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NB. Script diverges from guidance VO in places.

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[Start]

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Mecca, Saudi Arabia. For Muslims, the holiest place in the world.

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Birthplace of the prophet Muhammad, and home to the Kaaba, the focal point of all of Islam.

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Mecca today is home to an extraordinary new building: the Abraj Al-Bait, or Mecca Royal Clock Tower.

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At 600 meters tall, it is easily the largest clock-tower in the world.

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The clock faces are 43 meters across. The gear mechanism is intended to last over 100 years and each gigantic clock hand weighs 6 tons. It is undoubtedly a remarkable feat of engineering and design.

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The Mecca Clock Tower project, however, has been dogged by controversy from its inception.

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Many see it as a beautiful monument to one of the world’s great religions, and a symbol of Mecca to stand alongside Paris’s Eiffel Tower, and London’s Big Ben.

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But others finds its scale and opulence incongruous with the ascetic Islamic faith.

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For them, its eerie green glow emblematises all that is wrong with Saudia Arabia’s form of Islam: the commercialisation of religion and destruction of sites of incalculable historical value.

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Title:
“Triumph or folly?
Mecca’s Royal Clock Tower”

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The Mecca Royal Clock Tower is part of a mixed residential and commercial development composed of 7 buildings and constructed for an estimated 15 billion dollars.

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They sit directly beside the Grand Mosque, the largest structure in the world by surface area, which was recently expanded at a cost of 21.3 billion US dollars. Its new capacity is a hard-to-believe two million people.

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And the Grand Mosque houses the Kaaba – the black cube-shaped building which is Islam’s most sacred site.

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For centuries, pilgrims have been coming here as part of the Hajj – the pilgrimage to Mecca that every Muslim who is physically and financially able must make in their lives.

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As part of the Hajj,  they circle the Kaaba seven times.

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Like the Jewish tabernacle, the Kaaba is considered the House of God. All Muslims face it in their daily prayers. And each year 3 million of them visit the Kaaba as part of the Hajj.

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It can be hard to understand the sheer scale of these numbers. The Hajj is the largest annual gathering of people in the world. But the density of the resultant crowds also makes it extremely dangerous.

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This is Jamaraat bridge, where the “Stoning of the Devil” ritual takes place. Here, as part of the Hajj, pilgrims throw pebbles at three pillars – the Jamaraat.

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In the last twenty years alone, stampedes have led to the deaths of over 3000 people on Jamaraat Bridge.

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To improve safety and security, the old bridge was demolished.

And a new bridge was constructed at a cost of over 1 billion dollars. It’s five storeys tall.

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Extensive reconstruction of this type is widely recognised to be necessary. As cheap jet travel and rising incomes make the Hajj more accessible to Muslims worldwide, the number of people making the yearly pilgrimage is only expected to rise.

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By 2025 an estimated 17 million people will visit Mecca annually.

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But for some, the Royal Clock Tower is a step away from well-meaning renovation – and a step towards distasteful opulence.

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It certainly constitutes a triumph of human engineering. At 607 meters, it’s the third tallest building in the world, and is visible from 24 kilometres in any direction.

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It breaks over thirty world records, from largest clock face in the world – 35 times larger than that of London’s Big Ben – to longest minute hand, at 23 meters.

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Its construction was particularly challenging. Many of the architects, engineers and designers assembled to plan it were unable to visit the site, as only Muslims are permitted in Mecca.

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And the clock posed many engineering challenges. Every component, from the carbon fibre clock hands to the bronze alloy gear mechanism, had to be custom designed and precision engineered.

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Meanwhile, a 12,000 ton steel structure was required to support the immense weight of the clock – and withstand speeds of up to 324 kilometres per hour. load-bearing framework resembles the Eiffel Tower.

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Another task of gigantic complexity was the gold-leaf mosaic encrusting the clock’s exterior. It was to be assembled from 93 million glass tiles – but where to find them?

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The designers turned to Venice, Italy, where mosaic glass has been produced for over a thousand years.

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Their order – the largest ever –required developing robotic production methods. The resulting 12,000 square feet of mosaic are enough to cover two football fields.

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Another hurdle was ensuring visibility at night. Lighting engineers from Austria ruled out illumination from outside or within, settling instead on embedding LED lights in the surface of the clock and its hands.

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Over 2 million LEDs were produced for the Mecca Royal clock tower. Together with 32 laser beams visible from over 30 km away, they form the largest light show in the world. And their peak consumption of 2.2 megawatts is enough to power a small town.

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Meanwhile, the sound system mounted at the top of the tower is the most powerful in the world. Thanks to computer-aided acoustic modelling, it can broadcast 7 kilometres in every direction without deafening those at the base of the tower.

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But the Mecca Clock Tower has also attracted controversy. It  stands on the former site of a 1781 stone citadel, called the Ajyad Fortress, whose destruction in 2002 sparked global outcry. The Turkish Culture Minister called it “a crime against humanity” and a “cultural massacre”.

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Yet it is only one small piece of the on-going demolishment of such structures. Saudi Arabia’s state-sponsored strain of Islam, Wahhabism – a hard-line theology which has been described as ultraconservative, even fundamentalist – considers historical religious sites to encourage sinful idolatry.

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As a result, mosques, burial sites, and historical locations associated with Mohammed and other early Islamic personalities are regularly demolished. Up to 95% of Mecca’s millennium-old buildings have been destroyed.

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It is this contradictory legacy that critics cite in decrying the construction of the Abraj Al-Bait Towers, which house a 5-story shopping mall and a luxury hotel.

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Its creators hoped that the tower would not only be a clock-tower and minaret but also a sublime symbol and timeless manifest for the Islamic faith.

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[King Abdullah, lower thirds.]

Subtitles: “The most important thing to me is that spirituality is preserved. Look at the current state of Mina, people wanting to build here, there and everywhere. Let us seek refuge from God. This is Mecca, no work is to be done here lightly, whatsoever.”

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But some wonder: if the early destructiveness of Wahhabism paved the way to a hard-line Islam whose offshoots included Al Qaeda, does the Mecca Royal Clock Tower point now to a new, lavishly expensive vision of Islam taking root – to a Mecca reconceived as Las Vegas?

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One thing is certain. Driven by the same petrodollars that fuelled Wahhabist expansion, the paradoxes of modern Saudia Arabia will continue to delight – and outrage – the world.