A Reply to Dan Gibson: "Why The Early Qiblas Faced Petra?" | Mufti Abu Layth

he'll age dad Ali Salaam Coulomb in on all the grant and grandparents of the Prophet okay here's an interesting point oh I'll mention a bit about dan gibson I do follow dan gibson quite closely I mean I'm not up to date on everything that Dan Gibson has said but I follow him quite closely to be fair I look into you know what he said and I'm not just somebody that disregards something just because it goes against and what I'm

saying a lot of Islam realists have argued that MUC Muslims they feel that Islam did exist like the Prophet did exist most of them do except that like Patricia Crone and other people they feel that Makkah was not could not have been as significant as Muslims claim later Muslims claim and to be fair I think they've got a point that I don't think Mecca was a significant City at all or even a popular town I think this is something that is recreated

innocently by later Muslims not because they were trying to do propaganda I think this is what they thought assumed would have been the reality but now research seems to show that Makkah was not really like that the other thing is that a lot of these people felt that Makkah may have not been where Makkah is so Patricia Crone and other people I think Michael Cooke and some others they argued that Makkah may have been more in the northern kingdoms so in the kingdom of sham

now some people then suggested Petra now although from what I've read of Patricia Crone I don't think she conclusively said that that was the case but I believe that she felt she wasn't convinced with it being Mecca as in situated at Makkah so she felt it was somewhere she wasn't quite sure we but she was open to kind of suggestions that's what I've heard from some of her and I've got I'm still going through a few of her kind of works and articles and stuff now right so Dan Gibson however he has Dan

Gibson has done a lot of research which I um in some ways grateful to because you know we have two people we have to honor in even if it comes out with things that we don't like but at the end of the day this comes back to the point which I've been saying that what we lack in our tradition is a critical review so coming back to Dan Gibson's point he's gone around and he's got a book gibbler's in early Islam or early killers in Islam now he he measures I think is it a

hundred and sixty or something mustards around the world their foundations and things like this but what he tries to do several of them he visits them himself and some he can't so he uses certain satellite footage he does explain the exact method of which satellites he's used and how he's accessed that footage he explains all of these he's very transparent to be fair I think I don't believe he's as innocent necessarily as some people feel that he's very innocent I think you know this tongue-in-cheek he's definitely he is doing a bit of the naughty naughty is definitely I feel

that but that said I think it's all within bounds and limits I don't think he's falsifying evidence because to do that he would just get caught hell and it would ruin everything so he's measured the foundations of many messages and found them the much is found like those messages the ancient foundations dating from the first century of Islam seemed to be pointing not towards Mecca but to its petra now he's got in his book he's got diagrams and the standard deviation he's got like he's compared how many degrees are they off from Peck

how many degrees are they off from Mecca now they I think is it 60 odd or whatever is this a certain majority that he focuses on they seem to definitely be more always more closely aligned to Petra than they are to Mecca and there's some that are to McCann this some that are completely off like so they just pointing south so North Africa Masjid seem to be disappointing South the the andalusi mosques the Spanish mosques seem to be pointing south which makes no sense at all and then he comes up with a theory which i think is ridiculous that's theories ridiculous well they

were just replicating how they pointed from Damascus I thought that's just come on however what do I feel about all this these mustards pointing towards Petra is this a I mean is it just wrong I think that he may be right you know that these massive foundations may have pointed to it's Petra now was in more closer to Petra than to them to Makkah now why is the question now my theory people my

theory is that Petra um be knowing Li like not like innocently if you like not as a part of like a scheme or a plot but Petra has I feel being an actor if you like an active agent in the formation of certain Islamic phenomena now I feel that I'll come to this point a bit more I feel that began with really and was

concretize by one of the great grandfather's of the prophet muhammad salallahu alaihe salam his name was and that was in his actual name his actual name I believe was 8 but Jose is what he's known by Jose you see in his lifetime you see when Jose was a young and sorry no your money was just a little boy when he was a little boy his father passed he's the son of Caleb his father passes away now his mother remarries this man who is is an Arab he's from her tribe I believe they were

who's that I believe they may have been Pillai actually but he's from her tribe he marries her but he lives in sham now he Jose is an elder brother I believe his name is Zahra but because he's like a young man so the stepfather the news father he leaves him he's not really bothered but because this is an infant he takes Kosei and his wife Jose's mom up to sham now he takes them

