When “Revisionism” About Islam’s Origins Goes Wrong
The Strange Last Half-Hour of Dan Gibson’s ‘The Sacred City’ (2016).
In the 2016 documentary, The Sacred City, Dan Gibson’s primary argument is that Islam does not originate in Mecca, deep in the Hijaz, but much further to the north, in the Levant, in the border zone of the Christian Roman Empire. This occupies the first hour of the film and, as I wrote recently, Gibson is broadly correct, even if his evidence is not sufficient to carry his claim to have identified Petra as the specific city where the original ka’ba was located. I also noted that there were problems, in particular Gibson’s unsystematic approach to the historical sources. This does not seem to result from any agenda, as some of Gibson’s critics allege—his approach often leads to omitting evidence that would strengthen his own argument. But it did suggest Gibson was hostage to an unsound methodology and had not mastered the material. In the last half-hour of the film—as Gibson seeks to explain the process that took place between the end of the Second Fitna (c. 692 AD) and the Abbasid Revolution (750) to bury the memory of the Levantine ka’ba and produce the orthodox Islamic historiography as we have it—these problems lead Gibson seriously astray.
HOW DID THE KA’BA MOVE?
Where We Had Got Up To
Gibson had argued earlier in the film that the change in the ka’ba’s location and the qibla (direction of prayer) occurred at the tail-end of the civil war—in Arabic, fitna (strife, sedition)—that erupted in 683 AD between rebel leader Abdullah ibn al-Zubayr and the Umayyad Imperial authorities. Ibn al-Zubayr had barricaded himself and his forces in the Sacred Place of Prostration (al-Masjid al-Haram), the sanctuary surrounding the Sacred House (al-Bayt al-Haram), the ka’ba, and besieging Umayyads had devastated the ka’ba with catapults before withdrawing to attend to dynastic issues in Damascus after the ruler died. Ibn al-Zubayr swept away the remnants of the original ka’ba and built a new one, only for the Umayyads to come back with their catapults in 692 and demolish it again in the concluding stages of fighting that saw Ibn al-Zubayr defeated and killed.
Muslim Tradition says this all took place in Mecca. Gibson says the first round was in Petra and the second was in Mecca, because Ibn al-Zubayr migrated there during the lull in fighting, taking the Black Stone, supposedly a relic from Adam left at the first Sacred House, to place in the corner of his new Hijazi ka’ba. Given the trajectory of Gibson’s argument, it is not clear why a ka’ba was rebuilt in Umayyad-controlled Mecca, but let us not get ahead of ourselves.
While Gibson is very likely correct about the timing of the change in the ka’ba’s location, i.e., the early 690s, there is already an immense problem with his narrative here. One of the gravest weaknesses of the film—and strangest—is its total omission even of the name of Abd al-Malik, the Umayyad Caliph (r. 685-705) who fought Ibn al-Zubayr in the civil war, a titanic figure whose role in the forging of Islam as we know it is comparable, in Christian terms, to the role played by Saint Paul and the Emperor Constantine.1 It is overwhelmingly probable that it was Abd al-Malik who moved the ka’ba to the Hijaz after it had been destroyed twice over at the original Levantine location.
We may never know the reason Abd al-Malik selected Mecca specifically, but we know the context: the decision was made amid Abd al-Malik remoulding the Imperial creed from the primordial Biblical monotheism—what the Qur’an calls the Millat Ibrahim (way of Abraham)—that had motivated the Ishmaelite Arabs to seize the Holy Land half-a-century and more earlier, into a more exclusivist doctrine tailored to the vast Arab Empire that centred Muhammad as the Messenger of a God to whom Abd al-Malik was Deputy (Khalifa). The cord was being cut with Jews and Christians, their creeds judged superseded: accordingly, the sacral heart of the Empire could not be in the environs of their holy city, Jerusalem. It is another grave weakness of Gibson’s film that it includes no hint of doubt about the nature of Arab creed in first phase of the Empire.
