The main justification for this destruction is to eradicate apostasy (shirk) according to narrow religious interpretations of this concept. Most Muslims love to preserve this heritage which belongs to mankind, to show it to their children and deepen their religious convictions. What can be done to achieve this?
Dr Ifran Al-Alawi: Distinguished guests thank you very much for attending this lecture. I believe it is my second lecture in Abrar House on this theme. I gave a lecture several years ago and at that time I said that we have a few years before Mecca becomes Les Vegas. We have moved away from that phase and now we only have a few minutes – a few seconds.
For Muslims, Mecca is the heart of the universe. It is the heart beat of every Muslim. A consultant knows that when you tamper with the heart that affects the whole of the human body – your brain, your lungs and you will collapse. When you tamper with the heart of the universe you start having tsunamis which are called mizan. It is the balance which Allah has kept by stabilising the mountains around Mecca like Jebal Khadar, Jabal Khindimar, Jebal Umar and so forth.
Over the past 50 years and perhaps even more – let us not even go into what happened in 1805 when the Wahabbi started devastating destruction of their heritage – but let us talk about what happened in the past 50 or 60 years. I published an article in September 2014. It was an eye catching article because it was dealing with the demolition of the Prophet’s mosque and some of its sacred chambers.
Dr Ali Bin Abdel Aziz bin Shabil one of the academic lecturers of the Imam Hamad University based in Riyadh who is on the executive committee of hajj and umrah called for the sacred chamber of the Prophet where he is buried alongside two of his companions to be demolished and for the green dome to be removed. So anything which venerates the Prophet – -the columns which have been there since the Ottoman period – attracts bidha and innovation.
When this article was published the Saudis even until today have refused to release a public statement saying they don’t accept what I wrote. I found out about this particular statement because Shabhil released it into the Royal Presidency Journal and they published an extract of this document. Now why would you publish an extract of a document if you simply do not agree with it?
They wanted to taste the water while in Iraq and Syria the shrines of the prophets: Ayub, Jonah and Sherif Yousif Al Nabhani have been bulldozed by ISIL. The Saudis saw the Sunni world and the Shia world remained silent about the destruction in Syria and wanted to taste the water to see if they could do something about the Prophet’s mosque.
At this moment when we speak the Prophet’s mosque is going through a vast expansion from the 1980s which is the period of King Fahd. It is a very huge complex so they thought let us see if we can tamper with some of the sacred shrines.
When this article went viral it woke up a lot of Muslims and non Muslims. The sad thing is that my articles always capture an eye for one or two weeks and I am asked to do a number of interviews and after that they all go back into their caves and start meditating again and think maybe God will place another messiah in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. And of course that does not happen.
Ali Shabhil is still following Muhammed ibn Al-Uthaymeen one of the great Wahabbi clerics of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia who was a famous student of Bin Baaz. These are the clerics from the 1980s and early 1990s who said that the green dome should be removed because it is shirk and anything which venerates the Prophet or his companions should be taken out because it attracts bidha and innovation.
In the picture which was published in the Independent you can clearly see the Prophet’s birthplace is here. The oldest area of Mecca has gone due to the expansion today. You have the royal clock tower in the kabbah. You do not have anything which remains historically intact around Mecca at all. It is all history.
Where the king’s palace is today is very historic because it is where the Prophet Abraham called the people to visit the holy city of Mecca. These are all Ottoman houses. Some of the these buildings may seem very high but they are not. The Ottomans phased them away but the buildings were never higher than the minarets of the Kaabah. These old buildings are bed and breakfasts. They were the enclosures of some madrasas, schools and even some houses of the companions of the Prophet.
The Kabbah in 1996 was taken down brick by brick. This will probably shock you. The excuse was they had to rebuild the kabbah because it had decayed. The cockroaches started eating the pillars and it was decaying so they needed to replace it. There is a way of doing something rather than replacing it brick by brick. They removed everything from the foundations of the kabbah which go back about 340 years and got bricks and made them sink in the Red Sea in Jeddah. For the Saudis it was an interpretation of bidha.
