-Haram today walks into a city that no longer exists in the way its name suggests. The Makkah described by the classical geographers al-Azraqi and al-Fasi, the Makkah of narrow lanes climbing between black volcanic hills, of stone houses with carved wooden balconies leaning almost into one another, of named quarters with their own mosques, wells, guilds, and family lines going back centuries, has been almost entirely rebuilt, re-graded, and re-zoned in the space of little more than a hundred years. This article is a guide to reading the modern city against that older one: a history of Makkah’s neighbourhoods and social geography, and an honest account of what a visitor can and cannot still see of it. It draws on classical topographers, modern Saudi and Gulf historical writing, academic urban-history research, and current news reporting on the city’s ongoing transformation, dated as far as possible to July 2026.

This is not a companion piece to the guide’s articles on the Kaaba, Safa and Marwa, the Zamzam well, or the individual gates of the Haram, all of which are covered in their own dedicated entries in this guide. It is also distinct from the guide’s articles on Jabal Umar, the Ajyad Fortress, and the successive Haram expansions, each of which receives its own full treatment elsewhere; here they are referred to only where the story of a quarter cannot be told without them. The subject of this article is the city itself: the old neighbourhoods of Makkah, what is documented about how they worked, who lived in them, and what, if anything, survives of them today. Anyone researching the Islamic history of Makkah’s neighbourhoods, or planning a walking orientation as part of their Umrah, should treat what follows as a companion to visiting Makkah’s historic core rather than as a guarantee that a “heritage walk” through old Makkah is still possible. In large part, it is not, and this guide says so plainly rather than selling an experience that does not exist.

The Organising Frame: Al-Ma’la and Al-Masfalah, the Upper City and the Lower City

Long before Makkah had traffic circles, ring roads, or districts named after hotel developments, it had a single basic division that every resident understood instinctively: the city split into an upper half, al-Ma’la, and a lower half, al-Masfalah. This was not a formal administrative boundary in the modern sense. It was a description of elevation, drainage, and social geography all at once, and it is the key that unlocks almost everything else in this article, because nearly every historic quarter of Makkah identifies itself, even today, as belonging to one side of that line or the other.

The name al-Ma’la means, roughly, “the elevated place” or “the place one ascends to,” and it describes the higher ground to the north and northeast of the Kaaba, the direction from which the valley of Makkah climbs towards Jabal Qaiqa’an and the hills beyond. Al-Masfalah means “the lowered place,” and describes the ground that falls away to the south and southwest of the Kaaba, down towards Wadi Ibrahim and the openings that lead eventually out towards Jeddah. Makkah sits in a natural bowl among bare granite and basalt hills, and its oldest streets follow the logic of that bowl: water, and the flow of daily life, runs downhill from al-Ma’la into al-Masfalah, exactly as the Arabic names describe.

The classical historian Abu al-Walid al-Azraqi, whose ninth-century Akhbar Makkah (“History of Makkah”) remains the foundational topographical source for the city, drew the boundary in specific, almost surveyor’s language, as preserved in later Arabic reference works: everything from al-Safa to the twin hills of Ajyad and what lies below them is al-Masfalah, while what is occupied by Dar al-Arqam and the lane rising from al-Safa up towards Jabal Abi Qubays, continuing up the valley towards Qaiqa’an and as far as the flow of Qaiqa’an reaches near Suwayqa, is al-Ma’la (as cited in the Arabic reference compilation Marefa’s entry on al-Masfalah). In other words, al-Azraqi is not describing an abstract compass direction; he is describing a line a person could actually walk, following the natural rise of the land from the Kaaba precinct up towards the northern hills.

Modern Saudi historians who have written on this division add useful detail and some disagreement at the margins. The historian Sheikh Rajih al-Kraimi al-Abdali, writing in accounts carried by the Saudi outlets Makkah newspaper and al-Riyadh, places the dividing line running from al-Safa towards what was once called the Red Mountain, the site later occupied by the old Mecca Hotel: everything below that line, he says, is al-Masfalah, and everything above it, towards the district later called al-Mu’abbada, is al-Ma’la. On this account, Jarwal, the modern Mansour Street, Wadi Tuwa, and part of the al-Taysir district were all historically reckoned as part of greater al-Masfalah, a much larger territory than the single small quarter that carries the name today. Al-Abdali also makes the more startling claim that even the Yemeni corner of the Kaaba itself falls, in this scheme, on the al-Masfalah side of the line, while a portion of al-Safa belongs to al-Ma’la — a reminder that the division was felt as running through the very heart of the sanctuary, not just through the residential districts around it.

