Mecca, officially Makkah al-Mukarramah, is a city in the Hejaz region of western Saudi Arabia and is the capital of Mecca Province. Mecca is considered the birthplace of Islam and the Islamic prophet Muhammad, as well as being the holiest city in Islam.
It is located inland from Jeddah on the Red Sea in a narrow valley above sea level. Its metropolitan population in 2022 was 2.4million, making it the third most populated city in Saudi Arabia after Riyadh and Jeddah. The Cave of Hira atop the just outside the city is where Muslims believe the Quran was first revealed to Muhammad.; The Great Mosque of Mecca, known as the , is home to the Kaaba, believed by Muslims to have been built by Abraham and Ishmael. It is the direction of prayer () for all Muslims worldwide. Around 44.5% of the population are Saudi citizens and around 55.5% are Muslim foreigners from other countries. Pilgrims more than triple the population number every year during the pilgrimage, observed in the twelfth Hijri month of as an obligation for all Muslims at least once in their lives. With over 19.3 million international visitors in 2024, Mecca was one of the five most visited cities in the world.
Muslim rulers from in and around the region long tried to rule the city, and thus, much like most of the Hejazi region, has seen several regime changes. The city was most recently conquered in the Saudi conquest of Hejaz by Ibn Saud and his allies in 1925. Since then, Mecca has seen a tremendous expansion in size and infrastructure, with newer, modern buildings such as The Clock Towers, the world's fourth–tallest building and fifth–largest by floor area, towering over the Great Mosque. The Saudi government has also carried out the destruction of several historical structures and archaeological sites, such as the Ajyad Fortress.A Saudi tower: Mecca versus Las Vegas: Taller, holier and even more popular than (almost) anywhere else, The Economist (24 June 2010), Cairo.Fattah, Hassan M.Islamic Pilgrims Bring Cosmopolitan Air to Unlikely City , The New York Times (20 January 2005). However, many of the demolitions have officially been part of the continued expansion of the Masjid al-Haram at Mecca and the Prophet's Mosque in Medina and their auxiliary service facilities in order to accommodate the ever-increasing number of Muslims performing the pilgrimage. Non-Muslims are prohibited from entering the city.
Under the Saudi government, Mecca is governed by the Mecca Regional Municipality, a municipal council of 14 locally elected members headed by the mayor (called in Arabic) appointed by the Saudi government. As of January 2022, the mayor of the city is Saleh Al-Turki. The City of Mecca , which constitutes Mecca and the surrounding region, is the capital of the Mecca Province, which includes the neighbouring cities of Jeddah and Taif, even though Jeddah is considerably larger in population than Mecca. Prince Khalid Al-Faisal has been the provincial governor since 16 May 2007.
Etymology Mecca has been referred to by many names. Its etymology is obscure as with many Arabic words. Widely believed to be a synonym for , it is said to be more specifically the early name for the valley located therein. At the same time, Muslim scholars generally use it to refer to the sacred area of the city that immediately surrounds and includes the Kaaba.
is the official transliteration used by the Saudi government and is closer to the Arabic pronunciation. The government adopted as the official spelling in the 1980s, but it is not universally known or used worldwide. The full official name is (). is used to refer to the city in the Quran in Surah Al-Fath (48), verse 24.
The word Mecca in English has come to be used to refer to any place that draws large numbers of people, and because of this some English-speaking Muslims have come to regard the use of this spelling for the city as offensive. Nonetheless, Mecca is the familiar form of the English transliteration for the Arabic name of the city.
Macoraba, another ancient city name Claudius Ptolemy says was within Arabia Felix, was also claimed to be Mecca. Some studies have questioned this association. Many etymologies have been proposed: the traditional one is that it is derived from the Old South Arabian root M-K-R-B which means "temple."
Other names Another name used for Mecca in the Quran is at 6:92 where it is called (, meaning "Mother of all Settlements"). The city has been called several other names in both the Quran and . Another name used historically for Mecca is .AlSahib, AlMuheet fi Allughah, p. 303 According to an Islamic suggestion, another name for Mecca, , is synonymous with the Desert of Paran mentioned in the Hebrew Bible at Genesis 21:21. Arab and Islamic tradition holds that the wilderness of Paran, broadly speaking, is the Tihamah coastal plain and the site where Ishmael settled was Mecca. Yaqut al-Hamawi, the 12th-century Syrian geographer, wrote that was "an Arabized Hebrew word, one of the names of Mecca mentioned in the Torah."
The Quran refers to the city as in Surah Al Imran (3), verse 96: "Indeed the first House [of worship], established for mankind was that at Bakkah." This is said to have been the name of the city at the time of Ibrahim and it is also transliterated as and , among others. It was a name for the city in the ancient world.
History
Prehistory
In 2010, Mecca and the surrounding area became an important site for paleontology with respect to primate evolution, with the discovery of a Saadanius fossil. Saadanius is considered to be a primate closely related to the common ancestor of the Old World monkeys and apes. The fossil habitat, near what is now the Red Sea in western Saudi Arabia, was a damp forest area between 28 million and 29 million years ago. Paleontologists involved in the research hope to find further fossils in the area.