Gibson’s Narrative
Picking up the story, Gibson claims Kufa and Medina had sided with Ibn al-Zubayr’s rebels in praying towards Mecca, and continued this course after Ibn al-Zubayr’s demise. “The great Islamic Empire had divided into two”, Gibson says, with the Umayyads “defeated in battle and now the eastern part of the Empire was ruled by the Abbasids”. This is when some new mosques began facing Mecca in Saudi Arabia, says Gibson, and it raised the question of what to do with the old mosques facing Petra, as he believes. “It was during this time that mosques began hanging a sign on the wall to indicate the direction of prayer”, Gibson says, invoking the story from Tradition of the Caliph Uthman posting such signs on mosque walls in Medina. This is evidence, Gibson contends, for this being a moment when the qibla’s location was contested.
Gibson claims that around 89 AH (708 AD) a niche was “suddenly introduced” to indicate the direction of prayer as a “civil war” raged between the ruling Umayyads and the Abbasids. A map is then shown on screen where the Umayyads control Iberia, Morocco, and Algeria, and the Abbasids control everything west of that.
A “time of confusion” set in, Gibson claims, where “Abbasid reformers” pointed their mosques to Mecca, the “traditionalist Umayyads” retained the qibla towards Petra, and some “neutrals” pointed their qiblas “exactly between” the two. In 750, the Abbasids finally defeated the Umayyads and began constructing Baghdad as their new capital in 754. From this point, all mosques pointed to Mecca, except in the Umayyad-held areas of Spain and Northwest Africa, says Gibson, where they constructed mosques that directed their qiblas seemingly towards South Africa, but, he believes, they were actually parallel to a line between Petra and Mecca.
There is then a slightly discordant jump back to Petra, the purpose of which turns out to be Gibson trying to show why the Spanish Umayyads did not just keep on with qiblas towards Petra. Gibson argues that stones found in the city match the description—and were found in the right layer for the time—to match the descriptions in Islamic history of the Umayyads demolishing the ka’ba with catapults in 683, when Ibn al-Zubayr was besieged at al-Masjid al-Haram. Gibson goes on to say that in 713 AD an earthquake destroyed the dam in Petra, and floodwaters every year eroded such hard evidence as remained. It was the death knell for Petra as a vibrant centre of the Empire and mosques thereafter looked to Mecca.
Assessment
I have to stress that any bafflement felt by readers because of the above does not stem from me mangling Gibson’s presentation. That really is what he says. (Check it out for yourself.)
To start with the claim that Kufa sided with Ibn al-Zubayr’s rebels. Gibson’s evidence is a passage from Al-Tabari, where people in Kufa are quoted saying: “Ibn al-Zubayr, we are people who turn to the same qibla as you”.2 Just to add to the confusion, this is quoted in a later part of the film, not in the section where this narrative is being laid out, and it is only by induction we know Al-Tabari is writing about a period during the Second Fitna. The problem that was so pervasive in the first hour of the film is back: Al-Tabari is an exegete writing in the ninth century AD, two-hundred years after the events described, and Gibson himself has already partially recognised the issue with that in claiming Al-Tabari’s work cannot be relied upon—at least for the argument he was making—because it was altered by “later editors” to conform with evolving Islamic orthodoxy. Finally, the quote from Al-Tabari, contextually, shows the Kufans saying that, despite the political divisions, all Muslims are still brothers in faith. In other words, it is an attempt to encourage harmony, not a record of them joining the rebellion.
The intrusion of the Abbasids into the story shortly after Ibn al-Zubayr’s defeat, not only as “reformers” but as rebels who capture more than half of the Empire, is bewildering. It is not just that this did not happen—the Abbasid uprising began in 747 AD and prevailed in 750—but I found it impossible to track exactly what Gibson is claiming happened. Perhaps somebody else can make out whether the map above—which in reality represents the situation after 750—is supposed to have happened in the 690s or nearer 710. I watched multiple times and could not. It is clear that Gibson is claiming the Abbasid triumph over the “Umayyad traditionalists” came about as the culmination of a long post-Ibn al-Zubayr struggle over the qibla, the implication being that the Umayyad-Abbasid war lasted somewhere between about forty and nearly sixty years.
