Chapter 8 - The Sacred Geography of Islam

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the sacred geography of the legal scholars. The scholars of the sacred law of Islam created a sacred geography based on the notion that to face the Kaaba in any region of the world; a person should face the same direction in which a person would be standing if another person were directly in front of the appropriate segment of the perimeter of the Kaaba. In view of the fact that sacred edifice is itself aligned in astronomically significant directions, the directions adopted by the legal scholars for the qibla were towards the risings and settings of the sun at the equinoxes or the solstices or of various significant qibla-stars. The chapter also discusses the sacred geography of the scientists. Muslim astronomers from the 8th century onwards concerned themselves with the determination of the qibla as a problem of mathematical geography. This activity required knowledge of geographical coordinates and involved the computation of the direction among several localities by procedures of geometry or trigonometry, such as the analemma that is a sophisticated device for reducing problems on a sphere from three dimensions to two or spherical trigonometry.