The Petra Fallacy Early Mosques face the Sacred Kaaba in Mecca, not Petra!

Abstract

Dan Gibson’s book Early Islamic Qiblas (2017) prompted my reply “From Petra back to Mecca: from pibla back to qibla” (2017). His “Comparing two qibla theories” (2018) prompted the present response. I have appended a reaction to A. J. Deus’ “Monuments of Jihad” (2018) on the orientations of Turkish mosques. The abundant reliable publications on the determination of the sacred direction toward the sacred Kaaba in Mecca are here listed for the first time. To understand why this or that early mosque was pulled down and rebuilt in a different direction, read on, but rest assured, it all has nothing to do with Petra. Since these exchanges, I have made available on my Academia webpage a 1,350-page monograph entitled “Historical Mosque Orientations” (2023) with explanations of the orientations of hundreds of mosques towards the Kaaba, using the methods described in medieval texts. In 2023, Dan Gibson published a book entitled Let the Stones Speak, demonstrating for his revisionist readers, that the foundations of early mosques face Petra, so that the origins of Islam and its early history were deliberately falsified. He devoted an entire chapter devoted to show that my ideas were false.