In terms of using the story about Uthman posting notices in Medina as evidence for a qibla struggle in the first half of the eighth century, there is a problem within Gibson’s own narrative: Medina was supposedly under Abbasid occupation at this point; how and why an Umayyad Caliph would be doing anything there is not clear. More to the point, Uthman ruled, according to Tradition, between 644 and 656—nearly a century before this alleged kerfuffle over the qibla. It might seem like nitpicking to add that Uthman was not an Umayyad, but one of the pre-Umayyad Rashidun (Rightly-Guided) Caliphs.
No attempt is made to harmonise the argument that Petra’s physical destruction in the 710s was the key in its elimination as a focus for prayers with the argument minutes earlier that the Abbasid triumph in the 750s was the turning point. For that matter, there is no explanation how there could have been a “time of confusion” over the qibla from shortly after Ibn al-Zubayr’s defeat until the Abbasid Revolution, with the Umayyads pointing to Petra and the Abbasids pointing to Mecca, if Petra’s devastation by an earthquake in 713 was curtains for its sacral status.
In sum, Gibson completely loses control of the history and creates such a dreadful and frankly strange mess it is difficult even to follow what he is claiming, let alone take it seriously.
WHY DID NOBODY NOTICE?
Gibson’s Argument
Having earlier said that the concealment of al-Masjid al-Haram originally being at Petra “wasn’t a deliberate falsehood”, Gibson closes by making the opposite case.
In explaining how the change in ka’ba location went unnoticed, Gibson lays a lot of stress on the Umayyads creating a “literary vacuum”. By his account, “zealous Muslims” burned non-Muslim books and destroyed inscriptions in a ferocious wave of vandalism. He cites a letter sent by Umar ibn al-Khattab, the reputed second Rashidun Caliph (r. 634-44), to his general in Egypt, Amr ibn al-As, who had found stacks of books in Alexandria in 640 AD and wanted to know what to do with them. Umar, by Gibson’s account, wrote:
As for the books you mention, here is my reply. If their content is in accordance with the book of Allah, we may do without them, for in that case the book of Allah more than suffices. If, on the other hand, they contain matter not in accordance with the book of Allah, there can be no need to preserve them. Proceed, then, and destroy them.
Gibson also quotes the Muslim historian Al-Qifti saying the books were distributed to bath houses in Alexandria, where they were burned to heat the pools.
Another problem Gibson contends is memory in an oral culture. A particular incident he points to is the Battle of Yamama in December 632, a part of the so-called Ridda (Apostasy) Wars, a series of uprisings after the Prophet Muhammad’s death by Arabs who had joined up to Islam.3 At Yamama, 450 haffaz (people who had memorised the whole Qur’an) fell. This meant there was some unevenness in the completeness of Qur’ans, a matter resolved by the Uthman, who created a unified written Qur’an and burned the rest. “In effect”, Gibson says, “all non-Muslim books were destroyed and then the Muslims destroyed all of their own books and writings, except for five or six copies [of the Qur’an].”
If the Umayyads’ violent obscurantism did not amount to perpetrating a “deliberate falsehood” about Islam’s origins—the hatred of knowledge in Gibson’s telling was indiscriminate, after all, and they had no need to cover-up a change in the ka’ba location they opposed—the Abbasids cannot be so easily acquitted. The Abbasids revived Islamic intellectual life, according to Gibson, but outputs had to be in conformity with their interests. Earlier works that contradicted “the politically correct version of Abbasid history … were either destroyed or edited by later writers”.
Gibson suggests, without quite asserting, that Muslims are the “victims of an Abbasid cover-up”. Gibson goes so far as to float the idea that the one reference to “Mecca” in the Qur’an is an interpolation by a later Abbasid scribe, though Gibson grants that this might have been an accident, with the scribe believing he was “correcting” an error.
Gibson concludes by says he is not trying to rewrite all of Islamic history, just make “one small change” to the understanding: that the ka’ba had been in Petra for the first century or so.
