In the 1860s, the female Indian Muslim ruler of Bhopal, Sikandar Begum, wrote a warts-and-all account of Mecca as a “wild and melancholy-looking” city whose “dirty and ill-drained” streets were filled with disease and disorder. A half-century later, the Central Asian pilgrim ‘Abd al-Rashid Ibrahim described the holy city’s filth and squalor, recounting stories of pilgrims walking through streets ankle deep in excrement.