WikiIslam:Sandbox/Fernando/Mecca: Difference between revisions

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Revision as of 16:46, 22 September 2023

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A longer critique of David A. King on qiblas
(Refinement of remarks on King, and the notion of the orientation of a building.)
(A longer critique of David A. King on qiblas)
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The first three points only tell against traditional descriptions of Mecca as a bustling centre of trade.  They are compatible with the existence of a sanctuary patronised by local tribes.  But this raises the difficulty of the absence of Christians in the area, given that the Quran is so heavily influenced by Christianity.
The first three points only tell against traditional descriptions of Mecca as a bustling centre of trade.  They are compatible with the existence of a sanctuary patronised by local tribes.  But this raises the difficulty of the absence of Christians in the area, given that the Quran is so heavily influenced by Christianity.


Problem seven about the inscription can be dismissed by the claim that the Arabic word translated as ‘built’ also means ‘rebuilt’.  It should be noted however that this is compatible with the hypothesis that while there was a local sanctuary at Mecca, it became the Holy Mosque only in 78 AH.  
Problem seven about the inscription can be dismissed by the claim that the Arabic word translated as ‘built’ also means ‘rebuilt’.  It should be noted however that this is compatible with the hypothesis that while there was a local sanctuary at Mecca, it became the Holy Mosque only in 78 AH.  In any case, if a non obvious translation is proposed, it needs to be supported by examples of its use elsewhere.  


The Becca problem could just be a scribal error.  But then why was it not corrected before an authoritative text was issued?  Furthermore, if the Quran is to be taken seriously as a source of historical knowledge, then some explanation is required of why Abraham should have wanted to travel so far south from Canaan.  Both problems could be solved by accepting that Becca is not Mecca.  In which case the sanctuary of Abraham has been lost.
The Becca problem could just be a scribal error.  But then why was it not corrected before an authoritative text was issued?  Furthermore, if the Quran is to be taken seriously as a source of historical knowledge, then some explanation is required of why Abraham should have wanted to travel so far south from Canaan.  Both problems could be solved by accepting that Becca is not Mecca.  In which case the sanctuary of Abraham has been lost.
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A point against Petra is that it is not near the Dead Sea and thus the city of Lot, or not near enough.  But if Mecca is the only competition for the original shrine, it is much nearer.  If Petra contained a sanctuary, it is plausible that it would have been visited by farmers from further north.  In any case, the Quran is inconsistent in a number of ways.  The best that can be hoped for is to get a partial match to what it suggests about its historical context.
A point against Petra is that it is not near the Dead Sea and thus the city of Lot, or not near enough.  But if Mecca is the only competition for the original shrine, it is much nearer.  If Petra contained a sanctuary, it is plausible that it would have been visited by farmers from further north.  In any case, the Quran is inconsistent in a number of ways.  The best that can be hoped for is to get a partial match to what it suggests about its historical context.


Given the seriousness of the issue for both Muslims and non Muslim scholars, it is understandable that there is much hostility to Gibson’s hypothesis.  Yet little has been published against it.  There is a trenchant criticism from David A. King, a long time expert on mosque orientation.  His main point seems to be that geographical orientation is irrelevant to understanding early mosques, because their builders had no way of determining the direction of Mecca, and did not try.  Rather they orientated their buildings with the Ka’bah rather than towards it. There are a number of problems with this suggestion, one of which is that King never clearly explains what he means by orientation, or how it is to be measured.  Another is that King does not seem to recognise that his claims are hypotheses which need to be tested by empirical evidence.
Given the seriousness of the issue for both Muslims and non Muslim scholars, it is understandable that there is much hostility to Gibson’s hypothesis.  Yet little has been published against it.  There is however a detailed rejection by David King<ref>https://www.academia.edu/87024335/MOSQUE_ORIENTATIONS</ref>, a long time specialist on the study of mosque orientation.  King’s criticism is long, repetitive and abusive, and what follows is not claimed to be a definitive interpretation. Rather the aim is to extract testable hypotheses which are alternatives to Gibson’s Petra hypothesis.
 
King’s position can be summed up as follows.
 
