History

Ancient Mecca was an oasis on the old caravan trade route that linked the Mediterranean world with South Arabia, East Africa, and South Asia. The town was located about midway between Maʾrib in the south and Petra in the north, and it gradually developed by Roman and Byzantine times into an important trade and religious center. Ptolemy’s inclusion of Macoraba, a city of the Arabian interior, in his Guide to Geography was long held to show that Mecca was known to the Hellenistic world. Since the late 20th century, however, some scholarship has called the identification of Macoraba with Mecca into question.

According to Islamic tradition, Abraham and Ishmael, his son by Hagar, built the Kaaba as the house of God. The central point of pilgrimage in Mecca before the advent of Islam in the 7th century, the cube-shaped stone building has been destroyed and rebuilt several times. During pre-Islamic times the city was ruled by a series of Yemeni tribes. Under the Quraysh it became a type of city-state, with strong commercial links to the rest of Arabia, Ethiopia, and Europe. Mecca became a place for trade, for pilgrimage, and for tribal gatherings.

The city’s religious importance greatly increased with the birth of Muhammad about 570. The Prophet was forced to flee from Mecca in 622, but he returned eight years later and took control of the city. He purged Mecca of idols, declared it a center of Muslim pilgrimage, and dedicated it to God. Since then the city has remained the major religious center of Islam. As the ancient caravan route fell into decline, Mecca lost its commercial significance and has since lived mainly on the proceeds from the annual pilgrimages and the gifts of Muslim rulers.

Mecca was sacked by the Umayyad general al-Ḥajjāj ibn Yūsuf, and thereafter the city acknowledged the power of the Umayyad caliphate at Damascus and, following the eclipse of that dynasty, of the Abbasid caliphate of Baghdad. The city suffered great indignity at the hands of the Qarmatians in 930 when that sect’s leader, Ṭāhir Sulaymān, pillaged Mecca and carried off the Black Stone from the Kaaba. Beginning in the mid-10th century, the local city rulers were chosen from the sharifs, or descendants of Muhammad, who retained a strong hold on the surrounding area while often paying homage to stronger political entities. The ability of the sharifs, originally moderate Shiʿis, to adapt to the changing political and religious climate ensured their preeminence in local affairs for the next 1,000 years. In 1269 Mecca came under the control of the Egyptian Mamluk sultans. In 1517 dominion over the holy city passed to the Ottoman Empire, with its capital in Constantinople (now Istanbul). With the Ottoman collapse after World War I, control of Mecca was contested between the sharifs and the Āl Saʿūd (the Saud family) of central Arabia, adherents to an austere, puritanical form of Islam known as Wahhābism. King Ibn Saud entered the city in 1925, and it later became part of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the capital of Makkah minṭaqah idāriyyah.

Under Saudi rule, Wahhābism was enforced as the state credo, and the facilities for pilgrims were improved. Mecca underwent extensive economic development as Saudi Arabia’s petroleum resources were exploited after World War II, and the number of yearly pilgrims exploded. Despite lavish expenditures by the Saudi government to renovate the city and mosque area in terms of both beauty and safety, the overwhelming crush of pilgrims each year has led to tragedy on several occasions, as in 1990, when nearly 1,500 pilgrims were trampled in a pedestrian tunnel, and in 1997, when several hundred more died in a tent city fire and its ensuing panic.

Political turmoil and violence have also often plagued the city. In 1979 a group of militants, mostly Saudi but including many from other Islamic countries, seized the Great Mosque and were evicted only with great loss of life after an assault by the Saudi National Guard. During the 1980s and ’90s Iranian pilgrims frequently engaged in political protests that led to clashes with Saudi police, and many deaths and injuries ensued.