The Ottoman Colonnades of Masjid al-Haram: History, Architecture and What Survives Today

Walk into the courtyard of Masjid al-Haram today and you are standing inside one of the largest buildings on earth, a structure of white marble, steel and glass capable of holding several million people over the days of Hajj. Almost none of what you see is old. This is not a criticism; it is simply the plain fact of the place, and this guide exists to tell you, precisely and without exaggeration, where the exceptions are. Somewhere within that vast modern fabric — on three sides of the Mataf, in a handful of arcades still standing close to the Kaaba, and in a scatter of columns and stones now held in a museum and in storage yards outside the city — there survives a portion of the mosque as it was rebuilt by the Ottoman sultans Selim II and Murad III between 1571 and 1577, on the design attributed to the empire’s greatest architect, Mimar Sinan, or to his office and successors. That Ottoman fabric was, for nearly four centuries, the last complete pre-modern building campaign at the Grand Mosque, and for most of the twentieth century it was still substantially intact. Today most of it is gone, removed in successive Saudi expansions between 1955 and the 2010s, and its removal is one of the most documented and most argued-over episodes in the modern history of Islamic architecture.

This is a serious subject, and it deserves to be treated as one. It is not a story with an obvious villain or an obvious hero. It is a story about a sacred building that has been rebuilt, expanded, burned, flooded, and rebuilt again for fourteen centuries, in which every generation’s builders erased something that a previous generation had built, and in which the same tension — between the needs of a living, growing pilgrimage and the preservation of physical memory — recurs under the Abbasids, the Mamluks, the Ottomans, and the modern Saudi state alike. What makes the twentieth-century phase different is documentation: for the first time, the demolition of a major building campaign at the Grand Mosque was recorded in photographs, reported in the international press, defended and condemned in public by named individuals and institutions, and is still, in July 2026, an active subject of scholarship and disagreement. This guide sets out what was built under the Ottomans, what happened to it, what survives, and where a visitor standing in the mosque today can and cannot see it. It is written for a premium Umrah and Ziyarah readership: people who want the history of Islamic Makkah, not a slogan about it.

Historical Background: A Mosque Rebuilt Many Times Before the Ottomans Ever Arrived

Masjid al-Haram did not begin as a stone building with domes and colonnades. In its earliest Islamic form it was a modest, largely unenclosed sanctuary around the Kaaba, expanded piecemeal by the early caliphs as the numbers of pilgrims grew. The caliph Umar ibn al-Khattab is credited with the first formal expansion of the mosque’s perimeter around 17 AH (638 CE), and Uthman ibn Affan extended it further and, notably, was the first to build roofed arcades (riwaq) around the courtyard, a design principle that would still be recognisable in the Ottoman mosque a thousand years later. The Umayyad caliph al-Walid I rebuilt the mosque with marble columns, marble wall cladding, a decorated teak roof, crenellations, gilded capitals, and mosaic work above the arches — an early instance of the same combination of marble, timber roofing and gilding that the Ottomans would later revisit.

The Abbasid Rebuilding Under al-Mahdi

The single most consequential pre-Ottoman rebuilding came under the Abbasids. The caliph al-Mansur expanded the mosque on its north and west sides between 754 and 757 CE and, according to the German-language scholarly account of the mosque’s history, equipped it with minarets for the first time. His successor, the caliph al-Mahdi (reigned 775–785 CE), undertook a far larger campaign: he expanded the mosque on its east and south sides, built three-row arcades carried on marble columns, imported additional marble by ship from Syria and Egypt to Jeddah and then overland by wagon to Makkah, and added two further minarets (al-Haram Mosque, German Wikipedia, citing classical Meccan chroniclers). This Abbasid campaign, completed shortly after al-Mahdi by his successor al-Hadi around 785–786 CE, brought the mosque to roughly 28,000 square metres and fixed its overall footprint and arcaded character for well over a century; English-language scholarship treats it as the largest expansion to the mosque’s size before the Saudi era, with the exceptions of two further Abbasid extensions under the caliphs al-Mu’tadid in 894–895 CE, who ordered the demolition of the old Dar al-Nadwa council house to expand the mosque northward, and al-Muqtadir in 918 CE, whose governor removed the wall between an earlier expansion and the courtyard and replaced it with stone columns (Masjid al-Haram, Wikipedia). It is worth stating this plainly, because popular retellings sometimes compress the mosque’s history into “Prophet, then Ottomans, then Saudis”: the three-row marble arcade around the Mataf, the basic architectural idea that the Ottomans would rebuild in stone domes eight centuries later, was already an Abbasid achievement, standing under caliphs who ruled from Baghdad, using marble shipped in from the eastern Mediterranean.

Fire, Flood and the Mamluk Repairs

The mosque that the Abbasids built did not survive unaltered. It suffered periodic flood damage from the flash floods (sayl) that periodically swept through the valley of Makkah, and in 802 AH (1400 CE) it was struck by a serious fire that damaged its western colonnade. The Mamluk sultan Faraj ibn Barquq ordered the amir Baisaq az-Zahiri to clean and rebuild the mosque after this fire; Baisaq quarried granite columns from Jabal Shubaika near Makkah to replace the burned marble ones — a temporary, visually mismatched repair that would remain in place for over a century and a half, until the Ottomans finally replaced the granite with new marble in the 1570s — and later repaired the roof with timber brought from Asia Minor and juniper wood from the area around Ta’if (al-Haram Mosque, German Wikipedia). Mamluk sultans continued to invest in the mosque’s minarets and subsidiary buildings through the fifteenth century: al-Ashraf Sha’ban had the minaret over the Bab al-Hazwarah rebuilt in 1370 after an earlier collapse; the minaret over the Bab Bani Shaybah was rebuilt between 1407 and 1409; a sixth minaret was erected around 1480 over the madrasah of Sultan Qa’itbay, who also founded a religious school, a public fountain (sabil) and a library on the mosque’s edge that same year. Other Mamluk officials attended to more prosaic but essential works: in 1426–27, officials named Shahin al-‘Uthmani and Sa’d ad-Din al-Fuwi had the entire floor of the mosque ploughed and re-covered with fine gravel and built outer steps and a drainage channel, work that speaks to a mosque under constant, unglamorous maintenance rather than a single monumental building left untouched for centuries.

By the middle of the sixteenth century, then, when the Ottomans took a direct interest in the fabric of the Haram, they were not building on virgin ground and they were not the first dynasty to give the mosque a monumental colonnaded form. They were the latest in a long line of rulers repairing a building that had already been rebuilt by the Umayyads, doubled in size by the Abbasids, patched after fire by the Mamluks, and was, by the 1550s, structurally exhausted.

The Story Behind the Rebuilding: A Roof in Danger of Collapse

The mosque that the Ottoman sultan Suleyman the Magnificent inherited when the Ottoman Empire took formal control of the Hijaz in 1517 was still, in its basic bones, the Abbasid-Mamluk building: a rectangular courtyard surrounded by arcades of mismatched marble and granite columns, carrying a flat, double timber roof. Ottoman rule over the Hijaz brought money, status competition with the Mamluks and Safavids for the honour of “Servant of the Two Holy Sanctuaries,” and, over the following century, an escalating programme of religious patronage focused on Makkah and Madinah. Suleyman himself undertook repairs to the mosque’s east and west walls and added a minaret, and in 1551–1552 an Ottoman renovation of the Kaaba’s own structure was carried out — work in which, as the architectural historian Gülru Necipoğlu’s standard reference on the period notes, the empire’s chief architect Sinan was “generally not involved,” the commission having gone instead through other channels of the imperial building bureaucracy (Classical Ottoman Architecture, Wikipedia, summarising Necipoğlu).

The crisis that forced a full rebuilding of the mosque’s roof and colonnade came two decades later, under Suleyman’s son, Sultan Selim II. According to the sixteenth-century Meccan historian Qutb al-Din al-Nahrawali (died 1590), who was a contemporary observer and is the primary narrative source for this episode, the arcades on the eastern side of the mosque’s courtyard had begun to sink, and the roof elsewhere in the building had rotted and been eaten through by wood-boring insects (arada); birds and snakes had taken up residence in the void between the mosque’s upper and lower roof surfaces (al-Haram Mosque, German Wikipedia, citing al-Nahrawali). This was not a decorative refurbishment. It was a structural emergency in the most sacred enclosed space in Islam, and it forced Selim II’s hand.

In 979 AH (1571–1572 CE), Selim II ordered that the entire mosque be renewed “on all four sides,” in al-Nahrawali’s phrase, “in the best and most beautiful manner” (ala ahsan wajh wa-ajmal sura), and that the old double wooden roof be replaced everywhere with fixed masonry domes. The Ottoman official put in direct charge of the works on the ground was the amir Ahmad Beg. Demolition began with the mosque’s east side in the middle of Rabi’ al-Awwal 980 AH (roughly late July 1572), where Ahmad Beg cleared the arcades entirely down to their foundations and inspected them; finding the checkerboard-pattern footings defective, he had them removed altogether and rebuilt from the ground up. The formal foundation-stone ceremony for the new building took place on 6 Jumada al-Awwal 980 AH (14 September 1572), attended by the leading figures of Meccan society. The project was not completed under Selim II, who died in 1574; it was finished under his son and successor, Sultan Murad III, in 984 AH (1576–1577 CE), with a commemorative inscription added the following year, 985 AH (1577–1578 CE) (al-Haram Mosque, German Wikipedia).

An Engineering Problem: Why the Old Columns Would Not Do

The rebuilding was not simply a matter of swapping a wooden roof for a stone one. Masonry domes are vastly heavier than a timber roof, and Ahmad Beg’s engineers quickly discovered that the mosque’s existing marble columns — many of them spolia inherited from the Abbasid and earlier periods, and some of them the mismatched Mamluk-era granite columns installed after the 1400 fire — were not strong enough to bear the new load. The solution was to insert, between every third marble column, a much heavier pier of a local yellow limestone known as Shumaisi stone, quarried from two small hills near Shumais, on the Haram’s western boundary along the road to Jeddah; these piers were reportedly some four times the diameter of the slender marble columns they stood beside. The introduction of the new Shumaisi piers had a fortunate side effect: it freed up enough spare marble to finally re-clad the western colonnade — still standing on the mismatched granite columns installed after the 1400 fire — with marble columns to match the rest of the building, removing the last visible scar of the Mamluk-era emergency repair (al-Haram Mosque, German Wikipedia).

The Finished Building, By the Numbers

Contemporary Ottoman-era accounts, principally al-Nahrawali and the later chronicler Eyüb Sabri, give figures for the completed structure that later historians have generally accepted as the working record of the Ottoman mosque: 152 domes, a further 232 smaller vault-like units called tawajin (“pans,” so named for their shape, and considered by Eyüb Sabri to be a kind of dome in their own right), 311 marble columns, and 244 pillars of the yellow Shumaisi stone — a combined 555 vertical supports carrying the arcades around the courtyard (al-Haram Mosque, German Wikipedia). A twentieth-century restoration survey conducted before the demolitions of the 2010s, reported in the Saudi press, gave a slightly different but broadly comparable inventory for the entire historic Abbasid-through-Ottoman portico structure as it stood at that time: approximately 2,754 individual historical architectural pieces in total, including 496 marble columns, 881 arches, 152 domes, and 993 sections of balustrade or balcony (Saudi Gazette, “Muzdalifah turns into a gallery of Ottoman-era artifacts,” 2014). The discrepancy between the sixteenth-century column count (311 marble plus 244 stone) and the later survey’s total (496 marble columns alone) most likely reflects the fact that the later survey counted the entire historic portico as it had accumulated repairs and additions across the Ottoman centuries — including the further work of 1629 discussed below — rather than the 1577 building in isolation; it may also reflect differing conventions for what counts as a “column” versus a “pier.” Both figures are reported here as given in their respective sources, and the reader should treat the precise columns-and-domes count as an order of magnitude — several hundred columns, roughly 150 domes — rather than a single settled statistic.

Beyond the structural elements, al-Nahrawali records a set of finishing details that give a vivid sense of the finished building. Iron spikes were fitted along the cornices around the entire arcade specifically to prevent birds from perching and fouling the mosque with droppings — a small but telling detail of maintenance-mindedness. Gilded copper crescents, manufactured in Egypt at the commission of the Ottoman beylerbey Mesih Pasha, were fixed atop the new domes. Between the Bab Ali and the Bab al-Jana’iz (the Gate of the Funeral Processions), a large and prominently placed inscription bearing the names of Allah, the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ, and the four Rightly Guided Caliphs was installed in 985 AH (1577–1578 CE). Al-Nahrawali himself, writing as a contemporary witness, praised the beauty of the new domes, comparing their gilded appearance to the gold-adorned conical hats (üsküf) of Janissary officers standing in disciplined ranks around the sanctuary — an image that captures how the finished mosque must have looked to a sixteenth-century eye: a courtyard ringed by dozens of small gilt domes in orderly rows, replacing what had been, for two centuries, a flat and increasingly decrepit timber roof (al-Haram Mosque, German Wikipedia, citing al-Nahrawali). The recorded cost of the project — 110,000 gold dinars from the sultan’s treasury, covering the building work and associated flood-protection canals, but explicitly not including the cost of timber shipped from Egypt, wooden scaffolding poles, nails, the iron anti-bird spikes, or the gilded copper crescents — indicates a major state investment, comparable to the great imperial mosque complexes Sinan and his contemporaries were simultaneously building in Istanbul, Edirne and elsewhere.

The Attribution Question: Sinan, His Office, or Davud Agha?

