Why Wahhabis invited Starbucks to Islam’s holiest city?

According to tradition, the pilgrimage to Mecca, the Holy Mosque and the most sacred site in Islam, the Kaaba, should be taken in great humility.

Ostentation, luxury and material inequality are not human ills associated with this pious journey and the thought of the area around the Mecca Mosque becoming a millionaire’s playground will seem bizarre and shocking to many of the faithful who emerge from their humble Rochdale and Oldham terrace to set forth on the great journey.

Yet this is just what critics of recent trends in the Saudi Kingdom now fear, and their attention focuses on one of the most gigantic real estate developments in the history of the holy city, a complex of apartments, restaurants, shopping malls and walkways, which include the 31-floor ZamZam Tower, Saudi Arabia’s tallest building, so tall, in fact, it casts its shadow across the Holy Mosque itself and the worshippers.

Ironically this leviathan was build by the Bin Laden Group whose ’son’ Osama was launched on his path to infamy by his hatred of the way the Saudi Royals were allowing the westernisation of the Kingdom.

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Taking his advice in a Topshop less than 100 yards from the Grand Mosque one day in December was Fatima, a twenty-something housewife. Trying to decide between the pink silk-screened tank-top and the lycra scoop-neck blouse, she stood in front of the mirror, frantically holding one and then the other over her black abaya robe. Her friend urged her to hurry up, flashing a Visa card to pay for her stretch jeans and oversized sunglasses at the register so they could make it to the Grand Mosque in time for prayers. But Fatima had been waiting all year to splurge at Topshop. “The store is closing soon,” she snaps at her friend. “You can pray any time.”

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Historic Mecca, the cradle of Islam, is being buried in an unprecedented onslaught by religious zealots.

Almost all of the rich and multi-layered history of the holy city is gone. The Washington-based Gulf Institute estimates that 95 per cent of millennium-old buildings have been demolished in the past two decades.

Now the actual birthplace of the Prophet Mohamed is facing the bulldozers, with the connivance of Saudi religious authorities whose hardline interpretation of Islam is compelling them to wipe out their own heritage.

It is the same oil-rich orthodoxy that pumped money into the Taliban as they prepared to detonate the Bamiyan buddhas in 2000. And the same doctrine – violently opposed to all forms of idolatry – that this week decreed that the Saudis’ own king be buried in an unmarked desert grave.

Whereas proposals for high-rise developments in Jerusalem have prompted a worldwide outcry and the Taliban’s demolition of the Bamiyan buddhas was condemned by Unicef, Mecca’s busy bulldozers have barely raised a whisper of protest. Read more

Mecca Bucks -

Why Wahhabis invited Starbucks to Islam’s holiest city

Zvika Krieger, The New Republic – Published: Wednesday, March 26, 2008

Multinational capitalism and its edifices rise in the shadow of Mecca’s Grand Mosque.

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A pamphlet published last year by the Ministry of Islamic Affairs, endorsed by Abdulaziz Al Sheikh, the Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia, and distributed at the Prophet’s Mosque, where Mohammed, Abu Bakr, and the Islamic Caliph Umar ibn Al Khattab are buried, reads, “The green dome shall be demolished and the three graves flattened in the Prophet’s Mosque,” according to Alawi, executive director of the London-based Islamic Heritage Research Foundation.

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This shocking sentiment was echoed in a speech by the late Muhammad ibn Al Uthaymeen, one of Saudi Arabia’s most prominent Wahhabi clerics, who delivered sermons in Mecca’s Grand Mosque for over 35 years: “We hope one day we’ll be able to destroy the green dome of the Prophet Mohammed,” he said, in a recording provided by Al Alawi.

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A Warning to Muslims against the Bid’ahs
Preached by Muhammad Ibn ‘Abdi-l-Wahhab Read more

Quran Qir’at (Recitation) with urdu translation