And for the Muslims, Their Like
وَلِلْكَافِرِينَ أَمْثَالُهَا And for the disbelievers will be the like thereof. (Qur’an, Surah Muhammad, 47:10)
On an evening in October I prayed the sunset prayer inside the Grand Mosque in Mecca, and I entered this time through the northern expansion rather than the routes I had worn into memory over the years. I did this deliberately. I did not want to arrive as the man who already carries the old building in his chest and measures everything new against his nostalgia. I wanted to arrive as an architect, to look at the space as it actually is today and not as it survives in my affection, and to give the thing its honest due rather than my sentiment. Sheikh Faisal Ghazawi led the recitation, and somewhere in the first verses a problem opened in me that I could not take apart cleanly, which is a strange admission for a person whose entire training is the taking apart of spatial experience into its causes. I could not separate the effect of the voice from the effect of the room. I could not find the seam where the recitation ended and the architecture began, nor the seam where the architecture ended and the sheer fact of the place took over. The Qur’an is one. The space is not one. Had I heard the same voice, at the same quality, in some other volume of air, I do not believe the experience would have been the same, and I offer that as a personal spatial impression, not the result of an acoustic measurement.
I want to be careful here, because this is where writing about a place like this usually goes wrong, collapsing into either unbroken praise or unbroken nostalgia, and both are useless to an architect. So let me hold to the one thing I can actually testify to, which is the behavior of a very large void when it fills with human beings and sound. What I felt was not belief. It was the effect I felt height, sound and the density of standing bodies exert on my attention. That experience alone cannot establish the building’s acoustic performance. Call it the reverent connection a person forms with a void that has been shaped to receive them. The architect can design the height, the scale, the axis, the light, the movement, and the sound. The architect cannot design the sacredness, because the sacredness arrived before the architecture and does not belong to it. The most the building can do, in its very best moments, is to not get in the way. To step aside and let the thing appear. That is a discipline of restraint, and it is far harder than ornament.
The Verse and the Phrase It Left Behind
During the recitation the verse passed through the air, the closing of the tenth verse of Surah Muhammad, and for the disbelievers will be the like thereof, a verse whose context is the fate of nations that came before. I will not pretend to interpret scripture, and I have no standing to, and this piece has no interest in doing so. But a sentence formed in my head that is explicitly not from the Qur’an, that is nothing more than the private aside of an architect sitting on a floor and looking around himself, and the sentence was this. And for the Muslims, their like. Not the like of the punishment in the verse. The like of the right to a place. If civilizations build their temples and their cathedrals and their great civic halls, if every culture that has ever existed has expressed itself through its most ambitious enclosures, then why should the Muslim arriving from the far edge of Asia or Africa or Europe not also deserve to walk into one of the most important spaces in his inner life and find a void capable of receiving him with dignity. That is the whole of the phrase. It is a claim about architectural entitlement, about who gets to have great space made for what they hold sacred, and it is the quiet argument running under everything I am about to describe.
The space is enormous, but its dimensions are not my subject. Behind the prayer rows operates a system of cooling, sound, vertical transport, water and circulation. A city of services inside a mosque, its engineering converging on something simple: that a visitor should find somewhere to pray, hear the recitation and move with dignity. That is the significance of scale here, not the number alone.
A Space That Cannot Close
Here is the architectural fact that reorganizes how I see the place. As in operating airports and hospitals, maintenance here requires phased work and the isolation of areas while service continues elsewhere. The sanctuary adds the particular demands of worship and crowds: the construction and the maintenance and the upgrading all have to happen around and beneath a flow of human beings that never fully drains. That single constraint changes the entire nature of the design problem, because it means the ordinary definition of failure does not apply. In most projects a failure is a cost, a delay, a complaint, a defect to be scheduled and absorbed. When you are holding hundreds of thousands of people in one volume at one instant, a stalled escalator, a lapse in the cooling, an acoustic dead spot, a closed exit, a misread in the direction of a crowd, any of these can convert in moments from an operational fault into a human one. The building is bound by a kind of oath it never signed, that a person may come from the other end of the world and stand here and be able to pray, and find a place, and find water, and hear, and move, and leave. The design, at this scale, is really the management of that oath.
And this is where I would normally rest the article, in the demanding and genuinely interesting engineering of a space that cannot be allowed to fail. The reverent connection to the void, the restraint of an architecture that serves rather than performs, the sustainability of a structure that must endure repeated peak loads without ever going dark, the way the great expansions are less a style than an accumulation of layers each solving the capacity and movement problems the last one could not. That would have been the whole of it. But the world walked into the article on its own, and I cannot honestly keep it out.
