The title Fahd adopted in 1986 was not new. Servant, or custodian, of the two noble sanctuaries had been claimed by Ayyubid, Mamluk and Ottoman rulers, who understood that whoever guaranteed the safety of the pilgrimage and the upkeep of the mosques held a standing in the Muslim world that no other office confers. What was new was the decision to make it the ordinary form of address for a modern head of state in place of a royal style, and the timing: it came in a decade when the authority of the Saudi state to speak for Sunni Islam was being contested from several directions at once.
The responsibility is practical before it is symbolic. The pilgrimage brings a population the size of a large city into a small valley on fixed dates, and its history is a history of crushes, fires, epidemics and political demonstrations. Under Fahd the sanctuary at Mecca and the Prophet's Mosque at Medina were rebuilt on a scale that transformed both: covered prayer areas measured in hundreds of thousands of square metres, retractable domes, tunnels, and a capacity that turned an event limited by physical space into one limited by quota. Saudi authorities also administer the quota system that allocates pilgrim numbers by country, which makes the custodianship a matter of foreign relations as much as of building works.
The claim carries a corresponding exposure. Because the sanctuaries belong to all Muslims, decisions about them are answerable to a constituency far wider than the kingdom, and criticism of Saudi management, of the quota, of the demolition of older buildings around the sanctuaries and of the exclusion of political expression from the pilgrimage, is made in the name of the same custodial principle the title invokes.