system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: Why is the musilm holy site mecca instead of the cave Muhammad showed the Quran?
gpt
Theres a great documentary about this from the BBC. Essentially its to do with the politics of the time and the prophet Muhammad's actual teachings.

One of the core concepts of the Koran is that people should NOT worship holy sites or holy people but should only obey the word of God himself, which is the Koran. This is why there are such issues with creating images of the Prophet, because such images would invite worship of the person and not the message he brought from God.

However during the actual time when he was alive and he was writing the Koran there was major political issues with what he was doing. His birthplace of Mecca was controlled by the Quraysh tribe and as the major centre of trade in that area of the world there was a lot of money and power flowing through it. One of the Prophets main goals was to stop people worshiping the pantheon of tribal gods whos central meeting point was at the Kaaba.

I'd have to describe the entire story of the Prophet to explain it well but essentialy he ends up being thrown out of Mecca, leaving and traveling around (which is when he went to Jerusalem and created the Muslim ties with that city) and then finally returning to Mecca on pilgrimage with ten thousand devotees. Mecca lets him in and the pagan images around the Kaaba are destroyed. Mecca is declared the first holy sight of Islam. Obviously this awkwardly contradicts the idea of NOT worshiping sites or people but then religions tend to be self contradictory.

Essentially the question of 'Why Mecca and not Jabal al-Nour?' is that at the time Mecca was the centre of financial and political power and for Islam to survive and spread it had to be intrinsically tied to Mecca and despite the Prophet and the Koran expressly forbidding the worship of sites and individuals an exception was made for the case of Mecca in order to solidify Islam and create a centre of power. 

Edit: some awkward spelling mistakes. Pls no bomb me ISIS :(