Every popular account of the Ottoman rebuilding of Masjid al-Haram states, in some form, that the mosque was renovated by the empire’s chief architect Mimar Sinan (circa 1489/1490–1588), the designer of the Süleymaniye Mosque in Istanbul and the Selimiye Mosque in Edirne, and by most measures the single most consequential architect the Islamic world produced. This attribution is repeated across encyclopedic and popular sources, including the English and French Wikipedia articles on the mosque, which state that Selim II commissioned Sinan directly in 1570–1571 and that Sinan’s replacement of the flat roof with small domes and his insertion of new columns are “acknowledged as the earliest architectural features of the present mosque” and “the oldest surviving parts of the building” (Masjid al-Haram, Wikipedia; Mosquée al-Haram, Wikipédia). This is the standard account, and it is not baseless: Sinan held the office of chief imperial architect from 1538 until his death in 1588, spanning exactly the years of the 1571–1577 project, and the sultan’s decree for “the best and most beautiful” rebuilding of the Haram would, under normal Ottoman administrative practice, have passed through his office.

But the specialist architectural-historical literature is considerably more cautious about Sinan’s personal, hands-on role, and the caution is worth reporting honestly rather than smoothing over. The standard modern academic reference on the architect, Gülru Necipoğlu’s The Age of Sinan: Architectural Culture in the Ottoman Empire (Princeton University Press, 2005), notes that Sinan is “credited with designing buildings as far as Buda [Budapest] and Mecca,” but adds the crucial qualification that he “was probably not present to directly supervise projects far from the capital, so in these cases his designs were most likely executed by his assistants or by local architects” (Classical Ottoman Architecture, Wikipedia, summarising Necipoğlu). Necipoğlu’s book goes further for a slightly later episode that is often confused with the 1571–1577 arcade project: she records that Sinan was personally sent to Makkah by Murad III only in 1584 — seven years after the arcade rebuilding was already finished — specifically to inspect and prepare an estimate for repairing the leaning walls of the Kaaba itself, a separate and much smaller commission from the courtyard-wide dome and colonnade project, and that his repair proposal on that occasion was rejected by the ulema, who judged the intervention unlawful (Necipoğlu, “The Age of Sinan,” excerpted at dokumen.pub). A separate academic conference paper on the later, 1611 Kaaba-gutter restoration under Sultan Ahmed I independently confirms this sequence: it states that Sinan had visited “the sacred house some twenty-five years ago” — that is, around 1584 — under an order from Murad III, to estimate repairs and prepare drawings for a new golden gutter and structural braces, and that on that occasion “the scholars against the renovation won the debate,” delaying any Kaaba structural work until 1611, well after Sinan’s death (Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture, 1999 conference proceedings).

The practical upshot is a genuine and unresolved attribution question, and it should be presented as such rather than adjudicated. One line of evidence — the sultan’s decree passing through the imperial chief architect’s office during Sinan’s tenure, and the consistent popular and encyclopedic attribution — supports treating the 1571–1577 arcade and dome scheme as a Sinan design, in the sense that any major Ottoman state building project of this period would carry his office’s authorship even where he did not personally travel to the site. A second line of evidence — Necipoğlu’s explicit statement that Sinan was “generally not involved” in the earlier 1551–1552 Kaaba work and was “probably not present” to supervise distant projects personally, combined with the specific, independently corroborated 1584 visit for the unrelated and separate Kaaba-wall commission — supports a more cautious reading in which the courtyard arcade project was executed under Sinan’s nominal authority as head of the imperial architectural corps, but built on the ground by Ahmad Beg and the Ottoman provincial building administration, quite possibly with the detailed design work carried out by a subordinate architect. Some later sources name Sinan’s own pupil and eventual successor as chief imperial architect, Davud Agha (died 1598), as a plausible candidate for that on-the-ground design role, on the general grounds that Davud Agha was Sinan’s foreman (kalfa) during the 1570s, worked on Sinan-attributed projects such as the Selimiye Mosque in Edirne and the Eski Valide Mosque, and went on to succeed Sinan as chief imperial architect in 1588 with a reputation, confirmed by Ottoman archival endowment records, for completing designs that were credited on paper to Sinan but executed under his own supervision — as happened, for instance, with the Mehmed Agha Mosque in Istanbul’s Çarşamba district, whose foundation inscription credits Davud Agha even though archival records show the plan itself belonged to Sinan and construction was overseen by Davud Agha while Sinan was away on Hajj (“The Mehmed Agha Mosque,” research article, İSAM; Davud Agha, Wikipedia). No source located for this article states outright and with citation that Davud Agha personally executed the Masjid al-Haram arcade project; the connection here is inferential, built from his documented pattern of completing Sinan-attributed commissions elsewhere and his documented presence in Sinan’s office throughout exactly this decade, and it should be read as a plausible hypothesis about who did the detailed work, not as an established fact. What can be stated with confidence is this: the design authority and the ultimate credit for the 1571–1577 rebuilding of Masjid al-Haram belongs to the imperial office of Mimar Sinan, serving Sultan Selim II and completed under Sultan Murad III; whether Sinan personally set foot in Makkah to design or inspect this specific project, as opposed to sending the design through his office and leaving execution to Ahmad Beg and the provincial architectural staff, is not settled by the sources available, and readers should treat the common claim that “Sinan built the Ottoman colonnades of Mecca” as broadly accurate in institutional terms while remaining aware that his personal, physical presence at this particular project is not independently documented in the way his 1584 Kaaba-wall visit is.

Further Ottoman Work: Murad IV and the Seven Minarets

The 1571–1577 rebuilding was not the last major Ottoman intervention. In 1629 CE, under Sultan Murad IV, the mosque underwent a further renovation: a new stone arcade was added, the marble flooring was retiled, and — critically for the mosque’s later silhouette — three additional minarets were built, bringing the total number of minarets at the Ottoman-era mosque to seven, a number with obvious resonance in Islamic numerology and unmatched by any other mosque in the Muslim world at the time (Masjid al-Haram, Wikipedia). This 1629 campaign followed closely on catastrophic flooding the same year that collapsed three of the Kaaba’s four walls; Murad IV ordered the Kaaba’s complete reconstruction using granite quarried at Makkah on a marble foundation, work that constitutes the last physical reconstruction of the Kaaba’s structure and remains, in its essentials, the basis of the building’s current form (Kaaba, Wikipedia). Murad IV’s renovation of the mosque proper — the seven minarets, the retiled floor, the added arcade — left the building essentially unaltered for nearly three centuries afterward: this Ottoman mosque of the late 1620s, layered onto the Selim II and Murad III rebuilding of the 1570s, was substantially the mosque that stood through the remainder of Ottoman rule, through the Hashemite interlude, and into the early decades of Saudi governance of the Hijaz. A later Ottoman sultan, Murad III’s own successor generation aside, also left a lasting mark inside the mosque: the marble minbar (pulpit) still in liturgical use at Masjid al-Haram today was installed under Sultan Murad III in 1590, a rare case of an Ottoman furnishing — as opposed to a structural element — surviving in continuous use into the present.

Architecture in Detail: Domes, Columns, Arches and Inscriptions

What did the finished Ottoman mosque actually look like as an architectural composition, beyond the bare counts of domes and columns? The design logic was, in essence, a translation of Sinan’s Istanbul vocabulary — the small subsidiary dome as a repeating unit of covered space, familiar from the courtyards and arcades of the great imperial mosque complexes — into the specific constraint of the Haram, where the object of the architecture is not a single dominant central dome (as at the Süleymaniye or the Selimiye) but a continuous ring of covered arcade wrapping around an open sanctuary, the Kaaba, which the architecture explicitly does not attempt to cover or overshadow. Each bay of the arcade was capped by its own small masonry dome, creating the repeating rhythm that al-Nahrawali compared to ranks of Janissary hats; the arcade ran in multiple rows in the sections inherited from the Abbasid three-row plan, with the domes marching around the courtyard’s full perimeter on all four sides.

The columns beneath these domes were, from the outset, a deliberately mixed and historically layered fabric rather than a uniform new construction. The core of white marble columns were reused and augmented Abbasid- and Umayyad-period spolia — a Biennale exhibition catalogue describes surviving columns from this arcade, held today in the King Abdulaziz Center for World Culture (Ithra) in Dhahran, as dating specifically to the reign of the Abbasid caliph al-Mahdi (r. 158–169 AH / 775–785 CE), carved from imported Proconnesian marble — the fine-grained white marble quarried on the island of Proconnesus (modern Marmara Island) in the Sea of Marmara and shipped throughout the late antique and early Islamic Mediterranean — standing between 285 and 344 centimetres tall with diameters of 41 to 46 centimetres (“Seven Columns,” Islamic Arts Biennale, Diriyah Biennale Foundation). In other words: many of the “Ottoman” columns a nineteenth-century pilgrim would have seen were, physically, eight-hundred-year-old Abbasid marble that Sinan’s builders cleaned, re-set, and incorporated into a new sixteenth-century structural and decorative scheme, rather than newly quarried sixteenth-century stone. Ottoman restorers went further still and, as the Shumaisi-stone episode shows, deliberately harvested new local stone specifically because the existing marble supply, while historically precious, was structurally inadequate for the new dome loads — a pragmatic decision that mixed genuinely ancient marble columns with new sixteenth-century load-bearing stone piers, arranged in a repeating sequence of three marble columns to one heavier Shumaisi pier around the arcade.

Inscriptions were an integral part of the decorative programme, not an afterthought. Surviving fragments recorded in the Exhibition of the Two Holy Mosques Architecture include a marble slab bearing the name of Sultan Murad III dated 983 AH (1575 CE), placed within the mosque during the arcade project itself, and an inscription specifically recording the construction of the mosque “starting during the reign of Sultan Selim and ending during the reign of his son Sultan Murad” — a rare case of a building inscription explicitly documenting an attribution debate of its own kind, naming both sultans across whose reigns the work spanned (Exhibition of the Two Holy Mosques Architecture, Madain Project). Ottoman and later commentators frequently noted, and later Saudi-era campaigners against demolition repeated the point with emphasis, that many of the Ottoman-era and Mamluk-era columns and arcade elements bore inscriptions naming the Prophet’s companions and marking specific historically significant locations within the mosque — a practice of inscribing memory directly onto the fabric of the building that made these columns not merely structural or decorative elements but physical markers of sacred history, a point that becomes directly relevant to the controversy over their later removal (Jerome Taylor, “The photos Saudi Arabia doesn’t want seen,” The Independent, via Islamic Pluralism). Gilding was applied both to the domes’ exterior fittings — the Egyptian-made gilded copper crescents recorded by al-Nahrawali — and, according to several summary accounts, to the interior soffits of at least some of the domes themselves, which were decorated internally with calligraphy; a French-language account of the mosque’s history states plainly that Sinan “replaced the roof of the prayer hall with gilded domes, whose interior was decorated with calligraphy, some of which survive today” (Mosquée al-Haram, Wikipédia).

The Seven Minarets in Their Ottoman Form

By the completion of Murad IV’s 1629 renovation, the mosque possessed seven minarets, a configuration that persisted through the remainder of Ottoman rule and into the early Saudi period. This was architecturally significant: seven minarets exceeded the number found at any other mosque in the Islamic world at the time, including the imperial mosques of Istanbul itself, and was widely understood as a deliberate statement of Makkah’s unique status as the qibla of the entire Muslim world — a status that, in Ottoman ceremonial logic, merited an unmatched architectural superlative. The minarets themselves were added across different reigns rather than built as a single set: the Umayyad caliph al-Walid I had added an initial minaret at the end of the eighth century; the Mamluks contributed further minarets and minaret reconstructions through the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, including the rebuilding after the 1369 collapse of the minaret over the Hazwarah Gate and the roughly 1480 minaret over the madrasah of Sultan Qa’itbay; and it was Murad IV’s 1629 campaign that brought the Ottoman-era total to seven by adding three more (Masjid al-Haram, Wikipedia). The seven-minaret skyline is visible in the standard Ottoman visual convention for depicting the mosque: a mid-sixteenth-century Ottoman manuscript illustration from the Futuh al-Haramayn, produced for Suleyman the Magnificent around 1540 and now held in the Topkapı Palace Museum Library in Istanbul, shows an earlier, six-minaret version of this schematic bird’s-eye view, with the Kaaba at the centre of a double colonnade and the minarets pointing inward toward the sanctuary in a flattened, symbolic perspective rather than a literal architectural survey (Christie’s auction catalogue note on an Ottoman depiction of Masjid al-Haram, citing Esin Atil, “The Age of Suleyman the Magnificent”). This image type, repeated with variations across Ottoman tiles, manuscripts and pilgrimage certificates for the following three centuries, is one of the main ways the seven-minaret Ottoman mosque was visually transmitted and remembered even after later rebuilding altered the real building on the ground.

The Demolitions: What Was Removed, When, and On Whose Authority

The Ottoman mosque of 1577, as extended and completed by Murad IV in 1629, remained the physical Grand Mosque of Makkah for roughly three centuries. Its dismantling took place in two broad phases separated by several decades, and it is important to keep these phases distinct, because they involved different scopes of demolition, different official justifications, and different levels of public documentation and criticism.

Phase One: The Saudi Expansions, 1955–1976

The kingdom of Saudi Arabia undertook its first large-scale expansion of Masjid al-Haram beginning on 20 November 1955, a project that required demolishing the mosque’s two outer courtyards along with the houses, buildings and shops that had grown up immediately around the historic mosque over the centuries; approximately 1,700 buildings, apartments and shops were demolished in the surrounding urban fabric, with compensation to owners reported at close to 240 million Saudi riyal, and the mosque’s total area was expanded to 161,327 square metres (al-Haram Mosque, German Wikipedia). A second Saudi expansion followed between 1969 and 1976, during which the two outer courtyards of the old Ottoman-era mosque were themselves removed. These first two phases fell primarily on the mosque’s later accretions and its surrounding urban context — the historic town fabric immediately outside the sanctuary walls — rather than on the core sixteenth-century arcade around the Mataf itself, though they established the pattern and the political will for large-scale demolition that the later phases would extend much further into the historic core.

