Early Arabs with a Block & String knew better?

King continues his attacks against these earlier 7th-8th century ‘misdirected’ Arabs stating that their misdirected Qiblas were not facing Mecca because they were simply following Solstice and Equinox lines (the solstice are the longest and shortest days, while the equinox are the two days in the year when the time was equal). Why they needed those 'celestial directions' to position their Qiblas instead of simply pointing to the Ka'aba itself, since all of the earlier Arabs traveled to Mecca frequently for pilgrimage (so we are told by the earliest traditions), King doesn’t explain. What’s more, the Qur’an says, concerning the Qibla in Surah 2:149, “turn your face in the direction of Al-Masjid Al-Haram”. That’s very specific. Nowhere in this verse on the Qibla does it mention Equinox or solstice lines. King gets this information concerning the usage of Equinox and Solstice directions from an 11th century scholar named Al-Bazdawi (1030-1100 AD), who lived in the city of Samarkand (a famous silk route trading city, located presently in Uzbekistan). King wrote a paper on him; thus, the reason he likes to quote him. Yet, this scholar lived hundreds of miles away and hundreds of years later, suggesting that his assertions are nothing more than mere guesses. King then claims that the more accurate Qiblas were those of the later Arabs from the 9th – 11th centuries, because they used mathematics. But is he correct? Let’s look and see: 1) The earliest Petran Qiblas have a 2.9% of accuracy, or just 1.9% of accuracy if you take out the 2 worst examples, so that 18 of the 20 Petran Qiblas have only a 1.9% accuracy. Yet, these 18 Qiblas include mosques as far away as Guangzhou in China, and Methala in Kerala India, thousands of miles away. 2) The ‘In-Between’ mosques have a mere .98% accuracy, which is less than 1 degree! 3) The ‘Parallel’ mosques, situated in Northern Africa and Spain have a 3.5% accuracy. 4) he Meccan mosques had an average of 4.78% accuracy! Their degree of accuracy was the worst of the four! This proves that King was completely wrong. So, why were these earlier Arab’s Qiblas so accurate? They were the great Nabataean traders, the only traders capable of crossing the great deserts of their day, all the way to China. And the reason?  In these earlier centuries there were no roads across these deserts, nor were there good objects to follow one’s directions by (i.e. mountains or large rock outcroppings). They only had shifting sands. Therefore, the Nabataeans used the stars to guide them. Everywhere they went, they built temples which faced back to Petra, their holy city, to pray towards. It was these temples which later became mosques (note: the name for the mosque in the Qur’an is ‘Masjid al Haram’, which means the forbidden place to bow down for prayer). What did they use to find their way? To go north and south, they used the ‘Kamal’, a rectangular block of wood with a knotted string running through it, one end held in their teeth, while the other they would pull away from themselves until the bottom edge touched the horizon, and the upper edge touched the northern star, which always remained constant. They would count the number of knots which would tell them exactly how far they needed to go north or south. In order to not confuse the numbers they were counting, they would recite poetry using tunes which they would chant to the beat of their steps, knowing how many times a particular piece of poetry needed to be repeated between each of the knots in the string. That way they never lost count. Thus, poetry was hugely important to them, as it often saved their lives, and is equally important even today. To know where to go east and west they designated 32 stars which were used on a compass. This way they knew when they needed to go east and west from their location, in relation to the North Star. For instance, they walked a designated number of cadences of poetry towards the star ‘Al Naka’ in a north western direction. Upon finishing the requisite number of poetry lines, they would then turn towards another star, ‘Al Tir’, in an eastern direction, and so on… If they got the number of cadences incorrect, they would miss their oasis, and would die of thirst. This explains why they were so accurate with their directions; it was a matter of survival. Once roads were introduced, allowing the traders to go around the deserts, and once maritime travel became more important, the later 9th – 11th century Arabs no longer needed the stars or any poetry to find their directions, so they turned to mathematics, a seemingly less sophisticated and less accurate form of direction analysis. These later Muslims, who who no longer plied the deserts completely lost this form of direction finding, and so were confused when ascertaining why the earlier Muslims were so accurate. Yet, it was these confused scholars King turned to for his answers. © Pfander Centre for Apologetics - US, 2020 (27,210)