At the same time, the jQuery Mobile development blog says:
Use jQuery UI 1.8.23 and jQuery Mobile 1.1.1 or later for best compatibility with jQuery core 1.8.1.
It's unfortunate that there is so little coordination between the JQM and jQuery teams, and this is leading to a lot of developers wasting their time.Support for jQuery 1.7.2 (and soon 1.8)
jQuery Mobile 1.2 now supports versions 1.6.4, 1.7.1, and 1.7.2 of jQuery core. We recommend that you use 1.7.2 to take advantage of all the improvements in the latest release. We’re working on fully testing 1.8 and hope to support that soon.
Yet jQuery Documentation has suggested for some time that 1.7.2 is compatible.Query Mobile 1.1.1 Final
Requires jQuery core 1.6.4 or 1.7.1