Alright, this subject may seem a little stupid, but growing up in the South doesn’t give me much interaction with people of the Muslim religion.
When Muslim’s are supposed to pray to Mecca, which way do they face? The last time I checked, the Earth is still round, so couldn’t one in reality face either east or west and be facing Mecca?
If it has to do with distance, is there a recognized line like the Prime Meridian that separates Muslims on one side facing east and the other facing west?
Whichever direction is most immediately pointing toward Mecca. If you live in the U.S. South, it’s almost directly east. If you lived in Moscow, for instance, you should face south. A few years ago, the first Muslim in space (a Saudi) was told it was OK to face in any direction.
And in fact, to make things easier on the majority of Muslims, almost all mosques (all but one, in fact) have a niche on one wall indicating the geodesic direction to Mecca. That way, all you need is one surveyor/geometer in each community to consult when building the mosque, and geometry has always been a strong point with the Moslems (perhaps for that reason).
A Let’s say you’re in Honolulu, which is at about the same latitude as Mecca. Almost due west is the direction you’d face if you were to make the trip without changing your bearing. But the shortest route on the surface of the earth is what can be called the great-circle route. (That is what Chronos meant by “geodesic direction;” strictly speaking, it’s not a circle since the earth isn’t a perfect sphere.) By this route you would leave Honolulu going approximately toward the north-west. You’d be going due west at the northernmost point on the route, somewhere in Siberia, and you’d enter Mecca travelling approximately toward the southwest. Muslims consider the direction toward Mecca to be the great-circle route (approximately northwest from Honolulu). By the same reasoning, the direction toward Mecca from Atlanta is more-or-less toward the east-northeast.
BTW, there is a word kiblah (or Qibla) meaning "the direction toward the Kaaba. (The Kaaba is the shrine in Mecca that worshipers face.) The niche that Chronos mentioned is called a mihrab.
Where I’m from in southwest VA, several years ago they were building a mosque right off the interstate. Construction was completed, and immediately the project fell through because they realized it had been built facing the wrong direction. It has since been converted to a Life Bible College.
Oh, I forgot to mention: An easy way to determine this direction, approximately, at least, would be to have a globe with the axis going through Mecca and the point opposite it, rather than the north and south poles. Then, you just turn the globe until your current location is on the semicircle brace, and you can see the right direction. It’s an old ham radio trick.
there are many computer programs which will draw an azimuthal map of the worrld for you with any particular point at its center. Ham radio operators need them to know which way to point their antennas.
An azimuthal map centered in mecca would have Mecca at it’s center and every geographic point would be located at it’s true great circle azimuth from there and scaled distance. This map is only useful for this particular place and purpose as it is quite distorted for the rest.
The interesting thing is that your antipodes show up in any tirection at the very edge of the map. If you are somewhere in Europe, then New Zealand shows like a fringe all around the edge of the map.
These maps are drawn by calculating azimuth and distance from the center to thousands of points. The formulas for calculating the azimuth and distance between two points given their geographical coordinates are quite straightforward. I have a spreadsheet which does it and it has a list of cities so I can just plug in a list of cities (like for a trip) and it will tell me the distance between any two and the total.
The idea that when you are looking at a celestial body which is directly above Mecca (or any other point on Earth) is correct. A minor correction not mentioned is that you cannot go by your watch to determine the Sun’s meridian passage at Mecca as you have to account for the equation of time and for the true hour angle between your location and Mecca (not the difference between legal times in both places). Another obvious thing is that when the sun or moon are directly over Mecca they can only be seen from half of the globe and they are occult below the horizon for the observers located in the other half of the globe.
Any place located more than 90 degrees from me (10,000 Km) will be below the horizon for me but there is always a part of the sky visible for any two observers on the globe where ever they may be.
With my friends in Asia I like to calculate a date and time when the Sun or moon will be about half way between us and, therefore, visible to the both of us. Then we can both look at it simultaneously. (Ham radio operators can bounce radio beams off the moon to communicate). An interesting aside is that, due to parallax we both see the moon in a very different place in the sky (in relation to the background of stars I mean).
I find it interesting that the answer to question #5 at http://moonsighting.com/faq_qd.html seems to imply you should not face in the horizontal direction that would lead you to Mecca over a Great Circle but, rather, you should face in the direction to Mecca straight through the Earth: same azimuth but now you have to figure the elevation (or rather, depression) in which to send your prayers.
Hi,
This is my first post, I’ve been a lurker for a week now because I have yet to say anything useful in any of the discussions going on…but this discussion got my attention (for the basic reason is that I’m an Arab Muslim.)
