The Minarets of Masjid al-Haram: History, Architecture and Ziyarah Guide to the Towers of the Grand Mosque

For more than a century after the death of the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ, the holiest building in Islam had no minaret at all. There was no tower at the Kaaba when Bilal ibn Rabah رضي الله عنه climbed onto the roof of the sacred house itself on the day of the Conquest of Makkah and gave the call to prayer facing the Prophet ﷺ below him, an episode preserved in the memory of the community and recorded by Ibn Sa’d in his Kitab al-Tabaqat al-Kabir, and referenced in the fatwa literature discussing the wisdom of that moment (IslamWeb). There was no tower there during the caliphates of Abu Bakr, Umar, Uthman and Ali. There was no tower there when Abd Allah ibn al-Zubayr rebuilt the Kaaba according to his own understanding of the Prophet’s ﷺ wishes, and none when the Umayyad caliph Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan restored it to the Qurayshi form after reconquering Makkah in 692 CE. The adhan at the House of Allah is older than any minaret ever built to broadcast it. That is the fact this guide begins with, because it is the one detail about the minarets of the Grand Mosque that visitors most consistently get backwards, and it sets the tone for everything that follows: the towers are old, but they are not as old as the mosque, and the mosque is not as old, in continuous physical form, as most pilgrims assume. This is a guide to the history of Masjid al-Haram’s minarets — their construction, their number, their heights, their architecture, the muadhdhins who once climbed them and no longer do, and the controversies that have followed their demolition and rebuilding into the twenty-first century.

According to Dr Mansour Al-Daajani, a researcher in the history of Makkah cited in a 2026 profile of the Grand Mosque’s sound infrastructure, “the adhan in the Grand Mosque was first delivered from the roof of the Kaaba during the Conquest of Makkah in the eighth year after the Hijra, when the Prophet Muhammad instructed Bilal bin Rabah to give the call to the noon prayer,” and at that time “the Grand Mosque consisted mainly of the mataf area and had no surrounding walls, minarets or pulpit” (Arab News). The point is not a technicality. It is the theological anchor for this entire subject: the minaret is a later architectural convenience built to project a call that had already been given, unaided, from the highest point available at the time — the roof of the Kaaba itself. Everything a visitor sees rising above the Grand Mosque today, from the oldest surviving Ottoman-era tower to the newest gate minaret still being finished as of July 2026, is an addition to something that functioned perfectly well, by revealed instruction, without any of them.

History of the Minarets: When the First Tower Rose Over the Sanctuary

The first minaret at Masjid al-Haram was built more than a century after the Hijra, under the second Abbasid caliph, Abu Ja’far al-Mansur, the founder of Baghdad (Encyclopaedia Britannica). Al-Mansur undertook a major expansion of the mosque between 137 AH and 140 AH, corresponding to 754–758 CE by the Gregorian calendar, doubling the size of the northern and western wings of the prayer hall (the German Wikipedia’s article on al-Haram Mosque, citing classical building chronologies). As part of that expansion he built the mosque’s first minaret at the Bab al-Umrah corner, on the north-western angle of the sanctuary. Archnet’s academic summary of the mosque’s building history, compiled from the classical Makkan chroniclers, records it plainly: “Abbasid Caliph Abu Ja’far al-Mansur (754–775) added mosaics to the columns. He also doubled the size of the northern and western wings of the prayer hall and erected the minaret of Bab al-Umra on the northwest corner” (Archnet). Saudi Arabia’s own state-backed tourism authority dates the same event to the Hijri year 139, describing the minarets today as having “evolved through centuries, starting with the first minaret in 139 AH” (Visit Saudi). A March 2026 Arab News feature quotes Dr Al-Daajani giving the same account in slightly different words: “When minarets first appeared in 754 during the era of the Abbasid Caliph Abu Jaafar Al-Mansour, who built the first minaret in the Grand Mosque — the Bab Al-Umrah minaret at the western corner on the northern side of the mosque — this minaret and those built after it began to serve as places from which the adhan was raised” (Arab News). The dates recorded across these sources cluster narrowly around 754 CE (137–139 AH), with the broader building campaign running to about 758 CE; readers should treat the exact year as approximate within that four-year window rather than as a single fixed date, since the classical sources describe a multi-year building programme rather than a single ribbon-cutting.

It is worth pausing on what this means. Islam’s central sanctuary — the direction every Muslim on earth faces five times a day — went without a minaret through the entire lifetime of the Prophet ﷺ, through the four rightly guided caliphs, through the Umayyad dynasty in its entirety, and into the second generation of Abbasid rule. The adhan was called in those centuries from ground level, from the mosque’s edges, or, on the one attested occasion that gave the whole practice its symbolic charge, from the roof of the Kaaba itself. The minaret, when it finally arrived, was an architectural and acoustic innovation layered onto a practice that had never needed it.

Al-Mansur’s successor, the Abbasid caliph al-Mahdi, extended the building programme further. Beginning in 160 AH (776–777 CE) and continuing in a second phase from 164 AH (780 CE), al-Mahdi ordered the demolition of surrounding houses to enlarge the mosque and, in doing so, added further minarets to the structure. Archnet records that “in 777, due to the growing number of pilgrims, Abbasid Caliph al-Mahdi (775–785) ordered the rebuilding of the mosque, demolishing more houses around the Ka’ba,” and that “al-Mahdi also built three minarets crowned with crenellations and placed above Bab al-Salam, Bab Ali and Bab al-Wadi of the mosque” (Archnet). The German Wikipedia article on the mosque gives a similar account with a variant number, stating that al-Mahdi “furnished the mosque with two further minarets, which he erected at the other corners of the building and equipped with battlements” (al-Haram-Moschee, German Wikipedia). Between al-Mansur’s single tower and al-Mahdi’s additional minarets — two according to one account, three according to another — the Grand Mosque had acquired, by the last quarter of the eighth century CE, somewhere between three and four minarets standing over its four corners. This is the first of many places in the minaret story where sources genuinely disagree on a number, and readers should understand from the outset that this is a subject where even the classical Arabic chronicles, let alone their modern summarisers, do not always agree on a precise count at a precise date. The Abbasid caliphs al-Mu’tadid and al-Muqtadir carried out further, smaller extensions in 894–895 CE and 918 CE respectively, but the mosque’s overall form, including its complement of corner minarets, remained essentially stable from the late eighth century until the major Ottoman renovations of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (Wikipedia’s Masjid al-Haram article, drawing on Sami Angawi and classical building histories).

This guide’s companion article on the Ottoman colonnades of the Grand Mosque covers in full the architectural programme that Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent, Sultan Selim II and Sultan Murad III carried out between the 1550s and 1570s — the arcades, the domed roof that replaced the old flat ceiling, and the marble columns that survive today as the oldest visible fabric of the mosque. The minarets belong to that same Ottoman building story, and the two should be read together.

