Guardianship of Mecca, Medina and the Hajj

The Saudi monarch holds the formal title Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, adopted by King Fahd in 1986, reflecting the kingdom's role in administering the Hajj, which the Saudi Ministry of Hajj and Umrah organizes annually for several million pilgrims from across the Muslim world, allocating national quotas by country population; the 2015 Mina stampede, one of the deadliest Hajj disasters in modern history, killed over two thousand pilgrims by independent counts and prompted safety reforms to crowd management and infrastructure. Religious authority in the kingdom rests partly with the Council of Senior Scholars, a state-appointed Wahhabi clerical body whose rulings carry significant legal and social weight, though Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman's reforms since 2017 have curtailed the religious police's public enforcement powers and permitted cinemas, mixed-gender events and women driving, changes framed domestically as a return to a more moderate pre-1979 social order rather than religious liberalization as such.

The 1979 seizure of the Grand Mosque in Mecca by armed millenarian rebels, ended after a two-week siege with French and Pakistani special forces assistance, is widely credited with pushing the kingdom toward stricter religious enforcement for decades afterward, a policy only substantially reversed in the recent reform period.