Islam

Well, the whole surah can be read here: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Holy_Qur%27an_(Maulana_Muhammad_Ali)/53._The_Star but I can't see where Mecca is mentioned?

― Frederik B, Tuesday, November 20, 2018 11:57 AM (six minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Mecca isn't mentioned it's just generally presumed that Mohammed was in Mecca prior to the Hijrah

(i also cribbed this factoid from Orientalist Sir Hamilton A.R. Gibb)

more from Gibb on that Surah -

From the angle of content, one remarkable feature of the dis-
course is the absence of any dogmatic slant. Its theme is the
lordship of God, the personal responsibility of the created be-
ing, and God's reward and punishment. There would seem to be an almost deliberate avoidance of the distinctive confessional
elements of either Judaism or Christianity, and an emphasis on the basic themes of a monotheistic faith divorced from both the
rival creeds. How bitter that rivalry had been in South Arabia is known from historical data. Arab tradition connects these
religious rivalries with the political designs of the surrounding imperial powers, but even had there been no political overtones there could well have been good reason for a native monotheistic movement in Arabia to seek an independent middle course. And such was in fact to become a cardinal element in Islam.8

I read the Quran last year, but it's hard to get the point of it in translation. Listening to the original Arabic, a lot of it is legitimately beautiful. Especially Surah 55:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PD6Ov8JHTfk

Gopnik is usually a meh, but he can be useful in a survey kind of way:

That these stories, of the Garden and the Fall, are told so telegraphically surely indicates that their audiences were familiar with previous versions of them. And yet, Reynolds makes clear, no versions of what we now call the Old or New Testaments existed in Arabic when the Quran was composed—those texts would have been known almost exclusively through oral tradition and storytelling. There’s a strange irony here. The Christian Gospels were written in Greek, a language that Jesus and his followers didn’t speak, and certainly couldn’t read or write in (if they could read and write at all), and the version of the Jewish scriptures that the Gospels drew upon, the Septuagint, was also in Greek—which means that the Gospels as we have them emerged from behind a Hellenistic scrim. The Quran, in turn, draws from an overheard version of the Greek texts, probably as passed through North African and Syrian translations, so what we are witnessing is part of a centuries-old game of telephone, played throughout the ancient Middle East in many of its tongues.