Any claim the size of Islam’s (or Christianity or anything else) needs to stand up to scrutiny. This 2+ hour lecture is well worth your time as Jay Smith lays out in detail the evidence that the popular narrative of Islam centred around Mecca is simply not true and, rather, is a fabrication of Islamic rulers a number of centuries after the life of the Prophet.

tl;dw?

• There is zero evidence of a town called Mecca at the time it would have to exist according to the Qur’an.
• Qur’anic accounts of “Mecca” are highly inconsistent with the location, geography and flora of Mecca.
• All the early qibla (the alcoves in Mosques that point in the direction of Mecca) don’t point there. They point consistently somewhere else.
• The terms “Mohammed”, “Muslim”, “Islam” don’t appear until a number of centuries later.
• The most obvious conclusion to draw is that Petra was the seat of the original religion and there was no named prophet. “Islam” is a later construct that owes it’s identity to the political conflict of the time.