SUNNI NEWS: Mecca Bucks: Why Saudis invited Starbucks to Islam’s holiest city
Multinational capitalism and its edifices rise in the shadow of Mecca’s Grand Mosque.
According to some popular Muslim accounts, the marble Kaaba structure at the center of the Grand Mosque in Mecca was built first by the angels before God created mankind, reconstructed by Adam, and later rebuilt by Abraham and Ishmael. It’s safe to say that none of these builders could have anticipated the latest use of the Mosque’s image, in a promotional DVD for the Abraj Al Bait Towers, a giant new skyscraper complex slated to be built just across the street from one of the entrances to the Grand Mosque. The DVD shows a beautiful woman sitting in one of the towers’ luxury apartments with floor-to-ceiling windows that overlook thousands of pilgrims circling the Kaaba below. Eyes flashing a come-hither stare from beneath her tightly wound headscarf, she asks prospective buyers in Arabic, “Would you like to be here in this place in front of the Kaaba year after year?”
Unlike the United Arab Emirates, with its Western-friendly, oil-money-flush megalopolises Dubai and Abu Dhabi, Saudi Arabia had, until very recently, resisted commercializing its major cities–particularly Mecca, site of Islam’s holiest relics, where millions of pilgrims flock yearly to perform the hajj. But the dramatic rise in global oil prices, and the construction boom across Saudi Arabia that followed, has finally caught up with the city where Mohammed was born. » | Zvika Krieger, The New Republic | Wednesday, March 26, 2008