This upper city/lower city split was never merely topographical. A 2020s academic study of the pre-modern urban fabric of Makkah, published in a King Saud University architecture journal and examining an 1880 Ottoman military survey of the city, found that Makkah’s organic growth followed two axes radiating from the Kaaba: one climbing northeast towards al-Ma’la, the other descending southwest towards al-Masfalah, with the city’s main thoroughfares running between the two pilgrimage stations of Safa and Marwa (see “Reassessing Makkah’s Pre-Modern Urban Fabric,” Journal of Architecture and Planning, King Saud University). The same study argues that Makkah’s distinctive geography of shi’ab, the narrow valley-mouths and ravine-openings between the city’s encircling hills, each carrying its own name (Shi’b Ali, Shi’b Amir, and others), mapped onto a social geography of kinship and status. Neighbourhoods closest to the Kaaba were traditionally associated with the Quraysh and especially the descendants of Qusayy ibn Kilab, the ancestor credited with first organising settlement around the sanctuary; the next ring out held other Quraysh clans and allied tribes; and the outer, more marginal shi’ab were where later arrivals, freed slaves, and the households of servants tended to cluster. The old Arabic proverb “ahl Makkah adra bi-shi’abiha,” the people of Makkah know their own valleys best, captures how tightly people’s sense of identity was bound to which shi’b or quarter they belonged to. The same study also observes that Makkah’s street plan was never simply functional: house pairs and lane alignments were oriented so that, wherever possible, the eye caught a sightline back towards the Kaaba, making the sanctuary a permanent visual anchor for the entire town rather than just its geographic centre.

None of this survives as a lived social order today. Makkah’s population is no longer organised by hereditary quarter, and the tribal and status associations that once clung to particular shi’ab have been dissolved by a century of demolition, resettlement, and the arrival of a resident population drawn from across the Muslim world and beyond, working in the hospitality and service economy that now dominates the city’s centre. But the two-word shorthand, al-Ma’la and al-Masfalah, survives in daily use: al-Ma’la today is the name of the district holding Makkah’s historic cemetery, reached by heading north out of the Haram precinct, while al-Masfalah remains a recognised residential district south of the mosque, and Makkans still use “up towards al-Ma’la” and “down towards al-Masfalah” as basic orientation, much as residents of a hill town anywhere might say “up the hill” or “down by the river.” Understanding this single division is the most useful piece of orientation a visitor researching the history of Makkah’s neighbourhoods can carry into the city, because almost every quarter described below identifies itself, first, by which side of that ancient line it falls on.

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.

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.”

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 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.

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.

A Walking Orientation for the Pilgrim

This section is deliberately modest, because the honest verdict on walking old Makkah is that most of it is gone, and a guide that pretends otherwise does its reader a disservice. What follows is not a heritage trail; it is a orientation for understanding what you are looking at as you move through the modern city on ordinary Umrah business.

Leaving the Haram from its northern or northeastern gates and heading towards the flyover and the road that leads to Jannat al-Mu’alla, you are walking, roughly, through the ground once occupied by Suq al-Layl and the valley called Shi’b Ali or Shi’b Abi Talib. What you will see is modern retail frontage, the Makkah Public Library building on or near the traditionally cited birthplace site, and eventually the white perimeter wall of the cemetery itself. There is no marked “birthplace museum,” no preserved market stalls, and no signposted historic trail; the historic content of this walk is entirely in what you know before you arrive, not in what is labelled on the ground.

Leaving from the western side of the Haram, through the area of the modern King Abdulaziz Road and the Masar hotel and retail corridor, you are walking through what was once Harat al-Bab and al-Shubaykah. What you will see is hotel towers, shopping frontage, and the general infrastructure of a dense pilgrim-hospitality district; there is no surviving gate, no visible ribat, and no trace of the restored Dara house described above. If you continue south along the Haram’s southern flank you pass through the ground of old Ajyad, dominated now by the Abraj Al Bait complex and its clock tower, standing on the site of the demolished fortress and Bulbul hill; nothing of the fortress is visible, and its history is best understood by reading this guide’s dedicated Ajyad Fortress article before or after your visit rather than by looking for physical remains.