Ok, here’s the point, it doesn’t answer your question, but it might puta different perspective on it. All my life I’ve been taught that Islam is a religion of Usir (sp?) not Yusir (sp?)…basically meaning, it’s a religion that is supposed to make living simpler, not complex. In places like Kuwait, where the country’s religion is pre-dominantely muslim, it’s easy to find a source that would show you where the Qibla is. We have stickers in our hotels too , and worse comes to worse, you can always ask someone on the street, they’re sure to know.
However, if travelling to the US or Honolulu where it’s difficult to find such information, I really don’t think God/Allah will punish me if I prayed facing a generally eastern direction. The whole point behind prayer is not where you’re facing, but the prayer itself.
That said, it’s still a great discussion, I’ve never really thought of the Mecca facing thing to be such an issue in the US.
That’s all I have to say, not much help regarding the question, I know…but maybe it would put some muslim mind at rest?
Hi Bareedy, welcome to the board. Of course your input is useful and, even if it wasn’t, you have already seen it does not stop the rest of us from posting
I agree that most major religions are sensible if interpreted with common sense but then come the zealots who get hooked up on technicalities.
It used to be that in polite society, people avoided talking about religion and just respected each other’s beliefs.
Sensible men are all of the same religion.
“And pray tell, what is that?” enquired the prince.
Sensible men never tell.
Disraeli
My interest in this topic has nothing to do with religion and all to do with computing azimuth. It seems to me that getting an azimutal map centered in Mecca must be one of the easiest things to do. Then you can travel the whole wide world and know exactly the direction in which Mecca lies.
If you were exactly at the antipodes you could face any direction.
“Construction was completed, and immediately the project fell through because they realized it had been built facing the wrong direction. It has since been converted to a Life Bible College.”
That sounds SO urban legend, like the ubiquitous college library sinking under the weight of its books. If you’re supposed to face a niche in the wall, and the niche is in the wrong wall, you wouldn’t give up on the whole building and start over, you’d brick up the wrong niche and cut a niche in the right wall.
It sounds like a third-hand (“what I heard is that…”) years-later explanation for how a building built as a mosque ended up as a bible college.
Yeah, I know that story about the mosque and the Life Bible College sounds like an urban legend, but I’m quite sure it’s true. Construction began back in the 80’s, I remember the whole sequence of events firsthand. It was a while before it became a college, I can’t quite remember if construction was abandoned and then later completed for the college, or if construction was completed, the building was abandoned, and then remodelled sometime for the college; it was never used as a mosque. The college opened in 1988, the website is http://www.life-east.edu but I didn’t see anything there about the history of the mosque. I’ve looked but couldn’t find any links to the history on the 'net, the whole thing happened about 15 years ago.
>> the project fell through because they realized it had been built facing the wrong direction
Well, I for one find it difficult to believe. You are sure it’s true but you offer no support. I’m with John Bredin on this one. I mean, come on, anyone who can design a building can surely know in what direction to point it. This sounds like a made up ex post facto explanation.
Well, seeing as how it happened 15 years ago, support isn’t so easy to find on the internet, so I’ve sent the following email to the address listed on their homepage:
The former mosque is located on the South side of I-81, at the Western edge of the Ridinger estate just outside the limits of Christiansburg, VA, off of Ijaz Drive at the Route 8 exit. It was funded largely by the Ijaz family, residents of Christiansburg, in the 1980’s. You can see its rough location by searching for the street at http://www.mapquest.com.
The ornate onion-dome-looking thing on the building faces a little bit south of the highway, or roughly southwest, if my memory can be trusted. Forgive my ignorant terminology.
The son of Mr. Ijaz never commented to me that it was facing the wrong way. He was an acquaintance of mine. I did, however, hear from some of his close friends that the Mosque was encountering some serious financial difficulties due to cost overruns in construction.
I suppose you can take that either way: the cost overruns forced the mosque to close, or the cost of picking up the whole dang thing and realigning it forced it to close.
I consider it more likely that the relative lack of practicers in the area affected it more than anything else.
I’ve just enlisted the help of two honorary Dopers, Holy Hannah and Radford Rocket, a.k.a. “Mom” and “Dad.” Radford is playing golf with one of the mosque’s neighboring property-owners on Thursday. Holy, in the meantime, knows everything about everyone anywhere in that town. But she’s not a gossip, mind you. I’ll be expecting a call from her tonight.
Hey cabbage, were you a Christiansburg Demon? There’s another fine bit of weirdness that Our Fair City had to endure… not to mention the sordid tale of Bo Linkous.
