Who ruled Mecca?

Mecca lies in a narrow, barren valley among the mountains of the Hejaz in western Arabia, about 70 kilometres inland from the Red Sea port of Jeddah. With little rain and no farmland, it owed its existence to a well, Zamzam, and to a sanctuary, the Kaaba, which drew pilgrims and traders long before Islam. It is the birthplace of the Prophet Muhammad and the holiest city of Islam: Muslims around the world face the Kaaba in prayer, and every Muslim who is able is expected to make the pilgrimage, the Hajj, at least once during their life. Its political history has largely been shaped by that religious role.

In Islamic tradition the Kaaba was built by Abraham and his son Ishmael, and the Zamzam spring appeared to save Ishmael and his mother Hagar in the desert valley. Independent historical evidence for the early town is scarce. By the sixth century CE Mecca was governed by the Quraysh tribe, who looked after the sanctuary, hosted the pilgrims who came to its shrines and organised caravan trade with Syria and Yemen. Islamic sources describe an attack on the town around 570 by Abraha, the Christian ruler of Yemen, remembered as the Year of the Elephant.

Muhammad was born in Mecca around 570 and, according to Islamic tradition, began receiving revelations around 610. Opposition from the leading families of Quraysh led him and his followers to migrate to Medina in 622, the Hijra, which marks the start of the Islamic calendar. In 630 he returned at the head of a large force and the city submitted with little fighting. The idols around the Kaaba were removed, and Mecca became the spiritual centre of the new faith.

Political power soon moved elsewhere, first to Medina under the Rashidun Caliphate, then to Damascus and Baghdad. Mecca was the stronghold of the rival caliph Abdullah ibn al-Zubayr and was besieged by Umayyad armies in 683 and 692, when the Kaaba was damaged and later rebuilt. Under the Abbasid Caliphate, Zubayda, wife of Harun al-Rashid, paid for wells and a channel to bring water to the city and for facilities along the pilgrim road from Iraq. In 930 the Qarmatians, a radical Ismaili movement from eastern Arabia, attacked during the pilgrimage, killed many pilgrims and carried off the Black Stone, which was returned about twenty years later.

From the tenth century the city was governed by the sharifs, local rulers descended from the Prophet's family, who recognised in turn the Fatimids of Egypt, the Ayyubids, the Mamluk Sultanate and, from 1517, the Ottoman Empire. Each overlord gained prestige as protector of the holy places and paid for buildings and supplies; the Ottomans rebuilt the colonnades of the Great Mosque in the 1570s. Forces of the First Saudi State held the city from 1803 until 1813, when an Egyptian army acting for the Ottomans retook it.

In 1916 Sharif Hussein launched the Arab Revolt against the Ottomans from Mecca and proclaimed himself king of the Hejaz. In 1924 the forces of Abdulaziz ibn Saud took the city, and the Hejaz became part of the kingdom named Saudi Arabia in 1932. Oil revenue later paid for repeated expansions of the Great Mosque and the holy sites, which now accommodate millions of worshippers at once, at the cost of most of the old city's historic buildings. In November 1979 armed militants seized the Great Mosque, and Saudi forces needed two weeks to retake it. Entry to the city is restricted to Muslims. Mecca has about 2.4 million residents, and in recent years the Hajj has drawn between 1.5 and 2 million pilgrims, with millions more making the lesser pilgrimage, the Umrah, throughout the year.