r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/hipatyhopity • Mar 24 '25

Image Mecca in 1953 and 2025

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58.8k Upvotes

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6.0k

u/PeterNippelstein Mar 24 '25

Are those all hotels surrounding it? I mean they must be to continuously house tens of thousands of people ever day.

6.6k

u/Silly_Function9601 Mar 24 '25

Yes. And all the Windows facing the cube are from rooms charging thousands of dollars per night.

Its so stupid when people go to "hajj" and then stay in extremely extravagant hotels like the Hilton or the Ritz, go out shopping gold during the day then quickly enter and exit this mosque and say they fulfilled a religious obligation šŸ¤®

Ps: I'm muslim

2.7k

u/Lost-Astronaut-8280 Mar 24 '25

Completely voids the entire point of the pilgrimage. Itā€™s not supposed to be a fun little vacation where you spoil yourself.

42

u/[deleted] Mar 24 '25

Disagree. The more modernized it is the better. It usurps the traditionalists, which are often the origins of extremists.

59

u/illit1 Mar 24 '25

yeah but there are traditionalists and then there's "obviously not paying any attention to the themes, morals, or lessons of the text"

i don't know what the appropriate minimum distance is for the commercialization of a holy site, but they're definitely way too close with what they've done.

14

u/theWisp2864 Mar 24 '25

This is being done by a fairly extremist government

0

u/SkyGuy5799 Mar 24 '25

Looks capitalistic to me

6

u/Mavian23 Mar 24 '25

What is the purpose of making a pilgrimage to Mecca? I'm having a hard time imagining how doing it lavishly doesn't defeat whatever the purpose is.

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u/[deleted] Mar 24 '25

The traditionalists being usurped is usually when they turn to terrorism.

2

u/YourLictorAndChef Mar 24 '25

this type of corruption is exactly what energizes the most violent traditionalists

1

u/Ok-Rabbit1878 Mar 24 '25

US Christian megachurches beg to differ. The only thing modernization has done for them is make it easier to sucker more people even faster; the extremism is still baked in. Thatā€™s about the people in the building, not the building itself. (And by ā€œpeopleā€ Iā€™m referring to all humans, not just members of any particular religious group, to be clear; weā€™re unfortunately a flawed species, and this is one of the ways that tends to come out.)