Dan Gibson (author)
Daniel "Dan" Gibson (born 1956) is a self-published Canadian author studying the early history of Arabia and Islam. He is the author of "Early Islamic Qiblas: A survey of mosques built between 1AH/622 C.E. and 263 AH/876 C.E". Reception and critique. In 2017, historian David A. King authored a highly critical review of Gibson's "Early Islamic Qiblas" in which he cites plagiarism, misconstruction and misunderstanding of his 1990 work on Qibla direction. King also published a systematic review in 2018 entitled ""The Petra fallacy - Early mosques do face the Sacred Kaaba in Mecca but Dan  Gibson doesn't know how / Comparing historical orientations with modern directions can l"ead to false results". King is a subject matter expert on medieval Muslim astronomy, author of "World-Maps for Finding the Direction and Distance to Mecca: Innovation and Tradition in Islamic Science", several articles on the Qibla, multiple articles in the Encyclopedia of Islam, was formerly professor of Near Eastern Languages and Literatures at New York University, head of Institute for the History of Science at Goethe University Frankfurt, and director of history of Islamic astronomy at the American Research Center in Egypt. King argued that early Muslim  Arabs were unable to precisely establish Qiblas when building new mosques until later mathematical developments made precision possible. Further, King wrote, many variations in orientation are better accounted for by regional and local practices, imperfect geography, and folk astronomy. King noted Gibson's inadequate grasp of mathematics, citing Gibson's "spherical polygons" (p. 170) as inexplicable. King summarized his analysis of Gibson's work as an "amateurish, non-scholarly document that is both offensive to Muslims and also an insult to Muslim and Western scholarship." Gibson placed a response to King on academia.edu, "Dr. King on the other hand is  convinced that the sloppy qiblas actually intended to point: east, west, solstices, sunrises and so forth. I have not come across anything in Islamic religious manuscripts that support these Qiblas. But perhaps in time someone, somewhere will stumble across something that will change our understanding of Qiblas. All I have found so far, is that every Muslim expects the Qibla to point to Masjid Al Harām." Walter R. Schumm statistically tested the claims of King and Gibson with his results partially favoring Gibson. However he only used the data provided by Gibson without investigating the methodology of how the data  was obtained and noted a discrepancy between website data and book data for Qibla directions. Under the section on limitations in his study, Schumm admits to having not fully explored King's hypothesis about Qibla direction saying the results would have been too close and instead opting for Gibson's methodology in determining the Qibla direction. He also does not explore King's 2019 research on the topic where he lays out how the Mosque of Cordoba's Qibla was determined. Michael Lecker's review of Gibson's "Qur'ānic Geography" in the Journal of Semitic Studies from 2014, ends with  the sentence: "This book’s imaginative writing may have its followers, perhaps even in academic circles. But the study of early Islamic history is better served by small steps, one at a time." Historian Daniel C. Waugh wrote a skeptical review in "The Silk Road", in which he asks, "Is there anything in this rambling, self-published book that is to be taken seriously?"