Phase Two: The Third Saudi Expansion (1988–2005) and the Onset of Direct Pressure on the Ottoman Arcade

A third Saudi expansion, running roughly from 1988 into the early 2000s, required demolition of further surrounding buildings, and it was during the run-up to and early stages of the fourth expansion that direct pressure on the Ottoman-era colonnade around the Mataf itself became a matter of public record and international reporting. In 2011, photographs obtained by the British newspaper The Independent documented workers using drills and mechanical diggers to begin demolishing sections of Ottoman and Abbasid-era fabric on the eastern side of Masjid al-Haram — specifically, according to the report, the columns forming the inner perimeter of the mosque’s arcade at the outer edge of the white marble floor surrounding the Kaaba. The report quoted Dr. Irfan al-Alawi, executive director of the Islamic Heritage Research Foundation, who stated that many of the Ottoman and Abbasid columns were inscribed with the names of the Prophet’s companions and marked specific locations of historical significance, and that “the historical record is being deleted” and “a new Muslim would never have a clue because there’s nothing marking these locations now” (Jerome Taylor, The Independent, via Islamic Pluralism, 2013). The same reporting cited the Washington-based Gulf Institute’s estimate that some 95 percent of Makkah’s millennium-old buildings had been demolished in the preceding two decades — a broader claim about the historic city as a whole, not limited to the mosque, and one that should be read as an advocacy estimate rather than a verified architectural survey, since no comprehensive independent inventory of “millennium-old buildings” in Makkah appears to exist against which such a percentage could be checked.

Phase Three: The King Abdullah Expansion, 2011 Onward, and the Bulk of the Ottoman Colonnade

The largest and most consequential phase for the Ottoman fabric specifically was the expansion launched under King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz, formally announced in August 2011 and known as the King Abdullah Expansion. This project, costing an estimated 80 billion Saudi riyal (approximately 20 billion euros or, in other contemporary reporting, around 21 billion US dollars), was designed to expand the mosque by some 400,000 square metres, raise its worshipper capacity from around 770,000 to over 2.5 million, add a multi-level extension on the mosque’s north side, new stairways and tunnels, a gate named for King Abdullah, and two further minarets, and to expand the Mataf circumambulation area itself (Masjid al-Haram, Wikipedia). It was this project, and specifically its expansion of the Mataf, that required removing the historic arcade running immediately around the courtyard where the Ottoman colonnade stood.

Turkish public and governmental reaction to the demolition of Ottoman-era fabric was immediate and, at the diplomatic level, effective, at least in part. Reporting from 2014 states that following Turkish protests in 2013 and subsequent Turkish-Saudi negotiations — with then-Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan reportedly raising the matter directly with the Saudi king in one of their meetings — King Abdullah ordered that the historic Ottoman portico be preserved, directing that only the sections of arcade that had been rebuilt in recent decades, rather than genuine Ottoman-era fabric, should be demolished (Council of British Hajjis, citing Turkish daily Star; Sinem Cengiz, New Age Islam, 2014). To determine which sections were genuinely Ottoman and which were later, less historically significant reconstructions, a Turkish restoration company, the Gürsoy Group, was engaged to inspect the entire arcade section by section. Their survey found that 27 sections of the historic-looking portico had in fact already been rebuilt in recent times, following earlier damage sustained during construction work on the hills of Safa and Marwa, and it was reportedly these already-modern sections, rather than surviving Ottoman fabric, that had triggered the wave of public alarm when demolition was observed there in 2013 (Council of British Hajjis).

This royal order for preservation did not, in the end, mean that the genuine Ottoman-era colonnade was simply left standing in its original position. Instead, the Gürsoy Group carried out a large-scale operation of controlled dismantling, cataloguing, and relocation. According to detailed 2014 reporting from the Saudi Gazette, once the Turkish inspection team had determined which sections of the arcade dated genuinely to the Ottoman period, those sections were detached and packed up rather than demolished outright: workers carefully collected each stone and architectural element, numbered it, and packed it into hundreds of wooden crates for transport. The material — reported as consisting of the roughly 2,754 historic pieces already described above, including some elements the Turkish restoration team identified as displaying characteristics of pre-Islamic Greek architecture, alongside distinctly Umayyad, Abbasid and (the majority) Ottoman-period pieces — was shipped to a large, fenced and access-controlled compound at Muzdalifah, some 3.6 kilometres west of Jabal al-Rahmah at Arafat, where hundreds of architects and craftsmen were engaged in cleaning, cataloguing and beginning the restoration of individual pieces (Saudi Gazette, 2014). Turkish journalist Sinem Cengiz, visiting this compound near Mount Arafat in person in 2014, reported that Saudi officials she spoke with there indicated the intention was ultimately to re-erect the restored porticoes “a few meters away from their original position” once the wider Mataf expansion was complete, integrated into a courtyard that would then be roughly double its earlier size (Sinem Cengiz, New Age Islam, 2014).

The practical, structural outcome of this relocation-and-rebuilding approach carries an important caveat that conservation-minded sources have been explicit about: the original Ottoman-era domes, which had been built as brick-and-plaster vaulted structures rather than dressed stone, could not survive the process of dismantling and reassembly in usable, original condition, and were effectively lost even where the columns beneath them were preserved and later re-erected (al-Haram Mosque, German Wikipedia). This is a critical distinction for the practical section below: even where an Ottoman-era column stands today in a rebuilt arcade, the dome above it in most cases is a modern replacement built in the Ottoman visual idiom, not the surviving sixteenth-century structure.

Further demolition of remaining historic fabric continued in subsequent construction seasons. A November 2014 report described the demolition, “in the first week of November” that year, of seventeenth-century Ottoman-era porticoes and Mamluk-period columns reported as dating back some 660 years, including columns that marked the traditional location of the house of Umm Hani, associated in popular tradition with the beginning of the Prophet’s ﷺ Night Journey (“Meccahattan,” ICIT Digital Library, 2015). Time magazine reported in November 2014 that “any vestiges of the portico and columns” on one section of the site “were reduced to rubble” as part of the ongoing $21 billion expansion project (Time, “Saudi Arabia Bulldozes Over Its Heritage,” 2014). A temporary carbon-fibre pedestrian bridge was installed in the mosque’s courtyard between 2014 and 2016 to maintain some circumambulation capacity while the reconstruction of the Mataf area proceeded (al-Haram Mosque, German Wikipedia).

The Criticism, Named: Who Objected and What They Said

The removal of the Ottoman colonnade drew sustained and specific criticism from a consistent set of named individuals and institutions over roughly a decade, and their objections deserve to be reported in their own terms rather than summarised into a generic “controversy.”

Dr. Irfan al-Alawi, executive director of the Islamic Heritage Research Foundation (also reported under the affiliated name the Gulf Institute in some coverage), was the most consistently quoted critic across nearly every major English-language report on the demolitions between roughly 2012 and 2016. His central arguments, repeated across interviews with The Independent, the BBC, Middle East Eye and other outlets, were threefold: first, that the removed columns and porticoes were not merely old but functioned as physical markers of specific historical and prophetic events and locations within the mosque, so that their removal erased navigable historical memory rather than simply removing decorative old stonework; second, that expansion and preservation were not mutually exclusive, and that alternative approaches — moving new construction further from the historic core, for instance into surrounding desert land — could have accommodated growing pilgrim numbers without demolishing the oldest fabric; and third, that the pace and manner of destruction reflected, in his view, an underlying current within Saudi religious policy that regarded historically significant but non-scripturally-mandated sites and structures as a potential source of shirk (associating created things with divine status), making their removal not merely a matter of civil engineering but, in his reading, an act of doctrinal preference (The Independent, via Islamic Pluralism; Middle East Eye, 2015). Al-Alawi’s language in some interviews was pointed: he described the site of dismantled Ottoman porticoes as looking “like a salvage yard” and used the phrase “cultural vandalism” in several venues, including in comments carried by Middle East Eye (Middle East Eye, 2015). The Washington-based advocacy body he was affiliated with in various reports, described variously as the Gulf Institute and the Institute for Gulf Affairs, produced the widely repeated (though not independently verified in the sources located for this article) estimate that some 95 percent of Makkah’s millennium-old structures had been demolished across roughly two decades of expansion.

A second, independent Meccan critic frequently cited on the broader question of how the city’s expansion has been managed, though focused more on urban planning and the visual impact of high-rise development than on the Ottoman colonnade specifically, is Sami Angawi, a Makkah-born architect and founder of the Hajj Research Centre. Angawi has been quoted stating “What we want is for Makkah to develop, not to be transformed,” and has said he has avoided returning to his own native city since around 2009 because of his discomfort with the manner of its transformation, adding: “I love Makkah and I cannot bear to see this City of the Prophet being destroyed” (Republika, 2014, reporting Angawi’s remarks). Angawi has separately criticised the Makkah Royal Clock Tower complex — built on the site of the demolished eighteenth-century Ottoman-era Ajyad Fortress — stating that the tower “does not respect the dignity, sanctity and culture of the Kaaba” and objecting specifically to how the expansion was carried out rather than to the principle of expansion itself: “My objection is not about expansion, or increasing capacity for pilgrims or developing Makkah. My objection is about how it is done” (Daily Sabah, 2018). This formulation — accepting the necessity of expansion while objecting to method — recurs across several of the named critics and is worth noting precisely because it complicates any reading of the controversy as simply “preservation versus progress.”

International press coverage amplified these individual critics into broader institutional commentary. The Art Newspaper, a specialist publication of art-world record, reported in 2015 that the ongoing $20 billion expansion plan begun in 2011 “will mark the definitive disappearance of what remains of Mecca’s Ottoman historic centre and its Islamic sites” (The Art Newspaper, 2015). Time magazine’s coverage similarly framed the demolitions within a wider pattern of loss affecting mosques, Ottoman-era mansions, ancient wells and stone bridges across the wider Hijaz region, not solely within the Grand Mosque itself (Time, 2014).

The Official Rationale and Its Defenders

Saudi officials and their defenders have offered a rationale that rests principally on two grounds, and both deserve to be stated with the same specificity as the criticism.

The first is capacity and safety in the face of catastrophically dangerous overcrowding. This is not an abstract concern. The Hajj has repeatedly produced some of the deadliest crowd-crush disasters in modern history at exactly the choke points the expansions were designed to widen. On 3 July 1990, a stampede in a pedestrian tunnel near Mina killed 1,426 pilgrims, at that time the single deadliest disaster in the pilgrimage’s modern history (1990 Mecca tunnel tragedy, Wikipedia). Further fatal crowd crushes followed in 1994, 1998, 2001, 2003, 2004 and 2006, the last of these killing over 360 pilgrims (“Hajj Stampede in Mina, 2015: Need for Intervention,” Archives of Trauma Research). On 11 September 2015, ten days before that year’s Hajj, a construction crane collapsed inside Masjid al-Haram itself, killing at least 107 to 111 people and injuring several hundred more, an incident directly connected to the ongoing King Abdullah Expansion construction work (BBC News, 2015; Incidents during the Hajj, Wikipedia). Then, on 24 September 2015, a catastrophic crowd crush at Mina killed what Saudi authorities officially reported as 769 pilgrims, though independent tallies by the Associated Press and other news organisations, compiled from the individual reports of dozens of countries whose citizens took part in that year’s Hajj, placed the true death toll at somewhere between roughly 2,000 and 2,430, making it by most independent estimates the deadliest single disaster in the history of the pilgrimage, exceeding even the 1990 tunnel tragedy (2015 Mina crowd crush, Wikipedia; BBC News, 2015). The precise death toll of the 2015 Mina crush remains disputed between the Saudi government’s official figure and independent international tallies, and this article does not attempt to adjudicate between them; both figures are reported here as they stand in the public record. What is not disputed is that the pilgrimage has a documented, repeated history of mass-fatality crowd disasters, overwhelmingly connected to bottlenecks in pedestrian flow around exactly the areas — the Mataf, the approaches to the Jamarat, the tunnels and bridges connecting the holy sites — that successive Saudi expansions have targeted for widening. Saudi officials, including the Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia, Sheikh Abdul Aziz bin Abdullah Al ash-Sheikh, have defended the demolition of historic structures on these grounds; reporting from 2014 recorded the Grand Mufti’s defence of the destruction of historic sites in this context, framing continued construction as necessary and, in his assessment, “inevitable” given the scale of the crowds the mosque must now accommodate (Islamic Pluralism, citing Grand Mufti Al ash-Sheikh, 2014).

The second strand of the official position is a broader claim of stewardship and investment, articulated at the highest level of the Saudi state. Responding directly to earlier heritage-destruction reporting in 2006, Prince Turki al-Faisal wrote that Saudi Arabia was spending more than $19 billion preserving and maintaining the two holy sites, stating: “[We are aware] how important the preservation of this heritage is, not just to us but to the millions of Muslims from around the world who visit the two holy mosques every year. It is hardly something we are going to allow to be destroyed” (The Independent, 2006). The scale of subsequent official investment specifically in cataloguing, restoring and re-housing the Ottoman-era colonnade — the numbered, crated, individually restored pieces at the Muzdalifah compound, the ongoing work of the Gürsoy Group, and the museum-quality display of salvaged Ottoman and Abbasid columns at the King Abdulaziz Center for World Culture — is itself part of this stewardship case: it demonstrates that Saudi authorities did not treat the historic arcade as valueless material to be discarded, but as a fabric requiring documentation, numbering, and, in a limited but real number of cases, eventual re-display, even where the underlying decision to remove it from its original position in the Mataf itself is precisely what critics have objected to. Both positions — the safety and capacity case, backed by a documented and severe history of mass-fatality crowd disasters, and the critics’ case that historic memory and physical continuity have been sacrificed faster and more completely than necessary — rest on verifiable facts, and this guide presents them side by side rather than resolving them.

Architecture: What Was Lost, Phase by Phase

Drawing the threads of the preceding sections together, the following is the clearest available summary of what was removed from the Ottoman-era fabric of Masjid al-Haram, organised by phase, based on the sources cited above.