Islamic History of the Grand Mosque’s Towers: The Ottoman Seven

The number most often quoted for the pre-Saudi Grand Mosque is seven minarets, fixed under Ottoman rule in the early seventeenth century. Wikipedia’s account states that “in 1629, during the reign of Sultan Murad IV, the mosque was renovated. In the renovation of the mosque, a new stone arcade was added, three more minarets (bringing the total to seven) were built, and the marble flooring was retiled,” adding that “this was the unaltered state of the mosque for nearly three centuries” (Wikipedia). Archnet’s building history gives a related but not identical account of the same Ottoman campaign, noting that “the floor tiles around the Ka’ba were replaced with new colored marble tiles and the mosque was equipped with seven minarets,” and that in a further stage “four minarets were erected near Bab al-Umra and Bab al-Salam and the three older ones were refashioned” (Archnet). The same Archnet entry gives the clearest surviving physical description of those seven towers: they “stood eighty-nine meters tall on square bases,” each with “two octagonal balconies decorated with colonettes; the first located at the height of the mosque roof while the second was at the top end of the shaft.” That eighty-nine-metre figure recurs, remarkably, as the height quoted for the modern Saudi-era minarets built centuries later — a continuity in scale, whether by design or by later restoration to the earlier proportions, that the architecture section below examines more closely. SaudiPedia’s own account of minaret history states plainly that “there were five minarets before the Saudi era,” a lower figure than the seven usually cited for the finished Ottoman mosque, which likely reflects a count taken before Murad IV’s 1629 programme rather than after it, or a different scholarly reckoning of which towers counted as complete, freestanding minarets rather than partial or planned ones (SaudiPedia). This is the first explicit instance in the modern record of what will become a recurring pattern: official Saudi sources and international reference works do not always agree on how many minarets stood at a given moment in the mosque’s past, and this guide reports each figure with its source rather than silently picking one.

By the testimony of Sheikh Ali Ahmed Mulla, the Grand Mosque’s most senior twentieth-century muadhdhin, the seven Ottoman-era minarets carried specific names still remembered by the families who served them: he recalled climbing “each of the seven minarets of the mosque, such as the Bab Al-Umrah Minaret, Bab Al-Ziyara Minaret, and Bab Al-Hekma Minaret,” to call the adhan before loudspeakers existed (Ummid). A separate March 2026 account, drawing on the Grand Mosque’s own historical researchers, adds that in still earlier periods the adhan was delivered in sequence “from five minarets: the main minaret next to the Green Dome, followed by Bab Al-Salam, Bab Al-Rahmah (or Ar-Rahmaniyah), Shakiliyah, and Sulaymaniyah” — though that particular list, it should be noted, describes the arrangement at Masjid an-Nabawi in Madinah rather than the Grand Mosque in Makkah, and readers should not conflate the two sanctuaries’ separate minaret histories even where the underlying practice of relay adhan across multiple towers was similar in both cities (Bernama).

The Saudi Era: Counting the Minarets Through Four Expansions

The modern count of the Grand Mosque’s minarets is a moving target, and this guide states that plainly rather than pretending to a false precision. Since the Saudi state assumed custodianship of the two holy mosques, four successive expansion programmes have each added minarets, and the number has grown from the Ottoman seven to a figure that, as of July 2026, different reputable sources still report differently, because construction on the newest towers is ongoing.

The first Saudi expansion, carried out under King Abd al-Aziz and continued under King Saud between 1955 and 1976, is described by Wikipedia’s history section as having added “four more minarets,” alongside a refurbished ceiling and a floor replaced with artificial stone and marble (Wikipedia). SaudiPedia’s dedicated article on minaret heights gives the resulting total after this phase as seven — implying, on its own reckoning, that the mosque had five minarets immediately before this expansion and gained two net rather than four, a modest but real discrepancy with the Wikipedia figure that this guide leaves open rather than resolving by assumption (SaudiPedia). It is entirely possible that “four more minarets were added” and “the total became seven” are both accurate readings of different stages of the same multi-year, multi-phase programme; the first Saudi expansion was not a single event but a two-decade undertaking, and different structures within it reached completion at different points. What is not in dispute is that several of the historic Ottoman-era columns and features were lost in this campaign: Wikipedia records that “many of the historical features built by the Ottomans, particularly the support columns, were demolished” during these years, a fact that anticipates the far larger controversy that would erupt decades later over the King Abdullah expansion.

The second Saudi expansion, under King Fahd, ran through the 1980s and into the early 1990s, with the al-Sharq al-Awsat historical retrospective dating its formal conclusion to “the 30th of Dhu al-Qi’dah 1413 AH — April 22, 1993 AD” (Ashraq Al-Awsat / Asharq Al-Awsat English). This phase added new minarets at the King Fahd expansion’s eastern and western wings; the Haramain Archives project, an independent research and photo-documentation effort focused on the two holy mosques, records that “the extension…included the iconic 3 brown domes on the Haram rooftop parallel to the gateway…The side also contain 6 minarets, 2 of which were built after the expansion in 1991” (Haramain Archives). SaudiPedia’s figure for the resulting total is nine, stating that “the building of the second Saudi expansion included two new minarets, each with a height of eighty-nine m, designed architecturally to resemble the previous seven minarets” (SaudiPedia). That detail — that the new King Fahd-era minarets were deliberately built to the same eighty-nine-metre height and the same visual profile as the towers already standing — is architecturally significant, and the next section returns to it.

Between roughly 1987 and 2005, the mosque saw further, less centrally documented construction, described by Wikipedia only in general terms: “1987 to 2005 saw the building of more minarets, the erecting of a King’s residence overlooking the mosque and more prayer area in and around the mosque itself” (Wikipedia). No precise minaret count for this period appears in the sources consulted for this guide, and none is asserted here.

The third Saudi expansion, announced in 2008 under King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz and continuing under King Salman after 2015, is the single largest building programme in the mosque’s history and the one most directly relevant to the minaret controversy discussed later in this guide. Saudipedia’s article on the third expansion states that “four minarets were added during the expansion, distributed across various parts of the expansion” (SaudiPedia), bringing the number, on the account most widely repeated in international reporting, to thirteen. Arab News reported in 2021 that “the Grand Mosque has 13 minarets, making it the mosque with the highest number of minarets” in the world (Arab News), and the Saudi government’s own Presidency for the Affairs of the Two Holy Mosques confirmed in October 2023 that it had “completed the installation of the 13th and final crescent on the minarets of the Grand Mosque in Makkah,” with the structure “hoisted into place on the minaret of Bab Al-Fath as part of a major building expansion programme” (Arab News; corroborated by the Presidency’s own statement at pep.gov.sa).

The Count as of July 2026: A Number Still in Motion

This is where the record becomes genuinely unsettled, and where this guide asks the reader for patience rather than a tidy figure. Thirteen minarets, each carrying its golden crescent, were standing and complete by late 2023. But that was never presented, even by Saudi Arabia’s own state media, as the final number. SaudiPedia’s article — published in December 2024 and, as far as this guide’s research could establish, not superseded by a more recent official figure — states unambiguously that “the number of minarets at the Grand Mosque is nineteen,” immediately followed by the qualifying detail that “currently, construction and architectural work is being completed on six more minarets: the two minarets of King Abdulaziz Gate, the two minarets of Umrah Gate, and the two minarets of al-Fatah Gate. Once these six minarets are completed, the total number of minarets at the Grand Mosque will rise to nineteen” (SaudiPedia). Read carefully, this is a state-affiliated encyclopedia reporting a target of nineteen while simultaneously confirming that the towers needed to reach it were, at the time of its own publication, still under construction — a plan and a present reality quoted in the same breath, and a reader has to hold both facts rather than collapse them into one.

