World’s Largest Hotel: For Muslims Only

The Guardian had a story last week about the soon-to-be completed Abraj Kudai, a new hotel in Mecca which will have 10,000 guest rooms, 70 restaurants, four helipads, and five floors reserved for the sole use of the Saudi royal family.

Totally unmentioned by the Guardian is that you’re not allowed to stay there unless you’re Muslim.

Several years ago I wrote a piece on the steroid-level religious discrimination by which Saudi Arabia declares two entire cities off-limits to non-Muslims:

The Koranic revelations were given to the prophet Muhammed in Mecca, which was then a pagan place. Soon after, he left Mecca and traveled to Medina, where he assembled an army, returning to conquer Mecca in A.D. 630. “The Prophet then ordered, on the basis of what he said was God’s command to him, that the environs around Mecca should only be for Muslims,” explains Seyyed Hossein Nasr, a professor of Islamic studies at George Washington University.
The custodians of Islam take the ban seriously, and they have constructed a large apparatus to keep infidels out. In The Saudis, Sandra Mackey’s account of living in Saudi Arabia several years ago, she recalls trying to drive near Mecca (with her husband at the wheel, of course): “Billboard-size blue and white signs in both Arabic and English appeared along the road, warning non-Moslems to turn back.” She saw religious authorities and Saudi policemen “lounging in a small wooden building adjacent to the road.” Eventually, “we were forced off the road by one of the angry policemen.” She was fined about $100 and turned away. (What’s the penalty for actually being caught inside Mecca? The Saudi embassy refused to return calls.)
Ali Al-Ahmed, executive director of the Washington-based Saudi Institute, explains that these posts “check your religion, basically.” He notes that, “if you’re a Saudi, of course, there is no problem. But if you aren’t, your ID says what your religion is.” If you’re wondering why it’s not a problem if you’re a Saudi, Ms. Mackey explains it best by quoting a passage from a Saudi hotel directory: “Islam is the official religion of Saudi Arabia. Churches of other religious denominations do not exist in the kingdom.”
Professor Nasr has a more benign view. When traveling to Mecca, drivers are stopped at a toll station, he explains (the city has no airport): “Somebody comes forward and looks and says, ‘Are you all Muslims?’ And the people will say ‘yes’ and they’ll say, ‘Go on.'” But “if the authorities become suspicious because someone doesn’t look like a Muslim, they’ll say, ‘Recite the first chapter of the Koran’ or some such thing which all Muslims know by heart.”

It’s important to understand that this ban isn’t just for a single holy site, but for an entire metropolitan area. How seriously do the Saudis take it? This seriously:

Companies that rely on skilled workers often resort to using auxiliary offices outside the city. Mackey tells of the building of a hotel designed by a Western architect. The Saudis refused to allow him into the city and, she writes, “insisted that he stand on a hill outside of town and direct the work through a telescope.”

And yet American companies which care deeply about social justice at home are happy to accommodate discrimination abroad. Remember last year when Starbucks decided to ban customers who were legally carrying firearms from its stores? Because to Starbucks, progressive ideals are more important that constitutionally-enshrined rights. Well in downtown Mecca there’s a Starbucks. And not only is it inaccessible to non-Muslims, but it’s segregated by gender, too.

Cue the outrage in . . . never mind.

Jonathan V. Last is a senior writer at The Weekly Standard.

Related Content