King hates anyone who disagrees with him - Qibla Controversy Ep.9

When one looks at Dr King’s Paper they can see pretty clearly that he is having a problem with Dan Gibson, which is quite evident from the title itself; which says: “Early Mosques do face the sacred Kaaba, in Mecca, but Dan Gibson doesn’t know how”, a personal attack against Gibson from the ‘get go’, which is nothing more than emotional ‘ad hominem’, and not worthy of a true academic.

Ironically, he then spends the rest of his 54 pages trying to explain why none of the earliest mosques face Mecca, suggesting it is not Gibson but he who doesn’t know how!

When one watches Gibson’s responses to this paper (A total of 6 videos which you can watch on his site: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4YYNDqse-IE), they will notice that Dan does not respond in kind. He is never vitriolic, is always humble, but is also deeply hurt by Dr King’s personal diatribes against him. The contrast in styles can’t be more different.

It seems evident from the tone of King’s emotional response to Gibson that he was taken by surprise, which suggests that King has never had anyone in his career ever confront his research before, at least not at this level, nor with so many damaging conclusions. His only recourse was to over-react and demean Gibson relentlessly.

This doesn’t surprise us, since Al fadi and I have had similar reactions to our research, and to our many videos confronting Islam. We have always known that whenever anyone dares to confront Islam at any level they are vilified publicly very quickly, and are called ‘Islamophobes’ and ‘hate preachers’.

But, if anyone supports Islam, as King has spent his career doing, they are elevated by Muslims and secular academics alike, and applauded for their work. It doesn’t take long before they begin to believe everything they hear, and suppose that they are beyond criticism; and so, when it does come, specially by a mere amateur, with no degrees, someone who does not travel within the circles he travels, it is most humiliating, and a 'damn nuisance'.

Besides Gibson, there were 3 revisionist scholars for whom King particularly reserves his anger; Dr John Wansbrough, Dr Michael Cook, and Dr Patricia Crone. These three scholars all wrote well documented and well sourced academic books doubting the classical historical account concerning Islam’s beginnings and the Qur’an’s authorship.

Dr Crone in particular questioned the historicity of the city of Mecca before 741 AD, which destroyed Montgomery Watt’s ‘Trade Route Theory’ by simply investigating the trading documents from the 2nd – 8th centuries, reading them in their mother tongues (she was capable of reading and writing 15 archaic languages), and concluded that none of the trade could have gone through Mecca, or even within Arabia, because it was all maritime trade, controlled by the Eritreans (from Adulis). Her research confronted the very foundations of Islam itself historically.

King, therefore, had little love for her or the other two, and so it was not surprising that he said of them, “Some 50 years ago some over-enthusiastic London-based Arabists, John Wansbrough and his students Michael Cook & Patricia Crone came up with the idea that Islam began not in Mecca but somewhere unspecified in N. W. Arabia. This was a curious idea, not least because there were no obvious potential sites. One of the principal and most convincing arguments for their bold assertion was the ‘fact’ that the earliest mosques in Egypt and Iraq do not face Mecca, but rather some locality in N. W. Arabia.”

What’s curious about this quote is that Wansbrough, Cook and Crone did not come up with this idea of mis-directed Qiblas at all, as they were quoting two other scholars from 1905 AD, over 100 years earlier; namely, Dr Creswell (a favorite scholar of Kings), and Fehervari, who noted that two mosques in Iraq (in Kufa and Wasit), and another in Egypt (the Fustat mosque) were not facing Mecca at all, but much further north, possibly Jerusalem.

Why King had so much anger against these three, when their conclusions concerning Qibla directions did not come from their own research, but that of the very scholars King supported and admired himself, suggests that either he had not studied these earlier scholars nor their findings, or he simply could not accept anyone who might dare to counter his own work, as the leading authority on Qibla directions. You decide.

Yet, while his anger towards these three noted scholars was unfortunate, his more directed hatred toward Gibson was much deeper, more disingenuous, and possibly even dangerous; so, it is to that subject that we will next turn.
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