The Petra Thesis
According to Gibson, the orientation of mosques built in the early Islamic period does not fit the contemporary direction of prayer in Islam, the Qibla. Historians like David A. King dispute this, saying that astronomical and other factors determined the Qibla in this period. According to Gibson, 17 early mosques point towards the site of Petra which he claims to be intentional. Gibson says that the origin of Islam must have been in Petra, rather than Mecca. [3] [4]
King disputes this. In 2017, he authored a review of Gibson's Early Islamic Qiblas in which he cites plagiarism, misconstruction and misunderstanding of his 1990 work on Qibla direction. King also published a review in 2018 entitled "The Petra fallacy - Early mosques do face the Sacred Kaaba in Mecca but Dan Gibson doesn't know how / Comparing historical orientations with modern directions can lead to false results". [5]
Per King, "having discovered to his satisfaction that the mosques were aligned to Petra rather than Mecca, Gibson was able to claim that these early mosques were deliberately laid out in the modern direction of Petra. This is, of course, ridiculous, [...]". [5] He argued that early Muslim Arabs were unable to precisely establish Qiblas when building new mosques until later mathematical developments made precision possible. [2] Further, King wrote, many variations in orientation are better accounted for by regional and local practices, imperfect geography, and folk astronomy. King noted Gibson's inadequate grasp of mathematics, citing Gibson's "spherical polygons" (p. 170) as inexplicable. King summarized his analysis of Gibson's work as an "amateurish, non-scholarly document that is both offensive to Muslims and also an insult to Muslim and Western scholarship." [2] Gibson self-published his response to King on ResearchGate, "Dr. King on the other hand is convinced that the sloppy qiblas actually intended to point: east, west, solstices, sunrises and so forth. I have not come across anything in Islamic religious manuscripts that support these Qiblas. But perhaps in time someone, somewhere will stumble across something that will change our understanding of Qiblas. All I have found so far, is that every Muslim expects the Qibla to point to Masjid Al Harām." [6] Michael Lecker's review of Gibson's Qur'ānic Geography in the Journal of Semitic Studies from 2014, ends with the sentence: "This book’s imaginative writing may have its followers, perhaps even in academic circles. But the study of early Islamic history is better served by small steps, one at a time." [7] Historian Daniel C. Waugh wrote a skeptical review in The Silk Road, in which he asks, "One might well ask, is there anything in this rambling, self-published book that is to be taken seriously?" He points out that Gibson maintains nabataea.net and says that " From the standpoint of scholarly argument though, the book will invite serious criticism, as there are leaps of faith which leave even a non-specialist reader like myself gasping". [8] He continues "That said, there is a lot here which might give us pause. He is certainly not the first to point out the problems in interpreting the relatively few and cryptic references to what we might term “geography” in the Qur’an or the possible contradictions which arise in trying to establish the factual basis for information contained in the hadiths and early Islamic histories, all of which he repeatedly quotes in extenso." The review ends by concluding that whether Gibson is right or wrong, nothing is going to change in belief or practice.
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