http://www.straightdope.com/columns/001013.html
mentiones the problem of where Muslems face to pray.
At the anti-polar of Mecca, (which would be at sea among the
Marshal Islands), wouldn’t the shortest distance to Mecca
be DOWN? Would a devout Muslem take this into consideration?
The problem with that answer is that the shortest route from many places would also go through the soil. The anti-polar of Mecca (which is rather fetchingly referred to as Kaaba Prime here by SandWriter) would be where the difference between the direct route and the overland/ sea great circle route would be a maximum, but just about anywhere Kaaba would be closer through the Earth than around it. I guess the appeal of “down” at Kaaba Prime is that no other direction presents itself as the obvious one.
picmr
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How do Muslims know which way to face when praying? (13-Oct-2000)
moderator, «Comments on Cecil’s Columns»
I think that praying via a great circle route parallel to the local plane of the Earth is ill-advised. Unless prayers are strongly affected by gravity, they’ll keep going in a straight line that continually distances itself from the Earth (and thus from Mecca, too).
If they are affected by gravity, then the worshipper will have to solve a differential equation to determine the proper angle relative to the horizon so that the prayer comes back to Earth in the vicinity of Mecca.
Better to assume they travel in a straight line and let them tunnel thru the planet.
I just noticed that I put in my reminder to “please include the link”, but the original poster had already done that!
Oy vey, I’m getting old.
Please carry on and pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.
moderator, «Comments on Cecil’s Columns»
Clarification (from a non-muslim):
All muslims face down when they pray. They are kneeling and bowing. The question has to do with which direction to point their heads vs. their feet for the bowing part. It is very difficult for the Muslim to point his head toward the ground and his feet in the air and still be kneeling. So the answer about facing “down” is missing the point. Or more correctly, the question about which direction to “face” is improperly phrased. More properly one could phrase it “which direction should the praying Muslim clock his kneeling?”
Shouldn’t the Muslim in question face in the more Westerly direction? Since the Earth spins from West to East, it will bring Mecca around faster to meet the prayer, whereas in the other direction, the prayer will have to chase Mecca. Come to think about it, this factor might make it preferable to send the prayer the long way around the Earth in some places.
I had heard (and I can’t recall where) that at one stage, a group of Muslims were very interested in obtaining access to the little South Pacific atoll known as Mururoa. This is because it is very close to the antipodes of Mecca, and any inhabitants there spend their entire lives facing Kaaba. (Of course, to those of us who have any concept of geometry, it would only be true if one was prostrate, but such details do not seem to worry the truly devoted.)
It was at the same time that France decided that since it was also a long way from Paris, it would be an ideal place for testing nukes. I guess the French had a bit more ready cash.
I don’t know how much truth there is to this tale, but it does put an interesting bent on the issue.
J.
I think it’s interesting that there seem to be two thought lines here.
Prayers that don’t have mass, but have energy, project out from their origin point in a tangential line moving away from the earth.
Prayers that have mass follow a great circle from their origin to the Kaaba.
So the real question is, do prayers have energy or mass?
Seems kind of ironic, doesn’t it, prayers having mass.
(insert catholic joke here)
Somehow, I can’t imagine the devout getting all upset over being a few degrees off. And facing the wrong way doesn’t apply really if your glance travels 3/4 the way around the world instead of 1/4. It’s still going to pass over Mecca and be noticed by the powers that wait there.
Here’s a good map provided by **trygvenv **in Comments on Cecil’s Columns>Azimuthal Qibla Map
Now, to make my prior point, don’t stop at 180º of projection. Continue the projection until it’s 360º from center to edge. You’ll see that people who are facing exactly the “wrong” way are also facing directly at Mecca.
“You’ll see that people who are facing exactly the “wrong” way are also facing directly at Mecca.”
Consider this - if prayers traveled in a path that “curved”, that is, their heading changes constantly, then they’d spiral around the earth and eventually pass over every point! Such a “curve ball” prayer could be launched in any direction.
I was going to go into my thought son whether or not prayers had mass, but felt I’d really be over-analyzing the topic. Then I read the goat-launching thread…so here goes:
Prayers cannot be considered to be mere physical (that is, sound) waves. No prayer issued from off the Arabian peninsula could possibly be heard at Mecca, even by the Almighty Himself. There’s simply too much background and thermal noise for individual prayers to be distinguished.
Prayers must then either be some sort of massless elementary particle (like light or a gamma ray, or something) or some sort of non-physical thing, whose propagation rules are absolutely unknown.
3a) If the latter is true, then there’s no way to really know which way to face when praying for the purposes of being heard.
3b) If the former is true, then we can infer what type of particle they are by assuming that they may in fact received at Mecca. Photons are not (well, very, very weakly) affected by gravity and must take the direct route: straight thru the planet. They therefore must be of very high energy, like a cosmic ray.
cheers,
Matt
Maybe we’re all forgetting something here.
Isn’t the Mecca honor based on a particular event?
Then it would have happened at a particular point in the earth’s orbit around the sun.
So prayers should be directed toward the point in space where Mecca was back then?
(A joke! No offense intended to believers of Islam.)
What brought this up was the thought, while watching the old movie “The Time Machine”, that going back in time should somehow take recognition of the fact that the earth rotates, so that “here, only 1 minute ago”, would actually be “way over there, now” because of the earth’s motion.:eek:
I think that the particular event in question was most of the adult life of Mohammed, which spanned many years. Of course, you could then argue for the average position of that event, which would be somewhere inside of the Sun. There you go, Muslims ought to face the Sun when praying, and it’s a lot easier to determine than Mecca.
This post is available in a close-captioned form, for the sarcasm impaired.
I have a problem with Cecil’s statement from the article:
“there is a unique qibla [direction to pray] for every point on earth except two. The first is (duh) the location of the Kaaba itself. The second is the point precisely opposite it on the globe.”
It would seem to me that every point along the line of my qibla would have the same qibla.
not to quibble, or anything.
(my first post, woohoo)
.audient.
“It would seem to me that every point along the line of my qibla would have the same qibla.”
To quibble - Cecil’s meaning was that each point(except the two) has one and only one qibla. Two different points could have the same qibla, as you, ahem, pointed out - but that’s not a counterexample to uniqueness here.
oh, duh. Alternative parsing would have rendered it more sensical. thanks.
I seem to recall ads for a watch branded “Dalil” which had a little thingy that would show the direction of the Ka’abah and thus aid the devout in his divine messaging. This was in Malaysia, more than 15 years ago. Going by some of the explanations here, wouldn’t that watch only work in a narrow geographical area, and not the entire country? Anyone knows any more about this watch?