Book contents
- Frontmatter
- 1 Introduction: Muslims and modernity: culture and society in an age of contest and plurality
- PART I SOCIAL TRANSFORMATIONS
- PART II RELIGION AND LAW
- PART III POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC THOUGHT
- PART IV CULTURES, ARTS AND LEARNING
- 20 Islamic knowledge and education in the modern age
- 21 History, heritage and modernity: cities in the Muslim world between destruction and reconstruction
- 22 Islamic philosophy and science
- 23 The press and publishing
- 24 The modern art of the Middle East
- 25 Cinema and television in the Arab world
- 26 Electronic media and new Muslim publics
- Glossary
- Bibliography
- Index
- References
21 - History, heritage and modernity: cities in the Muslim world between destruction and reconstruction
from PART IV - CULTURES, ARTS AND LEARNING
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2011
- Frontmatter
- 1 Introduction: Muslims and modernity: culture and society in an age of contest and plurality
- PART I SOCIAL TRANSFORMATIONS
- PART II RELIGION AND LAW
- PART III POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC THOUGHT
- PART IV CULTURES, ARTS AND LEARNING
- 20 Islamic knowledge and education in the modern age
- 21 History, heritage and modernity: cities in the Muslim world between destruction and reconstruction
- 22 Islamic philosophy and science
- 23 The press and publishing
- 24 The modern art of the Middle East
- 25 Cinema and television in the Arab world
- 26 Electronic media and new Muslim publics
- Glossary
- Bibliography
- Index
- References
Summary
Introduction
In recent years, Islam’s two holiest cities have been purged of the ancient architectural vestiges of a more tolerant past. In the name of Wahhābī conceptions of religious purity, the Saudi leadership stripped Mecca and Medina’s historic sites of ‘heretical effigies’ fearing that heritage preservation ‘could lead to polytheism and idolatry’. The historic urban fabric around sacred sites was destroyed; Dār al-Arqām – the first school in Islamic history where the Prophet taught – was demolished; the Mosque of Billāl, the Baqīʿa cemetery of the Prophet’s companions, Shāfiʿī, Sufi and, of course, Shīʿa shrines were bulldozed down to bedrock by the Saudi Ministry of Awqāf to expunge the haunting spirits of Islam’s history of diversity. Since the oil boom of the 1970s Mecca’s delicate ecological system that had facilitated the sublime experience of the ḥajj around the holy precinct for a millennium and a half, has been turned into ‘a nightmare obstacle course generating hazards in which the very survival of the pilgrims was at stake’. Pilgrims had moved through it ‘like water flowing in a gentle stream’ for centuries. Now, the Qurʾānic Barren Valley was turned into a concrete jungle whose multistorey banks, malls and hotels have laid siege to the Grand Mosque. The developer charged with the reconstruction of Mecca and Medina – the Saudi Bin Ladin Group – celebrated the project as a ‘Story of the Great Expansion’.
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- The New Cambridge History of Islam , pp. 521 - 548Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2010
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