Posted on 03/01/2026 10:31:13 PM PST by SunkenCiv
...November 20, 1979, and Islam's holiest site... had been taken over by more than 200 armed militants. The weeks-long siege of the Grand Mosque, led by Juhayman, an anti-monarchy Islamist, would see gunbattle inside the mosque and in the holy city...
Masjid al-Haram's armed seige came to become a watershed moment for the Muslim world. It turned Saudi Arabia into a hardcore Sunni nation, creating a huge rift with post-revolution Iran. The Islamic revolution in Iran in 1979, the same year as the seige of Mecca, turned a moderate Iran into a radical Shia country.
The creation of two radical power centres -- a Shia Iran and Sunni Saudi Arabia -- split the Muslim world in the middle.
...the year 1979 brought seismic shifts across the Ummah. Pakistan took a sharp turn under Zia-ul-Haq's rule. Afghanistan was plunged into war by the Soviet invasion. This came even as Iran saw a revolution and Saudi Arabia the siege of the Grand Mosque...
In the two decades before the siege, Saudi Arabia underwent rapid modernisation under the rule of King Faisal and his successors.
The discovery of vast oil reserves came as a boon. The kingdom turned wealthy. This newfound wealth funded infrastructure development, western education, but also brought Western influences, technological advancements, and shifts in lifestyles...
Conservative religious groups saw this as a dilution of Islamic values and a compromise of the purity of the Saudi Arabian religious foundation...
Conservative groups sprang up in Medina, then spread across Saudi Arabia like a desert storm. Many chose to take up arms.
With a call for a return to a "pure" form of Islam, Juhayman al-Otaybi, the man who led the 1979 Grand Mosque siege, arrived in Mecca...
(Excerpt) Read more at indiatoday.in ...
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This should be fun.
1979 U.S. embassy burning in Islamabad
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1979_U.S._embassy_burning_in_Islamabad
[snip] Beginning at 12:00 p.m. on 21 November 1979, a large mob of Pakistani citizens violently stormed the Embassy of the United States in Islamabad and subsequently burned it down in a coordinated attack. The riot was led by local Islamists aligned with the Islamist Pakistani political party Jamaat-i-Islami, and the mob primarily comprised students from Quaid-i-Azam University. Lasting for almost 24 hours, the riot had been incited by Iranian religious cleric Ruhollah Khomeini, who was leading the Islamic Revolution at the time, after he falsely claimed in a widespread Iranian radio broadcast that the then-ongoing Grand Mosque seizure in Saudi Arabia had been orchestrated by the United States and Israel, prompting many anti-American riots throughout the Muslim world. [/snip]
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Grand Mosque seizure
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Mosque_seizure
Attack on the US Embassy in Islamabad
Witness History
20 November 2015
https://www.bbc.com/audio/play/p037wxzt
‘
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That’s the braindead left for you, embracing a seventh century death cult.
They’re probably hopin’ for some of that oil sheik money, since DOGE probably had an impact on their share of the skim.
To an outsider, it sounds like every single Mosque is ‘Islam’s Holiest Site’. If everything is the ‘most holy’ version of itself, then in reality nothing is. Right?
Is FreeRepublic broken?
I cant load FR if I’m logged in.
I was logged out and tried to reply and it prompted me to login and then I was able to reply. Weird.
It comes and goes. I think there some software updates going on and the modules are getting tested while partial service continues. I was getting an amusing message just about 90 minutes ago, then it kicked back on. But anyway, even I made a donation today, BTW. That’s so rare it’s mentioned in end-times prophecy.
I hope it hasn't bypassed anyone here that the most radical Islamists had no problem desecrating the holiest of the holy of Islam. But when non-muslims (French elite troops) were thought to have entered to help the authorities then there was a huge outcry.
Hypocrites!
Also, see the tagline for this one. From the FRchives:
The Saudi gov’t couldn’t get it done, probably refusal by troops to use weapons. The French gov’t was requested to send in, if memory serves, elements of the FF Legion. They formulated an armed response plan that wound up working great.
The self-proclaimed “mahdi” (the loon who organized the whole uprising) believed himself to be unable to be harmed by weapons, and was picking up live grenades to throw them back at the gov’t forces. Until the last one detonated in his hand and, surprise surprise, killed him, and he came to in an afterlife where he has to do take after take of that raisin bran commercial. They’re not even using camel’s milk.
The last stand was in the catacombs under the mosque compound (the photos on wikipedia actually show the survivors of the uprising under arrest inside one or more of those catacombs). They got hit with tear gas and loud horns and such, and bright lights. By that time they were out of ammo and/or will to fight, and finally complied with orders to surrender. The gov’t forces put the carcass of the ‘mahdi’ on a table and made his surviving gullible stooges file past it, which started the healing process (for them, not for him) such as it was.
The wahhab clerics had been threatened by the takeover, but used the need of their approval for the action as leverage to gain more power over the regime.
The regime would have been better off beheading all the uprising survivors, and putting all the carcasses in a pile outside of town, and incinerated them. Instead, most or all were permitted to go into exile.
Oh, and the catacombs were pumped full of rubble and concrete in the immediate aftermath, so there wouldn’t be problems like that in the future.
Wouldn't that be "slick"?
Thinking petrolatum.
That would be halal concrete, would it not?
“To an outsider, it sounds like every single Mosque is ‘Islam’s Holiest Site’. If everything is the ‘most holy’ version of itself, then in reality nothing is. Right?”
...and don’t forget, every day of the Calendar is a holy day in Islam.
They opposed modernization and felt technology was a distraction from religion. So, the rebels were Islamic Amish.
Actually, once the regime had been given approval of the religious courts they did turn to beheadings. Some 60 odd insurgents were publicly executed.
Islam is a lot of rules designed to keep order in a polygamous tribal society. They can be divided rather easily over stupid things.
I read the book about this event.
Amazing it was never reported anywhere at the time.
We’ve been making sure every meeting has been well stocked with delicious treats.
And had three food trucks give out lunch.
Not sure if we have any Muslims but we sure have a lot of vets.
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