Here is a new authorised plan to eliminate the houses, the mountains, everything left from ancient Mecca approximately 400 meters from the kabbah so nothing remains. And that is what is happening today. Workers inside the kabbah with modern drills have been injecting the walls. So what you see in the kabbah now is all plastic. Nothing from the Abrahamic period remains. It is all plastic. The lock of the kabbah was replaced last year and you have a digitalised lock. But the Prophet says the unjust ruler will come and take the key from you. So the Bani Shebi was returned the key but that lock and the key is worth $1. The Ottomans used to have beautiful keys. If you go to the Tokapi palace you will find you find them engraved with beautiful venerations of the Prophet and so forth.
This is a map from when they demolished the kabbah. It was in 1996. This is the heart of Mecca. My plan here is to show you when you penetrate three of four miles inside the earth’s crust and dynamite the mountains it is going to disturb the earth’s foundations and the crust.
These are the drills near the kabbah. Look at the sign of the construction. You have a bulldozer, a glass and a snake and the kabbah around it. Why do you need a glass of wine and a snake? Let us move away from the Masonic ideology. The bulldozer is the important thing. They like to bulldoze before they think about what they are going to build there.
This is the ugly tower. I used to show this 15 years ago before it was going to come. No one believed me. They told me I was exaggerating but it has already started and it is going to get worse. This is how it was before it came up and this is what I say it is going to look like. No one believed me. They have 121 buildings planned like this in the next 15 years. That is the king’s palace and all these Ottoman constructions which go back 350 years have all been dismantled and bulldozed. Nothing is left from the Mamluks going back 600 years. The Othmani columns are all gone. This is what it is going to look like because the king’s palace is going to be taken down and you are going to have a six star hotel coming. This is the picture I published in the Independent and you see all the hotels. This is the clock tower museum on top. So you go upstairs and the museum tells you how lovely the world keeper of the Islamic world is.
This is how Mecca looks today. It is a construction site. This picture was taken in January and this is the Mamluki period which venerates the Prophet, his companions and family going back 650 years. These are all taken down. None of them remain and you can see the construction site.
This is Shubakia a very old cemetery which many of the Meccans know and the modern pilgrims do not know. The Shubakia cemetery is the place where the Bedouins used to bury female children alive before the time of the Prophet. The Prophet said this was unjust and you should never ever bury females alive.
Now we are looking at the house where the Prophet was born. This is his birthplace and it is under heavy construction. If you look here on the left hand side there are 1400 bathrooms and toilets. It is the birthplace of Fatima the daughter of the Prophet. He lived here for 28 years. It is the Bait Al Khadija covered with the largest toilet in Mecca right opposite the Prophet’s birthplace.
This is how it looks today. The birthplace is shut to the public. You have massive bill boards saying do not come and pray here. There is no proof that the Prophet was born here and coming and touching this building is bidha and shirk. So you have the shariah police here who harass the pilgrims and of course a digitalised display.
Overlooking that particular house you have Jebel Khindamar which has been demolished to make way for the largest palace in the kingdom accommodating King Salman. This is the king’s palace, this is the birth place of Fatima the Prophet’s daughter where he lived for 28 years and this is where he received these revelations after the mountain of light. This is the Dar Al Hakim the first Islamic school part of the escalators now. The house of Abu Bakr the first companion is under the Hilton. So nothing remains to tell you where was what.
This was taken down in January. It is the pillar of the heavenly journey which the Ottomans marked. This is where the Prophet slept with his aunt Um Al Hani and the burak came to take him to Jerusalem. It has been taken down and you don’t know where it is now.
This is the birthplace of the Prophet Muhammad with the dome to show that this was a sacred place and it was taken down 100 years ago. It was put down 70 or 80 years ago to make sure nobody bulldozes this place but under the foundation of this house remains the intact house of Aminah the mother of the Prophet. They don’t allow us to dig there and excavate because they say it is not that location. They said the same thing about the House of Khadija. So this may become a parking lot in the next couple of months, God forbid.
