Before I went on the hajj, I flew home to Kashmir from Delhi to seek advice from my father, who had been to Mecca in 1987, as a bureaucrat supervising Indian pilgrims. He had travelled by bus through the Himalayas separating Kashmir from the Indian plains, taken a thirty-six-hour train journey to Bombay, and finally boarded a ship that sailed across the Arabian Sea to the port city of Jeddah. I had never seen the sea, but a childhood of reading tales of shipwrecks had filled me with a mortal fear of it. When my father left, I clung to his knees, and he promised to bring me a Polaroid camera. In the years since his pilgrimage, air travel has replaced sea voyages; instead of letters, pilgrims now send texts and e-mail photos from holy sites. Mecca, too, has changed. The pilgrimage, which draws between two million and three million people every year, has become a modern spectacle: it has been described by a Saudi Arabian Minister of Hajj as resembling “twenty Super Bowls in one stadium, when two million will come, and . . . these two million people will actually be taking part in playing the game.”

Kashmir is far from the cultural landscape of Arabia, but Mecca exerted a powerful influence in my homeland. For many of my middle-class family’s friends and acquaintances, the hajj was the only major journey that they made. They saved up for years and travelled to Mecca in their fifties and sixties, after they had put their children through college and built a house. South Asian Muslim men who have performed the pilgrimage are respectfully referred to as Haaji Sahib. Throughout the hajj, pilgrims wear an ihram, two unstitched sheets of white cloth that resemble a shroud, so my father took me to a store in Srinagar’s center that had a section for hajj gear. In the evening, after he had drawn me a flowchart of the hajj and explained its rituals, I managed to put on the ihram, with the help of a YouTube video in Urdu. Friends and relatives called to convey the prayers they wanted answered in Mecca. Though I had not prayed in many years, I grew up fasting during Ramadan, and when I go through turbulence on a plane I recite the verses of the Koran that I know by heart.

The hajj is one of the pillars of Islam—every Muslim who can afford it is obliged to travel to Mecca for the hajj once, and non-Muslims are forbidden to enter the city. With its origins in the story of Abraham, the hajj is a set of rituals performed every year for five days in the month of Dhu al-Hijjah. Pilgrims follow the route of Muhammad, who went on only one hajj before he died. It begins in Mecca, before moving to the desert of Mina, then to Arafat, for a daylong vigil, then to the rocky plain of Muzdalifah, a few miles away, where pilgrims collect pebbles to ritually stone the Devil, and then returns to Mina for three days. Back in Mecca, pilgrims bid farewell to the Kaaba, the cube-shaped granite building that is the holiest site in Islam. The Saudi government controls the flow of visitors through quotas, allowing each country one pilgrim for every thousand Muslim citizens. Indonesia sends around two hundred thousand people, which is the largest contingent, followed by Pakistan and India. Prospective pilgrims in India apply a year in advance, and most of them are chosen through a lottery, which awards passage for around twenty-six hundred dollars. The Indian government also sells a third of the places to private tour operators, who charge higher rates for more luxurious accommodations. The tour I was on was run by Feroz Ahmad, a carpet exporter from Srinagar, who every year takes around a hundred people for the hajj.

On a mild day in late October, I met up with my group at the Delhi airport. Ahmad, a tall, athletic forty-four-year-old with a crew cut and a flowing beard, was wearing a sleeveless leather jacket with a travel-company logo over a white kurta. We changed into ihram, offered a prayer toward Mecca, and boarded the plane to Jeddah, where we would land at the Hajj terminal, dominated by a series of white, Teflon-coated fibreglass tents, which opens annually for the pilgrimage season. A hundred thousand pilgrims would land there that day.

On the flight, I sat next to a madrassa teacher from Assam. “Are you performing the hajj for yourself?” he asked. The question surprised me. He explained that, once a Muslim had performed the pilgrimage for himself, he could go on behalf of anyone who wasn’t fit for the rigorous journey. He was a proxy for a wheelchair-bound businessman, who had paid his expenses. Everyone on the plane chanted the talbiyah, the defining prayer of the hajj: “Labbayk, Allahumah labbayk! Labbayk, la shareeka laka, labbayk! Innal-hamda, wan-n’imata, laka wal-mulk. La shareeka lak’.” (“Here I am, O Allah, here I am. Here I am, You have no partner, here I am. Verily all praise, grace, and sovereignty belong to You. You have no partner.”) As we approached Riyadh, the pilot announced the miqaat line, a religious boundary, where pilgrims formally declare their intention to undertake the hajj. I looked in my guidebook and read out the prayer.

Five hills used to form a rim around central Mecca, but since 1944, when one was razed to build a palace for royal guests, they have gradually been covered or diminished by development. East of the city, rugged peaks rise in the desert. Al-Masjid al-Haram, also known as the Grand Mosque, which houses the Kaaba, lies at the city’s lowest point. My companions and I were staying three miles east of the Grand Mosque, in Aziziah, an area of shops, residential housing, and hotels that had been built to accommodate pilgrims during the hajj season and the month of Ramadan, when Mecca is crowded again.

At our hotel, a five-story, blue glass and granite building with no name, pilgrims slept three to a room in narrow Chinese-made beds. My roommates were Ahmad and Yasin Malik, a forty-five-year-old militant turned politician. I was twelve when I first heard of Malik, in 1989. He was our local Che Guevara—the commander of the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front, which fought for Kashmir’s independence from India. On the walls of my school, boys wrote, “J.K.L.F.—Freedom Is Our Birthright!” Malik was arrested the following year and sent to prison, where he was tortured by Indian guards. On his release, in 1994, he claimed that reading Gandhi, Mandela, and Rumi in prison had led him to embrace nonviolence. Since then, Malik has become a political activist; in 2005, he collected 1.5 million signatures on a petition to give Kashmiri residents a voice in the peace process.

