Mecca

• 1. The City No Outsider May Enter

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  Around 19.3 million international visitors arrived at a single city in 2024, making it one of the five most visited places on Earth. Yet under Saudi law, a non-Muslim who reaches its boundary and is caught can be arrested and prosecuted. The city is Mecca, officially Makkah al-Mukarramah, set in a narrow valley 277 meters above sea level in the Hejazi region of western Saudi Arabia. Its metropolitan population in 2022 stood at 2.4 million. During the Hajj, that number more than triples within a week. This is a place that holds two truths at once. It is closed to most of humanity, and it draws more humanity than almost anywhere else. How did a barren valley with brackish water become the direction toward which every Muslim on the planet turns to pray? Why have rulers spent fourteen centuries fighting to hold it, and why has the modern Saudi state torn down so much of its own past inside its walls? The answers run from a fossil 28 million years old to a clock tower 601 meters tall.

• 2. Names Beneath The Name

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  Makkah is the official transliteration the Saudi government adopted in the 1980s, chosen because it sits closer to the Arabic pronunciation. The full official name is Makkah al-Mukarramah, and the Quran uses Makkah in Surah Al-Fath, verse 24. The familiar English form, Mecca, carries a complication. It has come to mean any place that draws large crowds, and because of that some English-speaking Muslims now regard the spelling for the city as offensive. The Quran also reaches for other names. At 6:92 it calls the city Umm al-Qura, the Mother of all Settlements. In Surah Al Imran, verse 96, it names the place Bakkah: "Indeed the first House of worship, established for mankind was that at Bakkah." That word has been transliterated many ways, among them Baca, Bakah and Becca. Older still are the names that surface in ancient geography. Claudius Ptolemy listed a place called Macoraba within Arabia, and since 1646 scholars have argued over whether it means Mecca. One traditional etymology traces the city to the Old South Arabian root M-K-R-B, meaning "temple." The 12th-century Syrian geographer Yaqut al-Hamawi recorded another name, Faran, which he called "an Arabized Hebrew word, one of the names of Mecca mentioned in the Torah."

• 3. A Valley Argued Over By Scholars

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  In 2010, the discovery of a Saadanius fossil turned the area around Mecca into an important site for the study of primate evolution. The creature lived in a damp forest near what is now the Red Sea, between 28 million and 29 million years ago, and it sits close to the common ancestor of Old World monkeys and apes. Move forward to human history, and the clear sources nearly vanish. The early history of Mecca remains shrouded, because the city lies in remote, rocky country that supported only meager settled populations in scattered oases. The Red Sea coast offered no easy ports, and the oasis dwellers and bedouins were illiterate. Academic research suggests that in Muhammad's time the population was around 550, while Muslim scholars using traditional sources place it as high as 10,000. The first clear reference to Mecca in non-Islamic literature appears in 741, long after Muhammad's death, in the Chronicle of 741. Earlier mentions stay ambiguous, and historians disagree sharply. Patricia Crone of the Revisionist school wrote that "the plain truth is that the name Macoraba has nothing to do with that of Mecca." Glen Bowersock argued the opposite, reading Macoraba as "Makkah" followed by an Aramaic adjective meaning great. Crone also doubted Mecca was a major trading outpost, then later set aside some of her own theories. She came to argue that Meccan trade ran on skins, hides, leather goods, clarified butter, Hijazi woollens and camels, much of it destined for the Roman army's enormous need for leather.

• 4. The Quraysh And The Caravans

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  Sometime in the 5th century, the Quraysh tribe took control of Mecca and became skilled merchants. Their most important pagan deity, Hubal, stood at the Kaaba, which had become a place of worship for the deities of Arabia's tribes. By the 6th century the Quraysh had entered the spice trade, helped by wars elsewhere that pushed routes off dangerous seas and the Persian Gulf onto safer overland paths. Camel caravans, said to have first been used by Muhammad's great-grandfather, drove the city's economy. Local nomadic tribes brought leather, livestock and metals mined in the mountains to be loaded and carried to cities in Shaam and Iraq. Goods from Africa and the Far East passed through on their way to Syria, including spices, medicine, cloth and slaves, and in return Mecca took in money, weapons, cereals and wine. The Meccans signed treaties with both the Byzantines and the Bedouins, and negotiated safe passage, water and pasture rights for their caravans. Although the land around Mecca was completely barren, it was the wealthiest of three settlements along that coast, with abundant water from the Zamzam Well and a place at the crossroads of caravan routes. Once a year the warring tribes declared a truce and converged on Mecca for an annual pilgrimage. They came to pay homage to their shrine and to drink Zamzam, but they also settled debts, arbitrated disputes and traded at the Meccan fairs. As other regional powers declined, Meccan trade became the primary binding force in Arabia in the late 6th century.

