The holy city is fast becoming a Las Vegas for pilgrims

[azzo]

Turkish Article:

Kâbe’nin sütunları Helenistik çıktı - Hürriyet GÜNDEM​

 

[azzo]

Rest of the Haram artifacts are transferred to proper facilities and Museums

 

[azzo]

Some rare and beautiful photos and images.

Old Zamzam facility

King Saud era proposal

1996 Kaaba restoration

1970's sky shot

Close up of Kaaba's door and lock (Gold)

Some photos

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[azzo]

Oh so you are creating Jannat on land? Anyways, if everything is so luxurious and comfortable then what is the use of doing haj.

I am not against building these hotels, but I dont like it building so close to Kabbah which blocks air, sun , wind..

True. I agree. The prophet and his companions should've walked barefooted to Mecca, to make even less comfortable.

Also we should stop using Planes, everyone should walk to Mecca, just like Abraham did.

Anyway, sarcasm aside, if this look like "jannat" to you then you're underestimating God.

Also you're contradicting yourself:

if everything is so luxurious and comfortable then what is the use of doing haj.

VS

I dont like it building so close to Kabbah which blocks air, sun , wind..

So you want it to be more or less comfortable for pilgrims? make up your mind Saudi hater.

And it's obvious that you have never visitied Mecca before, since it's already very hot there. So Saudi bult the biggest air conditioning facility in the world for pilgrims' comfort.​

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By the way, your logic is so similar to ISIS', I would only post in incognito if I were you.

 

[Shan-e-ibrahim]

True. I agree. The prophet and his companions should've walked barefooted to Mecca, to make even less comfortable.

Also we should stop using Planes, everyone should walk to Mecca, just like Abraham did.

Anyway, sarcasm aside, if this look like "jannat" to you then you're underestimating God.

Also you're contradicting yourself:

VS

​

So you want it to be more or less comfortable for pilgrims? make up your mind Saudi hater.

And it's obvious that you have never visitied Mecca before, since it's already very hot there. So Saudi bult the biggest air conditioning facility in the world for pilgrims' comfort.​

​

By the way, your logic is so similar to ISIS', I would only post in incognito if I were you.

Making it so close to the Kabbah is not right

 

[Zarvan]

City in the sky: world's biggest hotel to open in Mecca | Art and design | The Guardian

Four helipads will cluster around one of the largest domes in the world, like sideplates awaiting the unveiling of a momentous main course, which will be jacked up 45 storeys into the sky above the deserts of Mecca. It is the crowning feature of the holy city’s crowning glory, the superlative summit of what will be the world’s largest hotel when it opens in 2017.

With 10,000 bedrooms and 70 restaurants, plus five floors for the sole use of the Saudi royal family, the £2.3bn Abraj Kudai is an entire city of five-star luxury, catering to the increasingly high expectations of well-heeled pilgrims from the Gulf.

Modelled on a “traditional desert fortress”, seemingly filtered through the eyes of a Disneyland imagineer with classical pretensions, the steroidal scheme comprises 12 towers teetering on top of a 10-storey podium, which houses a bus station, shopping mall, food courts, conference centre and a lavishly appointed ballroom.

Located in the Manafia district, just over a mile south of the Grand Mosque, the complex is funded by the Saudi Ministry of Finance and designed by the Dar Al-Handasah group, a 7,000-strong global construction conglomerate that turns its hand to everything from designing cities in Kazakhstan to airports in Dubai. For the Abraj Kudai, it has followed the wedding-cake pastiche style of the city’s recent hotel boom: cornice is piled upon cornice, with fluted pink pilasters framing blue-mirrored windows, some arched with a vaguely Ottoman air. The towers seem to be packed so closely together that guests will be able to enjoy views into each other’s rooms.

“The city is turning into Mecca-hattan,” says Irfan Al-Alawi, director of the UK-based Islamic Heritage Research Foundation, which campaigns to try to save what little heritage is left in Saudi Arabia’s holy cities. “Everything has been swept away to make way for the incessant march of luxury hotels, which are destroying the sanctity of the place and pricing normal pilgrims out.”

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The Grand Mosque is now loomed over by the second tallest building in the world, the Abraj al-Bait clocktower, home to thousands more luxury hotel rooms, where rates can reach £4,000 a night for suites with the best views of the Kaaba – the black cube at the centre of the mosque around which Muslims must walk. The hotel rises 600m (2,000ft) into the air, projecting a dazzling green laser-show by night, on a site where an Ottoman fortress once stood – razed for development, along with the hill on which it sat.

The list of heritage crimes goes on, driven by state-endorsed Wahhabism, the hardline interpretation of Islam that perceives historical sites as encouraging sinful idolatry – which spawned the ideology that is now driving Isis’s reign of destruction in Syria and Iraq. In Mecca and Medina, meanwhile, anything that relates to the prophet could be in the bulldozer’s sights. The house of Khadijah, his first wife, was crushed to make way for public lavatories; the house of his companion Abu Bakr is now the site of a Hilton hotel; his grandson’s house was flattened by the king’s palace. Moments from these sites now stands a Paris Hilton store and a gender-segregated Starbucks.

“These are the last days of Mecca,” says Alawi. “The pilgrimage is supposed to be a spartan, simple rite of passage, but it has turned into an experience closer to Las Vegas, which most pilgrims simply can’t afford.”


Along the western edge of Mecca, the Jabal Omar development, which will accommodate 100,000 people. Photograph: Jabal Omar Development
The city receives around 2 million pilgrims for the annual Hajj, but during the rest of the year more than 20 million visit the city, which has become a popular place for weddings and conferences, bringing in annual tourism revenue of around £6bn. The skyline bristles with cranes, summoning thickets of hotel towers to accommodate the influx. Along the western edge of the city the Jabal Omar development now rises, a sprawling complex that will eventually accommodate 100,000 people in 26 luxury hotels – sitting on another gargantuan plinth of 4,000 shops and 500 restaurants, along with its own six-storey prayer hall.

The Grand Mosque, meanwhile, is undergoing a £40bn expansion to double the capacity of its prayer halls – from 3 million worshippers currently to nearly 7 million by 2040. Planned like a vast triangular slice of cake, the extension goes so far back that most worshippers won’t even be able to see the Kaaba.

“It is just like an airport terminal,” says Alawi. “People have been finding they’re praying in the wrong direction because they simply don’t know which way the mosque is any more. It has made a farce of the whole place.”

I think Saudis should stop and don't build any thing for next 10 years and when after few years if people die because of lack of facilities hang those who oppose it

 

[tested]

Don't see the issue here.

They have to manage tens of millions of pilgrims and unless they build gigantic facilities, how will they be able to effectively manage those people.

 

[azzo]

Mecca's "West gate" project

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[azzo]

New twin Minarets

The Minarets are 420 Meters high, ~100 meters higher than the tallest building in Europe, which may give a much needed balance to downtown Mecca and give the Mosque more prominence against the Gigantic 601 meters high Abraj Albait complex.

 

[Saif al-Arab]

@azzo

Excellent updates brother. Please post those in this thread below.

"Makkah and Madinah News and Updates"

We already made our correct points. The ignorants and their barking is irrelevant anyway.

Nobody does it better than KSA on this front.