Independent and international sources, unsurprisingly, lag and diverge. Wikipedia’s infobox for the mosque, as consulted for this guide, lists thirteen minarets with a combined reference height of 139 metres for the tallest — itself a figure this guide could not corroborate against any other source and flags as unverified rather than repeats as settled fact — while the same article’s narrative history text describes an August 2011 announcement of “two minarets, bringing the total number of minarets to eleven,” a lower number reflecting an earlier stage of the same third expansion (Wikipedia). Madain Project, an independent volunteer-run archive of Islamic architectural sites, repeats the same 2011-era figure of eleven in its own entry on the King Abdullah expansion (Madain Project). A May 2026 wire feature aimed at pilgrims preparing for the Hajj season described the mosque as having “seven towering minarets rising 300 feet (91 metres) high,” each “named uniquely like Ajyad and Qusayy” — a figure and even a set of minaret names that this guide could not verify against any other source in its research, and which sits so far below every other count discussed above (seven against a contemporaneous official target of nineteen) that it should be read as an error or as a description of only the historic core minarets rather than the mosque’s full modern complement (Ad Hoc News, May 2026). This guide includes that figure only to demonstrate the scale of the disagreement in circulation and explicitly does not endorse it.

What can be said honestly, as of July 2026, is this: thirteen minarets were structurally complete and crowned with their crescents by late 2023, according to the Saudi authorities’ own confirmed statement. A further six minarets — two each at the King Abdulaziz Gate, the Umrah Gate and the al-Fatah Gate — were, as of the most recent detailed official figure available to this guide (December 2024), still under construction, with a stated target of nineteen minarets once finished. Independent trackers of the expansion, including the crowd-sourced Haramain Archives Instagram project, reported in 2025 that “minarets into the final stages of completion” had occurred in 2024 and that “the King Abdullah expansion finishes and Saudi porticoes undergo transformation aesthetically” around the same time, alongside the note that the King Abdulaziz Gate itself, “after almost a decade” of closure for renovation, reopened to pilgrims in February 2025 with “all cranes…removed” (Haramain Archives; Haramain Archives, King Abdulaziz Gate reopening). Whether the specific minarets attached to that gate, and the further ones at Umrah Gate and al-Fatah Gate, had by July 2026 actually reached the nineteen-minaret target that SaudiPedia describes is not something this guide can confirm from a dated, citable source at the time of writing. The honest position — and the one this guide takes — is that the Grand Mosque had at least thirteen confirmed, completed minarets as of late 2023, that Saudi Arabia’s own stated target since at least 2024 has been nineteen, that construction toward that number was reported as being in its final stages through 2024 and 2025, and that no single source available to this guide states with a firm, dated citation that all nineteen were finished and standing as of July 2026. A pilgrim planning a trip should expect to see a mosque with somewhere between thirteen and nineteen minarets, treat any single confident number quoted online with some scepticism, and — if the exact count matters to them — ask the Presidency for the Affairs of the Two Holy Mosques or check recent, dated reporting closer to their travel date rather than relying on this or any other guide’s figure as final.

It is also worth recording plainly, because it recurs throughout this history and will recur again below, that minarets at the Grand Mosque have been demolished and rebuilt more than once in living memory, so that the “count” at any given date is never simply a running total of additions — it is a net figure after subtractions as well. Saudi Gazette reported in 2014 that demolition work as part of the third expansion’s final phase included “the King Abdulaziz Gate with two minarets over it and three floors” (Saudi Gazette), and a 2013 report from the same outlet’s international wire coverage noted that minarets being dismantled for the mataf expansion were expected to be “reconstructed after completion of the mataf expansion,” with the Presidency’s then head, Sheikh Abdul Rahman Al-Sudais, stating that “as part of the tradition of the Presidency in preserving the remains of the Grand Mosque, the pillars of the old mosque and minarets and carvings on them will be packed and kept safely” (Coastal Digest, reprinting Saudi Gazette wire reporting). The minarets a visitor sees today at the King Abdulaziz Gate are not, in several documented cases, the same physical towers that stood there a generation ago; they are replacements, built new in the same architectural idiom, after their predecessors were taken down to make room for a larger mataf and a reinforced structure beneath it.

Heights of the Minarets: The Eighty-Nine-Metre Standard and Its Exceptions

The single most consistently repeated figure for the height of the Grand Mosque’s modern minarets is eighty-nine metres. SaudiPedia’s dedicated article states it as a flat, repeated standard: “each with a height of eighty-nine m,” applied not only to the towers built in the most recent expansion phase but retrospectively to the earlier ones as well, since the article notes that the two minarets added in the second Saudi expansion were “designed architecturally to resemble the previous seven minarets,” implying the same height (SaudiPedia). Archnet’s independent architectural history gives the same figure for the Ottoman-era towers specifically, recording that after the seventeenth-century renovation the minarets “stood eighty-nine meters tall on square bases” (Archnet). The Haramain Archives’ account of the King Fahd-era expansion likewise describes “two new minarets (89 m) high using the same architectural design and building materials used for the seven existing minarets at the time” (Haramain Archives). Taken together, these sources describe a remarkably stable design decision spanning roughly four centuries: from the Ottoman rebuilding of the 1620s through the Saudi expansions of the twentieth century, new minarets at the Grand Mosque have generally been built, or rebuilt, to match an established eighty-nine-metre standard rather than each striving to be taller than the last, a restraint that stands in some contrast to the record-chasing height of the nearby Abraj al-Bait clock tower discussed later in this guide.

That said, this guide found at least two credible indications that not every minaret at the Grand Mosque conforms to the eighty-nine-metre figure, and reports them honestly rather than smoothing them away. Wikipedia’s infobox for the mosque lists a minaret height of 139 metres (456 feet) elsewhere on the same page that otherwise discusses the Ottoman and Saudi towers — a figure roughly one and a half times the eighty-nine-metre standard, and one this guide could not corroborate against any other source in its research (Wikipedia). Separately, a 2020 report on the King Abdulaziz Gate redevelopment quoted Anas Sirafi, head of the real estate committee at the Mecca Chamber of Commerce, stating that as part of that specific project “the height of a minaret will reach 137 meters” (Shafaqna). The proximity of that 137-metre figure to Wikipedia’s uncorroborated 139-metre infobox figure suggests the two may describe the same planned structure — a taller minaret, or pair of minarets, specifically at the King Abdulaziz Gate redevelopment, distinct from the eighty-nine-metre towers that make up the majority of the mosque’s minarets. If that is correct, then the Grand Mosque’s minaret heights as of July 2026 are not uniform: most towers stand at roughly eighty-nine metres, following a design standard maintained since the Ottoman period, while at least one gate’s minarets may have been built, or planned, to a significantly greater height of around 137 to 139 metres. This guide flags this as an area of continuing uncertainty rather than presenting either figure as the single, final word on the tallest minaret’s height.

