ABSTRACT
In Saudi Arabia, the demolition and erasing of the Islamic past is carried out in the name of religion as well as of modernization. Mecca and Medina have been refurbished with anonymous façades of steel, glass and concrete. By smashing artifacts, Saudis turn out to be simultaneously religious and modern. At the same time, they escape both traditionalism and the progressive attitudes of environmentalism. Also in this chapter I concentrate on a paradox: the Wahhabi economy of the sacred, which limits the sacred to a very small architectural area, leads to the secularization of the rest of the environment. As a result, religious architecture other than the Ka’aba must be declared secular and destroyed. The Wahhabi strategy is opposed to Western (and some other) ideas of conservation, which tend to “spread out” the sacred and to declare sacred even those items that were mundane in the first place.
