Mecca: The Sacred City

Reading Ziauddin Sardar's Mecca: The Sacred City is like watching 1,500 years of stop-motion photography. The book takes us from our own time, to Muhammad's, and then slowly back to the present. From chapter to chapter, Mecca might seem timeless – we hear repeatedly about the residents' anti-intellectualism and dependency on foreign handouts, their sacking of caravans, the endless rivalries and jockeying for leadership, the women's love of heavy perfume – but slowly the pieces move across the board. We are taken from a proud independent city through the pitch and yaw of women's revolts, successive regimes, Mongols, Crusaders, Brits, and the Wahhabi followers of ibn Saud. Occasionally, it may feel as though things are repeating themselves. But slowly the city morphs into the one recognizable today, a place of wealth and contradictions ruled by contemporary Saudi Arabia.