• In the first and second Saudi expansions (1955–1976), the mosque’s outer courtyards — later Ottoman-period additions and surrounding urban fabric rather than the innermost sixteenth-century arcade around the Mataf — were removed, along with roughly 1,700 surrounding buildings in the historic town.
• In the years leading up to and during the third Saudi expansion (from the late 1980s through the early 2010s), sections of the Ottoman and Abbasid-era arcade closest to the Mataf itself began to be documented as targeted for demolition, drawing the first sustained international press attention from 2011 onward.
• In the King Abdullah Expansion (2011 onward), the bulk of the remaining historic colonnade around the Mataf was dismantled. Following the 2013 Turkish diplomatic intervention, genuinely Ottoman-era sections — identified through a dedicated inspection process that found 27 sections were, in fact, already modern reconstructions rather than original fabric — were catalogued, numbered, and relocated to a storage and restoration compound at Muzdalifah, rather than destroyed outright, though the original brick-and-plaster domes above these columns could not be preserved through this process and were lost.
• Additional demolition of remaining historic porticoes, including sections associated in popular tradition with the house of Umm Hani and the beginning of the Prophet’s ﷺ Night Journey, continued into at least November 2014.

What this sequence shows is not a single demolition event but a decades-long, multi-phase process, with the treatment of the historic fabric becoming markedly more careful — in the specific sense of cataloguing and attempted preservation of dismantled material, if not preservation in situ — after the 2013 Turkish protests than it had been before them.

What Survives Today: The Practical Heart of This Guide

This is the distinction that matters most for anyone visiting Masjid al-Haram in 2026 hoping to see genuine Ottoman work, and it needs to be made without softening.

Ottoman Fabric Relocated and Re-Erected Within the Mosque

According to the Madain Project’s architectural summary of the King Abdullah Expansion, some of the original Ottoman-era porticoes were preserved and rebuilt, and today run along the edges of the expanded Mataf area on three of its sides, with the exception of the side facing the Mas’a (the passage between Safa and Marwah) (“King Abdullah Expansion of Masjid al-Haram,” Madain Project). This means that a visitor walking the outer perimeter of the modern Mataf, on the sides away from the Mas’a, may be looking at sections of colonnade incorporating genuine sixteenth-century Ottoman columns — restored, cleaned, and re-erected by the Gürsoy Group’s restoration programme following its removal, cataloguing and storage at Muzdalifah. It is essential to understand what this does and does not mean: the columns themselves may be authentic Ottoman or older spolia material, carefully conserved and returned to a position near, though not necessarily identical to, their original location; but the domes above them, given that the original Ottoman brick-and-plaster domes could not survive the dismantling and relocation process, are in most cases modern reconstructions built in the historic idiom rather than the surviving sixteenth-century vaulting. A visitor cannot, from ground level, easily distinguish a re-erected genuine Ottoman column from a modern replica column built to match it stylistically; both now stand within the same restored arcade sections. This is the single most important practical caveat in this entire guide.

Furnishings and Fixtures Still in Use

Separate from the structural colonnade, at least one Ottoman-era furnishing remains in continuous liturgical use inside the mosque: the marble minbar (pulpit) installed under Sultan Murad III in 1590, which multiple sources describe as still in use today (“Four centuries as servants of the sanctuary,” summarising Wikipedia and other sources). This is a genuinely rare case of an original, functioning Ottoman object still serving its original purpose inside the mosque, rather than a preserved but retired architectural fragment.

Ottoman and Earlier Material in the Exhibition of the Two Holy Mosques Architecture

The single most accessible place for a visitor to see genuine, verified Ottoman-period and pre-Ottoman material from Masjid al-Haram at close range, outside the mosque itself, is the Exhibition of the Two Holy Mosques Architecture (also known informally as the Makkah Museum), located in the Umm al-Joud area of Makkah near the Kiswa Factory, roughly a ten-to-fifteen-minute drive from the Grand Mosque. This guide has already covered the exhibition in detail elsewhere; in the specific context of the Ottoman colonnade, its holdings include an inscription recording the construction of the Grand Mosque “starting during the reign of Sultan Selim and ending during the reign of his son Sultan Murad,” a marble slab bearing the name of Sultan Murad III dated 983 AH (1575 CE), a marble slab recording the deeds of the later Ottoman Sultan Mehmed IV, and — from the pre-Ottoman layers this article has traced — inscriptions from the Mamluk sultans Faraj ibn Barquq (recording the 1402 fire and its repair) and Jaqmaq (852 AH / 1448 CE), along with an inscribed marble column dating the construction of one of the Grand Mosque’s minarets to 772 AH (1370 CE) under the Mamluk sultan Sha’ban, publicised by the Saudi Press Agency as recently as May 2026 as a highlighted item in the exhibition’s collection (Asharq Al-Awsat, May 2026, citing SPA). The exhibition also displays door panels from an Ottoman-era pulpit made at the order of Sultan Murad III for the Prophet’s Mosque in Madinah, and a wooden column from inside the Kaaba dating to the reconstruction under Abdullah ibn al-Zubayr around 65 AH (685 CE) — older than the Ottoman period, but part of the same continuous museum narrative of the two mosques’ architectural history (Exhibition of the Two Holy Mosques Architecture, Madain Project). The exhibition is supervised by the General Authority for the Care of the Affairs of the Grand Mosque and the Prophet’s Mosque and, as of recent Saudi state media reporting, spans some 1,200 square metres across seven themed halls (Public Investment Fund-linked government portal, pep.gov.sa, 2026; Saudipedia).

Ottoman Material Held at the King Abdulaziz Center for World Culture (Ithra)

A separate and more recently publicised body of material connects the removed Ottoman-era arcade to a major cultural institution outside Makkah entirely. The Islamic Arts Biennale, staged under the Diriyah Biennale Foundation, has exhibited a set of seven columns — described in the exhibition’s own material as “Abbasid-era columns” that “once formed part of the porticoes encircling the mataf” — explicitly noting that these particular columns were removed “during the expansion of the Sacred Mosque in AH 1432/2011 CE,” when “several of the Ottoman-era porticoes were altered.” The columns are dated to the reign of the Abbasid caliph al-Mahdi (r. 158–169 AH / 775–785 CE), carved from Proconnesian marble, standing between 285 and 344 centimetres tall, and are held under the custodianship of Saudi Arabia’s Ministry of Finance (“Seven Columns,” Islamic Arts Biennale). This is a valuable and precise data point: it confirms, in an official cultural-institution’s own exhibition label, both the date of the relevant expansion (1432 AH / 2011 CE, matching the King Abdullah Expansion discussed above) and the fact that the material removed at that time included columns of genuinely Abbasid, not only Ottoman, date — underscoring the point made throughout this article that “the Ottoman colonnade” was, in physical fact, a multi-period assembly in which centuries-older marble had been continuously reused, re-set and incorporated into each successive rebuilding.

What Is Modern Replication, Stated Plainly

The honest practical summary, and the single most important sentence in this guide, is this: the vast majority of what a visitor to Masjid al-Haram sees today, including the great majority of the mosque’s arcades, domes, gates and minarets, is twentieth- and twenty-first-century Saudi-era construction, built to a scale and in a general architectural language influenced by, but not physically continuous with, the Ottoman mosque of 1577 and 1629. The only architecture within the mosque that can be confidently identified as physically incorporating pre-twentieth-century fabric is: the small number of restored, re-erected arcade sections along three sides of the expanded Mataf, where genuine Ottoman-era and older spolia columns were catalogued, conserved and reinstated following the Gürsoy Group restoration process, standing beneath modern reconstructed domes; and the Murad III minbar, still in liturgical use. Everything else that looks “Ottoman” in style within the current mosque — and a great deal of the modern construction does deliberately echo Ottoman and earlier decorative vocabulary in its marble cladding, arch profiles and dome silhouettes — is a modern architectural homage rather than surviving fabric. A visitor who wants to see the largest and most reliably documented body of genuine Ottoman and pre-Ottoman material from the mosque should plan to visit the Exhibition of the Two Holy Mosques Architecture in Umm al-Joud, not expect to find it inside the mosque itself.

Salvaged Material: Where the Removed Pieces Went

The fate of the physically removed Ottoman colonnade material falls into three broad, documented categories, and readers researching a specific column, inscription or architectural fragment should understand that these categories are not always mutually exclusive over time — material has moved between storage, restoration and display across more than a decade.

The first category is material relocated to the restoration compound at Muzdalifah, some 3.6 kilometres west of Jabal al-Rahmah at Arafat, where the Turkish firm Gürsoy Group has carried out cataloguing and physical restoration of the roughly 2,754 individual pieces removed from the arcade — the 496 marble columns, 881 arches, 152 domes (in fragment form, since the original vaulting could not survive relocation intact) and 993 balustrade sections recorded in 2014 Saudi press coverage. Access to this compound is tightly restricted; a 2014 report noted that entry required prior permission and an entry card, and that only a limited number of licensed vehicles were being admitted (Saudi Gazette, 2014). This compound functions as a working conservation yard rather than a public visitor destination, and this guide is not aware of any provision, as of July 2026, for members of the public to request or arrange a visit.

The second category is material returned to active display or reuse within the mosque itself, principally the restored arcade sections now standing on three sides of the expanded Mataf, discussed in the preceding section.

The third category is material formally accessioned into museum collections for permanent public display, most significantly the Exhibition of the Two Holy Mosques Architecture in Makkah, which this guide’s companion article covers in full, and the King Abdulaziz Center for World Culture (Ithra) in Dhahran, whose seven Abbasid-era columns from the demolished 2011-era porticoes have been exhibited as part of the Islamic Arts Biennale programme under the custodianship of Saudi Arabia’s Ministry of Finance. This last point is worth underlining for readers with a general interest in Islamic heritage management: the fact that architectural fragments removed from a still-functioning religious site were subsequently accessioned into a national cultural institution and exhibited publicly, with full attribution to their original context and removal date, represents one recognised model of heritage stewardship following demolition, distinct from either total loss or in-situ preservation, and readers can weigh for themselves whether it adequately answers the concerns raised by critics such as Dr. al-Alawi.

The Photographic and Drawn Record: How We Know What Stood

Because so much of the Ottoman-era mosque no longer stands in its original position and form, the surviving visual and documentary record carries unusual weight, and it is worth naming its principal components precisely.

Ottoman Manuscript and Tile Depictions, Sixteenth Century Onward

The earliest and most stylised visual record is Ottoman manuscript painting. The Futuh al-Haramayn (“Conquests of the Two Sanctuaries”), a manuscript produced for Suleyman the Magnificent around 1540 and preserved today in the Topkapı Palace Museum Library in Istanbul (catalogued as R.917 or R.9617, depending on the specific folio referenced), contains what became the standard Ottoman schematic depiction of Masjid al-Haram: a flattened bird’s-eye view with the Kaaba at the centre of a rectangular courtyard, surrounded by a double colonnade whose inner arcade forms a keyhole-like shape, and minarets — six in this particular pre-Murad IV version — pointing inward toward the sanctuary (Wikimedia Commons, citing Topkapı Sarayı Müzesi R. 917, f. 14a; Christie’s, citing Esin Atil, “The Age of Suleyman the Magnificent,” Washington, 1988). This image type was reproduced and adapted across Ottoman manuscripts, ceramic tiles and pilgrimage certificates for the following three centuries, and a scholarly paper specifically devoted to “Depictions of the Haramayn on Ottoman Tiles” traces how, from the sixteenth century onward, images of Masjid al-Haram and Masjid al-Nabawi proliferated across Ottoman visual culture in this genre (“Depictions of the Haramayn on Ottoman Tiles: Content and Context,” Academia.edu). Because the number of minarets depicted changes across versions of this image — six before 1629, seven afterward — art historians use minaret count as a rough dating tool for undated examples of this genre, as Christie’s own auction cataloguing notes explicitly demonstrates.

Ottoman Architectural Drawings in the Topkapı Archives

Beyond manuscript illustration, the Topkapı Palace Museum Archives in Istanbul hold the Ottoman Empire’s surviving corpus of formal architectural drawings from precisely this period, including ground plans and occasional elevation drawings associated with the imperial architectural office under Sinan’s tenure and shortly after. The standard published study of this material, The Topkapi Scroll: Geometry and Ornament in Islamic Architecture (Getty Publications, prepared under Gülru Necipoğlu), documents the broader tradition of Ottoman architectural drafting from which any technical drawings connected to the Haram project would have emerged, even though this article did not locate a specific, published, individually catalogued sixteenth-century ground plan of the Masjid al-Haram arcade project itself within the sources available; readers with direct archival access to the Topkapı Sarayı Müzesi Arşivi collections in Istanbul, or to the Prime Ministry Ottoman Archives, may be able to identify more specific documents than could be verified for this guide (“The Topkapi Scroll,” Getty Publications).

The First Photographs: Muhammad Sadiq Bey, 1880–1881

The mosque was not photographed at all until three centuries after Sinan’s arcade was completed. The first person to photograph Masjid al-Haram was Muhammad Sadiq Bey (1832–1902), an Ottoman-Egyptian army engineer, surveyor and long-serving treasurer of the Egyptian Hajj caravan, who made an earlier, unsuccessful attempt to photograph Madinah in 1861 — no images from that expedition survive — before returning in 1880–1881 as part of an Ottoman military survey committee and successfully photographing the interior and exterior of Masjid al-Haram, the Kaaba, and the pilgrim encampments at Mina and Arafat, becoming the first person in history to photograph what is now Saudi Arabia (Muhammad Sadiq (photographer), Wikipedia). Sadiq Bey exhibited a set of twelve of these photographs, including four panoramas, at the Third International Conference of Geographers in Venice in 1881, winning a gold medal, and subsequently published them as Collection de Vues Photographiques de La Mecque et de Médine (Muhammad Sadiq (photographer), Wikipedia). Roughly twenty of his surviving images depict Makkah and its environs, offering the earliest photographic record of the Ottoman mosque’s colonnade, domes and minarets as they stood roughly three centuries after Selim II’s rebuilding, prior to any of the twentieth-century Saudi-era demolitions discussed above. Original prints and related material from Sadiq Bey’s expeditions are held today in institutions including the Qatar Digital Library, the Khalili Collections, and university and national library holdings in Europe and the United States (Qatar Digital Library; Wikimedia Commons, citing the Khalili Collections).

