The Saudis have spoiled Mecca – but the British Museum doesn’t want you to know.

                           The Royal Mecca Clock Tower looms over the Kaaba (Photo: Reuters)

The Saudis have spoiled Mecca – but the British Museum doesn’t want you to know.(TheTelegraph).BY Will Heaven.Go to the British Museum’s Hajj exhibition if you want a close-up look at Egyptian textiles and medieval Turkish manuscripts.
But if you want to find out the truth about Mecca, and specifically how the Saudis have destroyed and spoiled some of the holiest sites in the Islamic world, you’d be better off staying at home to read this jaw-dropping article in the New Yorker by Basharat Peer.
Here’s what the British Museum didn’t let on in its blockbuster exhibition, which I visited last month.
Looming large over the Grand Mosque and the Kaaba (the black cube-shaped building that is the holiest site in Islam) is the largest and second tallest building in the world, called the Royal Mecca Clock Tower complex.
You can’t miss it (see pic above) – unless, it seems, you’re a British Museum curator. The 2,000-foot hotel certainly didn’t feature in the exhibition.
Peer, a recent pilgrim to Mecca himself, writes with disdain: “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.”
When he enters the Clock Tower complex, he discovers it has the feel of “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…”No wonder some Muslims feel so at home in Harrods.
And the situation in Mecca is worsening: Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah plans to redevelop the centre of the holy city into “high-rises and shopping malls”. Mecca's mayor, Osama al-Bar, justifies all this by saying that “a tower is very much like a mountain in its height”. Never before have "mountains" looked so garish and distressingly ugly.Read the full story here.