Malik is a tall, thin man with an aquiline nose and a short beard. His hajj had begun at the Srinagar airport, where he arrived in a caravan of supporters. “Families of victims who lost their kith and kin and party supporters gathered to bid adieu to him,” a local English-language newspaper dutifully reported.

I asked Malik why he had come. “I started a war,” he said. “In the last twenty years, Kashmir has lost seventy to eighty thousand people, and politically we have achieved nothing. I feel that burden and beg Allah to forgive me and help Kashmir out of its misery.”

After two hours of sleep, we set out in a bus for the Grand Mosque, for the first stage of the pilgrimage. Aziziah was jammed with traffic. We climbed a highway along the eastern flank of Mecca and entered a mile-long tunnel bored through ancient hills. When we emerged, I pushed closer to the window, to try to get a glimpse of one of the mosque’s seven minarets, but all I could see were gigantic cranes hovering over half-built towers. I had not prepared myself for contemporary Mecca, a city of more than one and a half million people. In my imagination, it was dominated by the Kaaba, the minarets of the Grand Mosque, the stories of Muhammad, and the desert that formed the landscape of the Prophet’s life.

In medieval times, Mecca was a small, elegant town, its streets lined with traditional houses. In 1807, a Spaniard who performed the hajj under the name Ali Bey al-Abbasi wrote, “The houses are solidly built with stone, they are three and four stories high, and even more sometimes. The fronts are ornamented with bases, moldings and paintings which give them a very graceful appearance.” The façades were also distinguished by mashrabiyyah, latticework windows with geometric and floral carvings.

The oil boom of the second half of the twentieth century brought modern technology to Saudi Arabia, but the aesthetic refinement of classical Islamic architecture began to disappear. Starting in the mid-seventies, the old houses were replaced with drab towers. Modern Mecca feels as if it were built by a people without history or tradition—a sprawling imitation of modernist architecture. “The Saudis are technological determinists,” Ziauddin Sardar, a British writer on Islam, whose book, “Mecca: The Sacred and the Profane City,” will be published next year, told me. “In their world view, everything old is bad, while everything new, everything involving technology, is good.”

Our group stopped in a bazaar, and Ahmad led the way toward the mosque, raising the blue banner of al-Khuddam, his travel company. A jovial preacher named Arshad, who provided religious guidance to pilgrims on our tour, held a microphone in his hand and chanted the talbiyah. We repeated after him, and, after placing our sandals in shoe racks, entered through the Gate of Peace into the Grand Mosque, a white-and-gray marble complex with an octagonal courtyard and multilevel prayer spaces, crowned by minarets. There is also a viewing gallery on the roof, where pilgrims can contemplate the Kaaba and the worshippers who, five times a day in concentric rings, pray around it. Thousands of men and women sat in neat rows on the mosque floor, some in prayer, some reading the Koran. Throughout many of the rituals of the hajj, men and women walk together, and the Grand Mosque is the only prominent mosque in the world where worshippers are not segregated.

“This time when they show us their latest acquisition, we’ll gush regardless.”

Beyond the marble columns of the prayer area, I caught my first glimpse of the Kaaba, which sits in the center of the mosque’s open courtyard. Thousands of pilgrims circled it in a blur. Images of Muhammad and of God are forbidden in Islam; although a few artistic renditions of Muhammad exist, I had never seen one. As a child, as an adolescent, as an adult, every time I had thought of God I conjured two images: the word “Allah,” written in the flourishes of the Arabic alphabet—a language I do not know—and a small photograph of the Kaaba on a calendar that hung in our living room when I was a child. In the late eighties, when a cinema near our house, which usually showed Bollywood movies, screened a documentary on Mecca, I went to a matinée. As the image of the Kaaba lit up the dark theatre, the audience burst into ecstatic cries of “Ya Allah!” Hundreds of hands showered the theatre screen with coins and rupee bills. The Kaaba is so revered that before the Hajj the governor of Mecca himself washes its interior walls.

I stopped on the edge of a short flight of steps leading down to the courtyard. A black silk drape, embroidered in silver and gold with Quranic phrases, including the names of Allah—“Ya Hayyu, ya Qayyum!” (“O Living One, O Self-Subsisting One!”)—hung on the Kaaba’s walls. The drape, which is woven in a factory on the outskirts of Mecca, is changed every year. Pilgrims, their arms outstretched, reached to touch the lower portion of the Kaaba’s walls—around fifteen feet of granite left uncovered by fabric. A chorus of voices rose: “Labbayk, Allahumah labbayk!” I kept my eyes on the drape, clasped my hands nervously, and repeated the words aloud: “Labbayk, Allahumah labbayk!”

“Anything you pray for when you first see the Kaaba is granted,” my father had told me. He had prayed for my brother, who had poor eyesight. I prayed for my parents’ health, and for my uncle, the father of two young girls, who has lung cancer.

Abraham built the Kaaba with the help of his son Ishmael, and initiated the hajj on a site considered holy even before his time. “Proclaim the pilgrimage among men; they will come to thee on foot and on every kind of camel,” God commanded, according to the Koran. In the early seventh century, Muhammad, thirty-five years old and five years from his first revelation, watched as the Kaaba, damaged by fire and a flood, was reconstructed with the help of an Egyptian Coptic carpenter. It was rebuilt with layers of wood and stone, and its interior ceiling and columns were painted with representations of Abraham, Mary, and Jesus. Muhammad, who had a reputation for fairness, was entrusted with repositioning a stone on the southeastern corner, where it remains, framed by an oval silver ring. The stone is revered as the only vestige of Abraham’s Kaaba. Every pilgrim tries to kiss the stone, as Muhammad did on his hajj. All the touching has made it concave, and it has turned black; Muslims believe that it absorbs the sins of mankind.

