The Bin Ladens

The renovation projects began in 1985 and proceeded in two sequential phases—Medina first, then Mecca. In Medina the needs were greatest. For all the effort Wahhabi scholars made to discourage the veneration of the Prophet’s Mosque and other local historical sites, practicing Muslims simply could not be persuaded to forgo the journey to the city of the Prophet’s storied exile. Hajj spiritual rituals are entirely centered on Mecca, but most pilgrims, having taken the time and expense to travel to Saudi Arabia in the first place, felt compelled to include Medina as a side journey. The trouble was that the worship area in the Prophet’s Mosque was about one-tenth the size of the one in the Grand Mosque in Mecca, and as the number of pilgrims swelled during the 1980s, the squeeze in Medina appeared unsustainable. Fahd embraced an expansion plan that would transform Medina into a viable, if still undeclared, companion destination to Mecca. The urban clearance work necessary to extend the mosque’s footprint was completed by 1988; at that point, with Salem gone and Bakr fully in charge, renovation of the sanctuary itself began.⁴

For all of its modernity and scale, and despite its disregard for inherited architectural diversity, the Bin Ladens’ work in Medina did produce some beautiful and striking innovations, such as an array of retractable domes and umbrella-like coverings. The modernized mosque’s polish and lighting and soaring minarets, in the clear desert sky, against the silhouettes of barren hills, could produce spectacular visual effects, particularly at night; it could snatch the breath of even a skeptic like Hammoudi. These were achievements in which the Bin Ladens could and did take pride; the truth was, however, that most of their important and impressive work lay hidden from view. The Bin Ladens were not masters of architecture; they were masters of infrastructure.

The Prophet’s Mosque, across all its centuries as an icon in the desert, had never, of course, enjoyed air-conditioning. The Bin Ladens, however, had formed a partnership during the 1980s with York International Corporation, of York, Pennsylvania, the world’s leading manufacturer and installer of what are known as “large tonnage chillers,” industrial systems for cooling very large buildings. York chillers cooled the U.S. Capitol, the Pentagon, the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York, and the Kremlin. The systems typically worked by reducing water to a temperature of about forty degrees and then piping the water through the targeted building; this was the only practical way to distribute cool air through such large spaces. Large and mechanically complex machines cooled the water initially and then expelled its heat into the air upon its return from the building. York manufactured these chiller systems in a 1.5-million-square-foot plant in Grantley, Pennsylvania. The Medina chillers ordered by the Bin Ladens posed a number of unusual challenges. Desert temperatures and the project’s enormous size meant that York would have to manufacture a number of its heaviest-duty machine, later dubbed the Titan. Also, because only Muslims are allowed inside the Medina city center, there were questions about how the chillers could be reliably serviced if they occasionally required the attention of a non-Muslim engineer or technician. To address this concern, the Bin Ladens decided to install the principal chiller plant outside the Muslim-only exclusion zone, more than four miles from the Prophet’s Mosque; they dug a wide tunnel, big enough for a sport utility vehicle to drive in, between the chiller plant and the mosque, down which traveled trunk cooling pipes and other utilities. By the time the plant was finished, by 1993, it had given the marketing department at York headquarters something new to boast about: the air-conditioning project in Medina had become the largest heating or air-conditioning project of its type in world history.⁵

Anwar Hassan, a York manager who worked on it, was originally from Sudan. On his trips to Jeddah or Medina, the Bin Ladens would invite him to receptions, or to an iftar fast-breaking dinner during Ramadan. They projected “a great sense of pride” about their work in the holy cities. Hassan shared their vision that the Hajj could and should be modernized. He felt it was misleading to romanticize the past. He remembered stories he had heard as a child from one of his great-uncles in Sudan, who recounted how, in the days before Abdulaziz and the birth of Saudi Arabia, if a hundred African-looking Sudanese pilgrims attended Hajj, only sixty or seventy might return—the rest were victims of highway robbers, or disease, or worse. Even during the 1960s, when another of Hassan’s uncles undertook the pilgrimage, “He came back appalled at the poor level of hygiene. People would slaughter sheep in the street.” By the early 1990s, Hassan could ascend an escalator to stand amid the crowds by the Prophet’s tomb, and as he touched his head upon the floor in prayer, he might feel a touch of cool air on the back of his neck. “That’s a fabulous transformation,” he believed. “You have to appreciate that they did it for the comfort. It’s a great thing that they’ve done.”⁶

THOSE WHO THOUGHT otherwise did so at their peril.

Sami Angawi tied his thinning, graying hair behind his head in a ponytail, and he draped himself in undulating Hejazi robes, not the flat white uniform of Saudi national dress. He looked like a Saudi hippie. He adhered to Sufism, a school of Islam that emphasized diversity and individual spiritual experience. He had been born in Mecca to a traditional family of mutawwafs, or “pilgrimage guides,” an ancient vocation in decline in the age of Hajj package air-hotel tours and Saudi nationalization (by the 1990s, a federal ministry administered most aspects of the pilgrimage). At the University of Texas, Angawi studied architecture and urban planning; he wrote a master’s thesis about a possible renovation of Mecca that would emphasize historical preservation, pedestrian zones, and environmental conservation.

In 1975 he returned to Saudi Arabia to form and supervise a Hajj Research Center at King Abdulaziz University in Jeddah. Its goal, approved by the Saudi government, was “to preserve the natural environment as created by God and the Islamic environment of the two holy cities.” This was a tricky principle to interpret on Saudi ground, since if Angawi advocated historical conservation per se, he would run afoul of the religious establishment’s opposition to false monuments. Still, he believed that he could see a way forward. Angawi and his staff carried out surveys in Jakarta, Karachi, Cairo, and elsewhere, trying to document the experiences and desires of Muslim pilgrims in all of their heterodoxy. He incorporated this research into his evolving plans for Mecca and Medina. In his vision, influenced by environmentally conscious European urban planning, automobiles and buses would be excluded from the two city centers—vehicles would park on the perimeter, and pilgrims would flood through the worship areas on foot, praying not only at the mosques but also in parks and in traditional, renovated souks.⁷

This was not, of course, the image of Mecca and Medina’s future that King Fahd or the Bin Ladens had in mind as they undertook their massive renovations. Angawi was not a radical—he tried to work within the Saudi system, and he earned a lucrative living as an architect, enough to design and construct a stunning traditional Hejazi home in a wealthy neighborhood of Jeddah. Yet he had given much of his professional life to the proposition that Mecca and Medina need not succumb to the same soulless sprawl that was engulfing every other city in Saudi Arabia. He tried to suggest the purchase of Westinghouse fast trains that could speed large numbers of pilgrims between Mecca and Medina. He produced a film about the worsening traffic problems in the holy cities.