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During the Hajj Tawaf ritual, in which pilgrims circle the Kaaba seven times in an anti-clockwise direction, many seek to kiss, touch or at least point toward the stone, emulating the example set by the Prophet Muhammad.Īlso in the courtyard is the Zamzam well, the site of the miraculous spring that materialized to quench the thirst of Abraham’s wife Hagar and their son Ishmael after he left them alone in the desert at God’s command. Keystone Features/Getty ImagesĮmbedded in the eastern corner of the Kaaba is the Hajjar Al-Aswad, or Black Stone, a relic believed to date back to the time of Adam and Eve.
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Pilgrims in the Safa-Marwa gallery in 1965. In the vast courtyard at its heart stands the Kaaba, the cube-shaped structure which the Qur’an records was built by the Prophet Abraham and his son Ishmael as the first house of God.Ĭonsidered by Muslims to be the most sacred place on Earth, it is toward this shrine that believers around the world face five times a day throughout their lives as they conduct their prayers. Throughout October 1979, close to a million Muslims from around the world had flooded into Makkah for Hajj, the pilgrimage to the spiritual heart of Islam that every physically and financially able believer is obliged to complete at least once in their lifetime.įor poor and wealthy alike - from the humblest Muslim who had saved for years to make the journey, to Sheikh Zayed, the founder and president of the UAE who had chosen this year to perform Hajj - the spiritually bonding experience of renewing their commitment to the faith in company with fellow believers at the Grand Mosque, the largest in the world and the birthplace of Islam, would be one they would never forget.Įvery inch of the Grand Mosque is steeped in history and spiritual significance.
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Only now, as the Kingdom pushes forward into a new progressive era of transparency and modernization, can the full story of the siege of Makkah and the regressive shadow it would cast over the country for the next 40 years finally be told. Open, progressive and religiously tolerant, Saudi Arabia was about to travel back in time. Ahead lay two weeks of bitter, bloody fighting as Saudi forces fought to reclaim the Holy Haram in Makkah for the true faith, but that battle was merely the overture to a war for the very soul of Islam in the Kingdom. And then, murder and mayhem erupted in the very heart of Islam, perpetrated by a reactionary sect determined to overthrow the Saudi government and convinced that one among their number was the Mahdi, the redeemer of Islam whose appearance, according to the hadith (Prophet's sayings), heralds the Day of Judgment. In Iran, a liberal monarchy that had ruled for almost four decades had just been overthrown by a fundamentalist theocracy preaching a return to medieval religious values that many feared would pollute and destabilize the entire region. The Middle East was already on a knife edge. For the citizens of Saudi Arabia, however, the greatest shock was yet to come. The sacrilegious storming of the Grand Mosque in Makkah by armed fanatics in November 1979 sent a shockwave through the entire Islamic world.