The Clock Towers

This guide to The Clock Towers in Mecca opens on a January morning in 2002, when bulldozers climbed the hill above the Grand Mosque and tore down a two-hundred-and-twenty-year-old Ottoman fortress in nine days. It follows the diplomatic fallout that came next, as Turkish officials likened the demolition of the Ajyad Fortress to the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas and Saudi Arabia's Islamic affairs minister answered that the decision was the state's alone to make. The guide traces what a fifteen-billion-dollar pilgrimage complex was built to replace, and what was lost with the fortress that once guarded this same hill.