Setting the Record Straight: The Historical Existence of Makkah

Setting the Record Straight: The Historical Existence of Makkah

History

A constellation of revisionist authors — most notably Dan Gibson, whose work constitutes the most technically ambitious challenge to Makkah’s historicity, and supplemented by the polemical writings of Mark Durie and Peter Townsend — has in recent years advanced the claim that Makkah (Mecca) either did not exist as a significant settlement during the time of the Prophet Muḥammad or was not the original direction of Islamic prayer. These claims rest on selective reading of classical sources, misapplication of cartographic and archaeoastronomical data, systematic methodological inconsistency in the treatment of evidence, and a fundamental misunderstanding of the economics and sociology of pre-Islamic Arabian sanctuary cities. This article addresses each major revisionist claim in turn, presenting the cumulative epigraphic, cartographic, numismatic, literary, and archaeological evidence that firmly establishes Makkah’s historicity and its central role in the religious life of the Arabian Peninsula well before the rise of Islam. It further demonstrates that the revisionist methodology, when subjected to the same critical standards its proponents apply to the Islamic tradition, does not survive scrutiny, and that the scholarly consensus rejecting these claims is grounded not in confessional loyalty but in rigorous historical and scientific analysis.

Mohd Elfie Nieshaem Juferi

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