Mecca: The Sacred City

Mecca’s magnetism is unrivalled in the Muslim world, but it is known more as a symbol than a living city, the forgotten social and political realities of which Pakistani-British public intellectual Sardar uncovers in this captivating history. Despite its theological centrality, Mecca has often been on the margins of the Muslim polity—buffeted by the “irrational logic that haunts the exercise of empire”—and many of its rulers have “unashamedly offered... allegiance to the highest bidder.” Sardar focuses on human stories rather than dry minutiae, as in the tale of a Dutch scholar/spy who converted to Islam and married a local woman before his conversion was revealed to be a ruse. That Dutchman’s “unceremonious expulsion” receives more attention than a succession of emirs, of whom Sardar says “most of them were called Qasim or Hashim, [and] it is not easy to distinguish between them.” Mecca today is a “grotesque metropolis,” he notes, “built on the graves of houses and cultural sites of immense beauty and long history.” The house of the prophet Muhammad is slated to become a parking lot and his first wife’s is now a public toilet. The erasure of the city is not confined to its past: “In a city that owes its existence and survival to two women,” Sardar laments, “women are treated as chattels.” [em](Oct.) [/em]