This Ramadan, I am reminded of a funny incident when I first saw the green arrow in a hotel room. I was told that it indicated the direction (Qibla) towards the Kaaba in Mecca.
In the Beginning, determining this direction wasn't much of a problem. Presumably, Muslims were located on a local patch on the Earth's surface, which more or less resembles a flat piece of paper. They probably developed some sophisticated method to determine the Qibla using the stars. Later on, compasses might have been used.
But the surface of the Earth is not flat; it cannot even be deformed nicely onto a flat map. As one moves further away from Mecca, the ambiguity in determining the Qibla becomes more and more severe. Given a paper map, the quick solution would be to draw a straight line from your location to Mecca. That certainly looks like the shortest path.
If I had a pilot friend, he might convulse at this suggestion, pointing out vehemently that a straight line on a flat map deforms to a "rhumb line" on a globe. But these are not lines of shortest distance on the Earth's surface! One should instead face the direction "as the crow (or pilot...) flies", which traces out a Great Circle. This is a world of difference --- in North America, the former prescription gives Southeast as the correct direction, while the latter says Northeast is correct.
If I had an astronaut friend, he would scoff at these worldly notions. Being a privileged being whose location, unlike ordinary people, is not limited to the surface of the Earth; he has no need for complicated concepts like "geodesics" or "great circles". However, the question of determining the Qibla from space seems complicated enough that conference of 150 Islamic scientists and scholars had convened to settle the issue.
There is an Atoll called Tematangi, which is roughly the antipode of Mecca. The people there are lucky, because every direction seems roughly correct! It's a bit like standing on the North Pole, and trying to decide which direction the South Pole is. But if one is very particular about selecting the direction giving precisely the shortest distance to Mecca, then the "correct" Qibla would vary wildly from point to point. In fact, one descends into a singularity of sorts at the exact antipode of Mecca...
This is where naive thinking might actually serve us better. Certainly the shortest path from Temantangi to Mecca is a straight line through the centre of the earth. So the Qibla, dare I say, is "straight downwards".
In the Beginning, determining this direction wasn't much of a problem. Presumably, Muslims were located on a local patch on the Earth's surface, which more or less resembles a flat piece of paper. They probably developed some sophisticated method to determine the Qibla using the stars. Later on, compasses might have been used.
But the surface of the Earth is not flat; it cannot even be deformed nicely onto a flat map. As one moves further away from Mecca, the ambiguity in determining the Qibla becomes more and more severe. Given a paper map, the quick solution would be to draw a straight line from your location to Mecca. That certainly looks like the shortest path.
If I had a pilot friend, he might convulse at this suggestion, pointing out vehemently that a straight line on a flat map deforms to a "rhumb line" on a globe. But these are not lines of shortest distance on the Earth's surface! One should instead face the direction "as the crow (or pilot...) flies", which traces out a Great Circle. This is a world of difference --- in North America, the former prescription gives Southeast as the correct direction, while the latter says Northeast is correct.
If I had an astronaut friend, he would scoff at these worldly notions. Being a privileged being whose location, unlike ordinary people, is not limited to the surface of the Earth; he has no need for complicated concepts like "geodesics" or "great circles". However, the question of determining the Qibla from space seems complicated enough that conference of 150 Islamic scientists and scholars had convened to settle the issue.
There is an Atoll called Tematangi, which is roughly the antipode of Mecca. The people there are lucky, because every direction seems roughly correct! It's a bit like standing on the North Pole, and trying to decide which direction the South Pole is. But if one is very particular about selecting the direction giving precisely the shortest distance to Mecca, then the "correct" Qibla would vary wildly from point to point. In fact, one descends into a singularity of sorts at the exact antipode of Mecca...
This is where naive thinking might actually serve us better. Certainly the shortest path from Temantangi to Mecca is a straight line through the centre of the earth. So the Qibla, dare I say, is "straight downwards".