home to this place called Wadi el Cora the valley of settlements now Petra I believe that was Petra because when you look at it it states that worthier Bora had the tribes certain tribes settled they like the tribes of Bani or Zara now Benny Asura were settled around northern Arabia but also around Petra Petra also had the name amaura you see the mother of of settlements why he was between valleys voir dire ah most Muslim historians when they write about what

the Quran they say that he was a stepfather his name was Robbie and by the way that Robbie lived in Waddell Parag we're not quite sure where that is we think it's up there by mother in SOL there some people say it's over here and so they so they don't seem to know where it is because Petra after like maybe within a century or so after the prophet or century or within two centuries definitely disappears some people forget about Petra and only rediscovered in really the 18th 19th centuries so now okay so let's let's get to that story so

go say he seems to be brought up the Gosei means a stranger okay the term Cassie comes from North Cassie it was a thought yeah and the people of that region although his stepfather was really good with him but the people of that region had a disregard for him they saw him as a foreigner and they would always they would call him because and they wouldn't call Cassie therefore Jose which is a diminutive form so it's like disparaging more disrespectful so this call inclusive cause a so this Kosei got like a little stranger this stuck with him so this became his name now course I

always had this identitarian issue going on like an identity crisis because the people around him when he or other and these people would never accept him so he told his mom this is transmitted he complained that oh they keep calling every time I say something is they are who are you you're a foreigner you know you're not from from us you know so she says to him that don't you worry about them you're the son of Caleb Caleb was from a much more noble tribe the tribe of Parrish now whether Koresh were that noble or not in the eyes of other Arabs

the important thing is they be they definitely were noble now in Kosice eyes so Jose has this longing for this sense of identity and belonging he wants to so as he becomes a grown man he leaves sham and returns to Makkah when he returns to Makkah he's he's they say you know he's very handsome he was charming he was a strong man they say he was a warrior he was a very good fighter and he charms his way or he's is seen as attractive he marries the daughter of the high priest

in Makkah who's from this tribe called Xhosa when the high priest who holds the keys to the Kaaba dies the daughter inherits it and he's the husband so he gets it so he becomes the owner of the keys he then expelled huzzah this tribe from Mecca this leads to a like a mini civil war so what he does is he makes a cry for all Quraish people close or far crash wherever you are to come to Makkah and to join in this fight he also calls his chamois cousins you

know the like his step siblings and his cousins those that from which would I believe would have been in Petra he calls them now they come from sham and they join in the fight and eventually he wins he I mean there is a kind of like an arbitration that takes place but he kind of gets the upper hand after that he's in control of Makkah Jiri fashions how Makkah is established he actually calls for a migration of all Croatia's because they never used to live in Makkah wherever they are scattered to come back to Makkah and he will offer

them allotments and settlements so he says if you're close to chorus you can live within the mucker thing if not you can live in the valley outskirts he will give you land so he actually called so there's this mass migration of hora she's that move towards mccann settle he builds certain he rebuilds the Kaaba and changes some of the design now he also builds houses as settlements close to the Kaaba then a layer out encircling the Kaaba then encircling the Kaaba he gives these to certain notary people of

grace he's also known for several kind of battles defending Croatia against many tribes he was the most powerful leader that Koresh ever had before Islam obviously the Prophet is the most powerful leaders operation ever had that's with Islam but pre Islam per se is the ultimate this I feel is the reason that because maybe some of the changes he made he also dug up a lot of the welds in and kind of set up Makkah as a much more powerful kind of place this is I feel that the influences he brought me may have been from where he

was brought up so maybe the way he fashioned the houses around the Kaaba the settlements the encirclement this may have been influenced by his upbringing in petra this may be the reason why many historians in our books have referred to have referred to Makkah the kaaba's cabochons ian you see they in our own books i believe it may be in Buhari as well they've referred to the Kaaba as the kibosh a mere the Kappa from sham this led some people to believe maybe

the Kaaba was in sham but I believe that this was because it was the Shah mised Kaaba that the P because of the influence in fashioning it was so Shami it was referred to as the Shamy kaaba sham is the middle-eastern region like Damascus and Petra and these places Jordan and so on so okay so that's now with that understanding let's go back to the damn Gibson thing now I feel that you see we have to understand that historic civilizations and I mean

