Qibla

In Islam, the Kaaba is believed to be a sacred site built by prophets Abraham and Ishmael, and that its use as the qibla was ordained by God in several verses of the Quran revealed to Muhammad in the second Hijri year.

Early Islamic astronomy was built on its Indian and Greek counterparts, especially the works of Ptolemy, and soon Muslim astronomers developed methods to calculate the approximate directions of the qibla, starting from the mid-9th century.

In the late 9th and 10th centuries, Muslim astronomers developed methods to find the exact direction of the qibla which are equivalent to the modern formula.

The qibla is the direction of the Kaaba, a cube-like building at the centre of the Sacred Mosque (al-Masjid al-Haram) in Mecca, in the Hijaz region of Saudi Arabia.

Other than its role as qibla, it is also the holiest site for Muslims, also known as the House of God (Bayt Allah) and where the tawaf (the circumambulation ritual) is performed during the Hajj and umrah pilgrimages.

[9] The hadith (Muhammad's tradition) also prescribes that Muslims face the qibla when entering the ihram (sacred state for hajj), after the middle jamrah (stone-throwing ritual) during the pilgrimage.

[5] Islamic etiquette (adab) calls for Muslims to turn the head of an animal when it is slaughtered, and the faces of the dead when they are buried, toward the qibla.

[12] This manner of observing the qibla is easily done inside the Great Mosque of Mecca and its surroundings, but given that the Kaaba is less than 20 metres (66 ft) wide, this is virtually impossible from distant locations.

For locations further than Mecca, scholars such as Abu Hanifa (d. 699) and Al-Qurtubi (d. 1214) argue that it is permissible to assume jihat al-ka'ba, facing only the general direction of the Kaaba.

[23][24] One of the properties of a great circle is that it indicates the shortest path connecting any pair of points along the circle—this is the basis of its use to determine the qibla.

Common practical methods to find it include the observation of the shadow at the culmination of the sun—when the sun crosses exactly the local meridian.

The combination of these two apparent motions means that every day the Sun crosses the meridian once, usually not precisely overhead but to the north or to the south of the observer.

[36][37][b] As the sun reaches the zenith of the Kaaba, any vertical object on earth that receives sunlight cast a shadow that indicates the qibla (see picture).

[38][28] Since night falls on the hemisphere opposite of the Kaaba, half the locations on Earth (including Australia as well as most of the Americas and the Pacific Ocean) cannot observe this directly.

[36][37] Spherical trigonometry provides the shortest path from any point on Earth to the Kaaba, even though the indicated direction might seem counterintuitive when imagined on a flat world map.

Within the few generations after Muhammad's death in 632, Muslims had reached places far away from Mecca, presenting the problem of determining the qibla in new locations.

[57] There was a wide range of traditional methods in determining the qibla during the early Islamic period, resulting in different directions even from the same place.

[58] Historical sources record several such qiblas, for example: sunrise at the equinoxes (due east) in the Maghreb, sunset at the equinoxes (due west) in India, the origin of the north wind or the fixed location of the North Star in Yemen, the rising point of the star Suhayl (Canopus) in Syria, and the midwinter sunset in Iraq.

[59] The traditional directions were still in use when methods were developed to calculate the qibla more accurately, and they still appear in some surviving medieval mosques today.

King, various medieval solutions for the determination of the qibla "bear witness to the development of mathematical methods from the 3rd/9th to the 8th/14th centuries and to the level of sophistication in trigonometry and computational techniques attained by these scholars".

Since in reality the Earth is spherical, the directions found were inexact, but they were sufficient for locations relatively close to Mecca (including as far away as Egypt and Iran) because the errors were less than 2°.

[67] Muslim astronomers subsequently used these methods to compile tables showing the qibla from a list of locations, grouped by their latitude and longitude differences from Mecca.

[68] In the 14th century, Shams al-Din al-Khalili, an astronomer who served as a muwaqqit (timekeeper) in the Umayyad Mosque of Damascus, compiled a qibla table for 2,880 coordinates with longitude differences of up to 60° from Mecca, and with latitudes ranging from 10° to 50°.

[23][73] Because varying methods have been used to determine the qibla, mosques were built throughout history in different directions, including some that still stand today.

Different opinions exist among Indonesian Islamic astronomers: Tono Saksono et al. argues in 2018 that facing the qibla during prayers is more of a "spiritual prerequisite" than a precise physical one, and that an exact direction to the Kaaba itself from thousands of kilometres away requires an extreme precision impossible to achieve when building a mosque or when standing for prayers.

[16] On the other hand, Muhammad Hadi Bashori in 2014 opines that "correcting the qibla is indeed a very urgent thing", and can be guided by simple methods such as observing the shadow.

His efforts in adjusting the qibla were opposed by the traditional ulama of the Yogyakarta Sultanate, and a new mosque built by Dahlan using his calculations was demolished by a mob.

[88] Nevertheless, most early mosques in the United States face east or southeast, following the apparent direction on world maps.

[23] Before his flight to the ISS, Sheikh Muszaphar Shukor requested, and the Malaysian National Fatwa Council provided, guidelines which have been translated into multiple languages.

Khaleel Muhammad of San Diego State University opined "God does not take a person to task for that which is beyond his/her ability to work with."