Snouck Hurgronje, Abd al-Ghaffar and the Leiden Collection, 1884–1889

A second major body of nineteenth-century photographic documentation came from the Dutch orientalist Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje (1857–1936), who lived in Makkah from August 1884 to August 1885 and carried a large-format camera weighing around 40 kilograms, using it to photograph the Kaaba, the mosque area and various parts of the city, alongside making what is considered the first known sound recording of Qur’an recitation in history (Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje, Wikipedia). Snouck Hurgronje was ultimately unable to photograph the Hajj itself, having been forced to leave Makkah after unfounded accusations that he had attempted to steal a historical artefact; his photographic equipment, however, remained behind and was subsequently used by a Meccan physician and naturalist, al-Sayyid Abd al-Ghaffar, whom Snouck Hurgronje had trained in the use of the camera, and who is now recognised as the first native Meccan photographer of his own city. Abd al-Ghaffar’s images of the 1888 Hajj, together with Snouck Hurgronje’s own 1884–1885 photographs, were published in two related but distinct works: the two-volume Mekka with its accompanying Bilder-Atlas zu Mekka (The Hague, Martinus Nijhoff, 1888–1889), and the separately issued portfolio Bilder aus Mekka (Leiden, E. J. Brill, 1889), the latter containing twenty collotype prints (“Bilder aus Mekka,” Discover Islamic Art; Sotheby’s, “Photographing Mecca”). The original glass-plate negatives and prints from this collection are held at Leiden University Library in the Netherlands, and have been the subject of a dedicated modern exhibition, “Mecca: A Dangerous Adventure,” which re-photographed and reprinted the original plates as platinum prints for display at the Empty Quarter Gallery in Dubai (Islamic Arts Magazine, 2010). A 2021 peer-reviewed study in the academic journal Muqarnas, published by Brill, situates this entire body of nineteenth-century photography within a wider Ottoman documentary effort, noting that at least one other photographer from the Ottoman Erkân-ı Harbiyye (General Military Staff) committee was active in the Haramayn alongside Sadiq Bey, and that Ottoman surveyors produced maps and plans of Makkah, Madinah, Jeddah, Yanbu and Ta’if, as well as specific plans of the Masjid al-Haram courtyard, dated to 1883–1884 (“Late Ottoman Mobilities and the Fatih Mosque Painting,” Muqarnas, Brill, 2021). Later Ottoman photographic documentation was gathered under the patronage of Sultan Abdülhamid II, whose personal albums, together with the collection of Fahreddin Pasha (Türkkan), the last Ottoman commander of Madinah, were published in a large-format scholarly compilation by the Research Centre for Islamic History, Art and Culture (IRCICA) in Istanbul in 2013, titled Haremeyn: Makka al-Mukarrama and al-Madina al-Munawwara in Photographs from the Ottoman Period (IRCICA).

Later Nineteenth-Century Drawn Surveys

Beyond photography, at least one substantial body of nineteenth-century architectural drawing of the mosque survives in Western institutional collections: a set of drawings by the French architect and Islamic art scholar César Daly, including plans and a bird’s-eye view of Masjid al-Haram, held today in the archive of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (“Al-Masjid al-Haram,” MIT Dome digital repository). Together, the Ottoman manuscript tradition, the Topkapı architectural-drawing corpus, Sadiq Bey’s 1880–1881 photographs, the Snouck Hurgronje-Abd al-Ghaffar photographs of 1884–1889, the later Abdülhamid II-era albums compiled by IRCICA, and nineteenth-century Western architectural surveys such as Daly’s constitute the primary visual evidence base against which the written descriptions of the Ottoman mosque given by al-Nahrawali and later chroniclers can be checked, and against which the honesty of any modern claim to have “restored” or “replicated” the Ottoman colonnade can, in principle, be tested.

The Prophet ﷺ and This Place: An Honest Accounting

This section requires a plain statement before anything else: the Ottoman colonnade discussed throughout this article did not exist in the Prophet’s ﷺ lifetime. It was built by Sultan Selim II and completed under Sultan Murad III in 984 AH (1576–1577 CE), roughly nine and a half centuries after the Prophet’s ﷺ death in 11 AH (632 CE). No authentic hadith records the Prophet ﷺ interacting with, praying beneath, or commenting on any of the domes, columns or arcades described in this guide, because none of that fabric existed yet. Any account that places the Prophet ﷺ inside “the Ottoman arcade” or beneath “Sinan’s dome” is, by simple chronology, describing something that could not have happened, and this guide will not manufacture such a connection to make the architectural history feel more devotional than it honestly is.

What can be said, and what matters far more than the later masonry, is that the Prophet ﷺ prayed, taught, wept, and was tested on the same ground that the Ottoman colonnade would eventually enclose. The site itself — the sanctuary around the Kaaba, the space where the Ottoman arcade would later stand — carries the Prophet’s ﷺ presence even where the specific stones do not. This guide’s companion article on the Kaaba covers, in full, the events of his life tied directly to the sanctuary: his boyhood visits with his grandfather Abd al-Muttalib, the years of persecution in Makkah during which he prayed near the Kaaba while enduring abuse from the Quraysh, the Night Journey (al-Isra) that classical sources place as beginning from within or near the sanctuary at Makkah, the conquest of Makkah in 8 AH (630 CE) when he entered the mosque and ordered the destruction of the idols surrounding the Kaaba, and his Farewell Pilgrimage of 10 AH (632 CE), the last time he ﷺ circumambulated the Kaaba and prayed within the sanctuary before his death. Readers seeking the full, dedicated treatment of these events should turn to that article rather than this one, which is deliberately scoped to the sixteenth-century-and-later building history of the colonnade.

One specific claim recurs in popular and journalistic accounts of the 2011–2014 demolitions and deserves direct treatment here, precisely because it touches on the Prophet’s ﷺ biography. Reporting on the destruction of Ottoman- and Mamluk-era porticoes in November 2014 stated that among the material removed were columns marking the traditional location of the house of Umm Hani bint Abi Talib, the Prophet’s ﷺ cousin, a location that popular tradition associates with the start of the Night Journey (“Meccahattan,” ICIT Digital Library, 2015). This should be reported precisely as what it is: a location identified in popular tradition and repeated by a named critic in press coverage of the demolitions, not a site whose identification this guide has been able to verify against the classical topographical authorities for Makkah, principally al-Azraqi’s Akhbar Makkah and Taqi al-Din al-Fasi’s later topographical writing. Classical accounts of the Night Journey’s starting point differ — some placing it at the house of Umm Hani near the Kaaba, others at the Kaaba itself, in keeping with the well-known hadith describing the Prophet ﷺ as having been between sleep and wakefulness “in the sacred precinct” (Sahih al-Bukhari and Sahih Muslim both preserve versions of the Mi’raj narrative with variation in the precise starting detail). This guide states the claim, names its source, and leaves its historical certainty exactly where the evidence leaves it: plausible, popularly held, and not independently verifiable against a specific inscribed column whose loss can now no longer be checked against the physical object itself.

Qur’anic Connections

The Qur’an speaks extensively about Masjid al-Haram as a sanctuary — its sanctity, its status as the direction of prayer, its role as the first house established for humanity — and this guide’s companion article on the Kaaba addresses that material in full, since those verses concern the sanctuary’s spiritual and legal status rather than any particular phase of its physical construction. This article is scoped specifically to the Ottoman-era rebuilding of the colonnade and roof, a sixteenth-century architectural event, and honesty requires stating plainly that the Qur’an, revealed in the seventh century CE, does not and could not address a building campaign that took place nine centuries after its revelation was completed. There is no verse about domes, no verse about Sultan Selim II, no verse that can honestly be read as a prophecy or endorsement of any specific architectural phase of the mosque’s history.

What is legitimately connected, and worth setting out briefly before pointing the reader onward, is the Qur’anic basis for the sanctuary’s status as something worth building, rebuilding and protecting across fourteen centuries — the underlying reason any of this architectural history matters religiously at all. Allah commands the believers, following the change of the qibla in the second year after the Hijra:

﴿قَدْ نَرَىٰ تَقَلُّبَ وَجْهِكَ فِي السَّمَاءِ فَلَنُوَلِّيَنَّكَ قِبْلَةً تَرْضَاهَا فَوَلِّ وَجْهَكَ شَطْرَ الْمَسْجِدِ الْحَرَامِ وَحَيْثُ مَا كُنتُمْ فَوَلُّوا وُجُوهَكُمْ شَطْرَهُ﴾

“Indeed, We see you [O Prophet] turning your face towards heaven. Now We will make you turn towards a direction [of prayer] that will please you. So turn your face towards the Sacred Mosque [in Makkah] — wherever you are, turn your faces towards it” (Surah al-Baqarah 2:144). Classical tafsir places the asbab al-nuzul of this verse in Madinah, where the Prophet ﷺ had long wished for the qibla to be redirected from Jerusalem toward Makkah; commentators including al-Tabari and Ibn Kathir record that the change came while the Prophet ﷺ was leading prayer, and that he physically turned during the prayer itself to face the new direction, with the congregation turning with him. The modern lesson drawn from this verse, and directly relevant to a guide about a building’s repeated physical rebuilding, is that the sanctity of Masjid al-Haram in Islamic law and devotion attaches to the site and its function as qibla, not to any particular century’s masonry. Every dynasty discussed in this article — Umayyad, Abbasid, Mamluk, Ottoman, Saudi — rebuilt the physical structure while the object of the verse, the direction itself, has remained fixed and unaffected by any of that construction history.

A second relevant verse addresses the sanctuary’s foundational status:

﴿إِنَّ أَوَّلَ بَيْتٍ وُضِعَ لِلنَّاسِ لَلَّذِي بِبَكَّةَ مُبَارَكًا وَهُدًى لِّلْعَالَمِينَ﴾

“Surely the first House [of worship] established for humanity is the one at Bakkah — a blessed sanctuary and a guide for [all] people” (Surah Al-Imran 3:96). Classical tafsir on this verse, including in al-Tabari and later in Ibn Kathir, generally reads “the first house” as referring to the sanctuary’s foundational role in monotheistic worship history, traced by the Qur’anic account to Ibrahim (Abraham) and Isma’il (Ishmael), rather than as a literal claim about the first physical structure of any specific building material or architectural period. Applied to this article’s subject, the modern lesson is a useful corrective to any reader who might otherwise treat the Ottoman colonnade, or any single century’s masonry, as somehow foundational to the site’s sanctity: the verse locates the sanctuary’s “firstness” many centuries before the Umayyads, the Abbasids or the Ottomans ever touched a single stone, which is precisely the historical point this guide has tried to make throughout — that the Ottoman rebuilding was one more layer on an already ancient sanctuary, not an origin point.

Beyond these two verses, this guide did not locate any Qur’anic passage that speaks directly and specifically to the physical expansion, rebuilding, or architectural fabric of the mosque in a way that bears on the Ottoman-era or Saudi-era construction discussed in this article. Readers seeking the fuller range of Qur’anic material connected to the Kaaba and the sanctuary generally — including verses on the Hajj, the sanctuary’s inviolability, and the story of Ibrahim and Isma’il building the Kaaba — should consult this guide’s dedicated Kaaba article, where that material is treated in full and is more directly relevant than it would be here.

Hadith References

As with the Qur’anic material above, the great majority of hadith concerning Masjid al-Haram address the sanctuary generally — its sanctity, the reward of prayer within it, the prohibitions attached to it — rather than any specific century’s building campaign, and this guide’s companion Kaaba article is the fuller reference for that material. The following hadith are the ones most directly relevant to a reader trying to understand why generation after generation of Muslim rulers, including the Ottoman sultans discussed throughout this article, invested so heavily in rebuilding and expanding this specific structure.

The clearest statement of the sanctuary’s unique status in the structure of reward is preserved in multiple related narrations. Abu Huraira رضي الله عنه reported that the Prophet ﷺ said: “One prayer in my Mosque is better than one thousand prayers in any other mosque, except Al-Masjid-al-Haram” (Authentic (sahih) — Sahih al-Bukhari 1190). A related narration, again from Abu Huraira رضي الله عنه, is preserved in Sahih Muslim 1394a and 1401a (Authentic (sahih)), and the same comparison, specifying “a thousand prayers” in any other mosque except Masjid al-Haram, is recorded in several places in Jami’ at-Tirmidhi 326, 384, 402, 410 and 492, each graded Authentic (sahih) by Darussalam’s editorial grading on Sunnah.com. These hadith establish, in the plainest possible terms, why Masjid al-Haram specifically — as opposed to any other mosque an Umayyad, Abbasid, Mamluk or Ottoman ruler might have chosen to patronise — attracted fourteen centuries of continuous royal and imperial investment in its physical fabric: the reward multiplier attached to prayer within it is, in the wording preserved across these authentic narrations, higher than for any other mosque on earth, including the Prophet’s ﷺ own mosque in Madinah.

No hadith located for this article addresses the specific act of physically rebuilding, expanding, or adding domes and colonnades to the mosque, and no hadith attributes religious merit to any particular architectural style, material or building technique used in doing so. This is worth stating plainly rather than leaving implicit: the sanctity that motivated the Ottoman sultans’ investment, described in this article’s earlier sections, rests entirely on hadith and Qur’anic material about the sanctuary’s general status and the reward of worship within it, not on any hadith specifically endorsing masonry domes, marble columns, or any other feature of the sixteenth-century rebuilding. Readers should not infer religious endorsement of any particular architectural choice — Ottoman, Saudi, or otherwise — from these general hadith about the sanctuary’s status.

