Excerpt from The Siege of Mecca by Yaroslav Trofimov, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

At their 89 meters (292 feet) of height, the mosque’s minarets overlooked much of downtown Mecca, providing rebel snipers with a vast field of fire. Trigger fingers caressing the cold metal, they scanned neighboring streets for potential foes. “If you see a government soldier who wants to raise his hand against you, have no pity and shoot him because he wants to kill you,” Juhayman instructed these snipers in his guttural desert accent. “Do not hesitate!”


Under the minarets, even Saudis–proficient in the local dialect–had a hard time understanding what was going on. The crying of women, the coughing of elders, and the shuffling of bare feet filled the Grand Mosque’s courtyard with an anxious hum. Many foreigners among the tens of thousands of hostages spoke no Arabic at all and stood transfixed in the turmoil, asking better-educated countrymen for explanation in a multitude of tongues.

The conspirators were prepared for linguistic problems, and wanted to be comprehended. Soon they grouped Pakistani and Indian pilgrims on one side of the mosque, with a Pakistani-born rebel interpreting the announcements in Urdu to bewildered compatriots. A cluster of Africans was provided with a speaker of English. “Sit down, sit down and listen,” Juhayman’s gunmen yelled, rifle-butting those pilgrims who dared to disobey.

As cowed worshippers finally settled in fearful attention, the mysterious group indicated that its authority now extended well beyond the Grand Mosque to Saudi Arabia’s commercial capital and to the second of the country’s two holy cities. “Mecca, Medina, and Jeddah are now in our hands,” the rebels declared through the shrine’s public-address system, so powerful that their words could be heard throughout central Mecca.

Then Juhayman handed the microphone to an aide better versed in classical Arabic speech. It was high time to explain the purpose of this daring venture.

For the next hour, the Grand Mosque’s loudspeakers relayed the uprising’s shocking message to the world’s one billion Muslims, announcing that an ancient prophecy had been fulfilled at last and that the hour of final reckoning was being struck. By the time this speech, occasionally interspersed with gunshots, was over and the loudspeakers fell silent, panic infected the whole of central Mecca. Even waiters at the outdoor cafés near the mosque had all run away.


Thus began a drawn-out battle that would drench Mecca in blood, marking a watershed moment for the Islamic world and the West. Within hours, this outrage would prompt a global diplomatic crisis, spreading death and destruction thousands of miles away. American pilots and European commandos would all have to be involved in restoring the shrines of Islam to the House of Saud. Soon, American lives would be lost, and America would find itself more isolated than ever in the increasingly hostile Muslim universe.

The consequences of this forgotten crisis–which remains blotted out of history books in Saudi Arabia and many other Muslim lands–last to this day.

In tackling Juhayman’s brazen attack on its holiest shrine, the Saudi government showed sickening arrogance, cruel incompetence, and bewildering disregard for the truth. The royal family’s image was sullied forever. Many Muslims in Saudi Arabia and beyond, including the young Osama Bin Laden, were so repulsed by the carnage in Mecca that their loyalty started to fracture. In following years, they drifted toward open opposition to the House of Saud and its American backers. The fiery ideology that inspired Juhayman’s men to murder and mayhem in Islam’s holy of holies mutated with time into increasingly more vicious strains, culminating in al Qaeda’s death cult.

By a coincidence of global events, it is precisely this ideology that American policy makers–and the House of Saud–found right after the crisis in Mecca to be of great value on the Cold War battlefronts. Instead of being suppressed, Juhayman’s brutal brand of Islam was encouraged and nurtured as it metastasized across the planet since 1979. Today, hordes of his spiritual heirs are busy blowing up airplanes, tourist hotels, and commuter trains on four continents, self-satisfied smiles of true believers curling their lips.

Excerpted from The Siege of Mecca by Yaroslav Trofimov Copyright © 2007 by Yaroslav Trofimov. Excerpted by permission of Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.