JABAL AL NOOR

This guide to Jabal al-Noor in Mecca follows a forty-year-old merchant named Muhammad, who had spent a month each year climbing this mountain for solitary prayer, on the night in six hundred ten when something in the darkness of this cave pressed against him and would not let go. It follows what he did once he reached his wife Khadija, still trembling, and what her cousin Waraqah, a Christian scholar familiar with older scriptures, made of the story once he heard it. The climb today runs over a thousand steps to a cave barely four meters long, where thousands still crowd in during pilgrimage season.