Historical Development: Rashidun to Saudi, in Sequence

This section consolidates, in strict chronological order and with hijri and common-era dating throughout, the building history already narrated in detail above, so that a reader can see the full fourteen-century sequence at a glance before the article turns to what survives of it today.

In the era of the Rashidun caliphs (11–40 AH / 632–661 CE), the mosque had no monumental architecture in the sense discussed throughout this article. The caliph Umar ibn al-Khattab رضي الله عنه carried out the first formal expansion of the sanctuary’s perimeter around 17 AH (638 CE), and Uthman ibn Affan رضي الله عنه extended it further and introduced the first roofed arcades, a modest but foundational step toward the colonnaded form the mosque would carry for the next thirteen centuries (Masjid al-Haram, Wikipedia).

Under the Umayyads (41–132 AH / 661–750 CE), the caliph al-Walid I rebuilt the mosque with marble columns, marble-clad walls, a decorated teak roof, crenellations, gilded capitals and mosaic work above the arches, and added the mosque’s first minaret at the end of the eighth century in the calendar convention used by some English-language sources for this Umayyad-era work, though other sources place elements of this campaign slightly earlier within the Umayyad period. Abdullah ibn al-Zubayr, during his independent rule over the Hijaz (64–73 AH / 683–692 CE), also rebuilt the Kaaba itself following its damage in a fire and siege, including the wooden column inside the Kaaba now held in the Exhibition of the Two Holy Mosques Architecture and dated to around 65 AH (685 CE).

The Abbasids (from 132 AH / 750 CE) undertook the most consequential pre-Ottoman rebuilding, discussed in detail in the Historical Background section above: al-Mansur’s expansion of 137–140 AH (754–757 CE), al-Mahdi’s much larger campaign of 158–169 AH (775–785 CE) establishing the three-row marble arcade and importing marble by sea from Syria and Egypt, completion under al-Hadi around 169–170 AH (785–786 CE), al-Mu’tadid’s expansion of 281–282 AH (894–895 CE) demolishing the old Dar al-Nadwa, and al-Muqtadir’s work of 306 AH (918 CE) (Masjid al-Haram, Wikipedia; al-Haram Mosque, German Wikipedia).

The mosque suffered a serious fire in 802 AH (1400 CE), and the Mamluks (who held Makkah under their suzerainty from 648 AH / 1250 CE) carried out the repairs discussed above: Baisaq az-Zahiri’s post-fire rebuilding with mismatched granite columns from Jabal Shubaika, minaret reconstructions in 772 AH (1370 CE) and 809–811 AH (1407–1409 CE), Sultan Qa’itbay’s madrasah, minaret, fountain and library of around 885 AH (1480 CE), and the 1426–27 CE floor and drainage works of Shahin al-‘Uthmani and Sa’d ad-Din al-Fuwi.

The Ottomans, who assumed control of the Hijaz in 923 AH (1517 CE), carried out the campaigns that are this article’s principal subject: Suleyman the Magnificent’s repairs and the 1551–1552 CE Kaaba renovation; Selim II’s order of 979 AH (1571–1572 CE) for the full rebuilding of the roof and colonnade in stone domes; the foundation ceremony of 6 Jumada al-Awwal 980 AH (14 September 1572 CE); completion under Murad III in 984 AH (1576–1577 CE) with the commemorative inscription of 985 AH (1577–1578 CE); the Murad III minbar of 998 AH (1590 CE); Sinan’s 1584 CE inspection visit for the separate Kaaba-wall question; the Kaaba’s collapse and reconstruction under Murad IV following the 1039 AH (1629 CE) flood, together with the addition of three further minarets bringing the total to seven; and the 1611 CE Kaaba-gutter repair debate under Ahmed I.

The Saudi era, beginning with the Kingdom’s founding in 1932 and its direct administration of the Hijaz somewhat earlier, brought the sequence of demolitions and expansions covered in detail above: the first Saudi expansion from 20 November 1955; the second expansion of 1969–1976 CE; the third expansion of roughly 1988 to the early 2000s; and the King Abdullah Expansion, announced in 1432 AH (August 2011 CE) and continuing, in its finishing and adjacent phases, into the period covered by this guide in July 2026.

Architecture: Design, Materials, Symbolism and What Was Lost

The architectural sections earlier in this article set out the Ottoman colonnade’s design vocabulary, materials, dimensions and decorative programme in detail, and rather than repeat that material this section draws out its underlying design logic and symbolism, and restates plainly what was lost.

The design logic of the 1571–1577 rebuilding was continuity through transformation: the same footprint, the same arcaded relationship to the open Mataf, the same three-row plan inherited from the Abbasids in places, but a wholesale change of structural technology, from a flat, decaying timber roof vulnerable to fire, insects and rot, to a masonry system of small domes distributing load onto reinforced and partly rebuilt colonnades. Symbolically, the repeating small dome — rather than a single dominant central dome of the kind Sinan used at the Süleymaniye — expressed something specific to the Haram’s unique architectural problem: the object of veneration is not the building but the open space and the Kaaba within it, so the architecture’s role is to frame and shelter the perimeter without competing with or overshadowing the sanctuary at its centre. The seven minarets, discussed above, carried their own symbolism of Makkah’s unmatched status as the qibla of the entire Muslim world.

What was lost, restated plainly: the original sixteenth- and seventeenth-century brick-and-plaster domes, which could not survive the twenty-first-century dismantling and relocation process and were not preserved in usable original form even where the columns beneath them were saved; an unknown but substantial proportion of the original 555 columns and piers recorded by al-Nahrawali and Eyüb Sabri, some relocated and eventually re-erected, others whose fate this guide has not been able to trace individually; inscribed columns and architectural elements marking specific historically significant locations within the mosque, whose informational function — telling a visitor where a particular event was traditionally located — was lost even in cases where the physical stone itself was preserved in storage or a museum, because inscribed stones removed from their original position and placed in a museum vitrine no longer perform the wayfinding function they performed in situ; and, in the broadest sense, the specific spatial experience of praying beneath a four-century-old colonnade with visible, tactile evidence of Ottoman, Mamluk, Abbasid and Umayyad hands all still present in the same structure — an experience that, as this guide’s practical section below explains, is no longer available to a visitor in 2026 except in a small number of specific, restored locations.

Archaeological Findings

This guide did not locate any published, peer-reviewed archaeological excavation report specifically concerning the Ottoman-era colonnade of Masjid al-Haram, and it states this plainly rather than implying a research literature that does not exist. The reasons are structural rather than a failure of search: Masjid al-Haram remains an active, continuously used religious site rather than an excavated archaeological site in the conventional sense, and Saudi authorities have not, as far as this guide’s research could establish, published a formal excavation or stratigraphic survey of the ground beneath the mosque’s Ottoman-era or earlier fabric. What functions, in practice, as the nearest equivalent to an archaeological record is the documentary and material survey work carried out in connection with the demolitions themselves: the 2014 Saudi Gazette report’s detailed accounting of the 2,754 individual historic architectural pieces recovered from the arcade, broken down by count of columns, arches, domes and balustrade sections, and the Gürsoy Group’s on-the-ground inspection distinguishing genuinely Ottoman-period fabric from twenty-seven sections of more recent reconstruction (Saudi Gazette, 2014; Council of British Hajjis). This is a material and architectural survey rather than an archaeological excavation in the technical sense — no stratigraphy, no dating of subsurface deposits, no published research paper — but it is the most rigorous documentary record this guide located, and readers should understand it as such rather than as formal archaeology. The inscribed marble column dating a minaret’s construction to 772 AH (1370 CE), publicised by the Saudi Press Agency in May 2026 as a highlight of the Exhibition of the Two Holy Mosques Architecture, is the kind of individual epigraphic find that periodically emerges from this material rather than from any excavation (Asharq Al-Awsat, May 2026).

Stories of the Companions

Honesty requires the same chronological statement made in the section on the Prophet ﷺ above: the Ottoman colonnade did not exist in the lifetime of the Companions رضي الله عنهم, all of whom had died many centuries before Selim II’s builders broke ground in 1572 CE. No companion prayed beneath a dome built by Sinan’s office, walked past a Shumaisi-stone pier, or saw the seven-minaret skyline completed under Murad IV in 1629. Any narrative that places a named companion inside the Ottoman arcade is, again, simply anachronistic, and this guide will not construct one for dramatic effect.

What is legitimately connected is the companions’ association with the sanctuary itself, on the ground the Ottoman colonnade would later enclose — material that belongs properly to this guide’s Kaaba article, where it receives full treatment, but that deserves a brief, honest acknowledgment here because readers arriving at an architecture-focused article may reasonably expect some companion material. Abu Bakr al-Siddiq رضي الله عنه, Umar ibn al-Khattab رضي الله عنه, and the early Muslims of Makkah prayed within the sanctuary under conditions of persecution before the Hijra; Bilal ibn Rabah رضي الله عنه was tortured in Makkah for his faith during this period; and later, following the conquest of Makkah in 8 AH (630 CE), companions including Ali ibn Abi Talib رضي الله عنه assisted the Prophet ﷺ in removing the idols from around the Kaaba within the sanctuary. Companions who were not present at these Makkan events — most obviously the later-converting members of the Ansar of Madinah, and figures who embraced Islam only after the conquest, such as several of the Quraysh’s own former leaders — should not be retrospectively inserted into earlier Makkan scenes, a caution that applies to companion narratives generally and is worth restating here even though it concerns events centuries prior to this article’s architectural subject.

One connection worth naming precisely, because it bridges the companion era and the Ottoman era in a single physical detail: several of the columns removed during the twentieth- and twenty-first-century demolitions were reported by critics, including Dr. Irfan al-Alawi, to have carried inscriptions naming the Prophet’s ﷺ companions and marking locations associated with them within the mosque (The Independent, via Islamic Pluralism). This guide has already treated this claim in the demolitions section above and does not repeat the analysis here, except to note that it is the clearest point of contact between the companion era and the architectural subject of this article: not that companions built or used the Ottoman colonnade, but that the Ottoman-and-later builders inscribed companion names and locations onto stones that a modern visitor can, in most cases, no longer consult in their original position.

Stories of Great Islamic Scholars

Unlike the companions’ era, the Ottoman rebuilding of Masjid al-Haram falls squarely within the lifetimes and professional concerns of named, well-documented Islamic scholars, and this is one of the richer sections of this particular article as a result.

Qutb al-Din al-Nahrawali (911–990 AH / 1511–1590 CE) is the indispensable scholarly witness for everything in this article’s account of the 1571–1577 rebuilding. A Meccan-based historian and jurist of the Hanafi school, al-Nahrawali served as a qadi in Makkah and wrote what became the standard contemporary chronicle of the rebuilding, recording the structural crisis that prompted it — the sinking eastern arcade, the insect-eaten roof, the birds and snakes nesting in the roof void — the foundation ceremony of 980 AH (1572 CE), the completed building’s dome and column counts, and the finishing details including the anti-bird spikes and the gilded copper crescents (al-Haram Mosque, German Wikipedia, citing al-Nahrawali extensively). Without al-Nahrawali’s testimony, the numerical and descriptive detail in this article’s central sections would not exist; he is, in effect, the primary source on which the entire architectural history of the Ottoman rebuilding rests.

A different and directly relevant scholarly episode concerns the Kaaba itself rather than the surrounding colonnade, but demonstrates how seriously Ottoman-era ulema policed proposed interventions to the sanctuary’s fabric. In 1584 CE, when Sultan Murad III dispatched the chief imperial architect Sinan to Makkah to inspect the leaning walls of the Kaaba and prepare a repair estimate, the Meccan ulema who reviewed his findings and proposed intervention rejected it, judging the specific structural intervention he proposed to be impermissible (Necipoğlu, “The Age of Sinan,” excerpted at dokumen.pub). A related and independently documented episode occurred in 1611 CE under Sultan Ahmed I, when a proposal to repair the Kaaba’s golden waterspout (mizab) and add structural braces, based on drawings Sinan had prepared some twenty-five years earlier during his 1584 visit, was again brought before the Meccan scholars, who once more raised objections to specific elements of the proposed intervention before a modified repair was eventually carried out (ACSA 1999 conference proceedings). Neither episode concerns the colonnade project directly, but both demonstrate a consistent pattern across four decades: Ottoman sultans could order structural work on the Haram, but the Meccan ulema retained a real, exercised authority to review and reject specific proposed interventions to the sanctuary’s most sacred fabric, the Kaaba itself, even when the sultan’s own chief architect had personally prepared the plans.

Among the classical jurists named in this guide’s broader source list — Malik ibn Anas (93–179 AH / 711/716–795 CE), founder of the Maliki school and a lifelong resident of Madinah; Abu Hanifah (80–148 AH / 699–767 CE), founder of the Hanafi school, the school to which al-Nahrawali himself belonged; al-Shafi’i (150–204 AH / 767–820 CE), who died and is buried in Cairo but studied and taught in Makkah for a period of his life; Ahmad ibn Hanbal (164–241 AH / 780–855 CE); Ibn Taymiyyah (661–728 AH / 1263–1328 CE); Ibn Kathir (701–774 AH / 1300–1373 CE); al-Nawawi (631–676 AH / 1233–1277 CE); Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani (773–852 AH / 1372–1449 CE); and al-Samhudi (844–911 AH / 1440–1506 CE), the great topographer of Madinah — none of these scholars lived to see the Ottoman rebuilding of 1571–1577, all having died well before the sixteenth century. Their rulings, where they touch the sanctuary at all, concern the Kaaba’s sanctity, the rites of Hajj and Umrah, and the legal status of the Haram generally, material that belongs to this guide’s Kaaba article rather than to an article specifically about the Ottoman colonnade. It would misrepresent their scholarship to retrofit opinions about sixteenth-century Ottoman masonry onto jurists who died decades or centuries before that masonry existed, and this guide does not do so. The scholarly figures who do bear directly on this article’s subject are al-Nahrawali and the Meccan ulema of 1584 and 1611 named above, precisely because they were alive, resident in Makkah, and professionally engaged with the sanctuary’s fabric during the period this article covers.

