Al-Aqsa Mosque

This guide to Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem opens at seven in the morning on August 21, 1969, when a young Australian sheep farmer's son named Denis Rohan slipped through the Gate of Bani Ghanim carrying containers of benzene and kerosene, convinced that voices he took for God's had chosen him to act here. It lingers on the carved wooden minbar he knelt beneath, installed centuries earlier by Saladin after he retook Jerusalem in 1187. Listen for how a stranger's private certainty met one of the city's oldest structures.