It aims to be a beauty, well, mecca. And the message isn’t lost. But that still doesn’t discount the fact that the name is a play on the city in Hejaz which was the birthplace of the Muslim ...

His interviewees include pilgrims on their way to Mecca, a former adviser to Ariel Sharon, impassioned 9/11 commemorators on the streets of New York and Asad’s friends and colleagues.

In the 18th century, Muhammad Ibn Abd al-Wahhab and an army of 600 troops showed up at a tomb in the Arabian Desert, where one of the companions of the Prophet Muhammad was buried under an ...