There is a fundamental difference between the older Islamic world and the new, centralized model many Islamist currents aspire to.

In the older order, the sacred was a shared inheritance. Authority was dispersed across legal schools, scholarly lineages, cities, and local custom. No single force could plausibly claim a monopoly over religious meaning, over the governance of the holy places, or over the social life organized around them. Even pilgrimage and its revenues were never the uncontested property of one party or one doctrine; they were negotiated and mediated through multiple institutions.

The newer model reverses that logic. It seeks to concentrate what was historically plural: to place the holy places, ritual life, religious authority, territory, and the everyday norms of society under one center of command; along with the money and prestige that follow. The aim is not simply political rule. It is to narrow legitimacy to a single interpretation, and to treat alternative inheritances as deviation, disorder, or threat.

A question, then: if a rival power were to gain administrative control over the Muslim sacred places, how would it act? Or, put differently and without presuming intentions: what is the most consequential strategic position to occupy in the Islamic world, if not precisely the administration of the sacred itself?
And what would have been different if Mecca had been constituted as something like a neutral territory administered not by a dynasty with its own doctrinal commitments and strategic interests, but by an authority accountable, however imperfectly, to Muslims as a whole? Something like a Vatican of Islam: a space where the sacred remained, at least in principle, common property. The question is not whether such an arrangement was ever likely. It is what its absence has made possible.