What the rest of the world needs is to turn Mecca and Medina into glowing, smoking holes in the ground. Nothing else will serve. Sooner or later, probably later, civilisation wil realise it.

After that, let them organise pilgrimages; at least, the people who go on them will probably be sterile thereafter.

There is a precedent for a religion having its holiest places destroyed as a pacification measure. Can't say we liked it much - for centuries thereafter, it was said that no true Jew could pass by the Arch of Titus in Rome without weeping.

I'll add that the idea Fletcher proposes is dumb, what Col./Rev. Sensing would describe as "a spasm, not a strategy." It's highly unlikely to achieve what he believes it will, creates issues he hasn't begun to address or deal with, and leaves anyone adopting it with nowhere to go thereafter.

And those are just the practical ojections.

History is impossible to predict, and there are possible futures in which Mongol tactics are the order of the day and the scenario you describe could come true. But before we get there, a civilization worthy of the name needs to employ a real war strategy and explore other options.

Fahid Ghadry's idea has significant merit, I believe. Why not support people like him, and see?

I think that many Saudis would applaud the creating of a sacred district, incorporating both Mecca and Medina, but with bright lines drawn between what was inside and outside.

The two cities are, in some ways, already distinct in that non-Muslims are prohibited from entry. In most ways, however, ordinary Saudi life infiltrates: commerce, education, crime.

Drawing a bright line could lead to a situation where anything of questionable Islamic merit would be prohibited inside the district, but permitted outside it. Thus, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia could continue modernization while the sacred district remained immured in historical tradition on whatever levels were decided.

Drawing the geographic borders would be problematic for Saudis, particularly if they were to encroach upon Jeddah or the new "industrial and economic cities" existing or being planned. But that's something that could be worked out internally.

A tightly defined border delineating an area of absolute sanctity for Islam would also permit the extension of religious freedom (i.e., non-Muslim places of worship) outside those borders.

While the idea make a lot of sense, though, it's certainly not the right time to do it. Any move in this direction would be perceived as a foreign (i.e., anti-Muslim) idea forced upon Muslims.

Thus, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia could continue modernization while the sacred district remained immured in historical tradition on whatever levels were decided.

"Modernization" - is that the word you use to describe how the Sauds have been tearing up graveyards and holy places, then building hotels and port-a-potties over the remains?

:::

Historic Mecca, the cradle of Islam, is being buried in an unprecedented onslaught by religious zealots.

Almost all of the rich and multi-layered history of the holy city is gone. The Washington-based Gulf Institute estimates that 95 per cent of millennium-old buildings have been demolished in the past two decades.

Now the actual birthplace of the Prophet Mohamed is facing the bulldozers, with the connivance of Saudi religious authorities whose hardline interpretation of Islam is compelling them to wipe out their own heritage.

It is the same oil-rich orthodoxy that pumped money into the Taliban as they prepared to detonate the Bamiyan buddhas in 2000. And the same doctrine - violently opposed to all forms of idolatry - that this week decreed that the Saudis' own king be buried in an unmarked desert grave....

...Similarly, finds by a Lebanese professor, Kamal Salibi, which indicated that once-Jewish villages in what is now Saudi Arabia might have been the location of scenes from the Bible, prompted the bulldozers to be sent in. All traces were destroyed.

:::

The financiers of 9/11 do have a habit of doing this sort of thing. No wonder most of the Muslim world, and most of the world in general hates our "allies" in Saudi Arabia.

While the idea make a lot of sense, though, it's certainly not the right time to do it. Any move in this direction would be perceived as a foreign (i.e., anti-Muslim) idea forced upon Muslims.

Most Muslims regard Saudi control of Mecca as a foreign idea forced upon Muslims. If the Sauds didn't have us protecting them, they'd have lost control a long time ago.

Turning Mecca into a Vatican city?? In Christianism the separation between Church and State has been a characteristic factor that grew over time. It does not happen in Islam. Prophet Mohammed was also a prince, and as it, he settled civil law. His successors were califas, that is, both religious and administrative leaders.

Mustafa Kemal Attaturk, the father of modern Turkey, managed, using the army and sometimes extreme violence, to detach civil power from religion; but, I think, unfortunately Turks are not Arabs.

