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Mecca city is one of the oldest cities in the world since the first nuclei of the city was laid down more than 3700 years ago by the Prophet Ibrahim, and since that time it has been a sacred city. When the Prophet Mohammed began the call to Islam in 620 AD, the city entered a new era in its history to become the most important religious and commercial centre of the Hejaz. The holy Mosque with its courtyard containing the “Ka’aba” is the most important building not only in Mecca but in the Islamic world, and the “Ka’aba” is considered as the heart of the city. The pilgrimage to the city of Mecca (Hajj) is the fifth pillar of Islam, and unlike pilgrimage in other religions, it is a mandatory character for every member of the faithful who can afford it. For this reason, visitor numbers to Mecca have grown exponentially during the last few decades ranging between 1.5–2.5 million pilgrims per season, peaking to 3.2 million pilgrims in 2012 AD. This trend is closely connected with the different expansions of the holy mosque since 1955 AD, when the first Saudi extension doubled its area. The project was followed by two other major expansions in 1988 and 2010 AD. These projects were done at the cost of destroying some historical neighbourhoods where, however, the historical Ottoman portico has been conserved by a royal decree in 1969 AD. This paper will analyse the expansions of the holy Mosque focusing in the projects that took place in the Saudi rule and discussing how these expansions have affected the urban fabric of the city as well as their impacts in the historical area despite the first legislation of heritage conservation policies approved in 1972 AD by using a mixed approach of gathering data through a literature review as a secondary data and the primary sources which include official and non-official reports as well as government and non-government archive records.

A novel coronavirus, COVID-19, appeared at the beginning of 2020 and within a few months spread worldwide. The COVID-19 pandemic had some of its greatest impacts on social, economic and religious activities. This study focused on the application of daily nighttime light (NTL) data (VNP46A2) to measure the spatiotemporal impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the human lifestyle in Saudi Arabia at the national, province and governorate levels as well as on selected cities and sites. The results show that NTL brightness was reduced in all the pandemic periods in 2020 compared with a pre-pandemic period in 2019, and this was consistent with the socioeconomic results. An early pandemic period showed the greatest effects on the human lifestyle due to the closure of mosques and the implementation of a curfew. A slight improvement in the NTL intensity was observed in later pandemic periods, which represented Ramadan and Eid Alfiter days when Muslims usually increase the light of their houses. Closures of the two holy mosques in Makkah and Madinah affected the human lifestyle in these holy cities as well as that of Umrah pilgrims inside Saudi Arabia and abroad. The findings of this study confirm that the social and cultural context of each country must be taken into account when interpreting COVID-19 impacts, and that analysis of difference in nighttime lights is sensitive to these factors. In Saudi Arabia, the origin of Islam and one of the main sources of global energy, the preventive measures taken not only affected Saudi society; impacts spread further and reached the entire Islamic society and other societies, too.

A three-dimensional (3D) CFD model was developed, covering a square area of 3.64 km2 and comprising the Holy Mosque near its center, the actual terrain, and the main surrounding buildings. The gust wind effects on the existing cranes and the collapsed tower crane in 2015, the comfort of the pedestrians, and the air quality were studied for the first time in this area. The air quality was related to calm speed, accelerating the spreading of infectious diseases. The wind comfort levels were achieved in all selected locations. The wind speeds are generally low in the area. However, gusting wind currents appeared from limited directions, causing increments in wind speeds up to 30% and causing the tower crane to collapse. Therefore, finalizing work on some cranes is recommended soon, lowering the crane boom and stopping working on windy days or changing their places. The air quality in some sites may be relatively poor, such as at the lower terraces level. New tall buildings surrounding the mosque from the north and the east are not recommended unless studying their impacts on the air quality. Pruning north and east mounts can remarkably improve natural ventilation. Large-scale fans are another solution after a detailed simulation study.

