 | ||
Books Quranic Geography, Besides the Bible: 100 Book, Introduction to Physical Geology, Creative Pain Manage, How to Make Money on | ||
Daniel "Dan" Gibson (born 1956) is a Canadian independent scholar and historian of the early times of Arabia and Islam.
Contents
Personal life
Dan Gibson is son and grandson of two British-Canadian private historians who were excited for Biblical history because of religious reasons. They bequeathed this interest to their son and grandson. Gibson visited the Arabian peninsula for the first time in his early twenties. After high school and some studies in theology Gibson spent his whole life researching the history of the Arabian peninsula. With his family, he lived alternately in Canada and in various countries of the Near East. Gibson has four children and currently lives in Canada.
Research
First, Gibson interested himself for the history of the Arabian and Nabatean trade in the period from 300 BC to 500 AD. After he recognized contradictions between archaeological record and traditional historiography of Arabia resp. Islam, Gibson began to study the backgrounds of these contradictions. On the basis of his religiously founded tendency to read traditional texts as the Bible or the Quran as literally as possible, Gibson dismissed the traditional stories about Mecca not simply as purely fictional, as do many representatives of Islamic studies in our days. Rather, Gibson tried to find an explanation, why the traditional texts did not fit to reality. Although the starting point of this research thus was not purely scientifically motivated, the investigated research question itself is scientifically fully justified. After ten years of research especially on this topic, in 2011 his book Buch Qur'ānic Geography was published.
The central research results of Gibson are as follows:
On the basis of these results Gibson developed the theory that Islam's prophet Muhammad did not live in Mecca but in Petra. Already in 1977 Patricia Crone and Michael Cook proposed in their groundbreaking work Hagarism that the birthplace of Islam must have been somewhere in north-western Arabia. The Kaaba resp. the Black Stone of the Kaaba was moved from Petra to Mecca in the second Islamic civil war. The victorious Abbasids then enforced the use of the direction to Mecca. The memory of Petra got lost, since Petra became uninhabitable after a major earthquake, resp. the memory to Petra was intentionally eradicated from historiography by the Abbasids. The spelling of "Mecca" and "Becca", i.e. Petra, is almost identical in Arabic. With the exception of the Quran virtually all existing traditions about the beginnings of Islam derive from the Abbasid period. Under the perspective of scholarly Islamic studies these traditions are considered to be questionable and unhistorical in many respects.
Reception and Critique
Gibson's book was received very reluctantly by representatives of Islamic studies. One reason for this is Gibson's religious background and his lack of professional scholarship. This indeed influenced parts of his research, such as his premature assumption that the Library of Alexandria had been destroyed by the Arabs. Another reason is that Islamicists are very careful to agree on hypotheses concerning early Islam because of the impact on today's Islamic world even if the case seems to be clear. An example for this reluctant reception is Prof. Michael Lecker's review of Gibson's Qur'ānic Geography in the Journal of Semitic Studies from 2014, ending with the telling 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." - Prof. Daniel C. Waugh wrote a sceptical review in The Silk Road, in which he criticises many sloppy mistakes in Gibson's book but leaves open whether Gibson's cenral claim of early mosques pointing towards Petra is right or wrong.