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For the non-Muslim, Mecca is the most forbidden of Holy Cities--and yet, in many ways it is the best known. Muslim historians and geographers have studied it, and countless pilgrims and travelers--many of them European Christians in disguise--have left behind lively and well-publicized accounts of life in Mecca and its associated shrine-city of Medina, where the Prophet lies buried. The stories of all these figures, holy men and heathens alike, come together in this book to offer a remarkably revealing literary portrait of the city's traditions and urban life and of the surrounding area. Closely following the publication of F. E. Peters's The Hajj (Princeton, 1994), which describes the perilous pilgrimage itself from the travelers' perspectives, this collection of writings and commentary completes the historical travelogue. The accounts begin with the Muslims themselves, in the patriarchal age of Abraham and Ishmael, and trace the sometimes glorious and sometimes sad history of Islam's central shrine down to the last Grand Sharif of Mecca, Husayn ibn Ali, whose fragile kingdom was overtaken by the House of Sa`ud in 1926. Because of chronic flooding and constant rebuilding, there is little or no material evidence for the early history of Islam's holy cities. By assembling, analyzing, and fashioning these literary accounts of Mecca, however, Peters supplies us with a vivid sense of place and human interaction, much as he did in his widely acclaimed Jerusalem (Princeton, 1985).
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 Rule of thumb
Whenever Daniel Pipes gives a low rating....the book is well worth the read.
Nothing ever written positively about Islam is digestable to this man, which is why he was canned from the Institute of Peace. Just read what his colleagues wrote about his phobias.
buy the book!!  Mecca
"Mecca" is a companion volume to Peters' earlier 1994 study, "The Hajj: The Muslim Pilgrimage to Mecca and the Holy Places" (reviewed in Middle East Quarterly, September 1994). That book focuses on the experience of the pilgrimage, in Mecca and outside it; this one focuses on the geography and history of what Peters calls "the Muslim Holy Land," by which he means "Mecca and Medina and their spiritual environs." "Literary history" points to the fact that there is little or no material evidence for Islam's holy cities before 1925, this book's cut-off date, compelling the researcher to rely almost exlusively on written sources. As in the earlier volume, Peters mixes his own scholarly findings here with long excerpts from primary sources, both Muslim and Western. Rather than impose his own schema on the materials at hand, he follows their vagaries, jumping from the early centuries of Islam to the Age of Discovery with only a few pages on the intervening centuries. The result is an unusual but highly successful mix of literary collage with academic inquiry. Subjects especially worth noting include the account of the Qarmatians' conquest of Mecca in 930 and their stealing of the Black Stone; the story of Thomas Keith, a Scotsman taken prisoner by the Ottoman forces who converted to Islam and eventually became governor of Medina in 1815; and late nineteenth-century British musings about the recruitment of spies to keep an eye on possible seditious activity during the pilgrimage activities in Mecca. Middle East Quarterly, March 1995
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