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In 1978 the Muslim World League sponsored a massive convention in Newark, New Jersey, attended by virtually every Muslim organization with an address in the United States, including several members of the American branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. Speakers at the convention urged the participants to take part in the Saudi desire to “coordinate the Islamic work” in North America and dangled financial enticements for those who would take part.10 The Saudis also paid to fly prominent African American converts to Saudi Arabia for extensive religious indoctrination.

At the end of 1979, three events in the Islamic world coalesced into a multifaceted crisis that would reverberate for decades. In Iran, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini came to power after months of political crisis, transforming the secular government into an Islamic republic and displacing the Shah of Iran, who had been installed in power and supported for decades by the United States. Because of America’s support for the Shah, anti-American sentiment quickly built to a fever pitch and culminated in the seizure of the U.S. embassy in Tehran in November. Sixty-six American hostages were captured, launching an international crisis that would eventually bring down the presidency of Jimmy Carter.11

Within a few short weeks of the embassy disaster, a group of several hundred armed militants seized the Grand Mosque in Mecca, the holiest site in Islam, in the middle of the annual Hajj pilgrimage. The Saudis were already tense. Khomeini—a Shi’ite Muslim—had inspired an exciting new fervor for Islamic revival that threatened the Saudi-Sunni dominance of Islam around the world.12

When news broke that militants had seized the Grand Mosque, many in both Saudi Arabia and the West assumed the attack must be the work of Iran, but it quickly became clear that the threat was homegrown. Most of the militants were from Saudi Arabia, but the group included Egyptians, Kuwaitis, Yemenis, Iraqis, Sudanese … and at least two African Americans.13

The Americans had been brought to Saudi Arabia through one of the exchange programs specifically targeting African American Muslims. One American was killed during the siege, Faqur Abdur-Rahman, about whom little is known except his name.14 The second was captured by the Saudis after French commandos stormed the mosque on the government’s behalf. He was later released and repatriated. The name of the second American remains unknown.15

The story was covered up by both the Saudis and the United States. At the beginning of the two-week siege, the Iranian government fired off a scathing accusation that the United States was behind the assault. Rumors of American involvement sparked rioting and a mob attack on the U.S. embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan. Any credible evidence that Americans had been involved in the attack—even acting on their own initiative—would have dramatically escalated the situation.

The militants, led by a radical Saudi named Juhayman Al Otaibi, were a motley crew of messianic believers trying to act out a prophecy regarding the Islamic version of Armageddon, which included the start of an apocalyptic war against Christians and Jews. Otaibi’s writings had a strident anti-Western, anti-Christian tone, and they condemned the Saudi regime as well for a perceived failure to enforce the original traditions of the Prophet Mohammed.16

In some ways, Otaibi’s message foreshadowed the thinking of the not-yetimagined al Qaeda. The parallel may be the result of both groups following similar traditions and sources, but there may be more to it. Otaibi’s group preached on the grounds where Osama bin Laden attended college, at King Abdul Aziz University in Jeddah, and the group’s members were known in bin Laden’s social circle.17

Otaibi’s followers were not the first terrorists or even the first jihadist-terrorists, but they were the vanguard of the modern age of terrorism, foreshadowing what would follow in both tactics and message.

The third event of the winter of 1979 would spread an evolving,