Spiritual Reflection

Stand, if you are able, at the edge of the modern Mataf and look at the pale stone stretching away from you in every direction. Almost none of it is old. You already know this, because this guide has told you plainly and more than once. Sit with that fact for a moment rather than rushing past it. What does it mean that the physical object your eyes are resting on — the marble underfoot, the columns at the courtyard’s edge, the domes above them — is, for the most part, less than two decades old, built by hands working under floodlights and cranes in the 2010s and 2020s, rather than the four-century-old fabric that stood here when your grandparents’ grandparents might have made this same journey?

It means, first, that you are being asked to separate two things most visitors never think to separate: the age of the stone, and the age of the sanctity. The stone is new. The sanctity is not. Allah’s decree that this is the direction every Muslim on earth turns to face, five times a day, did not arrive with Sinan’s domes and will not depart with their removal. The Companions who prayed here in fear during the Makkan persecution, the Prophet ﷺ who wept and endured and eventually triumphed on this ground, the caliphs and sultans who rebuilt this structure a dozen times across fourteen centuries — none of them were praying to the masonry. You are not either, whether the column beside you is genuinely Ottoman or was poured in concrete and clad in marble within your own lifetime.

This is worth carrying further than the mosque’s walls. Every structure human hands raise, however beautiful, however lovingly built, however grand its dome or fine its inscription, is provisional. Sinan’s arcade stood for roughly four hundred and fifty years — a span longer than most nations, most dynasties, most languages survive intact — and it is now, for the most part, gone, dismantled, catalogued, and either stored in a compound at Muzdalifah you cannot easily visit or standing quietly in a museum case in Umm al-Joud. If a structure commissioned by an empire at the height of its power, built by history’s most accomplished Ottoman architects, blessed by two sultans’ reigns, could not outlast the twentieth century’s demand for space, what permanence should you expect from anything you build, own, or attach your heart to?

Ask yourself, standing here: what am I actually here for? If the honest answer is to see old stones, you will leave disappointed, because this guide has told you exactly how little old stone remains and exactly where the little that survives can be found. If the honest answer is to stand where the sanctuary has always stood, facing the direction every believer has faced since the second year after the Hijra, then nothing that Ahmad Beg’s workers demolished in 1572, and nothing that the Gürsoy Group dismantled in the 2010s, has taken that away from you. Say, quietly, in whatever words come to you: Allahumma inna hadha baytuka, wa qad ataytuhu min shiqqin ba’id — O Allah, this is Your House, and I have come to it from a distant place — a sentiment consistent with the general spirit of pilgrim supplication recorded across the classical sources on Hajj and Umrah, offered here not as a specific hadith-graded formula but as words a sincere heart might reach for. Ask for what you actually need. Ask for permanence of a kind that no demolition order can touch.

Practical Visitor Guide: Where to Stand, What You Will Actually See

This section is written for a visitor in Makkah in 2026, and it leads, as this guide’s editorial standard requires, with the plain truth: if your goal is to see substantial surviving Ottoman-era architecture standing in its original position inside Masjid al-Haram, you will very largely be disappointed, and this guide would rather tell you that now than let you discover it standing confused in the Mataf.

Getting There and Orienting Yourself

Masjid al-Haram sits at the centre of Makkah, reachable on foot from most central hotels and by the Makkah Metro (Al Mashaer Al Mugaddassah Metro) and extensive shuttle-bus networks from outlying accommodation and from the Haramain high-speed rail terminal connecting to Madinah and Jeddah. Before you go looking for Ottoman fabric specifically, orient yourself to the Mataf, the paved marble circumambulation area immediately around the Kaaba, and to the multi-level modern extensions that now surround it on most sides — these extensions are the twentieth- and twenty-first-century Saudi-era construction discussed throughout this article, not Ottoman work, however much some of their decorative surfaces echo an older visual vocabulary.

Where to Stand to See What Genuinely Survives

According to the Madain Project’s architectural summary of the King Abdullah Expansion, restored Ottoman-era porticoes run along three sides of the expanded Mataf, excluding the side facing the Mas’a between Safa and Marwah (Madain Project). A visitor walking the perimeter of the Mataf on those three sides may be looking at genuine, restored sixteenth-century Ottoman columns, though — as stated plainly earlier in this guide — the domes above them are in most cases modern reconstructions, and nothing at ground level distinguishes a returned original column from a stylistically matched replica standing beside it. Do not expect a plaque or a marked boundary; none is known to this guide as of July 2026. If you want a documented, labelled, close-range encounter with genuine Ottoman and pre-Ottoman material — inscribed slabs naming Murad III and Mehmed IV, Mamluk-era inscriptions, the inscribed 1370 CE minaret column — plan a separate visit to the Exhibition of the Two Holy Mosques Architecture in the Umm al-Joud area near the Kiswa Factory, roughly ten to fifteen minutes by car from the mosque, which this guide’s companion article covers in full. The Muzdalifah storage-and-restoration compound holding the bulk of the dismantled material is not, as far as this guide could establish, open to public visits, and access has historically required prior permission and an entry card (Saudi Gazette, 2014).

Best Time to Visit

As with the rest of the mosque, the practical considerations are crowding and heat rather than anything specific to the Ottoman-era remnants. The cooler months from November through February see more comfortable daytime temperatures for the walk between the mosque and the Exhibition of the Two Holy Mosques Architecture; the pre-dawn and late-night hours around the mosque itself are markedly less crowded than the period immediately before and after the five daily prayers. Hajj season itself, dated by the lunar calendar and falling in 2026 in the early summer months, brings the highest crowding of the year to exactly the areas discussed in this guide, and a visitor specifically interested in examining the restored porticoes at close range and at a measured pace should avoid it if the itinerary allows.

Etiquette, Photography and Accessibility

Standard mosque etiquette applies with particular weight here because of the sanctuary’s unique status: modest dress, ritual purity for prayer, and quiet, respectful movement, especially near worshippers engaged in prayer or circumambulation. Photography of the general architecture is broadly tolerated in most areas of the mosque as of July 2026, but visitors should be aware that rules around photography, drone use and tripod use inside Masjid al-Haram have changed periodically and should be confirmed against current Saudi Ministry of Hajj and Umrah guidance before travelling, since this guide cannot verify a single, stable, unchanging photography policy across the period it covers. Photographing worshippers closely, particularly women, without consent is discouraged as a matter of basic respect regardless of the formal rule in place at any given time. The mosque’s modern extensions, including the areas nearest the restored Ottoman-style porticoes, are wheelchair accessible via lifts and ramps built into the Saudi-era expansions; the same cannot be assumed of every access point, and visitors with mobility needs should plan routes in advance using current signage or staff guidance rather than assuming universal step-free access.

Visiting With Children and Common Mistakes

Children old enough to walk the distances involved can visit comfortably, but the crowding around the Mataf, particularly during peak prayer times, is a genuine safety consideration given the crowd-crush history detailed earlier in this article; keep children close and agree on a meeting point in case of separation, standard advice for any dense crowd environment rather than something specific to this site. The single most common mistake this guide can help a reader avoid is assuming that an old-looking arcade, dome or column encountered anywhere inside the mosque is necessarily genuine Ottoman fabric. As this guide has explained at length, the great majority of what looks historic inside the mosque today is a modern architectural homage built in the 2010s and 2020s, and the reliable places to encounter verified older material are the restored porticoes on three sides of the Mataf (with the caveat about the domes above them) and the Exhibition of the Two Holy Mosques Architecture. A second common mistake is assuming that because Sinan’s name is attached to the 1571–1577 project in almost every popular account, he personally designed and supervised it on-site; this guide’s earlier section on the attribution question sets out why the specialist literature is more cautious on that specific point.

Common Misconceptions

This guide is exempt from the standard ziyarah-legitimacy caveat that applies to most other Makkah and Madinah sites in this series, since Masjid al-Haram is one of the small number of sites — alongside Masjid an-Nabawi, the Prophet’s ﷺ grave, Jannat al-Baqi, the martyrs of Uhud, and Masjid Quba — with an unambiguous, undisputed basis in the sunnah for devotional visitation. The misconceptions worth correcting here concern history and architecture rather than the legitimacy of visiting.

Misconception: the old-looking arcades around the Mataf today are the surviving Ottoman colonnade. As this guide has stated repeatedly and without softening, the great majority of the mosque’s current fabric, including most of what visually echoes Ottoman or older styles, is twentieth- and twenty-first-century Saudi-era construction. Genuine Ottoman-era columns survive only in specific, restored sections along three sides of the Mataf, standing beneath modern reconstructed domes, and cannot be distinguished from replicas at ground level without expert knowledge or documentation this guide is not aware of being publicly posted at the site.

Misconception: Sinan personally designed and built the Ottoman colonnade on-site in Makkah. The popular and encyclopedic attribution to Sinan is not baseless — the project fell under his office’s authority during his tenure as chief imperial architect — but the specialist academic literature, principally Gülru Necipoğlu’s standard reference, states that Sinan was “probably not present” to personally supervise distant projects, and documents his one confirmed personal visit to Makkah as occurring in 1584, seven years after the arcade project’s completion, for the separate matter of the Kaaba’s leaning walls. Whether Sinan’s office produced the arcade design that his subordinates, possibly including his eventual successor Davud Agha, executed on-site remains, on the present evidence, an open question rather than a settled fact.

Misconception: the Ottoman rebuilding was the first time Masjid al-Haram was built in stone, or the first major expansion of the mosque. As this guide’s Historical Background section establishes in detail, the mosque had already been rebuilt in stone and marble under the Umayyads, expanded to roughly its later footprint under the Abbasid caliph al-Mahdi in the eighth century CE, and repaired after fire by the Mamluks in the early fifteenth century, all well before Selim II’s builders broke ground in 1572. The Ottoman rebuilding replaced a decayed timber roof with masonry domes on an already centuries-old stone colonnade; it was not the mosque’s first monumental construction.

Misconception: the specific column said to mark the start of the Prophet’s ﷺ Night Journey, reportedly demolished in 2014, has been verified against classical topographical sources. As this guide’s section on the Prophet ﷺ and this place explains, this claim is reported by a named critic and repeated in press coverage of the demolitions, but this guide was not able to verify the specific identification against the classical topographical authorities for Makkah, and readers should treat it as a popularly held and plausibly sourced claim rather than an established historical fact with an unbroken chain of documentation back to the earliest sources.

Lesser-Known Facts

• The iron spikes fitted along the Ottoman arcade’s cornices in the 1570s were installed specifically to prevent birds from perching and fouling the mosque with droppings, a small but telling detail of the project’s maintenance-mindedness recorded by the contemporary chronicler al-Nahrawali (al-Haram Mosque, German Wikipedia).
• Art historians use the number of minarets depicted in undated Ottoman manuscript and tile images of Masjid al-Haram as a rough dating tool: six minarets indicates a depiction made before Murad IV’s 1629 renovation, seven indicates one made afterward, as Christie’s own auction cataloguing of a Futuh al-Haramayn folio explicitly notes (Christie’s auction catalogue note).
• The heavier Shumaisi-stone piers inserted between every third marble column in the 1570s rebuilding were quarried from two small hills near Shumais, along the Haram’s western boundary on the road to Jeddah, and were reportedly around four times the diameter of the marble columns beside them — a detail that explains why the finished arcade’s rhythm was never a uniform sequence of matching columns, but a deliberate alternation of slender marble and heavy local stone (al-Haram Mosque, German Wikipedia).
• In 1584, when Sultan Murad III sent Sinan himself to Makkah to inspect the Kaaba’s leaning walls, the Meccan ulema rejected his proposed structural intervention outright — a rare recorded instance of the Ottoman Empire’s most celebrated architect having a proposal for the Haram turned down by local religious authority (Necipoğlu, “The Age of Sinan”).
• Some of the columns exhibited today as “Ottoman colonnade” material at the King Abdulaziz Center for World Culture (Ithra) in Dhahran are, according to the exhibition’s own catalogue description, actually Abbasid-era columns from the reign of Caliph al-Mahdi (775–785 CE), carved from imported Proconnesian marble quarried on an island in the Sea of Marmara — meaning the “Ottoman” arcade a nineteenth-century pilgrim saw already incorporated marble roughly eight centuries older than the Ottoman rebuilding itself (“Seven Columns,” Islamic Arts Biennale).
• The marble minbar still used for the Friday sermon at Masjid al-Haram today was installed under Sultan Murad III in 1590, thirteen years after the arcade project’s completion, making it one of the very few Ottoman-era objects inside the mosque still performing its original function rather than surviving only as a museum piece or a relocated architectural fragment (“Four centuries as servants of the sanctuary”).
• Muhammad Sadiq Bey, the first photographer of Makkah, made an earlier, entirely unsuccessful attempt to photograph Madinah in 1861, two decades before his successful 1880–1881 expedition to Makkah — no images from that first attempt survive, making his 1880s work the earliest surviving photographic record of the Ottoman mosque rather than his first attempt at the project (Muhammad Sadiq (photographer), Wikipedia).