thousands of years ago I feel that they did have much more knowledge of the globe then people several centuries ago so I do feel that they were maybe certain advanced civilizations that were destroyed I do kind of buy in to certain people like people today we've got I've gone through some of these things actually today let me just check right ok it's not here but people like Graham Hancock and other people what they've

argued that the Younger Dryas incident most likely demolished these ancient civilizations that were quite advanced I do find that quite convincing and compelling especially with the temple archaeological sites like Rebecca Tepe which were which archaeologically are dated to eleven and a half thousand years ago it's impossible that hunter-gatherers just put their Spears down and built massive kind of establishments all of a sudden that just doesn't make any sense so we know this is what I feel that we I mean we definitely know from evidence like even taking a look at maps maps that ptolemy

maps that other people have maps that the race Pirie map or the Ottoman cartographer you know the person who drew maps and he says I drew this from over a hundred you know archaic sources now in on his map which is from the 15th century I believe there's Antarctica now Antarctica is not discovered till the 1800s by the Russians so but he draws it accurately and he also even drew the certain rivers which were covered by ice since the Younger Dryas so not to mention other landmass that's been underwater on other maps yet visible on these maps it's been underwater since

the Younger Dryas since 11,000 years ago so I feel that people knew how to navigate and then maybe certain civilizations it got lost to them and then humans rediscovered it you know in much more recent history so we see these ancient civilizations like the pyramids and Petra is one of the ancient civilizations the Aztec kind of civilizations the Mayans the the Peruvian kind of monoliths that we have all sorry megaliths all these things they seem to be aligned with constellations now I feel that you see

similarly Petra would have been aligned with constellations now I don't believe the Nabataeans built Petra neither do I believe the pharaohs built the pyramids from scratch I feel that they built upon previous structures because it seems that this they kind of inherited certain sites and built upon them just as the you know people in the Amazon built on the the kind of Olmecs and all these the the the prior civilization stuff they didn't come up with it so I

feel Petra was similar and it is aligned to constellations so it may have been that because the Empire had a mercantile people people that have trade that were going around that they traveled china they traveled to india they went to different places because they were trade specialists right now it may have been that they had set up certain devotion site certain temples in line with the constellation that petra is aligned to so therefore they had these devotion sites already set up to that constellation so it would be pointing

towards petra it would kind of be aligned in that way this is what I am currently understanding I'm reading up a lot of things and this is what I feel may have happened at this stage I mean I may review my this theory in time to come but if I find more information and I feel that because the Nabataeans were also Arabs they were Arabs pre-islamic Shami Arabs that when Muslims reached those places the Nabataean Empire had kind of long dissolved and dissipated so because they were Arabs and these people

were prior Arabs most likely they just inherited their sites and took him over and because they were already aligned to Petra which was sham and all companions and Taba a new way sham was it was right just above the hedges which is where my plays so they may have just thought yeah that's good enough sham let's just point it from here because one of the questions was how did Muslims know which way Qibla was because the compass did not exist so you have to understand that especially from China how did they know

which way the tickler was I feel that they inherited the sites from the Nabataeans and so what's happened is the early foundations were maybe pointing towards Petra but so people like dan gibson maybe right but for the wrong reasons it's not because Petra was my car but I feel it may have been because these devotion sites were close enough and they may have been set up centuries before based on the knowledge of the constellations that Petra is aligned to

so that's my kind of current theory so I feel that I you know to be honest I've not really come across anybody providing any meaningful answer to what Dan Gibson has said and I feel that this actually is I mean I I feel it's the truth and I feel it's actually like wow everything then starts to fall into place like you start to see that mmm that makes actually a lot of sense and if you see make sense because one of the questions is why did they used to call maka whole aura when it's not really it was only a

small to a small town it would make sense if Jose had called it an aura because Jose came from Petra which was called Amara so the mother of settlements and now that this was his new kingdom he was set to establish it that this is now the mother of settlements so it just seems to all fall into place I don't know a lot while I'm still looking for it so yes I do ensure I do feel that a lot of these people are right but for the wrong reasons so I feel that Dan Gibson is kind of right

maybe just as Patricia Crone I feel she's right I feel these people are right but for the wrong reasons that's all so yeah people I think with that