How can a major city, the sacred city of Mecca, not be in any ancient records found before 740AD? And Mecca is not mentioned once in the Quran either, as Bekka is commonly associated with Petra now by archaeologists! And if Mecca wasn’t Mohammed’s home, how much of everything else that is taught by those with the Saudi money is also false??
See also: Questions for NZ Muslims.
Once you have a fake history, you have to back it up with a whole lot of other quickly invented fake stories, such as Why do Muslims claim Jerusalem as their own?
These books are useful to understand why the Quran makes no sense when read by itself.
- Dan Gibson – Early Islamic Qiblas: A survey of mosques built between 1AH/622 C.E. and 263 AH/876 C.E.
For the first time in history Dan Gibson has undertaken a comprehensive survey of Islamic mosques from the first two centuries of Islam. Using this data, Gibson demonstrates that Muhammad and the first four caliphs all prayed towards a different place! This location was also the focus of their pilgrimage. Gibson believes that Muslims are disobeying their prophet by focusing their prayers on a Black Stone in Saudi Arabia, when the Quran commands them to face the original location. - Dan Gibson – Quranic Geography
This book covers historical records of the four known times when peoples of the Arabian peninsula united and burst out of the Arabian deserts to conquer other nations (topics such as: The People of ‘Ad, People of Thamud, Midianites, etc.). The book also examines the geographical references in the Qur’an cross-referencing them with historical locations. - Dan Gibson – The Nabataeans Builders of Petra
This book examines the city of Petra, the ancient capital of the Nabataean Empire. Here massive monuments have been carved out of the ancient Jordanian mountains. Hundreds of magnificent tombs looked down on a city complete with colonnaded streets, coliseums, baths, temples, gardens and pools. Who were the people who carved this city into the red rose, sandstone mountains of Arabia? Why did they hide their city in a cleft in the rock? Why did they come here and why did they leave this spectacular site? - Patricia Crone – Meccan Trade and the Rise of Islam
Crone reassesses one of the most widely accepted dogmas in contemporary accounts of the beginnings of Islam, the supposition that Mecca was a trading center thriving on the export of aromatic spices to the Mediterranean. Pointing out that the conventional opinion is based on classical accounts of the trade between south Arabia and the Mediterranean some 600 years earlier than the age of Muhammad, Dr. Crone argues that the land route described in these records was short-lived and that the Muslim sources make no mention of such goods.
Another good explanation of the recent historical background of the last century, including the Arabic name change, can be found here: The Real al Aqsa Mosque is Not in Jerusalem
The Sacred City of Mecca: Have We Got It Wrong?
Other scholars suggest that Islamic cartographer Muhammad al-Idrisi thought Hurran was Mecca, the center of the Islamic universe in 1154.
For more scholarship about early Islam visit: The standard narrative has holes in it.
” . . . the first four caliphs all prayed towards a different place!”
If this is true, it’s not particularly surprising. We think it’s odd because we project our attitudes into past ages, and forget that people who lived before the advent of modern science, in largely illiterate societies, had a different mentality. They did not, for example, see any overriding need for precision and consistency, and often emphasized a point through poetic exaggeration. That’s why the messages they left are often open to wide interpretation.