Huge new monumnet found at Petra - could this be what the first Mosques pointed to?

[Minimalist]

Dr. Rafat Amari is great. I've heard of them before. Thanks for th link. I can't remember, though, if he's the one who said that all of the events of the Quran actually happened in North Arabia.

Yeah.  So on the one hand we have Luxenbourg ( a pseudonym for a scholar who doesn't want to have his family killed by fanatics) along with Spencer explaining his rather deep book suggesting that the origins of the koran were actually a Syriac book from a heretical xtian sect which had been driven out of the Roman Empire and into the marginal lands of Arabia after  the Council of Chalcedon (451). These monophysite (one nature) xtians were quite similar in their view of god to what later turned into islam's view.  Add to that the interesting fact that the Ghassanid kingdom arose right in north Arabia (coincidence?) and that they merged with Greek monophysite heretics.  The Ghassanids were reliable allies of the Byzantines in the long wars against the Persians effectively holding the Byzantines right flank.

So.  We have a heretical xtian army ( as far as the Byzantines were concerned) in North Arabia with a doctrine not at all dissimilar from what later came to be islamic in the right place at the right time after the Byzantines and Persians tore each other to shreds in the 6th century.

Yes.  It is all most interesting.