between Mecca and Medina. He produced a film about the worsening traffic problems in the holy cities.
Angawi emphasized, prudently, that he did not doubt “for a second” King Fahd’s good intentions, but he challenged the basic assumptions of the Bin Laden–managed projects. “We keep the foreigners out, but allow everything else you can think of—shopping malls, Kentucky Fried Chicken, McDonald’s, neon signs,” he said later. “The companies that plan, that construct, that buy the land—you only have one company [the Bin Ladens]. I have nothing against them. But this is the wrong approach. It’s a fantastic conflict of interest. The answer is bulldozers and dynamite. Knock it down, build it up, pour it over with marble and decorate it with things that look Islamic…If you want to accommodate more people praying, that’s one thing. If you want to accommodate more cars, that’s another. We ended up with skyscrapers and buildings.”8
By 1989, because of his dissent, Angawi had fallen under so much pressure from the Saudi establishment that he resigned from his Hajj center. At that point, the Medina renovation was a lost cause—the new mosque and its supporting infrastructure were under construction, and York International had its orders for multiton chillers. In Mecca, however, where the plans for renovation were not yet fully committed, Angawi saw an opportunity to push for at least some historical preservation of ancient monuments and sites. He and the Hejazi intellectuals around him in Jeddah who joined his quiet agitation felt a connection, often through their family histories, to the pre-Saudi architecture of Mecca. In some respects, Angawi’s circle in Jeddah—lawyers, architects, writers, business executives—constituted a new generation of globally minded Saudi intellectuals, who had been influenced through travel and schooling by preservation movements elsewhere in the Arab world, as well as in Europe. They understood that in Wahhabi-dominated Saudi Arabia, advocating historic conservation was a dangerous political and theological stance, but they also felt protected by the global respectability of their cause. So they pushed back—not enough to end up in prison, but enough, as it happened, to annoy the Bin Ladens.
The family’s renovation work in Mecca during the 1990s was of a different character than its renovation of the Prophet’s Mosque in Medina. In Medina a single building had to be expanded and updated. In Mecca the priorities had less to do with the Grand Mosque itself than with surrounding sites visited during the Hajj rituals. Each year, for example, all the pilgrims assembled in tent camps on the plain of Arafat, about nine miles from Mecca city; at a prescribed time, known as the Day of Standing, they stood together in an awesome assembly in the desert, beseeching God. That huge gathering was followed by a mass symbolic stoning of the Devil, carried out by hurling pebbles at certain columns several miles from Arafat. Each pilgrim was also expected to purchase and sacrifice a sheep or other animal, as an offering to God. The logistical and sanitary challenges presented by the occupation of an open desert camp of 2 million people, followed by group rock throwing and animal slaughter, can be readily imagined. Hajj after Hajj, a stampede, fire, collapsing bridge, or other mishap would claim hundreds of pilgrim lives. Even in the absence of such calamities, the heat of a summer Hajj on Arafat could be too much for many elderly pilgrims. Then, too, there was the traffic: “The largest traffic jam I have ever seen,” recalled Mark Caudill, an American pilgrim. It took hours to move just a few miles around Arafat, and even after the day’s rituals were completed, “The sounds and smells of diesel trucks idling through the night were accompanied by occasional screams of sirens, Saudi traffic police barking admonitions through bullhorns, and the roiling murmur of more than two million souls.”9
King Fahd, with the Bin Ladens as his instrument, tried to alleviate this traffic-induced suffering. His approach, however, was typical of transportation development approaches popular in the United States: more roads, more parking lots, more tunnels, and more bridges. The Mohamed Bin Laden Company built parking lots at Arafat and elsewhere during the mid-1990s, totaling millions of square feet. Above the Arafat plain, to cool off the faithful during the Day of Standing, they installed an overhead water piping system that spewed out thin jets of water above the pilgrims’ heads. They dug new connector roads and flyovers, laid down pedestrian walkways, installed water fountains, and put in 14,200 public toilets. They built a modern slaughterhouse that could accommodate 500,000 goats and sheep, plus another that could handle 10,000 camels and cattle—these facilities supported a new government-run voucher system for the slaughter ritual, whereby pilgrims could purchase a ticket that ensured a Saudi official carried out their sacrifice in a sanitary manner. All this was supported by new security systems in and around Mecca, designed to ensure that the 1979 uprising at the Grand Mosque was never repeated—surveillance cameras were installed copiously, along with command centers, alarm systems, and supporting communications. Here, too, the Bin Ladens were in charge.10