I walked toward the black stone, and found myself in a small stampede. Pilgrims raised smart phones above their heads to record the moment. A group of Pakistani men stood on a narrow ledge on the southern wall of the Kaaba, inching slowly toward the stone. Below, several hundred people jostled toward it, their joy mixed with struggle. I followed a group of Sudanese. We were a few feet from the stone. Its silver rim glinted in the sun. The Sudanese got closer, craning their necks to kiss the stone. Two men stood between the stone and me. A Saudi policeman standing on a ledge by the stone urged the pilgrims to keep moving: “Haaji, tareeq!” (“Pilgrim, this way!”) I inched forward, ready, but a moment later lost my balance. A torrent of Afghans charged from my right, pushing me away. I felt dejected but consoled myself with the knowledge that my experience was common—even Malcolm X, during his hajj, had failed to reach the stone. “One look at the fervor of those crowded around it made me see it was hopeless to try,” Malcolm wrote in his travel diary. I raised my hands in a salute and walked on.

In 622, Muhammad left Mecca for the town of Medina, some two hundred miles away. He had begun to share his revelations from God a decade earlier, and his tribe, which was the custodian of the Kaaba, resented his propagation of Islam. At the time, the Kaaba contained three hundred and sixty pagan idols, which did not accord with Muhammad’s monotheistic vision. Eight years after his migration to Medina, the Prophet conquered Mecca, removed the idols from the Kaaba, and established it as an Islamic house of worship. Since then, the Kaaba has been rebuilt several times, and its surroundings have been in an almost constant state of change. Unlike Christian holy places, such as St. Peter’s Basilica, at the Vatican, where the sanctity of the physical past is paramount, the Kaaba has undergone dramatic renovations, often erasing earlier layers of history.

Omar, the second Islamic caliph, built the first mosque on the site, an octagon that surrounded the Kaaba, which he covered with a white drape made of linen, silk, and wool. Further expansion was steady until the Ottoman era, when Sultan Selim II’s court architect, Mimar Sinan Aga, built white domes over the prayer area and decorated their interiors with gilded calligraphy. The current version of the Kaaba dates from 1629, when Sultan Murad IV repaired it after heavy rains. Until the nineteen-fifties, the Grand Mosque remained an Ottoman structure: a single-story complex distinguished by its seven minarets and a many-arched cloister, covered with Sinan’s domes.

The postwar oil boom made Saudi Arabia rich and broadened its ambitions. Before he died, in 1953, King Abdul Aziz ordered the first expansion of the Grand Mosque since the seventeenth century. A Yemeni migrant, Mohammad bin Laden, who had impressed the King with his skill and diligence, was given the contract. Work began in 1955, and most of the historic marble columns were replaced with artificial stone; three three-hundred-foot minarets and two gates were rebuilt. Ottoman architecture had come to be seen as a remnant of a colonial era, and so Abdul Aziz’s reconstruction, which expanded the mosque five-fold, was done in the Arab style of Egypt and Syria.

In 1979, millenarian terrorists led by Juhayman al-Oteibi seized the Grand Mosque, bolting its doors and trapping more than fifty thousand worshippers inside, before opening fire on Saudi police and security forces. Al-Oteibi and his men were former students of Sheikh Abdelaziz bin Baz, who went on to become the Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia. They saw the Saudi royal family as being obsessed with wealth and in thrall to the West. Crown Prince Fahd led the response, which moved slowly—its troops initially had no detailed maps of the mosque. After a week, the Saudis brought in three French commandos, who underwent a token conversion to Islam to access the mosque. They used tear gas to flush out al-Oteibi’s men. Hundreds of pilgrims, soldiers, and terrorists were killed in the two-week episode.

Fahd drew intense criticism for his inability to protect the site; when he became king, he took the title Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques (the other is in Medina). On the southeast side of the mosque, he constructed a new indoor prayer area, which followed the earlier Saudi design and color scheme. The minarets of the King Fahd Gate replicated those erected in the first Saudi expansion.

Two months before the most recent hajj, King Abdullah bought ten billion dollars’ worth of private property in Mecca, to expand the mosque again; this time, its capacity will increase from around seven hundred and fifty thousand worshippers to more than two million. The extension, which the Saudi Binladin Group plans to finish by 2020, will add a gate named for the King and greatly increase the number of bathrooms and shaded areas for pilgrims. Men and women will carry back to their small villages and towns tales of the Grand Mosque’s splendor, which is the reward sought by every Muslim ruler who alters the mosque.

“It is the House of God,” Malik said, and turned to me, reassuring us both that he had touched the Kaaba. I had seen him leading protests in Kashmir, but now his face was not that of a commander but that of a supplicant. We had to perform the tawaf, seven circumambulations of the Kaaba in a counterclockwise direction, which signal the unity of believers, praying and supplicating together in the ihram. We began the first rotation by saluting the black stone. Our right shoulders were bare, following the example of the Prophet, who on his hajj did so to signal defiance of his enemies. We started a slow jog. It was a hundred degrees in the sun, and my sweat dried instantly. Tens of thousands of people filled the glistening white marble floor around the Kaaba, and I lost sight of Malik. The same prayers reverberated in a number of accents. There were Afghans, Americans, Iranians, Indonesians, Indians, Chinese, Chechens, Pakistanis, Egyptians, Moroccans, Tajiks. You started a prayer walking alongside a Nigerian and completed it next to a Turk.