Heading south from the Haram into al-Masfalah, Jarwal, and the wider al-Aziziyya district, you move through what remains, in name, the largest of the old lower-city quarters, but what you will see in practice is a mixture of ordinary residential streets, small businesses, and hotel accommodation serving pilgrims on more modest budgets than those staying immediately adjacent to the Haram; this is the part of the walk closest to an ordinary, lived Saudi urban neighbourhood rather than either a heritage site or a tourist zone, and it is worth walking precisely because it shows what a non-monumental part of the holy city actually looks like today.

The realistic verdict, stated plainly: there is no continuous, signposted old-Makkah walking route comparable to, say, a European old town, and this guide does not recommend budgeting significant pilgrimage time to search for one. What is worth doing is walking these directions once, with this article’s descriptions in mind, so that the names on your map, Suq al-Layl, Harat al-Bab, Ajyad, al-Masfalah, resolve into an understanding of where the old city’s upper and lower halves actually lay, rather than remaining abstract historical labels detached from the ground beneath the modern hotels and roads.

Common Misconceptions About Old Makkah

Several misunderstandings recur often enough in casual pilgrim conversation and online pilgrim guidance to warrant direct correction here.

The first is the belief that old Makkah survives more or less intact somewhere behind the modern hotel towers, waiting to be found by a visitor who knows where to look. It does not. As this article has shown quarter by quarter, the overwhelming majority of Makkah’s historic residential fabric, its stone-and-timber houses, its ribats, its named lanes and wells, has been demolished across successive waves of Haram expansion and commercial redevelopment from the early twentieth century through to 2010 and beyond. What survives is names on maps and in local speech, not buildings.

The second, closely related, is the assumption that any area marketed to tourists or pilgrims as an “old town” or heritage district within Makkah itself represents original historic fabric. It generally does not; where genuinely old Hejazi-style buildings with intact rawasheen and carved woodwork do survive and can be visited, as at the Nassif House and Matbouli House Museum, they are located in Jeddah’s al-Balad district, a different city on the Red Sea coast, not in Makkah. A pilgrim who has seen photographs of beautiful old wooden-balconied Hejazi houses and expects to find their equivalent inside Makkah is very likely thinking of Jeddah.

The third is confusion between reused or overlapping quarter names, several examples of which this article has tried to resolve directly rather than leave ambiguous: al-Masfalah and al-Misfalah are the same quarter under two transliterations, not two different places; Suq al-Layl, Shi’b Ali, and Shi’b Abi Talib substantially overlap as names for the same small district northeast of the Haram, though sources differ on exactly how much of the older valley the modern market-quarter name actually covers; and al-Ma’la refers both to the broad historic upper half of the entire city and, in narrower modern usage, specifically to the district containing the Jannat al-Mu’alla cemetery, two related but not identical senses of the same word.

Finally, and most importantly for how a pilgrim should treat everything described in this article, none of the quarters, valleys, wells, ribat sites, or hills named above are sites with an established basis in the sunnah for intentional devotional visitation, or ziyarah, in the sense that applies to a small, specific list of places. The scholarly position on this point, as summarised by IslamQA’s answer on visiting places and mosques associated with the Prophet ﷺ, draws on the views of Shaykh al-Islam Ibn Taymiyyah, Shaykh Ibn Uthaymeen, and the Standing Committee for Issuing Fatwas: these scholars hold that only a short list of places around Makkah and Madinah, specifically Masjid al-Haram, Masjid an-Nabawi, the grave of the Prophet ﷺ, Jannat al-Baqi, the graves of the martyrs of Uhud, and Masjid Quba, have a basis in the sunnah for visitation undertaken with the specific intention of seeking religious reward. On this view, no evidence from the practice of the Prophet’s ﷺ companions supports singling out other historical sites, including the quarters, valleys, and former lodging-houses described in this article, for devotional visits, and doing so is discouraged as a preventive measure against practices that could shade into innovation or the mistaken belief that a particular stone, valley, or ruin carries special spiritual power in itself. The Standing Committee has specifically cautioned, in fatwa rulings summarised in the same source, against climbing mountains or seeking out caves with the intention of ziyarah, and against touching, rubbing, or tying cloth to stones, trees, or railings at historical sites.

This is a scholarly position, not a settled consensus adjudicated by this guide. Many Sufi and traditionalist scholars take a broader view of tabarruk, seeking a blessing through proximity to a place or object associated with the Prophet ﷺ or the early Muslims, and would regard a respectful, informed visit to a site such as Jannat al-Mu’alla, or an informed walk through the historic quarters described in this article, as a legitimate expression of love for the Prophet’s ﷺ family and companions rather than an innovation. This guide presents both positions and their proponents and leaves the decision to the reader. What can be said without controversy is that the sites covered in this article are historically and educationally valuable, and that visiting them, or reading about them, to understand the seerah and the social history of the holy city is a different act from visiting them in the expectation of specific religious reward; readers are encouraged to treat this article, and their own walks through the streets it describes, in that historical and educational spirit.

