The Hajj under the New Custodianship

After Abdul Aziz ibn Saud took the Hijaz with the holy cities of Makkah and Madinah in 1925, the guardianship of the two sanctuaries and of the hajj passed to the new Saudi state, and around 1930 the pilgrimage was performed much as it had been for centuries, in a sanctuary whose fabric was still essentially the one the Ottomans and earlier Muslim dynasties had built and maintained. At this date the Masjid al-Haram was the older mosque: an open court with the Ka'ba at its centre, kept plain and draped in its black covering, the kiswa, surrounded by the deep arched stone colonnades, the riwaqs, and the slender minarets of the pre-modern sanctuary, with the bare dark granite hills of Makkah crowding close around a city that was still small and low. The pilgrims came as they always had, by sea to Jeddah and overland, in far smaller numbers than today, perhaps a few tens of thousands in a year. The new custodianship brought a greater measure of security to pilgrim routes that had long been preyed upon by raiding, but the immense oil wealth that would fund the vast expansions of the Haram and transform Makkah into a city of towers was still in the future, beginning only at the end of the decade. This scene depicts the hajj around 1930, the Ka'ba and the circling pilgrims within the old Ottoman-era arcades of the Haram, beneath the hills of Makkah, the sanctuary on the threshold of its modern transformation.