1. ''‘For the interpretation of orientations of historical mosques, modern qibla directions are irrelevant.’''
 
2. The oldest mosques were orientated so that the walls have the same orientation to the fixed stars as the Kaaba.
 
OR  3. The oldest mosques were orientated so that the wall have the same orientation to the cardinal points as the Kaaba.
 
1. is a direct quote, and is clearly false.  If, for instance, it were discovered that all mosques face Mecca to within a reasonable degree of accuracy, it could be concluded that the builders understood  the command of the Quran in the obvious way, had the technical ability to fulfil it, and believed the Holy Shrine to be at Mecca.
 
So let us try a variant, 1’.  There was no attempt to orientate the oldest mosques towards Mecca, because they did not have the ability to do so.  Which raises the question, what were they trying to do?
 
As a first approximation, hypotheses 2 and 3 can be taken as equivalent. But what would be the point of such a convention?  It might be thought that what would be achieved is that worshippers would be facing in the same direction as those at Mecca.  But there are two problems with this idea.  It is a considerable stretch to interpret ‘facing’ as ‘facing in the same direction’, however ‘direction’ may be interpreted.  More seriously, worshippers at Mecca can be facing in any direction, depending which side of the Kaaba they are on.
 
Which suggests hypothesis 4 - The oldest mosques were orientated so the prayer direction was the same as that at Mecca or Petra.  This is consistent with Gibson’s data on ‘parallel’ mosques.  Towards the end of the seventh century the prayer direction of  mosques he describes as ‘Western Umayyad’ became parallel to a line between Petra and Mecca.  This does not however solve the problem about the earliest mosques, or tell us whether the target was Mecca or Petra.
 
An orientation the same as the Kaaba might seem better than nothing. But in fact it only raises further questions. Most fundamentally: what geometry did the builders think applicable to their problem? The author of the Quran believed in a flat Earth, ‘spread out like a carpet’ (Q71.19 etc.,[[Islamic Views on the Shape of the Earth]]).  To which Euclidean geometry applies.  We now know that the Earth is round, as did the ancient Greeks, so that the calculation of angles and distances requires spherical geometry. Flat maps can be useful for small areas, but become increasingly distorted as the area covered grows larger.  This is relevant to the problem of what ‘the same’ means when applied to the orientation of buildings.
 
In the case of rectangular buildings like the Kaaba, it could mean that the longest axes are parallel.  Which in turn could mean: at the same angle to a great circle drawn, say, through the midpoint.  Or alternatively: at the same angle to an orthogonal frame of reference based on the fixed stars.  These two standards will only give the same result at the equator.
 
King’s hypotheses also raise theological difficulties.  If early Muslims had no way of establishing the direction to the Holy Shrine, they had no way of obeying the command of the Quran to face it when praying.  The Quran repeatedly warns that anyone who disobeys will be tortured for all eternity in hell.  Are we to suppose that all Muslims living distant from the Shrine before the invention of GPS are currently suffering the eternal punishment?  Have Muslims currently worshipping in misaligned mosques mended their ways?  Is there any discussion of the problem by Muslim scholars, ancient or modern?
 
In sum, King offers no plausible alternative to the obvious interpretation of the Quranic command to pray towards the Holy Shrine, and Gibson has supplied the best evidence to date of where the builders of the first mosques thought it was.


Gibson claims to have established that too many of the early mosques face Petra to be due to chance.  How they did this is a matter of speculation, but their success is a statistical fact.  It is also a fact that after a period of uncertainty, later mosques succeed in being orientated with Mecca with a greater than random success rate.  Anyone who dislikes Gibson’s Petra hypothesis needs to show either that his measurements are wrong, or the statistical analysis faulty.   
Gibson claims to have established that too many of the early mosques face Petra to be due to chance.  How they did this is a matter of speculation, but their success is a statistical fact.  It is also a fact that after a period of uncertainty, later mosques succeed in being orientated with Mecca with a greater than random success rate.  Anyone who dislikes Gibson’s Petra hypothesis needs to show either that his measurements are wrong, or the statistical analysis faulty.   
Fernando
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