Optimizing Mecca: Expertise, Infrastructure, and Logistics in the Islamic Sanctuary

Abstract In the holy city of Mecca, crowds and numbers matter. A hadith, or saying of the Prophet, reports that when pilgrims number fewer than seven hundred thousand, angels will perform the rituals in their stead. One of the names of Mecca is umm al-zuhm or “Mother of Crowds.” Thinking about crowds in Mecca requires an alternate Islamic genealogy of “the crowd.” But in contemporary Saudi Arabia, the crowd is becoming a resource in new ways. As part of the Vision 2030 national transformation plan, the Saudi government wants to intensify Mecca's crowds, increasing the annual number of pilgrims from eight million to thirty million. Under this plan, the holy city is to become a laboratory for new sciences and technologies of crowd management, logistics, and optimization. This article demonstrates how Mecca comes to be constitutive of these new crowd sciences. The author shows how a range of knowledges (both religious and more secular) compete and collaborate through the building of a massive hajj infrastructure (the Jamarāt Bridge) and its system of logistical optimization (tafwīj). While the author is generally interested in how Mecca comes to be useful for these new crowd sciences and technologies, he is particularly interested in how Islamic law is deployed as “optimization” and as a crowd management “solution.” These strategies of crowd efficiency and optimization not only transform the performance of ritual itself but also diminish the cosmopolitanism that undergirds the hajj and its knowledge worlds.