Dan Gibson and Jay Smith are two academicians who in a very dramatic and convincing way have presented data that support the controversial opinion that the first direction of prayer in the mosques were pointing at Petra, not at Mecca, since moved away from Jerusalem. But if the qibla was changed from Jerusalem to another place, it was changed to "the invioble place of worship"! If the black stone at Kaaba was transported from Petra to Mecca some mosque builders may have refuted to change the qibla to Mecca. They may have considered the place in Petra more important than the stone. But the stone was not relocated without a reason, the place of worship was changed out of security reasons.
In videos on Youtube you can hear Jay Smith ask where the first Qur'an is to be found. The truth is that the Qur'an was a recitation! It was to be found in the head of the recitors, people that were entrusted with the task to memorise the recitation and who wrote it down to support the memory. They needed no vowels and no special diacritical marks since their capacity to remember were of a sort we hardly can imagine, living in an age as we are when calculators and computers have made us loose our memory before the real senility.
The written support of the memory for those reciting the Qur'an were bones, hydes, palmfibrers and so on. The oldest suras are very short and it is logical to think they were written down when the revelation got some volume. To ask were the Qur'an was to be found and complain over the disparity of the material constituting the written support is to ignore the fact that literature at that time was oral. Homeros had scribes that wrote down the Illiad and the Odyssé but just for the sake of their own possibility to memorise those epic stories Homeros easily could recite from memory. None denies the existence of Homeros and his literary output just because they were pieces of oral litererature.
The mening of the word "Mecca" in the Qur'an may be another than that of naming a city. The city may have got the name after the holy place of worship have been relocalised. In a similar way Jathrib became Medina.
The muslims have nothing to fear if it is true that Muhammad started his mission in Petra and not in what is now called Mecca. I do not say that it is a fact but the two academicians Dan Gibson and Jay Smith both do.
