Fahd of Saudi Arabia

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.

The King Fahd Complex for the Printing of the Holy Quran was established at Medina in the 1980s and is among the largest publishing operations in the world devoted to a single book. It produces the Arabic text in several standard readings, recitations on audio, and translations into scores of languages, and the great majority of what it prints is given away rather than sold, distributed through pilgrims returning home, through embassies, and through mosques and institutions abroad.

The effect on the availability of scripture has been enormous. In many places the free copy from Medina is simply what a Quran is, and for readers without Arabic the accompanying translation is the text they use. That gives the complex an influence over the reading of scripture that no commercial publisher could hold, because a translation is an interpretation at every point where the Arabic is capable of more than one sense, and the explanatory notes that accompany these editions carry positions on law and creed.

That influence is discussed rather than disputed, and the discussion has camps. One reading treats the programme as a work of custodianship in the plainest sense, making scripture available without charge to Muslims who could not otherwise obtain it. Another holds that free global distribution of one editorial line, at a scale no other body can match, has shifted the balance of Sunni interpretation toward the reading favoured in the kingdom, at the expense of local schools of law and older regional traditions. The two readings are not incompatible: a very large act of provision can also be a very large act of persuasion, and both camps agree on the scale.