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*Originally posted by PakistaniAbroad: *
No, but i think people misinterpreted God's words and took them too literally.. check out 10:105, 30:30 and 30:43 and share with us the new 'java-Religion-direction-calculator' application please.. i have a feeling some of us might be missing it by more than a few degrees.
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Who cares what the outcome is...It's the thought behind the attempt that counts...Who cares if the 'java-Religion-direction-calculator' is wrong...At least they made the attempt...
Shadows have nothin to do with Qibla!!!!!!!
In Pakistan Qibla - direction of Ka'ba in Mecca KSA - is West.
In Russi it is South.
In Africa in is north.
In Americas it is East.
You can not just take a world map and draw a line from your location to Mecca and figure out the bearings, because the we are not dealing with with planar geometry but spherical geometry. The direction is the direction of a shortest line between Mecca and the location.
A crude visualisation:
Take a globe mark Mecca with a pin and youe location with another. Tie a taunt string between the two (this gives you the shortest possible line between the two pts on the globe), the gneral direction of the string from your location pt is the direction of Ka'ba and the Qibla.
We had a debate when constructing our local masjid; all enginees thought it was East East South and all pilots swore it should be East East North. It turned out to be 12 degrees North of East.
My cousin who is an USAF pilot wrote a program which finds Qibla direction if you feed it local co-ordinates - Longitudes and latitudes.
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"If you are at a location that you cannot see the sun on the above mentioned two dates, then you can locate Qibla from the sun when it comes overhead at a point diametrically opposite of Makkah on the globe and look for the following two dates and timesQUOTE]
K-2. Great link. This could work as long as the people who have done the actual calculatons are accurate. This does avoid the problems of magnetic North and true north ...
Even though GPS devices are becoming increasingly available, most people in Islamic world do not have access to them.
Any way like you all say knowing general direction is good enough for Salat
Who cares what the outcome is...It's the thought behind the attempt that counts...Who cares if the 'java-Religion-direction-calculator' is wrong...At least they made the attempt...
Edit: No such word as 'outscome'...
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well said indeed
then let us think that there is a very high minaret over Ka’bah, so high that it reaches the sky. Everyone would agree that if we can see that minaret, facing to that is the direction of Qibla. Now, Allah (SWT) has provided that imaginary minaret in the form of the sun being at the top of that minaret. It has been observed for centuries that there are two days in a year (May 28 and on July 16) when sun comes exactly overhead Ka’bah at the local noon time. Muslims in many distant countries for centuries used to wait for these dates, in the hope to see which direction is the sun and then set the orientation of the mosques.
Click on Prayer Times and keep clicking/entering the information until you get the prayer times. Once you are on that page, you'll see the Qibla direction from that city on the left side of the window.
got told the Qibla was that way