This is the king’s palace and this is the birthplace of the Prophet Muhammad. They are saying that the birth place of Prophet Muhammed is coming in the way of the king’s palace because you could have the VIP’s walking through the grand mosque and towards the king’s palace. So let’s demolish that and make it into the imam’s residence.
When I wrote my article that frightened them and held them back for a short moment but who knows what will happen because the rains work like ISIL and they can come down at any moment and demolish it. This is Bait Al Khadiya which was demolished in the 1980s. You had five rooms and everything was demolished. This is the birthplace of Fatima the Prophet’s daughter and they covered it with sand. When they did this we did not know what they were going to do. They said they would excavate it again but they came down with the sand and they covered it again and they built the largest toilets. It is near Bab Al Salam. They still refuse us to excavate and preserve the rooms. Even if you put glass over it it will attract pilgrims and bidha and it is not allowed in Islam. That is their ideology.
That gives you an indication of what is happening in that particular area. You have the house of Khadija which is in the oldest area of Mecca. This is the house of the Prophet’s birthplace. That is the Masjid Al Haram and the king’s palace. This is where the white mosque stood at one time when the Prophet Ibrahim called the people to the house of God. You have heavy machinery working over this house and we know for a fact that it is damaged infrastructure. I have seen sewage seeping in that house when I was there four years ago. The caterpillars are really heavy so there is damage to the infrastructure of the house. These are the toilets.
There is damage to the Zamzam. It is the Ibrahiamic well which dates back 4,000 years before the Prophet’s time. It is attracting a lot of arsenic because it has to contain some chemicals top purify it before it reaches the pilgrims. So it goes to the Kudai well, and back to the steel pipes before you consume it. When my article exposed them they said this was contaminated plastic gallons. When our own person went there to take water directly from the tap they found arsenic inside. You store zamzam like this for six months and you will see algae collecting underneath and it becomes dirty. If you stored zamzam fifty years ago it would never contain algae and they have accepted that they have to put chemicals in it. But why disturb it. It is a fractured system. The reason it is fractured is that when they were building the Dar El Tawhid Hotel they were digging under the earth’s crust and it is a 4,000 year old well. It does not have the strength it had 100 years ago. It is a fractured system and satellite images were taken of it. It was explained to Bin Laden that it is fractured. Zamazm dried up. It went under the tunnels towards the house of the birth of the Prophet and it was brought back and the well was repaired to some extent. But it is still not intact. We can lose it at any time.
This is Jeddah, the grave of Eve. It was demolished. The grave of Khadija the Prophet’s wife and Qasim his son. This is how it looks today. They use it as a scrap yard because the Bedouins have houses there.
One of the oldest wells where the Prophet learned to swim is in the middle of rubble and can be taken down at any time. According to their sources this is not that well where the Prophet learned to swim. Bir Al Tuwah is not famous so it is an excuse for the Saudis to take it down although it still produces water.
This is the house of Hamza. You can see how close it is to the grand mosque. This is a rare picture. It was taken down at the end of last year on Shariah Ibrahim. This is the plan of Mawlid Al Nabi. This is the haram and the house of Mawlid. They want to raze the building, and demolish the house. The imam’s residence will be here and eventually the king’s palace behind it. That’s how the plan is.
I will turn to Medinah very quickly. This is an old picture of Medinah. This is the house of Fatima one of the grand daughters of the Prophet. This is the 1980s when they demolished many of the houses around it. This is how it looks today with excavations carried out and this is how it looked last month.
This is baki and you have the Prophet’s mosque which is extending so far. This means that we are losing a lot of area around the Prophet’s mosque and Al Baki is also going to be expanded further towards Masjid Ijaba.