Near the Kaaba, I reached a small copper enclosure, the Station of Abraham, where a boulder with the mark of a footprint sits on a pedestal. Muslims believe that when Abraham was building the House of God his son Ishmael brought the stone to help him reach higher. Abraham’s foot had left the mark.

The story of Abraham and his family is central to the hajj. In Islamic tradition, God ordered Abraham to leave his wife Hagar and their infant, Ishmael, in the desert near the Kaaba, to test their faith. The mother and the child were between the hills at Safa and Marwah, half a mile from the current site of the Kaaba. Ishmael was thirsty, and Hagar began searching for water. She ran south toward Safa, climbed the hill, and looked for an oasis. She rushed back to check on Ishmael and darted north toward Marwah, a quarter of a mile away. There was no water. She ran between the two hills seven times. As she returned from her last run to Marwah, she found water gushing from beneath Ishmael’s feet, where he had been kicking the sand. Hagar shouted, “Zomë, zomë.” (“Stop flowing, stop flowing.”) The water slowed down, and the spring was given the name Zamzam.

Muhammad described the water of Zamzam as having healing qualities, so pilgrims drink from the spring after the tawaf and throughout the hajj, and carry a few gallons home. The water is pumped into taps in the mosque from a purification plant. In 2010, King Abdullah inaugurated a hundred-and-eighty-seven-million-dollar expansion of the plant, which can now filter and serve 1.3 million gallons a day.

A couple from Algeria pose in front of a picture of the Grand Mosque at a photography studio in Mecca.
A couple from Algeria pose in front of a picture of the Grand Mosque at a photography studio in Mecca. Photograph by Abbas

Pilgrims reënact Hagar’s search for water by running or walking seven times between Safa and Marwah—a distance of two miles—in a ritual known as sa’y, the “effort.” In Abdul Aziz’s expansion of the mosque, the remnants of the hills were paved in white marble and enclosed in the eastern flank of the complex. A wide, two-tier covered walkway was built along Hagar’s path, with smaller paths in the middle, for wheelchairs. On the top of Safa, the hill’s remaining gray rocks sit behind glass. I followed a surge of barefoot pilgrims down its slope, tracing the path of Hagar, the slave girl and ancestor of Muhammad, who is one of the most revered women in Islam. Sa’y is meant to instill compassion for the needy and the exiled. My bare feet had begun to ache by the fifth run. After the final lap, I retreated to the taps, where a Pakistani man passed around recyclable cups of Zamzam water to fellow-pilgrims.

The muezzin gave the call for afternoon prayer. Later, I saw Ahmad, Malik, and a few others outside the Gate of Peace, where they were talking excitedly about the completion of the ritual. “Seeing the Kaaba was like falling in love for the first time,” Malik said. “I couldn’t take my eyes off it.” He paused. “It is the only mosque where men and women can be so close that at times your bodies touch, but the only attraction and thoughts I had were for the Kaaba and Allah.” Malik was referring to the tradition among South Asian Muslims of speaking of two loves: Ishq-e-Haqiqi, the love of God, and Ishq-e-Majazi, the human love.

After a ritual head shave, we could return to civilian clothes for a few days before the next stage of the pilgrimage. I couldn’t find my sandals, and so I gingerly walked with my companions across the scorching courtyard to a row of shacks not far from the mosque, where barbers waited. Three dollars and a few minutes later, we saw our bare heads in a mirror.

King Abdullah’s plans for Mecca include a metro that will connect the city to the pilgrim stops of Mina, Arafat, and Muzdalifah, a high-speed rail link between Mecca and Medina, and a redevelopment of the central part of the city into high-rises and shopping malls. “We will employ all kinds of modern technology to make Mecca smarter than any other smart city,” Prince Khalid al-Faisal, the governor of the province of Mecca, announced to the press during the hajj.

The King’s technocratic ambitions exemplify a Saudi tendency, reflected in the country’s strict religious doctrine, to erase all vestiges of the past. In 1924, days after the soldiers of al-Saud, inspired by the teachings of the puritanical preacher Muhammad Ibn Abd al-Wahhab, conquered Mecca, the destruction of buildings associated with the life of the Prophet and his companions began. Wahhabis believe that revering structures with ties to the Prophet can lead to idolatrous practices. The house of Muhammad’s wife Khadijah was destroyed, and the Saudis used the Prophet’s birthplace as a cattle market before it was turned into a library, in the early nineteen-fifties. I had visited the site, where the religious police, called mutawi’n, guard the library and forbid pilgrims, most of them South Asian or Iranian, from praying there. An electronic sign declares in several languages, “There is no proof that Prophet Muhammad, Peace Be Upon Him, was born in this place.” A complex of hundreds of bathrooms was built over the remains of the house of Khadijah during an expansion of the Grand Mosque. The house of Abu Bakr, the closest companion of the Prophet and the first caliph, was buried under a Hilton hotel.

In early 2002, a few hundred feet from the Abdul Aziz gate, King Fahd demolished an ochre-colored Ottoman fortress that had been built in 1781 on Mt. Bulbul, one of the five hills that overlooked the Kaaba, to guard Mecca from tribal raids. The dilapidated fortress was a modest presence that blended in with its natural surroundings. Its destruction soured relations between Saudi Arabia and Turkey. M. Istemihan Talay, then the Turkish minister of culture, described it as “no different from the pulling down of the Buddha monuments in Afghanistan.”

