The Green Dome

This guide to the Green Dome in Medina opens with the Prophet Muhammad's arrival in the year 622 on a camel he let choose where to stop, and the mosque of palm trunks and mud brick raised on that spot. It follows the young community through the near-collapse at Uhud, where his uncle Hamza was killed and word spread that Muhammad himself had fallen, and through a siege two years later when a Persian convert named Salman proposed a defense Arabia had never tried, a trench around the city's one exposed side. Best heard standing near the mosque's eastern wall.