Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Not only Muslims, but the entire world is watching in amazement as buildings that were
home to leading figures of the Islamic world are torn down. Example of this include the
flattening of Mount Umar, where the home of Hazrat Umar (pbuh) stands, and the
construction of skyscraper hotels, the demolition of the Mosque of Bilal from the time of our
Prophet (saas), the demolition of Ottoman houses with their elegant adornments and detailed
window decorations and stunning wooden doors and their replacement with houses of no
esthetic value at all, the construction of the Royal Makkah Clock Tower Hotel, completed in
2012, on the site of 400 graves of historical and cultural importance, a hotel being built on the
site of the home of Hazrat Abu Bakr (as) and the conversion of the area where the house in
which the Prophet Muhammed (saas) is thought to have been born, in Mawlid Street next to
the Kaaba, into a car park.
The same underlying causes are also behind the way the Kaaba, Muslims most sacred site,
today literally has the air of a tourist attraction and is surrounded by tall masses of concrete,
hotels and workplaces:a fanatical mindset that has nothing to do with the Islam of the Quran
and that is far removed from any conception of quality and esthetics being represented as the
true Islam. That mindset sees absolutely nothing wrong in the shameless desecration of the
Kaaba.Yet these sacred lands for which our Muslim brothers and forebears laid down their
lives in order to protect were entrusted by our Prophet (saas) to the entire Islamic world.