Thread by @iandavidmorris

I’m finally reading Dan Gibson’s ‘Qur’anic Geography’ and, friends, would it surprise you to learn that this book is Bad

I’ll give him this: I think Gibson is sincere. A lot of work went into this book. But he doesn’t know enough to know how little he knows.

Gibson has a fundamentalist reading of the Bible. He treats Genesis as the product of one author, Moses. The stories are taken at face value.

Gibson confuses the Horites of southern Canaan with the Hurrians of northern Mesopotamia. But it gets weirder:

The Hurrians spoke a language which is neither Semitic nor Indo-European. Gibson believes that Semitic peoples were descended from Shem and Indo-Europeans from Japeth, so the Hurrians must have been descended from Ham. This is nineteenth-century biblical race science.

Gibson identifies qur’anic ‘Ād (عاد) with biblical ‘Ūṣ (עוץ) because they are *kinda* similar. The reasoning is vague:

“Vowels in Arabic often change from one dialect to another and so a shift from a wow to an alif is not a difficult one.”
”It is also possible to interchange consonants that are similar: …some Yemeni dialects interchange za, ḍa, da, and tha.“

There is no reference to current scholarship on historical linguistics. Gibson seems unaware that phonological changes are regular and reconstructible.

Gibson indicates that he worked for the “Americana Institute of Canada” some time ago. I have no idea what this is meant to be.

(Though I note that both of Gibson’s publishers, CanBooks and Independent Scholars Press, seem to be his own personal operations.)

Where Genesis says “before any king reigned over the children of Israel”, Gibson understands this to mean before the Exodus. It’s a surprising argument:

Gibson repeatedly calls the leading men of Edom “sheiks”, a word that does not appear in the Bible, because he wants us to think of them as Arabs.

Gibson says “the Horites are called Horims” in Deuteronomy 2:12. This is because he can only read translations: Ḥorim (חרים) is just the plural of Ḥori (חרי).

Good grief.

I reckon experts in Ancient Near Eastern stuff would find loads in this first half to pick apart; I can see how tenuous his arguments are, but I don’t know the state of the field much better than Gibson does.

More from Gibson’s historical linguistics: unresearched guesswork that bends semantics and phonology all out of shape.

Gibson must think this sort of thing is what linguists do profesionally, but he could only think that if he hasn’t read any linguistics.

“From time immemorial the Arabs”
The magic words! Everyone take a shot!🍹

I am SUPER-tickled that Gibson consults Charles Forster on the notion that Qedar = Harb. I talk about this in my article on Macoraba, pp. 23–4: islamichistorycommons.org/mem/wp-content… To Gibson’s credit, he’s not buying it.

LEFT: R.B. Serjeant’s note on a translation of Ibn Ishaq.
RIGHT: Gibson’s misreading of Serjeant.

Gibson interprets a particular phrase, “the glens of Mecca and the beds of its valleys”, as meaning that there was abundant grass; neither the English nor the Arabic implies such a thing. In fact, he says, “no grass grows” in “the area around Mecca”. (It does, but sparsely.)

“The presence of trees and plants in ancient times can be easily tested by the presence of spores and pollens in undisturbed ancient soil. To date there is no record of trees having ever existed in ancient Mecca.” A bold claim there, supported by no citations of any kind.

Gibson worries that the numbers of “Meccan” soldiers in our sources are too large for Mecca itself to sustain. I actually think he’s right about this, but where he takes this as evidence against Mecca as the historical location for these events, I draw very different conclusions:

1) Such numbers are generally exaggerated.
2) Mecca was a net importer of food.
3) Not all soldiers with Meccan/Qurashi allegiance were necessarily resident in Mecca itself.

Gibson does not accept that cult images from “multiple religions” should have been kept together at the Ka‘bah. He speculates that they were gathered after an earthquake (in Petra): dug out of the rubble and stored in a central public place.

Of course, there’s no need to imagine “multiple religions” operating here: syncretism is a thing, and it’s not altogether strange for people to revere (say) Jesus and Mary *alongside* local gods or spirits.

