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]

 

[Richard Stanley]

Gibson provides numerous literary evidences that the original Mecca was Petra, which was once the Romans' "mother of all colonies", a cosmopolitan 'metropolis'.

Does this bolster the claims that Rome (or their Syrian cousins) created Islam, as it did for Christianity?

 

[Richard Stanley]

The following video discusses some more problems with Islamic Origins, e.g. that there is no external mention of Muhammad for decades in the beginning, when there otherwise should be. Looks like he is as fictional as Jesus of Nazareth. What I did note of interest is that the discussion of the Bedouins' role evokes so much of the story of Abraham and his camel caravan, and what can be derived the Hyksos period, i.e. that nomadic literal shepherds likely had their 'speculative' Shepherd Kings which they had politically rallied around.

Bekka is briefly mentioned and one wonders if they will ever get to Gibson's theory, but ...

They do mention the problem of the early qibla direction though.

 

[Jerry Russell]

The following video discusses some more problems with Islamic Origins, e.g. that there is no external mention of Muhammad for decades in the beginning, when there otherwise should be.

While the video raises many questions, it provides very few answers.

I've been recommending Emmet Scott's theory, which is that Islam originated when the Persian ruler Chosroes II converted to an Ebionite version of Christianity. It was this ruler, leading a Persian army, that carried out the early Islamic conquests: Byzantium in ~602, Jerusalem in 614, Libya in 621. Conventional history says that the Byzantines re-conquered much lost territory, only to lose it again by 632 to conquering Arabs, but Scott thinks this is ridiculous.

Scott allows that Chosroes II was in an alliance with Arab bedouins. And he believes this alliance eventually led to the Persian dynastic downfall, as the Arab Mu'awyia (the Ummayads) pulled off a coup-d'etat. This is when Chosroes II's version of Christianity morphed again into proto-Islam, and Mohammed (formerly just a representation of Jesus) became a uniquely Arab prophet. And, the Koran (which had been an Aramaic Christian devotional text) was mis-translated into Arabic.

While I've mentioned conventional dates above, Scott thinks the story might have happened ~300 years earlier (all or part?), shortly after the Nicene Council. The time warp resulted from historians' attempts to fit Islamic history into a Western timetable that was also warped by 300 years due to Otto III's desire to celebrate the First Millenium (1000 years after Christ) even though he was three hundred years early.

Compared to this sort of radical reshaping of history, the movement of Mecca from Petra seems like a minor detail?

For more on Emmet Scott's theory, see these two articles;

https://www.newenglishreview.org/custpage.cfm/frm/160197/sec_id/160197

https://www.newenglishreview.org/custpage.cfm/frm/184451/sec_id/184451

And also his book, A Guide to the Phantom Dark Age:

https://books.google.com/books?id=lIpYAwAAQBAJ

I also discussed the origins of Islam on the July 7, 2017 podcast with Joe Atwill, here.

Quote from the 2nd above-linked article:

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CHRONOLOGY OF ISLAM’S EARLY ORIGINS.​

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4th to 6th century: Ebionitism, a Jewish “Jesus movement”, spreads throughout Syria, Mesopotamia and Arabia. The Ebionites rejected the Four Gospels and insisted that Jesus was a faithful Jew who never challenged the laws laid down by Moses.​

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Circa 600: Chosroes II, a Sassanid king resident in Aramaic-speaking Ctesiphon, embraces Ebionitism and accords it a privileged position within the Sassanid Empire.​

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614: Sassanids, with large contingents of Arab troops, capture Jerusalem and carry out a massacre of the Christian population.​

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620: Sassanids, with Arab mercenaries and allies, conquer Egypt.​

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640: Arab troops, commanded by Mu’awiya, stage a coup d’etat against Yazdegerd III and seize control of large parts of the Sassanid Empire, including much of the Iranian Plateau.​

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660: Capital of the Empire moved from Ctesiphon to Arab-speaking Damascus and Arabization of the court commences.​

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670: Document henceforth known as the Qur’an transcribed into Arabic with many changes of meaning from the Aramaic original.​

 

[Richard Stanley]

It would be interesting to see how Jorjani would react to Scott's scenario.

 

[Richard Stanley]

Dan Gibson discusses the sites around and in Petra that the Quran mentions regarding 'Mecca'. He even provides a link to a Google Earth tour presentation with all the locations and will be adding material to that 'tour'.

 

[Richard Stanley]

The following is a marvelous discussion of the Qarmatians (aka the Ikhwan al Safa), related to the early Ismailis. Gibson asserts that the Qarmations attacked the new Mecca, out of their devout and real knowledge that New Mecca was not authentic.

The Qarmatians and the Ismailis were underground intellectual societies with ties to the Templars and parallels to the Freemasons. But here, the Qarmatians provided free educational access to the common man and woman.