The question is to separate civil and religious matters, turning Mecca into a Vatican city might be not the solution, but the latest consequence of it.

Islam needs to be "Crossanized". A historical review would eliminate the prophet's prophet status, his ride to Heaven and back, and those virgins responsible for all those jihad "crazies".

Joe, Moslems weeping I have no problem with. Maybe some sort of payback for the tens of thousands that they have caused to weep in the last century alone.

If the lesson isn't learnt? Well, there are other targets.

The problem is this one, as A.L. points out, that is, how religion and civil law mix together in an Islamic society.

Mohammed may stay as prophet, what he cannot longer be is prince.

Of course, few want that. Islamism constitutes an easy way to unite and control a Muslim society, otherwise divided by ethnicity, clans, etc. Moreover, any internal tension can be relieved as external Jihad, which is a stabilizing tool for those regimes, thus prolonging their existence.

A B-I-G problem for infidels like us.

From Mary's link (link): The practice of idolatry in Saudi Arabia remains, in principle at least, punishable by beheading. This same literalism mandates that advertising posters can and need to be altered. The walls of Jeddah are adorned with ads featuring people deliberately missing an eye or with a foot painted over. These contrived imperfections are the most glaring sign of an orthodoxy that tolerates nothing which fosters adulation of the graven image. Nothing can, or can be seen to, interfere with a person's devotion to Allah.

What a horrible way to live, an enemy of beauty, mankind and all gods but one, and that an evil one that commands wicked deeds and needless violence. I don't want to punish Muslims. They punish themselves.

The problem isn't retribution, or justice, or the goodness or wickedness of any individual. (Except Muhammed (bpuh), now forever beyond the reach of correction.)

It's a system. If Khaled is decent, and in a population of over a billion many people are bound to be not merely decent but excellent, power passes with more than chance frequency to Mohammed who isn't, because when Khaled puts his foot down the religion doesn't back him up, but when Muhammed puts his foot down he's being consistent with the spirit and likely the letter of the religion, and if he's the kind that's quick to resort to violence, that just makes him more like the original Muhammed (pbuh). How can you drive violence out of the religion when the ideal man who all are commanded to follow was a mass killer? How do you prohibit resort to violence, deciet and the suppression of free speech, when Muhammed (pbuh) licensed his assassns to lie to get to a poet he wanted butchered because she satirised him? How do you deny the legitimacy of tyranny and aggressive war on unbelievers when the final Prophet went in for both, and condemned as hypocrites those who did not want to follow him?

I think it's no accident that the anti-anthropomorphic Almohads ("monotheists") replaced the relatively less intolerant Almoravids in Iberia, or that the Saudi Wahhabis won out in Arabia. The dice are rigged.

I don't even know what people are really asking moderate Muslims to do. Forbid jihad violence? In the name of who or what, when Islam commands it and is a deadly enemy of everything that is not itself or a front end for itself? And it's not even safe, in a religion where accusing someone of not being a real believer and sanctioning them, even with violence, is easy.

The hell of it is, in this case as so many, is that the "Islamists" are right. Polytheism, ancestor worship and other things that Islam hates thrive on the kind of historical evidence the Saudis are industriously ruining.

Islam is getting its covenant written on the heart, in the form of Wahhabi-funded education, in place of material things that may tempt men to wickedness. This is in line with the severe prophetic spirit of monothestic religion in the Abrahamic tradition, and this is a pivotal time in religious history.

Dr Angawi said: "Mecca should be the reflection of the multicultural Muslim world, not a concrete parking lot."

Isn't that whose who hate Islam to the point of wanting Mecca nuked want? To "turn it into a parking lot"?

Just wait: Muslims will do that for themselves. This is the Muslim Mordor, in slow construction.

all what i have to say is that the number of christians convert to islam rises day by day thanks to allah , but tell me how much muslims change into other religion ??....it s so rare and those who do so do it for materialistic reasons .
tell me just how much christian scientists convert into islam , a lot because they are the people who have the ability to know truth and facts which are said in holy koran and sunnah.
by the way iam not mad of you but i feel sorry for you and i ask you just to read , search and ask about islam , not nesseserly muslims because not all of them are good , but islam as it is in islamic books , it s not a shame , it s good to know.