By way of comparison, and to give a visiting pilgrim some sense of scale, the four minarets of al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem — themselves substantial towers by the standards of most historic mosques — reach a maximum height of only about thirty-seven metres (Wikipedia’s al-Aqsa Mosque article). Even at the more conservative eighty-nine-metre figure, the Grand Mosque’s minarets are more than double that height, and the mosque’s thirteen or more of them, taken together, make it — on the strength of the widely repeated Arab News figure — the mosque with the largest number of minarets of any in the world (Arab News).

Architecture of the Minarets: Balconies, Finials and the Pencil Form

The minarets of the Grand Mosque, in their modern Saudi-era form, are built as octagonal shafts rising from a square base, each carrying two balconies — the classical Islamic minaret feature known in Ottoman Turkish as the şerefe — from which the muezzin’s call was traditionally projected before amplification made the climb unnecessary. Archnet’s account of the Ottoman-period towers describes exactly this configuration: “each had two octagonal balconies decorated with colonettes; the first located at the height of the mosque roof while the second was at the top end of the shaft” (Archnet). This two-balcony, octagonal-shaft design is a direct descendant of the mainstream Ottoman minaret tradition rather than an older Abbasid or Hijazi form. Wikipedia’s general article on minarets describes the type precisely: “classical Ottoman minarets are described as ‘pencil-shaped’ due to their slenderness and sharply-pointed summits, often topped with a crescent moon symbol,” continuing Seljuk models that “continued the Iranian tradition of cylindrical tapering minaret forms with a square base,” and notes that “taller minarets often also had multiple balconies (known as şerefe in Turkish) along their shafts instead of one” (Wikipedia). A separate summary of Ottoman minaret construction technique adds a structural detail worth including for its sheer craftsmanship: “in the construction of the tall and slender Ottoman minarets, molten iron was poured into pre-cut cavities inside the stones, which then solidified and helped to bind the stones together” — an early form of internal reinforcement that let the towers rise so high on a comparatively narrow base without a modern steel frame (Wikipedia).

A museum-published introduction to Ottoman religious architecture describes the same silhouette in terms any visitor standing in the mataf and looking up can recognise immediately: “the Ottoman mosque is well-known for its simple, elegant pencil-shaped minaret, which is often fluted and ends in a lead-covered, elongated conical cap,” adding that “the minarets may have anything from one to three balconies, usually resting on corbelled muqarnas vaults,” and that mosques built under royal patronage typically carried more than a single minaret, “ranging from two to six” (Discover Islamic Art, Museum With No Frontiers). The Grand Mosque, as a mosque under the direct patronage of the Ottoman sultans and, later, of the Saudi kings, always exceeded even the upper end of that typical range, which is part of why observers have long noted it as unusually thick with towers compared to almost any other mosque on earth.

The finial — the decorative metal or fibre element that crowns the very top of each shaft — takes the form, at the Grand Mosque today, of a golden crescent. The Presidency for the Affairs of the Two Holy Mosques completed the installation of these crescents across all thirteen then-standing minarets by October 2023, and Arab News reported the technical specifications of the final one installed, at the Bab al-Fath minaret: “more than nine metres tall, with a base width of about two metres,” constructed from “carbon fibre with engraved glass” over “an iron internal structure” designed for durability against wind and weather (Arab News). The Saudi Gazette’s report on the same programme specified that “there are a total of 13 minarets for the Grand Mosque, and each minaret is topped with a golden crescent,” and noted that two of the crescents, near the King Abdulaziz Gate, had been installed a few months earlier, in June of that year (Saudi Gazette). This crescent finial replaces, in visual effect if not in exact classical form, the cap-and-alem arrangement traditional to Ottoman minarets further north, in which a conical, lead-sheathed cap supported a stack of metal elements — commonly described in Ottoman architectural terminology as consisting of a sphere, a crescent and connecting rings — collectively known as the alem (a detailed public summary of Ottoman minaret parts, consistent with academic descriptions of the form). The Grand Mosque’s modern crescents are a simplified, single-element descendant of that older finial tradition, scaled up considerably to remain visible against the mosque’s vast modern courtyard and the glare of the Abraj al-Bait towers behind them.

Materials at the Grand Mosque’s minarets today combine traditional stone cladding with modern reinforced construction beneath it — a detail confirmed indirectly by the repeated Saudi state description of new minarets being “designed architecturally to resemble the previous seven minarets” (SaudiPedia) even where the underlying structural engineering is contemporary. Lighting at night is extensive and forms part of the mosque’s now-famous nocturnal silhouette: the minarets are floodlit in white against the dark sky, a treatment that photographs consistently show as one of the most recognisable images of the Haram after dark, though this guide could not find a single authoritative technical source describing the lighting installation’s specifications in the way the sound system has been documented, and does not invent detail where none was verifiable.

Internally, access to the upper reaches of the minarets today is understood, from the general pattern of Grand Mosque infrastructure reporting, to rely on a combination of stairs and mechanical lifts rather than stairs alone, consistent with the mosque’s broader modernisation of vertical access across its gates and prayer levels; the Grand Mosque authority’s own guidance to pilgrims describes lifts at the King Fahd Gate, the Umrah Gate and the Ajyad stairway serving the upper prayer floors and the roof, and describes designated lift access for people with disabilities at several gates (Arab News, on gate and lift access for pilgrims). This guide did not find a source describing minaret-specific internal lift installations in the way it found for the mosque’s gates and prayer floors, and does not claim pilgrims can ride a lift inside a minaret shaft itself; general Islamic architectural sources describe minaret interiors, in their classical form, as built around one or more internal spiral staircases, sometimes nested so that ascending and descending muezzins would not collide, a pattern described generally of Ottoman-tradition minarets (Wikipedia) and specifically, for a mosque of comparable Ottoman pedigree, in the note that “the main supporting element of the minaret is the stairwell” (Ottoman minaret construction summary). Whether any of the Grand Mosque’s minarets today are opened to the public for a physical climb is not something this guide can confirm; no source consulted described public access to the towers, and the modern practice, discussed in detail below, is that the adhan itself is no longer given from the top of the shaft at all.

The Demolition of the Ottoman Minarets and Colonnades: Conservation Criticism and Official Justification

No aspect of the minaret story has drawn more sustained international criticism than the demolition of Ottoman-era fabric during the third Saudi expansion, and this guide reports both the criticism and the official justification without taking a side, as the underlying facts are contested rather than settled.

The criticism is specific, named and repeated across more than a decade of reporting. The Independent’s 2013 investigation into the expansion, illustrated with photographs the paper said Saudi authorities did not want circulated, quoted Dr Irfan al-Alawi, executive director of the Islamic Heritage Research Foundation, on the loss of the mosque’s Ottoman and Abbasid-era columns and porticoes: “It matters because many of these columns signified certain areas of the mosque where the Prophet sat and prayed,” he said, adding that “the historical record is being deleted. A new Muslim would never have a clue because there’s nothing marking these locations now. There are ways you could expand Mecca and Medina while protecting the historical heritage” (The Independent). The same report cited an estimate from the Gulf Institute, a Washington-based research body, that some 95 percent of Mecca’s millennium-old buildings had been demolished over the preceding two decades. Al-Alawi has made the same argument repeatedly and in stronger terms elsewhere; in 2012 he told an interviewer that “Muslim silence over the destruction of Mecca and Medina is both disastrous and hypocritical” (Institute for Social Policy and Understanding’s report on Islamic pluralism, quoting al-Alawi), and a French-language report from Lebanon’s al-Manar archive in 2013 described him, in his capacity as president of an Islamic heritage association, accusing Saudi authorities of what the report called “cultural sabotage” of the city (al-Manar).