Early history (up to 6th century CE)
The early history of Mecca is still largely shrouded by a lack of clear sources. The city lies in the hinterland of the middle part of western Arabia of which there are sparse textual or archaeological sources available. This lack of knowledge is in contrast to both the northern and southern areas of western Arabia, specifically the Syro-Palestinian frontier and Yemen, where historians have various sources available such as physical remains of shrines, inscriptions, observations by Greco-Roman authors, and information collected by church historians. The area of the Hejaz that surrounds Mecca was characterized by its remote, rocky, and inhospitable nature, supporting only meagre settled populations in scattered oases and occasional stretches of fertile land. The Red Sea coast offered no easily accessible ports and the oasis dwellers and bedouins in the region were illiterate.
One study by Majied Robinson, based on early Islamic genealogical records, estimates that at the time of Muhammad the population of Mecca was around 550. Muslim scholars using traditional sources may place the number as high as 10,000.
The first clear reference to Mecca in non-Islamic literature appears in 741, long after the death of Muhammad, in the Byzantine-Arab Chronicle or Chronicle of 741. However, English writer Tom Holland claims that here the author places the region in Mesopotamia rather than the Hejaz. Republished in the US from original UK edition of the same year published by Little, Brown.
Possible earlier mentions are ambiguous. The Greek historian Diodorus Siculus writes about Arabia in the 1st century BCE in his work Bibliotheca Historica, describing a holy shrine: "And a temple has been set up there, which is very holy and exceedingly revered by all Arabians."Translated by C.H. Oldfather, Diodorus Of Sicily, Volume II, William Heinemann Ltd., London & Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1935, p. 217. Claims have been made this could be a reference to the Kaaba in Mecca. However, the geographic location Diodorus describes is located in northwest Arabia, around the area of Leuke Kome, within the former Nabataean Kingdom and the Roman province of Arabia Petraea.Jan Retsö, The Arabs in Antiquity (2003), 295–300Photius, Diodorus and Strabo (English): Stanley M. Burnstein (tr.), Agatharchides of Cnidus: On the Eritraean Sea (1989), 132–173, esp. 152–3 (§92).)
Ptolemy lists the names of 50 cities in Arabia, one going by the name of Macoraba. There has been speculation since 1646 that this could be a reference to Mecca. Historically, there has been a general consensus in scholarship that Macoraba mentioned by Ptolemy in the 2nd century CE is indeed Mecca, but more recently, this has been questioned. Historian Glen Bowersock favors the identity of the former, with his theory being that "Macoraba" is the word "Makkah" followed by the aggrandizing Aramaic adjective rabb (great). The Roman 4th-century historian Ammianus Marcellinus also enumerated many cities of Western Arabia, most of which can be identified. According to Bowersock, he did mention Mecca as "Geapolis" or "Hierapolis," the latter one meaning "holy city" potentially referring to the sanctuary of the Kaaba. Danish writer Patricia Crone, from the Revisionist school of Islamic studies on the other hand, writes that "the plain truth is that the name Macoraba has nothing to do with that of Mecca [...] if Ptolemy mentions Mecca at all, he calls it Moka, a town in Arabia Petraea."Crone, P. Meccan Trade and the Rise of Islam, 1987, p.136
Procopius' 6th century statement that the Ma'add tribe possessed the coast of western Arabia between the Ghassanids and the Himyarites of the south supports the Arabic sources tradition that associates Quraysh as a branch of the Ma'add and Muhammad as a direct descendant of Ma'add ibn Adnan.
Patricia Crone and Tom Holland has cast doubt on the claim that Mecca was a major historical trading outpost.Crone, Patricia; Meccan Trade and the Rise of Islam; 1987; p.7Holland, Tom (2012). In the Shadow of the Sword; Little, Brown; p. 303 However, other scholars such as Glen W. Bowersock disagree and assert that Mecca was a major trading outpost. Crone later on disregarded some of her theories. She argues that Meccan trade relied on skins, hides, manufactured leather goods, clarified butter, Hijazi woollens, and camels. She suggests that most of these goods were destined for the Roman army, which is known to have required colossal quantities of leather and hides for its equipment. The earliest Muslim inscriptions are from the Mecca–Taif area.
Islamic narrative
In the Islamic view, the beginnings of Mecca are attributed to the Biblical figures, Adam, Abraham, Hagar and Ishmael. It was Adam himself who built the first God's house in Mecca according to a heavenly prototype but this building was destroyed in the Noahic Flood. The civilization of Mecca is believed to have started after Ibrāhīm (Abraham) left his son Ismāʿīl (Ishmael) and wife Hājar (Hagar) in the valley at Allah's command. Some people from the Yemeni tribe of Jurhum settled with them, and Isma'il reportedly married two women, one after divorcing the first, on Ibrahim's advice. At least one man of the Jurhum helped Ismāʿīl and his father to construct or according to Islamic narratives, reconstruct, the Kaaba ('Cube'), which would have social, religious, political and historical implications for the site and region.