Muhammad from Becca, not Mecca

[Richard Stanley]

Scholar Dan Gibson makes a powerful argument in the documentary The Sacred City that the city of Mecca was substituted for Becca, aka Petra, during Islamic year 70 of the Islamic Second Civil War.

For one thing, all extant remains of first Islamic century mosques have their qibla prayer walls facing, not Mecca, not Jerusalem, but ... Petra. The documentary demonstrates considerable additional archaeological evidence to support this, including that the present city of Mecca, yet another pious fraud, does not match most descriptions of it in the Quran, yet Petra does match them all.

In fact, the Quran only spells out Mecca one time, using euphemisms for the rest of the mentions. Gibson demonstrates that using the Arabic script that Becca can be altered into Mecca by the easy addition of a small circular element to the 'B' letter. He discusses how easy the process was to substitute the revised Qurans, in the early days was as well.

The process of shifting focus to Mecca was aided considerably by the natural destruction of Petra's infrastructure by earthquake swarms. The once vibrant and rich Nabatean trading city was then completely abandoned and forgotten.

The important aspect of the big black cube, the Kaaba, is actually a relatively small meteoritic stone that is easy to relocate. It is known that this stone had been removed at one time, and then 'restored' (to its new home, that is).

 

[Richard Stanley]

Here's a good Amazon review of the documentary by G. Morton, which also mentions Gibson's book, Quranic Geography, on the same topic:

It's highly likely that Dan Gibson's claims – as also elaborated in his book “Quranic Geography” - about Petra as the Holy City of Islam's origin is correct. This implies Muhammad most likely never set foot in Mecca. But this means – though they are careful not to say it – that Mecca as the Qur'an's “Mother of all cities” (Q 6:92) is an Abbasid fraud. Historian Tom Holland already indicates that Mecca is not Islam's place of origin in his famous channel 4 documentary “Islam - The Untold Story” (now on YouTube). Neither in it nor in his highly acclaimed book “In The Shadow Of The Sword” (title from Muhammad's words “Paradise lies under the shadows of swords”) is Petra actually named but in his book it is hinted at in page 374: “So, although no contemporary tells us explicitly where Ibn al-Zubayr took refuge, the weight of evidence would suggest a location to the north of the Hijaz, midway between Kufa and Alexandria. Since this is precisely the region with which Muhammad himself appears to have been most familiar, and since Ibn al-Zubayr was consciously aiming to defend the Prophet’s legacy, the likelihood must surely be that the House of God in in which he barricaded himself stood not in Mecca but between Medina and Palestine: in that “blessed place” named by the Prophet himself as Bakka.'' Looking at a map or Google Earth this could well be Petra. It's also suggested where he talks about the qibla directions pg 385. The recent lectures by Jay Smith on YouTube elaborate on the latest in historical scholarship about all this.

That Mecca is not the origin of Islam is easily seem from the Qur'an itself. Verses 6:99 and 6:141, both Meccan verses delivered allegedly in Mecca, describe a place of much “vegetation of all kinds”: grapes, pomegranates, even corn and olive trees – similarly in 16:11, 23:20, 24: 35, 80:24-32. This is definitely not Mecca which was a dry desert location not even on any 7th century maps or trade routes. Olive trees, for example, are strictly Mediterranean area trees never grown there. But Petra had the water supplies to sustain these crops as well as a large, prosperous population, but it was totally wiped out by earthquakes & floods in 713 AD making it unsuitable for Islam's Sacred City. A new narrative involving a different location, Mecca, had to be invented and eventually it was adopted. This is consistent with the fact that all the earliest Muhammad biographies & hadiths were written centuries after Muhammad's died in 632. Of course, if Mecca is a demonstrable fraud, it has to be concluded that the standard Islamic narrative about the Muhammad and Mecca is false. Where does that leave Islam?​

 

[Richard Stanley]