I’ve been on long bus and train journeys in Morocco / India / Indonesia and observed muslim travelers praying during breaks. In some cases in Indonesia for example the bus stopped at the appropriate time just to allow prayer.
There’s also muslim prayer rooms in every single major airport I’ve ever been in, and has been mentioned Qibla arrows in hotel rooms in muslim countries. So whether or not they are required to, plenty of muslim travelers choose to pray during journeys.
The nearest land is Tematangi and it looks to be at least 50 kms from the antipodes, far enough that there is a clear Qibla great circle direction.
I finally found this website, it’s kind of cool. I’m in Topeka, Kansas, smack dab in the middle of North America, and this site tells me to face 42.95 degrees N, almost directly northeast. I would have thought it would be southeast, but that was going by a flat map.
And I guess I could have called the imam at the Islamic Center in town, but I know you people. Well, sort of anyway?
There are also cool little calculator things, programmed with the Qibla. You enter your current longitude and latitude, and it gives you a direction.
Another interesting rule: you pray in the direction that the locals do. So, if you happen to be visiting XYZtown, and everyone there prays facing west…you should also. It’s the polite thing to do. (Oops, sorry, can’t provide cite. Take it as “Something I read once when researching the matter.”)
There is some controversy about this, apparently, precisely because the direction in North America seems counter-intuitive to many people. The question is whether you use the starting direction of a great circle route (shortest distance), or calculate a rhumb line (constant compass direction). The northeast route is following a great circle. Some North American Muslims apparently advocate a rhumb line direction.
If your “flat map” is a Mercator projection, the rhumb line is is the straight line drawn between points on the map, and you can measure the compass direction from it. This feature was the purpose for the Mercator projection in the first place.
The idea is not that God has any need for you to pray in a certain direction, but that it’s a neat way to do things that unifies the community and gets the worshipper’s head in the right place for prayer. It’s a ritual- not too different than drinking a cup hot chocolate before bed or listening to the Rocky theme before working out.
Islam is not a particularly nitpicky religion, and it really about being in the right spirit of things, not agonizing over the details. Of course there will always be people with too much time on their hands that try to work out how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, but really these are not theological points. Nobody thinks God really cares which way astronauts pray, just that the astronauts do their best to pray with what they’ve got.
Meanwhile, if your “flat map” is a polar projection, then a straight line on that map is a great circle. And a straight line on a map could be any number of other curves, for other sorts of projections. There’s no real reason to elevate the Mercator to special significance, here.