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The real meridian is not in Greenwich, but in Mecca, 40 degrees longitude, with the cube of the Kaaba. The sacred center of Mecca marks the exact point of orientation. The zones are tuned spiritually to the North star, the place of the New Earth.
METHODS/EXPERIMENTS: The maps of the earth which we have looked at all of our life have a profound, albeit subliminal effect on our world view. Did you know that these maps are distorted and inaccurate depictions? The sizes of the landmasses are grossly distorted. When world maps were first created in the Renaissance by Europeans they intentionally distorted the system to enlarge the importance of their homeland, Europe. The traditional maps still in use today were devised in 1569 by the German map maker Mercator. They placed Germany in the middle (in fact Germany is in the northernmost quarter of the world) and made all of Europe look larger than it really was in comparison to the rest of the world. The bias is still with us in our world view today, including most of the maps shown in this book. Maps still follow the Mercator grid and show Europe to be larger than South America. In fact ,South America is almost double the size of Europe. As a result of Mercator's northern hemisphere distortion, Alaska appears three times larger than Mexico. In fact, Mexico is larger than Alaska. Greenland appears larger than China, whereas China is actually four times larger. The examples of distortion of the world view given to us by our maps could go on and on.
Only now are the first non-chauvinistic maps being produced without bias to any one region of the earth. They are "Peters Maps" from Peters Atlas of the World, and also published as a large wall map by the United Nations. It was created by the German historian Arno Peters to correct the distortions of traditional maps. The areas of the world are shown according to their actual size and so true comparisons of land mass are possible. A rough rendition of a Peters map is shown below. Find a full size Peters Map of the world and study it. Also see the books by Arno Peters: The New Cartography and Space and Time. You will find that the northern hemisphere, Europe, North America and Russia are not nearly as large as you thought, whereas the southern hemisphere, South America, Africa, China and India are surprisingly huge.
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خريطة تحديد القبلة
لكن يمكنك ملاحظة ان مكة المكرمة تقع وسط اليابسة
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. For the prayer services, one should also have a clean dress, a clean place, and know the direction of the Qiblah (Ka'bah in Mecca). With the help of an ordinary world-map
- it would be easy to find out the direction of Mecca (in Arabia, towards the middle of its Western coast); then a compass will indicate the exact position to be taken up. People in England, for instance, will turn to the South-East, those in the U.S.A. to East-South-East. It might be noted however that the world is spherical and in view of this, the shortest distance between a place and the Ka'bah is to be sought. For those in New York, it would be nearer to turn E.S.E., but for those in Alaska, North, (consult a globe). The antipode of the Ka'bah is somewhere near Sandwich or Samoa islands, and when passing this spot, on a boat for instance, all the four directions would be equidistant and the direction would therefore be left to the choice of the person leading the service, even as inside the Ka'bah. [For why the direction for North
America is E.S.E. and not N.E., please see
Footnote A : The N.E. direction that is currently popular in North America as a Qibla direction has been calculated using spherical trigonometry. The shortest course between two points on the surface of a sphere is called a "Great Circle Route" and it is the shortest distance if one were to travel on the surface of the earth. With this method, if you were to travel on this curved line, you would continually have to readjust your direction as you traverse the curvature of the earth. This direction has been calculated for North America to be N.E.
Similarly a Rhumb Line is calculated as the curve cutting the meridians of a sphere at a constant angle. Rhumb Lines and Great Circle Routes are the same for distances over 2,000 km. So the N.E. direction that has been calculated for North America is for both the Rhumb Line and the Great Circle Route. The N.E. direction would be correct for North America if one were to assume that the direction one faces must be calculated according to surface routes only -- i.e. that the direction one faces must be calculated on the surface of a sphere. However, the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. So if you were to draw a straight line from any city in North America to the Ka'bah, you would necessarily have to cut through the earth (because the earth is curved). The E.S.E. direction would be this type of line. If you took the Latitude and Longitude of your city and plotted it on a chart along with the Latitude and Longitude of Mecca, and then drew a straight line between those two points, then in North America, the angle would be E.S.E. Furthermore, if you calculated the distance between a Rhumb Line or a Great Circle Route and the straight line, you will see that the straight line is in fact the shortest distance. It goes without saying that if a person travelled in an E.S.E. direction over the surface of the earth, the distance would be much greater than either a Rhumb Line or the Great Circle Route or the Straight Line which cuts through the earth.
For this reason, it seems obvious to us that Dr. Muhammad Hamidullah's chart above does in fact represent a more accurate method for arriving at the direction of the Qibla -- Editor (Syed Mumtaz Ali)