Assessment
This section takes up the final ten minutes of the film and what Gibson is arguing at least becomes intelligible, albeit that proves in some ways to be even more troublesome. Several of the claims advanced are so flagrantly wrong I can see why some viewers, not just Muslims, suspect him of something untoward. It would be tedious to do this line-by-line. Three examples should suffice to demonstrate the problems.
First, Gibson’s broad claim of a malign conspiracy to erase the history of the original ka’ba. This is not only without any evidence; it is unnecessary. Empires mythologising their foundations and their history is a common phenomenon. Rome’s founding myths were significantly reworked in the reign of Augustus, more than half-a-millennium after the supposed events. Indeed, the only complete extant versions of the Romulus and Remus myth we have are from the late first century BC, notably in Virgil’s Aeneid and Livy’s History of Rome. In the early fourth century AD, under the first Christian Emperor, Rome ‘identified’ Gethsemane, Golgotha, the Empty Tomb, and the other sites in Jerusalem associated with Jesus. There is no reason to doubt the sincerity of those who undertook the project, and the sacred geography rapidly bedded down among the Romans, but no historian thinks these locations are “real”.4 In 623-24, during the final war with Rome, the Persians were cosmically outraged at the destruction of Adur Gushnasp, a Zoroastrian fire temple that—just like the ka’ba—was located in a remote region and was said to have origins that went back to the dawn of time. Except that the archaeology says the temple was probably under-150 years old, and historians have been able to piece together the religio-political circumstances that led to the shrine’s elevation.5
Second, the claim an orgy of book-burning by “zealous Muslims” left half-a-dozen Qur’ans as the only manuscripts in the Empire by the end of the Umayyad dynasty, clearing the way for the Abbasid rewriting of history, is the most ridiculous thing Gibson says in the film. It is improbable on its face. The Ishmaelites’ “text-referential perspective of the world” is in evidence ideologically from the earliest days,6 and a respect for texts in practice was generally a feature of subsequent Islamic societies.7 The specific letter Gibson cites from Umar I supposedly telling his troops in 640 to burn the books of Egypt—the basis for many anti-theist myths about the fate of the Library of Alexandria—is almost certainly fabricated.
The text of Umar’s alleged letter comes from the mid-thirteenth century, six-hundred years after the supposed event. Versions of it show up in the writing of Gregory Bar Hebraeus (Abu al-Faraj), a senior official in the Syriac Orthodox Church, and in Tarikh al-Hukama (History of the Wise) by Al-Qifti. While it is not clear if Al-Qifti personally is relying on Bar Hebraeus or vice versa, it is clear the two sources are interrelated and that they draw on pre-existing traditions—the one Christian polemical and the other Islamic, which started with Abd al-Latif al-Baghdadi—about the Muslim destruction of books in Alexandria, if not the library per se. Again, the direction of transmission between these earlier traditions is murky, but the date of their first appearance is quite precise: the first decade of the thirteenth century.8
In an odd way, there was a symbiosis between the Christian charge that Muslims were cultural vandals, and some Muslims wishing they had behaved this way during the conquests to demonstrate the supremacy of the True Faith over the superseded superstitions,9 not unlike the way some later Christians claimed they had destroyed pagan temples once Christianity triumphed in Rome, which never happened.10 Regardless, Bar Hebraeus is a hostile witness and whatever Al-Qifti’s motives, he is simply wrong: his claim appears in no Muslim source before 1200, and the Library of Alexandria had been destroyed long before the Arab conquests, no later than the 270s AD.
Finally, Gibson’s claim “Mecca” in the Qur’an could be a later interpolation by a scribe who believed he was correcting “Becca/Bakka” makes no sense. The difference between Mecca (مكة) and Bakka (بكة) in Arabic is admittedly small. As Gibson shows in the film, all it would take is a loop on the ba to make it a meem. The argument collapses—at least in terms of it being an innocent mistake—when one considers that no Muslim responsible for copying Qur’ans in the Abbasid period could have been unaware of the contents, and that is especially true if “Mecca” had never appeared in the Qur’an before that point. If a scribe did do this, it defies belief that nobody else noticed such a significant mistake in the Scripture and this one Qur’an became the basis for an accidental Empire-wide change. If the mention of Mecca in the Qur’an is a latter addition, it can only have come about by a deliberate edict from the Imperial centre, and if that occurred, it begs the question of why Mecca in the Qur’an is described as a valley in an unclear location,11 rather than being clearly linked to the ka’ba and the Hijaz.
