Numerous forum topics have been opened regarding the same subject. I suggest limiting responses to one, this one as it is the most replied-to.
If anyone wants intelligently presented debates/rebuttals between King and Gibson ... read: ... Both sides are presented...
"Both sides are presented" are not accurate words to attach to a rebuttal work. In the absence of a response by David A. King it is quite inaccurate to claim that "Both sides are presented".
A relevant article,
The Qibla Of Early Mosques: Jerusalem Or Makkah?, rebuttal to an argument which can be claimed to be the intellectual predecessor of the Petra claim. Another relevant article,
Ka'bah As A Place Of Worship In The HistoryA relevant quote,
And in those days Heraclius saw a dream in which it was said to him : «Verily there shall come against thee a circumcised nation, and they shall vanquish thee and take possession of the land». So Heraclius thought that they would be the Jews, and accordingly gave orders that all the Jews and Samaritans should be baptized in all the provinces which were under his dominion. But after a few days there appeared a man of the Arabs, from the southern districts, that is to say, from Mecca or its neighbourhood, whose name was Muhammad; and he brought back the worshippers of idols to the knowledge of the One God, and bade them declare that Muhammad was his apostle; and his nation were circumcised in the flesh, not by the law, and prayed towards the South, turning towards a place which they called the Kaabah. And he took possession of Damascus and Syria, and crossed the Jordan, and dammed it up. And the Lord abandoned the army of the Romans before him, as a punishment for their corrupt faith, and because of the anathemas uttered against them, on account of the council of Chalcedon, by the ancient fathers.
– The History Of The Patriarchs Of Alexandria, c. 96 - 97 AH / c. 715 CE.
Source: B. Evetts (Trans & Ed.), "History Of The Patriarchs Of The Coptic Church Of Alexandria - Peter I To Benjamin I (661)", in R. Graffin & F. Nau (Eds.), Patrologia Orientalis, 1904, Volume 1, Librarie de Paris, pp. 492-494. (Cited in
Dated And Datable Texts Mentioning Prophet Muhammad ﷺ From 1-100 AH / 622-719 CE)
If someone can do the work, it will be interesting to see whether the
oldest surviving Hadith manuscripts which also predate the Abbassids include any mention of Mecca or not.
Important to remember at this point is that the
Qibla, due to the Muslims performing five prayers
each day has the foundational importance of a magnitude so as to make hoodwinking hundreds of thousands of Muslims quite difficult, if not practically impossible.
Additionally, another side-point to add is the fact that by 50 years after the Prophet's death, the Arabs had taken over the Persian empire, therefore strong Islamic influence and its knowledge had reached from the borders of India to Egypt. In around a century after the Prophet's death Muslim rulers, religious influence and the knowledge of Islam had reached up-to-the Iberian peninsula (i.e. Spain). All this happened before the Abbassids even came to power and therefore before any alleged burning of libraries by the Abbassids.
Basically the Petra-truthers claim is that
somehow, against all odds, the Abbassid efforts to subvert Islam in one of the most fundamental ways possible was
so absolute,
so comprehensive that they managed to remove the mention of the original
Qibla from the hearts and minds of not only
all the Muslims of their time, which by now should number in the hundreds of thousands, but also from the minds of hundreds of thousands of non-Muslims especially Persians who had just lost their centuries old empire to the Arabs and were, quite understandably, especially bitter about it.
Furthermore, the Ummayyads were ruling in Spain while this supposed Abbassid inquisition is taking place, who had, just a few decades previously, been overthrown in a bloody coup by the Abbassids. A coup which included incidences of brutality, such as barring one male, all members of the deposed Caliph's family getting eliminated. Exactly what extraordinary theory do the Petra-truthers have, to explain as to why even the deposed surviving Ummayyads accepted the Abbassids re-invention of religion? Co-incidentally, this Spain also has a culturally and intellectually vibrant Jewish community which, according to the Petra theory, apparently had also been completely convinced by the Abbassids even though they were pretty much
completely beyond the reach of the Abbassid power.
Moreover, making the Abbassids as the conspirators in this elaborate scheme is even more problematic since their time was one of the most intellectually rich times for that region. Supported by facts such as
The Abbasids’ House of Wisdom in Baghdad. So, basically, the Muslims and people of other faiths of those regions were able to save centuries-old Greek works but found themselves completely incapable of saving a
single mention of Petra as the
Qibla.
Such extraordinary efficiency of a government is absolutely unprecedented and unheard of, well aside from fiction that is.