It’s odd that the Arabic tradition’s (late, hostile, and not altogether coherent) portrayal of the Meccan cult is basically trustworthy, in Gibson’s reading.

There’s more, but I really need to say this now:

If you read Gibson and think he sounds reasonable, you are being duped. His arguments are very, very poor. Perhaps you don’t notice how poor they are, because you don’t have the training that specialists have: so I’m telling you.

This is weird: Gibson doubts that Mecca could have been subject to blockade. (You don’t have to fully encircle a city: patrols and signals can help to intercept supplies and counter raids.)

Gibson understands this passage to mean that the journey from Mecca to Damascus took less than 40 days. If anything, I think the opposite is implied: the Umayyads in Mecca were too late to meet him. But in any case, 40 is a topos: see Conrad’s article cambridge.org/core/journals/…

Gibson: ”This passage does not tell us where the new Ka’ba was constructed.”
Tabari: “Ziyād ibn Jiyal told me he was in Mecca on the day when Ibn al-Zubayr was overcome… They re-established it on its foundation and Ibn al Zubayr rebuilt it”

I’ll leave it to the palaeographers to say whether Surah 2 has survived in the earliest manuscripts, but let’s keep some perspective: those manuscripts are fragmentary.

I mean, Surah 2 *is* in manuscripts that have been provisionally dated to the latter half of the 7th century; if Gibson’s demanding *non-Uthmanic* variants, which are vanishingly rare, he’s really setting an arbitrarily high standard of evidence.

Gibson: “The Nabataeans and Edomites were both descendants of Abraham, and so they had a monotheistic background and were reluctant to put human characteristics onto gods” 😐

Gibson: ”In the massive collections of writing produced by Abbāsid authorsbetween [sic] 750 - 950 AD (132 - 340 AH) the writers seldom mention the city of Mecca”

HOLD UP

The ABBASID writers SELDOM MENTION Mecca?!

Anyway, Gibson goes on to cite Khalid b. al-Walid’s impossibly quick pilgrimage as evidence that he must have gone to Petra, not Mecca; but of course the unlikely speed of the pilgrimage is the very reason the anecdote is told. (Gibson has a profoundly literal habit of reading.)

“Trebuchet stones”? No citation; no way to confirm anything about this.

“Is it any wonder that a mosque was built in Canton China (modern Guangzhou) while Muḥammad was still alive?”

Why, yes. So much so that it didn’t happen.

He cites this Huaisheng Mosque elsewhere, seemingly unaware that its claim to the seventh century isn’t taken remotely seriously.

Gibson: “there was also a literary vacuum in the early Muslim empire created by zealous Muslims who destroyed books and manuscripts, erased inscriptions, burned libraries and destroyed all literature except Islamic writings”

This is a breathtaking overstatement.

“One can only surmise that the city of Petra is today bereft of all inscriptions because of the actions of zealous Muslims during Yazīd’s reign.”

Evidence of targeted vandalism might help this case.

Gibson, on the dearth of early Qur’an manuscripts, cites scholarship from the 1970s. But things have improved: he’s just not kept up.

Gibson: Ibn Hisham, Bukhari, Tabari and Yaqut “are responsible for the bulk of Islamic history that has come down to us today.”

He knows embarrassingly little about our sources.

Ibn Hisham “begins the practice of editing past writings”, says Gibson, much to my surprise.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

SO VERY TIRED

“Muḥammad met some of the tribe of Anṣār (Quraysh in Medina)” ?!?!

A former follower of Mukhtar tells the Zubayrids: “we are people who turn to the same qiblah as you”. Gibson understands this to mean that there were two qiblas. The point, however, is simply that both sides are Muslims, part of the same ‘people’, who may therefore be reconciled.

Gibson also seems to think that the Ibn al-Zubayr in this passage is ‘Abd Allah, the self-declared caliph; in fact it’s Mus‘ab, his brother.