Shopping With God

What is lost through the glitz that Mecca has acquired is the subtlety of the spiritual experience

- Amir Ali

I Remember a conversation between two members of my extended family about the hajj, or the pilgrimage to Mecca, when I was a child. One of them, an elderly lady, had just returned from the pilgrimage and the other, a younger male relative, asked her what it felt like. The lady’s eyes lit up and she said that initially she had been very scared, as it went by so fast, but it was great to soar above the clouds and look down at the earth below from the aeroplane. The gentleman, himself a more widely travelled person, jokingly chided her: “Baaji (elder sister or cousin), I meant the destination, the holy city of Mecca, not how you got there!” This was a time when international air travel was just about becoming something more commonplace for the Indian middle class and therefore retained a kind of novelty to it. There were still stories going around about people making the journey by steamer ship.

The early experiences of hajj were ones about the great difficulty getting there—of pilgrims traversing the path on foot and on a camel’s back. There were tales of hajj pilgrims being looted on the way by robbers and highwaymen. Today’s experience seems to be much smoother. The city of Mecca itself and the precincts of the Masjid al-Haram or the Grand Mosque that encloses Islam’s holiest site—the Kaaba—have acquired the sheen of capitalism, made possible by the mighty petrodollar wealth of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The current cooling system of the Grand Mosque is one of the largest in the world with an energy consumption reaching 1,55,000 tonnes of refrigeration.

Today, the King of Saudi Arabia is referred to as the Khadim al-Haramain al-Sharifain or the custodian of the two holy cities of Mecca and Medina. The title originated with the Ottoman rulers when they had territorial jurisdiction over both cities. On the eve of the 1987