Sami Angawi consulted for the governor of Mecca following his resignation from the Hajj center. He tried to keep track of the city’s archaeological heritage. There had been a time, he knew, prior to the Saudi kingdom, when pilgrims in Mecca diverted themselves with visits to several hundred historical and mythical sites, much as visitors to Jerusalem and its surrounding areas still do. One semi-mythical site that had been long discussed in Meccan tradition was the Prophet Mohamed’s original home, where he lived during his days as a businessman, prior to receiving divine revelations. Around 1991, as the Bin Ladens began to shift their renovation work from Medina to Mecca, Angawi learned from a local preservationist that a site had been discovered that might be the Prophet’s house. It seemed to be in the right place. An ancient wall of the structure had been exposed by initial bulldozer work undertaken during Mecca’s redevelopment.
“I was told by one of the elders of the city that this place might be destroyed,” Angawi recalled. “So I moved in and I tried to use every connection and authority I have.” He found a professor at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London to advise his preliminary archaeological work at the site. He began to dig and to inventory carefully what he found. He undertook historical research to explore evidence that could confirm or refute the discovery.11
As he worked, the question became whether it might be possible to accommodate both Angawi’s vision of Mecca and that of Fahd and the Bin Ladens. Angawi and his allies acknowledged that the renovations had eased the experience of visiting pilgrims. Mecca and Medina could now “accommodate more, and it could accommodate them more comfortably,” said a Jeddah professional aligned with Angawi. “But it was done at the expense of other things.
“This is where they used the Bin Ladens,” Angawi’s ally recalled. “In the Holy Mosque of Mecca, there were columns with engraved inscriptions a thousand years old. And they’d say, ‘Wouldn’t a marble column be nice here?’ And the Bin Ladens would say, ‘Sure, we can give you a polished marble column.’ And they didn’t preserve what they knocked down for a museum, and they did it without any control or supervision…We have all these slick brass lamps, but no accounting of the heritage.”12
The Bin Ladens, of course, were considerably more influential than the preservationists. Within forty days after he started working at the presumed site of the Prophet’s house, Angawi won the formal attention of the Saudi government: Officials ordered him to stop what he was doing and vacate the place.
Angawi contacted the Bin Ladens, including Bakr. Couldn’t they find some way to work around this one particular area of the Prophet’s house during their renovation projects? Or could they at least proceed in gradual steps, so he could finish some of his digging and documentation? No, he was told. Either Angawi would get out of the hole or he would be bulldozed over himself, he was told. “We have our orders.”13
At that point Angawi began to lose some of his equilibrium. “I brought my children out to the site,” and he dared the Bin Ladens to start up their bulldozer engines. “They took that in for a couple of weeks,” he recalled. “I was really going wild. My mind was fixed.”14
Gradually the two camps shuffled toward a partial compromise. This was not jihad, after all; it was a struggle over principle and ideology between two wealthy and privileged camps of the Saudi elite, a struggle in which leaders on both sides carried memories of noisy but passive sitins at their Vietnam-era American university campuses overseas. In the end, Angawi was permitted to spend some time making a fuller inventory of his dig site—but he was then ordered to stay away from the site for three months. The Bin Ladens moved in and did their bulldozing.
Ultimately, the Bin Ladens installed a sparkling new public toilet facility on top of the ruin that Angawi believed had been the Prophet’s home. At times, it seemed, there was something about being a Bin Laden that made it hard to be subtle.
IN 1996 Bakr published a book to celebrate the family’s work in Mecca and Medina during the previous eight years. It was titled
