INTRODUCTION
The holy city of Mecca looked deceptively calm as the first dawn of the new century started to break behind craggy mountains.
Splashing his face with cold water, the Grand Mosque’s bearded imam fastened a beige hued cloak over his shoulders and muttered praises to the Lord. The time to lead the morning’s first prayer was minutes away.
Under his window, the mosque’s floodlit courtyard was filling up quickly. The hajj pilgrimage season, when this stadium size enclosure was traversed by more than a million worshippers, had already ended. Yet Mecca remained jam packed with the faithful. Many of them had spent the night inside Islam’s holiest shrine, curling up on wool carpets in the Grand Mosque’s multistory labyrinth of nearly a thousand rooms.
As usual, these worshippers camped along ...
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