• 5. The Year Of The Elephant

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  Abraha, a Christian leader, built a great cathedral at San'aa called al-Qullays in honor of the Negus of Axum, and he meant to divert the Arabs' pilgrimage away from the Kaaba toward it. The episode gave its name to the Year of the Elephant, dated roughly to 570 to 572, and Islamic tradition holds it as the year of Muhammad's birth. According to Ibn Ishaq, the affair turned violent before the army even marched. Abraha sent a messenger named Muhammad ibn Khuza'i with word that al-Qullays was purer than other houses of worship. When the messenger reached the land of Banu Kinana, a man of Hudhayl named Urwa bin Hayyad al-Milasi shot him dead with an arrow. Enraged, Abraha swore to raid the Kinana tribe and destroy the Kaaba, and he marched with a large army that included one or more war elephants. The tribes of Quraysh, Kinanah, Banu Khuza'ah and Hudhayl united to defend the city. Abd al-Muttalib told the Meccans to take refuge in the hills, and as he left a meeting with Abraha he was heard to say: "The Owner of this House is its Defender, and I am sure he will save it." The lead elephant, named Mahmud, is said to have halted at the boundary and refused to enter. Some have theorized that an epidemic such as smallpox broke the invasion. The Quran's 105th Surah, Al-Fil, tells it differently, describing birds sent by Allah that dropped small stones on the Ethiopian forces and reduced them to a state like eaten straw.

• 6. Conquest And The Turn Of The Qibla

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  Muhammad was born in Mecca in 570, into the faction of Banu Hashim within the ruling Quraysh. In the cave of Hira on Jabal al-Nour, he began receiving revelations through the archangel Jibreel in 610. After 13 years of persecution by the pagan tribes, he emigrated in 622 to Yathrib, later renamed Medina, in the journey called the Hijrah. The conflict with the Quraysh is taken to begin there. At the Battle of the Trench in 627, the combined armies of Arabia could not break Muhammad's forces. In 628, blocked from entering the city for pilgrimage, Muslims and Meccans signed the Treaty of al-Hudaybiya, a ceasefire meant to last 10 years that promised the Muslims entry the following year. Just two years later, the Banu Bakr, allies of the Quraysh, broke the truce by slaughtering members of the Banu Khuza'ah. Muhammad marched in 10,000 strong and conquered the city, and his followers destroyed the pagan imagery and rededicated the site to Allah alone. Mecca was declared the holiest site in Islam and the center of the Hajj, one of the faith's Five Pillars. After appointing Attab ibn Asid as governor, Muhammad returned to Medina, and he died in 632. The political center, though, moved away from Mecca again and again. Ali chose Kufa, the Umayyads moved the capital to Damascus, and the Abbasids to Baghdad, which held the heart of the empire for nearly 500 years.

• 7. Rulers, Sieges And A Famine Of Stone

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  In 930, the Qarmatians, a millenarian Shi'a Isma'ili sect led by Abu Tahir al-Jannabi, attacked and sacked the city. The Black Death reached Mecca in 1349, and a few decades earlier, around 1327, the Moroccan traveler Ibn Battuta arrived and stayed three years before leaving in 1330. He found the people humble and kind, willing to give a part of everything they had to someone who had nothing, and the city itself very clean. In 1517 the Sharif of Mecca, Barakat bin Muhammad, accepted the supremacy of the Ottoman Caliph while keeping wide local autonomy. The First Saudi state captured the city in 1803 and held it until 1813, destroying historic tombs and domes, until Muhammad Ali Pasha returned Mecca to Ottoman control. In 1853, Sir Richard Francis Burton made the pilgrimage disguised as a Muslim, one of the most documented such journeys, though Ludovico di Varthema had reached the city as early as 1503. Cholera was a recurring terror, breaking out among pilgrims 27 times between 1830 and 1930. Water itself was a centuries-long struggle. Zubayda, wife of the caliph Harun ar-Rashid, funded a vast waterworks likely costing 1.75 million gold dinars, building an underground aqueduct to bring water to the Masjid al-Haram. The system kept failing and was repaired again and again, until Suleiman the Magnificent rebuilt it entirely between 1525 and 1571. By al-Kurdi's count there had been 89 floods by 1965, the worst in 1942.

• 8. The Modern Sanctuary And Its Vanished Past

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  On the 20th of November 1979, two hundred armed dissidents led by Juhayman al-Otaybi seized the Grand Mosque, took tens of thousands of pilgrims hostage and held the building for two weeks, leaving several hundred dead and the Safa and Marwa gallery badly damaged. The siege came not long after the Sharif of Mecca was overthrown and the city was folded into Saudi Arabia following the Capture of Mecca in 1924, itself preceded by T. E. Lawrence's wartime intrigue with Hussain bin Ali and the Battle of Mecca in 1916. Under Saudi rule the city has been transformed and, in large part, erased. It has been estimated that since 1985 about 95% of Mecca's historic buildings, most over a thousand years old, have been demolished, leaving fewer than 20 structures dating to Muhammad's time. Gone are the house of Khadijah, the house of Abu Bakr, Muhammad's birthplace and the Ottoman-era Ajyad Fortress, much of it cleared for hotels, parking lots and pilgrim infrastructure. Above the Great Mosque now rises the Abraj al-Bait Complex, its central clock tower reaching 601 meters, the world's fourth-tallest building. The crowds bring their own dangers. On the 2nd of July 1990, a failed ventilation system in a crowded tunnel left 1,426 people suffocated or trampled, and on the 24th of September 2015, 700 pilgrims died in a stampede at Mina during the stoning ritual. The Haramain High Speed Railway, opened in 2018, now carries pilgrims between Mecca and Medina at up to 300 kilometers per hour. And on Monday, the 2nd of August 2027, the city will fall into the shadow of a total solar eclipse lasting 5 minutes and 8 seconds.