KABUL: (Middle East Press) A leading contemporary Muslim intellectual said that the Saudis have turned Mecca into Disneyland.
A London-based scholar and public intellectual who specializes in Muslim thought and who conducted research for 40 years at the University of Jeddah on the pilgrimage was quoted in French newspaper Le Bon as: “The Saudis have turned Mecca into Disneyland.” Though the city has been remade again and again in the image of whatever power was dominant at the time, its current custodians, who look to Houston as a model, have done more harm than any predecessors. Having bulldozed the last of the buildings that gave Mecca any architectural distinction, they have erected “a grotesque metropolis”, an “eruption of architectural bling”.
The newspaper quoted Sardar adding that the ruling regime in Saudi Arabia gradually proceeded to wipe out all traces of the past from Mecca specially the seventies that witnessed the destruction of the oldest Islamic sites.
According to the Persian Gulf Institute, based in Washington, up to 95% of Mecca’s millennium-old buildings have been demolished. The sections being destroyed date back to the Ottoman and Abbasid period and are the last remaining parts of the compound that are more than a few hundred years old.
