The Siege of Mecca The Siege of Mecca The Siege of Mecca: The Forgotten Uprising in Islam's Holiest Shrine and the Birth of Al Qaeda is a 2007 book by Wall Street Journal correspondent Yaroslav Trofimov about the 1979 Grand Mosque seizure in Mecca. Hundreds of Islamic radicals led by Saudi preacher Juhayman al-Otaybi invaded the Masjid al-Haram in Mecca, Islam's holiest shrine, on Nov. 20, 1979. The intruders included men from all over the Muslim world and a handful of American converts. Tens of thousands of worshipers were trapped inside the compound. The battle for the shrine lasted two weeks, causing hundreds of
Muhammad in Mecca historical works survived from the writers of 3rd and 4th century of the Muslim era. The text of the Qur'an is generally considered by university scholars to record the words spoken by Muhammad as the search for variants in Western academia has not yielded any differences of great significance. The Qur'an, however, mainly records the ideological and spiritual considerations of Muhammad, and only fragmentary references to the details of Muhammad's life in Mecca, which makes it difficult to reconstruct the chronological order of the incidents in his or his followers' lives in Mecca. Modern biographers of Muhammad try to reconstruct