the sad thing is though is while i agree with scholarship like this l  its largely has become the bastion of Islamophobia mostly for the fact is now wildly used  by far right  western  eurocentric nutcases  many of them who may or not be Christian and  many of who are drawn to people like Pamella Geller  for there own purposes which is what i meant by my prior statement 
which actually fundamentally undermines this scholarship all together   

Hi Aztec

Thanks for your post. I accept David King’s contention that you can’t determine the qibla from earliest mosque orientations, which rules out Dan Gibson at least on that basis. However King completely leaves out the problem that the Qur’an does not describe Mecca accurately in any way, whereas it does describe Petra, for example the ‘forbidden meeting place’ (masjid al-haram) with large circumscribing stones, Muhammad’s meditation cave facing the city, the river flowing through the middle, the mountains on either side, etc. etc.

Apart from the problem of confirmation bias, which should be examined in every case, we also have the problem (in your case) of ad hominem attack. Someone may be an ‘Islamophobic nutcase’, but that doesn’t necessarily mean what he is saying about Islam is wrong. If I am a smoker and I tell you that smoking is bad for you, should you dismiss what I am saying on the basis that I am a hypocrite? Lots of people do that and it stops them coming to the correct conclusion! Examine the evidence.