The House of Wisdom (14 page)

There is every indication that Muhammad had high hopes that his preaching would find favor among Medina’s Jews, less powerful than they once were but still important players in the political and economic life of the town. After all, Muhammad must have reckoned, his central message of strict monotheism augmented that which had already been spelled out to the Jews by their prophet, Moses; surely the influential tribes of Medina would recognize that and once again conform their behavior, which had drifted badly over the years, to the word of God.
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The period immediately surrounding the
hijra
saw a number of attempts by Muhammad to woo Jewish support. These included recognition of the Jewish Sabbath, fasting on the traditional Day of Atonement, general alignment with Jewish dietary laws, and the practice of intermarriage. Some have found suggestions in the Koran that Muhammad may have at one point considered a sort of federation linked by shared religious precepts.
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“Say: O People of the Scripture! Come to an agreement between us and you: that we shall worship none but God … and that we shall ascribe no partner unto Him, and that none of us shall take others for lords beside God” (3:64).

Perhaps the most public expression of Muhammad’s early policy toward the Jews was the decision shortly after his arrival in Medina to adopt the Jewish notion of rectiting daily prayers in a specific direction, known in Arabic as the
qibla
. Facing Jerusalem during prayer was an established tradition among the Jews. The Bible recalls that King Solomon built the First Temple in Jerusalem and then declared that the Jews would henceforth “pray to the Lord in the direction of the city which You have chosen, and in the direction of the House which I built in Your name” (I Kings, 8:44). Solomon’s promise became incorporated into Jewish law, and early synagogues were generally constructed in accordance with this dictate.

Any hopes Muhammad may have had for mass support among the Jews of Medina proved unfounded. It soon became clear that the leading Jewish tribes were not prepared to accept his teachings. Nor would they recognize him as a true prophet. In response, the Muslim leader began to step up political pressure on the Jews, while the later revelations collected in the Koran sharpened the intellectual and theological challenge to Judaism. In particular, the Jews were reproached for worshipping the golden calf, a throwback to impermissible idol worship, and for developing a legal code outside the strict confines of biblical teachings. As Islam first began to emerge as a faith in its own right, it adopted a month of fasting, as distinct from the single day set aside by the Jews. To distinguish his message from earlier revelations, Muhammad began to stress his spiritual ties to Abraham, who preceded the Jewish and Christian prophets. Abraham, the Muslims now taught, founded the sanctuary at Mecca, the Kaaba, and prayed for a prophet from the ranks of the city dwellers there.
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Sealing his break with the Jews, Muhammad abandoned their traditional Jerusalem-facing
qibla
for that of the Kaaba. According to some early Muslims, he did so while leading communal prayers by turning abruptly toward Mecca, at a place known ever since as the Mosque of the Two Qiblas.
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The notion of sacred geography, measured less by the cartographer’s coordinates than by spiritual need or scriptural reading, has long flourished in the human imagination. Its contours are shaped by religious experience grafted to common understandings of time and space, rather than by the physical features of the earth or the shifting political boundaries of city, state, or nation. The pilgrimage site, the scene of miracles, or the setting of another holy event—all may define the topography of the sacred map. Perhaps nowhere has this idea proved more compelling than in the Near East, birthplace of the three major monotheistic faiths. Here, geographies sacred and profane intersect in the ritual of prayer and in competing claims on holy space, as believers seek to align themselves physically with the divine.

Among the Muslims, the precise direction of prayer took on great religious, cultural, and political importance. As a result, Islam has historically gone to considerable lengths to define and determine the
qibla
and to honor the sacred geography centered on the
qibla
’s terminus at the ancient Kaaba—timeless symbol of God’s power and presence. In addition to the daily devotions, accurate knowledge of the
qibla
is required for the ritual slaughter of animals for food, the burial of the dead, and the call to prayer. The location of Mecca is, of course, also crucial for the hajj, the once-in-a-lifetime pilgrimage, which is a religious obligation for any able-bodied Muslim who can afford the trip. Over time, a huge theological and scholarly enterprise grew up around the observation of Islam’s sacred geography in general and the
qibla
in particular.

