day. Before that, thousands of pagans used to visit the city when it was the central place of idol worship in Arabia before Muhammad (peace be upon him) returned it to its Abrahamic origin as a bastion of monotheism. To ask the question whether the Mecca of Islamic tradition existed or not is to ask whether the Arabs of the seventh century were deaf, dumb and blind. Why would hundreds of thousands of people, in the second half of the seventh century, suddenly begin to visit the city of Mecca as a pilgrimage site if they didn't find their predecessors do it? 'On the broad perspective some complaints assert unequivocally, as is often said, that Islam was "born in the full light of history unlike the ancient faiths". That may have been the belief of Western scholars back in the days of Ernest Renan, but it is most certainly not the academic consensus today.' We ask Holland: have we yet discovered the full light of history or is there still a lot to discover? We quote Robert Hoyland again to show Holland as to the amount of evidence still in need of serious study: 'The problem of the historiography of this period is certainly a very challenging one, and will remain so while no accepted criteria exist to verify the Muslim literary tradition. And yet there are grounds for optimism. Firstly, we do have a number of bodies of evidence -- especially non-Muslim sources, papyri, inscriptions and archaeological excavations --