On the site, King Abdullah started building the Abraj al-Bait tower complex, also known as the Royal Mecca Clock Tower complex. Constructed, at a cost of two billion dollars, by the Binladin Group, it is a cluster of connected towers housing a multistory shopping mall, food courts, a hospital, luxury hotels, prayer rooms, parking lots, and helipads. At almost two thousand feet, the Clock Tower is seven times the height of the minarets of the Grand Mosque. It is the largest, and second-tallest, building in the world. When I walked along the western wall of the Kaaba, the Clock Tower felt like a concrete djinn staring down at me, dwarfing the mosque. Filled with resentment, I lowered my head in anticipation on each circumambulation.

The complex’s façade is a pale pink, with arches that frame opal-colored glass windows, a reluctant nod to Islamic design. The Saudi memory of a nomadic life is evident on the roof, where a floor of tents has been built by the German architect Bodo Rasch for the royal family. Rasch, who has worked in the kingdom for fifteen years, mostly on projects developed by the Binladin Group, also designed the Royal Mecca clock, which is the world’s largest. A golden crescent crowns the spire of the clock, which has four faces, whose white dials are encased in a square frame of gold. It bears a strong resemblance to Big Ben, but it is six times the height. The national emblem of Saudi Arabia, a palm tree and crossed swords, perches on each clock face between a seventy-two-foot minute hand and a fifty-five-foot hour hand.

On various evenings, I saw the clock from the road through the desert between Jeddah and Mecca, and from the top of a hill near my hotel in Aziziah; an LED inscription, “Allahu Akbar,” was visible for miles. In the lobby of the Binladin Group’s headquarters, in Jeddah, between models of the mosques of Mecca and Medina, there is a replica of the Mecca Clock Tower. In a commemorative book, the developers describe it as a gift from King Abdullah to the world, reflecting “his conviction of the importance of establishing Makkah Time as an international time reference.” It’s a goal that recalls the ambition of the Ottomans: in 1901, Sultan Abdulhamid II celebrated twenty-five years of his rule by commissioning a hundred clock towers across his empire. One of the most famous used to stand on the Jaffa gate, in Jerusalem, before the British demolished it, in the nineteen-twenties.

One afternoon, I walked into the Clock Tower complex. With bright fluorescent lights and neon shop signs, it has the feel of the Herald Square Macy’s on Thanksgiving weekend, or the duty-free section of the Dubai airport. The ground floor is devoted to retailers: stores that sell alcohol-free perfume, prayer mats, and hajj memorabilia; British and Italian clothing boutiques; luggage shops filled with Samsonite travel bags and Prada totes; and stores selling Al-Fajr prayer watches, which ring an alarm five times a day. I rode an escalator to an upper floor. On its glass railings were safety instructions illustrated by drawings of a fully veiled woman.

The higher floors of the tower contain five hotels, with a capacity of sixty-five thousand guests. At the Fairmont Mecca Clock Royal Tower, where the minimum stay during the hajj is fourteen days, the hotel executives’ business cards say “The Destination for a Divine Stay.” The rooms are graded in three tiers: those with a view of the Kaaba; those overlooking the Grand Mosque; and those looking onto the holy city. They are all fitted with speakers that relay calls to prayer and sermons from the Grand Mosque. A double room with a view of the Kaaba ranges from eleven hundred dollars to forty-five hundred dollars a night. “You take in the entire Grand Mosque in a single look,” a manager for Ahmad’s tour company told me. “The Kaaba appears much smaller, but one can see its white roof. It is mesmerizing.”

For a wealthy pilgrim, the cost of the hajj can exceed forty thousand dollars—twelve times the per-capita income of Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim country. The rulers of Mecca have always viewed pilgrims as a major source of revenue. In 1864, when Nawab Sikander Begum, the ruler of the Indian state of Bhopal, arrived by ship in Jeddah, the Ottoman governor’s tax collectors plundered her chests of gifts and money. On the road to Mecca, Bedouin raiders tried to kidnap her mother and steal several camels laden with valuables. When the Begum headed to the house she had rented, a slave of the Sharif of Mecca began to attack one of her courtiers. The Begum intervened, and was told by another slave, “My master the Sharif’s feast, which cost him five thousand rupees, is all getting spoilt, and his money is being wasted!” The Begum had never received an invitation, but, threatened with fatal consequences, ate at the Sharif’s house, where “the repast consisted of about five hundred specimens of Arabian cookery.”

I heard the evening call for prayer inside the Clock Tower. The stores and restaurants promptly shut, and shoppers and salesmen, waiters and managers joined in rows on the marble of the building’s ground floor. After prayers, at the back of the complex, I found a row of stalls manned by Egyptian and Indian immigrants selling tea and food. As night fell, a few hundred poor pilgrims laid out cotton sheets and cardboard boxes in a courtyard between the Hilton and the Clock Tower, where they slept throughout the hajj. Most of them were African and South Asian guest workers. Rameez Raja, a twenty-two-year-old from a village near Peshawar, was an assistant to an electrician in Riyadh. A wiry man with a gaunt face, Raja had come on the hajj to pray for a better-paying job. “Every year, people from my village who worked in Saudi Arabia came home wearing bright white clothes, big sparkling watches, and a lot of perfume,” he said. “I, too, wanted to return home like them and build a house for my parents. I didn’t know how hard the work here would be.”

Across the road, cranes hovered over another of Mecca’s hills, where a series of towers called the Jabal Omar Project were under construction. Where modest houses had stood, a complex of thirty-nine towers of hotels and apartments, with nine thousand parking spaces and four thousand shops, was rising in concrete and granite. T. R. Hamzah & Yeang, the Kuala Lumpur-based architectural firm that designed nine of the towers, had calculated that the average height of the five hills that once circled the Grand Mosque area was almost fifteen hundred feet; the architects fixed that height as the limit for their high-rises. The firm’s initial bid claimed that the project would create “a new protective rim” around the mosque, and “avoid a rampant disorganized skyline around the holy area.”

