Answering Christianity Research Center

Peace,

I put the evidence that suggests that Mecca is not historical in bold, that was the main purpose of this thread - hence why the information regarding the Qiblah is is not in bold. Petra is of secondary importance. You did not touch on the macro-historical data regarding Mecca.

"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".

This is needlessly pedantic, I am not into religious apologetics. Both sides are presented in that both authors views are linked, and if you read it then you'll find that Gibson agrees with a lot of what King claims.

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.

This is parroted everywhere. Look at the below table from Gibson's book, it largely agrees with the data of the orientations in your linked article.



Of the mosques that do face Petra:

Another relevant article, Ka'bah As A Place Of Worship In The History

Rubbish. I will not repeat myself. Those who are genuine can read back, or study the claims themselves.

A 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)

This dating roughly coincides with the advent of the finalized Qiblah, reinforcing the interests of the Mecca conspirators in light of the larger data preceding Islam.

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.

If the elites permit you to have such information. And some truth will inevitably be found in the hadith; they would not want to create fake material out of thin air, they would rather take real material and manipulate it towards whatever agenda you are trying to push. This is what Paul did with Christianity and what the Zionist media does with world events. These people are not stupid, and I have huge professional respect for them.

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.

Assumed conclusions from the hadith literature, salah does not denote a ritual prayer, I will make a separate thread about this in the future. In the mean time, read: https://www.quranite.com/salat-in-the-quran/

Excerpt:

"While he does not always capitalise the noun, he still treats it as a proper noun, i.e. the Prayer. Like Mount Everest in the grammar section above, by the Prayer he means something known and recognised as a discrete thing. Yet the Traditionalist shifts around to other values for ṣalāt as we shall see:

-Default: the Islamic ritual (proper noun)
-Prayer as an abstraction (abstract noun)
-The Jewish prayer (proper noun)
-Blessings – most commonly: blessings sent by the believer upon the dead prophet  (abstract noun)
-Blessings – from God toward men (abstract noun)
-Synagogues (common noun)"

For those with a damage attention span and cannot read, watch Joesph's excellent, erudite presentation on the Quranic concept of salah: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4APNPrfRORQ (I do not agree with everything in Joseph's video, but I do with Gerran's article).

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.

This is not our game. I say "Abbasid" for simplicity, what I really mean are the elites in general, because we do not know their dealings fully. Who knows why the Umayyad's would absorb Abbasid reinventions? It's like asking why would George Bush want to fly planes into buildings on American soil? No one truly knows (assuming 9/11 was an inside job). I follow macro-historical data (of which are generally archaeological in nature) and not interjections based upon political micro-translations of a thousand years ago; we do not know their dealings, are not permitted to know their dealings, and cannot know their dealings.

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.

You are assuming that there was an iron-rule for the original Qiblah, this is demonstrably not the case when you read the beginning of 2:177 on the Quranic concept of virtue and the historical context of Muhammad's time vis-a-vis the builders of early mosques. The Quran does not favour a racially centric Qilah, details of which can be found in Gerran's translation.

Also, I am not an expert on realpolitik. I use the pre-Islamic macro-historical data and generally disregard the micro-historical data, especially when the micro-historical data takes on a completely different flavour than the macro.

Such extraordinary efficiency of a government is absolutely unprecedented and unheard of, well aside from fiction that is.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EE9Lbu9_bVA

Arguably bigger, if true.

p.s. I will respond if your comment is well-researched, else assume that I am ignoring you. Peace.

Quote from: New World Order Cleanse on November 13, 2017, 02:32:54 PM

Quote from: AMuslimDude213 on November 13, 2017, 01:45:26 PM

Agh,it all resorts to the common Quranist argument

http://www.call-to-monotheism.com/questions_that_the_quranites_have_no_good_logical_responses_to


Even Your own Quranists

[48:24] He is the One who withheld their hands of aggression against you, and withheld your hands of aggression against them in the valley of Mecca, after He had granted you victory over them. GOD is Seer of everything you do.

(Rashad Khalifa translation)


And Rashad Khalifa translated most of it accurately,so you're also denying your own Quranist theory.

Issue is,you're making up arguments,and not backing them up,my point still stands if Muhammad SAW was from Petra there would've been some literature mentioning him out of the Quran in Petra since Muhammad SAW would've been a big influence to the Petrans.

Forget about black boxes and gymnastics for a second, I have a mental exercise for shaad, who claims this forum isn't intellectually stagnant: there are numerous problems and assumed conclusions in the above quoted comment, point some out and predict the trajectory of my reply.

It doesn't have to be perfect.

Already said, i would have used the same response....

He claimed that I was affiliated with Rashad Khalifa, just because I reject the Abbasid narrative as canonical like Rashad - this is not true. I don't believe in the no.19 miracle, it's choppy.

NWO cleanse, you said that MuslimDude's points are already dealt with in the documentary then it won't be hard for you refute it by yourself right? I remember you implied that this website is intellectually stagnant, so it would be easy for an intellectually superior being like you to refute those points....

"Mekka" root appears once in the Quran at 48:24. Some assert that 48:24 was altered from "Bekka" (denoting Petra) to "Mekka" (denoting Mecca) by politicians and other interested parties; some assert that "Mekka" means "destruction"; others believe that it indeed denotes a place called Mecca but not the Meecca known today, but some other place in northern Arabia.

And of course those who adhere to the Abbasid narrative (the hadith, majority of this forum) will believe that this word "Mekka" denotes today's Mecca. This is false, but you are free to double think if you feel it makes your life more comfortable.

Quote from: New World Order Cleanse on November 12, 2017, 05:25:04 AM

AMuslimDude STOP THINKING. Watch the documentary or shut up.

Every atom of data is considered; safa, marwa, ptolemy, surah fil, masjid al-haram etc EVERYTHING. Dont ask me to do your research for you.

I don't understand you're telling him to do his own research when you're the one who started this discussion...how is that even logical? If you've watched the documentary then why don't you summarise the points? It's $2.99 on Amazone prime, i wonder if his parents would allow him to rent this documentary...

Hi Professor Double Think,

He's a kid? I'll stop replying to him then. Well, this forum seems intellectually stagnant.

Well actually, one Muslim expert refuted this topic last year.
https://bloggingtheology.net/2016/10/05/was-the-earliest-qibla-petra-smith-lies-and-video-tape/

Read the literature, and I've seen this before. Don't go to speakers corner, no one can articulate their arguments in that environment.

What is the name of the documentary on Amazon?

The sacred city.

Please do not make further interjections until you've watched it, it summarizes everything quite nicely.

You just proved my point,Quranists deny the miracles of Muhammad SAW,these were miracles of our Prophet,which you afcourse disbelieve in.

You're reminiscing over a guys sweat.

Think about how stupid that is.