Mecca deal: how a botched Saudi hostage crisis paved the way for al-Qaeda.

• Author: Caryl, Christian
• Position: The Siege of Mecca: The Forgotten Uprising in Islam's Holiest Shrine and the Birth of al-Qaeda - Book review

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The Siege of Mecca: The Forgotten Uprising in Islam's Holiest Shrine and the Birth of al-Qaeda by Yaroslav Trofimov Doubleday, 301 pp.

If you're one of those people who believe that history is basically a comedy of errors, you'll love Yaroslav Trofimov's The Siege of Mecca: The Forgotten Uprising in Islam's Holiest Shrine and the Birth of al-Qaeda. It describes a savage, bloody, and remarkably consequential event that was staged by a bunch of deluded radicals, kept secret for days by one of the world's most tyrannical governments, and then completely and fatefully misunderstood by the outside world. For the nearly three decades since it occurred, it's been fitfully concealed and virtually forgotten. Yet the world would be a completely different place if it had never happened.

Trofimov's story focuses on the 1979 hajj, the Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca. As the traditional rituals were winding down that November, a group of young Islamist fanatics broke open caches of hidden weapons and took over the Grand Mosque, seizing several dozen hapless pilgrims from around the world in the process. The leader of the attackers, a wild-eyed Saudi Bedouin from a part of the kingdom that had long nursed a grudge against the royal family, announced to his bewildered "guests" that they were about to have the privilege of personally greeting the Mahdi, Islam's version of the messiah, whose appearance would usher in the end of history and, as a beneficial side effect, prompt the collapse of the Saudi regime. That latter point might have seemed trivial alongside the impending apocalypse, but of course it wasn't. The Saudi royal family had spent the 1970s wallowing in its burgeoning oil wealth, and the result was a contradictory culture of ostentatious corruption, high living, and some distinctly un-Islamic practices. The government's cautious sallies into modernization--such as allowing female news readers on TV--had infuriated more conservative elements, and particularly the clergy, who feared the erosion of their sere Wahabi version of the faith as well as the associated diminishment of their power.

On the surface of things, the occupiers of the mosque shocked the Saudi establishment and the global umma, or Muslim community, by their sacrilegious wielding of weapons in the holiest sanctuary of Islam. Yet at the same time they were also tapping into an undercurrent of anger against the perceived hypocrisy of the Saudi dynasty that would...