Raja Alem, a Saudi novelist who grew up near the Grand Mosque, set her novel “The Dove’s Necklace,” which won the International Prize for Arabic Fiction in 2011, in Mecca. It describes the lives of those caught up in the transformation of the city. During the hajj, her family was among those who have traditionally hosted pilgrims in all the rooms of their house. “I knew Mecca like the back of my hand,” Alem, who now lives in Paris, told me. “I returned to Mecca after a five-year absence and didn’t know how to reach the Holy Mosque.” Alem’s grandmother used to tell her that Mecca breathes through its mountains, and that its houses were built of breathing stone. “Now these foreign bodies made of cement, glass, and steel are rising in the sky and swallowing even the mountains, Mecca’s lungs,” Alem has said.

In online forums, some see the towers as a sign of doomsday. They connect the competition among oil-rich Arab states to build skyscrapers to a reference in the Hadith, or the Prophet’s sayings, about the arrival of Judgment Day. When the angel Gabriel asks the Prophet when the world will end, Muhammad replies, “When destitute camel herders compete in building tall structures.”

Sami Mohsen Angawi is probably the fiercest critic of the redevelopment of the city. A tall, handsome architect in his early sixties with the air of a headmaster, he comes from a Mecca family that claims descent from Muhammad. The Angawis, like the Alems, have served pilgrims for generations. “I used to carry the shoes of our pilgrims in a bag slung on my back and follow them during the tawaf,” he told me. Angawi’s father was the chief of police in Jeddah. During the hajj season, he would return to Mecca to house and feed the pilgrims, and guide them through the rituals. “And then he would take orders from the pilgrims—one would be a minister, and the other would be a peasant,” Angawi said.

In the early seventies, the Saudi government began an aggressive modernization project in Medina, and started by destroying most of the historic buildings in the city. Angawi feared that Mecca would be next, and founded the Hajj Research Centre, a preservationist institute. In the winter of 1975, Angawi persuaded the British writer Ziauddin Sardar to join him. Recalling the meeting in “Desperately Seeking Paradise,” a book of travels in the Islamic world, Sardar writes, “Angawi’s voice was clipped with emotion. ‘In a matter of days,’ he said, commenting on the slideshows of bulldozers demolishing ancient cultural property, ‘the whole city was razed to the ground.’ No one complained. Indeed not many knew what had happened.” Angawi worked at the center for fourteen years, trying to improve the organization of the hajj and to preserve the natural and historic environment of Mecca and Medina.

Angawi advocated following the choices that Muhammad made after his conquest of Mecca. “The Prophet did not stay next to the Kaaba, even though the house of his wife Khadijah was near it, and despite several others offering him their houses,” Angawi told me. “He camped miles away.” For Angawi, the way to save Mecca was simply not to build high-rises in the city, preserving what was old, sacred, and beautiful. “The Prophet said that you can’t cut a thorn plant in Mecca, you can’t hunt in Mecca. Even if you see the killer of your father, you can’t raise your hand,” he said. “Everything in Mecca shall be humble in relation to the House of God. The seerah of the Prophet, the landscape where he lived his life, is being demolished. Without it, the life of the Prophet becomes a myth.

“We came up with the science of hajjology,” Angawi went on. “When I had the solutions, I got a ‘Thank you very much.’ I knew the medicine my patient needed. I wasn’t asked.”

Osama al-Bar, the mayor of Mecca, is aware of the criticisms of the city’s development. A former director of the hajj institute that Angawi founded, he works from an expansive white-and-beige building two miles from the Grand Mosque. A bulldozer with an outstretched blade is engraved on the bronze seal of the city outside his office. As I sat in the waiting room, my phone caught a wireless connection: holy_internet. Al-Bar sees replacing the hills of Mecca with high towers as adhering to a divine sense of proportion. “When Allah showed the place for the Kaaba, he chose the lowest place in a valley,” he told me. “If you stood atop one of those mountains and looked at the Kaaba, it always seemed small from that distance. A tower is very much like a mountain in its height. If you look at the Kaaba from there, it seems the same size as it would from a mountain. These are the natural surroundings that Allah chose for his house.”

Al-Bar grew up near the Grand Mosque, where his father ran a small store selling kitchenware and memorabilia to pilgrims. After school, he helped at the store, picking up a smattering of the languages that pilgrims spoke. “Kitne ka?” he said, recalling the Urdu phrase for “How much?” One afternoon in 2007, al-Bar was in Jeddah in a General Motors showroom, helping his son choose a car, when his phone rang. It was a high-ranking Saudi official, who told al-Bar that he had been appointed mayor. Al-Bar smiled in reminiscence. “If you work for Mecca, for the guests of Allah, each good deed is doubled a hundred thousand times, ten to the power of five,” he said. “Mecca is everything.”

It is estimated that seventeen million believers will visit Mecca in 2025. Revenue from the pilgrimage already exceeds thirty billion dollars. “Last Ramadan, we had maybe two million people; in the hajj, we had around three million people,” al-Bar told me. “A haaji comes for the hajj, but he is a guest, a tourist. He needs housing, a hotel, catering, services, and trains.” A square metre of land in the area surrounding the Grand Mosque sells for up to a hundred and thirty thousand dollars, twice as much as Fifth Avenue real estate in Manhattan. “If the developer has the land, which cost him millions, shall I tell him to make it twenty dollars a room?”