The sad news is what do they have planned for the Prophet’s mosque? If you look at this wall here that is the kubba, green dome. You have Bab Al Salam here. Bab El Gibril. When you come out from the Prophet’s mosque you will stand here. They want to put an extra wall down here so nobody stands anywhere offering salutations to the Prophet. They want to put a wall there so you have to move away from the dome. They put umbrellas there so the people don’t even come out to look at the green dome and offer their salutations and say prayers. So when the umbrellas are up the whole of the green dome is covered.
This the new plan. Two years ago the plan was that once this mosque was built they would have times for women to visit. So they shut the mosque to the general public and open it at certain times for males to visit. Again when I released the last article two years ago they changed the plans and this is how it will look now. This is the future of Medina – just like Mecca.
At the time of the battle of the trench there were seven mosques and the first one to be taken down was Abu Bakr’s mosque which was made into a cash point machine. Masjid Ali and Masjid Fatema were also shut down. A Saudi mosque has been constructed on this mountain to accommodate the pilgrims. But that is not historical. The Prophet did not pray there. The companions of the Prophet did not pray there.
The Prophet received his revelation at the mosque of victory for three days. It is prophetic narration that you should go and pray where the righteous prayed. This is verse of the Quran. This is a very sad picture of the grave of Imam Ali Oreidi the son of Jaffar. His grave and his mosque have been dynamited. This is how it looks today. They said they have demolished the greatest shirk in Medina. It was an 1100 year old shrine still intact in Medina three miles from the Prophet’s mosque but because the Shias and the Sunnis used to go and venerate it you were not allowed to pray in it because it contained graves. So they sealed the mosque off but people still went there so they said let’s wipe it off. And this is what they did. So you can see where ISIS gets its idea from.
According to historians Imam Hussein’s head is kept in Cairo and many of the relics of the Prophet are kept next to it and it is still intact. This is what the shabab do. I am sorry to show you this. In Africa. a 300 year old shrine was sledge hammered and smashed. This is one of the oldest churches in Jeddah, a historical building preserved from the Ottomans but of course it is going to be knocked down. The pyramids are under threat. They want to knock down the pyramids just like they knocked down the Bamyan idols. Ali Askerei – what did they do? They blew it up.
Let us finish with the icing on the cake. Everything to do with the House of Saud has to be preserved. It has to be under UNESCO’s protection.The fort of King Abdel Aziz from which he conquered Saudi Arabia is a national heritage site protected by UNESCO. He is not a Prophet – he is just a ruler. His cars are in the museum of King Abdel Aziz, along with his walking stick, his glasses and garments. You will not find anything in the museums of Mecca and Medina belonging to the Prophet, his family or his companions or anyone like that. In Bat Shai mosque in Pakistan you will find the walking stick of the Prophet and his turban which had been taken by the Ottomans.
This is where the ideology of ISIL has come from and Dr Saddar will continue to talk about this. I would just like to highlight something very quickly. Two days ago there was an article on the BBC which I hate quoting because it is a really loosely news agency now. It said there is a divide between the Sunnis and the Shias in the UK. There is no divide. I can’t see any division between Sunni and Shia. The British have always ruled through rule and divide but there is no divide. Certainly there is a divide among the Sunni Muslims within their own sects. But not between the Shias and Sunnis.
The people who stand up and support my aims objectives of protecting heritage not only in Mecca and Medina but in Lebanon, Iraq, Egypt and Syria – I speak for all – but the people who have come forward to me and helped me to raise awareness and have even given me the platform to speak on this have always been the Shia community. Where are the Sunnis and the Sufis?
In Pakistan two days ago the latest news was that President Nawaz Sherif was visiting his fathers for petro dollars as usual. Last week he was off on umrah with his protocol and his minister Nassur Allah Khan said you cannot give us azam through loud speakers. You cannot send us salutations of the Prophet on the loud speaker and you cannot read the book of Qadir Gailiani – it has been banned. What version of Islam is this? The Taliban version. Who does Nawaz Sherif belong to? Jamat Al Tabliq. Their ideology is that of Isil, the Wahabis and the Neobandis. Thank you.
