Qualla: Mecca

Mecca: Introduction

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ali, CC BY-SA 2.5. Five times a day, roughly two billion people turn in the same direction. Whatever clock they are on, whatever hemisphere, whatever political circumstance, they orient themselves toward a single black-draped cubic structure at the center of a mosque in western Saudi Arabia. The Kaaba anchors the Islamic world geographically the way it anchors it spiritually. In Mecca itself, the crowds circling it during the Hajj can approach three million in a single week -- the largest regularly scheduled human gathering on Earth. Commercial flights may not pass over the city. No non-Muslim may enter. For fourteen centuries, this has been a place set apart from everything else.

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Image: Ali | CC BY-SA 2.5

Mecca: Where the Prophet Was Born

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Adiput (talk), Public domain. Muhammad was born in Mecca in 570 CE, into a city already organized around pilgrimage and trade. According to Muslim tradition, the Kaaba had been built by the prophet Abraham and his son Ishmael around 2000 BCE. In 610, in a cave on Jabal al-Nour just outside the city, Muhammad ...

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Image: Adiput (talk) | Public domain

Mecca: Centuries Under Distant Hands

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Granger18700, CC BY-SA 4.0. For over a thousand years after Muhammad, Mecca was ruled by outsiders who mostly left it alone. The Hashemite Emirs governed as local religious-temporal leaders from the tenth century. The Ottomans controlled the Hejaz from 1517 with only brief interruptions, building fortresses...

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Image: Granger18700 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Mecca: 1979: The Siege That Changed Everything

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Al Jazeera English, CC BY-SA 2.0. On 20 November 1979, at the first prayer of a new Islamic century, armed extremists seized the Grand Mosque and called for the overthrow of the Saudi royal family. The siege lasted two weeks and required French and Pakistani forces to help end it. The kingdom that emerged was dif...

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Image: Al Jazeera English | CC BY-SA 2.0

Mecca: The City That Was

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Yousefmadari, Public domain. An estimated 95 percent of Mecca's historic buildings have been demolished by the Saudi government, most of them more than a thousand years old. The Ajyad Fortress, an Ottoman citadel overlooking the Grand Mosque, came down in 2002 to clear ground for the Abraj Al Bait, a 15-bill...

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Image: Yousefmadari | Public domain

Mecca: The Crush of the Faithful

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ismael Cacharro, CC BY-SA 4.0. The modern Hajj moves millions of people through a choreography that is physically exhausting and sometimes dangerous. In September 2015, approximately 2,236 pilgrims were killed in a stampede at Mina -- the deadliest Hajj incident on record. Iran, which lost the most citizens, b...

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Image: Ismael Cacharro | CC BY-SA 4.0