Yeez,
You know what I think of Gibson's reliance on the tradition (Biblical or Quranic): not reliable
But I did read King's criticism on Gibson's qibla directions. While I think there is plenty to criticise (with what I've seen, I dont think Petra is the focus of early Islam, but I doubt it is Mecca), the way King does it is not at all objective. I don't doubt King's resumé is fantastic, doesnt change that his Gibson rebuttal is substandard (imo).
That i absolutely agree with you dear mundi., Irrespective of his resume... as I operate on a basic rule "NO ONE IS UNQUESTIONABLE"....
dr. King's rebuttal in those pdf files is appalling and he is irresponsible to use such words as these in a publication.. it is indeed substandard because of silly few words in his long publication., As you mentioned he does have a point w.r.t early Mosques and that Qibla .. the Islam prayer direction.....
but he should have not uttered such words as these..
................Gibson appears on the scene at the same time as the English historian Tom Holland, the self-styled “leading writer of the Ancient World”, who has had the audacity to claim on the basis of one very dubious late medieval non-Arabic text, that Muslims have been praying at the wrong times for over a millennium. Both Gibson and Holland write in total ignorance of orientalist research on the institutions of the qibla and prayer times over the past century. The Christian lunatic fringe has already adopted this very useful arsenal of ‘weaponry’ from Gibson and Holland in its fight against Islam................
.....Gibson is not to blame for his basic premise that Islam did not begin in Mecca. It goes back over 40 years ago essentially to three Arabists (Wansbrough and his students Crone & Cook) at the University of London (SOAS), who expressed the daft ..“revisionist” idea —though they were serious— that the origins of Islam were not in Mecca, but somewhere else in N.W. Arabia. The latter two of these, in their unfortunate 1977 book Hagarism, “written by infidels for infidels”......
without such words his publication on
Dan Gibson, Early Islamic Qiblas: A Survey of mosques built . pdf by DA King - 2018 would have been much better., in fact they are unnecessary..
But even Gibson and HIS ARDENT SUPPORTERS like you
must agree with what dr. king said here
..........I counter Gibson’s agnotological tour de force with the simple argument that the earliest Muslims could never have aligned mosques accurately toward the modern direction of Petra, or, for that matter, toward the modern direction of Mecca either. It is even easier to demolish Gibson’s necessary back-up thesis, which is that the first generations of Muslims had all of the necessary technical equipment —trigonometry, geometry, geographical coordinates, astronomical instrumentation— to derive the direction of Petra accurately for any locality from al-Andalus4 to China. Since this equipment in fact became available to the Muslims in al-ʿIrāq only in the late 8th and early 9th century, Gibson’s attempt to fabricate the evidence for an earlier epoch falls flat...
that is a fact..
I must also add that dr. King himself is NOT an historian of Islam
but his contribution on Scientific achievements in Mathematics.. Astronomy of so called Islamic world of that time is worth reading and worth mentioning .. I wonder whether he realized these contribution of so-called Arabs to Science is NOTHING TO DO WITH ISLAM but it is all to do with human curiosity to know the unknowns .. and i like dr. king's word .....Gibson’s
agnotological tour de force ... ...agnotological tour de force......lol..
with best
yeezevee
Topic: Qur'anic studies today