Makkah Al Mukarramah Library

The Makkah Al Mukarramah Library sits a few steps from the Grand Mosque, on ground tradition holds as the birthplace of the Prophet Muhammad. This guide traces the mid-twentieth-century dispute between scholars who wanted the site preserved as a landmark and those who saw that as forbidden veneration, and how King Abdulaziz ibn Saud tried to settle it. Many of the manuscripts on its shelves came from the private collections of Mecca's own scholarly families.