To restrict COVID-19, individuals must remain two meters away from one another in public since public health authorities find this a healthy distance. In this way, the incidence of “social distancing” keeps pace with COVID-19 spread. For this purpose, the proposed solution consists of the development of a tool based on AI technologies which takes as input videos (in real time) from streets and public spaces and gives as output the places where social distancing is not respected. Detected persons who are not respecting social distancing are surrounded with red rectangles and those who respect social distancing with green rectangles. The solution has been tested for the case of videos from the two Holy Mosques in Saudi Arabia: Makkah and Madinah. As a novel contribution compared to existent approaches in the literature, the solution allows the detection of the age, class, and sex of persons not respecting social distancing. Person detection is performed using the Faster RCNN with ResNet-50 as it is the backbone network that is pre-trained with the open source COCO dataset. The obtained results are satisfactory and may be improved by considering more sophisticated cameras, material, and techniques.

This paper aims to analyse and document the architectural heritage of the Holy Mosque in Makkah, Saudi Arabia (Al-Masjid Al-Haram) and its surrounding area. It focuses on the use of multimedia videos, photographic pictures and virtual reality technology in documenting the architectural heritage of the Grand Mosque area in the period following the new expansion and renovation of the Holy Mosque (within the last ten years) and compares it to the pre-expansion period. Muslims gave special care to building the Holy Mosque as they consider it the holiest place on earth. They did all they could to take care of it and develop the surrounding architecture to serve the large number of pilgrims and worshippers who visit the Mosque each day. The last ten years witnessed huge expansions to the Holy Mosque, several applications of modern design solutions, and developments in buildings, which led to the dispense of some of the historical architectural elements that have been decorating the Holy Mosque for decades. To preserve these decorations, and to shed light on the beauty of the current developed designs, they need to be analysed using photographic pictures, and documented using virtual reality technology, allowing interested researchers to study them in the future. The team of researchers for this paper consists of professional photographers, architects and interior designers. The research uses historic descriptive and analytical methods to achieve its aim.

Changing the prayer direction from Makkah to Jerusalem and then back to Makkah was probably one of the first Muslim community's most contentious incidents. Due to its being highlighted in Q. 2:142-44, it has aroused an unending debate among Muslim exegetes, jurists, and western historians as to why the qiblah was changed. Was it based on a divine command or Muhammad's independent judgment, a move to dilute the Arabs' emotional attachment to the Kabah, or a move to win over Madinah's Jewish community? Might it have been a throwback to the Abrahamic heritage, envisaged by the Prophet as a base for a wider, monolithic Islamic nationalism? This article seeks to closely examine and clarify the qiblah literature in an attempt to reveal the Ka'bah's role not only as a geographical locale but also as a spiritual magnet, and to find out whether this incident represented a break or a continuation of an earlier strategy of socio-religious change.

The study objective was the development and content evaluation of the paper-based Hajji Health Record (PHHR) instrument to make it appropriate for developmental phases of web based electronic Hajji (Pilgrim) Health Record (WEHHR) implementation. A qualitative and quantitative survey was done on 13 December 2008G in Alnoor Specialist Hospital, Makkah, Saudi Arabia. Twenty-two physicians of 19 countries were given a preliminary questionnaire containing basic sociodemographic information, followed by Hajjis’ health information sheet (HHIS) with a sample scenario of a case history. A structured evaluation questionnaire about HHIS was given afterwards. Five point Likert scaling was used starting from strongly agree to strongly disagree as 1 to 5. Data was analyzed by using SPSS programme version 16. Two tailed p -value <0.05 was considered as significant. Mean age was 48.6 years with range (35–64). Specialists were 10(45.5%) and teaching hospitals’ physicians were 11(50%). Twelve (54.5%) physicians had concept about EHR, while the same number had their Hajjis’ health record but only 33.3% (4/12) had sufficient health information. Response rate was 91.9% with average rating of 2.2 ± 1. Agreement response (78.8%) was noted for “medical history” category followed by “medication history” (76.2%). Average rating of consultants was (2 ± 0.88), while specialists, residents and general practitioners had 2.3 ± 1.2, 2.7 ± 1, 2.1 ± 0.58, respectively. Physicians without EHR concept had average rating 2.1 ± 1.16 than other group (2.3 ± 0.92). Majority of physicians were specialists. Overall response rate was superb with agreement response. No significant difference in rating was found among all categories of physicians.