In this first part of Lecture one on the Qibla we go into the Historical background concerning why so many of the earliest Qiblas (direction of prayer) are not facing Mecca at all, but were all facing Petra, in Jordan, up to 706 AD. We look at and explain that the earliest Qiblas were chosen not for religious reasons, but for political ecpediency, something the later Muslims didn’t understand. From there we went into what we think really happened in the 7th and 8th centuries, leading up to the takeover and control by the Abbasids in 749 AD, who then created their own political narrative, destroying any historical evidence for the earlier Umayyad dynasty, and introducing their own man, Muhammad, their own book, the Qur’an, and their own sanctuary, Mecca, all of which were situated in the wrong place and at the wrong time. Watch this episode to get the background to the political intrigue which existed in these two formative centuries, and then move on to the next segment of this first lecture, where we unpack how the later Abbasid Mecca borrowed and usurped the stages of the Hajj (pilgrimage), hoping to eradicate any references or vestiges of the earlier Petran sanctuary. © Pfander Centre for Apologetics – US, 2020 (40,090) (Music: “small adventure”, by Rafael Krux, from filmmusic-io – License CC BY)
QIBLA: Gibson’s ‘Qibla theory’ explained simply
