Makkah · a Light

The Haram at Makkah began as an open space between houses

In the lifetime of the Prophet ﷺ the Kaaba stood in a small courtyard with private houses pressed around it and no enclosing wall. Around 638 the caliph Umar bought the nearest houses, had them pulled down and put a low wall around the cleared ground. Uthman widened it again. The Abbasid caliph al-Mahdi spent heavily between 777 and 781 to enlarge the courtyard and bring the Kaaba nearer its centre. The arcades most photographed in old prints were Ottoman work of the 1570s. Saudi expansions since 1955 have taken the enclosure past 350,000 square metres, and each stage removed older fabric, including most of those Ottoman arcades, which historians of architecture objected to at the time.

Masjid al-Haram, Makkah · 638 CE to the present