Sami Angawi, a Hijazi architect and one of the most prominent specialists in the traditional building forms of Makkah and Madinah, has made a related but distinct argument, focused less on individual demolished columns and more on the overall transformation of the sanctuary’s skyline by the Abraj al-Bait towers built on the site of the old Ottoman Ajyad Fortress. Speaking to Business Insider in 2014, Angawi said: “It’s not Mecca. It’s Mecca-hattan. This tower and the lights in it are like Vegas…The truth of the history of Mecca is wiped out…with bulldozers and dynamite. Is this development?” He went further on the spiritual consequence he perceived: “Already we are losing the spirituality. Just look at the design: people can be doing anything on the top floors — the disco, the shopping, whatever — and they’re looking down on the Kaaba. It’s like being on top of the Kaaba. This is not just an architectural error, but a big crime, against the qibla, against the very heart of Islam” (Business Insider). A related quotation, given to the Daily Sabah in 2018, put the point more bluntly still: “this tower does not respect the dignity, sanctity and culture of the Kaaba…it has demolished a whole mountain” (Daily Sabah). A doctoral thesis on Mecca’s urban transformation submitted to Newcastle University in 2024 records Angawi identifying “the huge number of visitors, commercial progress, and lack of awareness” as the most significant threats to the city’s heritage, a more measured formulation of the same underlying concern (Alfelali, Newcastle University thesis, 2024).

These criticisms are not confined to Muslim conservationists. The architecture critic Oliver Wainwright, writing for the Guardian and quoted in Canadian coverage of the same controversy, described the new towers surrounding the Grand Mosque as “concrete high-rises superficially embellished with a pastiche of Islamic architecture” (CBC), and a 2015 report in the Art Newspaper stated that more than 90 percent of the old quarters of Mecca and Medina had been razed, and recorded that Turkish government officials had protested and sought UNESCO involvement, a request Saudi Arabia rejected as undue interference in its sovereign affairs (The Art Newspaper). The specific case of the Ajyad Fortress — an eighteenth-century Ottoman structure demolished in 2002 to make way for the Abraj al-Bait development, along with the hill, Jabal Bulbul, on which it stood — drew a formal diplomatic protest from Turkey; Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty reported at the time that “Saudi officials denied ‘destroying’ the fortress, saying they were only ‘dismantling’ it with the intention of rebuilding it elsewhere,” a claim disputed by Said Zulficar of the Paris-based heritage body Patrimoine Sans Frontières, who argued that rebuilding the fortress elsewhere would mean losing the historical significance of its original site (RFE/RL). Turkey’s then culture minister, İstemihan Talay, is separately reported to have called the fortress’s demolition “an act of barbarism” (New Age Islam).

Against this, the Saudi authorities’ own account, reported without the polemical framing found in some of the criticism above, centres on two justifications: pilgrim capacity and structural safety. Time magazine’s coverage of the broader $21 billion third expansion project noted that its stated purpose was to treble the capacity of the mataf, the area for circumambulating the Kaaba, to 150,000 people, and to raise the mosque’s total prayer capacity to 2.5 million during peak periods (Time) — figures that speak directly to the enormous and growing number of pilgrims the mosque must now physically accommodate each year, a number that did not exist on anything like the same scale in the Ottoman period when the seven historic minarets and their surrounding porticoes were built. A retrospective published by Asharq Al-Awsat in 2023, drawing on the recollections of the late Saudi minister Muhammad Abdo Yamani, records a more textured version of events specifically regarding the porticoes and minarets: a preservation commission convened under King Faisal recommended demolishing later, non-Ottoman additions to the mosque’s arcades while preserving the older Ottoman sections, and states that “three minarets” were constructed as part of that same second expansion phase — “one next to al-Safa, two next to King Abdulaziz Gate” — suggesting that even in an expansion remembered partly for preservation, new minaret construction continued alongside it (Asharq Al-Awsat). The same retrospective states that after Turkish officials repeatedly raised the preservation of the Ottoman porticoes in bilateral meetings, the Saudi king at the time ordered that the historic Ottoman sections be preserved rather than demolished, with only later, non-Ottoman-era porticoes cleared for the new construction, and that Ottoman-era portico elements which did need to be moved were detached, packed and placed under protection near Mount Arafat by a Turkish restoration company brought in for the purpose (New Age Islam).

Sheikh Abdul Rahman Al-Sudais, as head of the Presidency for the Affairs of the Two Holy Mosques, offered the same essential reassurance regarding minarets specifically that were dismantled during the mataf expansion of 2013, stating that the Presidency intended to preserve “the pillars of the old mosque and minarets and carvings on them,” packing them safely with a stated intention to reconstruct them once the mataf expansion was complete (Coastal Digest). Whether every minaret dismantled under that assurance was in fact rebuilt using its original material, as opposed to being replaced with an entirely new structure built to the same historic profile, is not something this guide’s research could confirm structure-by-structure; the pattern across multiple expansions appears to be a mix of genuine conservation, careful replication, and straightforward replacement, and readers should not assume that every minaret standing today at the Grand Mosque is either the original Ottoman fabric or a wholly new twenty-first-century structure — the honest answer, on the evidence available, is that both are true of different towers at different gates. This guide’s companion article on the Ottoman colonnades of the Grand Mosque treats the fate of the arcades and columns specifically, and readers wanting the fuller architectural and conservation history of that adjoining controversy should turn to it rather than expect this article to duplicate it.

It is also worth recording, as a matter of even-handedness, that the demolition controversy at the Grand Mosque sits within a wider pattern documented across Mecca and Medina more broadly, including sites with no minaret connection at all — the birthplace of the Prophet ﷺ, now housing a public library, and the house of his uncle Hamza, on the site of which a hotel was later built, are both cited in critical reporting as examples of the same underlying redevelopment pressure (OpIndia, a source this guide treats with some caution given its polemical framing, but whose specific factual claims about these two sites are corroborated by more measured reporting elsewhere). The minarets discussed in this guide are one visible, countable, and repeatedly photographed instance of a much larger and more contested transformation of the built environment around the Kaaba over the past seventy years.