Yet I wondered about Allah’s ninety-nine per cent. Wasn’t egalitarianism the essence of Islam? “The poor Muslims, the Muslims from Bangladesh, are living five hundred metres from the Grand Mosque, in Misfalah,” al-Bar said, assuring me that two-star hotels and cheap apartments were included in the plans for the new projects. I had spent some time in Misfalah, a neighborhood south of the mosque, where the streets are narrow and dark, and the decades-old, cheaply built apartment blocks and hotels have views of each other’s walls. On the unpaved streets, young boys did a brisk business in black-market cigarettes. In modest eateries with Bengali signboards, men bent over plates of rice and fish. I felt as if I had crossed continents and walked into a derelict neighborhood in Dhaka.

Four days after my arrival in Mecca, I watched thousands of pilgrims walk along a highway into a tunnel that had been bored into a hill rising behind our hotel, on their way to the desert of Mina. Mina is a stopover en route to the plain of Arafat, where millions gather for the foremost rite of the hajj, Yaum al-Wuquf, the Day of Standing Together, in which the multitudes ask for forgiveness. After a ritual bath, in which water touched every part of my body three times, I put on the ihram and joined Malik and our group on a bus. We followed a crawling procession of vehicles; thousands of voices rose above the din of traffic, chanting, “Labbayk, Allahumah labbayk!” Malik pointed toward the stream of believers, and I waited for him to make a religious observation. “After every demonstration in Kashmir, all politicians send out press releases saying that thousands or hundreds of thousands of people attended,” he said. “Seeing this, I think we always exaggerate the numbers.”

Three hours later, we arrived in Mina, a wide valley ringed by barren mountains, where the Prophet, who had travelled by camel, had stopped for the night. On the plain, Saudi volunteers and policemen in khaki uniforms stood out among the pilgrims in white. A tent city designed by Bodo Rasch, the architect of the Royal Mecca Clock, spread for miles.

Rasch is a friend of Sami Angawi, and also worked at the Hajj Research Centre. They met in the early seventies, when Angawi was studying architecture at the University of Texas at Austin. Rasch was a young student of the German architect Frei Otto, the world’s leading authority on lightweight structures, who was competing to design housing for the pilgrims in Mina. Angawi and Rasch joined him as assistants. “We were thinking of ways to design the site with minimum impact on the environment,” Angawi recalled. “We made the master plan with our hands, sitting there day and night, drawing. It was like prayer.” The Saudi government rejected Otto’s plan, and used traditional cotton tents instead. In 1997, the tent city burned down, and Rasch designed a replacement on the site. It is the largest number of tents ever erected for a single site.

Flying atop every tent was the national flag of its occupants, and as I moved from tents housing pilgrims from India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan to those of pilgrims from the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia, I saw some seven-star quarters, where liveried waiters carried dates, oranges, and coffee flasks into lounges with flat-screen televisions. The overpasses that had brought us from Mecca to Mina looped over the tents. Thousands camped on the bridges, where they had no shelter from the searing heat. In a connecting tunnel, where several hundred people slept on the sidewalk, exhaust fans roared overhead and gas fumes made it hard to breathe. A Saudi policeman, eager to push the pilgrims out, opened a bottle of water and poured it over a man’s head.

After night prayers, I shared a small tent with nine pilgrims. The desert cooled quickly, and we slept on foam mattresses separated by less than an inch, exhausted from the heat and the crowds. I slept beside Malik, whose ihram had slipped off his lower leg, revealing marks from beatings he had received in prison. Before dawn, we set out for Arafat, where Muhammad gave his last sermon, at Jabal-e-Rehmat, the Mount of Mercy. Most of our group consisted of elderly men and women, who chose to pray in the tents, but Malik and I followed a long stretch of pilgrims on a wide motorway to the mountain. Chants of “Labbayk, Allahumah labbayk!” rose to the bright skies. Our progress was slow. The sun punished our shaved heads. On the sides of the road, volunteers tossed bottles of water and cartons of apple juice to the pilgrims. Men on the beds of mobile-phone-company trucks distributed green-and-blue umbrellas advertising the superiority of the company’s connectivity and bandwidth.

“Don’t worry—I had one of those when I was a kid, but eventually he just drifted away.”

After an hour, we reached the base of the Mount of Mercy; on its crest, a rectangular pillar of brick and concrete marked the site of Muhammad’s sermon. Waves of pilgrims covered the brown boulders of the hill. We climbed the rocks, sweating under the sun, lending a hand to strangers seeking support and holding the hands that reached out to help us. A crush of bodies carried me toward the pillar. I placed my hand against it and closed my eyes. The words of the Prophet’s last sermon came to me: “A white has no superiority over a black nor does a black have any superiority over a white except by piety and good action.” Malik had tears in his eyes. Scores of hands held video cameras and clicked pictures. On the way back, we couldn’t find our tent. My knees and feet were complaining, and we were famished. An Arab man was distributing plates of rice and chicken by the road. “Haaji! Please!” he urged us. “Here everyone is a fakir,” Malik said. “It doesn’t matter if you sit on the street.”

That night, the pilgrimage led us to the rocky desert of Muzdalifah, where we camped by the highway; the six miles from Arafat had taken us six hours by bus. Other pilgrims arrived by train from Mina; access was limited to those from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf countries. Tens of thousands of pilgrims sat on tiny mats in the desert; others perched on the cliff of a neighboring hill. Hundreds of buses, lit by floodlights, were parked by the sides of the highway. Everyone slept in the open, even the wealthy. I found a place on the edge of the road. People combed the desert to collect forty-nine pebbles, none larger than a chickpea, which each pilgrim would use in the ritual of Stoning the Devil, in Mina, over the following three days. I kept my pebbles in an empty Pepsi bottle by my side. I dozed off for a bit but was woken by the fear of being run over by the buses that continued to rush past. I stayed awake, waiting for dawn.

