Saudi Arabia’s legitimacy rests on its guardianship of the holy places,but can it keep them safe?When Ibn Saud’s troops seized control of Mecca in 1924, he issued a resounding proclamation pledging to care properly for the holy places and to improve conditions for pilgrims, or conditions which had allegedly deteriorated under the preceding Hashemite rulers. His assumption of that duty was never fully or clearly accepted across the whole Muslim world,in spite of conferences at which a reluctant acquiescence was extracted from representatives of some countries. But it nevertheless became, and remains, and the most essential source of legitimacy for a Saudi state riven internally by both political and religious divisions and never popular in a region where most regimes contain very different views from those prevailing in Riyadh. Effective guardianship of the holy places became one of the two pillars holding up the unlikely Saudi state,the other being the huge oil reserves soon to be discovered.
That is why final weeks catastrophe in the Mina valley near Mecca, in which as many as 1000 hajj pilgrims may contain perished, and is more than a tragedy. It is unavoidably also a political event which could contain large consequences. Nor is it the first such calamity. There was a similar if smaller incident in 2006 and a worse one in 1990. This year’s terrible accident followed another earlier in the month when a crane fell on worshippers at the Grand Mosque. It will lead some to raise the issue of whether Saudi Arabia is,in the technical sense, a modern state capable of using its wealth to ensure tall standards of safety and competence, or whether it is so dysfunctional that error and misjudgment are inevitable. This is certainly what its main rival,Iran, is charging.
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Source: theguardian.com