The Siege of Mecca:

The Forgotten Uprising in Islam’s Holiest Shrine and the Birth of Al Qaeda

By Yaroslav Trofimov
320 pp. Doubleday, 2007 $26.00

Reviewed by Michelle Theriault

On November 20, 1979, a group of rifle-toting Muslim fundamentalists violently commandeered the Grand Mosque at Islam’s holiest shrine, Mecca. The siege, which lasted for weeks and left more than 200 people dead, was a bold statement against the rulers of the Arab world, who the rebels felt, had “failed to defend the true faith and stand up to the West.” At the time, the takeover barely made the news: attention was instead focused on the unfolding hostage crisis at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, and the Saudi Arabian government suppressed news of the incident. But the uprising quietly became a catalyst for a new and violent Islam: the Wahabist extremism that inspired the siege metastasized into the global Islamic jihad movement of today.

This link between modern day jihad and the events of 1979 had faded into near-obscurity until Yaroslav Trofimov, a veteran Middle East correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, took on the difficult task of describing it in his book The Siege of Mecca: The Forgotten Uprising in Islam’s Holiest Shrine and the Birth of Al Qaeda. Trofimov was the right man for the job. In the hours after the Sept. 11 attacks, his editors at The Wall Street Journal dispatched him to the greater Islamic world to take a reading on how the region was feeling about the West. His first book Faith at War documented his extensive travels in places like Mali, Afghanistan, Iraq and Bosnia.

In The Siege of Mecca, Trofimov deftly traces the tangled roots of Wahabi extremism from the politics of Bedouin soldiers to the relations of the Saudi royal family with Western oil interests. By the time the book arrives at the actual battle at the mosque, it reads like a breathless screenplay for an action movie. 

Despite Trofimov’s occasionally melodramatic style, the power of the story speaks for itself, and the reverberations of the siege are still being felt. Even as it faded from history (textbooks in Saudi Arabia don’t make mention of the incident), the rebellion at Mecca continues to inspire young and alienated Muslims. One in particular, the son of a powerful Saudi construction magnate, took it to heart. A decade later, he had organized a group of holy warriors ready to pick up where the rebels left off. His name, of course, was Osama bin Laden.