The Hejaz region of Arabia has long been a center of cultural and commercial exchange

Saudi Arabia Islam in the Hejaz The Hejaz region of Arabia has long been a center of cultural and commercial exchange. Being the spiritual and historical cradle of Islam and hub of all pilgrimage activity has made the region and its primary urban centers of Mecca, Medina, Jeddah and Ta’if important crossroads of Islamic culture and thought. Because of its religious significance and the commercial trade associated with the pilgrimage industry, the Hejaz has historically looked outwards towards the sea. Pilgrims from Africa, Europe, Central and Southeast Asia have long traveled to the Hejaz to perform the pilgrimage and many of them stayed on long after their religious obligations were complete to settle down and integrate themselves into the local community. The result has been a largely heterogeneous society, politically advanced, religiously tolerant and ethnically diverse. Much of the Arabian Peninsula was politically unified by 1932 in the third and current Saudi State, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The military campaign led by King Abdulaziz ibn Saud and his Bedouin army of inspired tribesmen conquered the Hejaz and ousted the ruling Hashemite clan. The new Najdi rulers, nomadic Arabs largely tribal and illiterate, found themselves at the reins of a highly sophisticated society. A cohesive political structure based on the Majlis al-Shura (consultative council) system had been in place for centuries. A central administrative body managed an annual budget which allocated expenditure on secondary schools, military and police forces.Similarly, the religious fabric of the Najd and the Hejaz were vastly different. Traditional Hejazi cultural customs and rituals were almost entirely religious in nature. Celebrations honoring the Prophet Muhammad, his family and companions, reverence of deceased saints, visitation of shrines, tombs and holy sites connected with any of these were just some of the customs indigenous to Hejazi Islam.As administrative authority of the Hejaz passed into the hands of Najdi sunni Muslims from the interior, the sunni ‘ulema (body of religious scholars) viewed local religious practices as unfounded superstition superseding codified religious sanction that was considered a total corruption of religion and the spreading of heresy. What followed was a cleansing of the physical infrastructure, the tombs, mausoleums, mosques and sites connected with the rites of innovated grave and saint-worship and deemed questionable by state-dogma and the introduction of a reformed theology that espoused a uniform, ultra-orthodox Islam.The initial dismantling of the sites began in 1806 when the Wahhabi army of the First Saudi State occupied Medina and systematically leveled many of the structures at the Jannat al-Baqi' Cemetery. This is the vast burial site adjacent the Prophet's Mosque (Al-Masjid al-Nabawi) housing the remains of many of the members of Muhammad’s family, close companions and central figures of early Islam. The Ottoman Turks, practitioners themselves of more tolerant and at times mystical strains of Islam, had erected elaborate mausoleums over the graves of Al-Baqi’.