There's not 100 Qibla directions, but merely 4!

While both King and Gibson agree that the early 7th century Qiblas were not facing Mecca, and that no-one knows why they weren’t, their solutions are quite different. The question needs to be asked concerning why the builders of the earliest mosques didn’t write down what they were doing, or why they chose the directions they did? They certainly could write, presenting yet again, a common problem we find with early Islam; namely, that nothing is written about how it began, or what they were doing, until 200 years later. Likewise, with the Qiblas, we find a complete blank concerning why they chose to direct the Qiblas the way they did. King’s solution to these misdirections was to go to those who were closest to the event, the Muslims from the 8th-10th centuries, and ascertain what they believed was going on in the 7th and early 8th centuries. Yet, even King admits that these medieval scholars didn’t know what had happened, or why these earliest mosques were incorrect. Which raises another question…why didn’t they know, since they lived only a century or so later, and lived right where these mosques had been built? What King gleaned from these scholars was that there were possibly 100s of different Qiblas, with around 7 different reasons, he believed, for why they were wrong. And the reason they were wrong was because the early builders were barbaric, didn’t understand mathematics very well, and so didn’t know their directions very well either. Gibson categorically disagrees, suggesting that there were only 4 different directions which all of these Qiblas fit into, and all of the four can be easily explained, if one were to simply look at what was happening politically ‘on the ground’. What’s more, he suggests that these early builders were very accurate in ascertaining their directions, in fact better than those who came later, who were dependent on mathematics. So, what were the four Qibla directions Gibson refers to? The first Qiblas, up to 706 AD are all facing the city of Petra, with mosques as far away as Guangzhou, in China, and Cheraman in Kerala, India, both thousands of miles away. Yet, they were all facing directly to Petra. In fact, they were all within less than 3% off, proving just how accurate these early Qiblas were. Then in 706 AD a new mosque was built by Al Hajjaj (the governor in Kufa, in present day Iraq), which he called the Wasit Mosque. Wasit means ‘in-between’, which is exactly where the Qibla for this mosque is pointing, exactly halfway in-between Petra and Mecca, even though there is nothing there to point to; it’s just sand. We do know from the Traditions that Al Hajjaj rebelled against Abd al-Malik, and thus began to build his own mosques, 20 of them, all facing this in-between position. These Qiblas are the most accurate, all within 1% of error. Ironically, once he died the in-between direction of Qiblas died with him, and no other mosque is then built facing that direction. The third Qibla was the Meccan Qibla, the first that we know of built in 727 AD at Banbhore, Pakistan, over 100 years after the Qibla was supposedly canonized (in 624 AD, according to the Islamic Traditions). Interestingly, it is not until the Abbasid caliphate is well ensconced in power, in 876 AD, that all of the mosques then only faced Mecca, most likely because Mecca was their sanctuary city, in contradistinction to Petra, which was the Umayyad’s sanctuary city. The fourth and final Qibla was coined by Gibson as the parallel Qibla, because the mosques who used this Qibla neither faced Petra, nor Mecca, but straight south, following a parallel line between Petra and Mecca. All of these mosques were built in Northern Africa, and Spain. Thus, not hundreds of directions, but only 4, and as to why these four were chosen, that will have to wait for another episode…so, until then…hold this space. © Pfander Centre for Apologetics - US, 2020 (27,190)