When Mustaqim Azmi made the grueling sea journey from India to Jeddah on his first hajj in 1953, he felt like a rich man landing in a poor country. Bedouins crowded the docks to welcome their Muslim brothers coming from the subcontinent—and to catch the stale roti bread the passengers had saved for them. "They were so hungry," Azmi recalls. But with OPEC's founding and the rocketing of oil prices following the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, Saudi Arabia became one of the world's wealthiest nations. "Today, we're the poor ones," says Azmi, now general secretary of the All-India Ulama Council. "We are...
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