Chairman: It is four years since the destruction of another icon in Bahrain where the revolution started. Jalal Farouz a former MP from Bahrain will address us. He will tell you about the situation four years on and there will be a short clip.
Jalal Farouz: Thank you ladies and gentlemen for being here. This week commemorates the fourth year of the intrusion of Saudi forces into Bahrain after a month of the revolution which started in Bahrain and the people gathered in Pearl Roundabout and they asked for a change of government in Bahrain. The Wahabis who entered Bahrain and called for death to the Shias and death to rafida they started all the atrocities. These are all the troops going into Bahrain and chanting death to Shia and we are here to take back Bahrain from the Shias. They started gathering round wherever there were demonstrations. Instantly they started demolishing mosques. Why would they demolish Shia mosques? This is Bahrain. All over Bahrain there were religious sites including the tombs of some sahaba dating back 1400 years. They were demolished as well.
The Independent reported that the Saudis demolished mosques. Al Jazeera said Bahrain targets Shia religious sites. Even the king’s committee said that at least 44 mosques and places of worship were demolished after the entry of the Saudis.
Here we see the bulldozers of the joint Bahraini-Saudi forces demolishing the mosques. This is a tomb of Sheikh Kabad. They demolished it even though it was a big site. This is one of the ancient mosques. They were all certified. This is a grave and mosque of one of the most prominent clerics in Bahrain. It dates back 550. This is the site of Amir Al Barbari. You can see the bulldozers bringing down the whole mosque and demolishing it even though it has been registered in the official sites of the government.
This is where this mosque was. So the people go and pray in the open because the mosque has gone but this is the site where the mosque was. Now they are not allowed to do this because the Saudi and Bahraini forces are round this area preventing the people from praying. The mosque of Saida Zeinab was burned down. This was how it looked before. Al Watia one of the oldest sites in Bahrain was demolished. They did not even respect the Quran the holy book of Muslims. They also burned it. You can see the Quran being burned there.
They go into mosques. This is the biggest mosque in Bahrain. In the middle of the night they put a hand grenade where the Grand Ayatollah stands. They sent a message: we are there for you. This is one of the shabas, Saad Sauhan. This is his grave. It was smashed by the Saudi-Bahraini forces. You could see they are even bringing out the remains. This was four years ago before ISIS and now we know where ISIS comes from. This is the way they treat the Shias. Associated Press published an article: Battle to Rebuild Razed Shia mosque in Bahrain and you could see how the people have tried to rebuild the mosques and the government goes in with its bulldozers and smashes them again. This is just a summary. I will show you a brief video.
Video:
These are the bulldozers bringing down the mosques. First they seize the area. This is Al Barbareri. This was the mosque and you can see how they are smashing it. Imam Sadiq mosque was also smashed. There is only one old man praying at one site which was burned down. They arrested and interrogated him and asked him why would you go and pray there. They do not want anything to remain which will show that Shias were there. I will show another video.
If a picture is worth a thousand words what would this one say? Resilience? Activists say they have documented 30 destroyed Shia religious sites in the past two months. They also made videos secretly hiding from the security forces inside homes and cars late at night.
This is a different Shia mosque but the story is the same. The security forces surround a mosque and then a bulldozer moves in. Troops dismantled this mosque. Then military vehicles and dump trucks drive away with the ruins. Some are lifted away. Others are torched. Burned Qu’rans lie in the rubble.
Human rights activists say worshippers have been attacked with tear gas. CNN has been unable to verify the authenticity of these videos but Amnesty International says the opposition speaks of a violent and relentless crackdown.
The kingdom’s Shia majority has played a major role in the opposition to the ruling Al Khalifa dynasty. The government says it is not targeting religious building insisting it is only removing makeshift constructions built illegally. The foreign minister denied any mosques have been demolished. International organisations like Human Rights Watch also accuse the Bahraini forces of shooting unarmed protesters.