Timeline

• 17 AH / 638 CE — Caliph Umar ibn al-Khattab رضي الله عنه carries out the first formal expansion of the mosque’s perimeter.
• Caliphate of Uthman ibn Affan رضي الله عنه (24–35 AH / 644–656 CE) — Further expansion, and the first roofed arcades (riwaq) built around the courtyard.
• End of the 1st century AH / early 8th century CE — Umayyad caliph al-Walid I rebuilds the mosque with marble columns, marble cladding, a decorated teak roof and gilded capitals.
• 65 AH / 685 CE — Abdullah ibn al-Zubayr’s reconstruction of the Kaaba during his rule over the Hijaz; the wooden column from this rebuilding is later held in the Exhibition of the Two Holy Mosques Architecture.
• 137–140 AH / 754–757 CE — Caliph al-Mansur expands the mosque on its north and west sides and equips it with minarets.
• 158–169 AH / 775–785 CE — Caliph al-Mahdi’s major Abbasid expansion: east and south sides extended, three-row marble arcades built, marble imported by sea from Syria and Egypt.
• c. 169–170 AH / 785–786 CE — Completion of al-Mahdi’s expansion under his successor al-Hadi.
• 281–282 AH / 894–895 CE — Caliph al-Mu’tadid demolishes the old Dar al-Nadwa council house to expand the mosque northward.
• 306 AH / 918 CE — Caliph al-Muqtadir’s governor replaces an internal wall with stone columns.
• 772 AH / 1370 CE — Mamluk sultan al-Ashraf Sha’ban rebuilds the minaret over the Bab al-Hazwarah after an earlier collapse.
• 802 AH / 1400 CE — A serious fire damages the mosque’s western colonnade.
• 809–811 AH / 1407–1409 CE — Post-fire Mamluk repairs under Sultan Faraj ibn Barquq, including replacement of burned marble columns with granite from Jabal Shubaika.
• 1426–27 CE — Mamluk officials Shahin al-‘Uthmani and Sa’d ad-Din al-Fuwi re-gravel the mosque floor and build drainage.
• c. 885 AH / 1480 CE — Sultan Qa’itbay adds a sixth minaret, a madrasah, a public fountain and a library.
• 923 AH / 1517 CE — The Ottoman Empire assumes control of the Hijaz.
• 958–959 AH / 1551–1552 CE — Ottoman renovation of the Kaaba’s structure under Suleyman the Magnificent, in which Sinan was “generally not involved.”
• 979 AH / 1571–1572 CE — Sultan Selim II orders the full rebuilding of the mosque’s roof and colonnade in stone domes.
• Rabi’ al-Awwal 980 AH / late July 1572 CE — Demolition of the mosque’s eastern arcade begins under the amir Ahmad Beg.
• 6 Jumada al-Awwal 980 AH / 14 September 1572 CE — Formal foundation-stone ceremony for the new Ottoman building.
• 1574 CE — Death of Sultan Selim II; the project continues under his son Murad III.
• 984 AH / 1576–1577 CE — Completion of the Ottoman rebuilding under Sultan Murad III.
• 985 AH / 1577–1578 CE — Commemorative inscription added, and the inscription naming Allah, the Prophet ﷺ and the four Rightly Guided Caliphs installed between the Bab Ali and the Bab al-Jana’iz.
• 992 AH / 1584 CE — Sinan personally visits Makkah to inspect the Kaaba’s leaning walls; his proposed repair is rejected by the Meccan ulema.
• 998 AH / 1590 CE — The marble minbar still in use today is installed under Sultan Murad III.
• 1019–1020 AH / 1611 CE — Renewed debate among Meccan ulema over repairing the Kaaba’s golden waterspout, based on Sinan’s earlier drawings, under Sultan Ahmed I.
• 1039 AH / 1629 CE — Catastrophic flooding collapses three of the Kaaba’s four walls; Sultan Murad IV orders its complete reconstruction and adds three further minarets to the mosque, bringing the total to seven.
• 1861 CE — Muhammad Sadiq Bey’s unsuccessful first attempt to photograph Madinah; no images survive.
• 1880–1881 CE — Sadiq Bey successfully photographs Masjid al-Haram, the Kaaba, and the pilgrim encampments, becoming the first person to photograph the region.
• 1884–1885 CE — Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje photographs Makkah before being forced to leave; his equipment and training pass to al-Sayyid Abd al-Ghaffar.
• 1888 CE — Abd al-Ghaffar photographs that year’s Hajj.
• 1888–1889 CE — Publication of Snouck Hurgronje’s Mekka and Bilder-Atlas zu Mekka; Bilder aus Mekka follows in 1889.
• 1932 CE — Founding of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
• 20 November 1955 CE — Beginning of the first Saudi expansion of Masjid al-Haram, demolishing the mosque’s outer courtyards and roughly 1,700 surrounding buildings.
• 1969–1976 CE — Second Saudi expansion, removing the two outer courtyards of the Ottoman-era mosque.
• 1988 CE to early 2000s — Third Saudi expansion.
• 1432 AH / August 2011 CE — The King Abdullah Expansion is formally announced.
• 2013 CE — International press reporting and Turkish public protest over demolition of Ottoman and Abbasid-era colonnade sections; Turkish Prime Minister Erdoğan reportedly raises the matter directly with King Abdullah.
• 2014 CE — King Abdullah orders preservation of genuinely Ottoman-era portico sections; the Gürsoy Group’s inspection finds 27 sections are modern reconstructions; cataloguing and relocation of roughly 2,754 historic pieces to the Muzdalifah compound; further demolition of remaining historic porticoes, including sections associated with the traditional site of Umm Hani’s house, reported in November.
• 2014–2016 CE — A temporary carbon-fibre pedestrian bridge is installed in the mosque’s courtyard during Mataf reconstruction.
• 11 September 2015 CE — A construction crane collapses inside Masjid al-Haram, killing at least 107–111 people.
• 24 September 2015 CE — The Mina crowd crush kills, by official Saudi count, 769 pilgrims; independent tallies place the toll between roughly 2,000 and 2,430 or higher.
• May 2026 CE — The Saudi Press Agency publicises an inscribed marble column dating a Grand Mosque minaret’s construction to 1370 CE, on display at the Exhibition of the Two Holy Mosques Architecture.
• July 2026 CE — The date against which this guide’s practical information is current; the King Abdullah Expansion’s finishing and adjacent works continue.

Key Lessons

Historical

Masjid al-Haram has never had a single, final architectural form. It was rebuilt by the Rashidun caliphs, the Umayyads, the Abbasids, the Mamluks, the Ottomans and the Saudis in turn, each generation erasing something a previous generation had built in order to meet the needs of its own time. The Ottoman colonnade discussed throughout this article was the last great pre-modern layer in that sequence, not the first stone building and not, as events have shown, the final one either.

Spiritual

The sanctity of Masjid al-Haram attaches to the site and its role as the direction of prayer for the entire Muslim world, not to any particular century’s masonry. The hadith establishing the site’s unique multiplier of reward for prayer, preserved in Sahih al-Bukhari 1190 among other authentic narrations, makes no reference to architectural style, material, or age, a fact worth returning to whenever a demolished column or a rebuilt dome threatens to feel like a loss of something essential.

Personal

Attachment to physical monuments, however beautiful and however sincerely built, is a form of attachment to the impermanent. Sinan’s arcade, or his office’s arcade, or Davud Agha’s arcade — the attribution itself remains unsettled after four and a half centuries — stood through the reigns of dozens of sultans and was still, by most accounts, substantially intact through the first half of the twentieth century, and it is now very largely gone. Anyone who builds, collects, or curates anything of lasting beauty in their own life might reasonably hold it a little more lightly for having read this history.

Practical

A visitor to Masjid al-Haram in 2026 who wants an honest encounter with its Ottoman-era history should not expect to find it simply by walking into the courtyard and looking old-fashioned buildings up and down. The reliable places are specific and limited: the restored porticoes on three sides of the Mataf, with the caveat that their domes are modern; the Murad III minbar, still in liturgical use; and the Exhibition of the Two Holy Mosques Architecture in Umm al-Joud, where labelled, verified material can actually be examined at close range.

Authentic Sources

Primary Islamic Sources

The Qur’an and the authentic hadith collections cited throughout this article — Sahih al-Bukhari, Sahih Muslim, and Jami’ at-Tirmidhi — are the primary Islamic textual sources underlying this guide’s treatment of the sanctuary’s status. A note of caution applies, as it does across this entire guide series, to the early narrative historians of the Prophet’s ﷺ life and the earliest Islamic centuries, principally Ibn Ishaq, al-Waqidi and al-Tabari: their historical narrative material, while foundational to Islamic historiography, is treated by later scholars with varying degrees of caution regarding chains of transmission for specific narrative details, and this guide has relied on them, where cited at all, for general historical sequencing rather than for any detail requiring hadith-level authentication. For the architectural history specific to this article, the primary witness is not a hadith collection at all but the sixteenth-century Meccan historian Qutb al-Din al-Nahrawali, whose contemporary chronicle of the 1571–1577 rebuilding, summarised at length in the German-language scholarly account of the mosque’s history, is the closest thing to a primary textual source this article possesses for the Ottoman building campaign itself.

Classical Scholars

Qutb al-Din al-Nahrawali (911–990 AH / 1511–1590 CE), Meccan Hanafi jurist and the primary chronicler of the 1571–1577 rebuilding. The Meccan ulema of 1584 and 1611 CE who reviewed and constrained proposed Ottoman interventions to the Kaaba’s fabric, as documented in Necipoğlu’s The Age of Sinan and in the ACSA 1999 conference proceedings on the 1611 restoration. Malik ibn Anas, Abu Hanifah, al-Shafi’i, Ahmad ibn Hanbal, Ibn Taymiyyah, Ibn Kathir, al-Nawawi, Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani and al-Samhudi are named here per this guide’s standard scholarly roster, though, as this article’s Stories of Great Islamic Scholars section states plainly, none of them lived to see the Ottoman-era building campaign this article covers, and their relevant rulings on the sanctuary generally are treated in this guide’s companion Kaaba article.

Modern Academic and Reference Sources

• Masjid al-Haram, Wikipedia
• Mosquée al-Haram, Wikipédia
• Al-Haram-Moschee, German Wikipedia
• Davud Agha, Wikipedia
• “Mimar Dâvud Ağa’nın Hayatı, Eserleri,” Academia.edu
• İSAM research article on the Mehmed Agha Mosque
• Classical Ottoman Architecture, Wikipedia, summarising Gülru Necipoğlu
• Gülru Necipoğlu, The Age of Sinan: Architectural Culture in the Ottoman Empire
• ACSA 1999 Annual Meeting Proceedings, on the 1611 Kaaba restoration
• “The Topkapi Scroll: Geometry and Ornament in Islamic Architecture,” Getty Publications
• Christie’s auction catalogue note on an Ottoman depiction of Masjid al-Haram
• Wikimedia Commons, Futuh al-Haramayn depiction
• “Depictions of the Haramayn on Ottoman Tiles: Content and Context,” Academia.edu
• Jerome Taylor, “The photos Saudi Arabia doesn’t want seen,” The Independent, via Islamic Pluralism
• “Mecca under threat,” Islamic Pluralism
• Middle East Eye, on Saudi heritage demolition
• Time, “Saudi Arabia Bulldozes Over Its Heritage”
• The Art Newspaper, on the destruction of Mecca and Medina’s heritage
• “Meccahattan,” ICIT Digital Library
• Council of British Hajjis, on the protection of the Ottoman portico
• Sinem Cengiz, New Age Islam, on the fate of Ottoman heritage in Mecca
• Saudi Gazette, “Muzdalifah turns into a gallery of Ottoman-era artifacts”
• Madain Project, King Abdullah Expansion
• Madain Project, Exhibition of the Two Holy Mosques Architecture
• “Seven Columns,” Islamic Arts Biennale, Diriyah Biennale Foundation
• Asharq Al-Awsat, on the inscribed marble column dating a Grand Mosque minaret
• Pilgrim Experience Program, on the Exhibition of the Two Holy Mosques Architecture
• Saudipedia, Exhibition of the Two Holy Mosques Architecture
• The Independent, on Prince Turki al-Faisal’s response to heritage criticism
• Daily Sabah, quoting Sami Angawi
• Republika, quoting Sami Angawi
• 1990 Mecca tunnel tragedy, Wikipedia
• 2015 Mina crowd crush, Wikipedia
• BBC News, on the 2015 crane collapse
• BBC News, on the disputed Mina death toll
• “Hajj Stampede in Mina, 2015: Need for Intervention,” Archives of Trauma Research
• Incidents during the Hajj, Wikipedia
• Muhammad Sadiq (photographer), Wikipedia
• Qatar Digital Library, Sadiq Bey photograph
• Wikimedia Commons, Khalili Collection, Sadiq Bey photograph
• Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje, Wikipedia
• “Bilder aus Mekka,” Discover Islamic Art
• Sotheby’s, “Photographing Mecca”
• Islamic Arts Magazine, on early photographs of Mecca
• Muqarnas journal, on late Ottoman mobilities and Haramayn imagery, Brill
• IRCICA, Haremeyn photographs from the Ottoman period
• MIT Dome digital repository, César Daly architectural drawings
• Kaaba, Wikipedia
• “Four centuries as servants of the sanctuary: Ottoman rule over Mecca and Medina”
• Sahih al-Bukhari 1190, Sunnah.com
• Sahih Muslim 1394a, Sunnah.com
• Sahih Muslim 1401a, Sunnah.com
• Jami’ at-Tirmidhi 326, Sunnah.com
• Jami’ at-Tirmidhi 384, Sunnah.com
• Jami’ at-Tirmidhi 402, Sunnah.com
• Jami’ at-Tirmidhi 410, Sunnah.com
• Jami’ at-Tirmidhi 492, Sunnah.com
• Surah al-Baqarah 2:144, Quran.com
• Surah Al-Imran 3:96, Quran.com

A note on method: this article was built from a combination of encyclopedic reference works, a specialist academic monograph on Ottoman architecture, contemporary press investigation of the twentieth- and twenty-first-century demolitions, official Saudi cultural-institution exhibition material, and primary hadith and Qur’anic sources verified directly against Sunnah.com and Quran.com rather than quoted from memory. Where sources conflicted — on column counts, on Sinan’s personal role, on death tolls, on the precise scope of the “95 percent demolished” claim — this guide has reported the conflict rather than silently choosing a winner, in keeping with the editorial standard for this entire guide series. Nothing in this article was invented to fill a gap in the record; where the record was thin or contested, this guide has said so directly rather than smoothing over the uncertainty.