The Muadhdhins of the Haram: Office, Lineage and the End of the Climb

The office of muadhdhin at the Grand Mosque is one of the oldest continuously filled religious appointments in Islam, tracing its symbolic origin to Bilal ibn Rabah رضي الله عنه himself, and it is also, in its modern Saudi form, an office held within specific families across generations rather than assigned freshly to each new appointee. The best-documented case, and the one most useful to a visitor trying to understand how the role has actually worked in living memory, is that of Sheikh Ali Ahmed Mulla, described in multiple sources as the longest-serving muezzin in the Grand Mosque’s modern history, with more than four decades of continuous service (Wikipedia; Ummid). Sources differ on his birth date — Wikipedia gives 5 July 1947, while a 2023 profile republishing details from the Arabic-language newspaper Al-Madinah gives 5 July 1945 — a two-year discrepancy this guide could not resolve and reports rather than silently picks a side on. What is consistent across every source is the family pattern: Sheikh Ali began performing the adhan at the age of fourteen, filling in for relatives who were themselves muezzins at the mosque — his maternal uncle Abdul Hafeez Khoja, his paternal uncle Abdul Rahman Mullah, and his grandfather Ahmed Mullah (Wikipedia). The Haramain Archives’ dedicated profile of the Mulla family describes it as “one of the oldest calling-to-prayer lineages at the Grand Mosque,” spanning more than a hundred years, and sketches a family tree running from Sheikh Ali Mulla, the grandfather, through Sheikh Abdul Rahman Mulla and Sheikh Ahmed Mulla, to Sheikh Abdul Malik Mulla and Sheikh Sadiq Mulla among the uncles and cousins who also served as muadhdhins (Haramain Archives). Sources also differ, by roughly a decade, on the year Sheikh Ali Ahmed Mulla was formally appointed muezzin: Wikipedia gives 1984, while both the Ummid profile and a separate account from Life in Saudi Arabia give 1975, the latter specifying that the appointment followed the death of a relative, Sheikh Abdul Malak al-Mulla, who had held the post before him (Life in Saudi Arabia). Given that two independent sources converge on 1975 against one source giving 1984, this guide treats 1975 as the better-supported figure while noting the Wikipedia discrepancy rather than erasing it.

Sheikh Ali Ahmed Mulla’s own recollections, recorded in the Ummid profile drawing on the Al-Madinah newspaper, describe the physical practice of the office before the era of loudspeakers in vivid, specific terms: “Muezzins (Muadhins) stood at each of the seven minarets such as the Bab Al-Umrah Minaret, Bab Al-Ziyara Minaret, and Bab Al-Hekma Minaret and called for prayer,” with a lead muezzin, stationed near the Zamzam well at what was known as the Shafi’i Maqam, initiating the call and each subsequent muezzin picking it up in relay from his own tower (Ummid). The English Wikipedia article on him describes the same relay system and traces its lineage explicitly to Ottoman practice, noting that a similar antiphonal, multi-minaret call “is still practiced in Turkey today” — a detail that connects the historic Haram practice directly to the broader Ottoman minaret tradition discussed in the architecture section above (Wikipedia). The Arabic Wikipedia entry on the same muezzin adds a further layer of specificity, describing an institution known as “Bayt al-Ra’is” — the chief’s household or office — responsible for timing the adhan and the iqama from the Shafi’i Maqam, with seven muezzins then calling from the mosque’s seven minarets in coordinated sequence, a practice the article states continued “until close to 1400 AH,” or roughly 1980 CE (Arabic Wikipedia). Sheikh Ali also recounted a specific episode from a power outage, when he climbed to the highest point of the mosque available to him to ensure the call to prayer still reached the surrounding area despite the failure of the electronic sound system (Ummid), and he is separately reported to have personally witnessed and adhaned through one of the most extraordinary events in the mosque’s modern history: the 1979 siege of the Grand Mosque by the armed group led by Juhayman al-Otaybi, during which the call to prayer was suspended for twenty-three days, with Sheikh Ali giving the first Maghrib adhan after the siege ended, in the presence of King Khalid bin Abdulaziz (Life in Saudi Arabia).

The Ummid profile names several other senior muadhdhins who served alongside Sheikh Ali Ahmed Mulla in recent decades, including Sheikh Abdullah Basnawi, Sheikh Abdul Rahman Basamji and Sheikh Ahmad Toufik, and states that as of its 2023 publication there were sixteen muadhdhins serving at the Makkah Haram, with six additional muezzins brought in specifically during Ramadan to meet the heavier schedule of taraweeh and tahajjud prayers (Ummid). The Mulla family lineage continues into a new generation: the same profile records that Sheikh Ali’s son, Atef bin Ali Ahmed Mulla, made his own debut as a muezzin at the Grand Mosque on 4 April 2022, a detail the Haramain Archives’ family profile frames as significant because, as of its own 2021 publication — written just before that debut — Sheikh Ali himself was described as the only remaining active muadhdhin from the Mulla line (Haramain Archives; Ummid).

The fact most relevant to a modern visitor, and the one this guide states plainly, is that the muadhdhin at the Grand Mosque today does not climb a minaret to give the call to prayer. The relay system of muezzins calling in sequence from separate towers, described above as continuing to roughly 1980, ended with the introduction and refinement of electronic amplification. The Arab News feature on the mosque’s sound system traces this transition in detail: loudspeakers were first introduced under King Abdulaziz, with sources giving slightly different years for the exact date — 1947 according to Dr Mansour Al-Daajani and to the memoir of Ahmed Ali Asad Allah Al-Kadhimi, and 1949 according to the historian Mohammed Tahir Al-Kurdi’s book on the history of Makkah (Arab News). The proposal to introduce loudspeakers is credited to Sheikh Abdul Zahir Abu Al-Samah, and the very first recorded use of the new technology at the Haram complex was not the adhan itself but the Day of Arafah sermon, delivered by Sheikh Abdullah bin Hassan Al Al-Sheikh at the Namirah Mosque; Abu Al-Samah went on to deliver a Friday sermon by microphone at the Grand Mosque on 31 October 1947. The speakers were initially installed at the Hanafi Maqam, then relocated to the Shafi’i Maqam above the Zamzam well during the 1957 expansion of the mataf, and finally, after the Shafi’i Maqam structure itself was removed in 1963, moved into a dedicated chamber to the south of the mataf courtyard — the first time, the report notes, that Grand Mosque muezzins worked from a purpose-built independent structure rather than an open-air maqam platform (Arab News).

That southern loudspeaker chamber, in expanded and modernised form, is where the adhan is coordinated today. The Arab News report describes the current installation as occupying nine interior domes across sixteen separate spaces on the basement and ground floors of the mataf building, covering roughly five hundred square metres, and housing approximately eight thousand loudspeakers connected through digital control systems with backup redundancy, alongside a dedicated air-conditioning capacity of 117 refrigeration tonnes, split between the imam’s area and the equipment service rooms, to keep the electronics and the officiants comfortable in Makkah’s heat (Arab News). A companion figure from Gulf News, reporting in 2023, states that the broadcast system runs on “8,000 stereos” overseen by more than 120 specialists, with backup amplifiers held in reserve in case of technical failure during a live call to prayer (Gulf News), and the Saudi Gazette separately reported in March 2026 that the General Authority for Care of Affairs of the Grand Mosque and the Prophet’s Mosque had deployed an additional, more localised audio network of over 260 speakers along the roads surrounding the Grand Mosque, connected through some eight kilometres of cabling and fibre-optic line, extending the reach of the adhan and Qur’an recitation into the streets around the sanctuary itself rather than only within its walls (Saudi Gazette). The system, per the Arab News report, is activated only in the minutes immediately before each prayer, rather than running continuously (Arab News). Dr Nada Al-Qurashi, a Saudi scholarship student studying in Ohio and quoted in the same feature, spoke to the emotional weight this broadcast system carries for Muslims who cannot be physically present: hearing the Haram’s adhan relayed and shared online, she said, connects her and millions of others to the mosque regardless of distance (Arab News). The minarets, in other words, remain the visual and symbolic markers of the call to prayer — the towers a pilgrim looks toward instinctively when the adhan begins — but the sound itself, since the mid-twentieth century, has travelled from a climate-controlled equipment room beneath the mataf, not from the top of any shaft.