The Thing I Cannot Stop Finding Strange
Reports of attacks on Riyadh’s airport were on my mind. Reuters reported another attack and civilian casualties on October 11. The interception over Medina reported by the Associated Press on October 15 does not establish that the Prophet’s Mosque was the intended target, nor does it establish an attack on the Grand Mosque in Mecca. Rhetoric must not erase that distinction. Looking at the elderly, children and pilgrims, my concern was not a reported strike on this place, but the question violence against civilians raises: why should someone coming to pray have to think about weapons before reaching a place of peace?
I am not writing about air defence, nor asking a mosque to become a fortress. What concerns me is the contradiction between a place people approach for worship and violence that can threaten their lives or their journey there. Deliberately attacking unarmed civilians to terrorise them is an outrage no political dispute can justify, whether in an airport terminal or at a mosque entrance. I do not need to imagine a missile above the sanctuary to say so.
The Sanctuary Means Safety
To understand the weight of the idea, I return to the assurances of safety at the conquest of Mecca. In Sahih Muslim, Book of Jihad and Expeditions, chapter on the conquest of Mecca, hadith 1780, the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, grants safety to those entering Abu Sufyan’s house, laying down their weapons or closing their doors. This is not a structural guarantee offered by a wall, but an undertaking to refrain from harm. That is the meaning I recall before the prayer rows: laying down arms and seeking shelter should offer safety, not make the defenceless easier to target. Societies have not always honoured their sanctuaries. Their violation does not cancel the principle; it makes defending that principle more necessary.
So I return to the phrase: And for the Muslims, their like. It is not a boast about expenditure, but the right of someone arriving from across the world to a space that receives them with care, and to peace that is not taken away by an attack. Architecture serves that right; it is not the party to be held responsible for choosing to violate it.
What the Architecture Can and Cannot Hold
One visit cannot provide a comprehensive assessment of the expansions. What I saw was an architectural and operational effort to support prayer and movement; what I felt deserves to be described within those limits. The professional question is not which layer is more beautiful, but how each serves people without obscuring why they came. An external attack, however, is not an architectural defect for which the building should bear responsibility. That responsibility belongs to whoever chooses violence.
There remains a role for architectural research in evacuation and continuity of service, and for design in protecting users’ dignity. But that does not turn the question into a contest between weapon and wall. What cities encounter in the news cannot be reduced to a formal problem for architectural competitions. The starting point is the wrong of attacking people, not the building’s capacity to endure it.
My final question is not how to make a sanctuary withstand a missile. It is how anyone coming to pray or perform Umrah can be exposed to violence in which they have no part. Architectural criticism examines capacity, circulation and service; it does not transfer an attacker’s responsibility to the walls of the place attacked. I came that evening to consider a space and found people who deserve to be left in peace. And for the Muslims, their like: a place worthy of what they hold sacred, and safety on the journey to it and within it. That is not a demand for privilege. It is a demand that worship should not become a reason for fear.
✦ ArchUp Editorial Insight
Responsibility for safety is divided between operating a place and preventing attacks against it; confusing those responsibilities can transfer the burden of violence to those who suffer its consequences. Management must support safe movement and reliable services, and design must enable that work. External threats do not, however, make worshippers or buildings responsible for an attacker’s choices. Reducing harm and justifying its source are different matters: better evacuation provides no legitimacy for an attack, while successful cooling or circulation cannot establish protection against every hazard. This essay is personal testimony, not an operational audit. Its critical value lies in distinguishing service from inviolability, rather than certifying the expansion’s overall performance. It extends the operational question explored in this archive’s reading of the mosque as a system of worship and movement, while the relationship between security and spatial meaning introduces another constraint: users should not pay for protection through the loss of dignity or belonging. This does not remove duties of prevention. It prevents those duties from displacing the responsibility of whoever attacks civilians.
Ibrahim Fawakherji — ArchUp
Sources
- Qur’an, Surah Muhammad, 47:10.
- Sahih Muslim, Book of Jihad and Expeditions, chapter: The Conquest of Makkah, hadith 1780 (1780c).
- Reuters, “One dead in new attack on Saudi airport, a day after Houthi strike kills 13,” October 11, 2026.
- Associated Press, “Saudi Arabia says it thwarted a missile strike on Medina, and other Middle East developments,” October 15, 2026.