Sources

Classical and Primary Topographical Sources

Abu al-Walid al-Azraqi’s ninth-century Akhbar Makkah remains the foundational classical topography of Makkah and is the ultimate source for the al-Ma’la and al-Masfalah boundary description discussed in this article, as preserved and quoted in the modern Arabic reference compilation Marefa’s entry on al-Masfalah. The sixteenth-century historian Qutb al-Din al-Nahrawali’s description of the Bab al-Shubaykah gate is preserved in the heritage account at al-Hejaz.org’s history of Harat al-Bab.

Modern Saudi and Academic Sources

“Reassessing Makkah’s Pre-Modern Urban Fabric,” Journal of Architecture and Planning, King Saud University; Saudipedia on traditional architecture in Makkah al-Mukarramah province; Saudipedia on the Third Saudi Expansion of the Grand Mosque; Middle East Technical University’s thesis on structuring the Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca; DergiPark’s academic study on Makkah’s sacred topography; Marefa’s entry on al-Masfalah; Arabic Wikipedia on Suq al-Layl; al-Hejaz.org’s history of Harat al-Bab; Indonesian Wikipedia on al-Qararah wa’n-Naqa; Wikipedia on the Ajyad Fortress; Wikipedia on the Mecca Metro.

News and Current Reporting (dated as of July 2026)

Makkah newspaper; al-Riyadh; al-Amir.info; Raseef22; Arab News’s 2008 report on Haram expansion demolitions; World Socialist Web Site’s 2002 report on the Ajyad Fortress demolition; BBC News’s June 2025 report on the Keyi Rubath; BBC News’s 2018 report on the Haramain High-Speed Railway opening; Siasat Daily on the Nizam’s Rubath; Guardian Nigeria on the mutawwif establishments; Arab News’s 2009 profile of mutawwif families; Arab News on the Establishment of Mutawwifs for African Non-Arab Countries; Arab News Japan’s profile of mutawwif Mohammed Sabgha; Zawya on Jabal Omar’s Phase 7 planning; Jabal Omar Development Company’s June 2026 summit statement; TradingView/Reuters on Jabal Omar’s 2026 hotel unit sales; the Guest of Rahman service programme on the Haramain Railway station; Arab News Japan on 2026 Hajj season rail capacity; Saudi Gazette on new Haramain trains; Saudi Gazette on Makkah airport and metro plans; MEED on the Mecca Metro design tender; Arab News Japan on the Al-Mashaaer Al-Mugaddassah Metro; thehajj.guide on Makkah’s infrastructure overhaul.

Practical and Travel Guidance

Momondo’s Mecca hotel listings; Booking.com’s Jarwal listings; Lonely Planet on Jannat al-Mualla Cemetery; Lonely Planet on the Matbouli House Museum, Jeddah; Hisar Travel Singapore’s Jannat al-Mualla etiquette guide; IslamQA on visiting places and mosques associated with the Prophet ﷺ.

Sources Documenting Southeast Asian and South Asian Communities

MUI.or.id on al-Misfalah and Indonesian scholarship; Line1.news on al-Misfalah; Batemuri Tour’s profile of al-Misfalah; WikiShia on the Boycott of Banu Hashim; IslamicLandmarks.com on the Valley of Abu Talib; IslamicLandmarks.com on the Ajyad Fortress; Muhammad Encyclopedia on the social boycott of Banu Hashim; AK News Hyderabad on the Rubath Nizam today.

A note on method: this article draws on classical Arabic topography (principally al-Azraqi as transmitted in later reference works), modern Saudi heritage journalism in Arabic, one peer-reviewed architecture-history paper, one graduate thesis on the organisation of the pilgrimage, and current news reporting on urban development, dated wherever possible to specific months in 2026. Where sources disagreed, this article has reported the disagreement rather than silently choosing one account, most notably over the exact boundary line between al-Ma’la and al-Masfalah, and over how much of the original Shi’b Abi Talib survives under the modern name Suq al-Layl. Where a quarter, al-Qararah in particular, is documented only thinly, this article has said so directly rather than filling the gap with unsupported description.