Mecca: The Sacred City

"Zia is somebody I’ve admired for a long time. He’s also been a great mentor to me, a very generous man in that respect. Here we have a wonderful book that is a biography of a city so often reduced to just the city where the Kaaba, the black cube, is. Zia gives us a series of chapters that take you right back to the pre-Islamic period that look at the city from a host of different perspectives including the commercialisation of the city, how it has been fought over and some really tragic moments too. What elevates the book for me are the personal narratives Zia weaves in. We begin with Zia on his own pilgrimage stuck in the horrific traffic of Jeddah and later on a mission to find a donkey in the city! It’s witty, it’s funny. He’s a clever writer who uses lots of personal anecdotes to bring it all home for the reader. He also doesn’t shy away from the tougher things. He’s a Muslim, but he’s not there to paint Muslim culture in romantic tones, he’s there to tell it as it is. So, he’s transparent about the fratricide that has taken place amongst rulers of the past, and he offers a most fascinating glimpse into the advent of Wahhabism. This is the arrival of the harsh, intolerant interpretation of Islam that has led to problematic situations across the world since. Zia takes us back to the beginning, which is meshed with the foundation of the Saudi Kingdom back in the 18th century, when the puritanical preacher Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb partners with Ibn Saud, the founder of the Saudi dynasty to marry one person’s political ambitions with another’s religious ones. Zia goes back using people like Ali Bey Abbasi—a Spanish noble and convert—to present the most fascinating account of the Wahabis entering Makkah and the violence that surrounded their brief reign. One of the most amazing things I realised reading the book was that Zia was in Saudi during the Siege of Makkah, which happened the year I was born in 1979. This was the warning I feel the Saudis didn’t heed; the moment Wahhabism came home to roost in the most terrifying manner. Juhayman al-Otaybi—a follower of one of the great Saudi scholars, Ibn Baz—decided to occupy the Kaaba militarily using guns he and his followers smuggled into the sanctuary inside coffins. Whilst there, he declares the Saudi government disbelievers and that the Mahdi had arrived and was with him, the Mahdi is a person who, according to Islamic tradition will arrive at the end of time. The Saudis have done a great job of sweeping the incident under the carpet. Most people don’t even talk about the siege anymore. Many don’t even know it happened. For the Saudis it was extremely embarrassing, given Juhayman was a student of one of their great scholars. During the eventual trial, he actually came face to face with his teacher. Zia gives us an account of it: the teacher agrees with almost everything Juhayman is accusing the Saudis of, but he cannot legislate the horrific, violent action Juhayman took, and so in the end he was put to death. The eyewitness account Zia gave as someone in Saudi as it happens just blew me away. He describes the initial confusion—have non-Muslims hijacked the place? Is it the Iranians? Then we have the complete mess the Saudis made of things, because they didn’t understand the gravity of the situation and never expected any Muslim would do something like this at the Kaaba. There’s a wonderful moment where Zia describes how CIA agents brought in to help are quickly “converted” to Islam so they can enter the sanctuary to tackle the terrorists. It’s quite brilliant, and anybody that doesn’t know about the siege should definitely read Zia’s account of it. As well as Al-Abbasi, Zia introduces a number of European travellers that visited the city, including the Swiss Johann Ludwig Burckhardt and Sir Richard Burton as part of a series of wonderful, non-Muslim eyewitness accounts in the book, including the story of the lesser-known Dutch orientalist, Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje, credited with taking some of the earliest photographs of Makkah and the Hajj. He also recorded, on wax cylinders some of the earliest Quranic recitation made at the Great Mosque around the Kaaba. Recordings that go right back to the Ottoman period of Makkah in the late 19th century. I think anyone who reads this book will begin to appreciate the city in a more comprehensive manner."