You can see the mind set of the Wahabi. The source is Wahabism. The Salafis who really believe that everything related to the age of Prophet Mohammed has to go. But things related to the Saudi Kingdom remain.
Ziauddin Sardar: We have seen vivid representations of what the Saudis have done to Mecca and Medina and the Bahrainis have done to the Shia mosques and shrines. The question arises why are they doing this?
I lived in Saudi Arabia for almost five years during the 70s and was fortunate enough to visit Mecca and Medina University and talk to many of their religious scholars including members of the religious police. I have been back to Saudi Arabia.
In the Wahabi world view time has a very special connotation. Indeed for the Wahabis time actually stops at the death of the Prophet. There is no time after, there is no history, there is no development there is virtually nothing after that. It is essentially the end of time.
That is why to a very large extent they live in this kind of time warp. If time stops in the middle of the 10th century then there cannot be any moral progress or moral evolution. There cannot be any ethical innovation. There cannot be any real thought after that. So it is not surprising that their notion of history is quite strange and very radically different from us.
If you combine this idea that time actually stops after the death of the Prophet with an absolute certainty about their beliefs then you have a very toxic mix. In the Wahabi world view there is no place for doubt. For most of us religion is a leap of faith. Part of the Quran tells us about believing in the unseen. Part of believing in the unseen is the notion of doubt. As a human being you will always have doubts and if you believe in the unseen then of course the unseen is open to interpretation. There will be lots of different interpretations of the Quran, of the life of the Prophet and there will be different ways of doing things. People will pray differently, they will build their mosques differently, they may emphasise different aspects of the Islamic belief system. But if you have absolute certainty that your position is not just the truth but the absolute truth and there can be absolutely no doubt about it then of course far from accepting different interpretations you will actively try and suppress them simply because in your world view they are wrong, they are idolatrous they may even be evil and as such they have no right to exist. So the idea of any plurality of thought is totally absent if you live in Saudi Arabia.
I ought to emphasise that there is not just a single Wahabbism. It is not a monolithic entity. There is a big difference between the hejazis and the najdis which people who know something about Saudi Arabia will recognise.
So this notion of certainty does not allow any notion of pluralism. So this ideology is based on actual certainty. It is justifiable that only their interpretation should be the dominant interpretation and there is no place for any other interpretation.
And since history stops at the 7th century history it has no validity and it is totally irrelevant and therefore historic properties have no validity. Cultural property has no significance. So that is essentially what we are up against: the dominant Wahabi ideology which is the ideology of ISIL, Boko Haram, the Taliban in Pakistan.
With this ideology it is not a question that it does not tolerate difference. It is a question of the faith that it does not recognise difference. Not just that it does not recognise difference it believes that difference should not exist because its own position is absolutely right and correct and should therefore be the dominant position.
That is what we are up against. My own feeling is that this presents us with one of the most treacherous moments in our history because a culture that does not recognise pluralism and is absolutely based on certainty has no notion of doubt, no understanding, appreciation or recognition of history. Essentially it cannot produce anything viable itself. It cannot be a thriving culture in any sense. It is a dehumanised entity. It is an entity essentially because it does not recognise the past. It has no past and because it has no past it has no future either and it exists mostly for now.
If you look at the developments in Mecca and Medina they are about now – they are about modernity and such a culture has no ethical content whatsoever. If you look at the poor folks who become ISIS victims there is no doubt in their mind that what they are doing, the brutality they are committing is the correct thing to do. Just as the Saudis have no doubt in their minds that the destruction they are committing, the vast number of cultural properties they have destroyed, the history they have erased for them it is absolutely the correct thing to do. And such a culture can have absolutely no notion of ethics of what ethics means in contemporary life.
So that is what we are faced with. So for us it is not just a question of saving Mecca and Medina which is very important. Also it is a question of standing up to this brutal and barbaric ideology that unfortunately has spread very rapidly throughout the Muslim World and we face a real threat that it may become the dominant ideology of the world.