The Abraj al-Bait Clock Tower: Not a Minaret, But Impossible to Ignore

No honest account of the Grand Mosque’s minarets can avoid the structure that now dominates every photograph, every skyline view and every visitor’s first impression of the sanctuary from a distance: the Abraj al-Bait complex, crowned by the Makkah Royal Clock Tower, rising immediately to the east of the mosque on the site of the former Ottoman Ajyad Fortress. It needs to be said plainly and without ambiguity: the clock tower is not a minaret. It has no religious function comparable to a minaret’s traditional role in projecting the adhan, it was not built as part of the mosque’s own architectural programme in the way every structure discussed elsewhere in this guide was, and it belongs instead to a commercial hotel, shopping and residential development completed in 2012 (Daily Sabah). Its scale, however, makes it impossible to leave out of any discussion of the mosque’s minarets, because it visually dwarfs all of them at once, standing at a height reported at roughly 601 metres — more than six times the eighty-nine-metre standard height of the mosque’s own historic towers, and taller by a considerable margin than the uncorroborated 137–139 metre figure this guide found for the tallest planned minaret at the King Abdulaziz Gate.

The visual and symbolic relationship between the clock tower and the minarets is precisely the subject of Sami Angawi’s most quoted criticism, cited above in the discussion of the demolition controversy: his objection is not narrowly about the minarets’ own height or number but about what a single, vastly taller commercial structure does to the visual hierarchy of the entire sanctuary. “This tower does not respect the dignity, sanctity and culture of the Kaaba,” he told the Daily Sabah, in a piece that also quoted a pilgrim, Wafa Sbbet, visiting from Sydney, who criticised the tower’s design for not reflecting the Arabic architectural character of the site around it (Daily Sabah). His “Mecca-hattan” remark, given to Business Insider, makes the same point through a single coined word: a comparison to the Manhattan skyline that, in his view, has replaced a skyline defined by minarets and low-rise sanctuary walls with one defined by a single, illuminated commercial tower (Business Insider). This guide’s companion articles on the Makkah Royal Clock Tower and on the Abraj al-Bait shopping mall cover the structure’s own history, its construction on the demolished site of the Ajyad Fortress, and the commercial development it houses in far more depth than is appropriate to repeat here; readers wanting the fuller account of the tower itself, rather than its relationship to the minarets specifically, should turn to those articles rather than expect this one to duplicate their content.

What belongs in this article is the narrower, honest observation that the clock tower and the historic minarets now occupy the same sightline for almost every pilgrim approaching the mosque from the east, and that the disparity in scale between them is not a matter of interpretation — it is a matter of simple measurement. A minaret at eighty-nine metres, however elegant its pencil-thin Ottoman profile or however carefully its golden crescent has been engineered and installed, cannot compete visually with a tower more than six times its height standing immediately behind it. Whether that juxtaposition is experienced by an individual pilgrim as a jarring intrusion, as Angawi and the critics quoted above experience it, or as a modern, practical answer to the genuine problem of housing and serving millions of pilgrims each year, as the Saudi authorities’ own stated capacity rationale would suggest, is a matter of personal and theological judgment this guide does not resolve on the reader’s behalf. What can be said with confidence is that the minarets remain the mosque’s own structures, built across thirteen centuries in service of the adhan, while the clock tower is a separate, vastly taller, and commercially driven neighbour that has irrevocably changed how those minarets are seen and photographed.

Visiting in 2026: Where to See the Minarets, Photography Rules, and the Best Light

A pilgrim standing in the mataf, directly facing the Kaaba, will generally find the historic minarets at the mosque’s older gates — Bab al-Salam, Bab al-Umrah and the towers nearest the original Ottoman core — more immediately visible against the sky than the newer gate minarets further out at King Abdulaziz Gate, King Fahd Gate and the Umrah Gate, simply because the older core of the mosque sits closer to the Kaaba and its towers rise more directly overhead. Visitors on the upper prayer floors and roof level, by contrast, gain a much wider panoramic view of the mosque’s full minaret complement at once, since the elevation clears the intervening rooflines and canopies that can obstruct sightlines from ground level. The Grand Mosque’s own gate and access guidance for pilgrims describes roof-level access as available via multiple lift and escalator routes, including at the Ajyad stairway, the Marwa stairway and the King Fahd Gate, with the roof level noted as having specific access provisions for worshippers with disabilities (Arab News). This guide notes, without being able to confirm a specific current restriction, that the roof level has historically been subject to gender-based access limits outside of Hajj, and pilgrims planning a rooftop visit specifically to view the minarets should confirm current access rules for their circumstances with mosque staff on arrival rather than assume any particular policy from past visitor reports.

Photography at the Grand Mosque is, as of this guide’s research, an area of some public confusion rather than settled clarity, and this guide reports that confusion honestly rather than asserting a single fixed rule. Reports have periodically circulated among pilgrims and travel bloggers, particularly ahead of Hajj seasons, suggesting an outright or near-total ban on photography within the Haram; other, more measured travel-industry guidance aimed at umrah and hajj pilgrims has pushed back on the idea of a blanket ban, describing restrictions instead as targeted at professional filming, drone use, and photography that disrupts other worshippers or intrudes on their privacy, rather than personal phone photographs of the mosque’s architecture, including its minarets, taken respectfully and without obstructing others. Given that this guide could not verify a single authoritative, dated statement from the Presidency for the Affairs of the Two Holy Mosques settling this question specifically for the 2026 Hajj season, pilgrims wanting minaret photographs should treat casual, respectful personal photography of the exterior architecture as generally tolerated based on the weight of travel-industry reporting, while expecting active enforcement against tripods, drones, professional equipment, and any photography of other worshippers without their consent, and should check for updated signage and any announced restrictions closer to their specific travel dates rather than rely on any online guide, including this one, as the final word.

The most photogenic light on the minarets, by the near-universal testimony of pilgrim photography shared online and consistent with general principles of architectural photography at any large stone or marble structure, falls in the hour after sunset, when the mosque’s floodlighting brings the pale stone and golden crescents into sharp, warm contrast against a darkening sky, and again in the pre-dawn hour before Fajr, when the towers are lit but the sky behind them is still deep blue rather than fully black. Midday light, by contrast, tends to flatten the minarets’ carved detail and their two-tiered balconies under Makkah’s harsh overhead sun, a general photographic principle rather than a claim this guide attributes to any single named source. Visitors should also expect that ongoing construction, particularly around the King Abdulaziz Gate, the Umrah Gate and the al-Fatah Gate — the locations of the six minarets still reported under completion toward the stated target of nineteen, as discussed earlier in this guide — may partially obstruct sightlines or restrict access to certain vantage points at any given time during 2026, and that this is a genuinely moving situation rather than a fixed layout a guide written months or years in advance can describe with total confidence (SaudiPedia).