Today, many tend to see religion as the enemy of scientific progress. Yet early Islam openly encouraged and nurtured intellectual inquiry of all kinds. Muhammad once said of the pursuit of knowledge, “Seek for science, even in China.” Another of the many sayings attributed to the Prophet, carefully collected, collated, and studied down through the centuries and known as the hadith, celebrates scholars as the true “heirs to the prophets.” The hajj, meanwhile, ensured the annual gathering of Muslims from all over, creating a global marketplace of ideas, innovation, learning, and cultural exchange.

Arab scientists and philosophers readily found divine support for science in the revealed word of God. A number of verses in the Koran refer to the order inherent in God’s universe and to man’s capacity to recognize and exploit this order for his own needs, such as keeping time: “He [God] it is who appointed the sun a splendor and the moon a light, and measured for her stages, that you might know the number of the years, and the reckoning [of time] … He details the revelations for people who have knowledge” (10:6). Elsewhere, the Holy Book advocates the use of elements of God’s creation for orientation amid the featureless deserts and navigation across the vast oceans: “He has appointed the night for stillness, and the sun and the moon for reckoning … And He it is Who has set for you the stars that you may guide your course by them amid the darkness of the land and the sea” (6:97–98).

At the same time, many of Islam’s rituals and obligations as laid out by the Prophet demanded a relatively sophisticated understanding of the natural world. Believers could not simply follow the advice of the Christian philosopher St. Augustine and allow piety to close their eyes “to the course of the stars.” Rather, Muslims must know the proper times of the five daily prayers, the direction of Mecca, and the start of the lunar fasting month of Ramadan. “Knowing the prayer times is a prescribed duty for discerning Muslims. This is summarized in the Koran, my friend, and was explained by [the Prophet Muhammad] … There is no virtue in a person who is neglectful of the prayer times, and he has no knowledge of Him who is to be worshipped,” writes the medieval astronomer Ibn Yunis.
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Such problems of religious practice were addressed with relative ease by the early believers, grouped in a few communities in and around the Arabian Peninsula. For the most part, the ways of Muslim folk astronomy—based on visual cues and lacking the scientific astronomers’ theoretical basis—were sufficient. This was particularly the case in the regulation of the prescribed daily devotions, often denoted by the changing shadows cast by a special stick, called a gnomon, inserted into the ground or built into a sundial. The present-day definition of the prayer times dates back to the eighth century, with each to be completed within a certain period as marked by astronomical signs. The daytime devotions are defined by the length of the shadows, while those at night are tied to observable celestial events. The first prayer is said after sunset, the traditional start of the Muslim day, and must be completed before nightfall. The second is recited after nightfall, while the third is completed shortly before sunrise. The fourth, commonly known in the West as the noon prayer, actually begins when the sun has already begun its decline from the meridian, directly overhead. The final, afternoon prayer is also marked by the progression of the shadow and must be finished before the sun goes down, marking the end of one day and the beginning of the next.
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Early Muslim scholars immediately grasped the importance of grounding their research in the faith, and many devoted the opening passages of treatises, commentaries, and other highly technical works to asserting the importance of their science to the daily concerns of the pious. This same concentration on practical issues may have left them vulnerable at times to conservative backlash. Once such problems were solved to the satisfaction of the believers, Muslim science would need to find new justifications for further study.
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But for now, faith and reason made for provocative bedfellows.

The rapid spread of Islam across much of the known world that followed in the years after Muhammad’s death began to put the accurate determination of time, date, and direction out of reach of basic folk astronomy. By the time of the Abbasid Empire, the Muslim seafarer off the Chinese coast, the Arab merchant in faraway Spain, the pious believer in remote Central Asia—all required information that was increasingly hard to communicate from a distant central authority. The desire to observe religious obligations uniformly across the great expanse of Muslim territory mirrored the unanswered plea from Emperor Constantine four centuries earlier for all of Christendom to agree on a single recognized date to celebrate Easter. It also neatly complemented the intellectual ferment induced by the policies of the Abbasid court. Under the patronage of the early caliphs, the demands of religion and the imperatives of science were free to interact for centuries in ways unimaginable in medieval Europe. They also created ample scope for early work on fundamental scientific principles. Invaluable spin-offs included breakthroughs in geography, instrumentation, optics, and navigation.

