My thoughts on Dan Gibson's Petra research | Mufti Abu Layth

right so have I emailed an Gibson myself I have an email dan gibson i have watched a lot of his his kind of his series and i find it interesting dan gibson has been one of the he's at the forefront of this campaign that that the muslims have got mecca wrong that Mecca was in Petra I'm not convinced by his research although I give it to him I feel that he has done some amazing research though I I have to I am really

genuinely impressed by some of these people who I mean I don't know if impressed is the right word but I am wowed by their commitment the people who are not Muslim but they will spend decades of their lives to an issue of Islam and I feel that we as Muslims or to welcome that even if it challenges our notions because if we are confident and secure in what we believe then we ought to be able to stand the test of

time and the test of critiques um and critics so so I feel that his evidence is very interesting I have been going through his book early travelers in Islam and I haven't been through his other ones yet on geography knees in the Quran but I've been through a lot of his series of archaeology in Islam it's very fascinating and some of it has got me and I'm still researching some of the things it's ongoing but I'm not convinced and I feel that he has this one interview where he has a

mathematician that speaks about the standard deviation and because what Dan Gibson has done in essence is he's gone to 60 of the most ancient allegedly ancient machines in the world that have some foundations that he can trace and he feels their table our points more towards petra than it goes to my the Foundation's not the current building so the current building will point towards Makkah but the Foundation's allegedly point towards petra now you see that the issue with this is that that doesn't stand true in all the the things so North Africa clearly doesn't it doesn't point to

McCann or Petra seems to point south and the Lucia Muslim Spain seems to point south he does come up with a theory to explain that not convincing at all many places that are far off you see because Petra and Mecca are still the East are in Petra is in modern-day Jordan so it's very Muslims were never trying to hit the Kaaba spot on he then does some interesting research and shows how close are they to Mecca than they are to Petra and it's true in many of the Masjid he shows they are closer to Petra than the automata but in in many others they're

not and he doesn't take that into consideration it does he just discloses it but he doesn't take it into consideration as much he then has one of his interviews he has a statistician that is then showing the statistics and the standard deviation of these of these qibla points and he does a diagram where if there were 10 points and you had to point the fact that these mustards are pointing towards petra the probability of them like he brings it down to something like a billion or something something ridiculous because if you've got ten points but every time it keeps

pointing towards this one more than that then the statistics is to the power of 10 and whatever now it's I mean it's all mathematics and I'm not a but I could clearly see what was a fallacy in his reasoning and that was that he begins this this equation with ten points saying that if you had to point to ten directions and you kept getting this one but when it comes to Petra and Makkah you're just talking about two places

they ranked 10 there is no 10 Cabela's this simply Makkah as Muslims claim or Petra's these people are claiming that Muslims once believed in petra now that's it so there isn't this time this equation is a fallacy in my in anybody who watches that can see that so the other thing to refute which is compelling is that proto sauce hypothesis that how can it be that the she had the Sunnah the Sony mainstream Muslims and the Huaraz all agreed upon

the Kaaba they would never have agreed I mean they would have the Shia would have definitely or the Huaraz would have used that as evidence against the mainstream of Muslims like they did in many other things why would they hold back on petra so I feel that that that said I do find many of the things they're saying very interesting like I don't think what dan gibson all these people are saying some of the things that they're saying like Patricia crone and these people is nonsense I feel it's very compelling and it's made me on certain matters reevaluate my own narrative and I feel

that Islam the history is how it was but the nuances may not have been what we thought they were I do agree with that after you know a lot of this since I've been researching this Islam revisionist what orientalist what they're saying I feel that on some things they do have a point they're not actually you know like we have this thing that they are just totally blind they're not they actually make a compelling argument answer not necessarily the Qibla thing on other matters so they do they spend so many years of their life like what were the correlation what did they used to trade in what were these journeys where were

these journeys to write letters that it was slave where did they used to go what do the other the Greek records demonstrate these people have looked into all of these they're not just you know just sitting there chatting nonsense and I feel that Muslims should just dismiss them so easily we should look into it so yeah I hope that helps