Common Misconceptions About the Minarets

Several beliefs about the Grand Mosque’s minarets circulate widely among pilgrims and deserve direct correction. The first, addressed at the outset of this guide, is the assumption that the mosque has always had minarets, or that they date to the Prophet’s ﷺ own lifetime; in fact, as established above, the first minaret was not built until the Abbasid period under al-Mansur, roughly a century and a quarter after the Hijra, and the adhan itself predates any minaret by that same span, having first been called from the roof of the Kaaba (Arab News). The second misconception is that the current number of minarets is a simple, fixed figure that any source can state with confidence; as this guide has shown at length, the true figure as of July 2026 sits somewhere between the confirmed thirteen completed and crescent-topped by late 2023 and the stated target of nineteen once six further gate minarets are finished, and no dated source available to this guide confirms that all nineteen were standing by the middle of 2026. The third misconception is that the Abraj al-Bait clock tower is one of the mosque’s minarets, or in some way replaces them; it is a separate, commercially operated structure built on the site of the demolished Ottoman Ajyad Fortress, with no adhan-calling function, and its extraordinary height relative to the actual minarets is precisely what has drawn sustained criticism from conservationists such as Sami Angawi and Dr Irfan al-Alawi. The fourth misconception, addressed in the section on the muadhdhins, is that the mosque’s callers to prayer still climb the minarets each time the adhan is given; in fact, this practice ended by around 1980 with the maturation of the mosque’s loudspeaker system, and the adhan today originates from a purpose-built underground sound chamber beneath the mataf rather than from the top of any tower (Arab News).

Timeline of the Minarets of Masjid al-Haram

Circa 630 CE (8 AH): Bilal ibn Rabah رضي الله عنه gives the adhan from the roof of the Kaaba on the day of the Conquest of Makkah, before any minaret exists at the site (Arab News).
Circa 754–758 CE (137–140 AH): The Abbasid caliph Abu Ja’far al-Mansur builds the first minaret at the Grand Mosque, at the Bab al-Umrah corner, as part of a wider expansion of the mosque’s northern and western wings (Archnet; Visit Saudi).
776–786 CE (160–170 AH, approx.): The Abbasid caliph al-Mahdi adds further minarets — two or three, depending on the source — at Bab al-Salam, Bab Ali and Bab al-Wadi, crowned with crenellations (Archnet; German Wikipedia).
1629 CE: Under Sultan Murad IV, the Ottoman renovation adds further minarets, bringing the total to seven by the most commonly cited figure, each reportedly reaching eighty-nine metres with two octagonal balconies (Wikipedia; Archnet).
1955–1976: The first Saudi expansion adds further minarets; sources vary between a net gain of four and a resulting total of seven (Wikipedia; SaudiPedia).
1988–1993: The second Saudi expansion under King Fahd adds two further minarets built to the established eighty-nine-metre standard, bringing the total, per SaudiPedia, to nine (Haramain Archives; SaudiPedia).
2002: The Ottoman-era Ajyad Fortress is demolished to make way for the Abraj al-Bait development, drawing formal protest from Turkey (RFE/RL).
2008–2011: The King Abdullah expansion is announced and its first phases completed, with reporting at the time putting the total number of minarets at eleven (Madain Project; About Islam).
2012: The Makkah Royal Clock Tower and the wider Abraj al-Bait complex are completed, standing roughly 601 metres tall beside the mosque.
2013–2015: Minarets at the King Abdulaziz Gate and elsewhere are dismantled as part of the third expansion’s mataf works, with Saudi officials stating an intention to preserve and later reconstruct them (Coastal Digest; Saudi Gazette).
2020: Construction on new minarets at King Abdulaziz Gate, Umrah Gate and al-Fatah Gate is reported at between roughly 37 and 45 percent complete (Zawya).
June–October 2023: Golden crescents are installed on all thirteen then-standing minarets, with the final crescent placed on the Bab al-Fath minaret in late October (Saudi Gazette; Arab News; pep.gov.sa).
2024: SaudiPedia states a target total of nineteen minarets once six further gate minarets are completed, and independent trackers report the King Abdullah expansion approaching its finish (SaudiPedia; Haramain Archives).
February 2025: The King Abdulaziz Gate reopens to pilgrims after nearly a decade of closure for renovation work, with construction cranes removed from the site (Haramain Archives).
July 2026: The standing count of completed minarets remains unconfirmed by any single dated, authoritative source available to this guide; readers should expect a figure between thirteen and nineteen and treat any more precise claim with caution.

Key Takeaways for Visitors

The Grand Mosque had no minaret for more than a century after the death of the Prophet ﷺ; the adhan predates the minaret, having first been called from the roof of the Kaaba itself (Arab News).
The first minaret was built under the Abbasid caliph al-Mansur in the mid-eighth century CE, with further minarets added shortly afterward under al-Mahdi (Archnet).
The number of minarets has grown across four Saudi-era expansions layered on top of an Ottoman baseline of seven; as of July 2026, at least thirteen are confirmed complete, with a stated official target of nineteen once construction at three gates finishes — treat any single, more precise figure with caution (SaudiPedia).
Most minarets stand at roughly eighty-nine metres, a height standard maintained since the Ottoman period, though at least one gate’s towers may be built taller, around 137 to 139 metres, on evidence this guide could not fully corroborate (Archnet; Shafaqna).
Ottoman-era minarets and porticoes have been demolished during the modern expansions, drawing sustained criticism from named conservationists including Dr Irfan al-Alawi and Sami Angawi, against an official rationale centred on pilgrim capacity and structural safety (The Independent; Time).
The Grand Mosque’s muadhdhins, drawn from lineages such as the Mulla family, no longer climb the minarets to call the adhan; the call has been broadcast electronically since the late 1940s and today originates from a dedicated underground sound chamber housing roughly eight thousand loudspeakers (Arab News).
The Abraj al-Bait clock tower beside the mosque is not a minaret and stands roughly six times taller than the mosque’s own towers; its relationship to the minarets is one of scale and visual dominance, not religious function.

Sources and Further Reading

This guide draws on official Saudi state and quasi-state sources including SaudiPedia, the Presidency for the Affairs of the Two Holy Mosques and Visit Saudi; international press reporting from Arab News, Saudi Gazette, Gulf News, The Independent, The Art Newspaper, Time and Business Insider; academic and reference architectural histories including Archnet, Wikipedia’s Masjid al-Haram article, Wikipedia’s general Minaret article and the Newcastle University doctoral thesis of M. A. Alfelali (2024); independent documentation projects including the Haramain Archives and Madain Project; and profiles of the muadhdhins of the Haram from Ummid and Life in Saudi Arabia. Readers seeking the fuller history of the demolished Ottoman colonnades, the Makkah Royal Clock Tower, or the Abraj al-Bait mall should consult this guide’s companion articles on those subjects rather than treat this article as a complete account of any of them.

The Minarets of Masjid al-Haram