At first the muezzin, the town crier to daily prayer, was selected for his upstanding character and strong voice with which to summon the faithful from the top of the minaret. Over time, knowledge of the heavens was added to the list of requirements. “Only an honorable, reliable, and trustworthy man who is acquainted with the times of prayer may pronounce the call to prayer from the minaret … The muezzin must know the [twenty-eight] lunar mansions and the shapes of the star groups in them, so that he may be able to tell time at night,” advises the Egyptian commentator Ibn al-Ukhuwwa.
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In urban areas, the rise of the mosque-based timekeeper, a sort of holy astronomer, gradually displaced the older folk customs. These professional scientists regulated local prayer times, but they also built astronomical instruments, wrote treatises on spherical astronomy, and taught students. Their work included the production and publication of meticulous almanacs—from the Arabic
al-manakh
—that listed the prayer times for each day of the year in such distant locales as China and Morocco. In medieval Cairo, a leading center of such activity, some two hundred pages of special tables were available for keeping time by the sun and other celestial markers.

Perhaps nowhere was the interaction of faith and science more important than in the question of the
qibla
, seen in the careful arrangements in all mosques to orient the believer. The earliest Muslims of Central Asia and Spain simply directed their prayers to the south, in imitation of the Prophet Muhammad when he was in Medina, 270 miles to the north of the holy city and the Kaaba. As the Arabs’ understanding of their universe became more sophisticated, they naturally demanded greater accuracy in conforming their practice to the sacred geography of Islam. “The Kaaba with respect to the inhabitants of the world is like the center of a circle with respect to the circle. All regions face the Kaaba, surrounding it as a circle surrounds the center, and each region faces a particular part of the Kaaba,” writes the twelfth-century religious jurist Zayn al-Din al-Dimyati.
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But where, exactly, was Mecca?

One common approach invoked pre-Islamic Arabian directional systems of the four winds—the word
qibla
itself may derive from the traditional name of the prevailing easterly wind,
qabul
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—while others relied on the positions of prominent stars, the direction of the winter sunrise, or other easily observed phenomena. Another popular schema identified the four corners of the Kaaba with each of Mecca’s traditional regional trading partners: Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and “the West.” Thus, sacred geography easily complemented established practical systems used for centuries by the Arabs’ desert caravans and oceangoing merchant fleets as they followed traditional trade routes. Over time, finer distinctions were made by associating more narrow geographic zones with specific architectural features of the shrine, such as a waterspout or a doorway.
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A thirteenth-century Yemeni text, exquisitely titled
The Sun, the Moon, and the Movements of the Fixed Stars Made Easy as a Gift to the Desirous and a Luxury for the Seeker
, spells out a system of twelve geographic sectors centered on the Kaaba. Other versions featured as many as seventy-two divisions.
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Such informal systems found favor with the Muslim jurists, who generally agreed that they met the requirements of the faith. But at times, confusion and conflict over the correct
qibla
prevailed. In one far-off land, for example, bewildered believers were faced with four different choices: One school of thought favored due west, in the direction of the traditional pilgrimage road to Mecca; another advocated the older, southern tradition of the Prophet at Medina; a third honored the
qibla
of the region’s earliest mosques; while a fourth preferred to leave the matter up to the astronomers.
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The use by the Muslims of earlier religious structures—such as synagogues or churches, with existing
qiblas
of their own—further complicated the picture. A mosque in the Negev Desert has been found with two different
qiblas
, one facing east toward Jerusalem and a later one, south toward the Kaaba.
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To this day, the prayer niches of many mosques fail to point the correct way to Mecca. This is particularly a problem in distant Indonesia, where lengths of string or other markers are commonly used to correct the
qibla
.
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