The sad thing is that nobody from the length and breath of the Muslim world from Morocco to Indonesia (except perhaps occasionally the Turks) have actually objected to what is going on. Suppose tomorrow the Israelis demolished a small mosque which was couple of years old in Gaza or the West Bank there would be riots in Karachi, they would be burning busses in Jakarta, they would be marching in Cairo and what has been going on in Mecca for the past 50 years, the systematic blatant and brutal destruction has not elicited any protest. Not a single protest, not a single demonstration, nobody got up and said anything. Perhaps because they too are imbibing an ideology where history has no value and religion is a question of absolute certainty and where pluralism has no place.
*Ziauddin Sardar is Chair of the Muslim Institute, a learned, fellowship society that promotes knowledge and debate, and editor of Critical Muslim, an innovative quarterly on contemporary Muslim ideas and thought. He is also the Director of the Centre of Postnormal Policy and Futures Studies, East West Chicago, and the editor of its journal East West Affairs. He has been described as a ‘critical polymath’ and works across a number of disciplines ranging from Islamic studies and futures studies to science policy, literary criticism, information science to cultural relations, art criticism and critical theory. He was born in Pakistan in 1951 and grew up in Hackney, East London.
Ziauddin Sardar has worked as science journalist for Nature and New Scientist and as a television reporter for London Weekend Television. He was a columnist on the New Statesman for a number of years and has served as a Commissioner for the Equality and Human Rights Commission and as a member of the Interim National Security Forum. Ziauddin Sardar has published over 45 books. The Future of Muslim Civilisation (1979) and Islamic Futures: The Shape of Ideas to Come (1985) are regarded as classic studies on the future of Islam. He pioneered the discussion on science in Muslim societies, with a series of articles in Nature and New Scientist and a number of books, including Science,Technology and Development in the Muslim World (1977), The Touch of Midas: Science, Values and the Environment in Islam and the West (1982), which is seen as a seminal work, The Revenge of Athena: Science, Exploitation and the Third World (1988) acquired a cultish following and Why Do People Hate America? (2002) became an international bestseller.
**Irfan Al Alawi **studied Philosophy and Islamic History at Al-Azhar University. He is Executive Director of the Islamic Heritage Research Foundation, International Director of the Centre for Islamic Pluralism and PhD lecturer in Islamic theology and Tasawwuf. He has written extensively on the destruction of the Islamic heritage with particular emphases on the holy sites in Hijaz, Saudi Arabia. He is considered an authority on the subject, having spent many years in Mecca and Medina, studying them and documenting their destruction by the Saudi authorities. He contributed articles to international newspapers. Dr Alawi has spent much of the past 25 years trying to highlight the destruction of early Islamic sites. He also participated in producing several documentaries on the ongoing destruction of holy sites in the Muslim world, especially after the rise of ISIS and its policy of systematic destruction of mosques, graves, Mausoleums and shrines. He is currently a Professor at the University of London and Netherlands. He is member of many leading professional Islamic governing bodies across the Globe: The International Institute of Islamic Thought and Civilization He is also a visiting fellow at The Woodrow Wilson International Centre for Scholars (Washington) and a regular visitor at the United Nations Geneva. He has contributed to many leading British Newspapers including The Independent, The Guardian, The Times, and The Weekly Standard Washington. He regularly does talks on BBC Radio 4, The Voice of Cape radio, The Cinnetwork Johannesburg Radio, Al Jazeera Arabic/English TV, CNN TV, BBC World Service TV and writes for and many Islamic journals across the world. He has translated many works in Arabic, English, Swahili and Urdu. Dr. Irfan studied other relevant disciplines at the traditional schools and learning circles at the hands of many leading sheikhs across the Arab world, particularly the senior Sheikhs of Mecca/Medina and Hadhramaut .He is forthcoming author of the Encyclopaedia of Mecca and Medina and Executive Director Islamic Heritage Research Foundation www.islamic-heritage.org
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