Pilgrims stone the Devil to signify overcoming temptation. We were back in the Islamic story of Abraham, who walked to Mina in order to sacrifice Ishmael, as God had commanded. Three pillars mark the places where the Devil tried to interrupt the sacrifice. The pilgrims commemorate Abraham’s faith by stoning the pillars, which represent the Devil. In recent decades, the increasing number of pilgrims has caused stampedes at the pillars. More than a thousand people were killed between 1994 and 2006—three hundred and sixty in 2006 alone. A member of the royal family came up with the idea of a multilevel complex to insure the pilgrims’ safety. The previous pillars, which dated from the nineteen-sixties, were replaced with eighty-five-foot-tall elliptical walls, with oval basins to collect the pebbles. The walls, which average six hundred feet apart, have ramps and escalators to allow pilgrims to stone the Devil from four levels.

The gray concrete complex, which was completed in 2009 by the Binladin Group, at a cost of $1.1 billion, looks like a massive parking garage. Warnings in several languages on its façade read, “Avoid stampede during hustle.” I was with Saif Ahsan, a thirty-one-year-old perfume exporter from Delhi, and his mother, Neelam, who suffered from painfully swollen feet. We entered on the ground floor. As the crowd converged on the entrance, Ahsan and I locked our arms around Neelam in a protective embrace. The closer we moved to the first pillar, the more aggressive the crowd became. A Bengali man raised his baby above his head. The crowd was pushing harder. I saw fear on the Bengali’s face; the baby cried. A human chain formed around them. Determined voices rose, deploying the now familiar phrase: “Haaji, tareeq!” A narrow passage emerged, allowing him and the child to exit safely.

We walked to the third pillar, which pilgrims stone on the first day of the ritual. Ahsan and I stood by his mother as she threw pebbles at the concrete wall that represented the pillar. Then it was our turn. We threw seven pebbles at the pillar, each throw punctuated by the recitation “Bismillah, Allahu Akbar.” Neelam, who had insisted on walking, was in pain. A circuitous mile-long road would bring us back to our tents. We had forgotten about the Devil and matters of temptation. We couldn’t keep pace with the crowd and moved along a peripheral fence, which Neelam used for support. An hour later, we were back, and Ahsan ran to fetch his mother some painkillers.

We spent the rest of the day praying, drinking coffee, and lounging in our tent, but other pilgrims turned to the networking and the deal-making that accompany the world’s largest gathering of Muslims. Several Saudi Arabia-based activists of the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front came to visit our tent. They had organized lectures for Malik in Jeddah and Riyadh after the hajj, and were working to get him interviews in the Saudi press and appointments with members of the royal family. (A large photograph of Malik in a white kurta appeared in the Arab News a week later, along with his latest assessment of the situation in Kashmir.)

The next day, Ahsan stoned the Devil for his mother, who stayed in her tent. I joined Malik and other Kashmiris. My anxiety about Neelam the previous day had made me miss the ritual’s element of release and fun. “Some villagers who were with me would throw their shoes at the Devil,” my father had told me. Malik’s neighborhood in Kashmir was famous for its stone-throwing protests against Indian troops. “This will be easy for you,” I teased him. He threw a pebble; it bounced back and hit his forehead.

Despite a few frivolous moments, I was depressed by the behavior of the crowds, whose aggression seemed to violate the meaning of the ritual. On my third day in Mina, I went by myself, waded through the crowd, threw the rest of my stones, and left the city of tents. The hajj was complete, except for a final circumambulation of the Kaaba. I wanted to be alone, and walked the three miles back to Mecca.

It was the beginning of the festival of Eid al-Adha, when Muslims sacrifice an animal, remembering Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son at God’s command. For a hundred and twenty dollars, travel operators would give a pilgrim a receipt that an animal sacrifice would be made in his name at an industrial slaughterhouse outside Mina. The meat would be packed and sent to poor Muslims around the world. I received a text message confirming that a sacrifice had been made on my behalf.

A few months after the hajj, I talked with Malik. He had recently become a father, and was in a reflective mood. “I feel I have to be more responsible, whether it is politics or my social and personal obligations,” he told me. “Being with all these people reminded me of Rumi instructing us to love all of God’s creation without any bias. On a more personal level, I have a short temper and get angry quickly. Since I have returned from the hajj, I have to remind myself I am a haaji and control my temper and avoid using bad language.”

I performed my farewell circumambulation one evening, with a large group of Chinese pilgrims—mostly elderly men from Xinjiang. They wore sleeveless turquoise jackets over beige martial-arts blouses and pajamas. “Al-Haaji min al-Sin,” or “Chinese Pilgrim,” was embroidered on their jacket pockets. Fourteen thousand Chinese Muslims had made the pilgrimage. We walked slowly, trying to linger. I lowered my head as the Clock Tower invaded the horizon. It was still too crowded to get close to the black stone. I moved reluctantly past the columns of the Grand Mosque, my eyes on the Ottoman sections.

Crown Prince Nayef bin Abdul Aziz al-Saud has called for the quick implementation of a project to double the capacity of the circumambulation area around the Kaaba. The renovation will cut into the Ottoman portico, and probably remove the older pillars. I was pained by the awareness that I might be among the last pilgrims to see the most beautiful parts of the mosque. The Ottoman arches glowed in the mosque’s sulfur lights, and Sinan’s white domes formed a serene arc against the black of the Kaaba. The Chinese walked backward, not turning away from the Kaaba until we had left the mosque. An elderly Chinese man with a wisp of white beard met my eyes. We looked at each other for a long moment. Neither of us spoke Arabic. He took my hand in his soft, wrinkled hands, nodded gently, and said, “Assalaamu alaykum.”