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To the people of Somerset: Come out this Saturday and help tackle the hijacker!
Two days after the Crescent of Embrace was unveiled in September 2005, several bloggers discovered that a person facing into the giant crescent would be facing almost exactly at Mecca. That makes the crescent a mihrab: the central feature around which every mosque is built.
The simplest mihrab--and the one you might be familiar with--is an Islamic prayer rug, which Muslims lay out facing Mecca for prayer. The Crescent of Embrace is, in effect, a gigantic Muslim prayer rug.
The Mecca orientation of the giant crescent is trivially easy to verify. Just use the Mecca-direction calculator at Islam.com to generate a graphic of the great circle direction from Somerset to Mecca. Muslims define their direction for prayer (called the “qibla”), as the great circle direction to Mecca (also called the “shortest distance direction,” or the “straight line direction”).
Curt Feb 7, 2008 at 5:52:01 am 2 comments
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