A Great Satan in this Grave

Why is Saudi Arabia, possibly the worst and most repressive country in the world, also the only place still keeping the modernist ethos alive? In the late eighteenth century, the Ottoman authorities placed an enormous fort on Bulbul Mountain, a hill in Mecca directly overlooking the Kaaba. According to tradition, the Kaaba is a replica of the Bait-ul Ma’mur, the house of God, which is visited by seventy thousand angels in constant prayer. It’s a kind of earthly shadow of its holiness, positioned directly beneath it: the two structures face each other, with the Kaaba facing up and the Bait-ul Ma’mur facing down. This is the place where the earth touches closest to heaven. (Directly above the Bait-ul Ma’mur is the throne of God himself.) Then, in between the two, there was this squat stone military fortress. You couldn’t make one rotation around the shrine without seeing it, perched on its bald hill, watching. A kind of sacrilege, but maybe a necessary one: the peninsula was about to col

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• Santi Ruiz