The Sacred Direction in Islam A Study of the Interaction of Religion and Science in the Middle Ages

Abstract

In Islam the sacred direction is towards Mecca, or more precisely, towards the sacred Kaaba in Mecca. Muslims face this direction in prayer and during various other ritual acts. Muslim astronomers from the 9th century onwards dealt with the determination of the qibla, as the sacred direction is called in Arabic. They treated it as a problem of mathematical geography and they produced highly sophisticated trigonometric and geometric solutions. They even compiled tables displaying the qibla as an angle to the local meridian for each degree of latitude and longitude difference from Mecca.

But these were not the only means used for finding the qibla, a fact immediately apparent from the orientation of medieval mosques, which in general do not face Mecca as they are supposed to. This paper addresses the question: what means were used in practice? The answer is contained in texts on folk astronomy, in which celestial phenomena are discussed without recourse to theory or computation, and texts on the sacred law, in which the qibla is always discussed because of its fundamental importance in Islamic practice. In these sources, astronomical risings and settings were advocated for the qibla. The reason for using astronomical horizon phenomena to face the Kaaba was that the Kaaba itself is astronomically aligned, a fact known in the medieval period but only rediscovered a few years ago. These findings cast new light on the origin of the Kaaba, and the author suggests that it may have been built originally as an architectural representation of an early Arab cosmology.

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