Occam’s razor says the “Mecca” reference was in the Qur’an all along. While particularly the Hadith—the sayings and example of the Prophet—dating from two centuries after Muhammad’s death do show evidence of being produced with political ends in mind, the reason the Hadith and the other elements of the interpretive Tradition were created was to explain the “ambiguous” passages of the Qur’an.12 If Islamic scholars had been in the business of editing or eliminating Qur’anic passages they did not understand, there would have been no need to create an exegetical canon. Instead, we have a situation where scholars did not dare tamper with the Qur’anic text, treating it with the reverence befitting the very Word of God, and tried to impose meaning on it from the outside. It is the fact that the seventh-century Qur’an text was left intact, and can be read unadorned with the ninth-century exegesis, which provides some shards of hope that the darkness around Islam’s origins can be pierced.
NOTES
Amer Sare (2023), ‘The Roots of Arab Islam as a State Identity: A Numismatic Approach to the Emergence of Arab Islam as a Public Identity in the Near East During the Rule of ‘Abd al-Malik (685-705 C.E.)’, Master’s Thesis at Lund University, p. 41. Available here.
The History of the Prophets and Kings (Tarikh al-Rusul wal-Muluk), a.k.a., The History of Al-Tabari: 21.112.
The opponent at Yamama was Musaylima, who claimed to be a prophet, according to the Tradition.
Simon Sebag Montefiore (2011), Jerusalem: The Biography, pp. 177-79.
Tom Holland (2012), In the Shadow of the Sword: The Battle for Global Empire and the End of the Ancient World, pp. 83-84, 387-88.
Angelika Neuwirth, ‘The Qur’an’s Enchantment of the World: “Antique” Narratives Refashioned in Arab Late Antiquity’, in, Majid Daneshgar and Walid A. Saleh [eds.] (2016), Islamic Studies Today: Essays in Honor of Andrew Rippin, p. 143.
The notable exceptions in Islamic history tend to reinforce the rule. The “Almohads” (al-Muwahhidun) of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and the Wahhabis in the eighteenth and nineteenth, were widely seen as extremists in Islamdom and their burning of books and libraries was part of the charge-sheet in polemics against them. (Both were also not only ideologically marginal but physically peripheral, the Almohads in Iberia outside Abbasid rule and the Wahhabis in central Arabia where the Ottomans—like all other hegemonic Empires in the region—struggled to extend their writ.) The most infamous case of literary destruction in Islamdom, after the sack of Baghdad in 1258, came from outside: the perpetrators were the Mongols. Events like the Minha persecution in the ninth-century and Saladin piling Ismaili books onto bonfires in Cairo after putting an end to the Fatimid Caliphate in 1171 are comparatively rare in Islamic history.
Jean-Arcady Meyer (2021), The Rise and Fall of the Library of Alexandria, pp. 335-36.
This impulse of later Muslim exegetes and historians, living in a world dominated by Islam, to back-project their triumphalism onto the early history of what became Islam is very likely behind the production of the story of Muhammad slaughtering all the males from the Jewish Banu Qurayza tribe in Medina. See: In the Shadow of the Sword, pp. 353-54. Ironically, in the modern world, such “righteous” atrocity narratives from the later Tradition—Khalid ibn al-Walid creating a river of blood by beheading captured Persians is another prominent case—are frequently invoked by anti-Islamic polemicists and Islamic extremists, above all the Islamic State, to justify their respective positions.
Luke Lavan, ‘The End of the Temples: Towards a New Narrative?’, in, Luke Lavan and Michael Mulryan [eds.] (2011), The Archaeology of Late Antique “Paganism”, pp. xv-lvi.
Qur’an 48:24.
Qur’an 3:7.