Masjid al-Haram

This guide to Masjid al-Haram in Mecca opens before dawn on a November morning in 1979, when fifty thousand worshippers had gathered in this courtyard for the prayer opening a new Islamic century. A former Saudi National Guard soldier named Juhayman al-Otaybi believed his brother-in-law was the Mahdi, and his armed followers had smuggled rifles inside a funeral procession. Then the gates clanged shut. The guide follows the tense two weeks that followed, as a government paralyzed by the need for religious approval decided how to respond on the holiest ground on earth.