The Hajj: One American's Pilgrimage To Mecca

For over 1400 years, Muslims have been making their holy pilgrimage to the sacred site of Mecca. In modern times, approximately two million Muslims make the pilgrimage - or Hajj - to Mecca each year, a trip required of the faithful at least once in every member's lifetime. Muslims from all over the world come together there, bereft of any outside identity save that of their shared faith. As the place where the prophet Muhammad received the verses of the Koran, Mecca is a place of great spirituality and tradition.

Non-Muslims are forbidden entry to Mecca, and it is, therefore, a place that few Americans will ever get to see. But in this special broadcast that aired during the last month of the Islamic year, when the Hajj is traditionally made, writer Michael Wolfe documents his trip to Islam's holiest shrine for ABC News Nightline. One of the more than five million Muslims in the United States, Wolfe is a convert, born the son of a Christian mother and a Jewish father. The occasion is his second Hajj, and Wolfe takes viewers step by step through the spritiual side of the pilgrimage, explaining the origins and meanings of the various rituals, and then speaking live, from the Great Mosque of Mecca, with ABC News' Ted Koppel.